BONES OF CONTENTION: RITUAL CANNIBALISM
I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments.
F. A. von Hayek, Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined
REMEMBER DR CHANCA, whom we saw at the beginning of the previous chapter depicting the recovery of ‘four or five bones’ of human arms and legs in a hastily abandoned hut? In what might come as a surprise, given that if you read Chanca’s work, his repeated use of the word ‘we’ gives the impression that he had experienced the horrors of the ‘cannibal hut’ first-hand, he never actually saw the scene he wrote about in 1493.
Though not an actual witness, Dr Chanca was a strong supporter of Columbus, and because of his professional status his written accounts carried tremendous weight. His letters make up much of what we know (or thought we knew) about the Admiral’s second voyage to the New World, and the contemporary view of the Caribs as subhuman man-eaters fit only for enslavement. Incidentally, Chanca’s account of the cannibal hut was sent back to Spain accompanied by a letter from Columbus, requesting that the doctor’s salary be increased substantially. Since Columbus was already using the cannibal angle to justify his attempts to ‘pacify’ the local inhabitants, it hardly seems simply coincidental that Dr Chanca would have penned an accompanying document contradicting his master’s description of the Caribs as subhuman eaters of men.
At best, then, Dr Chanca’s letter provides a brief, second-hand account of what may or may not have been the aftermath of cannibalism by the inhabitants of a single hut on the island of Guadeloupe. Meagre evidence? Certainly, but the story gained far greater significance as additional authors wrote about the incident. It would become a blueprint for cannibal tales throughout history, as descriptions of the practice were penned decades or even centuries after the actual event and without the input of additional witnesses.
But even if the events described by Chanca did take place, the bones Columbus and his men collected from the infamous hut were more likely part of a funerary ritual rather than proof of cannibalism. According to historians and anthropologists, rather than burying their departed ancestors, some Amerindians preserved and worshipped their bones. In 1828, author and historian Washington Irving pointed out that during Columbus’s first voyage, when human bones were discovered in a dwelling on Hispaniola, they were taken to be relics of the dead, reverently preserved. On Columbus’s second visit, however, when bones were found in a hut presumably inhabited by Caribs, the finding became incontrovertible evidence of cannibalism.
Regardless of politically motivated tall tales, the question remains whether there was any real cannibalism going on in the Caribbean when Columbus arrived. The debate continues. Anthropologist Neil Whitehead suggests that, while many reports are blatant examples of imperial propaganda, there are several reasons to think that the Caribs and other Amerindian groups did practise some forms of ritualised cannibalism. Whitehead’s rationale is that in addition to the self-serving allegations of man-eating, other Spaniards reported cannibalism in social context – as a funerary rite or ritual related to the treatment of enemies slain during battle. For example, in the seventeenth century, Jacinto de Caravajal wrote, ‘The ordinary food of the Caribs is cassava, fish or game … they eat human flesh when they are at war and do so as a sign of victory, not as food …’
According to anthropologists, ritualised cannibalism can be differentiated into two forms: exocannibalism and endocannibalism. Exocannibalism (from the Greek exo – ‘from the outside’) refers to the consumption of individuals from outside one’s own community or social group while endocannibalism (from the Greek endo – ‘from the inside’) is defined as the ritual consumption of deceased members from inside one’s own family, community or social group.
With regard to exocannibalism, a number of historical accounts claim that the Caribs consumed their enemies – those killed in battle, taken prisoner, or captured during raids. The belief was that this form of ritual cannibalism was a way to transfer desired traits, like strength or courage, from the deceased enemy to themselves.
Exocannibalism has been reported in a range of circumstances through the centuries, used as a way both to terrorise an enemy and to feed the hungry. In the 1960s anthropologist Pierre Clastres lived with the Ache of Paraguay and claimed that one of the four groups he studied ate their enemies. Similar claims have been made about the Tupinambá of eastern Brazil, most famously by Hans Stadin, a sixteenth-century German shipwrecked while serving as a seaman on a Portuguese ship. In his 1557 book True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America, Stadin, who reportedly spent a year in captivity before escaping, described raids in which the Tupinambá killed and ate everyone they captured (except, apparently, him).
Nearly four hundred years later, in the Pacific Theatre during World War II, Allied prisoners of war described numerous instances in which their Japanese captors tortured and then ate their prisoners. In post-war tribunals, survivors testified that their captors acted systematically, selecting one individual each day and hacking off limbs and flesh while they were alive and conscious. American soldiers also became even more insistent about removing the bodies of their fallen comrades from the battlefield after it was discovered that the Japanese sometimes sliced off pieces of the dead with bayonets – a gory ritual some Americans began to practise as well.
Perhaps the most famous wartime twentieth-century incidence of exocannibalism was the ‘Ogasawara Incident’ in which Lieutenant General Yoshio Tachibana ordered his starving men on the island of Chichi Jima to execute a group of downed American fliers who had been captured after carrying out a bombing raid. Medical orderlies were then instructed to cut the livers from the bodies and the organs were cooked and served to the senior staff. Tachibana and several others were arrested after the war but since cannibalism was not listed as an official war crime, in the end they were actually convicted and hanged for preventing the honourable burial of the prisoners the officer and his men had eaten. Later was it revealed that an American submarine had recovered one of the nine downed fliers, thus saving him from a similar fate at the hands of the starving Japanese. The lucky man’s name was Lieutenant George H. W. Bush.
