The popular meaning of “cannibalism” is well known; in this entry, it is the eating of human flesh by another human being. The actual word “cannibal” only appears after Columbus's fifteenth-century forays into the New World of the Americas. Prior to this period, references to man-eaters, consumers of human flesh, and anthropophagi were common in Europe and Asia. The word “cannibal” simply became a new, and easier to pronounce, shorthand. “Ethnography,” however, is a little harder to define. In the context of this entry, it needs to be distinguished from anthropology. Ethnography is primarily the professional, objective description and study of human societies and cultures. Anthropology and other social sciences rely on ethnographic studies as the foundation for further, and deeper, investigations into aspects of human societies. At their simplest, therefore, ethnographies are the raw material of cultural studies.

Reports of cannibalism usually identify two forms. The first is cannibalism as a dietary practice; the second is cannibalism as a religious sacrament. The first is characteristic of accounts of classic cannibalism, where the perpetrators are typically primitive, cruel, and inferior, their cannibalism being just one aspect of a deficient culture. The second is characterized by a culture on the way to civilization, misguided but with spiritual values that influence evolving social codes of behavior. The “type” of cannibalism identified often reflects the sentiments of the writer.

The literature pertaining to cannibalism is complex, ranging from the first basic “descriptive” accounts through to the most complex theoretical studies. However, it is a phenomenon cursed by unreliable sources, personal and cultural biases, faith rather than logic, and legitimacy assigned through age and by repetition. A consideration of the ethnographies of cannibalism not only serves to test accounts of cannibalism but also is a cautionary tale relevant to all history-based research—the importance of testing sources prior to their use and of seeking and assessing alternative explanations with the same vigor as writers often use in pursuing a cannibalism explanation.

Not all descriptions of foreign cultures are ethnographies. This is a critical distinction in the examination of cannibalism. Many later researchers and writers have relied heavily on text sources that, while superficially appearing to objectively describe foreign societies, are nonetheless not reliable and not worthy of the term “ethnography.” Most are popular stories rather than research-driven observations. Often written by travelers and dilettantes, or by government and church officials with particular agendas, they were extended anecdotes, intended to sell and so placing the emphasis on the strange and sensational. This indiscriminate use of, and trust in, older written sources by modern writers, often simply because they are old, leads to the creation and/or perpetuation of erroneous data, in the belief that they provide an accurate reflection of past cultural phenomena able to be accepted at face value. It also obscures actual cultural phenomena of significance.

Although many societies and cultural groups have been accused of cannibalism, it is a major characteristic of allegations of cannibalism that its alleged practice, as a cultural institution, is largely confined to nonliterate or proto-literate societies—those societies without their own written histories or codified laws of behavior. They are unable to bring written histories or laws to their own defense and are thus open to unsubstantiated allegations. Cannibalism is rarely reported from literate societies, either in their own texts or in the texts of foreign observers, and certainly never as a common, culturally endorsed practice. When it is reported in literate societies, it is typically in an outcast faction of that society.

This entry focuses on the varied quality of accounts of cannibalism, particularly those reported through a “colonial eye.” It distinguishes the characteristics of accounts and, in so doing, presents a typology of and a system for assessing such accounts.

Cannibalism as a Cultural Practice

The interrogation of the realities of cannibalism depends upon what sort of cannibalism is being discussed. There is no doubt that acts of cannibalism have occurred. Modern news media regularly feature stories where one person has eaten the flesh of another. Making reference to corroborating court evidence, such accounts are typically found to be isolated incidents, typically reflecting psychopathic acts by disturbed or traumatized individuals. There are also accounts of survival cannibalism, where people have been forced to consume human flesh in order to endure. However, in such cases, the participants acknowledge that theirs was a crisis-based action and not a normal acceptable cultural practice. Indeed, participants in such survival events carry around the trauma of their actions for the rest of their lives. Such aberrant events cannot lead to the conclusion that cannibalism is a common characteristic of the culture from which the participant derives. An act by an individual does not mean that the entire society with which that individual is associated contains cannibals. Most Western observers would accept this observation as it applies to their own society. They have in the past, however, used evidence of such actions, real or imagined, of an individual in another society to condemn entire cultures. Yet, to be a cultural phenomenon, the practice or concept must be endorsed by the participating society's norms and codes. A society can thus only be described as cannibalistic if its values condone cannibalism. It is at this point of identifying cannibalism as a cultural practice that most allegations fail. Cannibalism is universally condemned as bad; however, there will always be individual exceptions.

