Relations between Funerary Cannibalism

and Warfare Cannibalism: The Question

of Predation
La mort n'est pas une simple privation de la vie, un
deces; elle est une transformation dont le cadavre
est a la fois l'instrument et I'objet, une transmutation
du sujet qui s'opere dans et par le corps.
. . I l/.I JEAN-PIERRE VERNANT

Apareada Vilaga
Museu Nacional/Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

ABSTRACT The Wari', a southem Amazonian group of the Txapakura linguisticfamily,

ate their dead and their enemies until at least the beginning of the-L()6os. This article
argues the continuity between these two forms of cannibalism by demonstrating that
the Wari' conceive the ingestion of the dead as a means of transforming them into
prey. Predation - a defining characteristic of Amerindian warfare cannibalism -
comprises a crucial means of differentiating two terms set in relationship, whether
these terms be allies and enemies, the Wari' and animals, or the living and the dead.
In a world peopled by actual orpotential human subfects, to transform the other into
prey is to guarantee oneself the exclusive position of human, despite this being an
essentially temporary position.

KEYWORDS Amazonia, Wari', funeral, warfare, cannibalism

I
n examining the literature on Amerindian cannihalism, we find ourselves
faced with a paradox. On one hand, what are conventionally termed exo-
and endocannihalism appear to he in a relation of continuity, with Levi-
Strauss arriving at the conclusion that 'The now traditional distinction he-
tween exo and endocannihalism is misleading' (1984:141). Ethnographic ex-
amples of such continuity are the warfare cannihalism of the 17th-century
Tupinamha, in which an identification hetween the victim and his captor evolved
during the period preceding his execution; Pano funerary cannibalism, inter-
preted by Erikson (1986:198) as a form of'contra-exocannibalism,' since the
deceased was eaten by his own in order to avoid his being consumed by oth-
ers, whether enemies or animals (also see Dole 1974:306); and finally Guayaki
funerary cannihalism, in which, following Helene Clastres's (1968:70) analy-
sis, the dead of the group are treated as enemies. It is therefore surprising
that the literature also reveals - especially when we concentrate on the de-

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tailed descriptions of funerary rites - a considerable effort to stress the differ-

ence between these two practices, a task achieved primarily through the dis-
sociation of funerary cannibalism from a 'predation complex,' where preda-
tion is posited as the central feature of warfare cannibalism or exocannibalism
(Menget 1985:138), and thus approximates the latter to hunting activities.
For example, the funerary cannibalism ofthe Pano Kaxinawa and the Guayaki
- both cited in the literature as instances of continuity between different forms
of cannibalism - are presented by other authors as practices dissociated from
the notion of predation. Thus, in McCallum's view of the Kaxinawa:

Consuming the flesh, kin can perhaps retain within themselves something of the
deceased, releasing the soul toflyin the direction of the forest. Endocannibalism
was at the same time an act oflove, of compassion and of self-protection (because
of the rapid liberation of the soul from the body). As it was possible to dispose of
the body through other means, the act of eating it was motivated, above all, by
love and kinship - and should not be seen as predation (McCallum 1996:70).

In the case of the Guayaki, the oscillation in analysis shown by Pierre Clastres
in two articles written on the group's funeral (Clastres & Sebag 1963; P. Clastres
1968) provides us with an example which helps explain some of the reasons
behind ethnologists' hesitations in linking funerary cannibalism and preda-
tion. In the first article, the association between corpse, dead enemy and animal
prey is explicitly recognized. The same taboos - the same table manners -
were observed in these activities:

Likewise, the consumption of human flesh does not seem to present important
differences from that of animal flesh (Clastres & Sebag 1963:178).

While cannibalism properly speaking is found to possess no value beyond

that of alimentation ('until now only the alimentary value ofthis act has been
put forward' 1963:179), the authors argue that the cremation ofbones (which
were not ingested) contains a properly religious meaning: the elevation of
smoke to the skies allows the soul to rise to its celestial home.
In Clastres's second article, published five years later, the so-called alimen-
tary value of cannibalism was once more asserted, but only to be relativized
as follows:

Tbe alimentary component of anthropophagy is tberefore of considerable impor-

tance to the Guayaki; nevertheless, it is not exclusive, and the Indians have pro-
vided us with their own theory of cannibalism (Clastres 1968:41).

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Now it is the flesh's consumption which is responsible for the banishment of

the soul, which, if present, would provoke illness and even death. Clastres
concludes, therefore, that cannibalism's function is predominantly negative,
one of avoiding a state of internal disturbance generated by the soul's pres-
ence; its effect is 'static,' since nothing is acquired by eating humanflesh,only
the maintenance of the situation prior to death (1968:42).
It is interesting that Clastres begins the last article by pointing out a moral
difficulty faced by ethnographers in their recognition of cannibalism: very
often, the invaders of America invented cases of cannibalism in order to jus-
tify a pursuit of conquest involving the enslavement and extermination of
native peoples. As a response, Americanist ethnologists ended up discredit-
ing a/>nbn testimonies which appeared to derive from dubious sources (P.
Clastres 1968:31).'
According to the author, this is what happened with Guayaki cannibal-
ism. Writing on the theme in an article from 1943, Baldus assumed the cred-
ibility of material collected by the German Mayntzhusen, which testifled to
the reality of funerary cannibalism among the Guayaki. Three years later, in
1946, in a chapter from the Handbook of South American Indians written in
collaboration with Metraux, Baldus throws into question the very same ma-
terial. Thus, the ethnographic details which had previously made the exist-
ence of cannibalism among the Guakaki incontestable ('it is difficult to doubt
this material'), became classifled as unconvincing. Clastres concludes:

Without doubt, we should see in thesefluctuationsa sign of the difTiculty which

Americanists face in approaching the question of cannibalism, even when it really
exists (Clastres 1968:31).

However, the author does not make the link between this moral difficulty and
the dissociation between funerary cannibalism and the consumption of ani-
mal prey which we find in his own varying interpretations. Nonetheless, it be-
comes clear that the parallel between these two kinds of analytic shift - one
concerning the existence and the other the meaning of cannibalism - allows
us to propose that the emphasis on eschatological aspects of funerary canni-
balism, in detriment to its properly predatory aspects, is, among other things,
our contemporary (and ethically correct) version of denying that the act took
place. A negation which, we should remember, is not restricted to anthropo-
logical production, but very often characterizes the natives' own vision of
their practices. For example, the Yanomami of Helene Clastres and Lizot:

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consuming the bones of their kin is not cannibal behavior [...] cannibalism is the
excess, all the uncontrolled ways of acting; enumerated point by point, it com-
prises all those things which the Yanomami do not do. They are not cannibals.
The cannibal is always the other, no.? (Clastres & Lizot 1978:126).

