Cannibalism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cannibalism (from Caníbales,
the Spanish name for the Carib people,[1]
a West Indies tribe formerly well known for their practice of cannibalism)[2]
is the act or practice of humans eating the flesh or internal organs of other
human beings. It is also called anthropophagy. A person who practices
cannibalism is called a cannibal. The expression "cannibalism" has
been extended into zoology to mean one individual of a species consuming all or part of another individual
of the same species as food, including sexual cannibalism.
Cannibalism was
widespread in the past among humans in many parts of the world, continuing into
the 19th century in some isolated South Pacific
cultures, and to the present day in parts of tropical Africa. In a few cases in
insular Melanesia,
indigenous flesh-markets existed.[3]
Fiji was once known
as the 'Cannibal Isles'.[4]
Cannibalism has been well documented around the world, from Fiji to the Amazon
Basin to the Congo to Māori New Zealand.[5]
Neanderthals
are believed to have practiced cannibalism,[6][7]
and Neanderthals may have been eaten by anatomically modern humans.[8]
Cannibalism has
recently been both practiced and fiercely condemned in several wars, especially
in Liberia[9]
and Congo.[10]
Today, the Korowai
are one of very few tribes still believed to eat human flesh as a cultural practice.[11][12]
It is also still known to be practiced as a ritual and in war in various Melanesian
tribes.[13]
Historically, allegations of cannibalism were used by the colonial
powers to justify the subjugation of what were seen as primitive peoples;
cannibalism has been said to test the bounds of cultural relativism as it challenges
anthropologists "to define what is or is not beyond the pale of acceptable
human behavior".[14]
Cannibalism is rare and is not illegal in most countries.[15]
People who eat human flesh are usually charged with crimes other than
cannibalism, such as murder or desecration of a body.[15]
Cannibalism has
been occasionally practiced as a last resort by people suffering from famine, including
in modern times. A famous example is the ill-fated Westward expedition of the Donner
Party, and more recently the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, after
which some survivors ate the bodies of dead passengers. Also, some mentally ill
people obsess about eating others and actually do so, such as Jeffrey
Dahmer and Albert Fish. There is resistance to formally labeling
cannibalism as a mental disorder.[16]
Overview
The Carib
tribe in the Lesser Antilles, from whom the word cannibalism
derives, acquired a long-standing reputation as cannibals following the
recording of their legends in the 17th century.[14]
Some controversy exists over the accuracy of these legends and the prevalence
of actual cannibalism in the culture.
The spread of
human cannibalism (anthropophagy) in the late 19th century.
A well known
case of mortuary cannibalism is that of the Fore
tribe in New
Guinea which resulted in the spread of the prion disease kuru.[17]
Although the Fore's mortuary cannibalism was well documented, the practice had
ceased before the cause of the disease was recognized. However, some scholars
argue that although post-mortem dismemberment was the practice during funeral
rites, cannibalism was not. Marvin Harris theorizes that it happened during a
famine period coincident with the arrival of Europeans and was rationalized as
a religious rite.
In pre-modern
medicine, an explanation for cannibalism stated that it came about within a
black acrimonious humour, which, being lodged in the linings of the ventricle,
produced the voracity for human flesh.[18]
In 2003 a
publication in Science received a large amount of press attention when
it suggested that early humans may have practiced extensive cannibalism.[19][20]
According to this research, genetic markers commonly found in modern humans
worldwide suggest that today many people carry a gene that evolved as
protection against the brain diseases that can be
spread by consuming human brain tissue.[21]
A 2006 reanalysis of the data questioned this hypothesis,[22]
as it claimed to have found a data collection bias, which led to an erroneous
conclusion.[23]
This claimed bias came from incidents of cannibalism used in the analysis not
being due to local cultures, but having been carried out by explorers, stranded
seafarers or escaped convicts.[24]
The original authors published a subsequent paper in 2008 defending their
conclusions.[25]
Reasons
In some
societies, especially tribal societies, cannibalism is a cultural
norm. Consumption of a person from within the same community is called endocannibalism;
ritual cannibalism of the recently deceased can be part of the grieving
process,[26]
or a way of guiding the souls of the dead into the bodies of living
descendants.[27]
Exocannibalism
is the consumption of a person from outside the community, usually as a
celebration of victory against a rival tribe.[27]
Both types of cannibalism can also be fueled by the belief that eating a
person's flesh or internal organs will endow the cannibal with some of the
characteristics of the deceased.[28]
In most parts
of the world, cannibalism is not a societal norm, but is sometimes resorted to
in situations of extreme necessity. The survivors of the shipwrecks of the Essex
and Méduse in the 19th century are
said to have engaged in cannibalism, as are the members of Franklin's lost expedition and the Donner
Party. Such cases generally involve necro-cannibalism (eating the corpse of
someone who is already dead) as opposed to homicidal cannibalism (killing
someone for food). In English law, the latter is always considered a crime,
even in the most trying circumstances. The case of R v Dudley and Stephens, in which two
men were found guilty of murder for killing and eating a cabin boy while adrift
at sea in a lifeboat, set the precedent that necessity is no defence to a charge of
murder.