The History of Cannibalism Studies

The topic of human cannibalism has wide appeal. There have been thousands of reports of cannibalism over thousands of years. The more “scholarly” of these have appeared since the mid-twentieth century, corresponding with the emergence and development of disciplines such as anthropology and social history. The dignifier of “scholarly” must be used with caution, for, while there are a number of significant academic studies, there have also been a greater number of popular writings: works that, although perhaps written by an accomplished author with some professional qualifications, are, nonetheless, sometimes little more than simplistic compilations of untested allegations written for a popular audience.

Cannibalism has been researched from many directions. There are those researchers who concentrate on determining whether there is sufficient evidence to conclude it was practiced at all. Such studies typically apply a pragmatic and methodological process to identifying, testing, and analyzing accounts. There are those researchers who generally accept cannibalism as a practice and then interrogate the cultural significance of the belief and/or practice through diligent application of complex anthropological theory. Such studies typically say proof of the practice is not important. What is important is the belief. There are those who examine the fascination people have with cannibalism, in particular in the popular print media, film, and literature. An important aspect of such studies is that they look for accounts where cannibalism is identified, ignoring those far more prevalent accounts where cannibalism is absent and sometimes explicitly denied. Subject societies thus become branded as cannibals by a minimal number of accounts rather than through accumulated evidence from many sources.

It seems all cultures have some beliefs in cannibalism: that it was practiced by other societies, that it was a trait of their own society in the distant past, that it occurs occasionally under times of stress, that sometimes it is the result of violent pathological behavior, and so on. It does exist as a concept, and this concept—the persistent belief in cannibalism whether practiced or not—is important. Nonetheless, even more important is the requirement to determine whether it was ever a practice, and under what circumstances. The primary reason is that, if it is accepted uncritically, then other actual cultural phenomena may be ignored or belittled. Real information can be lost in favor of the more sensational.

It is the approach of the first group that is the focus of this entry: those who carefully consider the analysis of sources in order, first, to identify whether any cannibal acts did occur; second, to place reports and beliefs of cannibalism into a more nuanced social and historical context; and, third, to identify real behaviors and beliefs that may be concealed beneath the generic allegation of cannibalism. These researchers insist that, to truly investigate any belief or practice of cannibalism, it is necessary to exhaustively examine the sources in order to refine the evidence for or against the existence of the physical act. Typically, these researchers do not deny cultural beliefs in the act but assert that the sources often used to confirm the actual practice are unreliable or have been misinterpreted (e.g., Arens 1979, 1998; Evans-Pritchard 1960; Obeyesekere 2005; Pickering 1999).

This approach may first appear to be methodologically mechanical and fundamental; an examination of primary sources should be a standard process in the development of any research reliant on historical evidence. However, in the study of cannibalism in particular, such research is critical and a valid outcome in itself. It is through this approach that often-sublimated cultural information can be bought to the surface. This information, often proven to be noncannibal in nature, can help in a more accurate examination of social and historical processes and cultural beliefs. Questions addressed by researchers in this area include: Was cannibalism ever really a cultural practice? If so, where? If not, what is the source of the belief that it did? If so, what cultural beliefs secured its performance? How reliable are the historical sources used? What biases affected historical observations? What does a belief in cannibalism, even where it was not an actual practice, signify? What is its cultural context? What real cultural phenomena, or historical realities, might be concealed or ignored through concentrating solely on the actual act of cannibalism? Is there more to the belief than is often considered?

The result of this research into the quality of early reports has been a theoretical and methodological approach that allows not only for the elimination of unsubstantiated reports but also for the authentication of reliable reports. Nonetheless, with a few rare exceptions, reports can be consistently dismissed, their content assigned to other noncannibal behaviors. Of the few that remain, it can legitimately be concluded that, given the inherent failings of the majority of reports of cannibalism, and the number that can be proven to be false accusations or misinterpretations, the few surviving accounts are not necessarily reliable and survive only through literary merit. Invariably, in-depth research into the evidence for cannibalism in specific societies has contributed to disproving allegations. The closer we look, the less reliable is the so-called ethnographic evidence.

Ethnographies?

As noted, many historical accounts are classified as ethnographies purely because of their age or their foreign cultural content. They were rarely written by objective reporters. But they have still become the primary sources for allegations of cannibalism.

