Cannibals

SM: What was their attitude about cannibalism at the time you knew them?

FH: Well at least most of them in my area said that it was absolutely very disgusting and that they'd never eaten anyone - 'it's all a lie!'- but a Brazilian anthropologist had been about 50 miles away in other villages and they, just a few years ago, had eaten somebody, or so they said. I met somebody in a village up river who remembered some of these things about after 'the big capture' - They 'big capture' enemy warriors if they can and bring them home and club them to death in a ceremonial fashion and then the executioner has to go into his - a seclusion for about a month, and when he comes out they weave a kind of breast plate out of wicker, and in the interstices of the wicker they put these huge 'tocandira' ants. The French anthropologist Aimee was bitten by one of these and disabled for about a week. The bite is so penetratingly painful. So they had twenty or thirty of these ants caught in this thing. They strapped this on his chest and then he had to dance until the ants have finished biting him, until they've got no more venom to do anything. And to add to the fun , somebody goes and gets a hornet nest or two and smashes them on the ground at the feet of the dancer- then he also gets hornet stings like mad. And then after all that has happened - I don't quite know how - but this guy, Quashibo told me that the man, he sits astride his hammock with a hard-on, and the women come up and hold his penis, and they rub their hands that have held his penis on their foreheads. "Why do they do that Quashibo", I asked? "It's a remedy against headache", he said. "Quashibo..come on.!" "Yeah true! Yate! True!" And when you fit it all together - I mean they club them to death on the head - must give you a terrible headache - so I could see it as some kind of homeopathic remedy for headache.

SM: What is the number of the people for whom they belong to a certain group whereby somebody else is a foreigner and therefore possible prey or predator?

FH: Well their ancestors had very big villages, enormous villages, and they called their enemies brothers-in-law or least they called their brothers-in-law and their enemies by the same name which means face-owner, the owner of the face - it's all a matter of honor - the face. So to kill one of those you get your face - you get a lot of honor from it. And the people who are caught and brought back to the village are given the captor's daughter or sister for his wife and they're not looked after in any special way because it's an honor to be clubbed to death and eaten and if they went back home everyone would say, we don't want you here - why didn't you just stay there? We'll avenge your death - it's okay, you know, after you die that way you go straight up to warrior heaven and you've made it. Why are you back here, fucking coward? A French chronicler said that he'd met an Indian who'd been kept there for twenty years and then eaten. After twenty years and he'd raised a small family and all his family, all his children were killed and eaten at the same time.

SM: Really! That's surprising.

FH: Yes indeed and they called them also the loved-one. They loved them very much. They loved their prisoners so much that the Portuguese used to come and the French and tried to ransom them if they could and the captors would go for long journeys to the French camps in order to see their erstwhile captives, to see if they had been treated properly. They really loved them.

SM: How do you explain this - it seems so strange to me - this business of cannibalism, because it seems like another - I mean I suppose they had some sort of equivalent of being sportsman-like about this? Hard to imagine. I mean didn't they have concerns - what comes in between cannibalism and our way of thinking - compassion for example? If they kill some other guy from a nearby tribe, aren't they concerned that the guy has a family and there's no reason for him to die or like that?

FH: No, it's marvelous because then you keep the revenge game going because then that lot over there,they are related to your captor - they have to revenge his capture and his death, and so you just keep the whole pot spinning as long as it can be. But it was true that after some time, and I don't know how long, they got nauseated by the whole business.

SM: What caused that? The arrival of Christianity?

FH: Oh no, no, they were doing it before. Their pagueys, their shamans, used to then preach the immaculate lands, the spotless lands, - and that they should give up all these horrible activities; they would they would dump all their weapons, they'd leave their villages- men, women and children would just go marching through hostile country, entirely unarmed, until they reached the seashore, and there on the sand they would dance and dance and dance until they became light enough to walk over the water to the east where the sun rose because that was the island of immortality. There's one document of a tribe who had done this, and had failed to be light enough, and decided that they should have to go in the opposite direction so they ended up in the Andes somewhere. Can you imagine. And others just gave up and they went back home and starting eating people again because what else are they to do?

SM: And the shamans were behind this movement - when was that taking place?

FH: It was happening when the Europeans first arrived, there were these extraordinary movements - the whole place was full of messianic movements of just this kind and I don't think it was the Europeans who started it off - it was a part of the whole thing, and that it's very exciting and also it's very paranoid making.

SM: What is paranoid making?

FH: Being a cannibal and having to realize that you've got the better of them now that your turn is going to come - like it or not.

SM: Do you think they lived in this cannibal culture for a very long time or was it a recent aberration?. . . .

FH: You know, their rites are very similar to Aztec stuff. Very similar indeed. The Caribs who lived in the Caribbean and on the northern coast of Brazil, they had the same thing going , and the Tupinanga then, spread all the way down the coast past Rio and further south, and they went from there inland- I don't know how much - but they were thick, thick on the ground. Then you had the Caribs and the Aztecs and the Mayans - they were all doing it- and I suppose you had it also in Columbia when they had gold and real kingships going . . . .

SM: Did these people come into South America - Central and South America at the time it's now currently thought - or do you think they were indigenous at an earlier period?