There are
numerous examples of murderers consuming their victims, often deriving some
degree of sexual satisfaction from the act of cannibalism. Notable examples
include Albert
Fish, Issei Sagawa and Jeffrey
Dahmer. These individuals are usually considered to be mentally
ill, although the compulsion to eat human flesh is not formally listed as a
mental disorder in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).[16]
Cases of autophagia,
or self-cannibalism, have also been reported.
Myths, legends and folklore
Cannibalism
features in the folklore and legends of many cultures and is most often
attributed to evil characters or as extreme retribution for some wrong.
Examples include the witch
in "Hansel and Gretel", Lamia
of Greek mythology and Baba Yaga
of Slavic folklore.
A number of
stories in Greek mythology involve cannibalism, in particular
cannibalism of close family members, for example the stories of Thyestes, Tereus and
especially Cronus,
who was Saturn in the Roman pantheon. The story of Tantalus also
parallels this.
The wendigo is a
creature appearing in the legends of the Algonquian people. It is thought of variously as
a malevolent cannibalistic spirit that could possess humans or a monster that humans could
physically transform into. Those who indulged in cannibalism were at particular
risk,[29]
and the legend appears to have reinforced this practice as taboo.
As used to demonize colonized or other groups
See also: Blood libel
Unsubstantiated
reports of cannibalism disproportionately relate cases of cannibalism among
cultures that are already otherwise despised, feared, or are little known. In
antiquity, Greek reports of cannibalism, (often called anthropophagy in
this context) were related to distant non-Hellenic barbarians,
or else relegated in Greek mythology to the 'primitive' chthonic world
that preceded the coming of the Olympian gods: see the explicit rejection of
human sacrifice in the cannibal feast prepared for the Olympians by Tantalus of his
son Pelops. All
South Sea Islanders were cannibals so far as their enemies were concerned. When
the whaleship Essex was rammed and sunk by a whale in
1820, the captain opted to sail 3000 miles upwind to Chile rather than
1400 miles downwind to the Marquesas because he had heard the Marquesans were
cannibals. Ironically many of the survivors of the shipwreck resorted to
cannibalism to survive.
However, Herman
Melville happily lived with the Marquesan Typees for a time after the other two
tribes on the island told him they were cannibals. In his semi-autobiographical
novel Typee,
he reports seeing shrunken heads and having strong evidence that the
tribal leaders ceremonially consumed the bodies of killed warriors of the
neighboring tribe after a skirmish.
William Arens, author of The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy,[30]
questions the credibility of reports of cannibalism and argues that the
description by one group of people of another people as cannibals is a
consistent and demonstrable ideological and rhetorical device to establish
perceived cultural superiority. Arens bases his thesis
on a detailed analysis of numerous "classic" cases of cultural
cannibalism cited by explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists. He asserted
that many were steeped in racism, unsubstantiated, or based on second-hand or
hearsay evidence.[31]
Arens' findings
are controversial, and have been cited as an example of postcolonial
revisionism.[32]
Conversely, Michel de Montaigne's essay "Of
cannibals" introduced a new multicultural note in European civilization.
