Europeans have a longstanding tradition of being really, really weird and really, really suspicious of other people.

Chuck and I just recorded a podcast on totem poles that should be out soon and in the article there’s section on totem pole myths, specifically that they were used to ward off and/or worship evil spirits. That would be incorrect: totem poles are instead akin to a very tall wooden family history. Think a bit further, though. Where would that myth have come from? Yes, that’s right, European settlers. (I wrote another post on how European suspiciousness created the idea of witches.)

How about cannibalism? There’s a guy named William Arens who posited in 1980 that there’s never been a culture that practiced cannibalism. Instead, it was suspicious rumor generated by early contact between Europeans and native tribes. It’s not entirely odd, if you think about it. All it takes is an explorer in the grips of awe and cynicism while meeting a previously-undiscovered group of humans noticing there happen to be a lot of piles of bones here or there. Instead of considering the possibility that the people practice funeral rites that don’t include burying their dead (true), the explorer concludes that they eat one another (false), high tails it out of there and goes to tell everybody else that the group practices cannibalism. Sadly, the image of bone-nosed natives cooking Bugs Bunny in a huge pot is not a caricature of a real thought, but a pretty accurate portrayal of how whites viewed unconverted tribes.

(An aside: At least one group in Africa suspected that whites they encountered were practicing cannibals too. Explorer David Livingstone reported encountering such a belief, and figured out the natives were rationalizing the disappearances of their neighbors into the hands of slave traders, of whose real activities they were unaware.)

I say all this to mention the recent finding of a 17th-century witch jug in Staffordshire, UK, described in National Geographic. Apparently, the ornate bottle originally made in Germany was first made to hold beer, which is cool. But living in the pre assembly-line era, the Brits reused bottles like the one dug up outside an old pub to ward off evil spirits and bad luck in general. Sounds familiar.

The best part is what was put into the bottle to ward off evil: fingernail and toenail clippings, hair and — wait for it — urine. The bottle would then be buried just outside the house. It’s not so much the lack of stepping back for a moment while depositing waste into the bottle one intends to bury and thinking, “Wow, this is really crazy. What I’m doing is really, really crazy” that gets me. Indigenous tribes around the world had their own zany ideas as well. What gets me is that friends and family of people who urinated into bottles and buried them to ward off bad luck traveled across the world, met up with people who had their own strange rituals and instead of finding any affinity with the peoples encountered (who also had their own strange customs and rituals), they just kind of wiped them out.

It seems like a lack of perspective and any kind of self consciousness can really screw things up. Why does it seem that the people who have the bigger boats and better guns are convinced everyone else is wrong?

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More on HowStuffWorks.com:
How Totem Poles Work
How Cannibalism Works
How Natural Burial Works