Cannibalism – Greg Laden's Blog

Should I eat my placenta?

Greg Laden — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 16:35:36 +0000

Well, not my placenta exactly, but … well, someone’s?

Did you now that the placenta that is born out of a female primate’s body is an organ of the infant also being born? It is the first body part you lose. I use the term “primate” here because, even though all the “placental mammals” as we are called share some basic reproductive gestational anatomy, there are major categories across the mammals in this area, and primates are distinct from, for example, carnivores. These differences are of course very important when one is considering placentophagy. I mean, you wouldn’t confuse a walnut with an orange when picking a snack, why would you confuse a dog placenta with a monkey placenta?

In humans and mice, and presumably therefore in all mammals, the placenta and the rest of the embryo/fetus have growth patterns that are controlled at some basic level by two distinct developmental genes, each of which has the property of methylation. This is an epigenetic phenomenon for those who like to see that word in use. Here’s what happens. The gene that engenders growth of the placenta is turned on by dad’s allele, turned off by Mom’s. The gene that engenders growth of the rest of the embryo is turned on by mom, off by dad.

The idea here is that mom and dad have difference interests in the outcome. Mom wants to have an optimal (not maximal) number of offspring, so she parses out energy appropriately. Dad wants to have more offspring than mom, using a number of different moms if possible. Thus, he wants the growing embryo and fetus to suck as much energy out of each mom as it can.

The Placenta is the energy-sucking organ. It insinuates itself greedily into the blood supply of the mother, like an alien internal parasite. The mother’s body resists the introduction of placental tissues into her blood supply, the placenta fights back, and the result is a compromise which usually works out. Part of that compromising system, over long term evolutionary time, has been them other’s systematic turning off of the gene that she provides instantiating the growth of the placenta. Dad counters by turning off the fetus/embryo gene. And so on.

Anyway, should I eat my placenta or not?

Across cultures, there are many different practices associated with child birth that have to do with the placenta. Among one group I worked with in the Congo, the Placenta is buried under the threshold of the hut in which the birth happens. This is done by the father. That, and having a sharpened arrow handy to cut the cord, are his only jobs during child birth. But nobody eats the placenta.

I normally don’t pay a lot of attention to the “complementary and alternative medicine” literature, thought I am sent regular notices of various publications. Today, though, something came across my desk that I thought you’d be interested in. I’ll give some of the basic results, you can draw your own conclusions. Feel free to comment below. The topic is, of course, placentophagy.

The Paper:

Schuette Stephanie A., Brown Kara M., Cuthbert Danielle A., Coyle Cynthia W., Wisner Katherine L., Hoffman M. Camille, Yang Amy, Ciolino Jody D., Newmark Rebecca L., and Clark Crystal T.. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. January 2017, 23(1): 60-67. doi:10.1089/acm.2016.0147.

Methods:

Two cross-sectional surveys with questions regarding placentophagy practice were distributed to healthcare providers and patients. The provider survey was distributed via email listservers to international perinatal professional organizations and to obstetrics and gynecology, nurse midwifery, family medicine, and psychiatry departments at three urban hospitals. Patient surveys were administered in person at an urban hospital in Chicago, Illinois.

Key results that jumped out at me:

Higher income, higher education, and whiteness seem to be associated with a higher likelihood of engaging in placentophagy, with various degrees of effect.

The most likely kid of provider to suggest considering this practice are midwives, with all the other kinds of providers (physicians and nurses, mainly) being in the main unlikely to suggest it. Sample sizes are small, but 100% of the 66 OB/GYN’s asked said no, they would not suggest this. For nurses, with only 16 in the sample, two thirds said no, they would not, and one third were neutral. Non said they would suggest it. Among Midwives, only 17.6% said they were unlikely, and 29.4% said likely, the rest being neutral.

The survey looked at multiple locations but with enough in Denver and Chicago to identify a vague pattern: A provider in Denver is slightly more likely to thing this a good idea.

