The Rituals of Dinner

by Visser, Margaret

  Flesh is often not consumed in endo-cannibalism; people prefer to grind up bones or burn the body to ashes, then eat the powder mixed in a drink, or with, say, mashed banana. (Such practices show that eating people is not always for their protein content.) There might also be a taste—culturally induced, we are relieved to remind ourselves, in this particular social constellation—for half-rotted corpse carefully dug up and consumed, or for festering flesh from wounds. The action of eating one’s relatives is often sad, solemn, and loving: it can be a form of mourning ritual. It is also possible, however, for people in these societies to appear quite matter-of-fact, to eat up cheerfully and feel no apparent awe during the process.

  Exo-cannibalism was more common than endo-cannibalism, more violent and destructive—and easier for us to understand. Here people hate the people they consume, but eating their flesh is a joy. They pursue their victims (who must be foreigners) and eat them for vengeance. Captives were often tortured before being killed, or made to do battle against hopeless odds; it was hoped that, in the process, they would show considerable courage. They would then be eaten with special appreciation, the bravery they had been proven to possess passing into the bodies of their killers.

  At the Aztec “gladiatorial” sacrifice, for instance, the captive was tied by the waist to a sort of umbilical cord attached to the centre of the sacrificial stone. He was given weapons, and then attacked by warriors one by one until he fell. When he was seen to be about to die, he was seized, stretched on the stone, and slaughtered. The man who had captured him in battle would take his captive’s blood in “a green bowl with a feathered rim … On the lips of the stone images, on each one, he placed the blood of his captive. He made them taste it with the hollow cane.” The body was flayed so that its skin could be used later as a cloak, and the flesh carved up and eaten. The captor of this man was proud of his victim’s prowess, and identified himself with him and his courage. He would therefore refuse to eat him. “He is my son,” he would say. “Shall I perchance eat my very self?”

  It was quite often the case that the person who did the actual slaying of the victim was not allowed to eat him. He would have to fast for days or change his name or hide in the forest for weeks before returning to the group. In these cases, it was important that eating should be dissociated from killing; the killer was seen to be merely doing his duty, or acting for the good of other people and not himself. In the account of Hans Staden, the German naval gunner who was captured by the cannibal Tupinamba of Brazil in 1554, “Then the slayer seizes [the club] and thus addresses the victim: ‘I am he that will kill you, since you and yours have slain and eaten many of my friends.’ To which the prisoner replies: ‘When I am dead I shall still have many to avenge my death.’” Then the slayer strikes from behind and beats out his brains. “The women seize the body at once and carry it to the fire where they scrape off the skin, making the flesh quite white, and stopping up the fundament with a piece of wood so that nothing may be lost. Then a man cuts up the body, removing the legs above the knee and the arms at the trunk, whereupon the four women seize the four limbs and run with them around the huts, making a joyful cry. After this they divide the trunk among themselves and devour everything that can be eaten. When this is finished they all depart, each one carrying a piece with him. The slayer takes a fresh name … He must lie all that day in his hammock, but they give him a small bow and arrow so that he can amuse himself by shooting into wax, lest his arm should become feeble from the shock of the death blow. I was present and have seen all this with my own eyes.”

  Cannibals themselves often regard the eating of human flesh in general with awe and horror; it is ritually marked off from regular eating. The ancient Fijians, for example, ate everyday meals with their hands; when it came to eating human flesh, and only then, they used a special wooden fork. Cannibals often deny that they started the practice of eating people. The gods may have demanded it; we have no choice. Bloodthirsty enemies beyond our boundaries think of nothing but how to kill and eat us; we must meet force with force, and assure them that they will not eat us without paying exactly the equivalent price. The relationship of a cannibal with his victim may involve an elaborate metaphorical construct: the one to be tortured, killed, and eaten might represent darkness, primitive bestiality, the animal. (This is rather like our own imaginary monsters, who often turn out to be cannibalistic.) Or the victim is a monster, to be devoured—with care and propriety—by the enlightened, in order that the power he represents may be destroyed and civilization triumph. This power might be recognized and revered as useful energy, which is required by the good cannibal society that eats him and will thus channel his force to useful purposes. To eat one’s enemy is to “take in” his power, to one’s own increase.

  An exo-cannibal society, preying on its enemies, needed those enemies. There was a weird sort of interdependence between the two warring groups, each of whom wanted “others” to feed their wrath. Moctezuma explained that his people could not seek “reconciliation” with the Tlaxcalans, whom the Aztec loved to sally forth and capture for the feeding of hearts to the Sun: if the Aztec made friends with the Tlaxcalans, where would the victims come from, to propitiate the gods? Endo-cannibalism may look inward-turning, and for that reason sick (by our no doubt ethnocentric standards); exo-cannibalism however represented another kind of symbiosis, this time with enemies. The “biological” advantage of exo-cannibalism was that it insisted that people who were eaten should be taken in war; they were healthy specimens, and unlikely to be infected by disease.