The majority of written accounts are unsourced, unsubstantiated, and often highly sensationalized, saying little beyond that a certain group were cannibals; extra evidence is absent. Often the statement is simply based on the authors' own preconceived beliefs. It was expected throughout the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries that so-called primitive cultures would be cannibals. In the earlier centuries, this was the result of a religious predilection toward the less-than-human practices of “black” people and societies. In later centuries, when the colonial push was at its peak, it occurred because developing ideas of an evolution of societies and cultures placed preliterate societies at the bottom of the evolutionary scale, a place situated in uncivilized practices such as cannibalism, incest, multiple gods, and brutality, thereby deserving of control by more civilized colonial societies. Such stories were often invented and perpetuated by people who had no direct engagements with the foreign culture at all, or who had self-serving agendas.

Similarly, the literature abounds with secondhand accounts, where the author refers to another person's beliefs or alleged experiences. Again, the initial account is often unsourced and untested, and taken at face value. This tendency is not unique to early writers. Even today, commentators will take these historical accounts as evidence. The problem with unsourced secondhand and thirdhand accounts is that one story becomes many. The repetition creates a record of hundreds of accounts derived from one. The stories also often become added to in the retelling, with the details being exaggerated and the “evidence” strengthened. A good example is where one observer reports hearing of an act of cannibalism and this is cited by a second later writer who reports that the first had actually seen the act, while a third even later reporter has the first observer reporting he or she had seen the perpetrator “greedily devouring” a child (see Pickering 1999, 55). Such exaggerated accounts are common, especially when the author is writing for mass consumption, where sensation increases the prospect of sales (see also Obeyesekere 2005).

Historians also often rely heavily on the newspapers of the past for historical information. Again, these documents' age seems to bestow some legitimacy on their content. Such popular media were subject to the same sensationalism as those of today. For example, in nineteenth-century Australia, a number of allegations were made about Aboriginal people killing and cannibalizing lost miners. Subsequent coroners' inquests would invariably find that there was no evidence of cannibalism and that animals had interfered with the body. The coroner's report would not make it back into the popular media, however, so the allegations stood without subsequent clarification or retraction (Buchhorn 1994).

While there is always the possibility that the unsourced, secondhand and thirdhand accounts were based on actual events, there can also be no doubt that most were either hearsay fabrications based on an existing belief that certain groups were cannibals or else exaggerations of reports. They are thus unreliable as primary evidence.

Considering that the practice is believed to be so widespread, firsthand accounts are remarkably rare, with firsthand detailed accounts rarer still. There are two major forms of firsthand accounts: those where the writer claims to have observed a cannibal act or evidence thereof, and those in which a person admits to participating in or witnessing such an act. A characteristic of the first type of observation is that subsequent comparative research into the accused society's cultural practices can normally find alternative and well-documented explanations for what the observer has often described in part—in particular, mortuary rites. Many mortuary practices involve complex treatment of remains, including the separation of flesh from bone, which is analogous, and central, to the symbolic separation of body and spirit. While unusual to a Western observer, such ceremonies, while involving complex treatment of remains, can be demonstrated to contain no cannibal component. In other cases, remains will be found in an unusual context—for example, where ceremonial mummification over a low-heat drying fire is mistaken for cooking.

Another significant aspect of firsthand accounts is the separation in time from when the observation occurred and the reporting of the event through publication. Numerous accounts show evidence of growing in scope over the years as their authors published them in successive iterations. Often authors had an ego-based bias and attempted to deliberately exaggerate their observations and experience. For some, this propensity to exaggeration was acknowledged by other authors of the time, and it has subsequently been proven by modern researchers.

Admissions by people accused directly or indirectly of cannibalism are also subject to mitigating circumstances. There are numerous cases where a person states that, while their community members were not cannibals, the neighboring groups were; when a neighboring group says the same thing, the observer claims both were lying and both were cannibals. There are also numerous cases where people admit that their ancestors were cannibals but they are not any more. There are even accounts where people have admitted to eating someone. These and similar accounts, when examined closely, reveal significant insights into the belief in cannibalism by such accused groups.

Many admissions to past cannibal behavior are also found in accounts by people who have been educated by missionaries or Western colonial teaching institutions. In such cases, the children of the colonized were educated in cannibalism as a practice by the colonizers, and took on that imagined history of their ancestors as real.

Nor was the suspicion and allegation of cannibalism always one way. There are numerous accounts of indigenous people, on meeting Europeans for the first time, being afraid that the Europeans were cannibals and being suspicious of food offered to them. As a Pintupi man, Freddy West Tjakamarra (Burum and Batty 1993) stated, “I … thought that the tins might contain flesh of Aboriginal people. … Well I thought they carried human steaks in those tins. … We were frightened of what it might be.”

