Cannibal Tribe



A band of non-white natives dwelling far off the beaten path in some exotic locale who have ... unusual ... dietary requirements and complex social structures revolving around them, and who view the appearance of wayward white explorers in much the same way Homer Simpson would view a box of donuts arriving on his doorstep under its own power. In short, this is the I'm a Humanitarian trope bought in bulk so the storyteller can pass the savings on to you, and set in an exotic location for that special something extra. Expect to see lots of blood and Europeans tied to (or run through by) spits while turning over a fire.

The Cannibal Tribe trope plays into the remaining Acceptable Targets status of primitive peoples, pointing a finger at them and declaring how dangerous such vicious savages are to poor, innocent white people who don't mean anyone any harm. Note that in the very few real life examples that exist, when cannibalism wasn't a last-ditch response to a starvation scenario, it was usually reserved for ritual/religious purposes, such as the classic case of consuming (part of) a defeated enemy to gain his strength in an act of sympathetic magic. There are no reliable accounts of groups that "harvested" other nearby humans as a regular part of their diet, and Fridge Logic indicates that such a tribe would quickly either run out of "livestock" or be wiped out by its neighbors.

Sub-trope of I'm a Humanitarian. Compare/contrast Cannibal Clan, which is more or less the non-racist version of this trope, where the cannibals are typically white-trash types suffering from an advanced case of backwoods degeneracy.

Film

 * The entire Cannibal film genre, a slew of chiefly Italian movies made during the 1970s and 1980s which had a distressing sameness in their plots: Clueless white people go somewhere they shouldn't, and mostly end up eaten by natives, usually with lots of gore and nudity.  The End.
 * The Man From Deep River (1972) was the first Italian cannibal film and introduced the notions of white people being trapped in cannibal territory, exotic rituals, white-native sex and Me Me Lai and Ivan Rassimov. It was mostly a rip-off of the 1970 Richard Harris western A Man Called Horse with cannibalism thrown in.
 * Last Cannibal World (1977). four plane passengers are stranded in a jungle, the brown-skinned members of the group die quickly, the main character is stripped, fondled and urinated on and watches the natives kill first one of their own using bull ants and then a crocodile. He escapes using Me Me Lai, who helps him survive before being eaten by the pursuing tribe.
 * Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977)
 * Prisoner of the Cannibal God (also known as Slave of the Cannibal God and The Mountain of the Cannibal God (1978)
 * Papaya, Love Goddess of the Cannibals (1978)
 * Primitives (1979)
 * Cannibal Holocaust (1980). Upon the film's release, the director and producer Ruggero Deodato was arrested on the charge that they had had several of the actors murdered for the camera. Their names were cleared when they arranged for the "dead" actors to appear together on television. It has been suggested that The Blair Witch Project and The Last Broadcast appropriated their Mockumentary style from Cannibal Holocaust.
 * Eaten Alive! (1980)
 * White Cannibal Queen (1980)
 * Devil Hunter (1980)
 * Cannibal Ferox (1981). Natives capture two men who previously exploited them, along with three college students who have fallen in with them. The natives humiliate and kill all but one of them in slow, ritualistic fashion -- hence the official and alternative movie title: Make Them Die Slowly.
 * Cannibal Terror (1981)
 * Amazonia: The Catherine Miles Story (1985)
 * Cannibal Ferox 2: Massacre in Dinosaur Valley
 * The Green Inferno (1988).
 * Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death (1989) is a satire of those kinds of film that is better than it sounds. It had to be billed as Piranha Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death in the UK to avoid association with the genre.
 * In 2003, director Bruno Mattei directed and created two straight-to-video Cannibal Tribe films, Cannibal Ferox 3: Land of Death and Cannibal Holocaust 2: The Beginning (AKA Mondo Cannibale), the official sequel to the original Cannibal Holocaust movie. Both films are a mix of Cannibal Ferox, Cannibal Holocaust, Predator, plus every other cannibal film imaginable from the 70s and 80s, thrown into not one but two giant blenders. Once that's done, you've got yourself two demonic and tainted cannibal films forged from the blackest/darkest pits of Hell.

Literature

 * There's a cannibal tribe in Terry Pratchett's non-Disworld novel Nation, but aside from being terrifying raiders who take human prisoners for slaves (and dinner, of course), they're really quite reasonable... and not nearly as terrifying as First Mate Cox.
 * Elements of this turn up in the South Seas Treasure Game from the 1981 novel Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes.

Live-Action TV

 * A regular threat in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World.

Video Games

 * Monkey Island features a former Cannibal Tribe that has since turned towards vegetarianism.

Real Life

 * Mayincatec: Anthropologist Marvin Harris, author of the 1977 book Cannibals and Kings, has suggested that the flesh of the victims was a part of an aristocratic diet as a reward, since the Aztec diet was lacking in proteins. According to Harris, the Aztec economy would not support feeding them as slaves and the columns of prisoners were "marching meat".