What is Thanksgiving?

Thanksgiving is a feast. But what is a feast? Anthropology is all about examining ourselves through the lens of other cultures. Or, at least, that’s what we used to do back in the good old days. Let’s have a look at this great American holiday from this perspective and see what we see.

A traditional feast in Venezuela

The enemy has arrived, in force, outside your village. The men are armed and wearing the symbols of war, which is appropriate because your group and the group milling about outside your walled settlement are at war. One of the men, wearing war garb but adorned also with white feathers to indicate a peaceful intent, attempts to enter your village but is stopped by guards. They converse briefly and the guards allow the man to crawl into your village through the only opening in the surrounding wall left following preparations for possible attack. After crawling though the small opening, he sands and walks into the center of the plaza where he kneels, and is handed a large container of beer which may or may not be poisoned. He drinks the entire amount without stopping, so that if it is poisoned, he will surely die, and if it is not, he will surely cop a buzz.

The visitor drops the container that once held the beer, still squatting on his haunches, and sways back and forth for a moment. He does not feel the poison. He only feels the buzz. He belches, stands up and walks towards the entrance whence he came. On his way, he is stopped by a warrior who places a large package on the visitor’s back, a tumpline across his forehead to help carry it, muttering a few words about how he knows his sister is young and unmarried. The visitor gives the warrior a stern look and crawls, carrying the package of ready-to-eat food, out of the walled village where he will share it with his compatriots as a snack.

An hour later a group of the enemy warriors, shouting a war cry, pushes their way through the tiny village entrance only to find that every single one of your warriors, dressed in the symbols of warfare but also adorned with small white feathers, is taking a nap. The invading warriors, six of them, engage in an aggressive-looking dance shouting “we are strong, we will pierce your skull with a spear.” Half of the six visiting warriors are indeed armed with a spears, and as they approach you and your sleeping compatriots, none of you appear to wake. Perhaps a sleepy eye opens to glare at the bellicose visitors now and then, but for the most part, not a muscle is moved or a nostril twitched as the visitors jab, inches short, at the reclining men, again and again, until each warrior has been mock attacked by the three dancers. By this time you notice that the other three dancers are women, the wives of the warriors making the threats, in drag.

Just as these six retire to a place of their choosing near the center of the plaza, another set of enemy warriors enters through the small hole in the wall. Their dress is that of the warrior, but again, topped with little white down feathers of a certain bird. Their dance is aggressive but this time also sexual in nature, and their chant is very different form the last “Your girls are ready to fuck. Your girls are ready for us to take them away when we slit your throats.”

And again, each of your male compatriots continues to recline and appear to not notice the intrusion, while the children hide behind stores of food and the women sit and watch, quietly amused. Except the young women, who giggle, and some taunt back “You are too old and shriveled” only to be shushed by the older women who know that sometimes these events go very badly, when the visitors practice treachery instead of ritual, killing the men who recline indifferently in their hammocks, and raping and stealing the women.

Again and again groups of visiting enemies enter, sometimes just men, sometimes men and women, dressed outrageously and engaging in a dance and a chant, the combination of which has never been seen before and will never be seen again. They’ve been working on this routine for weeks. Again and again, your village’s warriors ignore the threats as though they were less significant than a bothersome fly, the children continue to hide but peek out from their burrows with increasing boldness, and the women go from sitting quietly to taunting and chanting back to eventually rising up and getting to the most important business they have on this day …

… cooking the feast.

After all the enemy have danced their way into the village, each group retiring to the growing gaggle in the middle of the plaza, your warriors jump from their hammocks and causally pick up war clubs, bows and arrows, spears, or simply rip a pole from their front porch, to use as a weapon. They surround and approach the seated visitors who pay them no mind. As they approach, you notice your distant cousin among the enemy visitors, and just as you see him, one of your own warriors, your brother, walks to him and leads him by the hand back to his section of the circular village, to sit by his hearth or lay in his hammock. The visitor’s elderly wife follows, and that is when you finally recognize her … she is your grandmother’s sister, and was born in the village you live in now. Again and again this happens: Members of your village invite visiting families to their hearth and home, and now and then you recognize a relative among the visitors, or you mark the relationship between one of your own and the enemy family, and very often the women in the group are rather close to your own lineage.

Over the next few hours, after the sorting out of the visitors so that all are resting, their weapons cast to the side, at one hearth or another, you all start to eat. Universally, a buffet can only begin when someone in charge of cooking the food cajoles someone who is visiting to begin to eat. Two older women who have been in charge for the last five days of making the beer, cooking the turtles captured last week by the men on a foraging trip, baking the plantains harvested from the garden, and processing the fruits collected by younger women and children just this morning, drag some of the visiting enemies to the beer trough or to one of the large cauldrons of food and get them started on distributing it. Quite suddenly the activity level rises, and in less time that it takes an old man to choke on his ebene¹, almost everyone is chowing down on the victuals, and most of the conversation has stopped.

Over the next two hours, the food is put aside and the men begin to talk. They talk about previous battles. Strangely, when one man reveals his pride in how quickly he killed the brother of one of the other men at the feast, there seem to be no hard feelings. It was war, and the man who did the killing was brave and is now of high status because of that killing. More important than that event, at the moment, is the fact that these two men each have a younger sister who is unmarried, and a younger brother who is also available. That there is blood spilled between them seems to increase the urgency with which they close a deal whereby they exchange their sisters in a marriage arrangement. In an hour or two, that deal is sealed. Now it only remains to get the girls to go along with it (now and then they do, though usually not).

Other men talk about their weapons, the narcotic drugs a particular person makes, a cache of machete’s recently obtained from the boat of a missionary that went missing (the boat, not the missionary) and two or three young dogs just now past their initial training and ready to hunt. Deals are made, objects are exchanged on the spot, other exchanges promised for later. Even though the women of your village were once renowned for making excellent pottery, today it is claimed that no one in your village, even the older ladies, have a clue as to how to do that. It just so happens that the visiting village, the enemies (or shall we say, at this point, the new allies?) are known to make the best pottery, while your village is known these days, though they never seemed to do this before, for making the best monkey-killing arrows.

Pottery and arrows and promises of more pottery and more arrows are exchanged, as well as two more promises of marriage. And, off to the side, a group of men have planned out the details of a raid on a third village, located to the south, former allies but since the breaking of two marriage contracts and a handful of other untoward events, now freshly minted enemies.

This goes on for three days. Shows of bravado, of expertise, making of alliances through trade and exchange and, ultimately (and we shall see how this goes) marriage arrangements, and perhaps equally ultimately, arrangements to cooperate in raids, waft through the conversation. Men speak in ritualized tones, sometimes softly but with a stage whisper meant to be heard by others, sometimes loudly with a chanting cadence, strongly suggesting that others are stingy, passive-aggressively decrying their own suffering for having gotten the short end of a deal, loudly committing their younger, healthier brothers and cousins to this or that duel to the death (the brother or cousin happens to be out of town at the moment).