Sacred and Secular Histories

As noted, the alleged evidence for and allegations of cannibalism appear to be most common in nonliterate or proto-literate societies: those societies with no long-term records of events or of cultural practices consolidated and written down as a socially appropriate code of behaviors. The question, therefore, is why cannibalism disappears as soon as people start writing their own histories and laws. A characteristic of such nonliterate societies is that their histories are short, restricted to memory and oral tradition. It is rare to find a secular history older than three generations. The histories of nonliterate peoples are invariably written by their conquerors.

The next attribute of such cultures is that the secular past quickly merges with the sacred past. The sacred past is the time of ancestors whose activities created the world. Such activities frequently involved acts of cannibalism on the part of what a Western commentator would call a mythical ancestor or god. Examples are not unique to preliterate or nonagricultural hunter-gatherer societies; the Greek god Kronos, for example, ate his children until he was killed by Zeus, while the Cyclops was an eater of human flesh. Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures have numerous stories of sacred ancestor beings that practiced cannibalism and invariably suffered for the practice, either by death or by being excluded from humanity. Every culture has sacred and secular stories where human flesh is eaten by other humans or creatures with anthropomorphic characteristics, such as a wolf or a bull-headed man. Invariably, the act is portrayed as evil and the cannibal is ultimately punished.

To a believer, the sacred past and the secular past are indistinguishable. The cannibal ancestors were the real ancestors of today's people. Therefore, the comment that “we don't now but we used to” need not reflect the actual cessation of a practice but rather the compression of sacred and secular histories into a moral code, and one that usually condemns cannibalism as antisocial. As Yunkurra Billy Atkins (2008 2016), an Aboriginal elder and artist from Jigalong, Western Australia, stated of sacred mythical ancestral beings, “I'm telling you that that cannibal mob is out there and they are no good.”

Another concern is that where cannibalism is identified as a cultural institution, in which the members of a society are willing cannibals supported by the moral codes of the culture, the practice is nonetheless the first to disappear upon contact with Europeans. In such a scenario, where there is no evil attached to the deed, it is socially condoned, yet it disappears quickly while other socially condemned “wrong” acts, such as killings, thefts, and other violence, persist. Cannibalism is elusive.

A characteristic of most studies of cannibalism is that they tend to treat the evidence in isolation, divorced from the other cultural practices and beliefs of the society in question. An account of cannibalism is taken and duplicated, or assessed, as if it were a socially distinct practice and belief. However, anthropology clearly demonstrates that cultural phenomena are interlinked; economic systems are linked with religious beliefs, kinship systems, and so on. If cannibalism were a traditional practice, it would necessarily integrate and articulate with wider belief systems and see some form of expression through these conjoined systems. Similarly, just as cannibalism could not exist within a cultural group without support from other cultural phenomena, it is unlikely that a group could have culturally supported cannibal practices while surrounded by other cultural groups that did not and that may not have had cultural prohibitions against cannibalism. Societies tend to share a great number of common values and belief systems with their neighbors, whether those neighbors be friends or enemies. These relationships and shared beliefs are essential for the maintenance of the exogamous exchanges necessary for community survival, for example trade, intermarriage, and the sharing of ideas. A “cannibal” group would most likely not survive in isolation; its neighbors would be expected to share some elements of the group's cultural practices. However, such shared values in cannibalism are rare. Major cultural practices cannot exist in isolation.

Cannibalism as Metaphor

Cultural statements cannot be automatically taken literally or at face value. The topic of cannibalism brings this point to the fore. All societies have systems of metaphor that, to the unfamiliar, could suggest a culture of cannibalism. The most prevailing context for cannibalism is within the metaphor of consumption. Consumption can certainly mean to eat; it can also mean to appropriate, to own, to desire, and to possess. The idea of eating someone is often used either romantically or lovingly, as in “you're so cute I could just eat you,” applied to children and lovers, or as a metaphor for sex. Accounts of people from nonliterate societies frequently refer to “eating” young women, but these references are subsequently, and clearly, identified by the informant as meaning having had sex. This is not unique to nonliterate societies. For example, today the internet has content related to a particular subculture of “Vore.” This concept, ranging from the silly to the obscene, attracts people with interests in the consumption of other people. The communication revolves around cannibalism, but with clear overtones of sexual dominance and/or submissiveness. Clearly few, if any, of these communications result in actual consumption, but the metaphor is clear.

