The first anthropologists visited the Fore between 1951 and 1953. Ronald and Catherine Berndt (..) flew into Lae, and then went on to Kainantu in late 1951. When they left Kainantu for their field site, Catherine Berndt, who had sprained her ankle, rode a horse ahead of a long line of porters: “An excited mob accompanied us and our carriers, grabbing at us and pulling us back, making sucking and hissing sounds, shouting and calling to us, greeting us with their welcoming words ‘I eat you.’
(..)
The Berndts stopped at Maira, in Kogu, where a large house had been built for them, as though .. they were the returning spirits of local ancestors. “Garden produce was heaped before us, pigs were killed, and dancing and singing went on until well after dark. . . . We were viewed as returning spirits of the dead who had forgotten the tongue of our fathers and wanted to relearn it”
(..)
Surprisingly, the Berndts rarely mentioned cannibalism in their early papers, but during the 1960s, when they were completing the publication of their fieldwork, they seemed, like so many other scholars of the time, to become fascinated by the subject. Patrol officers had occasionally reported stories of endocannibalism among the Fore, and the Berndts confirmed, almost in passing, that the Fore, especially the women, would engage in the ritual consumption of a loved one after death. Generally it was a relative who was “cooked and eaten almost immediately after death [although] a favored method was first to bury the corpse, and then to exhume it after a few days when the flesh was sufficiently decomposed to be tasty.” At first, cannibalism was little more than an interesting excursion from the Berndts’ main themes. But by the time Ronald Berndt came to write Excess and Restraint he was prepared to expatiate on such unusual funerary practices. “Human flesh,” he wrote, “is not eaten to absorb the ‘power’ or strength of the deceased, nor do men consider that female flesh will have a weakening effect on them.” Rather, it was thought that the dead liked to be eaten, and that their wishes should be respected. Most Fore believed that the crops would increase with the eating of their loved ones. Although Berndt, like most other analysts of cannibalism, never witnessed the feast, he accepted his informants’ statements on the matter, even their more bizarre tales linking the consumption of the corpse with necrophilia. Walter Arens later condemned Berndt’s “lengthy, titillating descriptions of often-combined cannibalistic and sexual acts,” but he went too far when he suggested that Excess and Restraint was “aptly titled only in the sense that on intellectual grounds it displays too much of the former and too little of the latter.”
// Warwick Anderson, 2000. “The Possession of Kuru: Medical Science and Biocolonial Exchange”
(..)
The Berndts stopped at Maira, in Kogu, where a large house had been built for them, as though .. they were the returning spirits of local ancestors. “Garden produce was heaped before us, pigs were killed, and dancing and singing went on until well after dark. . . . We were viewed as returning spirits of the dead who had forgotten the tongue of our fathers and wanted to relearn it”
(..)
Surprisingly, the Berndts rarely mentioned cannibalism in their early papers, but during the 1960s, when they were completing the publication of their fieldwork, they seemed, like so many other scholars of the time, to become fascinated by the subject. Patrol officers had occasionally reported stories of endocannibalism among the Fore, and the Berndts confirmed, almost in passing, that the Fore, especially the women, would engage in the ritual consumption of a loved one after death. Generally it was a relative who was “cooked and eaten almost immediately after death [although] a favored method was first to bury the corpse, and then to exhume it after a few days when the flesh was sufficiently decomposed to be tasty.” At first, cannibalism was little more than an interesting excursion from the Berndts’ main themes. But by the time Ronald Berndt came to write Excess and Restraint he was prepared to expatiate on such unusual funerary practices. “Human flesh,” he wrote, “is not eaten to absorb the ‘power’ or strength of the deceased, nor do men consider that female flesh will have a weakening effect on them.” Rather, it was thought that the dead liked to be eaten, and that their wishes should be respected. Most Fore believed that the crops would increase with the eating of their loved ones. Although Berndt, like most other analysts of cannibalism, never witnessed the feast, he accepted his informants’ statements on the matter, even their more bizarre tales linking the consumption of the corpse with necrophilia. Walter Arens later condemned Berndt’s “lengthy, titillating descriptions of often-combined cannibalistic and sexual acts,” but he went too far when he suggested that Excess and Restraint was “aptly titled only in the sense that on intellectual grounds it displays too much of the former and too little of the latter.”
// Warwick Anderson, 2000. “The Possession of Kuru: Medical Science and Biocolonial Exchange”
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