And even the Kaxinawa of McCallum:

Humans are neither cannibals nor consumers of rawflesh.Being cannibal means
being other - Inka oryuxibu - all that the living Kaxinawa strive not to be. (McCallum
1996:74).

To say that funerary cannibalism is predation would he the same as saying

that the feelings cultivated for a member of the group, a kinsperson, are iden-
tical to those which define relations of enmity: hostility and aggression (which
is the mode in which Freudian psychoanalysis interprets the act of cannibal-
ism in all its forms). As a means of opposing this type ofassociation, funerary
cannibalism, realized in an atmosphere of pain and compassion, should thus
be understood as an act of love - this, at least, is McCallum's (1996:70) asser-
tion. But mixed up here are the logic of the act and the emotions associated
with it.
Beyond this moral question, as we term it, we can identify a problem of
theoretical affiliation. The idea of predation was associated so intimately with
the theory of'culture as protein,' to use Sahlins's (1978) expression (an idea
defended by cultural materialists such as Harner 1977), that the only alterna-
tive left for those opposing this theory was - after a ferocious critique - to
assert its apparent opposite: funerary cannibalism as an eschatological re-
source. As if the only way of assuring that human bodies are not eaten to
satisfy hunger, or a particular taste for this kind of meat, were to deny any
relation between the flesh of the corpse and the meats which serve as much-
enjoyed food.
It is interesting to dwell for a moment on this so-called gastronomic as-
pect of funerary cannibalism - a feature stressed by informants, but one which
tends to be denied by seemingly non-materialist ethnologists. It is worth noting
that this type of claim is frequently found in the Amerindian literature on
funerary cannibalism rituals where the flesh of the corpse is eaten, and is cer-
tainly not restricted to Clastres's Guayaki. We may take the Pano language
groups as an example. In reporting a number of cases of cannibalism among
these populations, Gertrude Dole comments:

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But in spite of the obvious supernatural element in Panoan funerary endocanni-

balism, some of the data indicate that there is also a gastronomic aspect to the
practice. The Capanahua, for example, roasted the body 'like game' [...] The Cashibo
ate their old people with delight (Dole 1974:306).

I suggest we need to examine this emphasis on the pleasure of eating human

flesh with more caution, before we extract from it any rapid conclusions on
the protein value of the meal, a notion which empties the food of all its sym-
bolic character. I wish to highlight the fact that such claims ofgustative pleasure
coexist with others which appear to be set in contradiction. The Guayaki ate
intestines which were only slightly spoiled, as well as less putrid parts of the
decomposing corpses (Clastres 1968:38). By contrast, as I discuss later, Wari'
corpses were roasted after they had already reached an advanced state of
putrefaction, and then eaten with some sacrifice. Nonetheless, faced with this
almost indigestable meat, the eaters politely exclaimed: 'this is good, it isn't
at all rotten!'
If we suppose a relation of continuity between the type of exclamation
made by the Wari' and the claims about the deliciousness of the corpse's meat
reported by other authors, it becomes clear that we are presented with peo-
ple's efforts to prove the edibility (far from evident) of the deceased'sflesh.A
corpse does not look like food, whether this is due to the recognition of a
kinsperson or group member, or due to its rotten state. For this reason, in the
presence of the corpse - or that of the astonished ethnographer face-to-face
with such a bizarre custom - what is stressed is the unobvious: the corpse is
food. This kind of exertion is not restricted to the consumption of a dead
member of the group. Here, we may cite Cunhambebe's famous phrase in
reply to Hans Staden's disapproval of the former's consumption of human
flesh: 'I'm a jaguar. It's tasty' (Staden 1974:132). In turn, we may contrapose
this statement to Anchieta and Abbeville's observations on the repugnance
held for human flesh by the Tupinamba: some expressed an enormous dis-
gust for thisflesh,and would vomit after eating it (cf. Viveiros de Castro 1992a:
56). Relish and disgust are not, in my view, contradictory aspects associated
with the consumption of human meat, attributable simply to individual taste.
Rather, both are attitudes whose aim is to evince the edibility of the meat,
dehumanizing the deceased, but without failing to preserve some of his or
her humanity: this explains the obligatory abstention of some, such as the
enemy's killers, or the kin of the dead in the Wari' case, who sometimes ex-
press their avoidance precisely in terms of repugnance. As we shall see, this

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double posture in relation to the humanity of the deceased or the enemy

corresponds to the equally dual nature of these rites. In the case of the Wari'
funeral, a failure to perceive its double aspect - in which the deceased's hu-
manity and inhumanity remain in constant opposition - could lead us to a
partial interpretation, one which misses the rite's essence.
As far as the Wari' material is concerned, my hypothesis - possibly appli-
cable to some other ethnographic universes, as I hinted above - is that inges-
tion is a fundamental classificatory operator, one intrinsically bound to the
notion of predation, understood here as a relation between predator and prey.
Given the basic identity between humans and animals, predation has as its
aim the marking of a difference in a human continuum, or the explication of
this difference which in another mode would remain masked. Let us see how
this takes place among the Wari'.

The Wari'
Speaking a language of the Txapakura family, the Wari' live in southern
Amazonia, Brazil, and today comprise some i,8oo people. Known in the
anthropological literature until the 1960s as the Pakaa Nova, they consti-
tute, along with the More who live in Bolivia, the last remnants ofthis lin-
guistic family. Wari' is not an ethnonym; in their language, it means 'people,'
'us,' 'human beings,' and this is the term by which they are known to the
region's Whites. Until the beginning of the 1960s - when almost all the Wari'
decided to approach the Whites pacifically, having been at war with them
since at least the beginning ofthis century - they used to eat both their dead
and the enemies that they killed.^ Nowadays, the dead are huried, and ene-
mies are no longer killed.
Through the analysis of the two literal forms of cannibalism practiced by
the Wari', I wish to show firstly the relation between predation - which has
cinegetic predation as its model - and ingestion; and secondly the central
importance of these procedures as logical operators serving to register a dif-
ferentiation between the terms involved in the relation. Because humanity -
for the Wari' - is a potential inherent in various types of beings, this potential
is actualized as a position, one defined in the act of predation. The agency of
hunters, warriors and eaters ofthe dead, is directed towards assuring the Wari'
the place of humanity - that is, the position oiwari'.