Montaigne wrote that "one calls 'barbarism' whatever he is not accustomed
to".[33]
Accounts
See also: List of incidents of cannibalism
Among modern
humans, cannibalism has been practiced by various groups.[34]
In the past, it was practiced by humans in Europe,[35][36]
South America,[37]
among Iroquoian peoples in North America,[38]
Maori in New Zealand,[39]
the Solomon Islands,[40]
parts of West Africa[12]
and Central Africa,[12]
some of the islands of Polynesia,[12]
New Guinea,[41]
Sumatra,[12]
and Fiji.[42]
Evidence of cannibalism has been found in ruins associated with the Anasazi culture
of the Southwestern United States as well.[43][44]
Pre-history
Some
anthropologists, such as Tim White, suggest that ritual
cannibalism was common in human societies prior to the beginning of the Upper
Paleolithic period. This theory is based on the large amount of
"butchered human" bones found in Neanderthal
and other Lower/Middle Paleolithic sites.[45]
Cannibalism in the Lower and Middle Paleolithic may have occurred because of
food shortages.[46]
It has been also suggested that removing dead bodies through ritual cannibalism
might been a means of predator control, aiming to eliminate predators' and
scavengers' access to hominid (and early human) bodies.[47]
Jim Corbett proposed that after major
epidemics, when human corpses are easily accessible to predators, there are
more cases of man-eating leopards,[48]
so removing dead bodies through ritual cannibalism (before the cultural
traditions of burying and burning bodies appeared in human history) might have
had practical reasons for hominids and early humans to control predation.
In Gough's
Cave, England, remains of human bones and skulls, around 15,000 years old,
suggest that cannibalism took place amongst the people living in or visiting
the cave,[49]
and that they may have used human skulls as drinking
vessels.[50][51]
According to
one historical account, aboriginal tribes of Australia were "most
certainly cannibals", and would willingly eat anyone who was killed in a
fight; they would also eat men famed for their fighting ability who had died
natural deaths "... out of pity and consideration for the body".[52]
Early history
Cannibalism is
mentioned many times in early history and literature. It is reported in the
Bible during the siege of Samaria (2 Kings 6:25–30). Two women made a pact to eat their
children; after the first mother cooked her child the second mother ate it but
refused to reciprocate by cooking her own child. A similar story is reported by
Flavius
Josephus during the siege of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 AD (see Mary
of Bethezuba), and the population of Numantia during the Roman Siege
of Numantia in the 2nd century BC was reduced to cannibalism and suicide.
As in modern
times, though, reports of cannibalism were often told as apocryphal second and
third-hand stories, with widely varying levels of accuracy. St. Jerome,
in his letter Against Jovinianus, discusses how people
come to their present condition as a result of their heritage, and then lists
several examples of peoples and their customs. In the list, he mentions that he
has heard that Atticoti eat human flesh and that Massagetae
and Derbices (a people on the borders of India) kill and eat old people.
[53]
This points to the likelihood that St. Jerome's writing came from rumors and
does not represent the situation accurately.[citation needed]
Researchers
have found physical evidence of cannibalism in ancient times. In 2001,
archaeologists at the University of Bristol found evidence of Iron Age
cannibalism in Gloucestershire.[54]
Cannibalism was practiced as recently as 2000 years ago in Great Britain.[55]
In Germany, Emil Carthaus and Dr. Bruno Bernhard have observed 1,891 signs of
cannibalism in the caves at the Hönne (1000 –
700 BC).[56]
Middle Ages
During the
Muslim-Qurayš wars in the early 7th century, a case of cannibalism was
reported. Following at the Battle of Uhud in 625, it is said that after killing
Hamzah ibn Abdu l-Muṭṭalib, his liver was
consumed by Hind bint 'Utbah (the wife of Abû Sufyan ibn Harb
one of the commanders of the Qurayš
army)[57]
who later reportedly converted to Islam and became the mother of Muawiyah I
founder of the Islamic Umayyad Caliphate.
Reports of
cannibalism were also recorded during the First
Crusade, as Crusaders were alleged to have fed on the bodies of their dead
opponents following the Siege of Ma'arrat al-Numan. Amin
Maalouf also alleges further cannibalism incidents on the march to Jerusalem,
and to the efforts made to delete mention of these from western history.[58]
During Europe's Great Famine of 1315–1317 there were many
reports of cannibalism among the starving populations. In North Africa, as in
Europe, there are references to cannibalism as a last resort in times of famine.[59]
The Moroccan
Muslim explorer Ibn Batutta reported that one African king advised him
that nearby people were cannibals (though this may have been a prank played on
Ibn Batutta by the king to fluster his guest). However Batutta reported that
Arabs and Christians were safe, as their flesh was "unripe" and would
cause the eater to fall ill.
