What this means, in short, is that the Asadi regularly eat members of their own tribal unit, the only tribal unit on BoskVeld. Usually, this form of cannibalism signifies an attempt on the part of the deceased’s relatives and friends to incorporate the dead one’s memories and spirit by a ritual ingestion of his flesh. Eating the dead under such circumstances, then, is an act of homage and a visible expression of the community’s desire to insure the continuity of its lifestyle and its membership. Christians, by the way, participate in symbolic endocannibalism every time they celebrate Holy Communion. Eat this – drink this – in remembrance of Me.
Why, you may wonder, does the endocannibalism of the Asadi so offend and demoralize me? Because, God help me, I’ve begun regarding them as alien projections of my own consciousness, and, expecting better of myself, I expected better of them. Does that make sense? I’m afraid you’ll think it doesn’t. But, damn it, just when I’d begun to see glimmerings of something lofty in their makeups, old E.Z. – like some nineteenth-century Indian headman putting on a potlatch – comes dragging three carcasses into the clearing and unleashes the ravenous animal in every one of his goggle-eyed subjects! It’s more than I can stand.
The Asadi ignore me. It’s hot out here, and they ignore me. They go by, they go by, revolving about me like so many motorized pasteboard cutouts. And Turnbull’s not among them, he doesn’t revolve anymore, he’s been butchered and consumed. Butchered and consumed, do you hear? With the same wanton self-centeredness that we used to poison the Ituri and rout out the people who lived there. Turnbull’s dead, base-camp huggers, and There are no more pygmies, there are no more pygmies, there are no
PART THREE
The Ritual of Death and Designation
From the final draft of the one complete section of Egan Cheney’s otherwise unfinished ethnography:
DEATH
On Day 120 the old chieftain, whom I called Eisen Zwei, took ill. Because it had been several days since he had gorged himself during the general ‘feast,’ I then supposed that his sickness was unrelated to his earlier intemperance. I am still of this mind. For five days he had eaten nothing, although the other Asadi refused to observe his fast and began eating whatever herbs, roots, flowers, bark, and heartwood they came across. They ignored the old man, and the old man’s huri, much in the way they ignored The Bachelor and me.
Eisen Zwei’s sickness altered this pattern. On the afternoon of the first day of his illness, he abruptly rose and made the horribly glottal, in-sucking noises he had used to summon his people to the meat six days before. I came running from my lean-to. The Asadi moved away from their old chieftain, stopped their shuffling and shambling, and stared with great platterlike eyes whose pinwheeling irises had stalled on a single color. A spastic rumbling replaced the old man’s in-sucking noises, and he bent over at the waist, his arms above his head, to heave and heave again – until it seemed he would soon be vomiting into the dust the very lining of his bowels. Out of his mouth came the half-digested crimson oddments of his spectacular, six-day-old meal. Abashed by the sight, stung by the odor, I turned away. The heaving continued, and since the Asadi stared on, I turned back to observe their culture in action. Duty is a harsh mistress.
The chieftain’s huri flew up from his shoulder and flapped in the air like a small, wind-collapsed umbrella. I had never seen it fly before, and was surprised that it was capable of flight. Its ungainly flapping excited the already well-aroused population of the clearing, and together we watched the huri rise above tree level, circle back, and dip threateningly toward the branches of the trees on the western perimeter. The old man continued to vomit, but now every pair of color-stalled eyes followed the uncertain aerial progress of the huri, which, at one point, plummeted toward the perch where The Bachelor sometimes sequestered himself.
But The Bachelor wasn’t there, and I had no idea where he could be.
Crashing downward through the branches, the huri caught itself up and returned with blind devotion to the airspace over its master. An ugly joke, it sardonically defied gravity.
I thought that at last the huri was going to feed, that its sole diet might well consist of Eisen Zwei’s vomitings. I expected the starved creature to fall to earth upon these – but it did not. Somehow it kept itself aloft, flapping, flapping, waiting for the old man to finish.
Finally, it was not the huri that waded into the vile pool of vomit, but the old man’s shameless conspecifics. My curiosity overcame my revulsion, and I watched the Asadi carry away their portions of the half-digested mess as if each semisolid piece were an invaluable relic. No fighting, no elbowing, no eye-searing abuse. Each individual simply picked out his relic, took it a short distance into the jungle, and deposited it in some hidden place for temporary safekeeping.
During the solemn recessional, the huri quickened the air with its wing beats and an anonymous Asadi supported Eisen Zwei by clutching – tenderly clutching – his mane. When everyone had taken away a chunk of regurgitated flesh, the chieftain’s attendant laid him down in a dry place, and the huri descended to squat by its master’s head.
I should mention that The Bachelor was one of those who appeared in the mourning throng to select and depart with some memento of Eisen Zwei’s illness. He came last, took only a palm-sized morsel, and retreated to the clearing’s edge. Here he climbed into the tree above which the huri had flown its nearly disastrous mission only minutes before. Until sunset The Bachelor remained here, observing and waiting.
On Days 121, 122, and 123, Eisen Zwei continued in his illness, and the Asadi paid him scant attention. They brought him
