The assumption that others, representing different times and places, engaged in cannibalism has been a pervasive feature of Western social thought. As such, the cannibal image has made its inevitable way into contemporary anthropology. In the process, every exotic human group from the Highlands of Papua New Guinea to the Lowlands of South America has been obliged to assume the man-eating mantle as a result of Western contact. Initiating the trend in the fifth century bc, Herodotus labelled the Scythians anthropophagi (man eaters). Marco Polo also encountered cannibals in the thirteenth century during his travels to the Orient, likewise Christopher Columbus in his voyages to the New World, and eventually anthropologists spreading out through the then colonial world.
In some earlier instances, such as for the Aztecs, the cannibalism has been assumed to be nutritional (Harner 1977) as the participants sought sources of animal protein; in others the deed was only a ritual as, for instance, the natives of New Guinea sought the spiritual sustenance of friends or foes (Koch 1970). Yet, despite the innumerable allusions to such behaviour for other cultures, there is reason to treat any particular report, and eventually the whole genre, with some scepticism.
This pre-emptory conclusion is warranted for a number of legitimate scholarly reasons, including the absence of eyewitness accounts (Arens 1979). Depending on time or place, the information on the practice entered the historical record after the first contact — in some instances even after the obliteration of the original culture and the decimation of its population. This was the case for the Aztecs, who were reconstructed as cannibals, initially ritual, and then 500 years later nutritional, long after the supposed fact. Moreover, the reporters who documented the now defunct cannibal cultural system were the subsequent agents of the imperial power that had destroyed the society and were now engaged in the secondary process of conversion and exploitation of its sorry remnants. By this time Aztec informants converted to the new faith claimed that internal others, such as the nobility or priesthood, had indulged in such practices. Consequently, rather than documenting a custom, reports of alleged cannibalism functioned primarily to legitimize European conquest.
This suspect position could have been rectified later by modern anthropologists living among their subjects. However, second-hand reports on cannibalism in the just recent past continued to accumulate in the twentieth century until the topic became a staple of introductory texts and popular accounts of other cultures (see Harris 1977; 1987). Thus, the pattern continues to be one of circumstantial rather than direct evidence for the purported custom as ‘the other’ continues to be exoticized.
This is not to imply that cannibalism has never existed. There obviously have been instances of survival cannibalism under abnormal conditions of stress by individuals and groups. There have also been occasions of deviant cannibalistic episodes in all societies, and in some instances, ritualized or pseudo-scientific practices of this sort. For example, pulverized human body parts were prescribed for medicinal purposes in the West until the early twentieth century (Gordon-Grube 1988); they continue to be used in extract form in contemporary medicine; and there are groups in the United States which consume the placenta of the new-born as a ‘natural act’ (Janzen 1980).
The problem, then, becomes a matter of cultural translation, in the sense of contextual interpretation, and thus, the meaning of the behaviour.
Unfortunately, there has been a simplistic and unwarranted tendency to label non-Western societies in which such instances occur as cannibalistic, while not similarly characterizing our own. Taken together with presumptions of cannibalism with little or no reliable evidence, this proclivity has resulted in a veritable universe of cannibals saying more about the collective mentality of the West than the actual behaviour of others. We are not alone in this tendency, however. In many other parts of the world, Europeans are assumed to be the cannibals (Lewis 1986).