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Relations between Funerary Cannibalism and Warfare Cannibalism 89

Humanity
For the Wari', the presence of spirit (jam-, always accompanied by a suffix
indicating possession) is exclusive to a number of types of beings: Wari', en-
emies (Indians from other ethnic groups and Whites), certain mammals, all
fish, some birds, all types of bees and snakes, as well as a few plants. The
spirit characterizes humanity, the feature which turns any being into wari'.
Thus, animals endowed with spirit are taken to be humans: they have a hu-
man body which can be seen by shamans, they live in houses, drink maize
beer and eat roasted and cooked foods.
The body (kwere-, again always followed by a suffix indicating possession)
is the location of the personality; it defines the person, animal, plant or thing.
Everything that exists has a body, which provides the entity with its particu-
lar characteristics. The Wari' say: 'Je kwere' ('my body is like this'), which
means: 'this is my way,' 'I'm like this.' This also applies when referring to
animals or things. In this way, while the body {kwere) is the place of differ-
ence - the body differentiates species and individuals — the spirit is the place
of similitude. All beings endowed with humanity have, we could say, the same
culture, which is the Wari's' culture. Accordingly, they hunt, kill enemies,
usefireto prepare their food, cultivate maize, and so on. Nevertheless, this is
the way that they see the world. The Wari' know that the jaguar kills its prey
with its body and its teeth, and that it eats its food raw. But for the jaguar, or
better, from the jaguar's point of view (which the shaman can share, but not
the rest of the Wari'), it shoots its prey with arrows, just as a Wari' hunter kills
game or enemies, carrying the prey to its house and delivering it to its wife,
who prepares it usingfire.Humanity is a point of view on the world - that of
Wari' culture.
In this sense, just like the Makuna analyzed by Arhem (1993), the Wari'
provide us with an exemplary case of what Viveiros de Castro (1996, 1998)
terms perspectival thinking. According to the latter author, for many Amer-
indian peoples 'the world is inhabited by different sorts of subjects or per-
sons, human and non-human, which apprehend reality from distinct points
ofview' (1998:469).' This does not imply multiple representations of the world,
as relativism postulates, since 'all beings see ('represent') the world in the
same way — what changes is the world that they see' (1998:477). This 'per-
spectivism' is characterized as 'multinaturalism,' since it comprises a wide
range of'natures' and a single 'culture.' Animals, for example, 'see in the same
way as we do different things because their bodies are different from ours'
(1998:478). Point of view is a property of spirit, since only beings endowed

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with spirit are subjects, humans, but 'the difFerences between viewpoints [...]
lies not in the soul. Since the soul is formally identical in all species, it can
only see the same things everywhere - the difference is given in the specificity
of bodies' (1998:478). We shall return to this topic later in the analysis of the
Wari' funeral.

War and Warfare Cannibalism

The Wari' conducted war expeditions with the sole aim of killing enemies:
Indians of other ethnic groups and Whites. A group of men would leave in
the direction of the enemy village and lie in hiding, waiting for someone to
approach. The technique of attack was ambush. When the enemy approached
all the men released their arrows, shooting even if the first arrow had been
sufficient to kill. In this way, everyone became a killer, returning to the vil-
lage and beginning a period of seclusion, during which they remained almost
immobile, sustaining themselves on great quantities of non-fermented maize
drink {chicha) produced incessantly by women. The killers - all of them -
contained the spirit of the dead enemy within them, and it was this which,
with the help of the maize brew, caused them to swell and fatten; the ulti-
mate purpose of the seclusion.
Whenever possible, the killers brought with them parts of the victim -
head, arms and legs - which were carried, raw, in baskets slung over the should-
ers exactly like animal game, differing only in that the latter - with the ex-
ception of large animals such as tapir - are usually carried whole. The en-
emy's trunk, very heavy, was left in situ. The genitals (especially male geni-
tals) were taken by the men in order to be admired by women (and then
thrown on the fire to burn).
The enemy's flesh was transported raw for roasting in the village. How-
ever, if the journey was lengthy, it could be roasted in the forest by the kil-
lers. What is crucial here to our analysis is that the enemy'sflesh,just like the
flesh of game, was never eaten rotten. Arriving in the village, the women,
who constituted the majority of the people who stayed behind, welcomed
the killers exuberantly, especially if they had brought enemy flesh, and this
meat was roasted and eaten by them and by the men who had not been in-
volved in the kill.
Near to home, the warriors whistled or sounded theirflutes.Everyone ran
to meet them. They handed the enemy's body over to the women, saying
'Roast my prey' (Xainje watama). The enemy's flesh was consumed in the
same way as animal game, the meat eaten off the bone. The Wari' say, how-

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ever, that they ate the enemy's flesh with anger. The killers, who contained
the spirit of the enemy inside them, refrained from eating his flesh.
It is important to stress that the essential aspect of warfare was killing the
enemy, not eating him. In less favourable circumstances, when the killers were
forced to flee, the victim's body was left where it fell. Everything happened
exactly in the same form on their arrival, including the seclusion of the kill-
ers, although the enthusiasm of the women was slightly lessened. Eating the
enemy was an excess, a pleasure which they allowed themselves whenever
possible. In contrast to thefleshof deceased Wari' which, as we shall see, had
at least to be tasted, the enemy - having been killed like an animal - did not
need to be eaten. Predation by itself confirmed his animal status, placing the
Wari' in the position of humans.
What should be underlined here is that the Wari' do not strive to difleren-
tiate warfare and hunting: they endeavour to approximate them. When they
hunt and eat their favourite game, they quickly become subject to reprisal, a
counter-predation, which is likewise defined by hunting and by warfare. As
such, enemy iwijarri) and prey {karawd) are equivalent positions with which
the Wari' maintain the same type of relation: both are shot and eaten.
So, on one hand, the identity between wijam and karawa is founded on
their mutual diflerence from the Wari', who themselves occupy a position of
humans - the unique humans, wari'. This equivalence occurs in the context
of the relation between elements; that is, in the context of predation. Ideally,
the Wari' are,those who prey and this is what differentiates them, what char-
acterizes them as humans, wari', and constitutes enemies and animals - both
equally prey - as non-humans. Yet, on the other hand, what enables them to
be related to the Wari' is precisely their human potential; the capacity to act
as humans (also see Chaumeil 1985, for an analogous vision of Yagua war-
fare). In this sense, legitimate game is that which is also a predator, and the
animals preferred as prey by the Wari' are precisely those which are capable
of preying on them (symbolically). These animals and enemies can poten-
tially occupy the position of predators; they are capable of attacking, killing
and eating the Wari', and are, during these moments, humans, wari' (which
makes the Wari' non-humans - wijam or karawd).
However, it is important to note that when the Wari' speak of enemies
and game in the context of predation, they emphasize their animal charac-
teristics, not their human ones. Their desire is to demarcate that what is killed
and eaten is not people. An interesting fact is that the Wari' never use the
female gender when speaking of enemies, even when this involves women,

