Human cannibalism

• 1. Introduction

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  Human cannibalism challenges anthropologists, in the words of scholars who have wrestled with it, "to define what is or is not beyond the pale of acceptable human behavior." The word itself traces back to the Kalinago, the Island Caribs of the Lesser Antilles, whose name the Spanish rendered as caníbal or caríbal and whose legends, when recorded in the 17th century, reconfirmed their long-standing reputation as consumers of human flesh. Yet for every vivid account of cannibalism recorded across Pacific islands, Central Africa, and ancient China, there stands a cautionary fact: many of those accounts were written by outsiders with their own agendas, and colonial-era reports were especially prone to serving as justifications for subjugation and exploitation.

  What does the global record actually show? How did a practice range from funerary tenderness to battlefield ferocity, from medieval medicine to a formal murder trial in English law? And what happens when modern philosophy turns its tools on a subject that most people assume is simply, obviously wrong? The answers cut across tens of thousands of years of human history.

• 2. A Taxonomy of the Practice

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  Anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum proposed that the subject is so diverse it might be better to speak of "cannibalisms in the plural." Three broad categories capture most of that diversity. Institutionalized cannibalism is accepted within the culture where it occurs. Survival cannibalism is driven by starvation: shipwrecks, sieges, famine. And cannibalism as psychopathology is committed by isolated individuals whom their own societies regard as criminal.

  Within institutionalized cannibalism, the direction of consumption matters enormously. Endocannibalism, the eating of someone from one's own community, was often a funerary act, understood as "an act of affection" and a vehicle for transferring the soul of the dead into living descendants. Exocannibalism, by contrast, targeted people from outside the group. It was frequently "an act of aggression, often in the context of warfare", a way of pressing a final victory over a defeated enemy.

  A third variant, autocannibalism, refers to consuming parts of one's own body. It does not appear ever to have been institutionalized, though it surfaces occasionally as a pathological behaviour and in recorded cases of torture where individuals were forced to eat their own flesh.

  Some scholars once argued that beliefs about absorbing a person's positive qualities by eating their organs explained both endo- and exocannibalism alike. But researchers working specifically in New Zealand, New Guinea, and the Congo Basin found that such beliefs were simply absent in those regions, suggesting the motives were more varied than any single explanatory model can accommodate.

• 3. Medicine, Ritual, and Hunger

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  A form of cannibalism that operated largely beneath notice in Europe ran from early records dating to the first century CE through, in some cases, the second half of the 19th century. Medicinal cannibalism, the ingestion of human tissue "as a supposed medicine or tonic", reached its height during the 17th century and was widely practised in China as well. Europeans who elsewhere condemned cannibal customs were, sometimes at the very same period, consuming human body parts as remedies.

  In China, medical cannibalism extended to extraordinary expressions of filial devotion: people voluntarily cut portions of their own livers and boiled them to treat ailing relatives. Emperor Wuzong of Tang, gravely ill, reportedly ordered provincial officials to send him the hearts and livers of fifteen-year-old boys and girls, believing the flesh would cure him.

  Sacrificial cannibalism tied consumption to religious ceremony. Human and animal remains excavated at Knossos in Crete have been interpreted as evidence of a Bronze Age ritual in which children and sheep were sacrificed and eaten together. The Aztecs are the most frequently cited example of sacrificial cannibalism at institutional scale, though materialist anthropologist Marvin Harris argued that a shortage of animal protein was the underlying driver there, a position that cultural anthropologist Marshall Sahlins rejected as far too simple. Sahlins insisted that cannibal customs must be read as "complex phenomena" shaped by symbolism, ritual, and cosmology, not reducible to a protein ledger.

  Survival cannibalism occupies a starker register. The Essex and the Meduse, both lost in the 19th century, produced survivors who turned to the bodies of the dead. The Donner Party of 1846-1847 and the 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 became the most widely known modern examples. Such cases often involve only necro-cannibalism, eating a body that was already dead, rather than homicidal cannibalism. English law drew that line sharply: the case of R v Dudley and Stephens established that necessity is no defence to murder, effectively ending the older maritime custom of drawing lots to decide who would be killed and eaten to preserve a lifeboat's remaining passengers.

• 4. Nutritional Realities

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  Archaeologist James Cole calculated the nutritional value of the human body and found it comparable to that of animals of similar size. A typical adult man yields roughly 126,000 kilocalories across all edible parts, including skeletal muscle, lungs, liver, brain, heart, nervous tissue, bone marrow, genitalia, skin, and kidneys. Given a daily adult energy need of about 2,400 kilocalories, a male body could theoretically sustain a group of 25 men for just over two days on human flesh alone, or longer if the flesh formed part of a mixed diet.