The study looked at history of mental health diagnosis. 7.4% of those with no such history said they would consider placentophagy. 24.3% of those with such a history said yes. Across the board, asking about what form they would consider eating the placenta in, or if they thought there was this or that benefit, those with a history of mental health diagnosis generally thought it was good, low risk, and they would try a variety of methods.

There is no evidence that placentophagy has a benefit.

Among Cannibals

Greg Laden — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 19:36:02 +0000

I have lived among Cannibals, according to a lot of people who claim to know. The number of times that the “tribal” people of the Congo have been called cannibals is too great to be counted, most notably in great literature like The Heart of Darkness but most commonly, I suspect, from the pulpit or soap box by those raising money to spread this or that word. Most Europeans and Americans don’t know it, but many people who live in the Congo are quite convinced that the bazunga … the white foreigners … are cannibals. I’ve listened closely to these assertions, made by many individuals, and I’ve lived in both places for considerable time and I can say something about these claims.

They have a case.

(A repost)

At the moment, I’m leaning more towards the Europeans eating their fellow humans than Congolese dining in this manner but I suppose either is a possibility.

And, we should admit right away that cannibalism can be a rather touchy subject. As the subject of food so often is.

One day, while I was camped out to the south of the Rwenzori Mountain, some visitors came by which itself was very odd (that happened twice over five months) and with them a news magazine from Europe with a story from a Greek journalist who had been, just a month or so before, to a village up on the mountain. It was well known at the time that rebels inhabited the slopes of the Rwenzori and passed in and out of the few villages on or near the mountain, which otherwise catered to the very rare tourist-mountain climbers who came to walk among the five glaciers distributed along a line perpendicular to and straddling the equator. The story was macabre.

Rebels, who later were to become the controlling government of the DR Congo, had been in the village, but lookouts warned them that a company from Mobutu’s army was heading their way, so they went to the “poli” … the forest … to hide out. According to the story one of the villagers gave up the rebel position to the soldiers, probably under duress, who then closed in and captured a handful of the dissidents. Later, the army left with their prisoners and the rebels returned to town. A little bit of investigation revealed who the traitor was, and he was summarily executed. The rebels then gathered all the villagers together and forced them to watch as the snitch was butchered and roasted and eaten, by the rebels.

The fact that the story was reported in a European news magazine and reported by a European journalist was supposed to make it true. However, I was not impressed by that.

Listen. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was probably an attempt to convey to Europeans the inhumanity that was the Congo in King Leopold’s day, as opposed to a prurient racist sailor’s yarn. All of his natives were cannibals or reformed cannibals. But he misunderstood native life then about the same amount as short term visitors such as some Greek journalist writing for a French Magazine about the old Belgian Congo would as well. I have met and conversed with dozens of people, some advisers to me, some my advisees, some colleagues, some metaphorical riverboats plundering by in the night, who were full of claims about the Congo but devoid of knowledge. I lived there long enough to have some idea of what I don’t know, while they visited there short enough to think they know a lot. I could tell you stories.

The Greek Journalist claims to have witnessed the cannibalism. Without corroborating evidence I don’t accept it as true or even likely. Efe living in the Ituri more recently claimed that soldiers were killing and eating them. There was an international uproar. When outside authorities including the UN went in and demanded justice, information, and redress the Efe withdrew their stories, and it now appears that it was just that old cannibalism trope showing up again, as it does so often in the Congo. A couple of years before rebels supposedly dined on the snitch, two women in a village to the west of that region were sentenced by a judge to life in prison for eating their husband, who was apparently cheating on them. (Cannibalism was illegal in Zaire, though it is not illegal in most countries.) My good friend who shall remain nameless claimed that while he was a member of the government security police his unit was sent to a remote and illegal forest village to investigate a cannibalistic chief-gone-bad, a mad man who had convinced his villagers to eat their fellow humans, and when my friend and his fellow cops arrived they were horrified to find smoking racks covered with cooking human body parts. The same man, my friend, was also a missionary-trained preacher who had many stories that were rather unbelievable, about a nuclear bomb that went off and created the modern patricians of his people, about some guy who parted the Maji Nyunkunde (“sea of red”) by waving around a stick, about a baby that was born in a manger full of animal shit to a woman who had never had sex. Virgin birth? Parting seas? Cannibalism? Whatever.

