Last night watching THE 13TH WARRIOR starring Antonio Banderas with my girlfriend. In this movie, for those who did not see it, the subject of cannibalism is lightly touched upon (the primitive men who were assaulting a Viking villiage were taking and ... ahem ... devouring some human sacrifices).
Anyway, to make a short story long, girlfriend and I began to discuss the topic at length. We went over the subject of prion diseases, the Mad Cow epidemic in England, recent studies which have shown many of us may have had cannibalsm in our prehistoric lineages (and subsequent genetic resistance to prion diseases), etc. We work our way around to the topic of Papua New Guinea where the inhabitants of a particular village were dying of an alarming disease at an even more alarming rate. Most if the victims were women and children. See the following link and view the video about Kuru for the full story:
http://home.sandiego.edu/~scare/background.htm
On to the point of this post....
Girlfriend and I speculated how a culture (in this case a culture the size of a small New Guinean village) which apparently had no history of caanibalism could suddenly adopt it as an institution. Apparently when a group begins eating their own kind, their offspring begin to show symptoms of these prion diseases roughly 200 years later (not sure of the time frame for other species). So this is not some ritual which started in the pre-historic Pacific and lasted up through the ages. No group would survive that long. Instead, these New Guineans began their ritual in the ninteenth century and began dying aroudn 1950 when western researchers found them and put a stop to it.
Needless to say as I read these stories I became aghast. What, I wondered, could cause a group of people to do such a thing? In the case of the Donner party it was a choice of that or starvation, so one can begin to understand them (the same with the Bolivian soccer team). In the case of miscellaneous killers and psycopaths the excuse is insanity, of course. We are not talking about any of that. We are talking about primitive groups liked the Kuru in Papua New Guinea. Their excuse was they did it to honor their dead (only recently dead relatives were ingested). I don't buy any of that. No culture, large or small, wakes up one day out of the blue and says "Hey, let's eat grandma after she kicks it!" Any normal person from any culture in any time frame, I believe, looks upon cannibalism as a shocking and disgusting practice. My girlfriend and I theorize that recent volcanic activity, perhaps nearby Krakatoa, had ruined the whatever food supplies these Kuru natives enjoyed. Tribes from the lowlands and coastal areas could get food from the ocean. But these Kurus, isolated in the New Guinean highlands, perhaps faced starvation during the worst years of whatever disaster had befallen them. People begin to die of starvation and the only alternative they felt they had was to supplement the lack of protein in their diets with human flesh --- more precisely, the flesh of recently deceased family and friends. Perhaps the next generation, seeing this as a readily available food source, continued the practice, though they certainly did not give up hunting and gathering, and to ease their guilty consciences they attached some quasi-religious, symbolic meaning to their perversions and said "It is meant to honor the dead among us."
In any case, some may argue with my ideas and maintain cultures can suddenly become cannibalistic. I am not, afterall, an anthropologist. However I would ask for the opinions of those more educated in these matters. I am considerably perplexed. I cannot begin to imagine, aside from the above mentioned incidents of starvation, how a group of people can adopt such a revolting practice. Any ideas?
MQA
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Originally Posted by Cicero2
yummy.