  Techniques, in exo-cannibalism, of showing contempt for vanquished enemies were many and dramatic. The ancient Maoris of New Zealand were “an exceedingly good-tempered and sociable people … courteous and polite … it was considered a mark of inferior breeding to be rude in either speech or bearing.” Men ruled; women were profane, defiling—and never allowed to eat human victims. Food was also profane and impure, especially if it was cooked; so much so that everything associated with trapping and cooking food became profane, like the women who prepared and cooked it. All houses were tapu or the opposite of profane (the Maori word tapu is the origin of our “taboo”), and therefore food had to be eaten out of doors. Even touching cooked food was a defilement to the highest-ranking men; the Maori accordingly invented a kind of fork, a pointed stick called a tiirou, with which an exceptionally pure man could convey food to his mouth; in some cases this had to be done for him by another pure, tapu person. The pure one ate well away from women, and usually alone. If the food being consumed had first been offered to the gods, and there was no sufficiently tapu friend present to feed the loftily pure one, he had to eat it with his mouth from the ground, not touching it with his hands.

  Now it followed that food, being so low in the scale of purity, was not something with which you could compare a man; there was no more certain way to insult someone than to say, “I will use your head as a cooking pot,” or to refer to a man or a part of him as “cooked,” or to give some dish the man’s name. It will quickly be seen that the ultimate degradation one could inflict was to make metaphor a fact and actually eat the person: turn him into food. Most Maori cannibalism took place on the battlefield, where the enemy dead would be butchered on the spot and cooked in steam ovens swiftly constructed for the purpose by the victors. The bones would be collected afterwards and turned into profane domestic implements, especially those used in catching and cooking food. So, hands and fingers were used as hooks for holding food-baskets; fish hooks, pins, whistles, spear-points, needles, flutes, and rings for the legs of captive parrots could all be made of bits of enemies. A skull could be debased and mocked for decades by being used to carry water for household purposes. Knowledge that the deceased man’s bones had been quarried for everyday, profane use and were being contemned in this constant and ingenious manner would humiliate and exasperate his relatives and fuel in them the determination to avenge the enormity with an outrage if possible more satisfying still.r />
  Cannibalism, whatever form it took and for whatever reason, was never, in real life, a disorderly activity within the culture that practised it. The fact that it was allowed, sanctioned, or institutionalized made it a practice that was regulated, even if the rules were occasionally simple—on the face of it, and as far as we can tell with our scrappy information—and even if rules were commonly broken, as reporters from some societies say they were. Even when violent aggression reigned, there were social preferences, tastes, and traditions; something almost amounting to a cuisine.

  Many were the methods of preparing a man as a meal. The anthropologist Paul Shankman, in the course of examining cannibal cooking practices as a test of Lévi-Strauss’s claims that roasting is high in prestige, boiling low, and so on, collected ways of cooking people culled from reports on cannibal societies. The resulting collection was a “veritable smorgasbord” of methods. People have indeed been boiled in pots, and roasted by spit, rack, or exposure to an open fire. They have also been steam-baked, cooked on preheated rocks and in earth ovens, smoked, decomposed first, dried, powdered, preserved, stuffed into bamboo tubes and placed in the embers, their bones burned to ashes and stirred into many kinds of sauces, juices, and mashes. A body could be buried, then exhumed and eaten in its rotten state. Here is an account, by Ronald Berndt, of one such meal: “On the afternoon of the sixth day following his death his corpse was exhumed. The maggots were scraped off and placed on banana leaves. The body was then cut up, the meat and bones being cooked in one oven, and the maggots, tied up in small leaf bundles, in another; these are regarded as a delicacy.” The attention to detail, the neatness, and the decisiveness about what one wanted and how to achieve the necessary effect give this description a weird but unmistakably technological air like that of a careful culinary article from a magazine for gourmets.

  There were various tortures where people were prepared for cooking while still alive. People were eaten raw at times—but this was quite seldom, and even then there were rules. There was always the matter of who got which piece, and how much of it. Sometimes women did all the cannibalism (“materialist” anthropologists point out that this would have been because the men ate nearly all the animal meat themselves, leaving the women little protein), and sometimes it was the men, exulting over their prisoners of war by eating them. There were rules, among endocannibals, about which relatives one must not, or which one must at all costs, eat. A dying endo-cannibal might catalogue in detail which parts of him or her were later to be eaten by whom: a last will and testament of admirably generous detachment. Then there were the rituals during cannibal meals. These ranged from matters of simple order—whether or not one should collect the grease falling from cooking limbs, for example, and who had the right to eat it and how—to the extreme formality and richness of Aztec breast-cutting and heart-snatching ceremonies atop their blood-blackened pyramid shrines. Indications are that more ritual usually governed the eating of people than was found necessary at ordinary meals. But every dinner eaten with others requires rules, and these soon become elaborated into a system of table manners, which are ritual where eating is concerned.

  RITUAL

  A North American father, presumably initiating his son, aged fifteen, into the world of adult business affairs, took him out to what the boy described as “a big dinner meeting.” When the company was served spaghetti, the boy ate it with his hands. “I would slurp it up and put it in my mouth,” he admitted. “My dad took some grief about it.” The October 1985 newspaper article does not describe the response of the rest of the company. The son was sent to a boarding school to learn how to behave. “When we have spaghetti,” he announced later, “you roll it up real tightly on your fork and put it in your mouth with the fork.”

