| Sumario: | Representations of the Western cannibal have metamorphosed since Herodotus first recorded the practice of anthropophagy. These images of the cannibal have been intefrtwined with philosophical, religious and metaphorical representations, far removed from the indigenous interpretations of ritual anthropophagic practices. In this paper, we examine the imaginary cannibal of Western discourse and then compare Western medicinal cannibalism and the Catholic Eucharist with the mortuary anthropophagy of the South Fore people of Papua New Guinea. This comparison revealed underlying similarities in their beliefs of immortal essences which could be transferred from the dead to the living to ward off the inevitability of death. These findings removed long-established racist boundaries between indigenous anthropophagi and Western observers.
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