William Arens has a point. For the most part, cannibalism is a story, an accusation, a powerful cultural category, a threat, a scary trope, used as a means of control or as a way to convey the worst of insults. Unlike Arens, I will not use the fact that cannibalism is often reported with all the evidence suggesting that it didn’t happen, or no real evidence suggesting that it did happen, to support the conclusion that there is no such thing. And, I have a reason for doing that. Although I know of no direct evidence, in the form of human body parts with a good chain of evidence, to support cannibalism anywhere on the African Continent, there is plenty of such evidence for it globally.

A friend of a friend — no kidding — was on that airplane that went down in the Andes where people ate each other. I had these two other friends who had independently traced their genealogies back to a high mountain pass near the Nevada-California border, where the great, great grand uncle of one had eaten the great, great grand aunt of the other. There is a handful of reasonably well documented, believable cases of context-induced on-the-fly cannibalism-of-convenience. People eating people happens.

The ethnographic record also shows us numerous examples of a different kind of cannibalism, the kind where you eat the dead after they are already dead, and then, usually in some highly ritualized manner. This sort of cannibalism is strictly not cuisine. Again, this is very very rare in Africa where Conrad’s supposed cannibals lived. In New Guinea there are the people with the Kuru, a prion disease you get from eating undercooked grandad brains. In the Amazon there are people who, after cremating the revered elders, save the ashes and eat them as an infusion over a period of months or years. There are people around the world who carry out the middle eastern tradition of eating the body of their spiritual leader in the form of a sort of voodoo doll made of a cracker. And so on. But none of that counts for real cannibalism, the way we usually mean it when we think of it as that icky thing that the natives — or at least, other people do.

The archaeological record gives us more. Human bones with cut marks in the same basic pattern as animal bones, thrown in with the animal bones or sometimes treated separately, have been found in Mesolithic or Early Neolithic sites in southern Europe. Butchered bits have been found extensively among bone remains in the American Southwest. It is hard to tell what these all mean. Was this people eating those dead of other causes? Eating their enemies (there is some evidence for that)? Eating from a larder of some subclass or enslaved group? Eating people who annoyed them? People that they loved and wanted to possess a little too much?

Here’s a question for you. First consider the possibility that a culture … as in a reasonably well defined group of people who live in a certain place, share cultural practices and language and so on (people often use the word “tribe” here but I choose not to for several reasons) could be taken over by a crazy-ass maniac who has beliefs that would normally not become widespread cultural practices, but then those beliefs take hold. Or maybe not a maniac, but perhaps a cultish group of culty people. Then, this “culture group” now has this practice that by and large most humans, most places and most times, would say is wrong, deranged, evil, inappropriate, icky, whatever. But they do it anyway.

So here’s the question: Are (were) groups of humans, cultures, that regularly practice(d) cannibalism of the kind where you kill and eat some other humans now and then (never mind the details) representative of normal human variation that we happen to look askance at today because of our own cultural biases, or are they groups that have been possessed, as it were, of an aberrant belief, an abnormal norm, or a sort of social sickness? Putting this a slightly different way: Is there a human-wide displeasure with the idea of dietary cannibalism because as a species we have gone through a filter, narrowing down our norms to a subset of what is really possible or even common, or has eating people for food always been freakishly weird and preposterous?

I haven’t given you the evidence that Europeans and Americans are cannibals, from the perspective of people of the Congo. I will, but another time. It is not easy to talk about.

Cannibal, Native, Indigenous

Greg Laden — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:06:08 +0000

Three words used to describe “others” in Western literature. This topic came up in a previous post, and made me wonder what Google Ngram had to say about it. I made three different graphs because the scales are so vastly different (owing among other things, I’m sure, to multiple uses of the words). Here they are:

Cannibal:

Tribal

Indigenous

Interesting.

