Cannibalism has been called “the last taboo,”1 “the strongest of all taboos,”2 and “mankind’s oldest taboo.”3 It can be doubted that no other taboos remain in modern society, and Reay Tannahill rightly rejects the last appellation, pointing out that “the tabu on eating human flesh is by no means the oldest tabu in the world.”4 But there can be no doubt that the taboo against practicing cannibalism is very strong—so strong, in fact, that it may seem as if “the taboo on cannibalism has become transformed into a taboo on thinking about cannibalism,” as Robert N. Bellah observes.5
The back cover text of Lawrence H. Keeley’s book War before Civilization includes the sentence: “Finally, and perhaps most controversially, he examines the evidence of cannibalism among some preliterate peoples.” But why should evidence of cannibalism be more controversial than evidence of other violent and deadly practices? Cannibalism is a specific way of treating dead bodies—but in general, and quite reasonably so, people are more concerned with what happens to them while alive rather than with their body’s fate after death. Considering this rightful concern over the treatment of living individuals, we should be much more shocked by the practice of burning supposed heretics and witches alive and by other cruel execution practices that were usual in the European Middle Ages than by the fact that, in some societies, killed enemies were subsequently eaten (rather than being left to rot or, maybe, “properly” buried or cremated). Just as we might ask why some societies considered certain cannibal acts as acceptable, we might ask why the practice is met with such a particular abhorrence in ours—a question to which we will return shortly.
In any case it is notable that the “taboo on thinking about cannibalism” seems to have caused many researchers and historians to shy away from the topic altogether, which has encouraged meta-discussions about talks about the practices instead of the analyses of actual cannibal practices. While human cannibalism has attracted considerable attention and controversy, discussions of the topic often focus on the question of whether descriptions of such acts are accurate or pure slander, or they treat cannibalism as a topic of discourse rather than an actual practice. Investigations of actual cannibal practices are largely limited to a few typical forms, such as famine cannibalism, the consumption of killed enemies in warfare, or of deceased relatives as a funerary rite.
Scant attention has been given to other aspects of the practice—aspects which are nevertheless well documented in the historical record. These include the connection between cannibalism and xenophobia, which is evident in the capture and consumption of unwanted strangers. Likewise ignored is the connection between cannibalism and slavery: the fact that in some societies slaves6 and persons captured in slave raids could be, and were, killed and eaten. Other connections between cannibal acts and trade—the sale of human flesh or of corpses destined for consumption—are neglected as well.
Exploring these largely forgotten practices is the purpose of this book. It shows that cannibalism cannot be understood in isolation; rather, interconnections with other topics—such as the international slave trade in the nineteenth century and earlier—must be taken into account to get a comprehensive understanding of either topic.
Investigations of cannibalism—in particular, of violent practices, where people are killed and eaten, such as those studied in this book—are a part of examining the “darker side of humanity,” as Shirley Lindenbaum remarks.7 Are such investigations really necessary—is it not better to let this part of the past slide into oblivion? I do not think so. Science is always an enterprise of intellectual curiosity—an attempt to better understand the world as it really is and was. Shying away from certain topics because one considers them unpleasant and better forgotten violates the spirit of this enterprise. Moreover, true oblivion is unachievable—when the truth is not sought, all kinds of misconceptions start to flourish.
One such misconception is the idea that socially accepted cannibalism could never have existed anywhere. The idea that the cannibalism taboo is so strong that it must be universal and that therefore cannibalism as a socially accepted practice cannot have existed anywhere in the world has long been widespread in Western8 thought, as we will see later. It may well have reached its pinnacle in the late 1970s and the 1980s when the spreading of postmodernism encouraged a way of theory-building that often seemed to be based more on personal preferences than on a careful evaluation of available sources and collected evidence. How and why cannibalism denial—which might well be considered a forerunner of other, more widely known denialisms such as climate change denial9—could, in spite of all contrary evidence, achieve for some time an astonishing popularity even in certain academic circles, is a question we will return to in the Conclusion.
