Ship of Fools Page 11
His demand for eyewitness evidence begins with the undoubted fact that “cannibalism is an observable phenomenon” but proceeds to the very dubious inference that therefore “the evidence for its existence should be derived from observation by reliable sources” (21), meaning “those trained in the craft of ethnography”. There are in fact plenty of eye-witness accounts of cannibalism: “Claims of having observed cannibalism first-hand are rampant in the travelogues of explorers, missionaries, explorers, sailors and their ilk” (35). But he dismisses all these as having “little if any credibility”, and continues:
Leaving this brand of literature behind, and examining instead the production of professional anthropologists, the problems change but the situation still remains perplexing. From all corners of the globe the reports come in that a specific group of people has lived among were cannibals long ago, until pacification, just recently or only yesterday. The reader is engulfed by a stream of past tenses denoting varying removes in time, indicating a demise of custom some time before the researcher took up residence upon the scene. (35-6)
With one trivial exception of the ritual consumption of human ashes, which he rejects, he claims that no modern anthropologist has witnessed the consumption of human flesh by the people he or she was studying. This is hardly surprising, of course, since colonial administrators and missionaries had suppressed cannibalism, so by the time the anthropologists came on the scene they were too late to observe it. But not only does Arens dismiss eyewitness accounts by those not “trained in the craft of ethnography”, but is almost equally contemptuous about anthropologists generally and New Guineanists in particular, where apparently “academic standards seem to function as an almost forgotten ideal, rather than as standard operating procedure. Anthropologists with well-deserved reputations based upon previous research and publication become the victims of their own sensationalism and poor scholarship” (99).
The anthropologist Klaus-Friedrich Koch, for example, supplies copious details of cannibalism among the Jale of West New Guinea (Irian Jaya), such as:
Cannibalism is an integral part of a particular kind of war. The Jale distinguish between a wim war and a soli war. Only soli warfare ideally features anthropophagic revenge. While a wim war always ends within a few years and may last only for a day or two, a soli war usually endures for a much longer time and may extend over the period of a generation.… Wim warfare occurs between two or more wards of the same village, between two segments of the same ward living temporarily at different localities such as garden hamlets, or between two or more villages in the same district or adjacent districts. Soli wars, on the other hand, are usually waged between two villages separated by a wide river or by a mountain ridge, a geographic condition that puts them in different districts or regions. Informants repeatedly stated the maxim that “people whose face is known should not be eaten”. In practice immunity from anthropophagic vengeance derives from the nature and relative frequency of affinal links between two villages. (Koch 1974: 79-80)
Arens, however, simply dismisses all Koch’s research as the result of missionary propaganda, since he cannot claim to have witnessed cannibalism himself (Arens 1979: 98) but fails to ask himself the next and perfectly obvious question: “Where, then, did Koch get all this stuff about cannibalism—did he just make it all up?” Obviously he didn’t, and got it from his informants as he makes abundantly clear in his book, but it would be inconvenient for Arens to admit this since, as we have noted, it is one of the themes of his book that accounts of cannibalism are inherently hostile and derogatory lies told about other peoples, and not about one’s own.
Why, however, would the Jale say they had been cannibals if they hadn’t, and why did the Tauade happily admit to me that they had been cannibals too, referring to enemy groups with a laugh as “our meat, like pork”. In my book Bloodshed and Vengeance in the Papuan Mountains (1977) I give the following account of a cannibalistic event told to me by my best informant, Amo Lume:
While the initiation ceremony was in progress the Gane men made an attack. The Goilala seized their weapons and chased the Gane. There was a big battle. Aima Kamo speared Kog Kanumia Konoina, and Aima Kovio also speared him, and Koupa Teva axed him, as did Orou Keruvu, and Mo Kimani, chief of Watagoipa. Everyone came and chopped him to pieces. The Tawuni and Kataipa, valavala [allies] of the Goilala, were invited to take the bits home to eat. Kolalo Kioketairi (who had a twisted lip because he had cut his mouth while removing human flesh from a bone) cut off Kog Kanumia’s head and took it to Dimanibi singing a song. [Then the storyteller retraces his steps to give some further details.]
