Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2023 April 1
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April 1
editPrehistoric cannibalism, cruelty, and social cohesion
editAmerican journalist Adam Serwer famously wrote an essay called "The Cruelty is the Point" (2018), to describe what he saw as the "rejoicing in the suffering" by Trump and his supporters in those they "hate and fear". I couldn’t help be reminded by the 2017 findings in anthropology ("Assessing the calorific significance of episodes of human cannibalism in the Palaeolithic"), which implies that Paleolithic hominin anthropophagy might have less to do with nutrition and diet and more to do with social and cultural rituals and traditions, although nobody really knows. Serwer’s essay describes cruelty in terms of bonding mechanisms for social group cohesion. Putting aside the politics, could Serwer’s essay give us insights into early human behavior? In other words, if early hominins were not eating people for nutrition, might they have ate their enemies, which they presumably hated and feared, to solidify the power dynamics of the group? Viriditas (talk) 22:27, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
- It's the "us vs. them" or tribal mentality, which is as old as humanity. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:26, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks. What I’m trying to get at, to put it in a more modern context for contrast, is how the enemy was treated in the Paleolithic. If they weren’t eating the body for nutrition then they may have been doing something to the body that points to a ritual. For example, look at the controversy over how Captain Cook’s body was treated by Hawaiians. Viriditas (talk) 00:15, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
- It may not always have been enemies that got eaten: see Endocannibalism. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:35, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
- Great link to prehistory of endocannibalism in that article that I forgot about. Viriditas (talk) 01:02, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
- It may not always have been enemies that got eaten: see Endocannibalism. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:35, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks. What I’m trying to get at, to put it in a more modern context for contrast, is how the enemy was treated in the Paleolithic. If they weren’t eating the body for nutrition then they may have been doing something to the body that points to a ritual. For example, look at the controversy over how Captain Cook’s body was treated by Hawaiians. Viriditas (talk) 00:15, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
- Let's not forget that terms like "the Paleolithic" and "early hominins" cover huge swathes of time, many different environments, and many diversities of culture (technically, "hominin" includes chimpanzees), and what some people did at some points in prehistory is not necessarily representitive of the whole, any more than occasional reports of cannibalism in beseiged towns in the Middle Ages is representative of that milieu in general. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 176.249.31.43 (talk) 08:18, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
- For comparison, the term "the Middle Ages" covers a period of a mere 1000 years in Europe, while "the Paleolithic" covers more than 3,000,000 years globally. --Lambiam 09:10, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
- Let's not forget that terms like "the Paleolithic" and "early hominins" cover huge swathes of time, many different environments, and many diversities of culture (technically, "hominin" includes chimpanzees), and what some people did at some points in prehistory is not necessarily representitive of the whole, any more than occasional reports of cannibalism in beseiged towns in the Middle Ages is representative of that milieu in general. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 176.249.31.43 (talk) 08:18, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
- There was a fierce debate in ethnology, if there even ever had been cannibalism. It looks like, that there has been cannibalism in many "pre-historic" cultures all over the globe, South America, the South Seas, etc., I guess, but also in recent history (French Revolution - as a historian of that time once told me; Leningrad in W W 2). There definitely was a great deal of cannibalism in the Maoist "Cultural Revolution" (see for example the Website "factsanddetails.com"), and in terms which user:Viriditas mentioned: Political enemies were eaten and killed.--Ralfdetlef (talk) 11:17, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
- Hopefully not in that order.... --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 20:50, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
- From my reading on the subject (there is at least one book on it, which I no longer have access to) this was usually symbolic rather than hunger-motivated, with the liver being a particular target.
- See also List of incidents of cannibalism. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 176.249.31.43 (talk) 17:28, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
- There was a fierce debate in ethnology, if there even ever had been cannibalism. It looks like, that there has been cannibalism in many "pre-historic" cultures all over the globe, South America, the South Seas, etc., I guess, but also in recent history (French Revolution - as a historian of that time once told me; Leningrad in W W 2). There definitely was a great deal of cannibalism in the Maoist "Cultural Revolution" (see for example the Website "factsanddetails.com"), and in terms which user:Viriditas mentioned: Political enemies were eaten and killed.--Ralfdetlef (talk) 11:17, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
- From memory, Marvin Harris dealt with Aztec cannibalism and flower wars in Good to Eat and Cannibals and Kings from cultural materialism. --Error (talk) 08:54, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
- I am curious why you are focusing on such archaic time periods when human cannibalism of enemies was documented in the recent wars in Libera and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. You can even draw the relation that both countries claim to be democratic republics just like the United States. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 14:57, 3 April 2023 (UTC)