While the men have contributed measurable effort to prepare for the feast, the women have done most of the work and continue to do so. But as they alternately prepare food, nurse the children or clean the pots, they catch up. Many of these women are sisters, across the boundary between your village and the former enemy, or in-laws from marriages way back in time, or cousins of some kind. Every married woman is a cousin to her husband, but not of the same clan, but since all the men are of the same clan, many of the women end up being from one clan, but a different one from the men, and are therefore at least nominally related, if not sharing known and fairly recent ancestors. The men eye the women suspiciously as they converse quietly, as to not be heard. If the alliance being formed today goes well, these women may end up all living in the same village, and their friendships, broken for the last several years by war but now renewed, will be important. If the alliance fails, then every one of these women may be considered a spy, because she may be more loyal to her brother or her cousin’s husband than to her own spouse. The women are well aware of this concern, and they remember to allow certain bits and pieces of conversation to be overheard by the occasionally quiet men, bits and pieces that will enhance a sense of uncertainty for some of the men, a sense of security for others, depending.

In truth, and not admitted by the men, the women now conversing in the background are the ones who arranged this feast. On a day to day basis, the men of warring villages avoid each other, only coming into contact when a raid is carried out, and then, that contact is in the form of a fight with arrows or an attack with spears. The women, in the meantime, forage in small groups (of only women) or work in distant fields or some specialized resource gathering area (like a mineral or clay deposit) that may be shared by the women of warring villages. In truth, and not known to the men, many of these women have conversed just weeks before, and see each other with reasonable frequency, as their day to day business simply can not be carried out if they are not allowed to do so, irrespective of the state of alliance or hatred among the men. It was through these conversations between women of the two villages, across the boundary of warfare, that this feast was arranged.

So, what is Thanksgiving again?

The above fictionalized prose is a reasonable description of a typical traditional Yanomamo feast, as documented by several anthropologists during the 20th century. Obviously, we are speaking today of a feast because Thanksgiving is a feast engaged in by Americans on the third Thursday of November, and there may be some connections. The Thanksgiving Feast is thought by modern Americans, especially those who read Wikipeda (which has pretty much ruined any possibility of having a non-trivialized conversation about American Thanksgiving, as per Wikipedia’s usual inability to address matters anthropological or historical) to be just another harvest festival, a gathering to partake in the harvest and to thank the appropriate god or gods for their largess.

That may be at least a little true. Harvest festivals do not need historical continuity to be connected to each other or to be similar in how they work. It need not be the case that Canadian Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving and some roughly similar festivals found this time of year elsewhere are all descendants from some original Neolithic ritual. And, in fact, I would argue the opposite. The “first thanksgiving” (in the United States) was an event that happened at Plymouth in 1621. The documentation of this event is reasonably good, and it certainly happened, but much of what we know about it comes from documents that were clearly propaganda tools designed to raise money to fund the adventures of the Plymouth Plantation and other efforts. The event may have gone on for days and may have looked in some ways like the event I describe above, at least in so far as shared displays of bravado and arrangements for trading and overall male bonding are concerned. It was a male-oriented event but it is likely that most of the work was done by women. Both sides, the Wampanoag and the English (consisting of religious Puritans and others) brought the food, and it was held at the village of the English. The English may well have been engaging in something that seemed familiar to them earlier in Europe, and Wikipedia, in an all to typical fit of Western Centered cultural imperialism tells us so. But this ignores the fact that feasting was probably a widespread Native American activity.

One might argue that feasting is a global phenomenon, and that would be more or less true. Not all cultures have feasting, any more than all cultures have any given trait. But many do, and feasting is found in Eurasia, Africa and the New World, as well as Australia. But the nature and purpose of the feasting varies a great deal.

Here in Minnesota, Ojibwa Native Americans occupied most of the woodlands and some of the prairies during the 18th and early 19th century, with Lakota/Dakota/Sioux (I’ll call them Dakota) occupying the prairies of the western and southwestern part of the state, and the Dakotas. They were often at war. Ironically, the Dakota were probably the more war-like, having a culture more invested in bellicosity in comparison to the Algonquin speaking Ojibwa, but the Ojibwa had lucrative fur trapping contracts with the French and the English and, related to these contracts, were armed with guns. That made the Ojibwa more powerful than the Dakota, though the latter had certain advantages. As a result, it was clear to various leaders of the day that a continued war between them would result in strife and loss of income. Rather than fight all the time, they fought seasonally, selectively, and avoided fighting altogether when it interfered with the efficient exploitation of the numerous beaver of the region.

And, from all accounts, the maintenance of alliances between Ojibwa and Dakota was facilitated, in part, by feasting not entirely different (but perhaps less ritualized) than that described above. It seems most likely that the English at Plymouth, in the 1620s, were being brought into a Native practice by the Wampanoag, which was possibly done a few times then dropped (as other developments beyond our scope here occurred). By the time the “first Thanksgiving” was revived, about a century and a half later (eventually codified as an official holiday) the real meaning and purpose of it would have been forgotten. The first American Thanksgiving was probably a ritualized gathering meant to forge alliances, at which it is possible that a raid or two was planed, but at which there is no record of intermarriages between English and Native being arranged.

The First American Thanksgiving

Of the first Thanksgiving we have exactly two contemporary descriptions, and it isn’t much. In fact, there is so little, you can read it all in a few minutes. First, by Edward Winslow, from a letter of 12 December 1621, published for wider audiences within a year of its writing:

Our corn [i.e. wheat] did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown. They came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom. Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

The second description was contemporary and from a good source (William Bradford) but was not known to anyone else until the middle of the 19th century. It was the event of this description becoming widely known that caused the revival in the US of the idea of a “First Thanksgiving” and this is the reason we celebrate the holiday today.

They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercising in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides they had about a peck of meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion. Which made many afterwards write so largely of their plenty here to their friends in England, which were not feigned but true reports.

The true meaning of Thanksgiving

In the end, I think we all know what the true meaning of Thanksgiving is. Gravy, with stuffing a close second. Enjoy your feast and remember to treat your suaboya² well.

Sources

Bradford, William. 1908.Of Plymouth Plantation (Dover Value Editions). (Written ca. 1650)

Chagnon, Napolean A. 1996. Yanomamo: The Fierce People (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology). Harcourt Brace; 5th edition (November 15, 1996)

Heath, Dwight B. 1963: Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Corinth Books: New York

Winslow, Edward. 1621. Letter. In “Mourt’s Relation,” Heath 1963.

See also this About.com page on feasting by archaeologist Kris Hirst.

Notes

¹Ebene is a narcotic substance ingested via the nose that results in vomiting and severe illness along with a hallucinogenic state.

²Suaboya is your appropriate aged unmarried paternal cross cousin (father’s sister’s offspring) and thus your preferred marriage partner.

All traditional forager groups incorporate hunting and butchery into a broader cultural context. There is often ritual associated with hunting. Animals, especially mammals, are dismembered in stereotypical ways ways with some sort of meaning associated with the process. In many cases, meat goes through a process of “distribution and redistribution” whereby specific body parts are distributed to individuals based on their role in the hunt, and then, these parcels of meat are redistributed among the group on the basis of need, generally very evenly.

It appears that foragers value meat above other sources of food even if those other sources are more life-staining by being a larger part of the diet. The word “hunger” may sometimes really mean “hunger for meat” more than simple hunger for food. Although anthropologists have tried to link hunting success to reproductive success, this link is unclear. But, some concept of hunting ability or reliability seems to be associated in many cultures with one’s value in the group.

