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this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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i think cannibalism is a fine barometer of cultural relativism and lingering western chauvinism. to take the most charitable approach to op1, 'ritual cannibalism to honor the dead' is quite different from the consumption of enemies or strangers--for which our objection would be the violation of those non-consensual victims' consent or rights. but the Fore community in which Kuru famously spread did not practice that, theirs was the consumption of family/community members after natural death. i can't format an objection to that, besides the associated healthrisk---which modern medicine could probably prevent if applied to the problem. the Kuru outbreak actually killed that tradition so it's kind of academic to debate, but i think it's important examine knee-jerk demonization of foreign ritual on honest terms, and to apply a consistent standard to all sorts.
for a more practical question: should a religious practitioner be permitted to fast to death? a voluntary religiously-motivated suicide gets very different billing based on the context, and whether that's justified should be examined. maybe one is permissive of a fasting death or a self-immolation, but not an allegedly voluntary sacrifice, or a jonestown? what are the limits to religious freedom and bodily autonomy, and are those informed by a christian socialization or a materialist basis?
endnote: no, lol to the incest. my actual stance on religion is full abolition before someone twists this into support for mostly dead religions, this is about racist and chauvinistic attitudes that socialists are not automatically immune from
Seems to me that this is the answer to the question in most cases. Historically, some cultures practiced cannibalism but most have stopped and I don't know of any active movements to bring back that practice. There's an ethnocentric tendency to think of mainstream culture as one which evolves over time but minority cultures are static traditionalist museum pieces. That couldn't be further from the truth - minority cultures change in response to new conditions and information too.
I would go even so far as to argue that using indigenous cultures to try to justify cannibalism is engaging in the "noble savage" trope.
the Kuru affair happened in the 1950s-60s, not exactly the remote past. the problem is that "new conditions and information" in most cases consisted of christianizing, colonial influences. i don't think we can chalk up the fact people getting colonized and missionary'd tend to abandon cannibalism as a natural development of culture
just the opposite of anything i've asserted but ok
But like you said, the indigenous people who were afflicted by Kuru stopped because they got sick and medical evidence showed them cannibalism was why. Afaik there's nothing christianizing or colonial about that info.
Sorry I wasn't accusing you of doing it, I was agreeing with you. My bad that it was unclear.
unfortunately Kuru being documented and researched is a result of the establishment of australian colonial authority over those people, and the subsequent promulgation of missions to them. so it's hard to know to what extent which influence affected it most, or how the epidemic might have amplified the efforts of missionaries. surely there's a lot at play and it could indicate a way a cannibalistic social structure could have selective pressures against it, but it's not nearly as neat as i'd like to make firm judgements.
also to consider is the mutation in some of the people of the region to resist prion disease, which offers an alternate path out of a prion-disease problem, without behavioral-cultural modification. and identifying the cannibalism as the source of the problem is probably unintuitive enough that i'd consider it pretty unlikely for even an urban, literate, recordkeeping society to figure out. because most people that participated in the cannibalism didn't get sick, and those who did would at different timescales. without our detailed knowledge of the biological processes, it'd be kind of insane to assert that two people that munched on a brain and died 20 years apart both died from the same cause.
oops my bad
Yeah, I don't know enough about the historical or medical aspects of Kuru so I'm hesitant to speak like I know anything about it.
I suppose my main point is that there's sometimes this unspoken assumption that the forces of "civilization" (i.e. colonialism) are the only factors keeping indigenous people from backsliding into "barbarism" (i.e. their traditions at the time of colonization, and as documented by the incredibly racist race science of that era). I detected an undercurrent of that in the original post that we're all dunking on, and I thought that what you said about the tradition ending because of Kuru to be a really good example of how the unspoken colonial assumption is bullshit.
To me, the foremost struggles for indigenous peoples are sovereignty and development. I think that reviving medically sketchy traditions would be pretty low on the list of priorities of most indigenous peoples and 99% of the time when it's brought up in an internet argument it's in bad faith.
i mean it absolutely is bullshit, specific circumstances are always just annoyingly complicated. developments under a colonial system are real, and though inseparable from those pressures, it doesn't make the result ungenuine or something. i'll decry the missionaries up and down all day, but they create earnest believers, a people won't just jump back to the old ways after being coerced to abandon them.
100%, cannibalism discussion is just about overturning the excuses the europeans made for colonizing
I think you would come up against real problems there. bottom line eating someone just carries the risk of catching any infectious diseases they have
you could test for them i imagine? but like compare Mad Cow & other meat-eating risks 1st world resources are applied to that make consumption of animal products relatively safe
diseases often don't cross species very well. Consumption of animals that aren't genetically close to you is inherently safer than eating human
especially if they died by natural means as that normally means they were sick. A healthy killed animal is far safer to eat than a human that died of illness in many ways
that's a good observation, but this discussion is still kind of besides the point. yes, eating human meat is dangerous, but is it dangerous enough to forbid or merely to educate/mitigate risks?
