Endocannibalism

Endocannibalism is a practice of eating the flesh of a human being from the same community (tribe, social group or society), usually after they have died. Endocannibalism has also been used to describe the consumption of relics in a mortuary context.

Herodotus (3.38) mentions funerary cannibalism among the Callatiae, a tribe of India. Also, the Aghoris of northern India consume the flesh of the dead floated in the Ganges in pursuit of immortality and supernatural powers.

It is believed that some South American indigenous cultures, such as the Mayoruna people, practiced endocannibalism in the past. The Amahuaca Indians of Peru picked particles of bone out of the ashes of a cremation fire, ground them with corn, and drank as a kind of gruel. For the Wari' people in western Brazil, endocannibalism is an act of compassion where the roasted remains of fellow Wari' are consumed in a mortuary setting; ideally, the affines would consume the entire corpse, and rejecting the practice would be offensive to the direct family members.Ya̧nomamö consumed the ground-up bones and ashes of cremated kinsmen in an act of mourning; this is still classified as endocannibalism, although, strictly speaking, "flesh" is not eaten. Such practices were generally not believed to have been driven by need for protein or other food.

Kuru is a type of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) caused by prion that is found in humans. Human prion diseases come in sporadic, genetic and infectious forms. Kuru was the first infectious human prion disease discovered. It spread through the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, in which relatives consumed the bodies of the deceased to return the "life force" of the deceased to the hamlet. Kuru was 8 to 9 times more prevalent in women and children than in men at its peak because, while the men of the village took the choice cuts, the women and children would eat the rest of the body, including the brain, where the prion particles were particularly concentrated. The Kuru epidemic, which is recorded to have begun in the 1920s, is believed to have been started by the consumption of a single individual with Kuru, which then spread through the population. Oral history records that cannibalism began within the Fore in the late 19th century. Recent research at University College London identified a gene that protects against prion diseases, by studying the Fore people.

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