Human cannibalism

Anthropophagy in Medieval Sicily: a cultural theme between chronicle and representation. Anthropophagy is the consumption of human flesh and the most extreme form of destruction of the human body, a physical violence which is the quintessential taboo of the self-described “civilized” societies. It provokes disgust, surprise and sometimes fascination, creating a deep connection between the text and the reader, and between the message and the audience. With regard to Sicily, anthropophagy is a cultural theme useful to discern between the account of real events and their representation. The construction of the image of Sicily, and even more of its inhabitants, the Sicilians, is based on an accumulation of clichés, often of ancient origins, transmitted and interpreted over the ages. One of them is surely the “bestiality” of its first inhabitants, intended as the ancient Cyclops or the Giants sons of Saturn, both of them “tyrants” described as man-eaters. During the Early Middle Ages the idea that the Sicilians eat human flesh was transferred to the new conquerors of the island: the Muslims, an infidel enemy to be fighted and considered beyond the boundaries of humanity and nature, meant as a divine law and therefore “civilization”. In both cases the accusations came from the outside, i.e. from groups as the ancient Greeks or the Christians (both Byzantine and Latin-Norman) who had an interest in representing the old and modern inhabitants of the island as anthropophagists to be feared, conquered, subjugated and converted to religion and/or civilization.

The labeling of fellow humans as “cannibals” is a trope employed by people across the globe, often in an effort to cast doubt on the humanity of others. In this study I am interested in alimentation, and specifically anthropophagy, not only as a signal of belonging and exclusion, but also as a site of rationalized, intentional actions through which individuals demonstrate their humanity and so become human. Specifically, personhood is intertwined in much of Africa with actions and sentiments that express sociality, compassion, and circulation. These orientations are not, however, automatic. Very familiar human anti-social sentiments – such as envy, jealousy, spite, indignation, contempt, and selfishness – can be very personally gratifying. At the same time, however, they are destructive, insulating, and excessive, and therefore grotesque. Behaviors such as gluttony, incest, greed, and, of primary interest here, the eating of human flesh – acts that prioritize unbridled self-interest and callous accumulation of vitality for personal benefit and individuated wellbeing – are often associated in Africa with witches and sorcerers. Human personhood is about controlling or repressing (or, at least appearing to control and repress) these tendencies in favor of collaboration, porosity, and sympathy, most of the time. This makes the project of being and becoming human a perpetual act, and there exists a necessity to continuously craft and maintain personhood through everyday behaviors. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in which I conducted a year-long dietary survey, participated in community activities, and engaged 20 principle informants in regular, unstructured conversation in their local language, and then used emergent ideas to guide informal discussions with a wide substrate of additional townspeople, I argue that avoiding acts that can be conceived as anthropophagous offers opportunities for individuals to prove their commitment to pro-sociality, and so to socially become human. Specifically, I articulate a series of prohibitions on not only cannibalism (as all societies have), but also on eating animals that resemble human beings in physical, emotional, and spiritual form. While the forbidden meats are rarely even an option to consume, articulating the taboos and exhibiting repugnance at the thought of eating these animals are significant for their contributions toward actively performing the moral underpinning of social living and constructing humanity. What I am proposing, then, is that the avoidance of cannibalism and pseudo-cannibalism are not just symbolic statements, gustatory preferences, or an assertion of benevolence to counter European misconceptions – they also constitute the self. The language and rationale that my informants used to describe their dietary proscriptions suggests that values on sociality, porosity, and circulation were not only grafted onto food taboos, but also intimately enacted and embodied through them. People are doing things with food prohibitions, not just following them out of routine. While taboos on cannibalism are thus significant as one of few customs that are globally universal, which seems to suggest a biological basis, it is clear that there is also much to the construction of disgust at the consumption of human flesh that is culturally specific.

