The Yanomami tribes are an indigenous tribe of about 35 000 people and make up about 200 – 250 villages. Yanomami believe that the spirit world is a fundamental part of life. Every creature, rock, tree and mountain has a spirit. Sometimes these are malevolent and attack the Yanomami and are believed to cause illness. Shamans control these spirits by inhaling a hallucinogenic snuff called yakoana. Through their trance-like visions, they meet the spirits.
They’ve explained these spirits to look like bright lights, kind of like little stars in the sky, but are beautiful and decorated with parrot feathers and painted with annatto, an orange-red seed from an artichoke style plant. Others have earrings, use black dye and also dance and sing. Because of this, the Yanomami don’t believe that death is a natural occurrence. They think that a rival tribe’s shaman sent an evil spirit to someone in their tribe. It’s essential to protect the spirit after death and help them reach peace in the spirit world. They don’t hunt certain bird types because spirits could enter the body and not achieve peace.
They also believe that the deceased’s spirit can’t reach the spirit world until they’re gone from the living world by completing specific funeral rituals. These rituals are as follows:
- The deceased aren’t buried since the burial and decomposition process takes too long. Instead, they have a special cremation ritual.
- When someone passes, they cover their body with leaves in the forest for about 30 to 40 days.
- They then collect the bones for the cremation ceremony.
- After the cremation, they collect the ashes for a soup, which they eat.
- The soup is a mixture of the deceased’s ashes with fermented bananas; they then fill a gourd with the soup and pass it along for the entire community to consume
They believe that consuming the deceased ashes keeps the deceased spirit alive for the next generations. The departed spirit cannot reach peace in the spirit world until they eat the soup.
If an enemy tribe member killed the deceased, they might keep the ashes around until they can get revenge for the deceased’s death. They don’t eat the soup until the dead has a peaceful path to the spirit world. On the night of the planned revenge raid, only the women are allowed to eat the soup.
They believe in the ritual so much that they worry about deceased warriors whose bodies go missing because, without a body, no cremation ritual can occur.
So you might be thinking to yourself, doesn’t this imply that these tribes are cannibals? Well, technically, yes, but they do it for different reasons, so they’re classified differently. These tribes classify as what’s called endocannibalism. It is an ancient ritual that involves eating the flesh of a family member or friend who’s passed away. Endocannibalism is performed as a ritual and sanctioned by the tribe or participating group instead of eating human flesh for survival.
It happens throughout the southern American tribes, and often, tribe members will eat the dead out of respect, believing they can absorb the loved ones wisdom through the ritual.
For example, the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea, and I’m sorry if this gets a bit too gruesome, place a heavy focus on the woman and children consuming their fellow deceased men. Those who took part had to follow a specific protocol. For example, a woman had to eat her brothers’ brain or the hands of their brother-in-law.
Anthropologists who study these tribes believe it’s a way for the communities to process their grief. By consuming their loved ones, the intern changed their surroundings and rid themselves of painful memories. So in this way, the act of cannibalism is less aggressive than what the western culture is led to believe.