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as the female gender only exists for human beings. To refer to a woman from
an enemy group, they say: 'female enemy {femed},' \\ist as they speak of ani-
mals, and not 'enemy wife'.
We turn now to the Wari' funeral, where the corpse-food equivalence is
less perceptible, masked by ritual procedures whose aim is precisely to dif-
ferentiate this meal from both daily alimentation and the devouring of en-
emies.

The Funeral
During serious illness, the afflicted person is already wept for as though
dead. This is still the case today. The Wari' usually say that, at this moment,
kin (close consanguines) differentiate themselves from non-kin (distant kin
or affines) through their weeping: the former cry profusely, especially at the
moment of death; the remainder do not cry, or do so only moderately as a
mark of solidarity with the dead person's kin. After death takes place, non-
relatives are asked to leave for the other villages to pass on the news to other
kin of the deceased. Today, these distant kinsfolk are waited for in order for
them to weep for the deceased, but in the past when the dead were ingested,
their arrival was awaited before preparing the body for roasting: kinsfolk in-
sisted on seeing the body whole. Due to the average journey time of two to
three days, the hody was invariably rotten and swollen by the time it was
quartered.
Kinsfolk hugged the corpse, weeping and singing a funeral chant during
which they referred to the deceased by consanguine kinship terms, exactly
as today. In the past, though, when everyone or nearly everyone was present,
non-related men were asked to cut up the corpse. At this point, kinsfolk turned
away, unable to bear the sight of the loved one's body being dismembered.
Occasionally, one of them placed him or herself underneath the body, iden-
tifying with the deceased, and making it look as though his or her body would
also be cut; in addition, a woman sometimes received the internal organs of
the dead kinsperson, which she would hug and cry over. The parts were sub-
sequently washed and placed on a grill, also built by non-kin. The whole body
was roasted, with the exception of the genitals. Of the internal organs, only
the liver and heart were eaten. What was not set to be ingested was thrown
directly onto the fire.
The meat ready, kinsfolk had to separate it into pieces over a mat, accom-
panied on one side by small portions of soft maize cake (pamonka) prepared
by non-related women. Non-kin were then invited to eat the deceased, which

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they were obliged to do with delicacy, using small sticks to lift the meat to
their mouths, along with the maize cake. Some refused to eat owing to the
meat's advanced state of decay. However, kinsfolk were not perturbed by
those who would not eat, but rather with those who ate voraciously as though
they had been fed game. Eaters had to show respect and control.
If the meat was very rotten only a small part would be eaten, the rest being
burnt on the fire. Ideally, a corpse was entirely consumed/cremated at the
place of death, so that kin had to travel to it and not vice-versa. However,
according to some informants, it was common for kin who had not been able
to go to the place of the funeral to be confronted with a portion of the roasted
corpse, consumed before them by a non-kinsperson.
After the meat was finished, the brains were eaten, directly with the hands,
not only by non-kin, but also by infants related to the deceased: grandchil-
dren, according to the majority of informants; children, according to others.
The bones were either burnt on the grill or toasted, then macerated and in-
gested after being mixed with honey. The people who drank the bones were
non-kin, but also (according to some) children related to the deceased. Every-
thing left over was burnt and the grill buried. After this, kinsfolk in mourning
passed several months burning everything which reminded them of the de-
ceased. His or her name ceased to be pronounced, so that anyone called with
the same name was forced to change it. Again, this still happens today. Mourn-
ing only ended when it was decided to hold the 'leaving,' an end-of-mourn-
ing rite in which, following a collective hunt, pieces of roasted game were
wept over as though those of the deceased.

The Non-Predatory Aspect

At first sight, the funerary ritual provides evidence of an explicit effort to
differentiate the corpse's consumption from the consumption of prey and
enemies. While game and enemies were never eaten after they had become
rotten, the Wari' corpse was left to rot before being roasted. Although the
Wari' say that its putrefaction was an inevitable consequence of the lengthy
wake, since the body could not be cut up before the arrival of kin who lived
further away, it becomes clear that it was above all a cooking method; one
aimed at making ingestion difficult, and so preventing the corpse from being
eaten with pleasure. Otherwise, some say, it would have been eaten in the
same way as game. This also explains the use of sticks to lift the small pieces
to the mouth; they constituted table manners which sought to curtail any
manifestation of avid hunger. In contrast to the meat of game, which was

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eaten directly with the hands, and that of enemies, ingested with a gusto which
revealed the anger held for them, the Wari' corpse had to be eaten with mod-
eration and sadness.
Those who ate, who were not near kin ofthe deceased, were somewhat
reluctant to agree to the request by the deceased's kin to eat him or her, and
very often they wept along with the kinsfolk during the initial stages ofthe
funeral, referring to the dead person by terms of consanguinity. It was as if,
therefore, the ritual procedures had the precise objective of differentiating
the corpse from other types of prey.
This type of perspective makes it possihle for the rite itself to become dis-
sociated from the idea of predation. It is evident, though, that such differen-
tiation is only necessary because the corpse-prey identity is implicit in the
act of devouring, and flourishes at various moments, despite the ritual pre-
cautions. But this does not simply involve a hidden identity which can be
glimpsed by more careful scrutiny. The rite is in itself double or dubious: some
of its procedures sought the exact opposite effect, that is, to identify explicit-
ly the corpse with animal prey. This double nature is expressed in the dicho-
tomy between eaters and kin.

