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Reflections on Christianity, Cannibalism
and Capitalism
By and large, Anthropology deals exclusively with non-western and so called "primitive" cultures, without much critical awareness of its own western, scientific preconceptions. This is unfortunate, as other cultures are not in a position to develop their own anthropology, by which the west might be studied, in compensation. Having spent time on numerous Native American Reservations, I am aware of the considerable skepticism and frequent disdain for Anthropologists among these people. But, at the same time, I am aware that an Anthropology based on Traditionalist preconceptions is likewise biased, and is not preferable to the cultural relativism of academic Anthropology.(1) Michel Foucault's felicitous phrase, the "Archeology of Knowledge" indicates poetically what one might wish for in an Anthropology. Anthropology should be a study not simply of social practices and material remains, but the deeper human and subjective origin of the systems of knowing that develop into social and material practices. The investigation of human nature itself, in its capacity to know, imagine and create precedes social organization, and I believe Foucault was right to stress this over quasi-scientific and social studies, which study symptoms and effects rather than causes, and thereby hide social agendas behind a veil of "objectivity". But Foucault restricts himself primarily to the study of western Institutions and practices, such as prisons, mental hospitals, and the role of sexuality in society, omitting such areas as ancient societies, religions and their social institutions and practices. He omits also his own interest in power. As much as Foucault brings the ethnocentric agenda of European culture into question, he does so as an ironic member of this same culture. This leads him into an insoluble dilemma of adopting a critical attitude to western will to power at the same time as he participates in the will /to power through the critical tradition. His obsession with power is not in opposition to it. That is unfortunate. What we really need is a questioning of the apparatus of knowing and having power themselves. We need the sort of knowledge that questions power, undoes its injustices and liberates. The advantage of Foucault however, is that he does not exempt western man as a subject of study. He attempts to incorporate a critical awareness of western man's own consciousness and science into his Anthropology. This is at least a step towards detaching Anthropology from western scientific, ideological and cultural presumptions to supremacy. These presumptions make an ambiguous discipline of Anthropology, which has, often unconsciously, aided in the destruction of other cultures, even as it seeks to study and preserve them. We need to look on White upper class business, religious and academic concerns as if it were a relic, outsider culture. ***** Neither a scientific and reductionistic approach to human behavior, nor a metaphysical Anthropology goes very far to describe the multiple layers and complexes involved in a behavior. The problem is that human beings cannot be reduced to systems of knowledge and belief. Man is more than collected knowledge about him; or, to put this differently, man, as part of nature, transcends the transcendental and abstract systems that would define him. The difficultly of studying man, when one cannot escape from the human condition oneself, can only be mitigated by refusing to enter into abstract systems of knowledge and belief. But this has the result that one is cast adrift into veritable seas of complex facts, actualities and realities, which are only tentatively reducible to common factors. The process of coming to know undermines what comes to be known, and in the end one has asserted only the value of being human and of existence on earth. This is not nothing, certainly. But, y refusing the transcendental, one has, at the same time, delimited the will to power through knowledge and thus served, to some small extent, the value of social justice and the Rights of man. This is, perhaps exactly what Anthropology should do. I have loosely defined an approach to Anthropology that involves a paradoxical way of knowing that undermines itself. Knowledge becomes a means of understanding what it means to be human and part of nature, and not an end in itself, and this means that knowledge becomes its own critique; knowledge becomes a way of undermining the power of knowledge. This leads to the highly paradoxical result of asserting the power of human fallibility against the will to power through knowledge. ***** What am I talking about here?......... To take cannibalism as an example of a complex concept or practice that is used to justify a will to power through a knowledge system: one comes across references in Marxist writings to capitalism described as a system of cannibalistic economic practices. Why