Thesis title: ANTROPOFAGIA UMANA: UN APPROCCIO CONSILIENTE TRA STORIA, TEORIA E MATERIALE OSTEOLOGICO. Verso una diagnosi funzionale delle pratiche post-mortem nel record archeologico ed etnografico
Cannibalism remains today a rich yet complex field of debate, one that engages a wide range of disciplinary domains, from archaeology to cultural anthropology. Within this discourse, however, the History of Religions currently occupies a marginal position, despite the increasingly frequent invocation of the ritual dimension of such cultural behaviors. This research aims to reintegrate the theme of cannibalism into the field of discussion within the historical-religious sciences, proposing a theoretical and methodological reconfiguration of the question—namely, a critical reassessment of human anthropophagy as a theoretically unstable and methodologically elusive object.
Far from being reducible to mere alimentary practice or to a presumed symbolic-ritual act, anthropophagy is here conceived as a stratified "anthropological complex"—behavioral, representational, and emotional—whose analysis requires a radical reconsideration of the categories employed in existing scholarship, as well as the adoption of a multidimensional methodology of inquiry.
The thesis is structured in three chapters. The first, theoretical and foundational in nature, addresses the epistemological difficulties inherent in defining the phenomenon. Through a critical review of prevailing disciplinary approaches, it develops a methodological paradigm inspired by neurohistory and the bio-cultural theory of religion, integrating archaeological, cognitive, evolutionary, and ecological dimensions into a unified, consilient interpretative model.
The second chapter, comparative in scope, tests the paradigm by deconstructing the notion of “cannibalism,” understood as a mythological construct and cognitive device aimed at the dehumanization of the other. It introduces the neutral category of isophagy, defined as intraspecific consumption devoid of predefined cultural connotations. Drawing on behavioral data observed in animal species—particularly primates—the chapter elaborates a taxonomy of isophagy (active, passive, opportunistic), thereby laying the groundwork for an interpretation of human anthropophagy as a situated behavior, biologically and emotionally grounded, irreducible to closed and abstract symbolic systems.
The third chapter, ethnographic-archaeological in character, applies the interpretative model to the taphonomic study of 64 human crania from the “Lamberto Loria” Collection, housed at the “Giuseppe Sergi” Museum of Anthropology at Sapienza University of Rome. The integrated analysis of the osteological, historical, and ethnographic data attributes these objects to post-bellum trophy practices, refuting the original isophagic (cerebrophagic) hypotheses, and highlighting the need for a genuinely interdisciplinary research praxis grounded in the convergence of specialized methods, competences, and epistemologies.