Almost all hunting of mammals is done by men in all foraging societies, with a few exceptions. The exceptions do not make up a large percentage of the meat acquired, and are rare even within the societies in which they occur. A majority of non-meat foods are obtained by females, but a larger percentage of non-meat foods are obtained my males than meat obtained by females. Many reasons have been given for this but few of the seemingly pragmatic reasons seem to hold up well to further scrutiny, such as “hunting is dangerous and women have kids.” Women engage in all sorts of dangerous foraging activities. It may be that the best explanation for the sexual bias in foraging vis-a-vis animal and plant foods is to be found in the cultural roles of hunting.

Dietarily, meat is probably very important for most groups as food for pregnant and nursing women and young children. There are special dietary demands for such individuals that may not be well met with only wild plant foods, but that are easily addressed with meat. Putting this all together, one might suggest that obtaining and distributing meat by men is an important form of parental investment.

The archaeological record shows a long association of chipped stone tools made of selected conchoidally fracturing rock and meat acquisition. Early sites have both stone tools of this type and bones that seem to show marks of butchery with these tools. This has led many archaeologists to emphasize the role of hunting in human evolution. However, chipped stone tools do not leave preservable evidence of use on plant foods or other materials, because these foods and materials are not found on archaeological sites. The wear patterns on the tools themselves can sometimes be studied and these indicate that many stone tools were used extensively on plant material, either food items or objects of use (i.e., digging sticks or some other wooden implement). It may be that most stone tools were used for tasks other than hunting and butchery. Also, both stone tools and cut-marked bones are rare prior to about two million years ago, so piecing together a good prehistory of tools and animal acquisition is probably asking too much of the data. Nonetheless, we see evidence of the use of animal products quite early in human evolution; this is not a practice invented by modern humans, but rather, one practiced by human ancestors as well.

Modern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) hunt mammals and eat them. The total amount of meat consumed by a group of chimpanzees over the course of a year is much lower than the typical amount of meat in the diet of modern human hunter gatherers, but it is a regular addition to the diet. There are a lot of groups of chimpanzees for which we can not say hunting is documented, but every group of chimps that has been studied by primatologists exhibit this behavior. There is a large amount of variation across chimpanzee groups in how hunting is carried out and how much meat is typically obtained. Most of the meat is in the form of other primates (monkeys) but other mammals are taken. Non-mammal sources are also used by chimpanzees including birds and eggs and other vertebrates (but no fish, probably). When chimpanzees hunt monkeys, and are successful, the level of attention given to the captured food source is inordinate compared to, say, finding a good source of fruit. Chimpanzees of both sexes are excited about the prospect of getting a bit of monkey flesh.

Insect food is obtained by chimpanzees and also by many other primates. It may be the case that virtually all primates eat some insects (some eat mostly insects), though there are several species not especially known for it.

We think that the last common ancestor (LCA) of chimpanzees and humans was more chimp like than human like. Also, we think that this LCA was more like a common chimp (Pan troglodytes) than a bonobo (Pan paniscus). Since modern chimps across Africa, including those that have been separated from each other for a very long time, hunt mammals, and modern human foragers and their immediate ancestors are clearly documented as hunters of mammals, it is reasonable to postulate that the LCA also carried out this behavior.

Eating mammalian meat and other animal products is probably part of our evolutionary heritage at least since the chimp-human split. Modern foragers and, perhaps, modern chimps seem to attribute an importance to meat greater than one would expect from meat’s caloric contribution to the diet, and in modern foragers, hunting, butchery, and consumption of meat is tied in with numerous cultural practices.

Meat is probably an important contribution to the human “palaeolithic” diet and an even more important contribution to the human cultural repertoire. The invention of certain technologies, starting with chipped stone tools, allowed for the increased role of meat in our diet, though whether or not that increase happened in any given time or place is difficult to ascertain. For well over a century, mostly male archaeologists have held a fascination with the often phallic looking implements of hunting found in prehistoric cultures around the world, and in doing so have communed with the mostly male (we might guess) producers and users of those implements in the past. The human practices of hunting, butchery, and the associated often elaborate technologies are embedded in a meaning-drenched symbolic system that speaks to the role of males vis-a-vis females and children. If systems of kinship, marriage, and social power are characterized by an ever present though differentially strong patriarchy, hunting and butchery, and the tools of that trade, are material manifestations of that patriarchy.

Photograph (c) 1991 by Greg Laden

TAKE THE TURKEY OUT OF THE FREEZER NAO!!!

And now … a feast.

The enemy has arrived, in force, outside your village. The men are armed and wearing the symbols of war, which is appropriate because your group and the group milling about outside your walled settlement are at war. One of the men, wearing war garb but adorned also with white flagging to indicate a peaceful intent attempts to enter your village but is stopped by guards. They converse briefly and the guards allow the man to crawl into your village through the only opening in the surrounding wall left following preparations for possible attack. After crawling though the small opening, he sands and walks into the center of the plaza where he kneels, and is handed a large container of beer which may or may not be poisoned. He drinks the entire amount without stopping, so that if it is poisoned, he will surely die, and if it is not, he will surely cop a buzz.

The visitor drops the container that once held the beer, still squatting on his haunches, and sways back and forth for a moment. He does not feel the poison. He only feels the buzz. He belches, stands up and walks towards the entrance whence he came. On his way, he is stopped by a warrior who places a large package on the visitor’s back, a tumpline across his forehead to help carry it, muttering a few words about how he knows his sister is young and unmarried. The visitor gives the warrior a stern look and crawls, carrying the package of ready to eat food, out of the walled village where he will share it with his compatriots as a snack.

An hour later a group of the enemy warriors, shouting a war cry, pushes their way through the tiny village entrance only to find that every single one of your warriors, dressed in the symbols of warfare but also adorned with small white flags, is taking a nap. The invading warriors, six of them, engage in an aggressive-looking dance shouting “we are strong, we will pierce your skull with a spear.” Half of the six visiting warriors is indeed armed with a spear, and as they approach you and your sleeping compatriots, none of you appear to wake. Perhaps a sleepy eye opens to glare at the bellicose visitors now and then, but for the most part, not a muscle is moved or a nostril twitched as the visitors jab, inches short, at the reclining men, again and again, until each warrior has been mock attacked by the three dancers. By this time you notice that the other three dancers are women, the wives of the warriors making the threats, in drag.

Just as these six retire to a place of their choosing near the center of the plaza, another set of enemy warriors enters through the small hole in the wall. Their dress is that of the warrior, but again, topped with little white flags made of the down feathers of a certain bird. Their dance is aggressive but this time also sexual in nature, and their chant is very different form the last “Your girls are ready to fuck. Your girls are ready for us to take them away when we slit your throats.”

And again, each of your male compatriots continues to recline and appear to not notice the intrusion, while the children hide behind stores of food and the women sit and watch, quietly amused. Except the young women, who giggle, and some taunt back “You are too old and shriveled” only to be shushed by the older women who know that sometimes these events go very badly, when the visitors practice treachery instead of ritual, killing the men who recline indifferently in their hammocks and raping and stealing the women.

Again and again groups of visiting enemies enter, sometimes just men, sometimes men and women, dressed outrageously and engaging in a dance and a chant, the combination of which has never been seen before and will never be seen again. They’ve been working on this routine for weeks. Again and again, your village’s warriors ignore the threats as though they were less significant than a bothersome fly, the children continue to hide but peek out from their burrows with increasing boldness, and the women go from sitting quietly to taunting and chanting back to eventually rising up and getting to the most important business they have on this day …

… cooking the feast.