The Predatory Perspective

The point of departure for the analysis ofthe Wari' funeral that I shall de-
velop here is the marked distinction of behavior between kin and non-kin
participating in the act - or, as the Wari' say, between true kin, irinari{•where
in means 'real' or 'true'), who are close consanguines, and the xukun wari'
(where xukun means 'other,' in this context, 'other people') or naripaxii^more
or less kin'); ideally real affines. My hypothesis is that these different modes
of behavior are based on distinct points ofview or perspectives concerning
the deceased. Kinsfolk continued to see the loved one in the corpse, even
after its rotting, cutting up and roasting, and for this reason were unable to
eat the body, while non-kin perceived clearly that they were no longer con-
fronted with a human being, wari'. The service which they rendered to the
deceased's kin, cutting up the body, roasting it and then eating it, was that of
forcing the kin to share their vision: the corpse was no longer a person. This
they only effectively achieved some months later during the end-of-mourn-
ing rite. Non-kin acted to produce the dead body, the corpse, and the means
of achieving this was ingestion, as if edibility was the only irrefutable proof of
non-humanity.

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Relations between Funerary Cannibalism and Warfare Cannibalism 95

In the case of the funeral, the difference of perspectives which interests us

is not an attribute of different 'biological' species, but a characteristic intrin-
sic to the Wari' universe. Kin and non-kin act in a distinct manner, particu-
larly in terms of the corpse's ingestion, because they are able to see it in dif-
ferent ways. Here, perspective is also an attribute of the body, and it is this
difference in points of view whieh makes the funeral possible.
The Wari' conceive the possibility of various degrees of kinship, based on
the notion ofconsubstantiality. In the most restricted sense, kin are those whom
the Wari' tend to call 'true kin': grandparents, parents, parents' siblings and
their children, siblings, children, siblings' children, and grandchildren: a mini-
mal group within which sexual relations are considered incestuous. Spouses
also become kin as they gradually come to share body substances through
cohabitation and sexual relations. Nevertheless, the notion of kinship may
be extended so as to include persons of varying degrees of genealogical prox-
imity, until this embraces the Wari' as a whole. This is because the identity
between bodies is not restricted to 'genetic' determination, and - as in the
case of spouses - may be produced during the course of life. Cohabitation,
the sharing of food, this generates kinship. In this way, those described here
as non-kin are also conceived at various moments as kin; in the funerary rite,
even nowadays, they comprise all those not included in the group of 'true
kin,' and who are ideally real affines: siblings-in-law, parents-in-law, children-
in-law, whom the Wari' describe as the nearest non-kin, disposed to perform
in the funeral according to the expectations of the mourners.
What needs to be stressed here is that Wari' conceptions of body and spirit
do not easily equate with our western vision. The body, as the seat of perspec-
tive, is not only a conjunction of organs and functions: it also contains affec-
tion, memory (see Viveiros de Castro 1998:478), not easily translatable into
what we know as 'chemical composition' and 'physiological processes', even if
these processes determine emotions and are determined by them, as Conklin
writes (1995:86). The analysis of a detail of the funeral may help clarify this
point. As I have already mentioned, grandchildren, or even children, as in-
fants, were able to eat the brains of the deceased. The Wari' say that the in-
fants did not remember clearly and soon forgot, whereas adults kept the me-
mory of their dead kinsperson alive, even when confronted by pieces of his
or her roasted body. For the Wari', siblings, especially same-sex siblings, have
a maximal substantial identity, in such a way that the difference between them
- that which makes the ingestion of the deceased possible for one and im-
possible for another - cannot be expressed in terms of morphology or physi-

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96 APARECIDA VILA^A

ology. An intermediary level exists, one where life experience and memory
are situated, which the Wari' do not immediately translate in suhstantive terms,
even were such a translation possible.
This being the case, I do not think the primary reason that kin avoided
eating a deceased relative - even if some informants clearly express this idea
- was the fear ofdeath or serious illness, an imputation which Conklin (1995:8i)
relates to the danger of contact hetween identical suhstances. Rather than
heing constituted as a 'prohibition,' as Conklin suggests (1989:192; 1995:84),
avoidance was related to an inahility to eat, as becomes apparent in the vari-
ous descriptions of funerals which I collected. A dead kinsperson is not eaten
for the simple reason that it is impossible to see their flesh as food;"* this takes
us to the explanation given hy a Guayaki man for the impossibility of eating
the flesh of a dead hrother: 'One does not eat one's brother, one is sad; no
courage' (P. Clastres 1968:45). This logic hecomes clear when we turn from
the Wari' funeral to their shamanism. I never heard a shaman justify his avoid-
ance of the flesh of the animal species into which his spirit transformed in
terms of illness. They just said that they could not see the animal as a crea-
ture, only as a person, wari'. Consequently, they were unahle to eat it, or even
shoot it. Some extended this impossihility to all the animals possessing spirit,
all equally seen hy the shaman in a human form.
I do not wish to deny the reality of physiological principles - of the 'anti-
homeopathic idea' present 'in Wari' shamanism and ethnomedicine' refer-
red to hy Conklin (1995:96 n. 10). In this specific context, however, what is
relevant is not the notion that identical suhstances are physiologically in-
compatihle, hut that identical suhstances are one among various character-
istics of identical hodies, which share the same vision of the world and of
themselves: they see themselves as humans. Shamans, who are character-
ized hy the possession oftwo simultaneous hodies - one human and the other
animal - can alternate these two points of view through a manipulation of
their sense of vision. Thus, when he wishes to alter his vision, the shaman
ruhs his eyes slowly. If he is currently seeing people as creatures, adopting an
animal point of view, he shifts to seeing them as people; if, hy contrast, he is
seeing an animal in the form of a person, he will shift to seeing it as just any
other animal, and may even shoot and eat it. The prohlem here is that the
different points of view alternate very rapidly - a feature which does not occur
in the funeral - and the shaman runs the risk of suddenly perceiving that the
animal he thought he had shot is, in fact, a kinsperson.