I don't live in a country where it is a traditional funeral rite so my opinion there doesn't really matter
I definitely don't want commodity production of human meat
testing for prions, especially for ones that you don't know of yet (which can develop at any time in any person due to the nature of prions, but that's very very rare) is extremely difficult, when mad cow disease is detected in a cattle herd you cull the herd, it isn't worth it, the risk is far too high, and prions cannot be removed through anti-biotics or any kind of treatment, the only way to destroy them is denaturation through burning
prions are misshapen proteins that 'spread' in that when they touch the normally shaped proteins of the same kind they can cause them to become misshapen in the same way too, and being misshapen means this protein can't do its job, and when it's job is keeping your brain working or doing other important biological functions, you can see where issues arise
someone who was healthy at the end of their life may have prions in their body that were dormant and did not show symptoms, the longer you live the more likely you are to have proteins become misshapen, most are harmless and wouldn't spread anyway, and most people die without developing anything to do with prions because of just how unlikely it is to happen
but in the rare chance someone's body produces a misfolded protein that is both infectious and affects an important biological function then that extremely small chance would be buried in the ground or incinerated the majority of the time, but if more people practiced cannibalism then that protein would have a field day as it spread to the first person and then through blood contact spread to others, because a lot of prion disease is slow acting and/or has a very long incubation period (multiple years)
so not practicing cannibalism makes it a lot less likely for an untreatable deadly prion disease to materialize
so what i don't understand is how prions can be resisted, and whether the epidemiology of a prion disease is about who ingests/receives an incorrectly folded protein, or about individuals with particularly... foldable? proteins getting a prion and developing an illness that others wouldn't. i'm particularly confused because the immune system isn't involved, is it?
basically all prion diseases that we know of are not curable and have a 100% fatality rate
well, it can depend on some things, like for example if there was a difference in how well your body worked without that certain protein being functional compared to another person who is less resilient when this particular protein doesn't work well, it's kind of the reason why the incubation period varies so widely, the build up and conversion from good proteins to misfolded ones isn't instant and takes time, so until that build up gets to a level where it causes symptoms we just don't know that the person has anything wrong with them
there's variation between people of course, but no if a prion is a certain protein and you expose it to proteins of the same kind it makes them misfold, maybe certain people have a different variation of that protein that does the same job but is structured a little differently so it's not as susceptible or at all even, but that's speculation on my part, I haven't read deeply into this particular topic, generally speaking research into prion disease is still very inadequate, it's very rare, and is always fatal, so it's kind of hard to do research on
yeah the immune system can't really fight it typically, because the protein matches the ones that the body uses, there isn't much to tip it off since the immune system doesn't look at protein folding, it looks at what proteins, sugars, and other molecules something has, in fact, the immune system can actually help the prion disease move into the body and reduce the incubation period as was seen in this study on rats, https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1006/clim.2000.4875
oh also, not every exposure would mean 100% getting infected, especially since the propagation of the misfolding isn't instant and takes time, so if those proteins get disposed of and replaced before they can spread (as the body naturally does dismantle and rebuild lots of proteins) then you wouldn't get infected
though keep in mind that these are rare diseases, that affect like 1-2 people per million worldwide every year, some of those cases are due to infection (acquired), some are due to genetic issues that are inherited, meaning the body itself makes misfolded proteins sometimes due to genes being coded with a bad mutation in the area that codes for that protein, and some are just sporadic, meaning one protein just decides to misfold because it got built slightly wrong cause that person is extremely unlucky and then it spreads
more reading here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4890484/
generally speaking, not something you wanna ever risk the chance of making more common
hell yeah i really appreciate you taking the time :mashallah:, thank you
i'm fascinated to know how that chance of being infected stacks up against life expectancy, but that's gotta be an insane thing to study---probably a majority of possible prion-disease uhhh 'infected' might expire from other things before a decade or two of incubation actually completes. its not like we're doing detailed studies of every dead person to check.
extremely interesting, the only subject that's prompted me to consider going into biology
people be eating their own amputated limbs every now an then. if mr beast starts paying people to do it and buying them prosthetics etc so he can sate his lust for human flesh we can revisit the issue. in a more equal society where such coercion wouldn't be possible there's only the food safety concerns.
the problems with it are coercion/grooming and reproductive genetic risk. if you remove those somehow it's still bad to normalize the practice because "we didn't know we were related" almost never happens and actual violence happens consistently.
exactly, there's firm irreligious objections to incest with the thought-experiment defenses being so peculiar and rare they're not worth treating with. if there ever were someone arrested for 'we didn't know!' like sure, free them but the diagnostic there is a less awful justice system, not philosophical musing on a fetishized sex crime
"Accidental incest" happens more often than people think, particularly in smaller isolated counties. It's something of a problem in Iceland for example.
so much so that they made a smartphone app for it
yeah it's not something people would advertise about themselves. in that rare exception sure i'm not gonna go on the twitter dot com and cancel some random married couple that did not break up a long term relationship over it, but that's usually not what the weirdos who argue for it are talking about.
Some things should simply not be permitted in society regardless of what oppressed group practices it.
i didn't assert Fore funerary cannibalism was okay because they are oppressed.
I think in a rational society if someone wanted to do something harmful to themselves - whether it’s fast to death, or use drugs, or whatever - then it could just be treated like we treat so many other dangerous activities. If you want to drive a car you have to take a test to prove that your competent. So I suppose if someone wanted to fast to death they could have an assessment by a psychologist or some kind of expert, to ensure they haven’t been brainwashed or groomed or whatever and understand what they are doing, and if they do, then let them do it. But if it’s some kid that has been raised by cultists that would be flagged and their application to starve to death would be denied
very little you can do about fasting to death as well. You would basically have to imprison and forcefeed them
just have to rely on the fact no major religion calls for it and people natively don't want to starve to death