You were in fact correct in your belief that ritual cannibalism was a myth.
>Source: Vanderbilt University
>(http://www.vanderbilt.edu/)
>
>http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/08/010816082840.htm
>
>Date: Posted 8/16/2001
>
>Giving Cannibalism A Human Face
>
>Cannibalism is one of the last real taboos of modern
>society. As such, it evokes a powerful mixture of
>fascination and revulsion. So strong are these
>preconceptions, in fact, that both the public and the
>scientific community have repeatedly fallen prey to
>them. ìWe assume that cannibalism is always an
>aggressive, barbaric and degrading act,î objects Beth
>A. Conklin, an associate professor of anthropology at
>Vanderbilt University. ìBut that is a serious
>over-simplification, one that has kept us from
>realizing that cannibalism can have positive meanings
>and motives that are not that far from our own
>experience.î
>Conklinís perspective is based on an intensive study
>of the Warií, a group of native people who live in the
>Amazon rainforest. Her fieldwork provides detailed
>confirmation about how and why the Warií practiced an
>elaborate form of cannibalism until the 1960s, when
>government workers and missionaries forced them to
>abandon the practice.
Here's an excerpt from Beth A. Conklin's _Consuming Grief_:
***** Introduction
"I don't know if you can understand this, because you have never had a child die," Jimon Maram said quietly. "But for a parent, when your child dies, it's a sad thing to put his body in the earth."
His wife, Quimoin, turned away, bowing her head over the baby girl cuddled in her lap. Two years earlier, they had buried the child before this one, a two-year-old son.
"It's cold in the earth," Jimon continued, and Quimoin's shoulders trembled. "We keep remembering our child, lying there, cold. We remember, and we are sad." He leaned forward, searching my eyes as if to see whether I could comprehend what he was trying to explain. Then he concluded:
"It was better in the old days, when the others ate the body. Then we did not think about our child's body much. We did not remember our child as much, and we were not so sad."
Santo André, 1987
"In the old days when the others ate the body . . ."
Jimon and Quimoin's people call themselves Wari' (pronounced wah-REE), though in western Brazil, where they live, most outsiders know them as the Pakaa Nova. When Jimon and Quimoin were children in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Wari' still lived independent of Western civilization, and they disposed of the bodies of their dead as their ancestors had done, by eating the roasted flesh, certain internal organs, and sometimes the ground bones....
...The Wari' stopped practicing cannibalism after they were contacted by government-sponsored expeditions that set up base camps on the edges of Wari' territories with the goal of making contact with the Wari' and persuading them to accept peaceful relations with the national society. Various groups of Wari' entered contact in stages between 1956 and 1969, with the majority of the population entering contact in 1961-62. In each case, interactions with outsiders exposed Wari' to a devastating onslaught of infectious diseases against which they had acquired little or no immunological resistance. As one epidemic of malaria, influenza, measles, mumps, whooping cough, and other diseases followed another, hundreds of Wari' died. Within two or three years after the beginning of sustained contact, about 60 percent of the Wari' population--three out of every five people--were dead.
Constantly sick and traumatized by the sudden loss of so many of their relatives, those who survived the early post-contact epidemics were often too weak and demoralized to farm, hunt, fish, or care for their own sick family members. In order to get the food, antibiotics, and medical care they so desperately needed, they came to depend heavily on aid provided by Protestant missionaries, employees of the government Indian agency, and Catholic priests. Putting an end to cannibalism was a top priority for these outsiders, and they used a combination of persuasion and coercion to pressure Wari' to abandon the practice of eating their dead....
<http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/exconcon.html> *****
While Conklin takes the Wari' stories of "the old days when the others ate the body" at their face value, i.e., as reliable evidence of former practice voluntarily provided by native informants, I think that it is very likely that the stories of ritual cannibalism are a mix of:
(A) a symbolic way of saying that what existed before "three out of every five" Wari' died of infectious diseases brought by soldiers, missionaries, civil servants, & (very likely) anthropologists was better than what they have now;
and (B) a performance that the Wari' -- now dependent upon "aid provided by Protestant missionaries, employees of the government Indian agency, and Catholic priests," as well as upon a never-ending stream of anthropologists who come with grant monies to study them -- (consciously or unconsciously) put on, exchanging stories of ritual cannibalism for means of survival, basically giving outsiders what they want.
Yoshie