What (or whom) would you be willing to eat? My research examines anthropophagy (human cannibalism) in the movies: is it gratuitous and included for shock value, or does it cast light onto our most profound cultural and moral assumptions and taboos? Eating choices are determined by social and cultural identities, and normative gustatory practices vary widely between cultures, but reification or commodification of our proposed prey is standard. When applied to humans, it is shocking, because of our assumed, largely unexamined singularity. I examine how this is culturally inculcated in a selection of English-language feature films by looking at different iterations of anthropophagy – survivalism (necessitated by catastrophe or dystopian social collapse), the primitive savage of colonial discourses, the inhuman psychopath and the opportunistist. Incorporation of humans is abject, and disturbs our deepest social and cultural agreements. My research is driven by my animal activism and a desire to define and challenge the humanist, Cartesian, belief that humans are ontologically non-animal. Anthropophagy is, at its most basic, about treating humans as meat. I am using a critical paradigm, where assumed dualisms (e.g. human/animal, civilised/savage, sane/psychopathic) are deconstructed and examined through the plots and production techniques of selected films and the ways they’re received and interpreted. Interdisciplinary methodologies of film studies and cultural studies are used to examine how incidents are intensified or trivialised. Anthropophagy points to the need to limit voraciousness of appetite in a world reaching environmental resource saturation. I argue that the abjection experienced by viewers comes from abhorrence of the objectification of humans, and that the anthropophagous film unconsciously aids in deconstructing the human/animal binary and deobjectifying the sentient “other”, and thus recognising the damage done to the environment, our fellow creatures and each other through the use of the rhetoric of animality.

This research investigates a commonly held view in certain peri-urban areas around Chimoio, Mozambique, that German Pentecostal pastors and missionaries, as well as German communists, have been operating as witches from the 1990s until the present time. Drawing on ethnographic material (1999–2016), the chapter explores the popular perception that these ‘Germans’ (alemãos) were promulgating an egalitarian value of sameness and an ethos of purity: gradually, however, they came to be regarded as witches, engaged in nocturnal bloodsucking and undertaking savage hunts for children who were subsequently kidnapped or devoured. Drawing on colonial era cases and comparing the material with other African as well as Melanesian cases, the chapter also relates these ideas about the violence of German witches to long-standing experiences of enslavement, domination and violence, which involve dynamics of memorialization common across both Africa and Melanesia.

ABSTRACT: In Cabeza de Vaca’s famous Relación (1542, 1555) we find the narration of a subject in transit and of an identity unsettled by contact with the indigenous (what many critics have identified as a transculturated conquistador); yet the text also counters such ambivalent instabilities with an obstinate imperial teleology—the return to civilization—and a continuous display of ethnographic differentiation and distancing from the indigenous world. The latter two coordinates over-codify the journey’s narrative, precluding the implication of an Imperial subject’s surrender to the Other and organizing the account as the story of a lost conqueror who, rather than going native, finds his way home, able to textually unfold the artifice of his ‘return.’

Keywords: Cabeza de Vaca, Relación, Naufragios, ethnography, colonial dissimilation, going native, transculturation, empathy, cannibalism.
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En la famosa Relación de Cabeza de Vaca (1542, 1555) encontramos la narración de un sujeto en tránsito y de una identidad inestable en contacto con los indígenas (lo que muchos críticos han identificado como un conquistador transculturado); sin embargo, el texto también conjura tales inestabilidades y ambivalencias mediante una obstinada teleología imperial --el retorno a la civilización-- y una continua diferenciación y distanciamiento etnográfico respecto del mundo indígena. Estas dos últimas coordenadas sobre-codifican la narrativa del viaje, y contradicen la idea de un sujeto entregado al Otro. Por el contrario, el texto insiste en un relato imperial y narra la historia de un conquistador perdido que, lejos de aindiarse, busca y encuentra su camino a casa, y que es capaz de desarrollar textualmente el artificio de su 'retorno'.