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Eating as a Way of Dehumanizing

The descriptions which the Wari' provide of the funeral very often lead
listeners to helieve that kin were interested in only two visions: one of the
whole body, which they could embrace and to which they could say fare-
well; and the other of the vanished body, eaten by affines, so that the service
rendered by them appeared restricted simply to providing a dignified end to
the body (avoiding its consumption by animals). When they turned to non-
kin to ask them to cut up the body, they justified this request by saying that
they could no longer bear the sight of the body; they wanted it to disappear,
for it to be destroyed (also see Conklin 1989:467). By the way in which this
is expressed, the impression given is that what happened between these two
moments was not as important as the moments themselves; as if they had to
put up with all the intermediary phases - the quartering, roasting and ingest-
ing by others - in order to achieve the desired end.
However, it is notable that the kinsfolk who were unable to see the whole
body could be consoled with the sight of a piece of the roasted corpse in-
gested before their eyes. It could be said, therefore, that ingestion was an
essential moment of the funeral for kinsfolk. What they wanted was not to
see the deceased disappear, but to see him being eaten, which is different.
Another piece of evidence which confirms this hypothesis is the fact that the
Wari' insisted on the consumption of at least a small part of the corpse, even
when the body was in an advanced state of putrefaction, and was for the most
part burnt. Further still, the Wari' recognize that cremation, in destroying
the body, could be equally effective in releasing the spirit for a full life in the
world of the dead (also see Conklin 1989:463; 1995:87), to the extent that it
was common for kin to attempt suicide by throwing themselves directly onto
the funeral fire (under and not on the grill), when they wanted to meet the
dead kinsperson in the world after death.
The service provided by non-kin to kin was not limited, therefore, to the
body's disappearance. Conklin is in agreement with this idea, and attributes
cannibalism with the function of facilitating the work of mourning, by al-
lowing the substitution of the image of the deceased/corpse for that of life-
giving white-lipped peccaries (1989:483; 1995:88), which is the form that the
dead take when they return to the world of the living, when they will be hunted
and eaten.
My intent here is to offer a complementary interpretation, searching for a
meaning proper to the act of ingesting the corpse, and avoiding shifting at-
tention to a posterior moment - the ingestion of the deceased as a peccary,

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9^ APARECIDA VILA^A

which turns cannibalism into a metaphor for the relation between the living
and the dead in general. My central argument is that cannibalism actualizes
a living/dead separation, situating it in terms of an opposition between pre-
dators and prey, whieh for the Wari' equals that between humans and non-
humans. If non-humanity is eoneeived as a position, that of prey, it is under-
standable that edibility is essential to its definition. The Wari' realize that
there is no way of eonvineing kin that the corpse is no longer human other
than eating it. Thus, we eould say that the corpse was eaten in order for kins-
folk - who were suffering from a kind of visual deficiency - to be able to ac-
cept the death, that is, to accept that the entity was no longer the loved one,
but a dead body.^ At the same time that they dehumanized the deceased, at
the moment of ingestion the living afFirmed his or her humanity, and those
who were able to perform this act were those who had already come to terms
with the death and knew that the corpse was no longer a person - or they
could not have eaten it.
This does not mean, though, that the dehumanization or objectification
realized by the act of ingestion - whether of dead Wari', or of enemies and
animals - had anything to do with the domination which western thinking
associates with predation and consumption. As I sought to show above, pre-
dation is conceived by the Wari' as a relation taking place between subjects
who, in this act, assume definitive positions: predators are humans, and prey
are non-humans (non-subjects: objects, therefore). These positions are essen-
tially reversible, since the relationship takes place between implicitly equiv-
alent subjects. It should be made clear, however, that the fact that Wari' pre-
dation - which has ingestion as one of its forms of expression - does not con-
form to the western notion of domination, does not mean that it fails to pro-
duce an objectification of prey, since this is actually a central aim of the act:
to define differential positions within a continuum of humanity. The essen-
tial difference from our conception lies in the fact that this objectification
has temporality as its base, and allows the possibility of a reversal in the pro-
cess: this clearly relates to what I called the dual aspect of the rites.
Nonetheless, in order for me to be able to claim that edibility is the only
irrefutable proof of non-humanity, I need to explain why various non-hu-
man animals are not eaten by the Wari', and also why certain human ani-
mals, such as snakes, are never eaten. Let us start with the latter. Ingestion is
only necessary in the absence of predation, which has cinegetic predation as
its model. This becomes clear, as we saw, in the case of warfare cannibalism,
when eating the flesh of the victim constituted a kind of luxury indulged in

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whenever possible. This same logic is valid for the animals conceived as humans
which are left uneaten: they are always shot and killed hy the Wari', espe-
cially the inedihle ones, such as jaguars and snakes. Ingestion, or the attribu-
tion of edibility, is complementary to predation; it is able to take its place,
and in fact becomes necessary in its absence, as in the case of deceased Wari'.
Turning to the first question, which relates to the non-human animals which
are not eaten, nor even shot, we could say that the association between pre-
dation/edibility and non-humanity only concerns relationships which have
some meaning for the Wari': that is, those which occur between subjects,
between potential or actual human beings. Predation is only necessary when
the desire is to define positions within a continuum of humanity which is in
principle undifferentiated. When this is unnecessary, it matters little if the
animals are shot and eaten or not, and the avoidance and predilections asso-
ciated with different species concern other logics or other symbolic systems.

The End-of-Mourning Ritual

A particularly interesting moment where the equivalence between corpse
and prey becomes evident can be found in the end-of-mourning rite, which
I shall now briefly describe.
After a period of mourning, which varied from several months to one or
more years, it was decided that the moment had come to sing and be happy
once more, and so preparations were made for the end-of-mourning ritual
(ka hwetmao wa, 'the leaving' or 'exiting'). This ritual was preceded by a collec-
tive hunt, in which both bereaved kin and non-kin took part. The game was
brought to the village already roasted, and an attempt was made to arrive
hack home at the same time of day during which the death had taken place.
Already painted with genipap (a black fruit dye) while in the forest, the par-
ticipants oiled themselves with annatto (a red fruit dye) before entering the
village. The kinsfolk entered singing the funeral song, deposited the baskets
on the ground and continued to sing and weep in a circle around them, crouch-
ing down and touching the edges ofthe baskets with their hands. They wept
over the game as though the corpse was there, using, in the song, the same
kinship terms by which they had called the deceased. Here, though, even the
kin ate the game. Other people treated the game without ceremony, even ask-
ing for a piece for themselves, a demand which is never made in day-to-day
life, when meat should he offered and not requested. Very often, they referred
to the meat as 'the corpse': 'I want to eat corpse!' they exclaimed. After the
meal, men and women began to sing: the sadness had come to an end.

