Is it time for a more subtle view on the ultimate taboo: cannibalism?

IT IS the final word taboo: in most societies, the concept of 1 human consuming one other is morally repugnant. Even in circumstances the place it may arguably be justified, resembling when a aircraft crashed within the Andes in 1972 and ravenous passengers ate the useless to outlive, we nonetheless have a deep aversion to cannibalism. One of many survivors, Roberto Canessa, has since described the passengers’ actions as a “descent in the direction of our final indignity”.

Ethically, cannibalism poses fewer points than you may think. If a physique might be bequeathed with consent to medical science, why can’t it’s left to feed the hungry? Our aversion has been defined in varied methods. Maybe it’s right down to the truth that, in Western spiritual traditions, our bodies are seen because the seat of the soul and have a whiff of the sacred. Or perhaps it’s culturally ingrained, with roots in early trendy colonialism, when racist stereotypes of the cannibal have been concocted to justify subjugation. These got here to characterize the “different” to Western societies – and revulsion in the direction of cannibalism grew to become a tenet of their moral conscience.

A slew of current archaeological discoveries is now additional complicating how we take into consideration human cannibalism. Researchers have unearthed proof suggesting that our hominin ancestors ate one another surprisingly usually. What’s extra, plainly they weren’t at all times doing so for the explanations you would possibly count on – for sustenance or to compete towards and intimidate rivals – however usually as funerary rituals to honour their useless.

Prefer it or not, then, cannibalism is a crucial a part of our story. This isn’t to say that we should always change our attitudes in the direction of it. However understanding its deep roots would possibly shift our perspective on the few cultures that also practise cannibalism at the moment, albeit solely sometimes, such because the Aghori, a Hindu ascetic sect in India that does it in pursuit of transcendence. Above all, these discoveries invite us to rethink our revulsion to cannibalism within the context of our evolutionary previous.