Another misconception—often visible in movies or other popular accounts that try to depict cannibalistic societies—equates cannibalism with utter primitivity. One example is Last Cannibal World (1977),10 one of the first and most successful movies made during a short-lived boom of exploitation films with a cannibal twist made around the year 1980. It features “a stone age tribe on the Island of Mindanao,” the second largest island of the Philippines (not that cannibal peoples are documented in the Philippines). The movie cannibals live in a cave instead of constructing buildings of any kind; they lack a proper language, making just grunting and howling sounds (“these tribes don’t use language as we know it,” comments the hero); they have long and uncombed hair and highly uncultivated eating habits, ravenously tearing half-cooked (human) flesh out of each other’s hands. In short, they are as primitive and uncivilized as any script writer can imagine a people to be.
A very similar depiction of a clan of cannibalistic cave dwellers is given in the film Bone Tomahawk (2015),11 indicating that prejudices have not much changed during these nearly four decades. Such stereotypical cannibal savages have almost nothing to do with the cannibal peoples actually encountered by Western explorers in the Pacific Ocean, Africa, or elsewhere.
This book is an attempt to look beyond the misconceptions and understand certain cannibal practices as they really were. Actual cannibalistic societies were not particularly primitive—they had their social order and their own value systems, which were not necessarily less refined than the Western ones, though they were certainly different. Analyzing the principles that governed such societies is a part of the big endeavor of trying to explore the human condition—of exploring how humans lived (and died) under conditions that were sometimes so different from our own that they are difficult to even imagine. Investigating historical practices such as slave eating also reveals close interconnections between the consumption of slaves and captives in Africa and the international slave (and, as we will see, ivory) trade across the Atlantic and into the Arab world—an aspect of the history of slavery (one of the largest crimes of all times) that would remain unknown if we went on to ignore the historical record.
Before we plunge into societies where certain kinds of cannibalism were accepted, it may be worthwhile to reflect about contemporary viewpoints of the practice—which, however logical and “natural” they may seem, are actually a bit odd. In Western thought, the taboo against cannibalism is so strong and absolute that many believe that everyone, in any culture, must feel the same. One contemporary article, quite typical for this way of thinking, calls cannibalism “a universal taboo” and asserts that “no human society practices [or practiced] cannibalism.” Instead, all reports of cannibal practices are considered “smears” used to justify “genocide, enslavement and cultural erasure” against the wrongly accused groups. Not only is the rejection of cannibalism supposedly universal but its usage for the purpose of vilifying others seems to be universal too—the author calls it the “universal demonization of an otherwise fictional entity.”12
The belief that cannibalism is so obviously wrong that everyone must feel this—hence that socially accepted cannibalism exists nowhere—is not new. After observing the preparation of a cannibal meal in New Zealand in the 1820s, the British artist Augustus Earle comments that he had “witnesse[d] a scene which many travellers have related, and their relations have invariably been treated with contempt; indeed, the veracity of those who had the temerity to relate such incredible events has been every where questioned.”13 And the British admiral John Elphinstone Erskine writes after his visit to Fiji in the late 1840s: “The notion of using the bodies of our fellow-creatures for food is so revolting to the feelings of civilized men, that many have refused all belief in the systematic exercise of such a habit.”14
It would be nice to imagine that such feelings are the result of a thorough acceptance of human rights and human dignity. But this seems doubtful, as the European taboo against cannibalism is clearly older than these notions from the Age of Enlightenment which only became widely accepted during the course of the twentieth century. Earle considers the death penalty an appropriate punishment for “thieves and runaways,”15 and when he and Elphinstone were writing, slavery was still legal in the Southern United States, British India, French West Africa, the Portuguese territories and colonies, most of the former European colonies in South America, and many other parts of the world. While slaves in the Western world were not usually arbitrarily killed by their owners, their life expectancy was often severely reduced due to harsh working conditions. So-called refuse slaves, who because of illness or other factors failed to attract buyers, “were often left to die unattended on the quayside of the port of entry into the Americas”; if provisions on slave ships crossing the Atlantic became scarce, slaves could be thrown overboard with impunity.16
And yet the inhabitants of Western societies that tolerated such practices considered all cases of cannibalism as signs of primitiveness, depravity, or madness. While we might ask why certain cannibal acts were considered acceptable in some societies, we might equally ask why the practice is met with such a particular abhorrence in ours.
