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- In sum, this book is only partially successful. Arens succeeds in demonstrating that the evidence for cannibalism is often weak, even for the best documented examples. He also presents interesting hypotheses on the subject
of why people in general, and anthropologists in particular, are so willing to accept its existence despite this lack of evidence. The ideas in this book should serve to stimulate further investigations of these topics. Unfortunately, however, Arens fails to support satisfactorily his main thesis that no adequate documentation for cannibalism exists for any culture, an argument that seems too much the result of the author's personal convictions and too little the product of careful research. (en)
- [T]his essay has a dual purpose. First, to assess critically the instances of and documentation for cannibalism, and second, by examining this material and the theoretical explanations offered, to arrive at some broader understanding of the nature and function of anthropology over the past century. In other words, the question of whether or not people eat each other is taken as interesting but moot. But if the idea that they do is commonly accepted without adequate documentation, then the reason for this state of affairs is an even more intriguing problem. (en)
- Even if one could concede that cannibalism exists primarily as a cultural construct whose expression only
involves actual physical consumption of human flesh on rare occasions, which I am prepared to do, Arens still leaves little room for fleshing out the culture of cannibalism because he has buried the bones in a tomb of overly constrained empiricism. The cant from Arens seems to be that if cannibalism can be shown to be anchored in the murky world of mythic thought, metaphoric equations, and symbolic actions, then it has a chance of being reduced to that existence alone. (en)
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