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Concept
Endocannibalism
Summary
Endocannibalism is a practice of cannibalism in one's own locality or community. Endocannibalism has also been used to describe the consumption of relics in a mortuary context.
Herodotus (3.38) mentions funerary cannibalism among the Callatiae, a tribe of India.
It is believed that some South American indigenous cultures, such as the Mayoruna people, practiced endocannibalism in the past. The Amahuaca Indians of Peru picked particles of bone out of the ashes of a cremation fire, ground them with corn, and drank them as a kind of gruel. For the Wari' people in western Brazil, endocannibalism was an act of compassion where the roasted remains of fellow Wari' were consumed in a mortuary setting; ideally, the affines (relatives by marriage) would consume the entire corpse, and rejecting the practice would be offensive to the direct family members. Ya̧nomamö consumed the ground-up bones and ashes of cremated kinsmen in an act of mourning; this is still classified as endocannibalism, although, strictly speaking, "flesh" is not eaten. Such practices were generally not believed to have been driven by need for protein or other food.
Kuru is a type of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) caused by prions that are found in humans. Human prion diseases come in sporadic, genetic and infectious forms. Kuru was the first infectious human prion disease discovered. It spread through the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, among whom relatives consumed the bodies of the deceased to return the "life force" of the deceased to the hamlet. Kuru was 8 to 9 times more prevalent in women and children than in men at its peak because, while the men of the village consumed muscle tissues, the women and children would eat the rest of the body, including the brain, where the prion particles were particularly concentrated. Historical research suggests the kuru epidemic may have originated around 1900 from a single individual who lived on the edge of Fore territory, and who is thought to have spontaneously developed some form of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, a related prion disease.
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