After all the enemy have danced their way into the village, each group retiring to the growing gaggle in the middle of the plaza, your warriors jump from their hammocks and causally pick up war clubs, bows and arrows, spears, or simply rip a pole from their front porch, to use as a weapon. They surround and approach the seated visitors who pay them no mind. As they approach, you notice your distant cousin among the enemy visitors, and just as you see him, one of your own warriors, your brother, walks to him and leads him by the hand back to his section of the circular village, to sit by his hearth or lay in his hammock. The visitor’s elderly wife follows, and that is when you finally recognize her … she is your grandmother’s sister, and was born in the village you live in now. Again and again this happens: Members of your village invite visiting families to their hearth and home, and now and then you recognize a relative among the visitors, or you mark the relationship between one of your own and the enemy family, and very often the women in the group are rather close to your own lineage.

Over the next few hours, after the sorting out of the visitors so that all are resting, their weapons cast to the side, at one hearth or another, you all start to eat. Universally, a buffet can only begin when someone in charge of cooking the food cajoles someone who is visiting to begin to eat. Two older women who have been in charge for the last five days of making the beer, cooking the turtles captured last week by the men on a foraging trip, baking the plantains harvested from the garden, and processing the fruits collected by younger women and children just this morning, drag some of the visiting enemies to the beer trough or to one of the large cauldrons of food and get them started on distributing it. Quite suddenly the activity level rises, and in less time that it takes an old man to choke on his ebene¹, almost everyone is chowing down on the victuals, and most of the conversation has stopped.

Over the next two hours, the food is put aside and the men begin to talk. They talk about previous battles. Strangely, when one man reveals his pride in how quickly he killed the brother of one of the other men at the feast, there seem to be no hard feelings. It was war, and the man who did the killing was brave and is now of high status because of that killing. More important than that event, at the moment, is the fact that these two men each have a younger sister who is unmarried, and a younger brother who is also available. That there is blood spilled between them seems to increase the urgency with which they close a deal whereby they exchange their sisters in a marriage arrangement. In an hour or two, that deal is sealed. Now it only remains to get the girls to go along with it (now and then they do, though usually not).

Other men talk about their weapons, the narcotic drugs a particular person makes, a cache of machete’s recently obtained from the boat of a missionary that went missing (the boat, not the missionary) and two or three young dogs just now past their initial training and ready to hunt. Deals are made, objects are exchanged on the spot, other exchanges promised for later. Even though the women of your village were once renowned for making excellent pottery, today it is claimed that no one in your village, even the older ladies, have a clue as to how to do that. It just so happens that the visiting village, the enemies (or shall we say, at this point, the new allies?) are known to make the best pottery, while your village is known these days, though they never seemed to do this before, for making the best monkey-killing arrows.

Pottery and arrows and promises of more pottery and more arrows are exchanged, as well as two more promises of marriage. And, off to the side, a group of men have planned out the details of a raid on a third village, located to the south, former allies but since the breaking of two marriage contracts and a handful of other untoward events, now freshly minted enemies.

This goes on for three days. Shows of bravado, of expertise, making of alliances through trade and exchange and, ultimately (and we shall see how this goes) marriage arrangements, and perhaps equally ultimately, arrangements to cooperate in raids, waft through the conversation. Men speak in ritualized tones, sometimes softly but with a stage whisper meant to be heard by others, sometimes loudly with a chanting cadence, strongly suggesting that others are stingy, passive-aggressively decrying their own suffering for having gotten the short end of a deal, loudly committing their younger, healthier brothers and cousins to this or that duel to the death (the brother or cousin happens to be out of town at the moment).

While the men have contributed measurable effort to prepare for the feast, the women have done most of the work and continue to do so. But as they alternately prepare food, nurse the children or clean the pots, they catch up. Many of these women are sisters, across the boundary between your village and the former enemy, or in-laws from marriages way back or cousins of some kind. Every married woman is a cousin of some kind to her husband, but not of the same clan, but since all the men are of the same clan, many of the women end up being from one clan, but a different one from the men, and are therefore at least nominally related, if not sharing known and fairly recent ancestors. The men eye the women suspiciously as they converse quietly, as to not be heard. If the alliance being formed today goes well, these women may end up all living in the same village, and their friendships, broken for the last several years by war but now renewed, will be important. If the alliance fails, then every one of these women may be considered a spy, because she may be more loyal to her brother or her cousin’s husband than to her own spouse. The women are well aware of this concern, and they remember to allow certain bits and pieces of conversation to be overheard by the occasionally quiet men, bits and pieces that will enhance a sense of uncertainty for some of the men, a sense of security for others, depending.

In truth, and not admitted by the men, the women now conversing in the background are the ones who arranged this feast. On a day to day basis, the men of warring villages avoid each other, only coming into contact when a raid is carried out, and then, that contact is in the form of a fight with arrows or an attack with spears. The women, in the meantime, forage in small groups (of only women) or work in distant fields or some specialized resource gathering area (like a mineral or clay deposit) that may be shared by the women of warring villages. In truth, and not known to the men, many of these women have conversed just weeks before, and see each other with reasonable frequency, as their day to day business simply can not be carried out if they are not allowed to do so, irrespective of the state of alliance or hatred among the men. It was through these conversations between women of the two villages, across the boundary of warfare, that this feast was arranged.

…

The above fictionalized prose is a reasonable description of a typical traditional Yanomamo feast, as documented by several anthropologists during the 20th century. Obviously, we are speaking today of a feast because Thanksgiving is a feast engaged in by Americans on the third Thursday of November, and there may be some connections. The Thanksgiving Feast is thought by modern Americans, especially those who read Wikipeda (which has pretty much ruined any possibility of having a non-trivialized conversation about American Thanksgiving, as per Wikipedia’s usual inability to address matters anthropological or historical) to be just another harvest festival, a gathering to partake in the harvest and to thank the appropriate god or gods for their largess.

That may be at least a little true. Harvest festivals do not need historical continuity to be connected to each other or to be similar in how they work. It need not be the case that Canadian Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving and some roughly similar festivals found this time of year elsewhere are all descendants from some original Neolithic ritual. And, in fact, I would argue the opposite. The “first thanksgiving” (in the United States) was an event that happened at Plymouth in 1621. The documentation of this event is reasonably good, and it certainly happened, but much of what we know about it comes from documents that were clearly propaganda tools designed to raise money to fund the adventures of the Plymouth Plantation and other efforts. The event may have gone on for days and may have looked in some ways like the event I describe above, at least in so far as shared displays of bravado and arrangements for trading and overall male bonding are concerned. It was a male-oriented event but it is likely that most of the work was done by women. Both sides, the Wampanoag and the English (consisting of religious Puritans and others) brought the food, and it was held at the village of the English. The English may well have been engaging in something that seemed familiar to them earlier in Europe, and Wikipedia, in an all to typical fit of Western Centered cultural imperialism tells us so. But this ignores the fact that feasting was probably a widespread Native American activity.

One might argue that feasting is a global phenomenon, and that would be more or less true. Not all cultures have feasting, any more than all cultures have any given trait. But many do, and feasting is found in Eurasia, Africa and the New World, as well as Australia. But the nature and purpose of the feasting varies a great deal.

