#57089: — 01/09  at  03:32 PM
Harry, "anything that predates the Internet doesn't exist for young people. Sigh."

Knock it off Gramps, or I'll steal the rubber tips off your walker.

That's right, give a title that doesn't exist with no author name or any other reference... then jet away in an ink-cloud of egregious insults and anecdotes when your audience refuses to psychicly intuit what the hell you were talking about.

In my gloriously mis-spent youth I had more tolerance for that kind of horseshit.

PS: I'm neither young, nor American.

#57093: Ronald Brak — 01/09  at  04:00 PM
Dear Harry,

I might be PC but I do believe my father's stories about canibalism he witnessed in Papua. But I humbly admit that this second hand knowledge does not make me any kind of expert on the subject.

#57101: — 01/09  at  04:59 PM
Skepticism is good, although, around here, there is a political off switch a lot of the time.

#57117: Ronald Brak — 01/09  at  07:36 PM
I have heard several versions of stories about people eating human parts that have been accidentally severed, including Papuans. It is true that in some places they wouldn't let these pieces go to waste and they'd get eaten. However, in general the versions I have heard are very unlikely to be true. A sort of old urban myth, or an empire myth perhaps, as I live in part of the former British Empire. This makes me suspicious whenever I hear a similar story. But I must admit I've never taken the simple step of taking out my father's old photos and counting how many missing fingers are evident on the Papuans.

#57131: — 01/09  at  10:21 PM
Harry: "Skepticism is good, although, around here, there is a political off switch a lot of the time.

Oh, codswallop. What is political about this discussion? Are you sure you aren't channelling Allan-fricking-Bloom?

Here's why your second (or perhaps third) hand story doesn't make sense. Where cannibalism has existed in a culture it has always been a solemn ritual, not a gastronomic frenzy. (Gastronomic cannibalism is reserved for downed aircraft and criminals.)

I suggest you read up on how the Fore got unfairly tagged as cannibals as an example of how culture myths are embedded even in our oh-so-enlightened times.

#57214: — 01/10  at  11:06 AM
Gee, what's political about reflexive anticolonialist rhetoric?

Well, everything.

I know the debate about Fore cannibalism, and the exoneration of the Fore was 1) wholly ideological; 2) mistaken.

No more ideological, political screed was ever written than Walter Ahrens' 'Man-eating Myth.' Plausible, but, as it turned out, wrong.

Ronald, I wouldn't be surprised if fingers were missing among the Papuans, but that wouldn't reveal anything about cannibalism.

Years ago, Eric Hofer, the longshoreman-philosopher, entered the debate about the significance of the hand patterns in Cro-Magnon caves like Altamira. The anthropologists were having a merry debate about why so many digits were missing from the prints, which were made by placing the palm on the wall and blowing pigment over the hand: tribal identifiers? religious sacrifices?

Go down to the docks, Hofer sniffed, and you'll find many digits missing.

True enough. College professors probably average pretty close to 10 fingers, farmers and carpenters and other people who use their hands in rough work considerably fewer.

#57236: Ronald Brak — 01/10  at  12:29 PM
Well Harry, there certainly was canibalism in Papua. When my father whet to arrest two men for killing another they offered him the victim's hand. The question is what type of canibalism. In my non-expert opinion, most stories of friend's and relative's pieces being hacked off in a frenzy and eaten are probably either false or exagerations. Although I am sure that such things have happened at some point, I am confident such events would be very rare.

#57332: — 01/10  at  08:16 PM
Harry

Gee, what's political about reflexive anticolonialist rhetoric?

Uh, where?

I know the debate about Fore cannibalism, and the exoneration of the Fore was 1) wholly ideological; 2) mistaken.

Prove it. Bring some evidence that the Fore practiced cannibalism to the table.

Prove that the identification that the Fore were cannibals wasn't ideological and mistaken.

I'll give you a hint of where to start... Dr Gajdusek's early notes, before the cannibalism story got started. And the fact that it is almost impossible to induce kuru in the lab by ingestion.

Let's also look at the anthropological facts. The stories told was that cannibalism was a practice only recently introduced to the Fore, that is, the Fore were not originally a cannibal culture and they "borrowed" it from their cannibal neighbours in the 1920's. In fact, the claim of those that insist on sticking with the "kuru = cannibalism" tale is that kuru started at exactly the same time that the Fore took up cannibalism. That's really unlikely, and sounds far too much like a morality tale. Not only that, but it expects us to believe that one of the most traditional parts of any society's traditions, the funeral ritual, in a very unchanged society, was entirely replaced almost overnight throughout the entire population.

Not. Bloody. Likely.

No more ideological, political screed was ever written than Walter Ahrens' 'Man-eating Myth.' Plausible, but, as it turned out, wrong.

There you go with those egregious assumptions. I have not read the book, nor any excerpts from it. I am only vaguely aware of it's existance.

Ronald It's classic goalpost shifting. The presence of cannibalism in PNG doesn't demonstrate that every tribe in PNG engaged in cannibalism, and I am speaking specifically about the Fore.

#57334: — 01/10  at  08:23 PM
PS, Harry, I find your use of the word "exonerated" telling.

I have no dog in this fight. The concept of funeral cannibalism doesn't strike me as repulsive. It strikes me as repulsive that reality gets ignored when something salicious is in view.

#57346: — 01/10  at  09:46 PM
Man, I'm really, really glad to learn that it's hard to induce kuru in the lab by ingestion. Who were the subjects?