  Cole also noted, however, that for prehistoric hunters, large megafauna such as mammoths, rhinoceros, and bison offered a far better caloric return, simply because of their far greater body mass. As long as such animals were available and catchable, hunting them was the more efficient strategy.

  Jared Diamond argued in Guns, Germs, and Steel that protein scarcity was probably the underlying reason cannibalism was widespread in traditional New Guinea highland societies. Cannibals in New Zealand and Fiji offered their own explanation: a lack of animal meat. Anthropologist Emil Torday, writing about the Congo Basin, where many victims were butchered slaves rather than battlefield enemies, put the dominant motive more bluntly. "The most common reason was simply gastronomic," he wrote. "The natives loved 'the flesh that speaks' and paid for it." Historian Key Ray Chong found the same pattern across Chinese history, where, he concluded, "learned cannibalism was often practiced... for culinary appreciation."

• 5. Global Documentation

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  Fiji was once nicknamed the "Cannibal Isles," and the documentary record there is unusually detailed. Anthropologist Lorimer Fison described the preparation of whole human bodies in earth ovens: stones were heated in fire, placed inside the body cavity, and the entire corpse was sealed under earth. Steam built until the mound cracked and jets of savoury vapour escaped. When the "trussed frog", as such finished preparations were called, was lifted out, the face was painted and a wig or turban placed on the head. Fison observed that the features were "so little disturbed by the process that the dead man can almost always be recognised by those who knew him when he was alive." The Gau Islanders within the archipelago were especially famous for cooking bodies whole.

  In the Solomon Islands in the 1870s, a British captain encountered a dead body "dressed and cooked whole" for sale in a canoe. A settler treated the scene as ordinary and told the captain he had seen as many as twenty bodies lying cooked on the beach at one time. Decades later, a missionary confirmed that whole bodies were still carried up and down the coast in canoes for sale after battles, since human flesh was eaten, in the words of those who sold it, "for pleasure."

  The Fore people of New Guinea offer a different kind of documentation: a medical one. Their funerary practice of consuming deceased community members spread the prion disease kuru. Though the mortuary cannibalism was well documented, the practice had already ceased by the time researchers identified it as the disease vector. Marvin Harris theorized the practice arose during a famine period coinciding with European contact and was subsequently framed as religious ritual.

  In the Amazon Basin, the Congo, and among the Maori of New Zealand, cannibalism was similarly well attested. Among the Maori, children captured in war were sometimes spit-roasted whole, and whole babies were occasionally served at the tables of chiefs. In the Southern New Guinea lowlands, anthropologist Bruce M. Knauft described human predation as "an opportunistic extension of seasonal foraging or pillaging strategies," with human bodies accepted as protein sources alongside animals. Coastal populations, better nourished and physically larger, raided inland peoples with relative impunity.

• 6. Colonialism and the Uses of Accusation

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  Cameroonian anthropologist Francis B. Nyamnjoh traces a consistent pattern: accusations of cannibalism, true, exaggerated, or invented, were deployed to mark non-Western peoples as primitive and to justify their colonization. The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire generated widespread cannibal claims, and Queen Isabella issued an explicit exemption allowing the enslavement of declared cannibals. During Japan's 1874 expedition to Taiwan, as Robert Eskildsen documents, Japanese popular media exaggerated the aboriginal inhabitants' violence, in some cases by wrongly attributing cannibalism to them.

  William Arens pressed this critique to its furthest point in The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy, arguing that virtually all cannibal reports were unreliable and served only to establish cultural superiority over the accused. The academic response was largely rejection. Claude Lévi-Strauss called Arens's book "brilliant but superficial" and noted that "no serious ethnologist disputes the reality of cannibalism." Shirley Lindenbaum observed that Arens's provocation prompted anthropologists to re-examine their evidence, but the outcome was a more nuanced map of where and why cannibalism occurred, not confirmation that it had not.

  Nyamnjoh's own position is more careful than Arens's. He does not deny cannibal practices; he warns against accepting undiscriminating reports. He also notes European hypocrisy: the same cultures that condemned cannibal customs abroad were simultaneously practising medicinal cannibalism at home. Diego Álvarez Chanca, who sailed with Christopher Columbus on his second voyage and left the earliest firsthand account of Caribbean cannibal customs, did not fit the dismissive template at all. He described Carib practices factually and then added, of the same people, "that these people are more civilized than the other islanders."