As Kirsten Guest explains in the introduction to Eating Their Words, cannibalism has often been used as a limiting factor in colonial discourse, providing a method of delineating the civilized “us” from the savage “them,” as well as an excuse for devastating native or marginalized populations. The practice of anthropophagy meant savagery, which in turn meant being closer to the animal than to the human. But what happens in a world where there are no non-human animals? How do we define the self? And, perhaps more pressingly, what do we eat?

Don LePan’s Animals and Joseph D’Lacey’s MEAT are both speculative fiction novels set after great extinctions, and each features a society that goes to great lengths to refashion cannibalism as an ‘ethical’ foodway. In each novel, colonial discourse is flipped; the un-human ‘Other’ is no longer the cannibal, but rather that which the cannibal eats. MEAT creates this ‘Other’ by elevating a class of people, know as the Chosen, to sacred status, requiring the consumption of their flesh for religious reasons. Animals adopts an ableist agenda, restricting the definition of ‘human’ to exclude the disabled, known as “mongrels”, who become pets or meat.

This chapter will examine the sociopolitical and economic framework mobilized in each novel to support a narrative of ‘ethical’ cannibalism. It will interrogate the methods of social control used in these novels, looking specifically at the influence of faith, pop science, and the capitalistic drive in the creation and maintenance of foodways that in contemporary society would likely be considered unethical.

This chapter will argue that there are two layers of critique coexisting in each novel. The first is a more surface critique of meat eating and the factory farm industry. By portraying humans who are created into ‘Others’ and then eaten, the novels each paradoxically highlight the vitality and potential personhood of food animals, and thereby the inhumanity of current farming practices. The second is a deeper critique of the dangers of the capitalist drive for profit and expansion. This chapter will argue that these novels make explicit that it is our own bodies on the line in the confrontation between the planet and capitalism that Naomi Klein defines as the crux of the climate crisis. By depicting societies that recreate the problems of overproduction, overconsumption and the like, these speculative novels demonstrate that the ultimate consumer is not the townsfolk who eat the Chosen or the neurotypical people who eat “mongrels”; the ultimate consumer is capitalism.

El canibalisme ha estat practicat per nombrosos grups humans pertanyents a diferents cultures i civi-litzacions. Molts mites, llegendes i històries es refe-reixen a accions de canibalisme i abasten un marc geogràfic i temporal molt extens. No obstant, la seva acceptació per part de la ...