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The obvious relations between this rite and the funeral appear to confirm
some of my hypotheses coneerning the meaning of funerary cannibalism for
the Wari'. To begin our analysis, we should start by formulating thefirstquestion
which comes to mind when faced with accounts of the rite: why, in order to
come out of mourning, did the Wari' think it necessary to perform a kind of
reproduction of the funerary ritual, putting killed animals in the place of the
deceased.?
We could say, as Conklin did (1995:92-93), that this rite is related more to
thefinaldestiny of the deceased than to the funeral properly speaking. In other
words, the killed game represented the deceased not as a corpse, but in the
full realization of its eschatological destiny - that of becoming animal; speci-
fically, a peccary. For this reason, Conklin's informants say, meeting a herd
of peccary during the hunt which precedes the rite is particularly valorized.
It appears to me, though, that the fact that the game is insistently called
'corpse' suggests a fundamental relationship between the closing mourning
rite and the funeral, not the after-life destiny of the deceased.' It is as though
these killed animals took the place of the corpse, and not that of the deceased-
peccary, so that the rite for the closure of mourning was a kind of continua-
tion and conclusion of the funerary rite, where the corpse wasfinallyturned
into food for everyone's eyes, especially those of kin, who - despite weeping
for the dead kinsperson - could now see him or her as game. It does not seem
fanciful to me to say that mourning ended here and not during the funeral
hecause only in this rite is the operation of objectifying the hody, its transfor-
mation into prey, fully realized in the eyes of kin. And the way of affirming
this was once again through ingestion; it was in eating this game which was
the corpse that the kinsfolk revealed that their vision had changed, and that
they felt fiilly integrated with the rest of the group - with those who had
eaten the deceased during the funeral.
In the end-of-mourning rite, Wari' society is recomposed as wholly un-
differentiated: affines and consanguines mix once again, distinguished, as
humans (hecause predators) from the deceased-prey. The living-dead sepa-
ration, sketched in the funeral in the form of a distinction hetween predators
and prey, achieves here its fullest realization, hecause it is shared hy every-
one. For this reason, the mourning comes to an end.
The end-of-mourning rite illuminates more than one aspect ofthe funerary
ritual. Firstly, it makes it clear that one of the funeral's central functions is the
corpse's ohjectification and its transformation into prey. What therefore he-
comes particularly interesting is the insistence of many of my informants in

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Relations between Funerary Cannibalism and Warfare Cannibalism i oi

mentioning the presence of the spider monkey among the killed game, even
though, when questioned, they claimed that the rite could be perfectly well
performed with other animals. Now, the spider monkey is one of the few
animals without spirit included among the favourite game of the Wari'; they
say that it is iri karawa, a true animal. This suggests that the deceased must
be represented in this form of cannibalism in the figure of a fully animal, pure
object or pure body.'
But while the end of mourning rite is focused on the relation between the
deceased and his or her kinsfolk, the behavior of non-kin takes us back to
some questions raised in the analysis of the funeral. In the latter, non-kin,
pressurized by kin, had to mask their lucid vision of the corpse as prey: they
waited for the roasted meat to be served to them, and then ate it delicately
and in silence. Any demonstration of voracity, as we saw in the reports, was
condemned by the deceased's kinsfolk. As one informant said, you could not
just approach the corpse and pull ofFa chunk to eat. In the end-of-mourning
rite, by contrast, this is exactly what happened: non-kin expressed their vo-
racity out loud, asking for bits of the 'corpse' to eat, the same 'corpse' which
was being wept over by kin as one of their own. The impression given is that
in the end-of-mourning rite — faced by the transformation of the kin's vision,
who were finally going to eat the deceased - non-kin felt free to allow to
come to the surface a perception which they had experienced since the fu-
neral: the corpse was no longer a person. The insistence on calling the ani-
mals a corpse, so clear in the accounts, is nothing less than the affirmation of
something that the funeral as a whole, in the voice of the eaters, meant to
say: the corpse is an animal!'

Conclusion
In this paper, I have sought to show the continuity, for the Wari', between
hunting, warfare and funerary cannibalism. Ingestion emerges as a form of
predation, in the sense of establishing the difference between that which eats
and that which is eaten, in the mode of the distinction between predator and
prey, human and animal.
An examination of the literature reveals that the conception of warfare -
and of cannibalism associated with it - as predation is less problematic than
the association between funerary cannibalism and predation. As I suggested
at the outset, this relates not simply to factors of a moral kind or to questions
of theoretical allegiance (see p. 8 6), but primarily to the double aspect of the
funerary rites, related to the impossibility of the total objectification of that

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which is eaten, due to its latent humanity. It is as though the increasingly

evident humanity of that which is eaten, as we pass from animals to enemies
to dead kin, demands the performance of a more complex ritual, a gradient
which has its basis in the expression of a tension between the humanity and
non-humanity of what is eaten and, subsequently, oiwho is eaten.
So, from this perspective we could say that all is cannibalism, since what
is eaten is always human, so that, as Viveiros de Castro suggests (1996,1998),
the fantasy of cannibalism haunts the Amerindian world as the fantasy of
solipsism haunts ours. Yet, on the other hand, nothing is cannibalism, since
one never eats an equal. In this sense, McCallum (1996:75) would be correct
in claiming that we should not classify the Kaxinawa funeral as cannibalism,
given that the deceased is transformed, 'by means of song' (1996:67), into
animal flesh. What is eaten, therefore, is already no longer human, and in-
gestion only confirms this difference. In my view, the problem with this type
of reductionism is that we lose the essence of the logic of the ritual we intend
to analyze.
If I insisted here on the question of cannibalism as predation, it was above
all to reveal, primarily in the case of funerary cannibalism, an aspect which is
little visible in the literature on cannibalism (although perhaps more appar-
ent in the materialist version, but there it takes a distorted form). It should be
stressed, however, that this is only one aspect of the phenomenon, and in
order for us to be able to perceive cannibalism in all its complexity we need
to consider its different expressions and its various ethnographic contexts.
Although literal cannibalism, practiced by the Wari' and by other groups cited
in this paper, illustrates in a direct and emphatic way the relation between
ingestion and predation - as well as anthropology's difficulty in the face of
this problematic - it should in no way be located on a different level to forms
offigurative cannibalism, so widely difRised throughout the Amerindian world
(see Levi-Strauss 1984 and Sahlins 1983:88).
A point which remains to be approached is the question of funerary can-
nibalism as a means of incorporation, indicated by McCallum as an essen-
tial part of the Kaxinawa funeral (this work also refers us to the context of
endocannibal funerals in Papua New Guinea; see Poole 1983; Gillison 1983),
especially since this idea appears to be incompatible with the notion of can-
nibalism as a means of differentiation, which I developed here.
Accordingto Levi-Strauss (1984:141-143), cannibalism - literal or figura-
tive - performs two types of operation: the assimilation of the Other and the
transitory transmutation into an Other. Alteration occurs, therefore, in both

