What follows is an excerpt from a discussion group on cannibalism.  In the course of the discussion one of the the participants, y2karl (below in blue), quotes Marvin Harris extensively on the subject.  The excerpt begins with another participant, Faze, attacking Harris. I suspect that Faze is parroting comments he heard from one of his professors: 
 

y2karl, Marvin Harris was one of the most biased, axe-grinding, hobby-horse riding anthropologists in the business. For him, all of human culture was explained by what he imagined was this insatiable need for protein -- he even went so far as to believe that the human sacrifices of the Aztecs were driven by a dietary need for the protein in the victim's hearts (as if a whole civilization could get their protein needs met by enemy hearts). The man was fun, but something of a crank, especially as no respectable dietician ever corraborated his theories. So he was predisposed to be credulous about cannibalism. In fact, cannibalism was a keystone of his theory. Nobody's taken him seriosly for a long time.

What I find shocking is that the politically "progressive" posters of MeFi have fallen so eagerly for this cannibal myth. Doesn't it occur to anybody that accusations of cannibalism are simply a cultural universal-- a way of denigrating an enemy, a neighbor, a minority group, a means of justifying colonialism, missionary work, or just plain oppressions?

Doesn't it fall into the category of the blood libel against the Jews, or the Belgian nuns as one of those big, hysterical lies that's supposed to justify an obliterative response?
posted by Faze at 6:36 AM PST on July 30. 

Possible, Faze, but seems quite improbable. I think it has a lot more to do with the ignorance that the average modern person has about historical activities that are so alien to the 21st century mind as to seem
unthinkable (this goes far beyond cannibalism). I believe that Arens' "debunking" was pretty thoroughly debunked among anthropologists a decade ago, as I recall from my reading at the time (late for work, so no links at this time). The charges against him were that he set out to prove a thesis, not to objectively examine the data, and that he threw out or ignored much that countered his hypothesis.

And your suggestion that accusations of cannibalism are a universal cultural form of denigration implies the universality of a negative view of the activity, which is precisely what is being examined and, therefore, rather circular in reasoning.
posted by rushmc at 7:03 AM PST on July 30 

"What I find shocking is that the politically 'progressive' posters of MeFi have fallen so eagerly for this cannibal myth. Doesn't it occur to anybody that accusations of cannibalism are simply a cultural universal."

So what? So are accusations of murder. That doesn't mean that murder doesn't happen - and that some societies, from time to time, have seen more of it than others.

While there may well be 'cannibal myths' about certain societies, that doesn't mean that every story of cannibalism is myth. There are convincing accounts of Fijian cannibalism. And if you doubt those because of their internet provenance, all I can say is I've seen similar accounts in various 19th-century volumes, all by different people. If there was a grand conspiracy to spin a cannibal myth around the Fiji Islands it was surely even more elaborate than the conspiracy theories floating around about 9-11 today.
posted by rory at 8:12 AM PST on July 30 

(Of course, Sod's law means that after posting that link I see that the site has crap on it about the Holocaust being a 'myth', which casts a shadow on their motives for publishing those Fiji quotes. But Cargill, at least, was a genuine missionary to Fiji in the 1830s, his accounts from that time were indeed published, and I've seen some of them. And various
of those details, like using live men as rollers to launch canoes, I read long before seeing that page. You don't tend to forget that stuff...)
posted by rory at 8:23 AM PST on July 30 

"Marvin Harris was one of the most biased, axe- grinding, hobby-horse riding anthropologists in the business?? From the Columbia College obituary:
"Harris was a proponent of the four-field approach to the discipline of anthropology, which combines cultural anthropology, anthropological linguistics, biological anthropology and archaeology. His influence spans all four fields. Harris is known as the founder of cultural materialism, a theoretical paradigm and research strategy that attempts to explain cultural practices as a result of the ways in which a culture solves the practical problems of survival. He suggested that food taboos, warfare and witchcraft originate from a society's ways of adapting to a means of subsistence."

