From the most ancient times up to now, cannibalism has been with us

Sep 17, 2008 14:18 GMT  ·  By

There is no law to prevent the manifestation of cannibalism. Against killing or physical assault, yes, but not against eating your own. Cases of cannibalism are constantly scandalizing the public, and every time this happens, everyone wonders what makes one embrace it and practice it.

 

Human mind is a strange and tricky thing – it still eludes most deciphering attempts and pretty often it goes wild on socially unaccepted paths. Antropophagy, the clinical term for cannibalism, is one of these paths.

 

Seven years ago, an advertisement posted on a website reported that a German called Armin Meiwes was looking for "Well-built men, 18-30, who would like to be eaten by me." 43-year-old Bernd-Jurgen Brandes answered the call and they met on March 9, 2001. After getting Brandes doped with alcohol and painkillers, with his consent, Meiwes cut his procreating organ with a knife and, after cooking it, they both ate it. When Brandes fainted from all the bleeding, Meiwes cut his throat and, over the next months, consumed 20 kg (44 pounds) of his body. Along with Jeffrey Dahmer and Albert Fish, he became one of the most prominent recent figures of such kind.

 

But cannibalism is older than civilization and doesn't limit to humans. Egyptians thought their agriculture deity, Osiris, gave them crops in order to restrain them from eating each other, while Greek legends and mythology are abundant in such practices, starting with the father of gods, the time god Chronos. Even the Old Testament pictures Hebrews turning to cannibalism in order to survive in the African desert. Current Christian religious practices involve the ritual that simulates ingesting Christ's flesh and blood. People unwillingly let go of that practice only when they were forced to. But while we resent the idea that such odious criminals live among us or potentially even within any of us, recent happenings demonstrated that civilized people also resort to eating each other in order to stay alive.

 

Anthropology experts divide it into two categories: the learned one and the innate one, called cannibalism for survival. In the 19th century, it occurred so often that it became one of the unwritten laws of the sea in case of shipwrecks. It is a last resort that makes logical sense eventually. In such cases, anything that vaguely reminds of food or can be used as such is being consumed prior to getting to eat fellow humans.

 

The learned cannibalism can be further divided into endocannibalism and exocannibalism. The first one defines the consumption of a kinsman flesh (someone from the person's family, tribe, society etc.), with religious intents, like venerating the dead or assimilating one of their esoteric features (strength or wisdom). There are many tribes still in existence where this practice is common, be it in the form of eating bits of flesh or mixing the dead person's ashes in a rudimentary soup. On the other hand, exocannibalism draws upon rage, hatred or humiliation and doesn't involve lineage perpetuation or funeral rites. Instead, it concerns physical hunger, terrifying other groups or stealing powers. For the Mianmins, a mountain tribe in Papua New Guinea, their Abtalmin neighbors were their "game." Endocannibalism was eradicated by governments and missionaries in the late 1950s but the fearsome exocannibalism survived.

 

The question concerning the emergence of the cannibalism practice is disputed between the anthropological schools of materialism, which blame it on need, and of idealism, which claim it arose from religious practices and sacrificial rituals gone wrong – either way, this brings us closer to the animal stage. Some anthropologists sustain the idea that we don't eat each other mainly because it would be bad in evolution terms, as we're driven by the idea of seeing our genes survive and properly. But bluntly put, poor as it is in the long-term survival of the species, it's excellent for a short-term survival of the specimen.

 

Still, what Meiwes, Dahmer or the others did, although also labeled as cannibalism, is being referred to as pathological anthropophagy (the ingestion of human flesh caused by insanity) and it doesn't fall into the range of anthropology, but rather psychiatry.