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Human Biology 74.1 (2002) 156-159



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Book Review

The Cannibal Within


The Cannibal Within, by Lewis Petrinovich. New York, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 2000. ix + 232 pp. $41.95 (hardback), $20.95 (paperback).

The Cannibal Within is an extended essay on the woes, delights, circumstances, and meanings of "That frightful feasting" (p. 197, citing Stone 1994) that Petrinovich argues has been and continues to be part of human nature. Petrinovich is an Emeritus Professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, and has a long-standing interest in death from natural causes and with human agency and acts of consumption. His other recent volumes are: Living and Dying Well (1996) and Darwinian Dominion: Animal Welfare and Human Interests (1999).

Petrinovich is most successful in amassing an extraordinarily diverse corpus of data from paleoanthropology, archaeology, historical accounts by adventurers and missionaries, court records, ethnographies, biographical accounts, newspapers, and literary sources. His 250 or so citations are heavily weighted toward books, monographs, and popular materials with approximately 25% from professional journals. He is less successful in his explication of neo-Darwinian and sociobiological theory as explanatory models for cannibalistic behaviors.

The Cannibal Within focuses on survival cannibalism that serves as his strongest case for defining a pattern of behavior with evolutionary roots. In chapter 1 he introduces his theme with an account of the 19th-century shipwreck and cannibalistic activities of the crew of the Francis Mary. He takes up this theme again in chapter 3 with the detailed presentation of a dozen or so additional shipwrecks accompanied by cannibalism. Along with chapter 2, in which he presents the tragedies of the American westward expansion, most notably the Donner Party, he demonstrates a pattern of survival cannibalism that is consistent with Darwinian theory. Namely, we eat those individuals who at the time have low reproductive fitness potential by virtue of being past their prime (the elderly) or with a slim chance of reaching their prime (the young). In keeping with good sociobiological precepts we preferentially eat those individuals who are not related to us. Petrinovich was able to document a hierarchy of preferences in which exotic humans (i.e., foreigners, slaves, Indian guides) were eaten first and relatives last and only in the direst circumstances. Anthropophagy was considered less morally reprehensible than killing, so corpses were generally consumed before people were intentionally killed. Particularly in the cases of shipwrecks, lots were drawn to [End Page 156] determine who should sacrifice his life for his shipmates. Invariably, the "odd man out" was literally the odd man who was the foreigner, who had no family ties and would not have increased the cannibal's inclusive fitness. History records very few trials for murder under these circumstances.

Petrinovich puts a strong evolutionary spin on his interpretation of the regularities he documents of who is eaten. He relies most heavily on selectionist models, particularly Bell (1997) and Dawkins (1996). The difficulty is that the historical data that he presents as supporting these theories lack the detail (e.g., the genetic relatedness of shipmates) that would be confirmatory. The best supporting case in which we know who is related to whom is that of the ill-fated, snow-bound Donner Party. Grayson (1990, 1993) detailed the relationships and deaths of the party members. He demonstrated a positive relationship between longevity (and survival) and the size of an individual's immediate kin group. Single men with no other family members present had a high mortality rate (80%) as did the very young, ages 1-4 years (62.5%), and the old, ages 50-69 years (83.3%). While mortality was high for all groups with only 55% of the original party of 87 surviving, women had a higher survival rate than men. Chapter 4 rounds out the presentation of materials on survival cannibalism with the presentation of the famous case of the Andean plane crash of the Uruguay rugby team in 1972, popularized in a book and movie a few years later, and the case of an abandoned US Army expedition in the Arctic in the 1880s. The last few...

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