Here in Minnesota, Ojibwa Native Americans occupied most of the woodlands and some of the prairies during the 18th and early 19th century, with Lakota/Dakota/Sioux (I’ll call them Dakota) occupying the prairies of the western and southwestern part of the state, and the Dakotas. They were often at war. Ironically, the Dakota were probably the more war-like, having a culture more invested in bellicosity in comparison to the Algonquin speaking Ojibwa, but the Ojibwa had lucrative fur trapping contracts with the French and the English and, related to these contracts, were armed with guns. That made the Ojibwa more powerful than the Dakota, though the latter had certain advantages. As a result, it was clear to various leaders of the day that a continued war between them would result in strife and loss of income. Rather than fight all the time, they fought seasonally, selectively, and avoided fighting altogether when it interfered with the efficient exploitation of the numerous beaver of the region.

And, from all accounts, the maintenance of alliances between Ojibwa and Dakota was facilitated, in part, by feasting not entirely different (but perhaps less ritualized) than that described above. It seems most likely that the English at Plymouth, in the 1620s, were being brought into a Native practice by the Wampanoag, which was possibly done a few times then dropped (as other developments beyond our scope here occurred). By the time the “first Thanksgiving” was revived, about a century and a half later (eventually codified as an official holiday) the real meaning and purpose of it would have been forgotten. The first American Thanksgiving was probably a ritualized gathering meant to forge alliances, at which it is possible that a raid or two was planed, but at which there is no record of intermarriages between English and Native being arranged.

Of the first Thanksgiving we have exactly two contemporary descriptions, and it isn’t much. In fact, there is so little, you can read it all in a minute. First, by Edward Winslow, from a letter of 12 December 1621, published for wider audiences within a year of its writing:

Our corn [i.e. wheat] did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown. They came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom. Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

The second description was contemporary and from a good source (William Bradford) but was not known to anyone else until the middle of the 19th century. It was the event of this description becoming widely known that caused the revival in the US of the idea of a “First Thanksgiving” and this is the reason we celebrate the holiday today.

They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercising in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides they had about a peck of meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion. Which made many afterwards write so largely of their plenty here to their friends in England, which were not feigned but true reports.

In the end, I think we all know what the true meaning of Thanksgiving is. Gravy, with stuffing a close second. Enjoy your feast and remember to treat your suaboya² well.

Sources

Bradford, William. 1908. Bradford’s History fo Plymouth Plantatoi 1601-1646. (Written ca. 1650) Orignial Narratives of Early American History (Series), Jameson, J. Franklin, Ed. Charles Scribiner’s Sons, NY.

Chagnon, Napolean A. 1996. Yanomamo (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology). Harcourt Brace; 5th edition (November 15, 1996)

Heath, Dwight B. 1963: Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Corinth Books: New York

Winslow, Edward. 1621. Letter. In “Mourt’s Relation,” Heath 1963.

See also this About.com page on feasting by archaeologist Kris Hirst.

Notes

¹Ebene is a narcotic substance ingested via the nose that results in vomiting and severe illness along with a hallucinogenic state.

²Suaboya is your appropriate aged unmarried paternal cross cousin (father’s sister’s offspring) and thus your preferred marriage partner.

Other posts of interest:

• How to get rid of spiders in your house
• Why is your poop green?
• How many cells are there in the human body?
• Is there really a plot hole in Harry Potter Goblet of Fire?
• How long is a human generation?
• Is blog ever really blue?
• How to not get caught plagiarizing
• The origin of the domestic chicken
• What are the three necessary and sufficient conditions of Natural Selection?
• How do I get rid of foot fungus?
• Which is better, Tap Water or Bottled Water?
• Has Global Warming stopped?

Also of interest: In Search of Sungudogo: A novel of adventure and mystery, which is also an alternative history of the Skeptics Movement.

The people who lived in this village were very familiar with the idea of an anthropologist, and were aware that we had a research facility a few days walk to the east. Others, while they had heard of us, either had never met any of the outsiders or didn’t care much either way about us.

When we initially embarked on our long trek to the village, we carried enough food to get there, but not much more. I was assured by my fellow travelers that the streets of the village would be paved with food, as it were, and that we would not have to carry much with us, and if we brought just a little cash and some tobacco and salt, we could easily trade for plenty of spare rice to get ourselves back to the road fatter than we had left. Since it was technically the tail end of one of the two seasons of widespread reduced food availability, I didn’t much like that idea but I didn’t have a choice. It was simply impossible to carry enough food to make the trip there and back. So we gambled with the odds against us.

And, of course, we lost. We arrived at the village with a kilo of rice and little else, and there we found there was not much food. Even though the rice harvest was just starting, so people weren’t exactly starving, there was nothing close to an abundance. We knew that we could eat while we stayed in the village … there was enough for that … but clearly we’d have to make the trip home without provisions. We’d have to live off the land for the three day walk home … which would probaby be a four day walk since we’d be starving and you go slower when you are starving. (Another story for another time. It was not a good week to be a monkey along our route!)

The village was traditional and I was a guest, so I was treated accordingly, and had to act accordingly. This meant we travelers needed to divide up into appropriate traditional roles and mete ourselves out among the villagers per spec, and thereafter more or less spend our time that way. The Efe men went to hang around with the Efe that were living in the village and they were also able to sit with the village women when they were outside processing food; Our cook went to work and hung with the village women in the mafika … an open air kitchen building with a roof and food stores, cooking gear, etc. … during the heat of the day. And, as the adult male, I was expected to hang around with the other adult males in the baraza … the open air ramada-like roofed-over sitting area in the middle of the village. As men, we would have important things to do in this baraza. Planning things and stuff.

So, I sat there and did my Ethnoarchaeology, hanging out with the other men, observing things and writing it all down, while the women prepared our first meal together, which would include all of the rice we had brought and whatever the village had to offer.

And what did the village have to offer? There were three things besides our rice. Someone had killed an antelope that morning so there was a bit of meat. The meat was cooked in palm oil traded about noon that day with some Budu merchants who had come by to exchange forest products for oil. (The oil was traded for a forest fruit known as “eme” which is not really food but rather medicine.) Then there was sombe. Sombe is wonderful. It is the very young leaves of the casava (manioc, manihot) plant pounded and cooked with palm oil. The process is much more complex than I’ve indicated. It is the main thing to eat that I miss from the region, and impossible to get outside the forest unless you have connections and live in Belgium.

And the third thing was bugs. To be specific, palm larvae. These are grubs of some critter, and you get them from inside a palm tree, which were eaten frequently this time of year. They are fried up in a bit of palm oil which gives both flavor and color, and some salt is added. They are not very flavorful but they are quite nutritious.

When the food was all prepared, the women came over one or two at a time and gave a plate of food to each man. A woman or women associated with a particular man or men as mother, wife, sister, or daughter had prepared each plate and had brought it to the baraza, so of course, our traveling cook, Maria, brought me my plate.

When she handed me the plate, our cook also gave me a knowing look, because she knew that I was not enamored with the traditional roles of her culture and was somewhat uncomfortable getting served along with the other men in the baraza. I returned the look as I glanced down at the plate, and on the plate was some rice, some antelope, some sombe, and about a dozen palm grubs. But there was a small problem. While all the food types were neatly separated into their own zones on my plate, some of the sombe had moved across the plate and joined the palm grubs. A splotch of green leafy food rested among the larvae of the palms.

Maria was five steps away when I called out.

“Maria!”

She stopped and turned. I pointed at my plate.

“Maria, there is some food in my bugs!”

She was close enough to see exactly what I referred to.