FH: I have no idea - i mean the whole thing is up for grabs as I had always imagined it would be and I don't know where the turmoil of peoples meeting each other and spreading is - it's very difficult to discover. One of the linguists makes out that all the languages are ultimately related in South America which I can hardly believe - what do they call it - chronolinguistics ? You know it's like figuring out the mutations in a genome. So he was doing that. I think it must be very difficult to sort these matters out.

SM: Do you think humans in general at an earlier stage of development generally lived like cannibals - lived as cannibals everywhere? Or is that . . . .

FH: No I think it's a moment in social organization

SM: When does that come?

FH: Well every civilization has started with human sacrifices, some bizarre kinds- sometime it's the mother's brother who is the mother's brother's son who is sort of the victim - in China it was the young people as far as I remember. Way back in the Zhang Dynasty and before; there are some strange documents that have the king or whatever he was called, he would have poles set up with a leather sack filled with the victim's blood like a balloon tied up at the top of the poles and then he would shoot arrows at it in order to show that he was the master of the universe. Every civilization I think has done this. It's part of the ego trip.

SM: We have historical records and records of exploration only for the last, what 6000 years at the most - 4000 years at the most - but homo sapiens were running around Europe at least and probably the rest of the world too - for what 50, 100,000, 200,000 years before that? Can we assume that the population level stayed low because they ate each other a lot? (Laugh..) A lot of sacrifices?

FH: I suppose it helps to keep numbers down. I don't know. And it helps also to make social bonds that are much more compelling because you can't afford to be out on your own - you'd just be nabbed. You immediately need a gang. You need a gang.

SM: If you look at this from the point of view of modern times though, for example, at least in the 20th century, we have our social - what we call patriotism - as a similar kind of bond which includes the country like all the British of World War II, or the French, but there you're talking about numerous millions of people and you might go back in European history and say well - you can find similar things that go back to city-states or local areas or extended communities and from that angle it looks like these early forms of living were much tinier and their - the bubble of who was closely related enough to defend each other is very small, but that may not be the case, I don't know.

FH: Well look at the Aztecs - there were vast quantities of Aztecs . . .

SM: And they didn't eat each other - they only ate the outsiders?

FH: I think they had learned. I think that the Hopi were the ones who didn't want to join the Aztecs - that's why they're pacifists now. And there was a big blow-up when the Aztecs killed the Moon Goddess - what was it - something of that kind.

SM: Are there other cannibal apes?

FH: Not that way - well, actually, there seems to be evidence that sinopithecus was eating himself - they've found chewed bones or skulls with marks of getting at the brains inside to have a nice lick. . . . so I suppose the whole thing may be one of those Freudian initiations into life as it is. You just have to eat somebody otherwise you're . . . . .

SM: In fact cannibalism is not the fringe where human kind gets closer to the animal kingdom - it's a specifically human development. Has to do with a psychic stage in humans.

FH: It has to do with social developments and maybe it's just the simplest form of revenging yourself. Because there is another kind of cannibals in South America, where if your father dies and you put him in his hammock at the edge of the village until he rots to bone, then you take up the remains and you pound the bones up, (or do you burn them, or both?), and then you put them in a pot of water and make a soup and then everyone has a drink and they feel very odd and they go off then in order to raid a village- until this horrible sensation of having eaten a dead man is allayed by killing somebody.

SM: Each of them has to do this?

FH: Well that's the regulation - I don't know how far it goes, but you know, relatives - you know you would invite them all for Christmas lunch to eat your dad or drink your dad's bones and then your allies and you can go off and raid some villages over there - it's kind of a bit of an opportunity for organizing things together. And lots of people don't do that at all. Bushmen don't do that and . . . . . aborigines I think they used to have something....(inaudible) that someone would volunteer a nice fat baby and all the girls would start munching - I suppose they cooked it - must be delicious..(Laughs) And I don't know what their reactions are. I think it must be very strong meat, because you're not only eating meat, you're eating meaning- I thought about it very hard when I was there because once there was a report that a villager from a village a days walk away had seen an intruder and over the next days the story grew and grew until it was decided to go to the village and investigate, and I went with them . So there we were walking in the middle of the day, half-way there, and Anakapa Gunt, who was just ahead of me, turned to me and said - "I'm going to give the war cry now and I want you to understand it's very terrifying and if you're not ready - your bowels, your ass, will fall out of your lasso - and so we don't do it when women and children are around it's too awful for them." And he suddenly erupted like an angry cow with a sort of wounded and terrible roar -everything inside went ...(gestures, noises) Then he said " How are you now?" Well, I was wondering if they would catch an Indian and put him to the usual trial and club him to death and then I'd be there with a haunch of thigh or something (gnawing sounds)- would I actually do that and would I say - stop! stop! eating people is bad, you musn't do it! Or would I be there with my camera...?

SM: How did it end?

FH: Well, it was a young man who said he'd seen this Indian in the village and no-one knew anymore than this one young fellow and he was just of an age when I thought he was wanting to show that he was a man and he'd seen an enemy and zip! he'd got away in the shrubbery somewhere - it's very difficult to hunt in that area sometimes- and the rumor mill had been working and suddenly it was a whole heap of people setting upon this village...

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