The answer seems to be connected to the Jewish-Christian notions of the bodily resurrection of the dead. According to the traditional viewpoint, people do not just have immortal souls, but their bodies will ultimately be restored and reunified with their souls. If a dead body is burned or a shipwrecked sailor is consumed by fish, this is considered a problem which God’s omnipotence can overcome: surely, He knows where to find the pieces and how to reassemble them. But cannibalism poses a logical problem, since “you are what you eat” (as the proverb says) and Christian thinkers were aware of the worrisome consequences. Athenagoras of Athens (ca. 133–190), considered one of the “Fathers of the Church,” wondered:
How can two bodies, which have successively been in possession of the same substance, appear in their entirety, without lacking a large part of themselves? In the end, either the disputed parts will be returned to their original owners, leaving a gap in the later owners, or they shall be fixed in the latter, leaving in this case an irreparable loss in the former.17
More than a thousand years later, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) still thought about the same question. He decided that God can overcome even this challenge. Because “the flesh swallowed by a cannibal belongs to his victim by right . . . there will be a lack in the cannibal’s body at the resurrection, but this will be filled by the infinite power of God.”18
But even if God is capable of overcoming this challenge, the cannibal’s attempt to mess with resurrection is far worse than anything else people can do within the realm of the living. “Because he claims for himself an extraordinary power over the circulation of atoms, upon which God will have to intervene with infinite power . . . , the cannibal is a diabolical figure in the most profound sense, an anti-Divinity,” summarizes Catalin Avramescu on the traditional Christian viewpoint.19
Most contemporary Christians would certainly consider this kind of theological worry as quaint and beside the point. Nevertheless, the modern taboo against even thinking about cannibalism as anything other than madness or false accusation might well be an inheritance of this old discourse, at least to some degree. But certainly other factors play a role in keeping the taboo alive. One modern commentator states:
Treating humans like cattle to be slaughtered and eaten goes against most of our instincts, because no matter how you spin it, everyone sees themselves as an individual. Everyone has their own hopes, dreams, fears, desires, and for all of that to be chucked away for the sake of a meal is, well, disgusting.20
This short remark mixes some insights into what makes cannibalism so particularly “disgusting” and unacceptable in our minds with certain misunderstandings (which are probably quite typical) about what cannibalism actually is. Indeed, it goes utterly against modern individualism to deny a human being all their individual traits and capabilities, treating them as nothing but edible matter. Being potentially edible is something that humans have in common with most animals and most plants. By turning this potential into actual edibility, the cannibals seem to add insult to injury, apparently denying the humanity of their victims. Humans are treated “like cattle”—and cattle, as everyone knows, are not treated very well.
And yet, from the cannibal viewpoint it may be exactly the humanity of their victims that matters—they know the difference between human flesh and beef (or whatever animal meat is available to them) and prefer, under certain circumstances and for whatever reasons, the former. Still, that is not the kind of appreciation of one’s humanity that anyone who considers themselves an individual with individual preferences, experiences, and aspirations is likely to value. Besides this mutual misunderstanding between the modern individualist and the cannibal, it must also be pointed out that the idea that humans were treated by cannibals “like cattle” is only partially true. Slaves and captured enemies or foreigners were sometimes butchered for consumption—as we will see—but human beings were never systematically raised and bred for this purpose (as far as we know). Human beings were never used just as “livestock” (and nothing more). Instead, cannibalism was always linked to activities connecting humans with other humans, though often in adversarial and potentially humiliating ways—a fear or hatred of foreigners, slavery, warfare, sacrifice, or acts of punishment.
Which brings us back to the question of why warfare, human sacrifice, and slavery are not seen as quite as “disgusting” and shocking as cannibalism by the modern individualist. To be sure, the latter two practices will be strictly rejected by contemporaries, and most will agree that warfare is only acceptable in self-defense or in certain other, clearly limited circumstances, such as the prevention of severe human rights violations. But compared to cannibalism, these practices do not evoke a similar degree of shock and disgust, sometimes combined with an unwillingness to even think about such practices or admit that others could possibly have engaged in them. And yet, all the “hopes, dreams, fears, desires” of an individual are utterly ignored by those who enslave or sacrifice them, and war leaders similarly accept that a certain number of fighters and civilians on both sides will be killed, negating all hopes and dreams they might have had.
Clearly, there must be something besides the negation of individualism that shapes our feelings about cannibalism. Maybe it is an unconscious memory of the old Christian fear of the cannibal as anti-God? Or the humiliation of persons being treated (more or less) like animals? In any case, the rational interpretation of a violation of individualism and individual rights can explain part of our rejection of cannibal behaviors, but it cannot fully explain the strength of the taboo.
