The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

According to Marshall Sahlins (NYR, November 23), the “overall view” of Cannibals and Kings is that “culture is business on the scale of history.” He derives this idea from the fact that cultural materialism finds explanations for sociocultural phenomena in the relative costs and benefits of alternative activities. Sahlins’s idée fixe is that costs and benefits are the same as “profit” and “loss” and that they therefore are applicable only to cultures which economize in conformity with the formal categories of capitalism. However the costs and benefits of cultural materialism refer to the more or less efficacious ways of satisfying the need for food, sex, rest, health, and approbation. Although these costs and benefits cannot be measured with precision, rough approximations can easily be obtained in terms of rising or declining death rates, calorie and protein intake, incidence of disease, ratio of labor input to output, energetic balances, amount of infanticide, casualties in war, and many other “etic” and behavioral indices.

These costs and benefits clearly constitute categories that are epistemologically distinct from price market and econometric notions of profit and loss measured in monetary terms. Moreover, they are relevant to much broader sets of concerns, namely the more or less efficient solution of biological, psychological, and ecological problems experienced by all human beings and all cultures. An interest in efficacious solutions to such universally experienced problems is scarcely a trait that is peculiar to members of the bourgeoisie. But anyone who has a lively concern with the basic material conditions of human welfare including Marx and Engels emerges from Sahlins’s analysis as a proponent of “western business mentality.” This is one monopoly that businessmen east or west neither merit nor enjoy.

“To Get Some Meat”

Sahlins does not stop at fantasizing the ideological implications of a science of culture rooted in the analysis of material costs and benefits. He renders an inaccurate account of the manner in which cultural materialists actually apply optimizing principles to the explanation of specific puzzles. From Sahlins’s account, one would suppose that cultural materialism treats the costs and benefits of alternative innovations as if they were timeless options open to any society at any moment in its history. But the corpus of cultural materialist theory is evolutionistic. In Cannibals and Kings I view specific optimizing alternatives as actionable only at a definite moment in a developmental process.

Neglect of this aspect of cultural materialism leads Sahlins to misrepresent the explanation of Aztec cannibalism (first proposed in Harner 1977). The point of my version of this theory according to Sahlins is that in effect the Aztec ate people “to get some meat.” What Sahlins omits is that both Harner and I insist that cannibalism was widely practiced in Mesoamerica before the Aztecs arrived in the Valley of Mexico and that as part of the small-scale ritual sacrifice of prisoners of war it was probably almost universal among chiefdoms in both hemispheres. We contend further that as states developed, they usually reduced or eliminated human sacrifice, substituting animal for human victims, and that they invariably gave up the practice of eating prisoners of war. The explanation for this trend is that it was part of the general tendency for successful expansionist states to adopt ecumenical religions and to incorporate defeated populations into the victor’s political economy as peasants, serfs, or slaves.

However, in the Aztec case, and as far as we know only in the Aztec case, the state itself took over the earlier human sacrifice and cannibalism complex and made it the main focus of its ecclesiastical rituals. As the Aztecs became more powerful they did not stop eating their enemies; instead they ate more and more of them. At least 20,000 captives were immolated in four days at the dedication of the main Aztec temple in 1487 and by the beginning of the sixteenth century at least fifteen to twenty thousand people were being eaten per year in Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital (Harner 1977:119). Since the skulls of the victims in Tenochtitlan were placed on display racks after the brains were taken out and eaten, it was possible for the members of Cortès’s expedition to make a precise count of one category of victims. They found that the rack contained 136,000 heads but they were unable to count another group of heads that had been used to make two tall towers consisting entirely of crania and jawbones (ibid.:122).

The scale of this complex bears no resemblance to any other cannibal complex before or since. The Aztec are a unique case and they therefore demand a unique explanation. Sahlins, however, tries to lump the Aztec complex with instances of small-scale pre-state ritual cannibalism in Oceania and elsewhere. He distorts the problem from one of explaining Aztec cannibalism in particular, to one of explaining cannibalism in general. What has to be explained is not why the Aztec sacrificed and ate people but why they sacrificed and ate more people than anyone else.

Why then were the Aztecs unique? Our explanation is that the Aztec did not give up cannibalism because the faunal resources of the Valley of Mexico had become uniquely depleted. As a result of millennia of intensification and population growth the Central Mexican highlands had been stripped of domesticable ruminants and swine and of wild birds, fish, or ungulates in numbers sufficient to supply significant amounts of animal protein per capita per year (Sanders and Santley in press). The few available domesticable species—birds and dogs—could not be raised in sufficient quantities to make up for the absence of cattle, sheep, goats, horses, pigs, guinea pigs, llamas or alpacas. All other populous ancient states, including the Inca of Peru, possessed several domesticated herbivores whose meat and blood were substituted for human flesh in state-sponsored sacrificial rituals and feasts. These ecclesiastical redistributions of animal protein were used to reward loyalty to the state, especially loyalty on the battlefield, and to enhance and consolidate the power of the ruling class.

