Cannibalism and Cultural Superiority

In The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the author several times describes cannibalism occurring on islands east of Ind. In addition to the inhabitants of the islands being naked and having sex with many partners, they also greatly enjoy eating human flesh, even buying children from merchants to eat them. Given  Sir Mandeville's description of the islands, I would guess that the islands are part of countries we know today as Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Cannibalism is believed to still exist among certain groups in New Guinea, but rather than eating it as regular food, New Guineans who practice cannibalism usually eat the flesh of a dead friend or family member as part of the mourning process, a practice called endocannibalism that Sir Mandeville also mentions. In addition, some communities eat people who have been accused of being witches.

The Korowai People only eat witches

Exaggerating or emphasizing certain cultural practices in order to make others look uncivilized is nothing new. Sir Mandeville may have done the same to excite his readers or exotify the people living on the islands. Early European colonizers in the Americas wrote of violent cultural practices, torture, and human sacrifice done by native Americans, but some scholars today believe that such accounts were exaggerated in order to dehumanize the natives and create justification for colonization. The French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote of this cultural superiority in his 1653 essay "Des Cannibales." Montaigne had met 3 cannibals from Brazil, who had never left their homeland before and were visiting France for the first time. The cannibals explained to Montaigne things they found unusual, such as how some people had enormous wealth and ate everything, while some men were starving in the streets. According the them, it was strange that the poor tolerated such inequality and didn't kill the rich or burn their houses. Montaigne challenged European feelings of superiority over people like the Brazilian cannibals, arguing in his essay that some European practices were even more barbaric than the Brazilian custom of eating their dead enemies, and that the Brazilians in some ways were more humane. I would agree with him, considering that Europeans at the time, like some cannibals, killed accused witches and believed in all sorts of superstition. It seems that whether we consider a practice to be barbaric or not depends on what our culture deems normal.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/47372552@N06/4343341886/
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/on-ethnocentrism/
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/sleeping-with-cannibals-128958913/?no-ist=&page=3