Calificar a otros seres humanos como “caníbales” es un tropo empleado en todo el mundo, a menudo como parte de un esfuerzo por poner en duda la humanidad del otro. En este estudio me interesa el tema de la alimentación, específicamente la antropofagia, no sólo como una señal de pertenencia y exclusión, sino también como un lugar de acciones racionalizadas e in­tencionales a través de las cuales las personas demuestran su humanidad y devienen así socialmente humanos. En concreto, la condición de persona está íntimamente ligada en gran parte de África con las acciones y los sentimientos que expresan socialidad, compasión y circulación. Estas orientaciones, sin embargo, no son automáticas. Sentimientos antisociales muy familiares tales como la envidia, los celos, el despecho, la indignación, el desprecio y el egoísmo pueden ser muy gratificantes personalmente; al mismo tiempo, no obstante, son destructivos, aislantes, excesivos y, por lo tanto, grotescos. Los comportamientos como la gula, el incesto, la codicia y, de principal interés aquí, el consumo de carne humana —actos desenfrenados que priorizan in­tereses particulares y cruel acumulación de vitalidad para beneficio personal y bienestar individuado— son a menudo asociados en África con las brujas y los hechiceros. Cuando se habla de persona humana se habla de controlar o reprimir (o, por lo menos, parece que controla y reprime) estas tendencias en favor de la colaboración, la porosidad y la simpatía, generalmente; esto hace que el proyecto de ser y convertirse en humano sea un acto perpetuo, y existe una necesidad de confeccionar y mantener continuamente esa cuali­dad de persona con conductas cotidianas. Con base en un trabajo de campo etnográfico de 15 meses en el que llevé a cabo una encuesta de un año sobre alimentación, participé en las actividades de la comunidad y me entrevisté con 20 informantes clave en conversaciones cotidianas, no estructuradas y en su propia lengua, utilizando enseguida ideas emergentes para orientar las discusiones informales con un amplio sustrato de habitantes vecinos, sostengo que el hecho de evitar actos que puedan ser concebidos como antropófagos ofrece oportunidades a las personas para demostrar su compromiso en pro dela sociabilidad, y de esa forma convertirse socialmente en humanos. En síntesis, me centro en una serie de prohibiciones no sólo sobre el canibalismo (como todas las sociedades tienen), sino también sobre el consumo humano de animales que se nos parecen física, emocional y espiritualmente. Mientras que las carnes prohibidas como alimento raramente son una opción para con­sumir, tanto la expresión de los tabús como la demostración de repugnancia ante la idea de comer estos animales son importantes porque contribuyen a apoyar activamente la base moral de la vida social y construyen humanidad. Lo que estoy proponiendo, entonces, es que el rechazo del canibalismo y el pseudocanibalismo no es solamente una declaración simbólica, una preferencia gustativa o una afirmación de benevolencia para argumentar las equivocadas ideas europeas, sino que también constituye el ser mismo. El lenguaje y el razonamiento utilizados por mis informantes para describir sus prohibiciones dietéticas sugieren que los valores de sociabilidad, porosidad y circulación fueron no sólo trasplantados a tabús alimentarios, sino también íntimamente promulgados y consagrados a través de ellos. Las personas están haciendo cosas con las prohibiciones alimentarias, no siguiéndolas solamente fuera de la rutina. Mientras que los tabús sobre el canibalismo son, por lo tanto, importantes como una de las pocas costumbres universalmente acepta-das, lo que parece sugerir un fundamento biológico, está claro que también hay mucho más de construcción de la indignación por el consumo de carne humana que es culturalmente específico.

The labeling of fellow humans as “cannibals” is a trope employed by people across the globe, often in an effort to cast doubt on the humanity of others. In this study I am interested in alimentation, and specifically anthropophagy, not only as a signal of belonging and exclusion, but also as a site of rationalized, intentional actions through which individuals demonstrate their humanity and so become human. Specifically, personhood is intertwined in much of Africa with actions and sentiments that express sociality, compassion, and circulation. These orientations are not, however, automatic. Very familiar human anti-social sentiments – such as envy, jealousy, spite, indignation, contempt, and selfishness – can be very personally gratifying. At the same time, however, they are destructive, insulating, and excessive, and therefore grotesque. Behaviors such as gluttony, incest, greed, and, of primary interest here, the eating of human flesh – acts that prioritize unbridled self-interest and callous accumulation of vitality for personal benefit and individuated wellbeing – are often associated in Africa with witches and sorcerers. Human personhood is about controlling or repressing (or, at least appearing to control and repress) these tendencies in favor of collaboration, porosity, and sympathy, most of the time. This makes the project of being and becoming human a perpetual act, and there exists a necessity to continuously craft and maintain personhood through everyday behaviors. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in which I conducted a year-long dietary survey, participated in community activities, and engaged 20 principle informants in regular, unstructured conversation in their local language, and then used emergent ideas to guide informal discussions with a wide substrate of additional townspeople, I argue that avoiding acts that can be conceived as anthropophagous offers opportunities for individuals to prove their commitment to pro-sociality, and so to socially become human. Specifically, I articulate a series of prohibitions on not only cannibalism (as all societies have), but also on eating animals that resemble human beings in physical, emotional, and spiritual form. While the forbidden meats are rarely even an option to consume, articulating the taboos and exhibiting repugnance at the thought of eating these animals are significant for their contributions toward actively performing the moral underpinning of social living and constructing humanity. What I am proposing, then, is that the avoidance of cannibalism and pseudo-cannibalism are not just symbolic statements, gustatory preferences, or an assertion of benevolence to counter European misconceptions – they also constitute the self. The language and rationale that my informants used to describe their dietary proscriptions suggests that values on sociality, porosity, and circulation were not only grafted onto food taboos, but also intimately enacted and embodied through them. People are doing things with food prohibitions, not just following them out of routine. While taboos on cannibalism are thus significant as one of few customs that are globally universal, which seems to suggest a biological basis, it is clear that there is also much to the construction of disgust at the consumption of human flesh that is culturally specific.