[T]he Tawuni and Kataipa took away their pork [given by the Goilala to celebrate the victory] with Kog Kanumia of Gane’s body. They dismembered Kog at the Kovelaiam bridge over the Kataipa river, and made a big oven [an earth oven with hot stones], in which they cooked the pork and Kog Kanumia at the same time. Kolalo tied a vine to Kog Kanumia’s head and held it over the fire to singe off the hair [pigs similarly have their hair singed off before cooking], then cooked it in the oven. When it was taken out, he skinned the face and feasted on the white flesh beneath. After this the Tawuni and Kataipa went back to their places. (Hallpike 1977: 213)
The remark about “the white flesh” beneath the dark skin of the face is interesting, because in fact even dark-skinned human flesh, when cooked, does indeed turn white, like pork and chicken, a realistic detail which gives additional credibility to the story. Arens dismisses my account of Tauade cannibalism, carefully ignoring the episode just described, but again fails to answer the basic question of why on earth the Jale, the Tauade, and many other peoples of Papua New Guinea would claim to have been cannibals themselves in the past if this were not true.
In the same way as these accounts of cannibalism from native informants, anthropologists have had to rely on the people’s recollection of other aspects of their life and culture that were suppressed or had died out, like warfare or exposing corpses to rot, or initiation ceremonies, but should it be assumed that native informants were lying or mistaken about all these as well? It seems a curiously disrespectful attitude to indigenous peoples to dismiss all their recollections of their own past as unreliable. The Tauade used to be one of the most violent societies on record, and my informants gave me copious accounts of all manner of warfare and mayhem, which were supported by government records, but during the two years I lived with them I never witnessed a single homicide apart from an accident, or even a physical assault, let alone a battle, yet these are all highly observable phenomena nonetheless.
So the reason that so many anthropologists’ accounts of societies in Papua New Guinea mention cannibalism is not because they had “become the victims of their own sensationalism and poor scholarship”, but because their informants told them a great deal about it. By contrast, a survey of the historic literature and modern ethnography of the Cushitic-speaking peoples of the Horn of Africa, which include the Konso, reveals virtually nothing on the subject of cannibalism, except one or two vague references in the earlier literature. This is not because anthropologists working in this area were more objective than those working in New Guinea, but simply because there was probably little or no cannibalism in the Horn of Africa.
At this point it is time to revert to Arens’s “basket of deplorables”, all those travellers, missionaries, and old sea-faring men he so despises; according to Arens, “The legion of reports by non-specialists were found to range from highly suspect to entirely groundless when viewed from the perspective of objective scholarship and common sense” (181), whereas they actually provide some of the best material on cannibalism. Arens’s complete denial of cannibalism puts him in the same logical position as someone who insists that all swans must to be white, and that accounts of black swans are absurd myths only believed by the ignorant and credulous: it simply takes one example of a black swan for the whole theory to start unravelling—if one, why not others? My black swan for Arens is the following eyewitne
ss account of Maori cannibalism by Captain Cook. It can most easily be found in Beaglehole’s standard and readily available biography of Cook (1974) by looking in the index under “Cook, James, reflections on cannibalism”, which took me all of five minutes to unearth. Beaglehole takes the account from Cook’s Journal for 23 November 1773 in Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand, and it reads as follows ² :
There had been rumours of a war expedition to Admiralty Bay, lately picked human bones had been found, when on 23 November, with Cook anxious to get to sea but prevented by the wind, some of the officers went on shore to amuse themselves and were confronted by the remainders of a cannibal feast. The broken head and the bowels of the victim were lying on the ground, his heart was stuck on a forked stick fixed to the head of a canoe. Pickersgill gave two nails for the head and took it on board, to the interest of a number of New Zealanders on board who had not participated in the banquet. Would one of them like a piece? asked Clerke, “to which he very chearfully gave his assent”; Clerke cut a piece and broiled it in the galley, and the man devoured it ravenously. At that moment Cook, who had been absent, came on board with Wales, Forster, and the young islander Odiddy [not a Maori], to find the quarter-deck crowded and excitement general. Revolted as he was, the spirit of science triumphed, he must be able to bear witness from his own eyes to a fact that many people had doubted on the first voyage reports; Clerke broiled another piece, it was similarly consumed before the whole ship’s company; some were sick; Odiddy, first motionless with horror, burst into tears and abused Clerke as well as the New Zealanders, up till then his friends; Wales and Cook thought it over. (Beaglehole 1974: 358-59)
