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Of Caribs and Cannibals
Wednesday, February 16th, 2005 05:10 pmA fantasy about pirates is not the first thing you would expect to start a political controversy, but representatives of the native Carib community are upset about the sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean portraying their ancestors as cannibals. Cannibalism, they say, is an imperialist slur, designed to justify the oppression of native peoples.
They have a point. The only evidence we have that the Caribs practiced cannibalism is accounts by the Spanish conquerors, who obviously had a vested interest in portraying the natives as subhuman. This is itself ironic, since the conquistadors (even by European accounts) practiced barbarity on a scale that makes eating dead people look tame. On the other hand, the Spanish desire for people to believe that the Caribs were cannibals does not mean that they definitely weren't cannibals; they may well have been. My Celtic ancestors were reported by Roman imperialists as making drinking bowls out of the heads of slain enemies, and while this may have served Roman propaganda interests, it was probably because they really did enjoy cranial tableware.
We will probably never know whether the Caribs ate people, but we can be certain that some people did. Unfortunately, reactions to cannibalism are a kind of political litmus test. In the old days of imperialism, cannibalism made good propaganda, hence all the cartoons of missionaries boiling in pots. Native people were savage and depraved, and it was the white man's burden to civilise them, starting with better eating habits. Around the 1960s, things started to change. Doubt was cast on stories of cannibalism. There was a growing tendency to adopt the noble savage myth; not only were indigenous peoples not depraved, the were actually better than us. This tendency was reinforced by the fact that many stories of cannibalism were indeed false, often confusing it with funereal customs involving the ritual eating of the deceased (which is icky but not necessarily immoral). Where anthropologists found actual cases of cannibalism, these were dismissed as abnormal.
Unfortunately for the proponents of prelapsarian bliss, there still remains plenty of good evidence for cannibalism, and not just from anthropologists. The fossil record shows many cases of human bones bearing marks of butchering in the same manner as animal bones. Even if cannibalism was not the rule in the Paleolithic, it seems to have been widespread. We don't know exactly how or why people ate each other, since fossils don't tell us much about motives. It could have been a response to famine which developed into a habit. It could have been the aftermath of warfare, with the ritualistic eating of an enemy being a way to gain control of his soul. Or maybe they just thought people tasted nice.
The interesting thing is not that cannibalism happened, but that it stopped. Like slavery, which was seen as natural and inevitable for several thousand years, cannibalism seems to be something that we tried and (for the most part) gave up on. Indeed, one theory suggests that slavery was the reason for the demise of cannibalism: the work you got out of an enslaved enemy was superior to the short-term gain of eating him. This is plausible, though other factors are equally likely. Eating human flesh (especially brains, I hear) can lead to all sorts of nasty diseases, and there is also the fact that tribes who made a habit of gastronomical raiding might have annoyed their neighbours enough for the latter to simply wipe them out. It certainly seems likely that the strong taboo on cannibalism in most societies is the result of the non-cannibals getting the upper hand.
This in turn leads us to the demonising of other societies by accusations of cannibalism, whether they be true or false. Ironically, this attitude is not so far removed from the attitude which enables cannibalism in the first place: that certain groups of people are less than human, and are (sometimes quite literally) fair game.
They have a point. The only evidence we have that the Caribs practiced cannibalism is accounts by the Spanish conquerors, who obviously had a vested interest in portraying the natives as subhuman. This is itself ironic, since the conquistadors (even by European accounts) practiced barbarity on a scale that makes eating dead people look tame. On the other hand, the Spanish desire for people to believe that the Caribs were cannibals does not mean that they definitely weren't cannibals; they may well have been. My Celtic ancestors were reported by Roman imperialists as making drinking bowls out of the heads of slain enemies, and while this may have served Roman propaganda interests, it was probably because they really did enjoy cranial tableware.
We will probably never know whether the Caribs ate people, but we can be certain that some people did. Unfortunately, reactions to cannibalism are a kind of political litmus test. In the old days of imperialism, cannibalism made good propaganda, hence all the cartoons of missionaries boiling in pots. Native people were savage and depraved, and it was the white man's burden to civilise them, starting with better eating habits. Around the 1960s, things started to change. Doubt was cast on stories of cannibalism. There was a growing tendency to adopt the noble savage myth; not only were indigenous peoples not depraved, the were actually better than us. This tendency was reinforced by the fact that many stories of cannibalism were indeed false, often confusing it with funereal customs involving the ritual eating of the deceased (which is icky but not necessarily immoral). Where anthropologists found actual cases of cannibalism, these were dismissed as abnormal.
Unfortunately for the proponents of prelapsarian bliss, there still remains plenty of good evidence for cannibalism, and not just from anthropologists. The fossil record shows many cases of human bones bearing marks of butchering in the same manner as animal bones. Even if cannibalism was not the rule in the Paleolithic, it seems to have been widespread. We don't know exactly how or why people ate each other, since fossils don't tell us much about motives. It could have been a response to famine which developed into a habit. It could have been the aftermath of warfare, with the ritualistic eating of an enemy being a way to gain control of his soul. Or maybe they just thought people tasted nice.
The interesting thing is not that cannibalism happened, but that it stopped. Like slavery, which was seen as natural and inevitable for several thousand years, cannibalism seems to be something that we tried and (for the most part) gave up on. Indeed, one theory suggests that slavery was the reason for the demise of cannibalism: the work you got out of an enslaved enemy was superior to the short-term gain of eating him. This is plausible, though other factors are equally likely. Eating human flesh (especially brains, I hear) can lead to all sorts of nasty diseases, and there is also the fact that tribes who made a habit of gastronomical raiding might have annoyed their neighbours enough for the latter to simply wipe them out. It certainly seems likely that the strong taboo on cannibalism in most societies is the result of the non-cannibals getting the upper hand.
This in turn leads us to the demonising of other societies by accusations of cannibalism, whether they be true or false. Ironically, this attitude is not so far removed from the attitude which enables cannibalism in the first place: that certain groups of people are less than human, and are (sometimes quite literally) fair game.