In italian we say that something is as good as the pig because nothing of this miracle animal will be wasted … and also being omnivore it is the most likely source of human organs as the hart transplants … genetics and a memory of the tabu of cannibalism?! The corps of Christ in the “communion” etc. as another clue of our recent “antropofagus” -  PaleontoLogicaMente - ancestry ..

Considering PaleontoLogicaMente “memory” as a foundation of evolutionary consciousness we should consider the millennial ordeal of the Jews as the paradigm for Neanderthal’s much needed consciousness upgrade … no wonder they do not eat pork meat as it must seems to them a sort of slur of their constant prosecution throughout recorded history… definitely it is not at al ``instinctively” kosher to to practice this type of “self” cannibalism… if you think about it we all benefit from the Bible - to compare our present with the just past present still present - of the Israelis’ ordeal. Not to mention the endless number of cultural continuous contributions to science up until now … Newton, Einstein and Darwin just to mention only two most recent “conscious” Hebrews should ring the bell … suffering therefore must be also at list one of the keys of consciousness…also you may appreciate Neanderthals unconscious nastiness: a cruel infliction of pain upon some as happened to Jesus, definitely the archetypical Jew that offered his life benefiting all of us until now with us most enlightened statement on the Golgotha: forgive the Neanderthals because they are unconsciously unconscious… is henceforth most urgent and past due “time” that the Roman “emperor” settles the standstill shameful issue of Palestine. If not for indemnity and honest gratitude, at least to draw the umpteenth benefit of humanity in general ...

In italiano si dice che qualcosa è così buono come il maiale perché nulla di questo animale miracoloso andrà sprecato… ed essendo anche onnivoro è la fonte più probabile di organi umani come per il trapianto di cuore … la genetica è un ricordo del tabù del cannibalismo?!  Il corpo di Cristo nella “comunione” ecc. come un altro indizio della nostra recente - PaleontoLogicaMente - ascendenza “antropofaga”.

Considerando la "memoria" PaleontoLogicaMente come fondamento della coscienza evolutiva dovremmo considerare il calvario millenario degli ebrei come il paradigma per il tanto necessario aggiornamento della coscienza di Neanderthal ...  persecuzione costante nel corso della storia documentata ... sicuramente non è affatto "istintivamente" kosher praticare questo tipo di cannibalismo "auto" ... se ci pensi bene tutti traiamo beneficio dalla Bibbia per confrontare il nostro presente con il - passato appena passato ed ancora presente - calvario degli israeliani.  Per non parlare del numero infinito di continui contributi culturali alla scienza fino ad oggi… Newton, Einstein e Darwin solo per citare solo due più recenti ebrei “coscienti” dovrebbero suonare il campanello… la sofferenza quindi deve essere anche a lista una delle chiavi di  coscienza…puoi apprezzare anche la cattiveria inconscia dei Neanderthal: una crudele inflizione di dolore ad alcuni come è successo a Gesù, sicuramente l'ebreo archetipico che ha offerto la sua vita a beneficio di tutti noi fino ad ora con la nostra più illuminata affermazione sul Golgota: perdona i Neanderthal perché  sono inconsciamente inconsapevoli... è ormai più urgente e scaduto il "tempo" in cui l'"imperatore" romano risolva la vergognosa situazione di stallo della Palestina.  Se non fosse per l'indennizzo e la dovuta onesta gratitudine, almeno per trarne l’ennesimo beneficio dell’umanità in generale...