is this? There is the purely historical reason that Marxism has affinities with an historical development of gnostic "heresies" that developed alongside Christianity, and that some of these heretical ideas held that Christianity was a cannibalistic sect. Charges of cannibalism would later be leveled at Christianity from Islam as well. But be this as it may, the relation of communism to Christianity is a close one, though neither most Marxists or Christians are prepared to admit the many affinities between the two millennialist ideologies. Hegel's delusions of being a manifestation of the Christic Logos, and the influence of this presumptive totalism on Marx is pertinent, because communism, like Christianity and capitalism became a system of power/knowledge that depended on force and violence to assert it claim to legitimacy. Initially, Marxism, like Christianity, was a marginal cult, and from a cult it turns into a state religion, gaining power, claiming to be a totality of knowing, a way of living, with systems to punish those who did not conform. In any case, criticisms of the Christian Eucharistic rite as a cannibalistic rite go back to the first centuries after Christ. But a historical analysis sidesteps the fact that the charge of cannibalism is often used by many different peoples as general term for moral depravity of a supposed enemy’s inhumanity. Christians charge "savages” with cannibalism, Islam charges Christianity with cannibalism; communism charges capitalism with cannibalism. All these charges may contain an element of truth, at the same time as they are efforts to justify the will to power and conquest one one systems of knowledge/power against an enemy. There is a certain truth to the Marxist claim against capitalism insofar as capitalism does indeed devour, metaphorically speaking, that which or those whom it uses to secure profits and power. The profit motive has devoured whole peoples and landscapes, as happens now in the Amazon jungles, or happened before, in Vietnam, or Africa, enslaving populations or resulting in atrocities. It is literally true that capitalism, devoured the substance of Native American tribes, and gobbled up the lands of these peoples and left mangled corpses behind them. But on the other hand, when one looks at the here Christian missionaries in the 15th to 19th centuries, one finds frequent efforts to accuse tribes in Africa or the Americas of cannibalism. Here the concept of cannibalism is a political hyperbole used to discredit a people or an ideology and thereby sanction a just war, aggression or exploitation against them. Thus, for a Native American to say that capitalists and Christians cannibalized their culture and lands has a certain truth to it, though the expression is not exactly accurate. But for the European who looked at all American tribes as cannibals, was not just hyperbole but in nearly all cases a racist lie. The charge of cannibalism, like the charge that such and such a people are "evil", as when Reagan called the Soviet State an "evil empire", is almost always an excuse for aggression. If one can reduce a people or population to "otherness" such that they become a "them", and thereby non-human, savage or evil, then murder, exploitation or even actual cannibalism are sanctioned, The Nazi treatment of Jews, even to the point of making lampshades of their skin is a particularly gruesome example of the ideological alienation of the "other". Marxism itself, in its Stalinist form, was also cannibalistic in this metaphorical sense, insofar as it eliminated or murdered whole sectors of its own population, while, at the same time, Stalinist propaganda used the concept of cannibalistic capitalism to justify aggression and war against capitalist nations. In discussions about what is evil, or what is cannibalism, therefore, one is not so much talking about a literal event, but about a context, and the meaning of a concept within a set of complex circumstances. Evil, I think, does not exist as a reality in itself; that is, there is no metaphysical agent of destruction, no devil, no satanic reality. There are only acts of malice and destruction caused by societies and individuals. So likewise, with rare exceptions for survival, cannibalism is above all a symbolic practice, which orchestrates social motives; only incidentally is it an actual eating of flesh. So, I am saying that there are two kinds of cannibalism, literal and symbolic. There is actual cannibalism. Cannibalism was practiced among the Hua of New Guinea, the Aztec or Iroquois. Then there is there is symbolic cannibalism, such as occurs in the Christian Eucharistic ritual. But this distinction between actual and symbolic cannibalism explains very little. Regarding literal cannibalism Peggy Sanday, in her study Divine Hunger observes: "More than just a reaction to external conditions cannibalism is a tangible symbol that is part of a system of symbols and ritual acts that predicate consciousness in the formulation