See more on Cannibalism

You come from Cannibals

Greg Laden — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 15:57:48 +0000

A man “lies crumpled on the sand … Behind him a dark trail leads back to the spot from which he has just been dragged. Looking closer, we notice something slightly odd about the figure crouching over the wounded man. His posture does not suggest a doctor attempting to staunch bleeding, or even to check heartbeat or pulse. Look a little closer still, and you may be inclined suddenly to reel back or to close your eyes. The man sprawled at such an odd angle beside the injured [man] has his face pressed against a gaping tear in [his] throat. He is drinking blood fresh from the wound…” Why? Well, to cure his epilepsy, of course. The date is 24 AD, the injured man is a gladiator, and the man drinking the blood must have bribed his way to the front of the line because he’s getting what a lot of other people in Ancient Rome routinely sought. A nice blood meal, for medicinal purposes, of course.

Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

And that is not the most shocking thing you’ll read if you devour Ricahrd Sugg’s Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians. In this scholarly yet macabre book, Sugg documents the practice of consuming or wearing or otherwise messing around with human flesh, skin, fat, brains, and blood as generally recommended by the best and most reputable healers, and as generally practiced by people of means and education, among others. “James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine.” Corpse medicine. Sounds like cannibalism to me!

Suddenly, the Eucharist makes sense. The consumption of human tissue in Europe for quite some time was a primarily Christian practice. Some of the tissues were harvested from the bodies of the freshly executed. Were the fabled crowds gathered to see the bad men hang after something other than a good show? Was it like a drive-through, a buffet, or more of a sit-down affair? Interestingly, though the roots of this tradition go back to the Classical Period, and it was developed to its full science during the Medieval Period, Medical Cannibalism seems to have reached it’s height during the early Renaissance and continued into the Victorian Era, though much reduced in fashion. You have to read this book.

Is cannibalism normal?

In my last essay on Cannibalism (Among Cannibals) I asked if you thought that cannibalism could ever be considered as just one of many of the diverse modes of human behavior, recently abandoned by virtually all societies and thus seen as much odder and demented than it should be viewed. In particular, I was asking about cannibalism where you go and kill someone so you could eat them. The stuff I mention above, from Sugg’s book, seems a bit more like ritual cannibalism where you eat your ancestors, perhaps cremated and calcined and made into a sort of soup, as part of a ritual. So maybe, if you are of European Ancestry, you can keep believing that your people have never really been cannibals. But I’m not so sure. Sucking the blood from the gaping wound of a dying gladiator is probably not what you were thinking as an example of “not demented” or fully ritualized. And, once there is a sufficient demand for human body parts, tissues, and fluids, would you think for a moment that there were not agents who could provide these valuable items in ways that were exactly the same as killing someone so you could eat them … because people were killed, so they could be eaten, then, well, eaten?

No. Sorry. If you are of European Ancestry, you come from Cannibals.

One way to make sense of this all is to consider blood, and bodily fluids in general. These days, in Western society, we know that these things are dangerous. Some people (smart people) carry around portable shields that allow them to give mouth-to-mouth to strangers and not get a disease. Ambulance workers and other first responders routinely don protective materials to avoid contact with fluids. I’m not sure … do mothers still suck the blood from their children’s wounds like they did when I was a kid? Probably not. Do people still suck the blood from their own wounds? (Not counting when you bite your own tongue.) I’m not sure, you tell me. When was the last time you tasted human blood?

Our fear of fluids has gone so far that you can’t get a good piece of red meat out any more unless you go to the highly specialized restaurant’s, where despite the availability of Pittsburgh you will see people ordering “medium” or even, gasp, “well done.”

Given this, the whole idea of paying to suck the blood from the gaping wound of a dying gladiator is enough to put you off your lunch, but I submit that this disgust is a cultural trait that you need not be endowed with. I’m not saying sucking blood is a good thing. I’m just saying that it is a bad thing, to you, because you learned to be that way. And in other times and other places, the distaste for human body parts, tissues, or fluids may not have been routinely learned.