For a brief
time in Europe, an unusual form of cannibalism occurred when thousands of Egyptian mummies preserved in bitumen were
ground up and sold as medicine.[60]
The practice developed into a wide-scale business which flourished until the
late 16th century. This "fad" ended because the mummies were revealed
actually to be recently killed slaves. Two centuries ago, mummies were still
believed to have medicinal properties against bleeding, and were sold as pharmaceuticals
in powdered form (see human mummy confection and mummia).[61]
In China during
the Tang
Dynasty, cannibalism was supposedly resorted to by rebel forces early in
the period (who were said to raid neighboring areas for victims to eat), as
well as both soldiers and civilians besieged during the rebellion of An Lushan. Eating an enemy's heart and liver
was also claimed to be a feature of both official punishments and private
vengeance.[62]
References to cannibalizing the enemy has also been seen in poetry written in
the Song
Dynasty, (for example, in Man
Jiang Hong) although the cannibalizing is perhaps poetic symbolism,
expressing hatred towards the enemy.
While there is
universal agreement that some Mesoamerican
people practiced human sacrifice, there is a lack of scholarly
consensus as to whether cannibalism in pre-Columbian
America was widespread. At one extreme, anthropologist Marvin Harris,
author of Cannibals and Kings, has suggested that the
flesh of the victims was a part of an aristocratic diet as a reward, since the Aztec diet was
lacking in proteins.
While most pre-Columbian historians believe that there was ritual cannibalism
related to human sacrifices, they do not support Harris's thesis that human
flesh was ever a significant portion of the Aztec diet.[63][64][65]
Others have hypothesized that cannibalism was part of a blood revenge in war.[66]
Early modern era
European
explorers and colonizers brought home many stories of cannibalism practiced by
the native peoples they encountered. The friar Diego
de Landa reported about Yucatán instances,[67]
and there have been similar reports by Purchas from Popayán, Colombia, and
from the Marquesas Islands of Polynesia,
where human flesh was called long pig.[68]
According to Hans Egede, the Inuits, when they
killed a woman accused of witchcraft, ate a portion of her heart.[69]
It is recorded about the natives of the captaincy of Sergipe in
Brazil: "They eat human flesh when they can get it, and if a woman
miscarries devour the abortive immediately. If she goes her time out, she
herself cuts the navel-string with a shell, which
she boils along with the secondine, and eats them both."[70]
The 1913 Handbook
of Indians of Canada (reprinting 1907 material from the Bureau of American
Ethnology), claims that North American natives practicing cannibalism included
"... the Montagnais,
and some of the tribes of Maine; the Algonkin,
Armouchiquois, Iroquois, and Micmac; farther
west the Assiniboine, Cree, Foxes, Chippewa, Miami,
Ottawa,
Kickapoo,
Illinois,
Sioux, and Winnebago; in
the South the people who built the mounds in Florida, and the Tonkawa, Attacapa, Karankawa, Caddo, and Comanche (?);
in the Northwest and West, portions of the continent, the Thlingchadinneh and other Athapascan
tribes, the Tlingit, Heiltsuk,
Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, Nootka, Siksika, some of
the Californian tribes, and the Ute. There is also a tradition of the practice among the Hopi, and mentions of
the custom among other tribes of New Mexico
and Arizona.
The Mohawk,
and the Attacapa,
Tonkawa, and
other Texas tribes were known to their neighbours as 'man-eaters.'"[71]
The forms of cannibalism described included both resorting to human flesh
during famines and ritual cannibalism, the latter usually consisting of eating
a small portion of an enemy warrior.