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directions. Transmutation into an Other takes place in the form of the cap-
ture of the position of that which is eaten by those who eat it. This is what
Viveiros de Castro (1986, 1992b) showed in Tupinamba cannibalism, where
eating the enemy produced a shift of perspectives: the eaters adopted the
jaguar point of view of the enemy. This also applied to the figurative canni-
balism of the Arawete killer, whose fate was to become an enemy in relation
to tbe group (Viveiros de Castro 1986,1992b). We can apprehend Jivaro war-
fare homicide from the same perspective of an alteration in the killer (Taylor
1985: 161). Among the Wari', tbe identification between the killer and the
dead enemy occurs by means offigurativecannibalism, where the killer in-
corporated and digested the blood of his victim (also see Albert 1985 on the
Yanomami), who thereby became his consanguine kin. After death this id-
entification wasfiiUyrealized, and the killer became a member of the enemy
species.
Finally, it remains for us to discuss the other sense of assimilation; that is,
the incorporation of that which is eaten, whether in the form of an individual
integrated into the capturing society, as in the case of Chiriguano war vic-
tims for example (Saignes 1985); or whether in the form of consuming the
deceased's attributes, as in the case of the Kaxinawa funeral (McCallum 1996);
or even the capture of identities from the outside, as in Jivaro head-hunting
(Taylor 1985:161). An examination of the ethnographic material suggests that
differentiation and incorporation-identification are two faces of the same pro-
cess. This applies at various levels: part of society identifies with that which
is eaten, while the other part differentiates itself, as in the case of kin and
affines in the Wari' funeral rite, and the killers/non-killers in various warfare
rituals. Differentiation is a stage preceding consumption/incorporation, as
in the case of Kaxinawa cannibalism, where the deceased is symbolically trans-
formed into animal meat, and that of the Tupinamba victim, who was re-
enemized at the moment immediately prior to being executed; identification
is subsequent to consumption (which supposes differentiation), as in the case
of the eaters of the Wari' dead, wbo ended up assuming the position of affines,
masked in daily life - a position which the dead assume in relation to the
living; and tbe eaters of the Tupinamba enemy, who, as I mentioned above,
adopted the enemy's jaguar point of view.
In the same way that the real should not be given a privileged status in
relation to thefigurative,we cannot restrict incorporation to a substantivist
notion, where what is absorbed in being eating is simple matter (including
here the deceased's qualities and attributes). Eating, it becomes clear, is above

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all a logical operator. Alimentation, yes, but only in the full meaning of alimenta-
tion, which includes its symbolic aspect.

Acknowledgments
Fieldwork among the Wari' was funded by FINEP, The Ford Foundation and
The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Translation to English
was done by David Rodgers. I would like to thank Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
for the various discussions which stimulated me to write this article, and also
Marilyn Strathern, Patrick Menget, Peter Riviere and Philippe Descola for their
comments and suggestions. I also thank the anonymous reviewers oC Ethnos for
their valuable criticisms and comments. This paper was originally presented as a
lecture on the course given by Philippe Descola at EHESS, Paris, in May 1999.
Notes
1. Levi-Strauss (1984:141) also comments on this tendency of ethnologists to deny
well documented evidence of the occurrence of cannibalism, which he attributes
to a kind of disinterest in the topic.
2. Many of my informants over 60 years of age based their testimonies on experiences
lived through by themselves.
3. See also Vila?a 1992, 1996 and 1998; and Lima 1995 and 1996.
4. Even though non-kin also abstained from eating the deceased, their motives
pertain to another logical domain: to the putrid quality of the meal, which made
ingestion difficult.
5. The Achuar offer an interesting parallel: among them, it is the deceased who
needs to be convinced of his death (Taylor 1993:664). Among the Wari', even
though there exists the idea of a dead 'ghost' which haunts the living, what is
empbasized is the kin's difficulty in accepting the death, not the deceased's.
6. It should be observed that the termjama, which I translate as corpse, is not usu-
ally employed to refer to the deceased as an ancestor. For this the Wari' use the
collective term orojima, which can be translated as 'the dead.' The dead ancestor,
even though he or she may be identified as a particular peccary by sbamans, is
considered part of an undifTerentiated collectivity of dead.
7. An anonymous reviewer pointed to what appears to be a contradiction: I claim
here that the dead are represented by an animal without spirit (the spider monkey),
while I previously (see p. 97) claimed that, in the subaquatic world, the dead,
when they wished to come to the surface, took the form of peccaries - that is,
animals with spirit. There is no contradiction involved. The peccary is the body
of tbe deceased's spirit, wbicb lives beneatb tbe water in human form. The spi-
der monkey represents not the deceased's spirit, but his/her body, tbe corpse,
wbich was transformed into prey by ingestion. I thank this reviewer for the
opportunity to clarify this point, as well as for indicating the possibility of estab-
lishing parallels between tbe Wari' final mourning rite and tbe second obsequy
rites of other Amerindian groups, a topic which I shall attempt to explore on an-
other occasion.
8. The same anonymous reviewer questioned the vision of the corpse which I attribute
to affines. If they see the deceased as prey, why do they eat so discretely during

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the funeral? As I argued above, the funeral procedures are - in a general fashion
- ambiguous, since they must evince/produce the corpse's non-humanity at the
same time as preserving its humanity. The choice ofthe real affines as eaters re-
lates to this point. I think, though, that the Wari' would reply to this question in
a different way. They would say that eating the corpse in a restrained fashion
does not constitute part of the relationship between affines and the deceased,
but that between affines and the living, who expect such behaviour from the
former. The affines eat the corpse carefully, not from respect for it, but from be-
ing attentive to the wishes of the living, who look to differentiate the corpse
from animal prey.

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