"In fact, cannibalism was a keystone of his theory." Oh, really... A short summary of Cultural Materialism.  Also, Marvin Harris's Cultural Materialism. 

Nobody's taken him seriosly for a long time??
Oh, really...American Anthropological Association website--note who's quoted at the top.
posted by y2karl at 8:44 AM PST on July 30 

"He even went so far as to believe that the human sacrifices of the Aztecs were driven by a dietary need for the protein in the victim's hearts (as if a whole civilization could get their protein needs met by enemy hearts." That is so silly (and wrong)--care to source where he ever said anything like that?
posted by y2karl at 8:48 AM PST on July 30 

Pages 228-34 in Harris's 1985 "Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig" lay out the theory in embarassing detail, all a bit too lengthy to copy out here. Harris was a powerful department head at Columbia. I'm sorry to hear that he's passed away, and I will say this much for him: he was an entertaining popularizer, and unlike most of his colleagues at the time, he wasn't a Marxist.
posted by Faze at 7:25 PM PST on July 30 

Faze: What I find shocking is that the politically "progressive" posters of MeFi have fallen so eagerly for this cannibal myth. Doesn't it occur to anybody that accusations of cannibalism are simply a cultural
universal -- a way of denigrating an enemy, a neighbor, a minority group, a means of justifying colonialism, missionary work, or just plain
oppressions? 

Not really...I don't have a moral problem with the idea in itself, nor does it particularly disgust me to contemplate. The idea of a culture that practices it does not mean that they are being denigrated.
posted by bingo at 1:40 AM PST on July 31 

I believe if you read more closely, he notes the hearts were cut out by the priests in the sacrifice and burnt on the altars, the bodies of the sacrificed then dismembered and rolled down the steps of the pyramids for the waiting peasantry below...

"he even went so far as to believe that the human sacrifices of the Aztecs were driven by a dietary need for the protein in the victim's hearts (as if a whole civilization could get their protein needs met by enemy hearts)."  Um, Faze, the hearts? 

As some ceremonies involved such sacrifices in the thousands, that's a lot of meat in a densely populated land where the top three sources of protein were dogs, turkeys and pond scum (algae skimmed from the lake around Tenochtitlan and pressed into cakes). 

And since you've read Harris, you'll perhaps remember an extensive quotation in Of Cannibals And Kings from an eyewitness account by a French priest capture by the Iroquois that involved the torture, killing, dismemberment and consumption of an enemy prisoner. 

"Arens maintains, and convincingly proves, that there is no first-hand, eye-witness evidence that any tribe, nation or culture on earth has ever made a normative behavior out of cannibalism." 

I believe I quoted another part of Harris's extensive bebuttal of the brilliant Arens' contention above--in which he is most case-by-case specific but you seem to be able to ignore that...

--as well confabulate the narrative of Aztecs eating the remains of victims of human sacrifice into Aztecs eating human hearts alone...

--not to mention reducing your reduction of his theory of cultural materialism into this insatiable need for protein ...(Although an impartial observer might decide otherwise from the links on cultural materialsim provided above.)

Oh, he was an entertaining popularizer but evidently not up to your post-docoral standards of scientific rigor. Right....No matter what half-cocked, weak and wrong things you said in the first place, you manage to introduce more with each response--Talk about making yourself right by making the other guy wrong--chalk you up in the Immortal Hall of the Never Wrongs.
posted by y2karl at 10:45 AM PST on July 31 

Harris was a powerful department head at Columbia. Well, he'd been at the Univerisity of Florida for some years before he died, if you're insinuating the obituary was a puff piece. Oh, and he was also the former chairman of the general anthropology division of the

American Anthropological Association, too. Nobody's taken him seriosly

for a long time, indeed.

posted by y2karl at 12:27 PM PST on July 31 

y2karl, those were some pile-driving posts. I would say that I stand

corrected, only nobody could remain standing under that relentless

barrage. Let me just say... ah, never mind.

posted by Faze at 1:31 PM PST on July 31