Cannibalism / Bill Schutt

 

Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History by Bill Schutt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a book club selection, but it's something that I probably would have willingly picked up of my own accord eventually. (When as a teen I was finally able to choose my own books from the extension library that sent books to farm families, one of the first ones I picked was a book on cannibalism, the title/author of which is missing from my memory banks.)

I find that geologists and biologists have a similar sense of humour to mine, making their nonfiction fun to read. When you're dealing with a sensational subject, a little lightness doesn't go amiss. (I assume that those who would be offended by the humour probably wouldn't pick up the book in the first place.) One of my personal difficulties is fear of spiders, but I found the spider chapter particularly amusing. For example, [M]ale wolf spiders become extremely picky when females show up and initiate courtship—which they do by alternately waving their forelegs around in the universal signal for “Pick me! Pick me!”

I was pleased to see literary works like Daniel Dafoe's Robinson Crusoe and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus referenced, not to mention The Odyssey and the histories of Herodotus. I had never considered before where our taboo against cannibalism originated, but it makes sense that it would be rooted in both the Judeo-Christian religious tradition and our veneration of the Greco-Roman world.


The use of the European taboo as an excuse to enslave, murder, and otherwise abuse non-Christian indigenous peoples is undeniable and the accounts of early colonizers have permanently muddied the waters on whether cultural or ritual cannibalism was ever practiced in the New World. To think about a culture uncontaminated by Christian values, the author includes chapters on Chinese and Pacific Island history, which were interesting.

Schutt was willing to go to greater extremes than I am—he chose to try a menu dish that included human placenta. The consumption of placentas is a trend which I simply do not understand! As the author documents, it is very rare and mostly practiced by privileged individuals. Texture of food is a major issue for me, so do not sign me up for such a menu item. (BTW, is this something that vegans are allowed to do? Just curious…)

The last chapters on Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies may be the most compelling argument for the position that Eating People Is Bad (the title of chapter 13). Ranging through several TSEs like Kuru, BSE, scrapie, and CJD, Schutt explores the mechanism of infection with these horrible diseases. I was completely unaware of the current questioning of the prion hypothesis in favour of a viral vector. Whichever source it turns out to be, this seems to me to be an excellent reason to avoid a Soylent Green type future.

This is a difficult topic to address, as it tends toward the sensational even when the researcher is trying to be clinical. Like other highly emotional topics, it tends to get mixed up with cultural and religious beliefs, rendering us very unobjective. Examining the issue throughout the zoological world gives the reader a more neutral frame of reference. Not a book for everyone, but entertaining if you view humans as part of the natural world.



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