As with most
lurid tales of native cannibalism, these stories are treated with a great deal
of scrutiny, as accusations of cannibalism were often used as justifications
for the subjugation or destruction of "savages". However, there were
several well-documented cultures that engaged in regular eating of the dead,
such as New Zealand's Māori. In an 1809 incident known as the Boyd
massacre, about 66 passengers and crew of the Boyd were killed and
eaten by Māori on the Whangaroa peninsula, Northland. Cannibalism was already a
regular practice in Māori wars.[72]
In another instance, on July 11, 1821 warriors from the Ngapuhi tribe killed
2,000 enemies and remained on the battlefield "eating the vanquished until
they were driven off by the smell of decaying bodies".[73]
Māori warriors fighting the New Zealand government in Titokowaru's
War in New Zealand's North Island in 1868–69 revived ancient rites of
cannibalism as part of the radical Hauhau
movement of the Pai Marire religion.[74]
Other islands
in the Pacific were home to cultures that allowed cannibalism to some degree.
In parts of Melanesia,
cannibalism was still practiced in the early 20th century, for a variety of
reasons — including retaliation, to insult an enemy people, or to absorb
the dead person's qualities.[75]
One tribal chief, Ratu Udre Udre in Rakiraki, Fiji, is said to have
consumed 872 people and to have made a pile of stones to record his
achievement.[76][77]
The ferocity of the cannibal lifestyle deterred European sailors from going
near Fijian waters, giving Fiji the name "Cannibal Isles". The dense
population of Marquesas Islands, Polynesia,
was concentrated in the narrow valleys, and consisted of warring tribes, who
sometimes practiced cannibalism on their enemies. W. D. Rubinstein wrote:
It was
considered a great triumph among the Marquesans to eat the body of a dead man.
They treated their captives with great cruelty. They broke their legs to
prevent them from attempting to escape before being eaten, but kept them alive
so that they could brood over their impending fate. ... With this tribe,
as with many others, the bodies of women were in great demand.[5]
This period of
time was also rife with instances of explorers and seafarers resorting to
cannibalism for survival. The survivors of the sinking of the French ship Méduse in 1816 resorted to
cannibalism after four days adrift on a raft and their plight was made famous
by Théodore Géricault's painting Raft of the Medusa. After the sinking of the Essex
of Nantucket
by a whale, on November 20, 1820, (an important source event for Herman
Melville's Moby-Dick) the survivors, in three small boats,
resorted, by common consent, to cannibalism in order for some to survive.[78]
Sir John
Franklin's lost polar expedition is another example of cannibalism out of
desperation.[79]
On land, the Donner Party found itself stranded by snow in a high
mountain pass in California without adequate supplies during the Mexican-American War, leading to several
instances of cannibalism.[80]
Another notorious cannibal was mountain man Boone Helm,
who was known as "The Kentucky Cannibal" for eating several of his
fellow travelers, from 1850 until his eventual hanging in 1864.
The case of R v. Dudley and Stephens (1884) 14 QBD
273 (QB) is an English case which dealt with four crew members of an English
yacht, the Mignonette, who were cast away in a storm some 1,600 miles
(2,600 km) from the Cape
of Good Hope. After several days, one of the crew, a seventeen-year-old
cabin boy, fell unconscious due to a combination of the famine and drinking
seawater. The others (one possibly objecting) decided then to kill him and eat
him. They were picked up four days later. Two of the three survivors were found
guilty of murder. A significant outcome of this case was that necessity was
determined to be no defence against a charge of murder.
