Human Cannibalism Taboo

The Human Cannibalism Taboo is treated in Jubal Harshaw’s argument not as an inborn prohibition but as a powerful cultural reflex: people mistake learned revulsion for instinct, while the taboo’s social value lies partly in restraining dangers that civilization has not actually removed. The discussion begins with Mike’s request to eat Harshaw’s body, a gesture Harshaw interprets as the highest honor Mike’s Martian upbringing permits him to offer. What horrifies Duke becomes, in Harshaw’s account, evidence of how radically different moral customs can be—and of how much each person’s sense of the natural has been taught.

The Taboo as Learned Training

Duke insists that cannibalism is against instinct because the thought of it turns his stomach; he says he never needed anyone to teach him that it was sinful. Harshaw rejects the inference. Nausea, he explains, can be a conditioned reflex formed not through a single explicit lesson but through immersion in a culture: jokes about cannibals and missionaries, cartoons, fairy tales, horror stories, and countless small signals. The absence of a remembered instruction does not make a response innate.

Harshaw supports that distinction by pointing to the historical reach of cannibalism. Ritual cannibalism was widespread among Indigenous American cultures, and, he argues, every branch of humanity has practiced it at some point. A person’s ancestry therefore does not establish that the custom is alien to human nature; at most, it indicates which people who practiced it are among that person’s ancestors. Duke resists the suggestion that his own family history is relevant, and Harshaw responds that neither of them has grounds for treating the taboo as a universal instinct. His point is not that modern people should eat one another, but that a learned revulsion cannot be mistaken for proof of an unchanging biological law.

Why Society Needs the Prohibition

Harshaw does not conclude that the taboo should be discarded. He describes it as an excellent practical safeguard precisely because, in his view, human beings are not reliably civilized. If fear of the practice were weaker, people might be tempted to prey on one another for material advantage. The taboo’s force is demonstrated in Duke’s own joke about his ex-mother-in-law: he can imagine the danger of someone who hates him if the ordinary prohibition against treating a person as food did not hold.

Harshaw extends the argument to a neighbor who is casual about other people’s fences and livestock during hunting season. Without a strong taboo, Harshaw says, he would not confidently trust that neighbor—or even Duke and himself—not to end up in someone’s freezer. The image turns an abstract moral rule into a concrete protection against opportunism. The prohibition works not because every person has transcended self-interest, but because a shared cultural restraint makes certain forms of predation unthinkable to most people.

Mike’s Martian Practice as a Contrast

The argument grows out of Mike’s request to eat Harshaw’s body. Harshaw asks Duke to attend to the manner and tone in which Mike made it: Mike was offering what he understood, by the values taught on Mars, as his highest compliment and asking for a boon. Harshaw urges the others not to judge that offer solely by the standards learned in Kansas. The scene exposes a collision between two moral frameworks: one finds the act intrinsically monstrous, while the other can understand it as an honor within a religiously formalized custom.

Harshaw distinguishes the Martian practice from predatory, coercive cannibalism. As he understands it from conversations with Mike, a Martian is not seized and butchered against his will. The dead are eaten rather than buried, burned, or exposed to vultures, but the custom is formalized and religious. A Martian chooses when to die after discussing the decision with friends, receiving their advice, and obtaining the consent of the ghosts of ancestors to join them. Death then comes without violence or lingering illness. This account does not ask Duke to adopt the custom; it clarifies why Harshaw regards Mike as civilized by Martian standards even though Mike’s practice violates Earth’s most visceral taboo.

Cultural Relativism and Its Limits

The exchange does not equate all customs or dissolve moral judgment into mere preference. Harshaw acknowledges that his own emotional prejudice against eating a human body is trained into him too. He can share Duke’s repugnance while still recognizing that its source is cultural, and he can defend the taboo’s usefulness without claiming that it is instinctive. That distinction lets him hold two thoughts together: the taboo protects people in a society where self-interest can become predatory, and another society may organize death and the treatment of the dead around rules that make its own practice nonviolent.

Duke’s resistance shows how difficult that separation is. He initially takes bodily revulsion as self-evident proof of instinct and regards his own society as civilized in contrast to supposedly savage ancestors. Harshaw challenges both assumptions by tracing the feeling to accumulated social instruction and by pointing to the gap between a culture’s claim to civilization and its need for restraints against exploitation. The taboo thus becomes more than a rule about what may be eaten: it is a test of whether people can distinguish what they have been taught to feel from what is truly innate, and whether their moral confidence survives comparison with another culture’s coherent, if alien, practice.