You said: 'Not only that, but it expects us to believe that one of the most traditional parts of any society's traditions, the funeral ritual, in a very unchanged society, was entirely replaced almost overnight throughout the entire population.'

Tell that to the Hawaiians. They gave up their tabu against 'free eating' overnight. And it was part of their funeral ritual, and they were a very unchanged society.

I introduced the concept of feeding frenzy cannibalism in a mood of mild irony. Perhaps the evolutionary distance between humans and squids is not so great as it might seem, at least for some behaviors.

But I was also aware that I would probably catch a moral relativist or two. Bingo.

#57353: — 01/10  at  10:19 PM
Harry Who is being a moral relativist?

I think that would be you, who are judging everything relative to your own Gilded Age mores, without regard for morals.

Millions of Christians practice ritual cannibalism every day. That you choose some questionable traveller's tale about those far-off dusky folk is very telling... cannibalism is always something those other, not-really-human folks do, elsewhere. This is pretty much universal in cannibal tales. Where the rubber hits the road is where there is actual evidence.

You have yet to produce any evidence that the Fore were cannibals.

The kuru subjects were IIRC, chimps (might have been rhesus, it has been some time since I read the material). They could induce kuru by innoculation, but not ingestion.

Funnily enough, the Fore funeral rituals that were actually, you know, witnessed and even recorded on film involved plenty of opportunity for innoculation. They practiced bone breaking. Originally Dr Gajdusek noted this as the most probably route of infection.

Claiming that the Hawaiian ritual changed overnight without any other cultural shift is... wrong. The *entire* kapu system was overthrown on the death of Kamehameha. It was overthrown by political "machinations" in a strong, centralized authority and in a culture that had been exposed to powerful outside influences.

There are absolutely no such parallels amongst the scattered Fore. No other culture shifts are evident, and they are assumed to have just suddenly adopted the funerary practices of disliked neighbours that they had been familiar with for millenia. I refuse to accept this narrative without evidence. Extra-ordinary claims, and all that.

Please, before you ask someone to swallow something, ask yourself, "Would I put that in my mouth".

#57355: — 01/10  at  10:37 PM
It occurs to me that you are the one that is politicizing this....

The "old white guy" intepretation of history (pre and proto, too) has been proven demonstrably wrong on many, many things. Apparently (some) old white males regard this, not as an expansion of knowledge, but as a challenge to their feelings of entitlement, an encroachment upon their supreme social position.

Thus the enemy must be slandered, and put in it's place. Truth be damned.

Bad science leads to bad science. The discovery of prion resistance genes throughout the human population has been loudly touted as evidence of widespread prehistoric cannibalism. The only support for this claim is the highly questionable and probably false "kuru = cannibalism" story. By accepting this narrative and ignoring the other possible ways that such a gene could have entered the population we are throttling off potentially interesting knowledge.

#57402: Ronald Brak — 01/11  at  08:35 AM
I have to admit I find this thread pretty confusing. I think a lot of discussion is happening on a level that is way above my head. But that's okay, maybe I'll learn something that will help me later. Anyway, I began this discussion I seem to have sparked off simply because I wanted to point out that my own limited knowledge suggests that a particular form of cannibalism was probably very rare and not nearly as common as many traveler's stories suggest. But then politics and political correctness were mentioned and I got the impression that someone thought I didn't think any canibalism ever took place, which I didn't like because my father witnessed some. I have to admit that I don't know what the term politcal correctness means. I honestly don't know the definition. As for politics, cannibalism isn't associated with either end of the political spectrum in my country. It's a bit of a dead issue. It never comes up in elections.

Anyway, this thread has been an interesting exchange, although hard for me to understand.

#57442: — 01/11  at  10:20 AM
Ah, I see. And what odd practices -- I seem to have missed them -- are leading English people to inoculate themselves with variant CJD? Some weird funerary rite of old white men?

I may have misunderstood you, Ronald. Your initial post led me to believe that you were objecting to ANY white man saying anything bad about any brown person. The Ward Churchill/Haunani-Kay Trask tack.

Now I understand you to simply have cautioned me against believing travelers' tales. Well, blanket unbelief is no more thoughtful than blanket belief.

Graculus obviously does not know much about Hawaii. Neither its early postcontact history nor its present 'politically correct' interpretation.

Here is a practical example of how I define political correctness.

The ancient legends of Hawaii are full of tales about Koko O Na Moku ('Blood of the Islands') and Kepaniwai ('stream clogged with the blood of slain soldiers'). The missionaries, who never observed any Hawaiian warfare, pretty much accepted the legendary accounts as veracious.

The politically correct version -- what a friend of mine who does contract archaeology calls 'instant tradition' -- is that precontact Hawaiian warfare was largely a ritual with hardly any bloodshed. (Akin to the Mainland U.S. myth that Indians did not fight to kill but merely went through an elaborate but harmless game called 'counting coup.')

The PC version is taught at the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii, although, weirdly, one of the professors there is also on record as saying that when the legends contradict the physical evidence, the legends must be taken as superior evidence.

Reasonable people will probably adopt a viewpoint between the extremes. The chapter on 'Warfare' in Douglas Oliver's 'Oceania' is a good summary of the evidence.

What PC boils down to is, nobody can say anything negative about anybody but white men, or they are racists. Evidence be damned.

PC people seldom hesitate to throw the baby out with the bathwater. When it comes to cannibalism, Ahrens is the principal and I believe earliest complete statement of the PC and antiwestern view: it never existed.

I now understand your view about cannibalism to be on the middle ground, where I stand also.