Captain Cook is renowned as one of the most meticulous and objective of observers, and it did not take someone “trained in the craft of ethnography” to describe this particular incident. But if one finds a black swan it could hardly be the only one, and statistically one would expect that a number of others also existed. The most effective method of proving that something like cannibalism does not exist, would be to find cases where the evidence for it seemed to be the strongest, and then try to demonstrate that in fact this so-called evidence is fabricated or otherwise too weak to prove the case. If the strongest cases fail to demonstrate the existence of cannibalism, then it is a reasonable inference that weaker cases are likely to fail as well, even if we cannot examine all of them.
Anthropologists, among many others, have long considered that before colonial rule the Maori of New Zealand, many New Guineans, and the Fijians were cannibals, which is why I naturally went first to the records of Captain Cook. Arens, however, in “marshalling the available material”, does not mention the Maori at all , about whom there is clear evidence of cannibalism from many sources (see Jennings 2004, for example), and in the index of his book the Fijians rate only one mention, p.176. Turning to this , and expecting at least some discussion of their celebrated cannibalism, one finds only a reference to a Hawaiian gift shop: “Here they can purchase ‘Authentic Cannibal Forks’ made in Fiji which, the package instructs the buyer, were originally used by the chiefs, since it was tapu for such food to touch their lips. It adds that missionaries stopped the practice, and suggests instead that the owner can now use these instruments as ‘pickle forks’” (Arens, p.176). And this is all the evidence that Arens can marshal on the topic of Fiji, one of the most intensively studied examples of institutionalised cannibalism in the ethnographic literature.
There are many eyewitness accounts of Fijian cannibalism from the nineteenth century, of which one of the best known is that of William Endicott (1923) based on his experiences in March 1831, as third mate of the Glide . ³ He describes going on shore after hearing that the nearby village are celebrating the arrival of three enemy corpses, killed in a recent battle, and which had been brought back to be eaten (bakola ). One of the bodies was given to a neighbouring village but the other two were prepared for the oven:
The heads of both savages being now taken off, they next cut off the right hand and the left foot, right elbow and left knee, and so in like manner until all the limbs separated from the body (see Sahlins 1983: 81-2 for confirmation of this ritual practice). [After a special piece was cut from the chest for the King] The entrails and vitals were then taken out and cleansed for cooking. But I shall not here particularise. The scene is too revolting. The flesh was then cut through the ribs to the spine of the back which was broken, thus the body was separated into two pieces. This was truly a sickening sight. I saw after they had cut through the ribs of the stoutest man, a savage jump upon the back, on end of which rested upon the ground, and the other was held in the hands and rested upon the knees of another savage, three times before he succeeded in breaking it. This ended the dissection of the bodies (Endicott 1923: 62). [A fire-pit had been dug about 6 feet in diameter and one and a half deep, and lined with stones, and a large fire made in it, into which small stones were placed.]
[A]s the bodies are cut to pieces they are thrown upon the fire, which after being thoroughly singed are scraped while hot by the savages, who sit around the fire for this purpose. The skin by this process is made perfectly white, this being the manner in which they dress their hogs, and other animal food. (ibid., 63)
The head of the savage which was last taken off, was thrown towards the fire, and being thrown some distance it rolled a few feet from the men who were employed around it; when it was stolen by one of the savages who carried it behind the tree where I was sitting. He took the head in his lap and after combing away the hair from the top of it with his fingers picked out the pieces of the scull which was broken by the war club and commenced eating the brains. This was too much for me. I moved my position, the thief was discovered and was as soon compelled to give up his booty, it being considered by the others he had got by far too great a share. The process of cleansing and preparing the flesh occupied about two hours. There was no part of these bodies which I did not see cleansed and put in the oven.