This is not the place for a lengthy discussion of the biochemical and physiological advantages associated with animal versus plant sources of protein. It is sufficient to note that animal sources of protein in the form of milk or meat are universally valued over plant sources of protein and are everywhere given a central place in ecclesiastical redistributions, honorific feasts, and upper-class commissaries. (Hindu India, the world center of vegetarian ideologies, is one of the world’s largest consumers of milk and milk products.) The reason for this is that proteins are essential not only for normal body function but for recuperation from infections and wounds.

To make proteins, the human body needs twenty different kinds of amino acids. It can synthesize all but eight or nine of them, the so-called “essential” amino acids. To obtain these essential components from plants, one must eat large amounts of carefully balanced combinations of plant foods at the same meal. Meat, eggs, and other animal proteins, however, provide the essential amino acids in balance even when eaten in small quantities. The world-wide preference for animal protein therefore reflects an adaptive cultural and nutritional strategy. Any population which did not seek to maximize its animal protein intake relative to that of neighboring populations, would soon find itself physically smaller, less healthy, and less capable of recuperating from the trauma of disease and the wounds of combat (cf. Scrimshaw, 1977).

The theory advanced by Michael Harner and me is that the uniquely severe depletion of animal protein resources made it uniquely difficult for the Aztec ruling class to prohibit the consumption of human flesh and to refrain from using it as a reward for loyalty and bravery on the battlefield. It was of greater immediate advantage for the Aztec ruling class to sacrifice, redistribute, and eat their prisoners of war than to use them as serfs or slaves. Cannibalism therefore remained for the Aztecs an irresistible sacrament and their state-sponsored ecclesiastical system tipped over to favor an increase rather than a decrease in the ritual butchering of captives and the redistribution of human flesh.¹ The Aztec ruling class, unlike any government before or since, found itself waging war more and more not to expand territory, but to increase the flow of edible captives. All of this bears little resemblance to the economistic fable concocted by Sahlins in which the Aztecs go to war to “get some meat” because it is cheaper for them to cook people than eat beans. The critical optimized costs and benefits are not only those associated with the choice between two sources of protein—but also between alternate modes of justifying ruling-class hegemony in a severely depleted habitat at a definite moment in the evolution of the state in Mesoamerica.

Sahlins’s Aztec Arcadia

Our theory of Aztec cannibalism is based on the contention that the Valley of Mexico was a uniquely depleted habitat. Sahlins however rejects this contention. Indeed, he makes the claim that the Valley of Mexico was a veritable protein paradise. He writes that “of all the peoples in the hemisphere who practiced intensive agriculture, the Aztecs probably had the greatest natural protein resources.” However, it is an established archaeological, ecological, and plain common sense fact that the hunting, fishing, and collecting of non-maritime natural protein resources cannot provide densely urbanized populations with nutritionally significant amounts of animal protein on a sustained yield basis. Only domesticated protein resources can do that. Even with densities of less than one person per square mile, hunters and collectors need hundreds of square miles of reserve areas in order to sustain per capita animal protein at modest levels (say, thirty grams per capita per day, or less than half of the current US ration). In this perspective, Sahlins’s contention that the 1,500,000 people who lived in the Valley of Mexico could have gotten an ample supply of meat from hunting deer is worth about as much as the suggestion that New York City could get its meat from wildlife in the Catskill mountains.

William Sanders and R. Santley (in press) have studied the archaeological evidence for overkill and depletion in the Valley of Mexico for the period 1500 BC to AD 1500. They estimate that at the beginning of this period deer meat contributed 13.5 percent of the calories in the diet. In Aztec times “overkill had become so acute” that only 0.1 percent of calories could come from deer meat. They estimate that “total meat from all wild sources could not have exceeded 0.3 percent of the annual requirement [of calories].”² This works out to 0.6 grams of protein per capita per day. (For reference, it is useful to think of the amount of protein in a hen’s egg, namely about six grams.)

The idea that the lakes in the Valley of Mexico could have supplied significant amounts of fish protein per capita per year is no less incorrect. These lakes in pre-contact times averaged less than three feet deep; at the lower elevations in the chain the water was too salty to drink and during the dry season the surface area shrank considerably due to evaporation. After the conquest the Spaniards began to drain the lakes. However, even in Aztec times the surface was covered with algae out of which the Aztecs made their famous “scum cakes.” These algaic blooms suggest that the lakes had a low oxygen content and that vertebrate species were not abundant below the surface.