of the social other and reproduce consciousness in the ritual domination and control of the social other. Where domination and control are subordinate to accommodation and integration, cannibalism is absent, regardless of the nature of the food supply"2 In other words, food supply has very little to do with cannibalism; except in rare cases such as the Donner party or in the Nazi camps where desperate people ate other people so they themselves could survive. But where cannibalism does occur in tribal cultures it is symbolic action, sometimes literal and sometimes not, whose purpose is to orchestrate social motivations, to control behavior and assert power. Literal cannibalism is as much a effort to impose a consciousness or a knowledge system as is symbolic cannibalism. Indeed, symbolic cannibalism, as occurs in Christianity, may be far more enduring and ultimately destructive than literal cannibalism. The object of the devouring of other human beings is power, and not nourishment. Power is defined as the ability to derive benefits and to confer sanctions or punishments for or against others. Cannibalistic actions, even in the symbolic form of the Christian Eucharistic ritual, fulfill this definition of power. The eating of the flesh and the drinking of the blood of Christ, is supposed to join the soul of the recipient to the substance of the body and blood of Christ. Since Christ represents a supernatural world, or "heaven" that is separated from this world, and access to this other world is possible only through the Eucharistic rite, the administrators of the ritual have power over the accessibility of the postulants to salvation, or failing this, to damnation. In other words, a standard of legitimate knowledge is imposed, represented by the body of Christ, and this standard acts a medium through which social conformity can be exacted and punishments against those who do not conform can be threatened and executed. The tortures of heretics by priests over the centuries, exceeds even the violent torture of victims by the Hua or the Iroquois. In other words, cannibalism is not about dietary nourishment, but about the maintenance of a social system and the imposition of a system of knowledge and cultural values. Even among the Aztecs, who, some claim, practiced cannibalism and human sacrifice in order to compensate for meat shortages, the material, dietary cause appears to have been incidental, or at most a convenient by product. The principle reason for sacrificial blood rites among the Aztecs, seems to have been the maintenance of the metaphysical and cosmological system that upheld the hierarchical social order of the Aztec elite. The Aztecs believed that the universe depended upon the blood of the sacrificed victims just as Christians believe that the universe began and will end in relation to the body and blood of Christ. The violence of Aztec civilization was directed against smaller tribes considered to be enemies of the empire. Likewise, Christian civilization was spread by colonial violence, all over the world. "He that is not with me is aginst me"(3) and "Go ye into all the world and preach ye the Gospel to every creature"(4) are two of the many sentences of Christ that justified the violence and rapaciousness of Christian colonialistic practices. Christ said he did not come to bring peace but a sword, to divide "brother against brother", and indeed he did so, as two thousand years of bloody Christian wars and conquests demonstrate. The hypocrisy of the Conquistadores, whose own Eucharistic rite was symbolically cannibalistic, could hardly condemn native American practices when their own practices were as bad or worse. The symbolic cannibalism of the Christian rite thus follows the same pattern of sacrificial and cannibalistic rites in many cultures. In order to preserve the power and values of the status quo, in a given society, sacrificial violence must be brought against those who live outside the society. Or, in the case of mortuary cannibalism, the dead of one's own people must be eaten, to preserve the power of tribal values against the ravages of time and bodily mortality. Among the Hua, of New Guinea, for instance, mortuary cannibalism serves to assimilate the spirits of the dead back into the living, as well as to preserve an elaborate reciprocity of balance and submission among power relationships between males and females. The devouring of dead males by females, the Hua believe, insures the tribe of regeneration. The eating of the body of Christ has a similar, though much more universal function. The body of Christ is supposed to represent the "truth". This "truth" is a totalistic abstraction which relativizes actual human bodies, and thereby reduces them to the inferior status of "flesh". The domination of "flesh" by "spirit" then becomes a means of an apocalyptic effort at world domination and the domination of nature. The abstract truth of Christ becomes the means by which the flesh of nature and unbelieving