As with many terms, different people mean different things when talking about cannibalism. For the purpose of this book, a standard dictionary definition can serve as guideline: “the practice of eating the flesh of one’s own species.”21 Some authors use a broader definition, according to which the consumption of any body part of a member of one’s species makes one a cannibal. Thus, Paul Moon remarks that “someone who nibbles at their fingernail and then swallows it” is “technically” a cannibal.22 Some even interpret the consumption of excretions of a human body, such as “mucous, excrement, and placenta” as cannibalism.23 Such broad definitions are not used in this book, and neither is the drinking of blood from a member of one’s species considered cannibalism (unless combined with other cannibal practices). At the same time, “flesh” in the above definition may be understood to refer not only to muscle tissue and body fat but also to edible organs such as brain, heart, liver, and intestines.
While the term cannibal is sometimes used with a pejorative meaning, I use it in a technical sense: a cannibal is someone who has at least once practiced cannibalism, as per the definition above, whether knowingly or not. Since people do not always know what exactly they are eating, it is possible to be a cannibal without knowing it. In the course of this book, we will encounter a few cases of persons unwittingly becoming cannibals, learning only later what they had eaten.
In our society, cannibalism might well be seen as the ultimate transgression, but clearly that was not the case in societies where cannibal acts were considered acceptable, maybe even expected, under certain circumstance. But we must realize that this is not a binary switch, a question of “nobody must be eaten!” versus “anybody may be eaten!” Any social practice is governed by rules controlling what is and is not allowed, and cannibalism is no exception. When cannibalism is a socially accepted practice, the most fundamental questions such rules must answer are: who may be eaten and under what circumstances?
Various cannibal societies differ to a large degree in how they answer these questions. If, for example, the corpses of deceased community members are ritually consumed by relatives and friends, cannibalism is a nonviolent funerary rite often known as funerary cannibalism. If, on the other hand, enemies killed or captured in warfare are eaten (war cannibalism), cannibalism is a violent act which may serve to humiliate and symbolically—as well as physically—annihilate one’s enemies. In both cases, such acts are governed by rules, but the rules regulating who may be eaten and under what circumstances—in short, who is considered “edible”—differ and the meanings of the acts differ with them. Literally, edible means that something can be consumed and digested, when prepared in a suitable manner, without making the eater ill. But in a stricter sense it means that something is good to eat or meant to be eaten. I will put the term in quotation marks when this second meaning is intended.
It is important to keep in mind that societies which accepted certain cannibal practices were not “ruleless” or “lawless”—they merely had rules which differed, at least in this regard, significantly from ours. In the next chapter we will look more closely at which kinds of rules could typically be found in some of these societies.
Another important question concerns the reliability of sources. When looking for evidence of cannibalism, one quickly notices that it is well documented both in the archaeological record and in written sources. With the exception of China, however, local cultures in the regions which will be discussed in this book were largely oral—most written accounts therefore come from outsiders, often Europeans, who visited or had moved into these regions. How trustworthy are these sources? Some authors have suggested that they may often be mere fabrications or at least wild exaggerations, produced by colonialists to justify the oppression of local peoples24 or by missionaries to convince their audience at home to support a good cause performed under the most difficult and dangerous circumstances.25
This may sometimes be the case and it suggests that we must take care, especially when relying strongly on a single source or on a small number of sources whose authors were in close connection to each other (say, by working for the same government or the same mission). The evidence which will be explored in the following chapters, however, comes from a wide variety of sources—not just from colonialists and missionaries, but also from travelers, anthropologists, and oral accounts of those who partook in such practices or heard of them from their ancestors. Moreover, those working for colonial governments were sometimes highly critical of these governments,26 casting doubt on the idea that in the very same works they would have fabricated evidence supporting the government’s actions; and among the accounts of missionaries are letters and diaries published decades after they were written and not originally intended for publication.27 Sometimes accounts describing similar practices in the same region were originally written in different languages and published in different countries, making a deliberate collusion between their authors unlikely.