It turns out that some jokes translate and some do not. It is all a matter of available symbolic reference and context. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pointed at a plantain or banana peel laying on the ground (these are a main crop for the region) and said to someone “Hey, don’t slip on that!” Every time I did that I amused myself but the person whom I had warned had no clue that this was funny to me, no image of Woody Allen and a giant banana peel came to their mind. The joke was always a dud.

But this time it clicked. Maria laughed heartily and, pointing at me and barely able to talk, explained the joke to the men in the Baraza. They all laughed as well. Maria told the joke to the women back at the mafika, and I could hear their laughter mixed with phrases like “Those white people… they are so funny sometimes” and that sort of thing. The joke spread across the Ituri Forest and it was also retold among anthropologists. In fact, one famous anthropologist giving the keynote address at a major event celebrating Mary Leakey’s birthday told the joke as part of his remarks. Mary Leakey LOL’ed.

Maria, there’s some food in my bugs!!!! Still cracks me up.

• Please visit the other posts in this series:
• No Place to Sit Down
• The reason the Efe won’t normally kill an insect …
• “We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans”
• “Excuse me, there’s some food in my bugs!”
• Bug Girl and Greg Laden Speak Skeptically with Desiree Schell
• Day of the locust. Yum!

We had a situation like that arise in the Ituri Forest one year. Our practice was to grow some food, and occasionally purchase food from a local market when one existed, but to mostly stay away from the food the local people grew, because we didn’t want to be draining away their resources. So, we would go to town every several weeks and purchase a number of long-term staples, including 20 kilo sacks of rice, beans, or other dry foods, a few gallons of palm oil, and to splurge, twenty boxes of pasta and dozens of tiny little cans of tomato paste which we would turn into feeble Italian food.

Once you brought that food back there was no changing plans. If something bad happened to the sack of rice, there would be no rice for six weeks. We kept the food in a special food storage hut, and our cook, a locally hired woman who worked a few hours a day for us, would take very good care of it. All sorts of things can go wrong from leaks in the roof to vermin to mold or rot. If something bad happened to the sack of rice, there would be no rice for six weeks.

And one day something went wrong with the beans.

At first we noticed little black spots floating around in the cooked beans. A little later we noticed that among the beans, while cleaning them there were these little tiny things that would fly away. Then we noticed that some of the beans had little holes bored into them. Eventually, we put two and two together and figured out that we had some sort of infestation. Some small beetle creature had taken up residence in our beans. The or their larva would bore a hole into a bean and live there for a while, presumably eating each bean from the inside out. I’m pretty sure both the larvae and adults were doing the boring, but I can’t be sure. The way we handled this was to spread the beans out on something, in the sun, for a while and a bunch of the beetles would fly away. Then we’d wash off the beans as per usual and some of the beetles left behind, beetle corpses (of which there was an increasingly large amount) and grubs would be washed away. But as each day passed, the number of beetles that would end up in the coked beans went up and up and up, and the efficacy of getting rid of the beetles was obviated by their ubiquity. So we stopped laying the beans out in the sun. At that point we stopped eating “cooked beans” and started eating “cooked beetles and beans” or, for short “B&B”.

And eventually we discovered that this was not all that uncommon. If you want beans in that habitat, you’re gonna get beetles too. Its just that this particular batch of Beans and Beetles was farther along than usual. Eventually we had to speed up the rate at which we consumed the beans so that there would be some left for us to eat! And, as I recall, the next batch of beans had hardly any beetles in it.

Well, I’m sorry to report that you do that every day when you eat stuff made out of pretty much any plant, but probably to a lesser degree. When products are made in factories in the US, some sort of test is applied to the powder or juice or whatever the corn or beans or wheat is turned into, to see how much invertebrate (mainly insect) matter is in there. I assume that batches with “too much” are mixed with batches of “not much” to make batches of corn meal, or wheat flour that have under the regulated maximum amount of insect matter. I’m just guessing at that, of course. One of you must know…

In any event, there is nothing wrong with eating most insects, especially those that eat the foods we eat. Chances are they are low in toxins, and they are loaded with amino acids and other protein related molecules! Here as well as the Ituri, people eat insects all the time in this manner.

But of course, that is not what people are really asking me. They want to know if I’ve ever eaten insects as part of the cuisine.

Yes, of course I have, but I see I’ve run out of time. I’ll get back to you on that shortly.

• Please visit the other posts in this series:
• No Place to Sit Down
• The reason the Efe won’t normally kill an insect …
• “We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans”
• “Excuse me, there’s some food in my bugs!”
• Bug Girl and Greg Laden Speak Skeptically with Desiree Schell
• Day of the locust. Yum!

Many, though certainly not all, insects are linked to important things in life. This is true of many things that are not insects as well. For instance, one does not walk to the right of a young male Canarium tree in the afternoon, because he who shall not be named could be sitting in the tree, and then you’re screwed. Or, one should not handle the fetus of an antelope if any females in your family are planning on getting pregnant soon. For many insects, killing them is bad because that may affect fertility of someone related to the one who kills the insect.

Generally speaking, the local culture is very uptight about babies and fertility issues generally. Some of this is spillover form the village-dwelling horticultural Lese with whom the foraging Efe share a culture. The Lese have a repressed fertility owing to a number of causes. When a fertility rule is broken, a great deal of effort may be expended to fix it. As the reproductive ecologist Peter Ellison (who was involved in the same project) once said, “The Lese and Efe are constantly afraid of overdrawing on the bank of fertility.” (I paraphrase.) One of the most dangerous things you can do is to accidentally have twins. That’s like going to an ATM machine to get 100 bucks and the machine gives you 200 bucks. What do you do with the extra money? Will you get caught? When you check your bank account later, will there be 100 or 200 bucks taken out? Will there be a fee? A fine?

An insect that you don’t know about might be an insect linked to something important like fertility, or if not fertility, something else. Better to just leave it alone and let it go on its own way.

Oh, and there is probably a lot of heterogeneity across the cultural landscape in the detailed beliefs. It is not at all unlikely that an Efe visiting a distant settlement will discover that those people have a different set of beliefs about various insects or other things. The ethnography certainly shows different things happening across time and space, rather dynamically. The Efe do not generally look at beliefs of other people with disdain. Rather, they figure that those beliefs might be valid as well, and try to incorporate them in their routine.

So it makes sense that Efe would assume that an insect they’ve never seen before … and in this very species rich rain forest that is not as unlikely as it sounds, though it is certainly not a daily occurrence … has an importance of which they are simply unaware.

• Please visit the other posts in this series:
• No Place to Sit Down
• The reason the Efe won’t normally kill an insect …
• “We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans”
• “Excuse me, there’s some food in my bugs!”
• Bug Girl and Greg Laden Speak Skeptically with Desiree Schell
• Day of the locust. Yum!

It turns out that there are plenty of chairs and benches and other things to sit on in “Africa” though if you go into the deep forest to hang out with the Efe Pygmies siting down can get a little dicey. But what she really meant is that there is no place to sit where there will not be a bug or a spider or something either where you want to sit, under where you want to sit, or flying around where you want to sit.

It isn’t really true though. When I first went to the Ituri some people quite thoughtlessly (i.e., they did not put any thought into what they were saying) advised me to bring bug spray, because the place would be thick with mosquitoes and such. So I brought a couple of small jars of bug spray, an after I arrived, I found the big basket hanging from the roof of the supply hut that contained all the other containers of bug spray that various researchers has brought there over the previous five years or so, only to discover that there was no use for such a thing. “Maybe we’ll have a garage sale someday” I thought as I added my bug spray to the rest.

