On March 7, 2015, the San Diego Union Tribune (
visit link) ran the following story:
CANNIBALS EXHIBIT'S AIM: GOOD TASTE MUSEUM OF...
Mugshot of Peter RoweBy Peter Rowe | midnight March 7, 2016
Closing its long-running torture exhibit, the San Diego Museum of Man opened a cheerier show over the weekend.
Welcome to "Cannibals: Myth & Reality."
"This is very different," said Grant Barrett, the Balboa Park institution's marketing manager. "There are parts of this exhibit that are lighthearted or compassionate."
Banishing the iron maiden, the rack and thumb screws has changed the mood in the 3,000-square-foot gallery. Artifacts of sadism have been replaced by a show that, while no laugh riot, adds a dollop of pop culture to its blood and grilled guts.
A wall of movie posters reminds visitors that cannibalism appears in everything from the 1991 tearjerker "Fried Green Tomatoes" to last year's "In the Heart of the Sea." Play the "Donner Party" video game or a life-size version of "Operation," using large tweezers to extract calorie-rich organs and muscles.
Finding the right tone here was critical, as the show's designers didn't want to cut too close to the funny bone.
"How do you make this not flippant," asked Emily Anderson, the exhibit's curator, "and still make it engaging?"
Her aim was to educate and entertain, and also to spark a reconsideration of our ties to this queasy subject.
Genetic research indicates that, in prehistoric times, "people were eating people all over the world," Anderson said. "We may all have ancestors who were cannibals. How did it go from something that happened all over to this great taboo?"
Rx: Powdered flesh
Christopher Columbus is believed to have coined the term "cannibal," using it to describe inhabitants of San Salvador, where the explorer made his first New World landfall. Writing to his royal patrons, Spain's Ferdinand and Isabella, he noted that the natives were maneaters who could be enslaved.
"The labeling of other people as cannibals was used to justify taking over their territory," Anderson noted.
Cultures in Latin America, Africa and the South Pacific have engaged in cannibalism, but the extent and meaning of this practice is still debated. Moreover, there were bloody echoes in the West - the Mayans' human sacrifices had religious significance, as did the Spanish Inquisition's auto-da-fés.
Much of "Cannibals" challenges assumptions that eating people was a horror unique to backward savages, unknown in advanced civilizations. One room re-creates an 18th century European apothecary stocked with common nostrums. Suffering from diarrhea? Here's a dose of powdered human flesh. A tumor in your throat? Consume this placenta. Epilepsy? Sip this warm blood.
"This was medicine practiced by the leading scientists and pharmacological manuals," Anderson said. "This was not fringe."
Neither were these instances of classic cannibalism as we know it from "Silence of the Lambs" and other scholarly sources. With or without fava beans, humans were not killing and eating other people.
However, that's what happened in the aftermath of numerous 18th and 19th century shipwrecks. Sailors from the doomed HMS Peggy (1765), the Tiger (1766), the Medusa (1816), the Essex (1820) and dozens more were known to draw lots to determine who would die and who would dine.
It wasn't until 1884 that rescued sailors were charged with murder for killing and devouring a shipmate. Until then, Anderson said, mariners saw this grisly occurrence as "an unpleasant necessity of life."
‘Taking communion'
Even on land, the exhibit stresses, there were numerous instances of desperate people consuming the dead. There was the Donner Party, pioneers marooned without adequate supplies in the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846-47, and the residents of Leningrad, besieged by the Nazis from September 1941 until January 1943.
In that Soviet stronghold, daily rations fell to as low as 150 calories. Unlike the authorities who executed Russians caught eating corpses, Anderson withholds judgment.
"What would you do if you were starving to death?" she said. "If this was your reality, what would you do?"
One room poses those questions in a stark, sympathetic way. In a dark chamber lit by votive candles, film clips outline the tale of the 1972 Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes. On a barren, snow-swept mountain for two months, survivors turned to their only source of sustenance.
"They talked about this experience as taking communion," Anderson said. "For them, it was a spiritual event."
Or perhaps it was a natural event? One corner of the exhibit describes cannibalism among frogs, polar bears and other species. When more than one embryo occupies a pregnant shark's womb, for instance, a deadly form of sibling rivalry erupts.
"The largest and strongest embryo will attack," Anderson said, "until there is just one left."
Sometimes, cannibalism occurs where we least expect it - bunnies? really? - and doesn't exist where we believe it does.
A "pygmy cannibal tribe" was displayed at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. "There was no evidence that any were actually practicing cannibals," Anderson said.
In Canada, officials banned the "Man-Eater Dance" of the Kwakwaka'wakw people, even though the "Man-Eater" was a symbolic, not literal, figure.
"We want to encourage people to empathize," Anderson said. "Put themselves in the shoes of other people they might disparage or distance themselves from."
Ready for a two-year run, the museum has stocked its gift shop with "Cannibals" T-shirts and buttons. They've also set up cafe tables on the plaza outside the exhibit. Just the spot for a quick bite.
peter.rowe@sduniontribune.com
(619) 293-1227
Twitter: @peterroweut
Cannibals
Cannibals Exhibit will run 2 years"