Paul Moon notes that when several independent observers give accounts of a practice, varying in details and circumstances but agreeing in certain common themes, this clearly points to descriptions of an actual practice. He concludes that, “in the absence of any evidence of collusion” or deliberate fabrication, such reports should be considered generally reliable, though there may be mistakes in the details or misunderstandings about motives.28
But maybe Westerners brought their stereotypical notions about cannibal “savages” with them and used them to “embellish” the reports of the cultures they encountered, thus creating a seemingly consistent but nevertheless false picture even without deliberate collusion? If this were the case, one would expect reports of cannibalism to cover all or most of the regions visited or colonized by Europeans more or less evenly. However, the evidence of cannibalism is limited to certain regions.
In the infamous European “Scramble for Africa,” that continent was nearly completely colonized by European powers between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, while a wealth of often quite detailed accounts refer to cannibal practices in certain central and western African regions (especially the Congo basin and Nigeria), similar accounts from northern, eastern, and southern Africa seem to be missing completely or to be limited to exceptional times such as severe famines. The situation in the South Pacific is similar—various detailed accounts come from certain islands and archipelagos (in particular, New Guinea, Fiji, and New Zealand), while elsewhere (for example, in Samoa and Tahiti) cannibal practices seem to have been unknown.29 This highly uneven distribution is another hint that descriptions of such practices refer to actual local phenomena rather than to mere fantasies in the heads of their authors.
This book is largely devoted to three topics which so far have received scant attention in the literature. Each of these topics explores the interconnections between cannibalism and a large-scale issue of current or of earlier times:
• The connection to slavery: the consumption of slaves and persons captured in slave raids—slave eating for short.
• The connection to xenophobia, a fear or hatred of foreigners: the kidnapping and consumption of individuals or small groups of people who have left the safety of their own community and may be seen as unwanted intruders or simply as convenient victims. I will use the term foreigner poaching to refer to this practice.
• The connection to commerce or trade: the sale of human flesh or of people or corpses destined for consumption. I will occasionally use the term commercial cannibalism in this context—arguably just a convenient way of speaking, as it was not the cannibalism itself that was commercial (people were not paid to eat human flesh), but the acts that enabled or facilitated it. In cases where slaves were deliberately bought for consumption, slave eating may also be regarded as a kind of commercial cannibalism. But not every commercial act that facilitated cannibalism was connected to slavery, therefore this topic deserves an independent investigation.
Each of these practices occurred in various regions throughout the world. In this book, each of them will be investigated in the context of a few regions where it has been particularly well documented. The selection of these regions is not arbitrary: it follows the sources by choosing regions for which a considerable number of preferably detailed sources can be found. References to similar practices in other regions will sometimes be made in passing or in endnotes, but such other regions are not the main focus of attention.
Before turning to individual topics and regions, I will in Chapter 1 consider under which circumstances and due to which motives cannibal practices occurred in general, in order to develop a taxonomy of such practices. Understanding the different aspects influencing cannibal behaviors will provide useful background knowledge regarding the context of the specific practices explored in this book.
Chapters 2 to 10 are all dedicated to slave eating—a well-documented, but so far deplorably under-investigated topic that may be considered the main focus of this book. Chapter 2 deals with the practice among the Maori in New Zealand; Chapter 3 investigates the Bismarck Archipelago near New Guinea and takes a look at Sumatra. Subsequent chapters are dedicated to the Congo basin, where the practice is particularly well-documented. Chapter 3 starts by exploring the interconnections between local cannibalism and the international trade in slaves and ivory. Chapter 5 investigates how two particular groups of foreigners—Swahilo-Arab slave and ivory traders from the African east coast as well as European officials of the colonial Congo Free State—benefited from and sometimes actively encouraged cannibal practices, without being cannibals themselves.
Chapters 6 to 8 aim to deepen our understanding of Congolese slave eating: Why, in which ways, and where did it take place? How did it work from an economic viewpoint and in which ways was it tied to commercial practices? How was it shaped by patriarchal social structures, and what were its connections to the exploitation of slaves in general? Finally, Chapters 9 and 10 are again dedicated to foreign—in particular, European—influences. Chapter 9 is a case study of a particularly well-documented and controversially analyzed example of the involvement of a European explorer in a case of cannibalism which took the life of a young enslaved girl. Chapter 10 takes a step back to consider more generally the question of European influences on cannibal customs elsewhere of the world—in Central Africa in particular. In this context we will also explore what is known about the beginnings and the end of Congolese cannibalism.