  Reports from Central Africa followed similar patterns. Several Europeans who wrote about cannibal customs in that region described the practitioners in strongly positive terms, calling them "splendid" and "the finest people" and sometimes rating them as intellectually and morally superior to the non-cannibals around them. Missionary George Brown, writing from Melanesia, explicitly rejected the European stereotype of cannibals as "particularly ferocious and repulsive." Many of the cannibals he met, he wrote, were "no more ferocious than" anyone else and were "indeed... very nice people."

• 7. The Philosophy of a Hard Question

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  Philosopher Mathew Lu observed that, in modern society, cannibalism is widely regarded as ethically wrong, yet it is "surprisingly difficult to explain why." The challenge concentrates on passive cannibalism, eating the body of someone who died of unrelated causes, because active cannibalism, killing someone to eat them, is generally condemned for the killing, not the eating.

  On utilitarian grounds, if eating a body increases the pleasure of the eaters without decreasing anyone else's happiness, a case can be made that the act is not merely permissible but mildly beneficial. Kantian philosophy demands that persons be treated as ends, never as means, but a corpse is no longer a person with autonomous standing, which weakens the standard objection. Philosopher J. Jeremy Wisnewski examined these and other arguments and concluded that he could find no "rational justification for the cannibalism prohibition." For him, any decision against eating human flesh rests on "sentimental" rather than "moral" grounds.

  Lu proposed a path through this impasse via virtue ethics in the Aristotelian tradition. On that basis, he argued, human corpses carry "genuine moral value" and deserve respect that eating them, except in life-or-death situations, would violate. Cooking and consuming a body destroys its human form completely. When other foods are available, he concluded, this destruction of "residual humanity" is unnecessary and therefore wrong.

  New Zealand-born philosopher Richard Routley, in a 1982 paper, took a non-speciesist position and argued that if killing someone is justified, the subsequent consumption of their body is also admissible, since the eating was not the reason for the killing. He further held that "respectful" consumption of bodies to which people had consented was acceptable, drawing an analogy with organ donation. He rejected cremation, by contrast, as wasteful compared to a body being consumed.

  The debate spilled into the laboratory era when cultivated meat technology made it possible to grow human tissue without any killing. In a 2024 British survey, 88% of respondents said commercial production of cultivated human meat should be forbidden, a higher figure than for any animal species in the survey. Yet 20% said they would try such meat if it were legally available, largely out of curiosity, and men and people under 25 were notably more inclined to try it than women and older respondents.

• 8. Myth, Taboo, and Folklore

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  Romanian philosopher Catalin Avramescu identified one reason the cannibalism taboo took on such particular force in the Christian world: the doctrine of bodily resurrection. If the dead are to be raised not just spiritually but bodily, and if a body is composed of what a person has eaten, then a cannibal act creates a paradox. The flesh of the eaten person would, in theory, have to exist twice simultaneously, to resurrect both the one who ate it and the one from whom it came. Christian thinkers including Athenagoras of Athens and Thomas Aquinas wrestled with this problem. Both concluded that divine power could resolve the paradox, but it made cannibalism appear as a direct challenge to a central doctrine, rendering it diabolical in the theological imagination.

  Folklore across many cultures echoed this anxiety. The wendigo of Algonquian legend was a malevolent cannibalistic spirit capable of possessing or physically transforming those who indulged in cannibalism, and the legend reinforced the practice as taboo. The Zuni told of the Atahsaia, a giant who devoured his fellow demons and sought human flesh. Slavic folklore offered the witch Baba Yaga; Japanese tradition the Yama-uba. Greek mythology produced an entire constellation of cannibalism stories: Thyestes, Tereus, Cronus, and Tantalus. Homer's Odyssey, Beowulf, and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus engaged with the subject in literary form.

  Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal (1729) is probably the most famous satirical treatment in the English language, suggesting that poor Irish children could ease their country's economic burden by being sold as food to the elite. Mark Twain returned to the device in 1868 with "Cannibalism in the Cars." In popular culture, the cannibal figure became a fixture of horror, nowhere more durably than in Thomas Harris's creation of Hannibal Lecter. The 1972 Andes crash that stranded the survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 generated direct treatment of survival cannibalism in the 2023 film Society of the Snow. And the science fiction classic Soylent Green (1973) turned on the delayed revelation that its central food product was made from human flesh, a twist that retains its power more than fifty years after release.