infidels and savages are to be dominated. In other words, the price of salvation, in the Christian universe, is the crucifixion of the natural world, and this crucifixion solidifies the benefits its which accrue to those who embrace the Christian ideal. Destruction of other cultures as well as environmental destruction is built into the Christian model of the universe. The Eucharistic rite sublimates a transgressive cannibalistic impulse into a will to power through knowledge, and the aspiration to this knowledge, in turn, justifies colonial exploitation and the domination of nature. Or, to express this in yet a different way: The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ sets up an intangible and abstract ideal as the criterion of the ultimately knowable. This is ideal makes of all actual reality, the "world" in Christian parlance, a reality that is lesser, and therefore dispensable. The eating of the sacrificial victim in the form of the body of Christ becomes the principle means of participating in the abstract and intangible reality that has been posited by Christ's sacrifice. The cruelty of the crucifixion is thus displaced and projected upon the world by the symbolic cannibalism of the Eucharistic ingestion of Christ's blood and body. Christ justifies this in the following statement "the world has tribulations, but be of good cheer because I have overcome the world"(5) The price of Christ's crucifixion, in other words is paid for in worldly "tribulation", and Christ's victory is attained at the cost of those who live in the actual and ordinary, day to day world, far beneath the sublime abstractions of the "truth" of the Transfiguration and the sublimity of the "kingdom of heaven". There is no real difference between the imaginary abstract, supernatural world, posited by the religions, and the actual world that we live in. But the imaginary distinction of an eternal, supernatural world and an actual temporal world serves a social purpose by allowing the imposition of a legitimizing consciousness. This legitimizing consciousness is able to impose conformity and punish deviation and by this means, it preserves power and control over a society. The human body inevitably becomes the theatre in which systems of knowledge play out their cruelties and their drives for supremacy. It need not be this way, but for most of human history this is how it has been. ***** Weber's thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, that the Protestant rebellion of the Puritans and Calvinists was the origin of capitalism, while accurate in many respects, seems shortsighted. The words of Christ himself already imply a capitalist view of the world. The whole notion of original sin and the necessity of salvation implies a debt to God, and therefore the entire Christian world view is conditioned by notions of debt and payment. The parable of the Talents, the notion of gathering abstract or "heavenly" treasures, the pearl of great price, the "wages of sin" and the payment in suffering for the debt of the flesh of the Crucified-- these are all economic concepts, however they may be couched in metaphysical and symbolic language. One can trace an historical evolution, for instance, from the Church's sale of Indulgences, or spiritual insurances, as it were, to lighten the posthumous suffering of sinners, to the development of Insurance companies insuring slave and merchant ships that went to exploit the colonies and export Christian values to the New World. It is not far from slave ships owned and operated by Christians to the development of the modem insurance company with its entirely secular and capitalist exploitation for profit of fear, risk, sickness and death. The capitalistic system of power and knowledge makes literal what was already virtual in the words of Christ. One can trace the origins of both capitalism and modern science to the Nominalist/Realist controversies of the 12th to 14th centuries. The Doctrine of Transubstantiation literalized the eating of Christ's flesh and drinking his blood. This makes the Eucharistic rite a literal act of cannibalism, however symbolic it may seem to be. In this rite one enters into a compact with the abstract world represented by the heavenly body of Christ, and therefore the actual world becomes a place of gross physicality which must be radically transformed through knowledge. The world becomes a place to be dominated through man's knowledge, made in the image of Christ. This domination requires that nature be "transubstantiated" into man's understanding of it, Christianity, capitalism and science orchestrate a system of knowledge that confers power, and this power depends upon the ability to exploit nature and other cultures and people by transforming them into the image of Western man's desires. The cannibalistic act of the Eucharistic rite thus becomes the domination of nature and other cultures by Western man. The destruction of nature and other cultures follows form this