What is Human?: Food Taboo and Anthropophagy in Northwest Mozambique

Abstract

The labeling of fellow humans as “cannibals” is a trope employed by people across the globe, often in an effort to cast doubt on the humanity of others. In this study I am interested in alimentation, in particular anthropophagy, not only as a signal of belonging and exclusion, but also as a site of rationalized, intentional actions through which individuals demonstrate their humanity and so become human. Specifically, personhood is intertwined in much of Africa with actions and sentiments that express sociality, compassion, and circulation. These orientations are not, however, automatic. Very familiar human anti-social sentiments—such as envy, jealousy, spite, indignation, contempt, and selfishness—can be very personally gratifying. At the same time, however, they are destructive, insulating, and excessive, and therefore grotesque. Behaviors such as gluttony, incest, greed, and, of primary interest here, the eating of human flesh—acts that prioritize unbridled self-interest and callous accumulation of vitality for personal benefit and individuated wellbeing—are often associated in Africa with witches and sorcerers. Human personhood is about controlling or repressing (or, at least appearing to control and repress) these tendencies in favor of collaboration, porosity, and sympathy most of the time. This makes the project of being and becoming human a perpetual act, and there exists a necessity to continuously craft and maintain personhood through everyday behaviors. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in which I conducted a year-long dietary survey, participated in community activities, and engaged 20 principle informants in regular, unstructured conversation in their local language, and then used emergent ideas to guide informal discussions with a wide substrate of additional townspeople, I argue that avoiding acts that can be conceived as anthropophagous offers opportunities for individuals to prove their commitment to pro-sociality, and so to socially become human. My special focus is on a series of prohibitions that regard not only to cannibalism (as all societies have), but also on eating animals that resemble human beings in physical, emotional, and spiritual form. While the forbidden meats are rarely even an option to consume, articulating the taboos and exhibiting repugnance at the thought of eating these animals are significant for their contributions toward an active performance of the moral underpinning of social living and constructing humanity. What I am proposing, then, is that the avoidance of cannibalism and pseudo-cannibalism are not just symbolic statements, gustatory preferences, or an assertion of benevolence to counter European misconceptions—they also constitute the self. The language and rationale that my informants used to describe their dietary proscriptions suggests that values on sociality, porosity, and circulation were not only grafted onto food taboos, but were also intimately enacted and embodied through them. People are doing things with food prohibitions, not just following them out of routine. While taboos on cannibalism are thus significant as one of the few customs that are universally accepted, which seems to suggest a biological basis, it is clear that there is also much more on the construction of disgust at the consumption of human flesh that is culturally specific.