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Wari Family Barbecue

  

The right thing to do and the tasty way to do it.
by Francine Travis  
 

Wari Family Barbecue

1 fresh corpse
3 dozen palm leaves
1 bundle fire vine
10 cups corn

Before butchering, have a close kinsman lie face down on a straw mat and place the deceased directly on the kinsman's back, keeping corpse substances from falling to the earth.

Making a vertical abdominal incision, remove all internal organs.

Wrap heart and liver in palm leaves. Set aside. Other internal organs, including intestines and genitals, will be thrown directly in the fire.

Remove the head and sever limbs at the joints. Wash thoroughly. Note: If deceased is a child, wrap all body parts in leaves before roasting -- the way Wari cook soft foods like small fish and animal organs.

Place leaf-wrapped organs and all body parts on a roasting rack, kindling a fire beneath with a decorated bundle of makuri xe or "fire vine."

During roasting, grind corn and wrap tightly in palm leaves to make kapam, the dense cornbread that is the proper accompaniment to meat.

Take no pleasure in the dismemberment, preparation and ingestion of the deceased. Eat reluctantly, but dutifully. After the funeral meal neither think nor speak of the dead -- the body will remember.
It's no more nor less strange than burial, when you think about it. Just another response to the ambivalence with which the living experience proximity to death. Inevitably, the urge to maintain connection to the dearly departed runs into the brute necessity of disposal: Grandma starts to stink after a day or two, and something must be done about it. We respond by smearing her with natural tone lipstick and a pancake foundation, making her pretty before dropping her into a ditch. What's the big deal if others choose to fire up the grill instead?

It is a dying art, but there was a time not too long ago when the elaborate rituals of "funerary" or "mortuary" cannibalism were all the rage among certain tribes of South American Indians. Up until about 50 years ago, for example, the Wari people of western Brazil ate their dead because the thought of putting them in the ground seemed disrespectful. For them the earth was, well, dirty; leaving their loved ones there seemed a great insult. Besides, as they saw it, burial was not a real solution anyway -- sort of like using mashed potatoes to hide your brussel sprouts. No matter how fervently you wish otherwise, they're still there. Is that anyway to treat a friend?

Seen this way, there's almost something sweet about the Wari alternative. "I felt sorry for he who had died," one tribal elder recalled recently. "That is why I ate him."

In Consuming Grief, a new book from the University of Texas Press, anthropologist Beth A. Conklin explores Wari anthropophagy as the product of interconnected beliefs about the body, memory and the afterlife. She also provides grisly culinary details that at times read like a cookbook coauthored by Jeffrey Dahmer and Martha Stewart. Of course, we don't recommend you try this recipe at home. If you must, though, do go easy on the salt. Grandma was on a low sodium diet.

 

  
   
An avid hunter since age ten, Francine Travis grew up in the Pacific Northwest. She is currently at work on Eat Your Kill: The Wild Game Cookbook.