American consul
James W. Davidson described in his 1903 book, The
Island of Formosa, how the Chinese in Taiwan ate and traded in the flesh of
Taiwanese aboriginals.[81]
Roger
Casement, writing to a consular colleague in Lisbon on August 3, 1903 from
Lake Mantumba in the Congo Free State, said: "The people round here are
all cannibals. You never saw such a weird looking lot in your life. There are
also dwarfs (called Batwas) in the forest who are even worse cannibals than the
taller human environment. They eat man flesh raw! It's a fact." Casement
then added how assailants would "bring down a dwarf on the way home, for
the marital cooking pot ... The Dwarfs, as I say, dispense with cooking
pots and eat and drink their human prey fresh cut on the battlefield while the
blood is still warm and running. These are not fairy tales my dear Cowper but
actual gruesome reality in the heart of this poor, benighted savage land."[82]
Modern era
World War II
Many instances
of cannibalism by necessity were recorded during World War II. For example,
during the 872-day Siege of Leningrad, reports of cannibalism began
to appear in the winter of 1941–1942, after all birds, rats and pets were eaten
by survivors. Leningrad police even formed a special division to combat
cannibalism.[83][84]
Following the Soviet victory at Stalingrad it was found that some German
soldiers in the besieged city, cut off from supplies, resorted to cannibalism.[85]
Later, following
the German surrender in January 1943, roughly 100,000 German soldiers were
taken prisoner of war (POW). Almost all of them were sent
to POW camps in Siberia
or Central Asia where, due to being chronically underfed by their Soviet
captors, many resorted to cannibalism. Fewer than 5,000 of the prisoners taken
at Stalingrad survived captivity. The majority, however, died early in their
imprisonment due to exposure or sickness brought on by conditions in the
surrounded army before the surrender.[86]
The Australian
War Crimes Section of the Tokyo tribunal, led by prosecutor William Webb (the future Judge-in-Chief),
collected numerous written reports and testimonies that documented Japanese
soldiers' acts of cannibalism among their own troops, on enemy dead, and on
Allied prisoners of war in many parts of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity
Sphere. In September 1942, Japanese daily rations on New Guinea consisted
of 800 grams of rice and tinned meat. However, by December, this had
fallen to 50 grams.[87]:78–80
According to historian Yuki Tanaka, "cannibalism was often a systematic
activity conducted by whole squads and under the command of officers".[88]
In some cases,
flesh was cut from living people. An Indian POW, Lance Naik
Hatam Ali (later a citizen of Pakistan), testified that in New Guinea:
"the Japanese started selecting prisoners and every day one prisoner was
taken out and killed and eaten by the soldiers. I personally saw this happen and
about 100 prisoners were eaten at this place by the Japanese. The remainder of
us were taken to another spot 50 miles (80 kilometres) away where 10
prisoners died of sickness. At this place, the Japanese again started selecting
prisoners to eat. Those selected were taken to a hut where their flesh was cut
from their bodies while they were alive and they were thrown into a ditch where
they later died."[89]
Another
well-documented case occurred in Chichijima in
February 1945, when Japanese soldiers killed and consumed five American airmen.
This case was investigated in 1947 in a war crimes trial, and of 30 Japanese
soldiers prosecuted, five (Maj. Matoba, Gen. Tachibana, Adm. Mori, Capt.
Yoshii, and Dr. Teraki) were found guilty and hanged.[90]
In his book Flyboys: A True Story of Courage,
James Bradley details several instances of
cannibalism of World War II Allied prisoners by their Japanese captors.[91]
The author claims that this included not only ritual cannibalization of the
livers of freshly killed prisoners, but also the cannibalization-for-sustenance
of living prisoners over the course of several days, amputating limbs only as
needed to keep the meat fresh.[92]
New Guinea
The Korowai tribe of
south-eastern Papua could be one of the last
surviving tribes in the world engaging in cannibalism.
Africa
During the
1892–1894 war between the Congo Free State
and the Swahili-Arab city-states of Nyangwe and Kasongo in
Eastern Congo, there were reports of
widespread cannibalization of the bodies of defeated Arab combatants by the
Batetela allies of Belgian commander Francis Dhanis.[93]
The Batetela, "like most of their neighbors were inveterate
cannibals."[94]
According to Dhanis' medical officer, Captain Hinde, their town of Ngandu had
"at least 2,000 polished human skulls" as a "solid white
pavement in front" of its gates, with human skulls crowning every post of
the stockade.[94]
In April 1892,
10,000 of the Batetela, under the command of Gongo
Lutete, joined forces with Dhanis in a campaign against the Swahili-Arab leaders Sefu and
Mohara.[94]
After one early skirmish in the campaign, Hinde "noticed that the bodies
of both the killed and wounded had vanished." When fighting broke out
again, Hinde saw his Batetela allies drop human arms, legs and heads on the road.[95]
One young Belgian officer wrote home: "Happily Gongo's men ate them up [in
a few hours]. It's horrible but exceedingly useful and hygenic ... I should
have been horrified at the idea in Europe! But it seems quite natural to me