It’s all cultural

And maybe in some cases, quite the opposite may have happened: Such a taste may have been cultivated. And once you’ve got a culture where eating raw human liver or rendered human fat or whatever is seen as a good thing, it is very hard to not define such a culture as “Cannibals.”

So why, then, is it the case that in our Western literature the prevailing notion (over the last couple of centuries) is that dark skinned people living in far off lands are sufficiently cannibalistic (even when they aren’t) that the term “Cannibals” can actually become the primary term by which they are referred (used in much of the literature more often than “Natives”), but French, English Germans, and others who, if of sufficient status, mainstream, and solvent, did it whenever they could but are not thusly labeled?

Because the meaning of the word “cannibal” has almost nothing to do with who eats whom.

See more on Cannibalism

Among Cannibals

Greg Laden — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 13:00:59 +0000

I have lived among Cannibals, according to a lot of people who claim to know. The number of times that the “tribal” people of the Congo have been called cannibals is too great to be counted, most notably in great literature like The Heart of Darkness but most commonly, I suspect, from the pulpit or soap box by those raising money to spread this or that word. Most Europeans and Americans don’t know it, but many people who live in the Congo are quite convinced that the bazunga … the white foreigners … are cannibals. I’ve listened closely these assertions, made by many individuals, and I’ve lived in both places for considerable time and I can say something about these claims.

They have a case.

At the moment, I’m leaning more towards the Europeans eating their fellow humans than Congolese dining in this manner but I suppose either is a possibility.

And, we should admit right away that cannibalism can be a rather touchy subject. As the subject of food so often is.

The fact that the story was reported in a European news magazine and reported by a European journalist was supposed to make it true. However, I was not impressed by that.

I haven’t given you the evidence that Europeans and Americans are cannibals, from the perspective of people of the Congo. I will, but another time. It is not easy to talk about.

See more on Cannibalism

Arens, William. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (Galaxy Books).

ï»¿Brown, Paula, and Donald Tuzin. “The Ethnography of Cannibalism”. Society for Psychological Anthropology, 1983.

Bullock, Peter Y. “A reappraisal of Anasazi cannibalism.” Kiva 57, no. 1 (1991): 5-16.

CÃ¡ceres, Isabel, Marina Lozano, and Palmira SaladiÃ©. “Evidence for bronze age cannibalism in El Mirador Cave (Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain).” American journal of physical anthropology 133, no. 3 (July 2007): 899-917. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17492670.

Chong, Key Ray. Cannibalism in China. Longwood Academic, 1990.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (See all Classic Literature)

FernÃ¡ndez-Jalvo, Y, J Carlos DÃez, I CÃ¡ceres, and J Rosell. “Human cannibalism in the Early Pleistocene of Europe (Gran Dolina, Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain).” Journal of human evolution 37, no. 3-4 (n.d.): 591-622. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jhev.1999.0324.

Goldman, Laurence. “The Anthropology of Cannibalism”. Bergin & Garvey, 1999.

Holden, C. “CANNIBALISM: Molecule Shows Anasazi Ate Their Enemies.” Science 289, no. 5485 (2000): 1663a.

Lindenbaum, Shirley. “Thinking About Cannibalism.” Annual review of anthropology 33, no. 1 (2004): 475-498. http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143758.

Pickering, Michael P. “Food for Thought: An Alternative to ‘Cannibalism in the Neolithic'” (October 3, 2010). http://www.jstor.org/pss/40286899.

Villa, P. “Cannibalism in prehistoric Europe.” Evolutionary Anthropology 1, no. 3 (1992): 93-104. http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/evan.1360010307.

Cannibalism – Greg Laden's Blog

Should I eat my placenta?

Among Cannibals

Other posts of interest:

Cannibal, Native, Indigenous

Cannibal:

Tribal

Indigenous

Other posts of interest:

You come from Cannibals

Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires

Is cannibalism normal?

It’s all cultural

Among Cannibals