Conklin explores funeral cannibalism
Photo by Billy Kingsley
Vanderbilt anthropologist Beth Conklin spent two years living with the Wari',
an indigenous population of about 1,500 people in the western Brazilian
rain forest.
by Ellie Shick
The two years Beth Conklin spent living among the Wari' tribesmembers in
western Brazil offered her a rare opportunity to gain first-hand information
from living practitioners who, until the 1960s, engaged in an activity some
might consider barbarian.
The Vanderbilt anthropologist said she gained important insights into how
these people cope with and view death through her study of their practice
of mortuary cannibalism. Rather than finding the practice as an antisocial
act of aggression, Conklin said it helped them detach from a loved one.
For two years in the mid-1980s, while conducting research for her dissertation,
Conklin studied the Wari', an indigenous population of about 1,500 people
living in the western Brazilian rain forest. Until the 1960s, the Wari'
disposed of nearly all their dead by consuming substantial amounts of the
corpses.
"All Wari' elders living today took part in or witnessed this mortuary
cannibalism," said Conklin, assistant professor of anthropology and
of religious studies. Her research is unique in that few detailed
accounts of cannibalism exist from the viewpoint of living practitioners.
"Among anthropologists, mortuary cannibalism ‹ the eating of kin
rather than enemies ‹ has received rather short shrift," Conklin
said. Far from an antisocial act of aggression associated with eating your
enemies, mortuary cannibalism has a socially integrative dimension. It was
considered the most respectful way to treat a human body.
"Mortuary cannibalism helped mourners emotionally detach from memories
of the dead, which in turn, helped them deal with the loss of a loved one,"
Conklin said. "For the dying, being incorporated into fellow tribesmembers'
bodies was far more appealing than being left alone to rot in the dirty,
wet, cold and polluted ground."
As opposed to contemporary Western society, Wari' customs offer the bereaved
a fairly structured set of ritual activities that facilitate the mourning
process in a relatively healthy way. For example, mourners are given a full
year to grieve, in which they're cared for by other tribe members. Because
the sight of the deceased's material objects evokes memories, all tangible
reminders are destroyed or transformed. A dead person's house and personal
possessions are burned or discarded. Crops planted by the deceased are given
to non-relatives.
"The Wari' embrace a very sophisticated psychological understanding
of the spirit's reluctance to leave the human world and the psychological
bonds that link the living to the dead. The destruction of the corpse has
a dual effect: it speeds the emotional dissociation for the both the survivors
and the dead person's spirit," Conklin said.
Cannibalism played a powerful role in the Wari' social process of mourning,
which today still embraces the belief in ancestors' regeneration as animals
in the human world with ongoing, life-supporting relations to their living
relatives.
In Wari' afterlife, the spirits of the dead reside under the waters of deep
rivers and lakes. The ancestors appear as they did in life, but everyone
is strong, beautiful and free of disease. Life is easy and crops grow abundantly,
but all food is vegetarian. There is no hunting or fishing because all animals
have human forms underwater.
Wari' believe that when ancestral spirits emerge from the water into the
human world, they assume the bodies of fish or white-lipped peccaries, pig-like
animals that roam in large herds. In re-entering the human world, they allow
themselves to be killed for food, thus establishing a reciprocity of life
support between the living and the dead.
"For Wari', the magic of existence lies in the commonality of human
and animal identities, in the movements between the human and nonhuman worlds
embodied in the recognition through cannibalism of human participation in
both poles of the dynamic of eating and being eaten," Conklin said.
The demise of mortuary cannibalism among the Wari' in the early 1960s resulted
from contact with the outside world, which exposed the Wari' to epidemics
of measles, influenza, tuberculosis and other cosmopolitan diseases. Newly
dependent on outsiders for food and medical care, the Wari' acquiesced to
the demands of missionaries and government agents who threatened to withhold
food and medicines from those continuing to eat the dead. The Wari' acquiesced
and began burying their deceased.
Today, burial continues to be a source of covert dissatisfaction among some
elder Wari', who still view it as a less loving way to treat a human body
than cannibalism or cremation.
Vanderbilt Office of
News and Public Affairs
Document last updated Jan. 14, 1997