here. Don't show this letter to anyone indiscreet."[96]
After the massacre at Nyangwe, Lutete "hid himself in his quarters,
appalled by the sight of thousands of men smoking human hands and human chops
on their camp fires, enough to feed his army for many days."[94]
In the 1980s, Médecins Sans Frontières, the
international medical charity, supplied photographic and other documentary
evidence of ritualized cannibal feasts among the participants in Liberia's
internecine strife to representatives of Amnesty International who were on a
fact-finding mission to the neighboring state of Guinea. However,
Amnesty International declined to publicize this material; the
Secretary-General of the organization, Pierre Sane,
said at the time in an internal communication that "what they do with the
bodies after human rights violations are committed is not part of our mandate
or concern". The existence of cannibalism on a wide scale in Liberia was
subsequently verified.[97]
The
self-declared Emperor of the Central African Republic, Jean-Bédel Bokassa (Emperor Bokassa I), was
tried on October 24, 1986 for several cases of cannibalism although he was
never convicted.[98][99]
Between April 17, and April 19, 1979 a number of elementary school students
were arrested after they had protested against wearing the expensive,
government-required school uniforms. Around 100 were killed.[100]
Bokassa is said to have participated in the massacre, beating some of the
children to death with his cane and allegedly ate some of his victims.[101]
Cannibalism has
been reported in several recent African conflicts, including the Second
Congo War, and the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra
Leone. A UN human rights expert reported in July 2007 that sexual
atrocities against Congolese women go "far beyond rape" and include sexual
slavery, forced incest,
and cannibalism.[102]
This may be done in desperation, as during peacetime cannibalism is much less
frequent;[103]
at other times, it is consciously directed at certain groups believed to be
relatively helpless, such as Congo Pygmies, even
considered subhuman by some other Congolese.[104]
It is also reported by some that witch
doctors sometimes use the body parts of children in their medicine.[105]
In the 1970s the Ugandan
dictator Idi
Amin was reputed to practice cannibalism.[106][107]
In Uganda, the Lord's Resistance Army have been accused of
routinely engaging in ritual or magical cannibalism.[108]
North Korea
Reports of
widespread cannibalism began to emerge from North Korea
during the famine of the 1990s[109][110]
and subsequent ongoing starvation. Kim Jong-il
was reported to have ordered a crackdown in cannibalism in 1996.[111]
Chinese travellers reported in 1998 that cannibalism had occured.[112][113]
Three people in North Korea were reported to have been executed for selling or
eating human flesh in 2006.[114]
Further reports of cannibalism emerged in early 2013, including reports of a
man executed for killing his two children for food.[115][116][117]
There are
competing claims about how widespread cannibalism was in North Korea. Refugees
reported that it was widespread[118]
however Barbara Demick wrote in her 2010 book Nothing to
Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea that it did not seem to be.[119]
Other cases
Further
instances include cannibalism as ritual practice, and in times of drought,
famine and other destitutions, as well as those being criminal acts and war
crimes throughout the 20th century.
In West Africa,
the Leopard Society was a secret society active into
the mid-1900s and one that practiced cannibalism. Centred in Sierra
Leone, Liberia and Côte
d'Ivoire, the Leopard men would dress in leopard skins,
waylaying travelers with sharp claw-like weapons in the form of leopards' claws
and teeth.[120]
The victims' flesh would be cut from their bodies and distributed to members of
the society.[121]
As in some
other Papuan societies, the Urapmin
people engaged in cannibalism in war. Notably, the Urapmin also had a
system of food
taboo wherein dogs could not be eaten and had to be kept from breathing on
food, unlike humans who could be eaten and with whom food could be shared.[122]
The Aghoris of northern
India are a
splinter sect of Hinduism who practice cannibalism in which they consume the
flesh of the dead floated in the Ganges in pursuit of immortality
and supernatural powers. Members of the Aghori drink from human
skulls and practice cannibalism in the belief that eating human flesh
confers spiritual and physical benefits, such as prevention of aging.[123][124][125]
During the
1930s, multiple acts of cannibalism were reported from Ukraine and
Russia's Volga, South Siberian and Kuban regions during the Soviet famine of 1932–1933.[126]
Survival was a
moral as well as a physical struggle. A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June
1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was "not sure that I
shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you." The good people died
first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who
gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who
refused to kill their fellow man died. ... At least 2,505 people were
sentenced for cannibalism in the years 1932 and 1933 in Ukraine, though the
actual number of cases was certainly much greater.[127]
Cannibalism was
proven to have occurred in China during the Great Leap Forward, when rural China was hit
