Cannibal by Daniel Korn, Mark Radice and Charlie Hawes, Channel 4 Books,
拢14.99, ISBN 0752219421.
HUMANS are omnivorous. They will even eat other humans. Not often, it鈥檚 true,
but anthropophagy is more common than most of us care to imagine. A succession
of maritime incidents in the 1700s, for example, made the idea of cannibalism
seem so normal that it became known euphemistically as 鈥渢he practice of the
蝉别补鈥�.
But is it only people in extremis who eat other people? Has it ever
been a common practice? And why and when does it occur? Cannibal sets
out to answer these stomach-turning questions. Its remit is vast: to analyse the
political, ethical and social drivers behind, among other things, Aztec
zealotry; the trade in human flesh in besieged Leningrad; the processing of
corpses in Nazi concentration camps; and even the medicinal use of human tissue.
It is undeniably topical, given the number of superannuated infant organs
languishing in children鈥檚 hospitals all over Britain. But I think the authors
ultimately mismanage their subject by attempting to lump all cannibalism
together.
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To kill people for food requires a massive act of dissociation. The more
human beings are perceived as subhuman, or of another species, the easier it
becomes to slaughter them. The archaeological evidence for cannibalism in Iron
Age Britain consists mainly of fragments of human bone processed and discarded
in exactly the way the bones of other food animals were processed and discarded.
Cannibalism is often more than the eating of human meat: it is also the
processing of humans as if they were animals.
The human skin, hair and fats harvested in the concentration camps of the
Second World War were not a grotesque appendix to the 鈥渇inal solution鈥�, but
fundamental and structural to the Nazis鈥� ideological project.
Much more dissociation was needed from a Nazi camp guard than from a Fijian
warrior in the 14th century. For the Fijian, his living self was a mere
extension of the land鈥檚 energy and productivity. Pre-Christian Fijians who fell
off canoes were left to drown, not through callousness, but merely because their
fellows believed the land had indicated that the individual no longer required
life. The drowned person would continue to enjoy a spiritual existence鈥攐ne
that, incidentally, could be extinguished only through the timely consumption of
the lifeless (but not yet vacated) corpse. For the warlike Fijians, cannibalism
was the only practical way of eliminating enemies.
Spiritual beliefs of this tenor may also give rise to funerary cannibalism,
in which ingestion of the processed body preserves and honours the spirits of
the dead鈥攁 practice about as far away from the reckless gnawings of the
starving and snowbound Donner Party as you can get.
Where Cannibal ties itself up in knots, is in its attempt to 鈥済et to
the heart鈥� of something that is better considered as a spectrum of diverse
practices. Why should cannibalism have a 鈥渉eart鈥� at all? Could it not be a
rather gruesome good idea, hit upon for diverse reasons by diverse people in
diverse situations?
The first inklings of difficulty come with the book鈥檚 examination of
notorious 鈥渃annibal killers鈥� such as Jerry Dahmer and Andrei Chikatilo. Here the
book鈥檚 aim veers suddenly, and worryingly. Now the writers are intent 鈥渢o find
out how thin and perhaps inauthentic, the veneer of modern liberal civilisation
really is鈥�, by comparing psychopathic behaviour with the anthropological
record.
Well, yes, Dahmer did make plans to construct an altar using 12 of his
victim鈥檚 skulls and two complete skeletons. But to suggest that he may have been
鈥渟imply following on a human tradition, buried deep in our `primitive鈥� past鈥�
begs a frightening number of questions.
At best, such thinking leads to the kind of vapid ethical tit-for-tat with
which Arthur Koestler (himself no stranger to psychopathic behaviour) filled his
Janus trilogy. At worst, it plunges the book into gibberish. The idea
that 鈥渆ating people is wrong鈥� is, the authors declare, 鈥渢he primitive and
irrational taboo impressed upon society by several centuries of 鈥榗ivilisation鈥�.鈥�
So what are they saying鈥攅ating people is reasonable?
These authors want to have their cake and eat it. They want us to fear
cannibalism, and at the same time to despise the modern 鈥渉ypocrisy鈥� that makes
cannibalism fearsome. As the philosopher John Searle never tires of pointing
out, in circular debates like these, it is always the terms that are wrong.