The media are making a meal of cannibalim. Fijian chiefs formally apologised yesterday for the ingestion of a missionary in 1867. With frissons of old-fashioned horror, we read reports spiced with the “vegetable relish” served at the feast, or pore over pictures of the missionary’s indigestible boots. Thomas Baker, Fijian cannibalism’s only white victim, was something of a sensationalist himself. He believed that anthropophagy was a bestial perversion, a measure of the moral difference between civilisation and savagery. He was wrong.

Cannibalism is normal. Under the stones of almost every civilisation lie the bones of cannibal feasts. Few, if any, societies are without cannibal episodes. Routinely, in Western history, in extremities of famine, siege or retreat, the quick feed off the dead. To kill a shipwreck companion for food, as long as lots were drawn as to who would fill this role, was lawful until 1884, when survivors from the Mignonette were arrested, to their genuine surprise, after eating their cabin-boy during 24 days adrift.

This “custom of the sea” had landward parallels, satirised in Mark Twain’s story of respectable passengers’ recourse to cannibalism on a delayed railway journey between St Louis and Chicago. In 1972, when an aircraft carrying the Uruguayan football team crashed in the Andes, the survivors ate those who died.

Cannibals sometimes eat people for bodily nourishment but more commonly for self-transformation, the appropriation of power, the ritualisation of the eater’s relationship with the eaten. Often, in the West, cannibalism is for kicks: intellectual pleasure from transgressing convention or sexual thrills from ingesting flesh. In a notorious case in 1874, the Rocky Mountain prospector who called himself “Alferd” Packer split his companions’ skulls and fed on their remains: he became a celebrity-ghoul. With a kind of irony which some find appetising, a university dining room is named after him. Other real-life Lecters include “Liver-eating Johnson”, who targeted Crow Indians in revenge for the murder of his wife in 1847, and, in 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer of Milwaukee, whose tastes comprised gay necrophilia as well as cannibalism. He had a fridge full of human body parts when the police came to call.

Cannibals and their critics agree about one thing: cannibalism is not morally neutral. Moralists suspect that its effects are uncivilising. Cannibals, however, find it a means of self-betterment. Cannibal logic selects a menu for its symbolic value or supposedly magic power, choosing human flesh with as much moral self-consciousness as vegans bring to beans. For the Orokaiva people of Papua New Guinea, cannibalism is a means of “capturing spirits” in compensation for lost warriors. The same country’s Hua eat their own dead to conserve vital fluids supposedly non-renewable in nature. For the Aztecs, a captive’s flesh conferred his prowess: in a complementary gesture, the captor also donned his victim’s flayed skin, with the hands flapping at his wrists like trinkets. In Baker’s Fiji, human meat was the gods’ food and cannibalism a form of divine communion.

Curiously, human beings are the only routinely cannibal mammals. Cannibalism is therefore a defining characteristic of humankind. In our culture it has become the subject of an irrational taboo — although it is hard to see anything offensive about it, as long as the victim is decently dead.

Indeed, some societies insist on cannibalism as the only reverent way to dispose of the deceased. Until the 1960s the Gimi women of the Papuan highlands used to eat their dead menfolk. The practice is still re-enacted in mime with dummy corpses. “We would not have left a man to rot,” protest the women, “We took pity on him!” Their explanation recalls the sages who told Alexander the Great that they ate their honoured dead out of respect and could not bear to burn or bury them. Today’s Fijians can take comfort: to kill Baker was a crime, but to eat him was, from the murderers’ perspective, a rational, moral and, of course, ecologically efficient way of disposing of the evidence.

The author teaches at Queen Mary, University of London

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