The 11th-annual Social Science Undergraduate Symposium ended its first full day Wednesday with "Cannibal Controversies: Challenging Stereotypes in Social Science."
Beth Conklin, a professor of anthropology and religious studies at Vanderbilt University, was Wednesday's keynote speaker.
Conklin addressed many controversies concerning cannibalism. She said cannibalism was extreme behavior beyond a boundary not to be crossed.
Conklin spoke on the history of cannibalism. She used the Aztecs as an example of a group who used cannibalism in human sacrifice.
Conklin also addressed the controversy concerning the Anasazi, a group suspected of cannibalism. Recent tests have found traces of human deoxyribonucleic acid that exists in human intestines in preserved Anasazi fecal matter.
"This is a really touchy issue," Conklin said.
The majority of Conklin's lecture, however, focused on the Wari', a group native to Amazonian Brazil.
"They thought of cannibalism as an honorable thing to do," Conklin said.
Prior to contact with missionaries, the Wari' practiced cannibalism in their funeral rituals.
For three days, the family of the deceased held the body and cried. Then, the male in-laws of the deceased dismembered the body and placed the parts on a grill. Organs were wrapped in clean green leaves before being placed on the grill as well.
The firewood for the roasting was composed of one beam from the roof of every house in the community. The beams were cut to uniform size and then tied together.
After the parts were taken from the grill, the person closest to the deceased had to remove the flesh from the bones with their fingers. Conklin said it provided closure and was a very psychologically intense process.
The Wari' never ate their relatives. The in-laws, therefore, were given the social obligation of consuming the deceased. They never touched the flesh with their bare hands but instead used tiny wooden splinters. At times, those eating the flesh would vomit or become ill.
At dawn, the remaining parts of the body were cremated with the leftover firewood, pounded to dust and swept away.
"Clearly, they were not eating because they liked the taste of human flesh," Conklin said. "They thought it was far better to destroy the body than to leave it to decompose."
Conklin also stated that for the Wari', grief was connected to memory and cannibalism was a way to consume grief.
When a member of the Wari' community died, all traces of his or her life were erased. The home and possessions were burned, along with any areas in the rainforest associated with that person. Consuming the deceased ridded the community of the final reminder, the body.
"It's made me a lot more sensitive to ... the physical realities of death," Conklin said of her time spent studying the Wari'.
"You can't have a single theory of cannibalism," Conklin said, because the common stereotype is that cannibalism is always violent and malicious. However, for the Wari', it was a promise of continuing relations between the dead and the living, "beyond, not the grave, but beyond the roasting rack."
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