Among the Cannibals: Adventures on the Trail of Man's Darkest Ritual

It's the stuff of nightmares, the dark inspiration for literature and film. But astonishingly, cannibalism does exist, and in Among the Cannibals travel writer Paul Raffaele journeys to the far corners of the globe to discover participants in this mysterious and disturbing practice. From an obscure New Guinea river village, where Raffaele went in search of one of the last practicing cannibal cultures on Earth; to India, where the Aghori sect still ritualistically eat their dead; to North America, where evidence exists that the Aztecs ate sacrificed victims; to Tonga, where the descendants of fierce warriors still remember how their predecessors preyed upon their foes; and to Uganda, where the unfortunate victims of the Lord's Resistance Army struggle to reenter a society from which they have been violently torn, Raffaele brings this baffling cultural ritual to light in a combination of Indiana Jones-type adventure and gonzo journalism.

Illustrated with photographs Raffaele took during his travels, Among the Cannibals is a gripping look at some of the more unsavory aspects of human civilization, guaranteed to satisfy every reader's morbid curiosity.

"Australian Raffaele's quest for cannibals sent him around the world from the New Guinea highlands to the streets of Mexico City. Along the way he encountered necrophiliac Indian holy men, the brutalized child-victims of Uganda's civil war, and the iron-pumping king of Tonga. Raeffele's primary goal is to explore exactly what leads different cultures to violate one of humanity's greatest taboos. Yet Raffaele (a Smithsonian feature writer) is not above taking detours and his itinerary includes lessons in Tantric practices, drinking bouts with Tongan transvestites, and a tour of a Frida Kahlo exhibition. Raffaele is a competent adventure writer and has no problem asking questions along the lines of: 'Have you eaten human flesh?' Unfortunately, he displays a less-than nuanced perspective, leading him to statements such as: 'He is a mass killer whose humanity seems to have been almost entirely sucked out of him.'' The fact that a number of the cultures he investigates haven't engaged in cannibalism in centuries makes his quest often seem misguided. Raffaele also needlessly tries to force the drama by phrasing his issues in the most lurid terms imaginable. What could have been a serious investigation of the most extreme varieties of human experience becomes a kind of cannibal farce." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Paul Raffaele is a bluff, jaunty Australian adventurer and journalist with 40 years of experience in remote, primitive, dangerous parts of the world. Now he has sought out the last remaining cannibal tribes and cults on Earth and answered the three most important questions. Who are they, why do they do it, and what do we taste like?

The book opens with an arduous journey deep into... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) the interior of Papua New Guinea, where a fierce Stone Age tribe called the Korowai lives in treehouses and practices ritual cannibalism. Lacking any knowledge of germs and microbes, they ascribe all deadly illness to witchcraft, and a dying Korowai will whisper the name of the khakhua, or male witch, who is responsible. It will be a man they all know who has been invaded by the evil khakhua spirit, and he must now be killed, cut into pieces, roasted in leaves and eaten. Raffaele doesn't actually witness any cannibalism, here or anywhere else, but he gathers plenty of interesting detail. The Korowai say the meat tastes good, similar to a young cassowary (an ostrichlike bird), and the best parts are the brain and the tongue. Raffaele asks them if they also eat their enemies, and they are appalled. "We don't eat humans," they assure him; "we only eat khakhuas."

Then we're off to Benares in India, where Raffaele interviews some holy men of the Aghor sect, who drink whiskey from human skulls and eat the charred remains of the dead from funeral pyres on the banks of the Ganges. By breaking humanity's strict taboos (they also have sex with corpses), they claim to transcend society and come closer to enlightenment. They, too, say the meat tastes good and identify the brains as the best part.

Raffaele struggles with all this. A former altar boy, he holds a firm moral conviction that cannibalism is disgusting and wrong. But he can't help liking his new Korowai friends, can't help feeling sad that their traditional culture is doomed. Modernity is fast approaching, fronted by loggers and chainsaws. He also enjoys the company of the Aghor, tries hard to see things from their perspective, then turns vehemently against them at the end of the chapter: "Eating human flesh, unless you have no prospect of other food and are starving to death, is an evil act, justifying the taboos placed upon it throughout much of human history, and no amount of religious mumbo jumbo can sanctify it."

In 1979, the American anthropologist William Arens published an influential book arguing that tribal and ritual cannibalism has never existed; he held that the innumerable firsthand accounts were all racist lies advanced to justify conquest and colonization. It is unfortunate for Raffaele, and his readers, that Arens and his disciples are still taken seriously in academia, because it forces him to keep presenting evidence, over and over again with increasing exasperation, that, yes, all over the world — including medieval Europe where people ate pieces of mummified corpses to cure certain diseases — human beings have practiced cannibalism.

This is an uneven book, both in its structure and in the quality of the writing. When Raffaele is among the cannibals, he is engaging, but much of the book is padded out with his airport, taxi and hotel experiences, potted histories and summaries of tangential and unrelated topics, and he is not a funny or talented enough writer to make these compelling. India, unsurprisingly, is a "place of startling extremes." He goes to Mexico City to look into Aztec cannibalism and finds that "Mexicans are a passionate people."

Toward the end, the tone changes again, and we get a well-reported, well-told and absolutely heart-rending chapter from northern Uganda, where the rebel Lord's Resistance Army has forced many hundreds of captured children to kill and eat other children, making it easier to turn the boys into child soldiers and the girls into sex slaves. The evidence is overwhelming in the drawings the rescued children make, the similarity of their accounts and how deeply it has traumatized them. Seeing these children through Raffaele's eyes, and hearing their stories, one understands with ringing clarity why he gets so exasperated with desk-bound academics who insist that cannibalism, especially in Africa, is a racist-imperialist myth.

Reviewed by Richard Grant, the author of 'God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre' an exploration of drugs and lawlessness in Mexico., Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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There are many forms of cannibalism, says Raffaele, a feature writer for the Smithsonian magazine--perversion, to honor or insult defeated enemies, to remember beloved relatives, and to keep from starving. He focuses on cannibalism as part of religious ceremony, recounting his travels among peoples in New Guinea, the Ganges, Tonga, and Uganda who he predicts will be absorbed into world culture within a generation or two. He also assembles the record of the Aztecs in pre-colonial Mexico. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Paul Raffaele is a feature writer for Smithsonian magazine. He is Australian and lives in Hong Kong.