Chapters 11 and 12 are dedicated to foreigner poaching, the murder and consumption of unwanted foreigners. Three regions where such acts were common will be studied: New Guinea and the neighboring Bismarck Archipelago, Fiji, and Central Africa.
Chapter 13 investigates commercial aspects of cannibalism not directly connected with slavery—the sale of human flesh and of corpses destined for consumption.
Chapters 14 and 15 explore commercial and culinary aspects of cannibalism in China, where human flesh repeatedly appeared on marketplaces during times of famine and warfare, and where it was occasionally eaten even outside such times of hardship, sometimes due to culinary choice. While the rest of book deals with regions that were highly decentralized and, before the imposition of colonial regimes may well be considered as “stateless,” China is a huge country with a very long tradition of statehood. These chapters will allow an understanding of how and under which circumstances the consumption of and the trade in human flesh could gain a certain social acceptance even in such a very different setting.
The Conclusion includes a review and a discussion of certain questions that arise when exploring cannibalism, including parallels and differences to meat eating in general and why and how cannibalism denial could, for some time, spread widely even in academic circles. A final topic is the pitfalls cannibalism poses for philosophic positions such as moral relativism.
1. The subtitle of Marriner, Cannibalism.
2. Korn, Radice, and Hawes, Cannibal, 10.
3. From the subtitle of Travis-Henikoff, Dinner with a Cannibal.
4. Tannahill, Flesh and Blood, 34.
5. In Sagan, Cannibalism, ix (foreword).
6. Some authors prefer the term “enslaved person” over “slave” in order to stress that being enslaved is a social condition, not an innate property. While this is a valid concern, I nevertheless often use the shorter term for convenience.
7. Lindenbaum, “Thinking about Cannibalism,” 482.
8. The capitalized term Western (and related terms) is used in this book for peoples and cultures of predominantly European origin—including not only Europe but also large parts of the current population of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. This use of a cardinal point is, of course, purely conventional and has no geographic meaning (seen from Africa, Europe is in the north, from North America, it is in the east).
9. See Sahlins, “Artificially Maintained Controversies.”
10. Ultimo mondo cannibale, Interfilm, dir. Ruggero Deodato, Italy.
11. RLJ Entertainment, dir. S. Craig Zahler, USA.
12. Nate Taskin, “The Cannibal: The Universal Boogeyman,” Massachusetts Daily Collegian, 26 October 2017, accessed 25 September 2020, https://dailycollegian.com/2017/10/the-cannibal-the-universal-boogeyman/.
13. Earle, Narrative, 114–15.
14. Erskine, Journal, 256. A few decades later, Alfred St. Johnston made a similar comment (St. Johnston, Camping among Cannibals, 226).
15. Earle, Narrative, 121.
16. Thomas, Slave Trade, chapters 22 (quote) and 25; Lang, Land, 215.
17. Quoted in Avramescu, Intellectual History, 131.
18. Ibid., 134.
19. Ibid., 134–35.
20. Zoe Delahunty-Light, “Can We All Agree That Gaming’s Evil Post-Apocalyptic Cannibal Trope Has to Stop?” GamesRadar+, 18 December 2017, accessed 25 September 2020, https://www.gamesradar.com/can-we-all-agree-that-gamings-evil-post-apocalyptic-cannibal-trope-has-to-stop/.
21. Oxford Dictionary on Lexico.com, “Cannibalism,” accessed 28 September 2020, https://www.lexico.com/definition/cannibalism.
22. Paul Moon, “Are We Really Just Meat and Nothing More?” The Spinoff, 31 May 2017, accessed 28 September 2020, https://thespinoff.co.nz/books/31-05-2017/more-than-it-can-chew-a-new-book-about-cannibalism-lacks-meat-on-its-bones/.
23. Lindenbaum, “Thinking about Cannibalism,” 479.
24. Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism, 148.
25. Davies, Human Sacrifice, 159.
26. See “Cannibal Stereotypes and Realities” in the Conclusion.
27. For example, Augouard, 28 années au Congo; David Cargill as quoted in Hogg, Cannibalism; Jaggar, Unto the Perfect Day.
28. Moon, This Horrid Practice, 52.
29. Douglas L. Oliver notes that cannibalism was apparently not practiced in the Society Islands, in Hawaii, nor in most islands of Micronesia. In Melanesia it was widespread, but by no means universal (Oliver, Oceania, 316).