Boil, Boil, Ritual, and Toil

So the first time I ever heard about the flesh of the dead being consumed, was when I read Anne Rice’s “Queen of the Damned”, this was the part where the twin women eat the flesh of their deceased relatives so that they will gain their power and free the soul (the book is way better then the movie, by the way).  I later found out this portrayal of the practice of anthropophagy, was not exactly kosher, though entertaining, the book's explanation it was not very accurate. 

So when one of the readings for the past week was about human flesh and what people do with it when humans die, this topic resurfaced in my mind.  The article I am referring to is “Death and Ambivalent Materiality-Human Flesh as Culture and Cosmology” by Terje Ostigaard.  I found this article to be extremely interesting and the whole idea of consuming the dead, the human flesh holding the soul, and every which way the soul can escape the body to be absolutely mind-boggling.

Then I was thinking about the possible cannibalism that we talked about in the Pueblo people on Friday, and I also wondered, would archaeologists be able to figure out if the cannibalism was for a purpose other then funerary ritual, is there actually a way to differentiate?  And not to sound callous but also why would we be so adverse to consuming dead humans, as we do consume the dead much of the time, for those who partake in anything meat, seafood, or poultry related, how did the change to the majority of cultures go to not consuming the members of the group after they pass.

           

And so…. I found a couple answers:

To the first question the article “Consuming Passions: Reviewing evidence of Cannibalism within the Prehistoric Archaeological Record” by James Cole(link at end of blog entry) describes that yes through analysis of the archaeological context of the amount of hominid to faunal remains in the area and the cut marks and ways in which the remains have been treated can also give a clue to whether or not cannibalism is present.

So to the second question there is evidence of diseases that were passed one through the consumption of the flesh, and it began to be widely discouraged.

Also changes and importance of preserved flesh in new religions and traditions were in play.

My personal opinion to why we have become adverse to eating human flesh of the dead would be because of our love/hate relationship with being near the dead, and in the case of North American mainstream, individualism.  The love/hate relationship I speak of, would want to hold onto and know where our deceased are after they have passed and we have disposed of them.  However the hate part of this relationship is not hate, but distance, we don’t want to be so close that we are touching the dead in anyway or that they are physically connected to the living in most cases. 

The other idea I mused was that in North American mainstream, we are very concerned with the idea of the individual.  Some of the traditions that come with funerary rite cannibalism, also quoted as  “spiritual cannibalism”, propose the idea that the consumption, especially by relatives of relatives, is to connect the living to the dead and to absorb their power and strength.  This threatens the idea of Individualism, because if someone is absorbed or strongly connected to another they are no longer an entity of themselves.

So that’s my quick two cents on this very large topic, I would like to hear from anyone else wanting to contribute!

link: http://www.assemblage.group.shef.ac.uk/issue9/cole.html

Human Bones

link for the picture: http://oldtiden.natmus.dk/udstillingen/bondestenalderen/stenalderens_storstensgrave/hvordan_foregik_begravelserne/language/uk/