Further, we need not just look for the cannibal metaphor in the other—that is, societies foreign to our own experiences and values. Western advertising is rich in cannibal allusions. Food is anthropomorphized to speak to us of its desirability. One particular major cosmetic and skin-care company has run a series of advertisements under the line “skin good enough to eat” accompanied by images of young women portrayed as food items (Coloribus n.d.). It is not hard to imagine how a foreign observer, totally unfamiliar with Western language, humor, and metaphor systems, might interpret this information.

Early reporters characteristically took descriptions from their study subjects literally, especially when that interpretation fitted the preconceptions of the observer. People were often either admitted cannibals or liars. Unfamiliarity with languages and artistic symbolism, and reliance on interpreters or communication through a second language, meant that true meanings of statements were lost and misinterpreted. This is not unique to the writings of the untrained or the historical; it still occurs in anthropology today, where the student has to learn to look for hidden meanings in statements and stories by informants.

Other Evidence

Collecting institutions worldwide are full of unusual objects. Within indigenous collections, it is possible to see examples of the collected bodies of murder victims, the mummified bodies of the dead, decorated heads and body parts, photographs of combat involving killings, head hunting, unusual mortuary practices, and other phenomena strange to the Western eye and experience. Nonetheless, despite years of collecting and photography, there remains little reliable evidence for, or visual documentation of, institutionalized cannibalism.

There have been arguments for archaeological evidence for cannibalism (Villa et al. 1986; White 1992). Such accounts have been questioned and it has been suggested that alternative explanations for the evidence exist, such as unusual mortuary practices (Pickering 1989). The argument is that it is in the statistical nature of archaeological survival of phenomena that well-documented, and more commonly practiced, noncannibal social phenomena are more likely to be represented in the archaeological evidence than are rare and isolated events. This issue continues to be debated.

Exceptions?

Reliable evidence for culturally condoned cannibalism is thus very poor worldwide. There are, however, exceptions. Obeyesekere (2005), for example, has considered cannibalism among the Māori and other Pacific groups. The evidence suggests that most reported cases were not actual acts of cannibalism but rather threatening displays and parodies. There may have been instances of Māori cannibalism following initial encounters between Māori and British as the Māori learned of the practice from their first encounters with the British and then duplicated it as a weapon against the invaders. The practice apparently ceased immediately upon the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, essentially at the exact moment when the “primitive other” of the Māori came to be perceived as civilized peers of the British. In Papua New Guinea, Gajdusek (1957) had claimed that the disease kuru was transmitted through cannibalism. He alleged the practice began in the early 1900s and finished in the 1950s, a period of first Western contact and just before his arrival. Gajdusek's allegations of cannibalism have been vigorously criticized (Arens 1998).

In cases such as these, the cannibalism is short lived and typically associated with periods of colonial contact, expansion, and dominance. Very different cultures, with very different worldviews, come into contact. This contact may institute a trauma within a culture that leads to a breakdown in certain social codes. Examples of survival cannibalism at the group level have been recorded among both civilian and military forces trapped without resources and subject to the extreme horrors of wars, as well as among castaway mariners and air crash survivors. In each case, the group has considered the options and, for a time, agreed to put aside normal social conventions.

Conclusion

The charge of cannibalism has always been leveled against people whom other societies find foreign or inferior. It was a weapon of colonialism and of class. It was an expected trait of so-called “primitive” societies and, not surprisingly, explorers found what they were looking for. It is notable that cannibalism always seems to be reported in those societies that do not have a written history or written sets of laws and social codes to refer to in their defense, or in social groups on the margins of larger societies. Research is increasingly disproving cannibalism as a cultural practice; however, it is still not possible to say it never existed. It is only through very detailed examination of specific societies that the question can be examined. Nor can cannibalism be treated in isolation. It must be tested against other social phenomena, such as mortuary beliefs, kinship systems, sacred stories, and worldviews, as well as within the system of metaphor and communication used within the society under consideration. It must also be assessed against other alternative explanations. Cannibalism as an approved cultural practice in any society may never be fully proven or disproven. Research in the ethnographic literature is increasingly suggesting that a conclusion of cannibalism occurring is becoming less and less viable as the sole explanation for alleged phenomena, and the more that accounts are definitively disproven, the more other accounts become suspect. There remains a need for further studies of the topic of cannibalism: studies that address specific rather than generic cultural groups and that situate the research in the wider context of other social practices and beliefs.

SEE ALSO: Colonialism and the Museum; Cultural Evolution; Death and Dying; Ethnography; Human/Environment Dichotomy; Infanticide; Sacred Time; Social Darwinism