There is no such element of terror involved in the practice of endocannibalism, although it too can be carried out in order to transfer the spirit of the dead or their strengths into the bodies of the living. Anthropologists have proposed that, much like Christian burial rituals or the administration of last rites, endocannibalism was undertaken by some groups in order to facilitate the separation of the deceased’s soul from its body. The Melanesians (living in Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea) reportedly practised a form of mortuary cannibalism for this reason, consuming small titbits from the bodies of their deceased relatives, as we will see in the next chapter.
Anthropologist Beth Conklin studied the Wari’ from the western Amazonian rainforest of Brazil. She reported that, until the 1960s, the Wari’ consumed portions of human flesh as well as bone meal mixed with honey. Having conducted extensive interviews with Wari’ elders, she concluded that the Wari’ were keenly aware that prolonged grieving made it hard for mourners to get on with their lives. With the corpse being the single most powerful reminder of the deceased, the Wari’ believed that consuming the body would eradicate it once and for all. Nonetheless, they were forced by missionaries and government officials to abandon their funerary rites and to bury their dead according to the Western tradition. According to Conklin, the Wari’ found this ritual to be particularly repellent since they considered the ground to be ‘cold, wet and polluting’, and that ‘to leave a loved one’s body to rot in the dirt was disrespectful and degrading to the dead and heart-wrenching for those who mourned them’.
Getting back to the question of whether or not the Caribs were cannibals, I met Cristo Adonis, the spiritual leader of the Trinidadian Amerindians, during a trip to Trinidad. Rather than use the European colonial assigned names Carib and Arawak, Adonis refers to his ancestors as the Karina and Locono people. Today, only around 600 members survive, none of whom are full-blooded members of the tribes. Adonis told me that his people did in fact practise both endocannibalism, in the context of religious practices, and exocannibalism, as a way to gain power from their defeated enemies. His evidence for this claim derives solely from ethnohistorical accounts and stories passed down over hundreds of years, which are far from concrete proof, though he questioned ‘why indigenous historians pass on stories about their ancestors practising cannibalism if the stories weren’t based on real customs’.
Actually, I can think of some potential reasons for claiming one’s ancestors were cannibals (e.g. to instil fear in their enemies), but Neil Whitehead also thinks that the Caribs were man-eaters. Whitehead offers accounts of Amerindians practising cannibalism, written by non-Spanish writers, arguing that since the English, French and Dutch were enemies of Spain, they would have wanted to develop alliances with the Amerindians. Since the non-Spaniards were presumably on friendlier terms with the locals, they would have been in better position to observe and report on the true behaviour of their native allies.
Arguing against Carib cannibalism, perhaps, is the fact that the documentation by non-Spaniards regarding the behaviour contains some seriously fanciful descriptions. For example, alongside his descriptions of anthropophagy, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote about some indigenous peoples having their heads located within their chests and their feet pointing backwards, the latter a characteristic that made them ‘very difficult to track’.
As a result, readers – both casual and scholarly – were subjected to a 500-year indoctrination period during which they heard little if anything about the genocidal mistreatment of native populations. After all, who would sympathise with far-off, profoundly foreign indigenous populations or be able to appreciate the sociological significance of cannibalism (if the practice did occur)? Far more likely, they would come away believing that Columbus and the other European explorers had fought off hordes of cannibalistic subhumans, thus sparing many a grateful savage the horrors of the cooking pot. From the New World to Africa, Australia and the Pacific islands, regardless of the true nature and extent of the practices, cannibalism was generally perceived to be a widespread phenomenon. It would be the role of the good Christians – explorers, and the missionaries who invariably followed them – to take control of the situation and thus put an end to this most horrific of human behaviours.
For the most part, this public mindset concerning ritual cannibalism remained until 1979, when Professor William Arens initiated what became a loud and serious debate over the validity of cannibalism as a social practice. In his book The Man-Eating Myth, Arens argued that, aside from some well-known starvation-induced instances, there was absolutely no proof that cannibalism, ritualised or otherwise, had ever been practised in any human culture. He also pointed out how cannibalism had become a handy symbol for any unacceptable behaviour practised by ‘others’ – a broad and malleable category of evildoers that included enemies, followers of non-Christian religions and any groups determined to retain their ‘uncivilised’ customs. Arens asserted that colonial groups had been guilty of making false accusations of cannibalism against native populations across the globe and throughout history, regardless of scant evidence. With Christopher Columbus acting as a poster boy, applying the cannibal tag justified the condemnation and, if necessary, the eradication of anyone accused of breaking this ultimate taboo – a practice whose validity (Arens was quick to point out) was always unsupported by anything resembling first-hand evidence.
The reaction to Arens’s incendiary book was swift and mostly negative. Ultimately, though, I’ve found myself agreeing with much but certainly not all of his hypothesis, in part because of the brutal pounding colonial invaders doled out to indigenous groups over the centuries. On the other hand, my investigation into ritual cannibalism leads me to conclude that there is plenty of evidence to support the stance that some cultural groups practised cannibalism, and that they did so for a variety of reasons. As for the claims of Carib cannibalism specifically, the fact remains that beyond the second- and third-hand accounts, there isn’t a shred of physical evidence, nor is there any indication that Columbus or his men ever actually witnessed man-eating themselves. The debate continues.