The stones which had been placed upon the fire were now removed, the oven cleaned out, the flesh carefully and very neatly wrapped in fresh plantain leaves and placed in it. The hot stones were also wrapped in leaves and placed among the flesh, and after it was all deposited in the oven, it was covered up two or three inches with the same kind of leaves, and the whole covered up with earth of sufficient depth to retain the heat. (ibid., 63-4)
This construction of the earth oven was exactly the same as that which I observed among the Tauade. It was not due to be opened until after midnight, so Endicott went off and did not return to the house where the feast was until shortly before dawn, when he found that the feast had been going on for some time. But he was not too late, and was offered a piece of meat: “It was accordingly brought carefully wrapped in a plantain leaf as it had been placed in the oven. I unwrapped it and found it to be a part of a foot taken off at the ankle and at the joints of the toes. I made an excuse for not eating it, by saying that it had been kept too long after it was killed, before it was cooked, it being about thirty-six hours” (ibid., 66-7). (Other seamen from the Glide, who also went ashore, independently confirmed the basics of Endicott’s account, see Sahlins 2003: 5.)
Not everyone believed this and other accounts, and Sahlins comments:
Faced by a similar incredulity, another British captain, Erskine of HMS Havannah , was compelled to preface his discussion of Fijian cannibalism by lengthy quotations from eyewitness reports of earlier European visitors. These include accounts from the voyage of the Astrolabe (1838), the US Exploring Expedition (1840), and from the missionary-ethnographer John Hunt (1840). Erskine also prints in full the narrative of John Jackson, a seaman resident in Fiji from 1840 to 1842, which contains three detailed descriptions of cannibal feasts (pp. 411-477). (Sahlins 1979)
There are many other eye-witness accounts of Fijian cannibalism from the nineteenth century, of which Sahlins mentions, in particular:
(1) Mary Wallis, the wife of a bêche-de-mer trader, was in Fiji for about 46
months between 1844 and 1851. Her diaries (1850; 1994) record some 32 cannibal events—I may be off by one or two—in 21 different locations, many involving multiple bakola . There are also five or six more general discussions of cannibal practice; (2) Rev. Thomas Williams” published journal (1931) reports 28 cannibal incidents (including some in editorial notes, mainly from Williams” other writings) at 17 locations, and also includes five general discussions (cf, Williams and Calvert 1859); (3) in Rev. Joseph Waterhouse’s book on Bau (1866) there are 24 instances at ten or more places, plus ten general discussions. (Sahlins 2003: 5).
Sahlins gives a general description of how cannibalistic symbolism permeated the whole Fijian way of life. It was expressed in:
…the specific drumbeats announcing the taking of bakola [cannibal victims]; the pennants flying from the masts of victorious canoes signifying bakola on board; the ovens reserved for cannibal feasts; the special stones near the temple on which bakola were carved up; the sacred trees on which their genitals were hung; the (natural) bamboo splints used to carve human flesh and the elaborately fashioned forks used to eat it; the distinctive dances, songs and unrestrained joy with which young women, dressed in finery, greeted the return of successful warriors; the sexual orgies while the bodies were cooking; the ritual consecration of warriors who had killed and the enshrinement of their war clubs in the temples; the miserable afterlife of unsuccessful warriors, pounding a pile of shit through all eternity; the gourmet debates about body parts; the taboos on human flesh for certain persons; the cures effected by pressing cooked bakola flesh to the lips of afflicted children; the sail needles made from the bones of notable bakola and the poetry from their fate. (Sahlins 2003: 4, and see also Sahlins 1983: 72-93)