  What he described, after having learned it, is a dinner-table ritual—as automatic and unquestioned by every participant in it, as impossible to gainsay, as the artificial rules and preferences which every cannibal society has upheld. Practical reasons can be found for it, most of them having to do with neatness, cleanliness, and noiselessness. Because these three general principles are so warmly encouraged in our culture, having been arrived at, as ideals to be striven for, after centuries of struggle and constraint, we simply never doubt that everyone who is right-minded will find a spaghetti-eating companion disgusting and impossible to eat with where even one of them is lacking. Yet we know from paintings and early photographs of spaghetti-eaters in nineteenth-century Naples (where the modern version of spaghetti comes from) that their way of eating pasta was with their hands—not that the dish was likely to appear at a formal dinner. You had to raise the strings in your right hand, throw back your head, then lower the strings, dexterously, with dispatch, and without slurping (there are invariably “polite” and “rude” ways of eating), into your open mouth. The spaghetti in the pictures does not seem to have sauce on it.

  Today, spaghetti-eating manners demand forks, and fistfuls of wet pasta are simply not acceptable at any “civilized” occasion. The son’s ignorance cast a dark reflection upon his father: he had not been doing his duty, had not given his child a proper “upbringing.” Even if the boy had not seen spaghetti before, he subsequently admitted that what he ought to have done was to look about him, watch how other people were eating this awkward food, and imitate them. In any case, the options were clear after this demonstration of ineptitude: either the boy learned his table manners, or he would not be asked to a “big dinner meeting” again, by anyone who had heard of his unfinished education.

  He had offended not only against modern proprieties that limit the use of hands while eating, but also against ritual: he had done something unexpected. Ritual is action frequently repeated, in a form largely laid down in advance; it aims to get those actions right. Everyone present knows what should happen, and notices when it does not. Dinner too is habitual, and aims at order and communication, at satisfying both the appetite of the diners and their expectations as to how everybody present should behave. In this sense, a meal can be thought of as a ritual and a work of art, with limits laid down, desires aroused and fulfilled, enticements, variety, patterning, and plot. As in a work of art, not only the overall form but also the details matter intensely.

  This pernicketiness has some of its basis in biology. Human beings, like animals, are extremely sensitive to small signs, to tiny noises in the night, to small discrepancies in the customary layout of their environment, for these may be the only warnings received before a hidden danger strikes. Alertness and sensitivity are normally essential for survival, especially in the wild. But being human, and depending as we do on knowing our way round our complex and perilous social world, it is entirely necessary to us that we should also react instinctively to very small signs given by other people in social contexts. No one in the group might even be conscious that such a sign has been given. But those of us with the best-attuned social sense will instantly and instinctively “know” what is afoot. Every person must be careful—or rather, drilled from an early age until automatically disposed—not only to notice signs, but also to provide them, as a reassurance that this person is what other members of the group hope he or she is; that this individual wishes to join in, play the game, and be civil.

  It is equally understandable that mixing with people whose rituals differ from our own can be very trying. Innumerable travellers’ tales involve the visiting hero being offered some horrendous “delicacy” which he has either to eat, or risk offending his host. But we can be put out just because some foreigner raises his eyebrows to mean yes, or asks us how much money we make, or stalks off in a rage because we folded our arms or failed to take our hands out of our pockets. The really dramatic “ethnic” behaviour we consciously apprehend at once, and so can “make allowances” for; everyone has heard of the chances of having to eat an eyeball, or smash glasses after the toast. But the smaller, less noticeable signs can catch us off our guard and rob us more insidiously of our sense of security. Most of the pictu
resque details that strike travellers as weird have to do with table manners. Tourists quite commonly visit marvels as mighty as the Pyramids of Egypt, but come home really jolted by, and unable to forget, the Egyptian manner of pouring tea into a glass until it slops into the saucer. When eating and drinking we are particularly sensitive and vigilant, and immediately react to the slightest deviation from what we have learned to regard as the proprieties.

  Ritual, being both expected behaviour and correct, is a series of actions constantly repeated. Repetitiveness serves the meaning being expressed, for if the pattern is at least generally constant we can concentrate on the message embodied in the performance. (We do not have to think how to handle our knife and fork every time we are served, but can set to and enjoy the steak, while demonstrating effortless restraint and competence, and showing our desire to be communicative, sharing companions.) We also notice the slight intentional variations which always occur in ritual, and are therefore thrown into relief. (What fun, and how formally informal, to be served artichokes and be allowed to use our hands.) But this does not entirely account for our need constantly to repeat actions ritually. The repetition soothes us, apparently, in and by itself—inducing what James Joyce called “those here-we-are-again gaieties.” Rituals survive because people want them to do so; they “work.” Culture, not instinct, determines a good deal of what we do. Human beings rejoice in the action of patterning, in itself.