ideology put into action. The Crucifixion likewise becomes literalized as the rape of nature. The exact process whereby the Eucharistic symbol and practice forged a mentality that eventually became capitalism, communism and science would have to be documented and explored in more detail, But the intent of this paper is speculative rather than documentary. It is clear in any case, that cannibalism, symbolic or literal, is primarily a practice or a symbolic means of attaining power and of imposing a system of knowledge and control. The sublimated cannibalism that is practiced in a secular world of science and capitalism is not less horrible that that of the Aztecs. In fact, the capitalist communist and scientific preying upon other peoples and cultures may be more horrible and stemming from a deeper hypocrisy than the more blatantly brutal cannibal cultures of the past. It is not without significance, for instance, that Jeffery Daumer's father describes himself in a recent book as someone who buried himself in a scientific chemical laboratory because he found the world of human beings repugnant and chaotic. Systems of knowledge and power, like Christianity or science, posit a world of "truth" that is divorced from this world, and this world inevitably suffers from the divorce. Jeffery Daumer's violent murders seem, in part, to be a compensation against the cold implacability of his father's indifference to life. Daumer said that his motive for killing 17 young men, some of whom he ate, was to gain complete control and power, which corresponds to the motive for most cannibalistic societies. Daumer seems to have had a kind of scientific indifference to the value of human life, but, at the same time, he ate and devoured his victims out of a kind of perverse and Christian desire to assimilate and come into union with those whom he had killed. Daumer even destined an altar on which to display his victims. This altar was a macabre version of a Christian altar Indeed, the Daumer case typifies not only aspects of primitive cannibalistic rites, but also destructive and devouring aspects of Christian and scientific civilization. The Daumer case is a gruesome reminder of the destructive capacity of the will to power through science and religion. Whether one looks at cannibalism as practiced by the Hua, the Aztecs, Christians, or Jeffery Daumer, the constant that emerges is the will to power through knowledge and the effort to legitimize this will to power. The concept of evil does not arise in this inquiry because labeling something evil, while perhaps useful in expressing moral outrage, does not lead one closer to understanding and thereby possibly preventing the destructive actions such as violence, war and cannibalism. A counter example to the case of Daumer, who internalized both Christian and capitalistic suggestions of cannibalistic consumption and ideology, is the case of the Haitian poet René Depestre. Depestre, in his great poem "Rainbow for the Christian West", rejects the devouring qualities of capitalism and Christianity and stands up for himself as a man independent of these ideological systems of knowledge and power. For instance, here is a stanza from his great poem, where he rejects the Christianity that did so much harm to his beloved Haiti.... I do not remain seated
under a tree For Depestre then, and for us too, is possible to escape from the domination of a devouring and destructive capitalist, communist or Christian culture. Though one must still beware of becoming enslaved in yet another systems of symbols or powers. We need not live inside the enclosing envelope of symbols and systems of knowledge imposed upon us. It would seem that the poetry of resistance is indeed one place to where a new Anthropology that does not serve the domination of exploitive knowledge systems might begin. Peggy Sanday observes in the earlier cited quote that "where domination and control are subservient to accommodation and integration, cannibalism is absent". The question then becomes: how is it possible to limit or the will to dominance and power. How do we oppose systems of knowledge that abuse and cause harms? Is there a way of knowing that does not assert power and which leads to "accommodation and integration". I do not yet know how to answer this question. But it seems to me that a truly useful Anthropology would begin with this question. We begin with being skeptical of claims to knowledge and power. 1. By traditionalist Anthropology, I am referring to Mircea Eliade, Frithjof Schuon, Joesph Epes Brown, Huston Smith and other writers in that school. 2. Sanday, Peggy. Divine Hunger Cambridge University Press, 1986. pg.26 3. Matthew, 12.30 4. Mark, 16.20 5. John. 16.33 6. Girard, Rene, Violence and the Sacred, Johns Hopkins University press 1977 The information about Jeffrey Daumer comes form a psychological documentary about the case. I was unable to locate the producer and title.
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