Behavior: Do People Really Eat People?

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An anthropologist says cannibalism is a myth

Columbus, greeted by the peaceful Arawaks on Hispaniola, was immediately warned about the man-eating Caribs on nearby islands. The conquistadors reported that the Aztecs butchered victims, ate the flesh and fed the entrails to zoo animals. Henry Morton Stanley said he was beset on all sides by savage cannibals during his famous trek through Africa to find Livingstone. Margaret Mead wrote about the man-eating Mundugumor of New Guinea. There is only one thing wrong with all these reports: they come second or third hand, and are probably false. That is the surprising thesis of a new book called The Man-Eating Myth by Anthropologist William Arens, who believes cannibalism may never have existed anywhere as a regular custom.*

Arens, who teaches at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, knows he is taking on the whole profession of anthropology. He feels that the profession is wrong, misled by generations of gullible researchers and inventive travel writers. In fact, he says, cannibalism is a myth used by the West to justify colonialism, slavery and—in the case of the Aztecs—genocide.

The origin of the myth, he thinks, is the tendency of every group to accuse its neighbors of cannibalism. The Arawaks and Caribs are good examples, and Mead was told about the Mundugumor by the Arapesh tribe. But Arens finds no reliable firsthand accounts of cannibalism. "Like the poor," he says, "cannibals are always with us, but happily just beyond the possibility of direct observation."

Arens' theory arrives at a time when cannibalism is a hot topic in the academic world. Some sociobiologists believe it is evidence of man's inherent aggressiveness. Anthropologists are busy classifying different kinds of cannibalism, or depicting it as a ritualistic denial of death—the victim lives on by being incorporated as food. Columbia Anthropologist Marvin Harris (Cannibals and Kings) is a strict materialist who argues that cannibalism was a near universal practice made necessary by a scarcity of protein.

Naturally enough, Harris, like other anthropologists, takes issue with Arens. Says he: "There are all kinds of eyewitness accounts of cannibalism, from castaways, Jesuit missionaries and others. Arens is pushing skepticism to the point of producing nothing but total ignorance about the world."

Arens thinks many of these reports are similar to tales of witches. Often the explorer or traveler simply misinterprets the unfamiliar tribal language. Plagiarism, and the marketability of savage tales from the wilds have also helped establish the existence of cannibalism, says Arens. One example: 16th century accounts of cannibalism among the Tupinamba, a now extinct Brazilian tribe, all use similar wording. Arens thinks it unlikely "that a parade of international travelers all passed through a Tupinamba encampment on different days when the Indians were about to slay a war captive while the main characters were repeating similar statements to each other."