So, an Efe camp is usually in the middle of the forest, and that is a good place to sample the invertebrate life in that habitat. There are not clouds of mosquitoes or flies in the rain forest, or at least not in this rain forest. Why? There are too many bugs! If any insect tried out the strategy of being in a horde some other insect would come up with the strategy of eating the entire horde, and said strategist would simply wait round, in numbers, under wet leaves somewhere, for the next horde to come along. Really, clouds of insects, like the mosquitoes or lake flies or black flies we get in the norther states and provinces of North America exist because there is a winter, from which the landscape emerges, and into which swarm hordes of insects, one horde after another, until deadly winter returns again. A set of evolutionary stable strategies resulting in this pattern have developed in this region. If you got rid of the winters (though you could not get rid of seasonality) there would be few swarms of flying insects in a highly species rich forest environments. Swarming insects are more likely to be found in habitats with a winter, in low species diversity forests, and grasslands (including marshes and swamps). Not so much in tropical rain forests.

But that does not mean there are not a lot of insects. There are plenty, and even sitting in a camp is a great way to discover new ones. One day as I sat on my Efe Chair a whopping big slow moving thingie came along and started to climb up the chair leg. I managed to guess that it was some kind of cricket … bear in mind, though, that crickets in the African rain forest are as much like our temperate crickets as an elephant is like a hyrax. I asked the nearest Efe what it was.

He looked. Shrugged his shoulders. “No idea.”

I was surprised. Normally the Efe knew the name of anything I pointed to (and yes, I did verify their knowledge using various techniques … they weren’t usually making stuff up, though that could happen now and then). We kept an eye on the slow moving creature as it explored around on my chair and the nearby ground, and everybody who came along got asked.

“What is that thing?”

“Huh. No idea. Strange looking.”

Eventually, an older man picked the thing up with a stick and moved it several hundred feet into the rain forest and let it go. Why do that instead of ignore it or squish it? Well, the Efe don’t squish an insect or other invertebrate unless they know what it is. With good reason.

• Please visit the other posts in this series:
• No Place to Sit Down
• The reason the Efe won’t normally kill an insect …
• “We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans”
• “Excuse me, there’s some food in my bugs!”
• Bug Girl and Greg Laden Speak Skeptically with Desiree Schell
• Day of the locust. Yum!

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.

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.

See more on Cannibalism

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

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.

Cáceres, Isabel, Marina Lozano, and Palmira Saladié. “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.

Christy G. Turner, II, and Jacqueline A. Turner. “The First Claim for Cannibalism in the Southwest: Walter Hough’s 1901 Discovery at Canyon Butte Ruin 3, Northeastern Arizona” (December 30, 2007). http://www.jstor.org/pss/280828.

Cole, James. “Consuming Passions: Reviewing the Evidence for Cannibalism within the Prehistoric Archaeological Record”. assemblage – the Sheffield graduate journal of archaeology, May 1, 2006. http://www.assemblage.group.shef.ac.uk/issue9/cole.html.

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

Fernández-Jalvo, Y, J Carlos Díez, I Cáceres, 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.

Hurlbut, Sharon A. “The taphonomy of cannibalism: a review of anthropogenic bone modification in the American Southwest.” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 10, no. 1 (2000): 4-26. http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/(SICI)1099-1212(200001/02)10:1<4::AID-OA502>3.0.CO;2-Q.

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.

Pennell, C R. “Cannibalism in early modern North Africa.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 18, no. 2 (1991): 169-185. http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&doi=10.1080/13530199108705536&magic=crossref.

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

Rautman, A E, and T W Fenton. “A Case of Historic Cannibalism in the American West: Implications for Southwestern Archaeology.” American Antiquity 70, no. 2 (2005): 321-341. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40035706.

Turner, C G. “Cannibalism in Chaco Canyon: the charnel pit excavated in 1926 at Small House ruin by Frank H.H. Roberts, Jr.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 91, no. 4 (1993): 421-439. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8372934.

Turner II, Christy G, and Jacqueline A Turner. “On Peter Y. Bullock’s ‘A reappraisal of Anasazi cannibalism’.” Kiva 58, no. 2 (1992): 189-201.
VILLA, P, and E MAHIEU. “Breakage patterns of human long bones.” Journal of Human Evolution 21, no. 1 (July 1991): 27-48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0047-2484(91)90034-S.

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

Villa, P, C Bouville, J Courtin, D Helmer, E Mahieu, P Shipman, G Belluomini, and M Branca. “Cannibalism in the neolithic.” Science 233, no. 4762 (1986): 431-437. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17794567.

Villa, P, Claude Bouville, Jean Courtin, Daniel Helmer, Eric Mahieu, P Shipman, Giorgio Belluomini, and Marili Branca. “Cannibalism in the Neolithic.” Science 233, no. 4762 (1986): 431-437. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/233/4762/431.

Villa, P, Claude Bouville, Jean Courtin, Daniel Helmer, Eric Mahieu, P Shipman, Giorgio Belluomini, et al. “Cannibalism and the colonial world.” Science 233, no. 1 (October 3, 1986): 431-437. http://www.jstor.org/pss/30247373.

What happened with the dog was this: The distraction was a set of children and other family members spilling over their front property line doing some thing or another and potentially stepping into my contemplated path, the path I would follow after making a left turn, which, in turn, I would do either quickly to get ahead of the car coming straight in the opposite direction, or more slowly letting the oncoming car go first. My scan of the busy pedestrian environment yielded sightings of two or so children on a curb or in the street, an adult about to cross the street, someone about to get out of a car across the street (all this was on the street onto which I was about to left-turn) a brown dog on the sidewalk and what I thought for a moment to be a large black dog sitting at the very left edge of my peripheral vision, in the shadow of a tree, up by the house, on the lawn. With all this activity going on, I stopped and waited to make the left. This allowed me to decipher the landscape more accurately: People living in a house where front yard work was in progress had dropped their chores to greet someone who had pulled into a parking spot across the street. Perhaps this person was delivering the donuts or something, because the yard work was abandoned with no sign of remorse. Oh, and that thing I thought was a dog was a lawn mower with a jacket thrown over the handle. Which, just for a split second in the corner of one’s distracted eye, can look kinda like a big black dog sitting there.

Had I lived in a culture in which we believed a) animals transform into, or hide themselves as, human-made objects and especially b) that there was a great significance linked to catching such a transformation in the act, I may well have accepted that the dog transforming into a lawn mower was for real. Indeed, even if we did not live in a culture with these criteria, if you see enough dogs transform into lawn grooming equipment and have no culturally mediated facility to question the legitimacy of such observations, eventually and inevitably you will build up a body of evidence suggesting and supporting such a belief system.

And, that’s just visual mistakes that the eye and brain easily correct. If we throw in a few individuals with delusional behavior and a few individuals prone to auditory hallucinations and a few prone to visual hallucinations (listed, I think, in decreasing order of frequency in any population) then you can get full blown mystical tranmogrifitive religion of some kind. This means that any culture without a religion, in the absence of an actively maintained rational belief system and science, will very likely become a culture with a religion, eventually. And the pets will probably get involved. There may be a reason that dogs and cats are so often deities. Perhaps there is even a reason why “god” is “dog” spelled backwards.

