The law of sympathetic magic

It's hard to know the extent to which our modern notions of cannibalism are based on a biased Western viewpoint. It was actually while I was researching a topic of emotional psychology that I came across what seemed like a rational explanation of cannibalistic behavior.

I was reading The Handbook of Emotion's when I came across an article by Paul Rozin on the nature of disgust. Something caught my eye. Rozin gave criteria for things that would universally elicit disgust for all humans. One of his criteria for eliciting 'interpersonal' disgust was an envelope violation--a breaking of the skin or 'envelope'. I personally have trouble keeping my eyes on the screen when a gory scene in a horror movie comes on so this seems to be true. I couldn't possibly imagine the violence and butchery (inevitable if the meat is to be consumed) that must occur when one engages in cannibalism. Does this elicit disgust in the Māori and if it does, then why do they do it? These are the questions going through my mind as I'm reading Paul Rozin's article. He talks about a phenomenon he calls the 'law of sympathetic magic'. It's the idea that humans unconsciously think that when they eat the properties of what they eat will transfer to them. Think of how disgusted you would be to eat a perfectly sterile cockroach, even if you knew it was sterile. The law usually has negative connotations but it also has positive ones in which you gain some desirable essence from what you eat.

Could this be why the Māori engaged in cannibalism? In order for me to accept this explanation there would have to be cultural proof to back the idea up. Most of the accounts of cannibalism were between two Māori tribes, and occasionally Europeans.It seemed like an entirely aggressive act and there doesn't seem to be any evidence of non-aggressive endocannibalism. If the law of sympathetic magic was an active belief of the Māori I would assume they would also want the desirable essences of their own deceased--people they would have had more exposure to and more certainty as to the quality of their character. But at the same time, it shouldn't be overlooked that there are often taboos and religious beliefs that would deter endocannibalism in many pacific island cultures.


But to what extent is this based on actual knowledge of Maori culture and religion? It seems plausible-- it almost, in fact, seems like the basis for part of the definitions of endo/exo cannibalism. It could, however, be a completely Western Analysis of the behavior which extenuates the degree of awareness the Maori had on the 'effects' of their own cultural practice. The notion that an envelope violation would cause universal disgust almost completely rules out the idea of cannibalism. It certainly is possible that Rozin's criteria for eliciting disgust are not as universal as he would like to think. Maybe the law of sympathetic magic is an effect of cannibalism, but i wouldn't go so far as to so it is the sole motivation for the act. Perhaps in inter-tribal warfare cannibalism had the effect of terrifying a tribes enemies and making the tribe look strong, but that doesn't mean we can make the assumption that Māori cannibalism originated for that reason without further understanding their culture and religion. It's important to understand the inevitable bias in a Western explanation of a phenomenon that originated devoid of Western influences.