My Final Explanation

I've read modern psychology books, modern and dated anthropological accounts, and plenty of online reasearch to try to get a grasp on the difficult to comprehend act of cannibalism. I've tried to bridge the inevitable cultural bias that impedes my understanding of cannibalism by trying to step into the Maori's shoes and I think I have succeeded.

The law of sympathic magic (that to an extent we believe that we absorb the qualities of what we eat) seemed at first a completely Western way to view cannibalism but I think that it certainly influenced the act becoming a socially acceptable form of utu. It coincides with Animatism and the idea that mana can be manipulated--in the case of the Māori this manipulation would have to coincide with complex laws of tapu. The biggest hurdle in understanding cannibalism was getting past my own Western moral standards (or the idea that there are universal moral standards) and understanding that the Māorii developed the practice in isolation. Utu is often translated into revenge, and I think this is the epitome of Westerners applying their own moral logic onto Māori culture. Utu is more accurately the idea of redemption for the sake of the balance.

I will give an example that tries to explain cannibalism in a way that a Westerner might understand. If a member of another tribe comes into the chieftain's tent and murders him he has severely violated tapu. The mana must be balanced and for the tribe whose chieftain was slain, cannibalizing the murderer is a way of re-balancing mana and getting redemption. If the murderers tribe saw the murderer as breaking their own laws of tapu, the cannibalism will be looked at as just. But if they see the act as violating their tapu they might respond in kind by cannibalizing or killing the members of the other tribe who cannibalized the murderer. This is why the Māori were so often in and out of tribal warfare. Anger is not the motivating force. The atmosphere of constant tribal warfare constantly reinforced the use of cannibalism as a form of utu and made it a socially acceptable act among tribes.