ABSTRACT
Post-mortem rituals can require survivors to eat the corpse or its products, a practice known as endo-cannibalism or sarco-cannibalism. The Bera-wan of Borneo ate fluids from the decomposing corpse with rice, a symbol of death as transition. Displaying both reverence and repugnance, the Melanesian people of New Guinea ate the flesh itself before vomiting, a symbolic maintenance and rupture of bonds with the dead. Coming from societies where endo-cannibalism evokes horror, Western colonialists usually outlawed these practices. Controversy raged, for example, when in 1972 a group of Argentinian rugby players survived an airplane crash by eating their dead team members' flesh.