The dog-lawnmower event is like the time a friend of mine, an older Lese woman living in the Ituri Forest, made the claim that a satanic beast had crushed the leaves and bushes in a forest clearing where she was alone gathering some resource or another. Lese women are almost never alone in the forest because they believe that satanic beasts prey on lone women, so she was rather on edge. And a serious downdraft which often happens in association with the frequent severe thunderstorms that happen there was probably mistaken by her for the activities of such a beast. On checking around, I found out that the normative description for a satanic attack is exactly the same as the normative description for a sudden natural downdraft, and one told the former from the latter by context. Like, if it happens in the vicinity of a lone woman in the forest, then that’s the satanic attack. Otherwise it’s just a meteorological event.

It reminds me of the time a house full of college educated Americans I knew all swore that they saw the ghostly disembodied head of an 18th century man suspended among the branches of an old oak tree outside their kitchen window. The house they were in was initially built in the late 17th century and added to many times since. They were a stone’s throw from the approximate location of the original Sleepy Hollow, and it was common knowledge that ghosts of dead 18th century men, often having died a shocking or violent death (like getting hanged in an oak tree) were to be seen now and then in these parts.

It reminds me of the time that spectral footprints passing down a hallway in a building known to be the most haunted building in the world, ever, were considered by several Euro-Americans as a likely ghost (details here: A true ghost story: A City of Death and Misery). One group of people had moved out of the apartment where this happened, certain that ghosts were afoot (as it were).

The woman in the forest made a culturally reasonable interpretation of a downdraft. In her culture, these things happen. At least two or three of those people living in that ancient farm house, many years ago, are known to me today and are skeptics. At least one of them is a regular donor to a major skeptical organization of which you’ve heard, and has obviously undergone a transformation from gullible hippie of the 1960s to modern rational free-thoughter of the 21st century (I oversimplify, but that’s the idea). Those living in the farm house made a culturally reasonable interpretation of a light from an upstairs bathroom reflecting off a gnarled crux on an old branch. Some of the people in the most-haunted-building were pre-disposed to believe the footsteps were those of a ghost, others not, and it took a few days to prove which group was correct. And I made a culturally reasonable interpretation of the mogrification of a dog into a lawn mower. (That interpretation was, just to be clear, that there was no mogrification, just a trick of vision. See the UFO story linked to above.)

If you take a look at some of the strange stuff that is reported to have happened in the Bible or other ancient texts, miracles and such, most of it is pretty mild by modern standards and would be rather run of the mill in, say, a Vegas show room or the living room of a home with a newly minted tween magician showing off to friends and family. This is why the world’s most famous skeptic today is a magician (Randi). It doesn’t even take sophisticated science or forensics to explain most of this stuff … just an understanding of the basics of trickery. Even if we see a seemingly unexplainable trick by a great modern magician, we assume it is a trick even if we can’t explain how it is done. We don’t separate the performance of Lance Burton between those that are just tricks and those that are “actual magic.”

It does not matter if Moses ever actually pulled off the staff-to-snake gag, or the burning bush illusion, or if he even existed. Things like that were probably done in those days or at least known of, and of course, they become parts of a story, and thus part of the book, because they are mystical scenarios that fit nicely into story telling about mystical things. The idea that a group of people would, under the right circumstances, take fiction, even over the top science fiction, as fact is not even close to hard to believe in the modern world where we can, in fact, explain pretty much everything a human can perceive, including down drafts and doggish lawn mowers.

The demands of an Apocalypse, to be real, are probably mild. We know that a world wide flood did not happen in human times, but it did not have to have happened for the Noachean Legend to be based on ‘fact’ (which it may or may not be, no reason to assume it was not made up from whole cloth rather than a hundred-year flood). Plagues of locust or other grain-eating creatures happen in biblical proportion routinely somewhere in the world every year. Entire cities burn down. The burning or destruction by earthquake, volcano, or storm of London, San Juan, Boston, Lisbon, New Orleans, Fukushima, Pompeii, Kyoto, San Francisco, Anchorage, Herculaneum, all could have turned into the stuff of legend but for modern perspective that tends to explain things differently. But any “culture group” that lives as a population of a few thousand, which is in fact how most cultures that ever existed were organized for eons, can be entirely wiped out and described as having suffered an apocalypse by the surviving neighbors.

On the day of the predicted rapture, yesterday, it is reported by Rebecca Watson and others that while the heretic Mr Deity spoke at an atheistic anti-rapture event, an earthquake struck. That’s more than enough to get a belief system going. The Grimsvotn volcano of Iceland produced a major eruption on the same day, probably affecting the flights of some of those at the conference, or at least, as a form of billowing exclamation point. I’m certain that over the next few months, the time over which those who were not raptured are to suffer things apocalypsic, there will be much documented suffering and pain, plague and pestilence, shaking of the earth and fire.

The rapture as described wherever it is described (as in made up by some guy a hundred years ago) and the apocalypse as described in the bible do not need to happen, as so described, to be real, from the perspective of those who believe in it. That is what faith is all about, and those who are skeptics and rationalists and scientists need to accept that as a fact, and rather than denying the rapture and the subsequent apocalypse, observe it. Have faith, skeptics! Reverend Harold Camping will come up with an explanation!

In fact, pay close, very close attention to this, especially in America. This country was founded by apocalypsers, in part. The Puritans of the Mass Bay Colony were quite convinced that soon after building their City on the Hill the second coming and judgment day would occur. That is why they founded and settled new communities. They did not have a rapture concept. Rather, they had the concept of a city that they would build as a demonstration of their faith and love for god and so on and so forth, and by having done this would pass to heaven at the end of earthly days, etc. etc. There were of course different versions of this, but the Puritans set dates just like Harold Camping did, and when the dates arrived and nothing happened, they set new dates. Different groups of Puritans also set different geographical locations for their City on the Hill. And some, when resetting the dates, also adjusted the location. One group of Mass Bay Puritans is said to have moved to what is now Mexico, new date in hand, after one of the failed end-days. Today, the Puritans, or Pilgrims, are mostly mythical in American Culture. Most of what we say we know about them is wrong, and their numerical influence was much smaller than supposed by many. But there was probably an influence on modern culture, including the fact that they were more Medieval than the average European, less tolerant and more unscientific than the average Renaissance adults of the day, and had this end of the world thing going for them, or more accurately not going.

Many of those who were not raptured by elevating into heaven leaving behind their smoking shoes were, I promise you, raptured in some other way. They’ll explain this to us later. At the moment, we are hearing very little, as though their normally loud and obnoxious voices were taken up into heaven leaving their silent selves behind. But mark my words, we’ll hear a post hoc explanation from some of them, soon enough. And in the meantime, we can enjoy the Apocalypse as it unfolds in the pages of our newspapers daily for the next few months.

Today’s news:

• Iceland closes main airport amid volcano eruption
• Earthquakes in New Zealand, San Francisco
• NY case shows daily dangers faced by hotel maids
• Lyme disease cases spike
• Feral cats identified as possible Willow Creek rabies source

For now, fellow skeptic, you are totally justified to consider yourself part of a more advanced civilization observing the quaint and culturally interesting activities of an older, less developed one that lives amongst us. Be amused. But also keep in mind that it is quite possible for a culture to posses powers it is not ready to posses, weapons or technologies it is not able to use safely. The situation is dangerous. And, the situation is not resolved.

Some of the images come from here, here, here, here, here.

Here’s a detail: