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Unintended Consequences — Part 2
You don't see a pith helmet in Neil Whitehead's office
overlooking Lake Mendota, nor a poster from an Indiana Jones movie.
He's a different sort of swashbuckling anthropologist. Think
Harrison Ford with a splash of Anthony Hopkins. Picture a slightly
tweedy character with an unabashed interest in mysterious places
and dark tales.
The forty-seven-year-old professor grew up in London, the son of
a publisher of technical journals and a homemaker. Focusing on conflict,
he says, was a natural outgrowth from the headlines of his youth.
“I grew up during a very lively terrorist war with the IRA
[Irish Republican Army],” he says, “and I believe the
world has gotten more like that as time goes by.” His PhD
research at Oxford University concerned the Caribs, ferocious natives
of Central America and the Caribbean, whose name supplied the root
for both Caribbean and cannibal.
Whitehead's studies led him to conclude that, while the European
explorers considered the Caribs to be cannibals, those opinions
were suspect. A couple of decades after 1492, the year Queen Isabella
sent Columbus across the ocean and evicted the Jews from Spain,
she permitted Spanish conquistadors to usurp land from “cannibals”
without payment. The edict, says Whitehead, created a huge financial
incentive to “discover” cannibalism among the “savages”
of Central and South America.
 The
experience led Whitehead to focus his studies on conflict, rather
than the more traditional anthropological subjects such as culture,
clan, and belief. Examining the ways that people and cultures clash
allows “anthropology to speak to the central problems of our
society, not bury itself in rather obscure truths,” he says.
However, he soon discovered that discussions about violence are
surrounded by taboos. “Our attitude and knowledge about violence
are where they were about sex thirty to forty years ago,”
he says. Indeed, Whitehead's new book, Dark Shamans: Kanaimà
and the Poetics of Violent Death, contains descriptions of
kanaimà horrendous enough to be taboo in many publications.
This story, too, avoids some of the harsher details, but interested
readers can consult the book for more explicit descriptions.
In 1992, a year before joining the faculty at UW-Madison, Whitehead
made his fateful trip to the Guyana highlands, a forested part of
the southern region of the country. Although part of Guyana, the
area has closer economic and social relations to the Amazon basin
of Brazil, to the south. Once predominantly populated by Patamuna,
a fairly traditional people, the highlands have faced incursions
from miners, who have been moving north from the Amazon region.
Whitehead was planning to survey the highlands, assembling a list
of old villages, burial sites, and caves with artifacts for the
aid of future researchers. No sooner had he arrived, however, than
the local nurse implored him to shift his attention to kanaimà.
She insisted that kanaimàs were still stalking, bludgeoning,
poisoning, and mutilating their victims on forested mountain paths.
Kanaimàs, Whitehead learned, usually didn't immediately
kill their victims, preferring to first maim and intimidate by breaking
victims' fingers or dislocating their necks. After the victim
endured a few months or years of pain, the kanaimàs would
mount a ferocious killing attack, piercing the victim's tongue
with snake fangs, mutilating the mouth and anus with sharp objects,
and inserting toxic plants into the anus. “The sheer violence
of the attack,” Whitehead says, “is meant to drive out
the life force of the person.” Even with medical treatment,
victims die an excruciating, lingering death.
Initially, although the nurse was in a position to know, Whitehead
refused to believe her horrifying tales. On his first day of hiking
through the mountains, however, he had his mind changed for him.
The professor and his Patamuna associates entered a cave that held
a solitary, ceramic urn containing several old bones. The Patamuna
treated the urn with awe, and refused to touch it. Whitehead, however,
not only moved the urn to take a photo, but also removed one of
the bones. That action, as it turned out, sealed his fate, guaranteeing
that he would soon have a deeply personal interest in kanaimà.
The Patamuna interpreted Whitehead's behavior as an announcement
that he was either a kanaimà himself or one of their enemies.
His actions, he believes, motivated his new enemies — presumably
directed by kanaimàs — to poison him. Their intent
was not murder, Whitehead says, which they easily could have accomplished
through their knowledge of natural poisons. Instead, he believes,
their goal was to threaten him about being too nosy.
 The
attack, delivered in the form of a meal, caused several weeks of
serious gastrointestinal problems, and it helped persuade Whitehead
that the nurse was right. That realization, followed quickly by
scientific curiosity, locked him into a decade of investigating
— though never personally practicing — the deadly rituals
of dark sorcery. During the next five years, he revisited the area,
talking with the families of victims and buying interviews with
a few men who claimed to be kanaimàs. The work culminated
with the publication of Dark Shamans, a chilling account
of ritualized mutilation and murder — but also a compelling
interpretation of why the practice has endured.
That story is full of contradictions. Kanaimà is murder,
an illegal act, and an extreme example of dark shamanism.
Yet other shamanic practices are seen as healing, both in Guyana
and elsewhere. “Kanaimà is part of the eternal battle
between light and dark shamanism,” Whitehead says. In the
local world view, “it's sacrifice, not murder or revenge.
It's connected to the idea about what is necessary to sustain
the bounty and fertility of the cosmos. It represents the sorcerer's
gift to human beings.”
Because dark sorcery is usually performed by neighbors against
neighbors, kanaimà also creates a bizarre dynamic among Patamuna
communities in Guyana. On one hand, Whitehead says, most victims'
families would “quite happily kill the kanaimà if they
could,” and for that reason, kanaimàs often prey on
people without family members who could avenge them.
Yet he adds that kanaimàs do carry a certain moral authority.
In a region where law enforcement is weak and where encroaching
cultures threaten local ways, kanaimà can be beneficial —
even practical. “It shows that they have not lost all their
culture,” says Whitehead. “Kanaimà becomes a
vivid, dramatic way of affirming that, and creating a rather useful
caution in the minds of government agencies, cops, and armed Brazilian
miners about whether they should screw around with these people.”
1, 2, 3
On Wisconsin Home
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Unintended Consequences
- David Tenenbaum has written about cannibalism
for UW-Madison's science Web site, The Why Files.
- Mel Gibson portrayed Scotland's William
Wallace in the 1995 movie Braveheart. Wallace's struggle
to free Scotland from English rule at the end of the thirteenth
century resulted in his barbaric death and later reputation as
one of Scotland's greatest national heroes.
- Robert Louis Stevenson examined cannibalism in his 1890 book,
In the South Seas. Read his thoughts on the practice in Chapter
IX, titled "Long-Pig
— A Cannibal High Place."
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