The myths and perturbing realities of cannibalism

Cannibals. The word evokes images of missionaries being boiled inhuge pots by savages with bones through their noses in sinister clearings in mysterious jungles. The whole notion has a comic book air of bright colors and exaggerated stereotypes. Of course, you say, real cannibals don't boil missionaries in big metal pots.

What's interesting is that it's at least passingly possible thatthere aren't any real cannibals at all. This category of behavior that is almost universally believed to exist has been cast into serious doubt. How can this be? And what on earth does it mean that something we all know exists might not?

For starters, cannibalism must be precisely defined. Cannibalismis eating members of one's own species; cannibals are people- eating people. But not all cannibalism is the same. One way to classify cannibalism is by who is eaten. The choices are three: autocannibalism -- eating parts of oneself (a truly staggering idea if you extend it past nail-biting); exocannibalism, or eating outsiders or foreigners; and endocannibalism, eating mebers of one's own social group.

There are also functional types or categories of cannibalism, based on why someone is eaten: survival cannibalism, ritual or religious cannibalism, and dietary or gastronomic cannibalism. Simply put, survival cannibalism occurs when people are trapped without food in some way -- in a boat adrift on the ocean, on a mountain by snowfall -- and resort to eating other members of the group. It must be a ghastly decision: whether to starve or eat fellow humans. The nicer, more acceptable version of this unacceptable behavior involves eating only the folks who are already dead, rather than knocking them off for dinner. Even this notion, if you think about it for a minute, is pretty awful: sitting around looking at each other, wondering who's weak enough to die soon and be eaten. It has the makings of a great 1950s moral dilemma movie. Survival cannibalism is one type of cannibalism that clearly has occurred and is well documented.

In contrast to this is ritual or religious cannibalism -- not only acceptable but even socially required. It occurs when the consumption of human flesh, perhaps following sacrifice, is an intrin- sic and necessary part of a religious rite. A commonly cited example, which may or may not be accurate, involves the notorious human sacrifices of the bloodthirsty Aztec priests, followed (it's said) by drinking the blood and eating the flesh of the victims. Such circumstances need not be remote or apply only to ''barbaric savages.'' As recently as World War II, the false story that Jews needed the blood of Gentile children to make matzohs was believed by an appalling number of people. Consider, too, the Martian anthropologist (a favorite device of classroom teachers) who happens upon a communion service in a church. What will he think of the invitation ''Take, eat, this is my Body . . .'' ?

And finally, dietary or gastronomic cannibalism is the eating ofpeople simply as food. In this type of cannibalism, presumably, either there's no taboo against eating fellow humans or the con- sumers don't recognize the humanity of the consumed.

All this typology enabled historians and ethnographers to compile lists of which tribes or prehistoric groups do or did practice cannibalism of which type(s). The problem with it, as William Arens pointed out in The Man-Eating Myth, which was published in 1979, is that good documentation of either ritual or dietary cannibalism is nonexistent. Nearly all accounts of cannibalism come down to one of three things: accusations by other, usu- ally neighboring, groups; statements that one's ancestors (but never oneself) were cannibals; or travelers' tales full of hearsay and verbatim transcripts of remarks made in a language unintelligible to the traveler. Arens's attempts to find accounts by reliable eyewitnesses to acts of cannibalism were frustrated at every turn, which led him to a strong and controversial conclusion: ''I have been unable to uncover adequate documentation of cannibalism as a custom in any form for any society.''

A number of anthropologists, especially those whose field work has taken them to South America and the Pacific, have countered Arens's skepticism by reporting that cannibalism is well known and well documented among the peoples they're familiar with. But Arens is awaiting convincing cases that prove customary practice.

Perhaps Arens's standard of good evidence, especially as appliedto travelers' tales from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is unrealistically stringent. From travelers' accounts alone, many customs and facts -- including, for example, the existence of the gorilla -- would be rejected as unproved, because only recent documentation is up to Arens's standard. Still, as Arens observes, ''from all corners of the globe reports come in that a specific group of people an anthropologist has lived among were cannibals long ago, before contact, until pacification, just recently, or only yesterday. The reader is engulfed by a stream of past tenses denoting varying removes in time, indicating a demise of the custom sometime before the researcher took up residence on the scene.''