Once the soul leaves the body, where should it be placed, in the depths of the Earth or deep within the bowels of a person? Today, cannibalism is less widely practiced and burial is the predominant method of funerary ritual around the world. The consumption of loved ones has not always been considered an act of violence but once seen as one of devotion. The consumption enables the deceased relative to better enter the spirit world and the recipients can obtain some of the essence of their loved one for the Fore people of Papua New Guinea and Wari people of Brazil (Burley, “Eating Human Beings”). In early modern Europe, people would taste a stranger’s flesh not to mourn this unknown person’s passing but under the assumption that such an act had curative powers. Although the

body can function as a symbol of society, each culture treats the bodies, and the cessation of life, differently. Rituals are used to separate death and life (Douglas). In comparison to
funerary cannibalism of these isolated groups, the European practice of medical cannibalism, becomes more abrasive and barbaric. As the apothecary system developed into the Western medical system, the body became the site of bioprospecting.
 

As strange as apothecary jars look, with colorful script in abbreviated Latin, to the modern eye, any apothecary from across Europe in the early modern period would have been able to recognize the names and uses of each compound. Besides the sweet flowers and exotic spices in the apothecary shop, some unfortunate souls are trapped in these very containers although not for long. Once a peasant or king came in with a headache or perhaps anxiety, the mummy would find a new home once more. Although authentic Mumia, those ancient bits of body, wrappings, and spices from the tombs of Egypt, received a premium price compared to the local, embalmed bodies of someone taken from the gallows or battlefield, both were consumed to provide a bit of the soul to whoever was suffering from ailments (Dunea). Mumia was used from antiquity to the early modern era but most popular from the 16th to 18th centuries (Scholz-Böttcher et al.). Despite medical cannibalism existing as a long-standing European-tradition, this act of consumption is often associated with places far from Western society.

The Fore of Papua New Guinea practiced eating dead kinfolk up until the twentieth-century. The incorporation of the body of a dead person into living relatives is an act of transumption as it is part of the process for rebirth as ancestors. The Fore believe that the kwela, the pollutant part of the body, will haunt the family if it is not taken care of properly. To avoid such a fate, the kwela must be buried or eaten. Once eaten, the kwela will reside in the wombs of female relatives where it is not able to harm people that share the deceased’s blood. Yesegi, a person’s occult power, is eventually passed onto one of the deceased’s children during this ritual. Although bodies could be buried, transumption was the most common method as the Fore would rather see their loved ones eaten by people
than by worms, insects, and other creatures of the dirt. The act was one of devotion, loyalty, and grief. The kwela would attack any woman whose family had any involvement in the death. The Yesegi was recycled within the family and the deceased was reborn as an ancestor. Jaw and collar bones were kept and worn but the rest of the body and any utensil or leaves that touch the body, were also cooked and consumed (Whitfield et al.). Although the Fore engaged in this ritual for completely different reasons than Europeans consuming
strangers for health, European witnesses to such acts were horrified in both the pacific islands and across the Atlantic.

Before the early 1960s, cannibalism was common in Wari’ society of Brazil. The consumption, when against an enemy group, was an expression of supremacy and revenge, but could also be one of compassion and duty. No part of the corpse was allowed to touch the Earth. The act of eating allows movements between the worlds of people and animals. The disposal of the corpse by ingestion, and only by non-blood relatives due to a taboo against auto-cannibalism, is a performance more dramatic than the routine consumption of animal flesh as food. The refusal and evident consumption of the putrid condition of the body is an act of paying homage to eaten loved-ones. The ritual ends with the body gone and the possessions, including the house, burned, thus the Wari able to relinquish emotional attachments to the deceased (Burley “Eating Human Beings”).

While cannibalism is uncommon in the Western medical system today, the consumption of the body is the basis of this medical knowledge. Medicine is built on the manipulations of the physiological body whether living or dead (Bishop “Embracing Death”). The lifeless human allows the medical doctor to be trained in anatomy. The dead body became the
fetish of medical students by the 1790s as students searched for truth buried in the body and raced against decay. The dead body was the static ideal in which to measure the dynamic nature of life against. Dead material is foundational to the study of life because it was the only method to understand life. The practice of vivisection allowed for the understanding of life as the physicians controlled the mechanisms of life and death
(Bishop “On Medical Corpses and Resurrected Bodies”). This knowledge was collected by motivations of obtaining immortality as physicians, apothecaries, and alchemists alike

all searched for the elixir of life which would repel death (De Vos). Here is the birth of the false promise that life can be sustained indefinitely if enough “spare parts’’ are sacrificed. In

the predominant Christian traditions of Western society, hospice care is where the resurrection of Christ is enacted (Bishop, “On Medical Corpses and Resurrected Bodies”). In hope of the resurrection of the body, Christianity argues that death is abominable and unnatural (Cunningham). Here, Christian ideals of everlasting life are completely opposed with the transcendent nature of the Fore and Wari’s beliefs on the afterlife.

Once Mumia fell out of fashion in the 19th century, people sought cures that are still tried on and tested on other’s bodies (Barber). The modern hospital is a type of laboratory where experimental knowledge is gained by exploration of the body (Bishop “The Machinations of Life”). Doctors did not believe the body could function without the brain until the organ transplants of the 1960s. This aligns with the concept of brain death in which, for the first time, it is imagined that parts of the body can live while others die. This redefinition of death coincidentally, or maybe not, appears around the start of organ donation or simply a coincidence. Regardless, there is the oxymoronic invention of “living cadavers” to name the source of organs. This term is imported into the clinical area from anatomy and physiology laboratory (Bishop, “Commissioning Death: From Living Cadavers to Dead Brains”). In reference to the corpse, the patient becomes less than human, similarly to the people centuries ago whose flesh filled apothecary jars. This comparison is not to criticize voluntary organ donation but show the tension between whether to care for humans or to utilize their remains. Although the deceased would not need their bodies anymore, the same cannot be sent for their families and communities (Graham). Under a new framework, organ donation is a sacred gift where families can witness a small part of their loved ones stay in this world. There is power in funerary arrangements.

Contemporary Western society has no shared social contexts and few cultural practices to prepare for death in contrast to earlier society. When death becomes a private matter, increasingly medicalized, society loses the knowledge of how to respond to death. Before the 18th century, death was the difference between present and past states but then became focused on the separation between living related and dead individuals (Tomaini). Rituals enacted on the human body are matters of both personal and private (Douglas). By leaning into the social element, the grief of death, the dearly departed are integrated back into the community in the way that cannibalistic funerary rites intended, instead of consumed as sources of knowledge like bits of Mumia inside ajar. In the end, funerals are for the living and not the dead.