hard by drought and famine.[128][129][130][131][132][133][134]
Prior to 1931, New
York Times reporter William Buehler Seabrook, allegedly in the
interests of research, obtained from a hospital intern at the Sorbonne a chunk of human meat from the body of
a healthy human killed in an accident, then cooked and ate it. He reported,
"It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but
not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other
meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I
think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could
distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined
or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork
have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not
too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and
ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste,
strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the
one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable."[135][136]
In his book, The Gulag Archipelago, Soviet writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described cases of
cannibalism in 20th-century USSR. Of the famine in Povolzhie (1921–1922) he wrote:
"That horrible famine was up to cannibalism, up to consuming children by
their own parents — the famine, which Russia had never known even in Time
of Troubles [in 1601–1603] ..."[137]
He said of the Siege of Leningrad (1941–1944): "Those who
consumed human flesh, or dealt with the human liver trading from dissecting
rooms ... were accounted as the political criminals ..."[138]
And of the building of Northern Railway Prisoners Camp
("SevZhelDorLag") Solzhenitsyn reports, "An ordinary hard
working political prisoner almost could not survive at that penal camp. In the
camp SevZhelDorLag (chief: colonel Klyuchkin) in 1946–47 there were many cases
of cannibalism: they cut human bodies, cooked and ate."[139]
The Soviet
journalist Yevgenia Ginzburg was a former long-term
political prisoner who spent time in the Soviet prisons, Gulag camps and
settlements from 1938 to 1955. She described in her memoir, Harsh Route
(or Steep Route), of a case which she was directly involved in during
the late 1940s, after she had been moved to the prisoners' hospital.[140]
...The chief
warder shows me the black smoked pot, filled with some food: 'I need your
medical expertise regarding this meat.' I look into the pot, and hardly hold
vomiting. The fibres of that meat are very small, and don't resemble me
anything I have seen before. The skin on some pieces bristles with black hair
(...) A former smith from Poltava, Kulesh worked together with Centurashvili.
At this time, Centurashvili was only one month away from being discharged from
the camp (...) And suddenly he surprisingly disappeared. The wardens looked
around the hills, stated Kulesh's evidence, that last time Kulesh had seen his
workmate near the fireplace, Kulesh went out to work and Centurashvili left to
warm himself more; but when Kulesh returned to the fireplace, Centurashvili had
vanished; who knows, maybe he got frozen somewhere in snow, he was a weak guy
(...) The wardens searched for two more days, and then assumed that it was an
escape case, though they wondered why, since his imprisonment period was almost
over (...) The crime was there. Approaching the fireplace, Kulesh killed
Centurashvili with an axe, burned his clothes, then dismembered him and hid the
pieces in snow, in different places, putting specific marks on each burial
place. ... Just yesterday, one body part was found under two crossed logs.
When Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571
crashed into the Andes
on October 13, 1972, the survivors resorted to eating the deceased during their
72 days in the mountains. Their story was later recounted in the books Alive: The Story of the Andes
Survivors and Miracle
in the Andes as well as the film Alive,
by Frank Marshall, and the
documentaries Alive: 20 Years Later (1993) and Stranded:
I've Come from a Plane that Crashed in the Mountains (2008).
Cannibalism was
reported by the journalist Neil Davis during the South East Asian wars
of the 1960s and 1970s. Davis reported that Cambodian
troops ritually ate portions of the slain enemy, typically the liver. However he,
and many refugees, also report that cannibalism was practiced non-ritually when
there was no food to be found. This usually occurred when towns and villages
were under Khmer Rouge control, and food was strictly rationed,
leading to widespread starvation. Any civilian caught participating in
cannibalism would have been immediately executed.
On July 23,
1988, Rick
Gibson ate the flesh of another person in public. Because England does not
have a specific law against cannibalism, he legally ate a canapé of
donated human tonsils
in Walthamstow High Street, London.[141][142]
A year later, on April 15, 1989, he publicly ate a slice of human testicle in
Lewisham High Street, London.[143][144]
When he tried to eat another slice of human testicle at the Pitt International
Galleries in Vancouver on July 14, 1989, the Vancouver police confiscated the
testicle hors d'œuvre.[145]
However, the charge of publicly exhibiting a disgusting object was dropped and
he finally ate the piece of human testicle on the steps of the Vancouver court
house on September 22, 1989.[146]
The entire article can be found
at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism