Cannibalism

Cannibalism is defined as the ingestion of members of one's own species. As used in zoology, it refers to species that prey on their own kind. In anthropology, it is used specifically to refer to the eating of humans by humans. Around the 16th century in English-speaking countries, the term cannibalism began replacing the Latin-derived term anthropophagy. The word cannibal is usually traced to the Caribbean and the voyages there of Christopher Columbus. Richard Hakluyt's Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America and the Islands Adjacent (1582) popularized the word in its English form.

Analytic categories of cannibalism vary. A recent archaeological study used the threefold classification of survival, funerary, and gastronomic cannibalism. Other categories commonly found in the literature, both anthropological and otherwise, include aggression, criminal, epicurean, nutritional, ritual, sexual, spiritual, and, less commonly, medical and autocannibalism.

Anthropologists usually focus on ritual cannibalism and often use the subcategories of exocannibalism to refer to the consumption of members from a culturally defined outside group and endocannibalism to refer to the consumption of members of one's own group. Hermann Helmuth suggests that exocannibalism was more common among agriculturalists and endocannibalism among foragers. In the folk model, exocannibalism is usually associated with the effort to strike fear in the enemy as well as to absorb the spirit of the enemy, and involves killing. Associated with an effort to maintain the group's identity, endocannibalism is often viewed as showing respect for the deceased. Obviously connected to burial ceremonies and sometimes called “mortuary cannibalism” or “compassionate cannibalism,” endocannibalism rarely involves killing. For example, according to Beth Conklin, the Wari people of Amazonia justified their mortuary cannibalism with the belief that when they consumed the corpse, the spirit of the dead was absorbed by the entire tribe.

Cannibalism has a long history, ranging from 5th century BC writings of Herodotus to Bruce Knauft's documentation of three cases of cannibalism between 1978 and 1983 among the Gebusi in south central New Guinea. Probably the first full-scale treatment of cannibalism in English was Garry Hogg's 1958 Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice. More journalistic than anthropological, the book, nevertheless, was based on acceptable scholarship and remains a useful survey.

Recently, archaeologists working in the U.S. Southwest have provided incontrovertible evidence of cannibalism. For example, Tim White's extraordinarily meticulous account of cannibalism among the Anasazi in the U.S. Southwest uncovered the cannibalized remains from one site of 17 adults and 12 children. The number of cannibalized remains from other Anasazi sites is expected to exceed 100. Christy Turner and Jacqueline Turner concluded that cannibalism occurred in the Four Corners area for about four centuries, beginning about AD 900. In some Anasazi sites, human proteins have been identified as residues in cooking pots and in human feces. And preserved human waste containing identifiable human tissue was found at an Anasazi site along with osteological evidence of cannibalism.