Biden’s uncle eaten by cannibals? A diplomatic flare-up revives a thousand-year “Rashomon” of cannibalism

Diplomacy and the missing airman

It has been reported that President Joe Biden, during a visit to a Pennsylvania war memorial, suggested his World War II uncle might have been eaten by “cannibals” after his plane went down over New Guinea — a remark that quickly ballooned into a diplomatic incident. Papua New Guinea’s prime minister James Marape pushed back forcefully, saying his country should not be labelled by a sensational stereotype and stressing that Papua New Guineans are a peaceful people. Official U.S. Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) and National Archives records list Ambrose Finnegan as missing in action after an A‑20 crash on May 14, 1944, and attribute the loss to a non‑combat flight accident; there is no documented evidence that his remains were recovered by local groups.

Cannibalism: myth, medicine and memory

Why did a single offhand line revive a centuries‑old tale? Because “cannibal” is a word born of mistranslation and myth — Columbus likely misheard “Carib” as “cannibal,” and the label stuck, feeding colonial narratives that portrayed distant peoples as savage. That mythic frame has real consequences: it justified conquest and was weaponized in travelogues, missionary accounts and imperial policy. At the same time, there are complex, verified histories that complicate caricature — the Fore people of Papua New Guinea suffered kuru in the 20th century, a prion disease linked to mortuary consumption of brain tissue; once the practice ceased the epidemic waned. Elsewhere, scholars document ritualized or famine‑driven cannibalism in contexts as divergent as the Aztec sacrificial system and imperial China’s wartime famines (records in texts such as 墨子, 左传 and 资治通鉴 recount extreme episodes), yet these remain exception, atrocity or medical case studies — not timeless cultural traits.

Why it matters

The episode underlines two truths. First: leaders’ historical anecdotes can amplify long‑standing stereotypes with geopolitical consequences. Second: the reality behind stories of “cannibals” is mixed — part myth, part verified medical and historical episodes, and often bound up with colonial distortion and wartime desperation. Who benefits from reviving such images? And who pays the diplomatic and human cost when centuries of fraught storytelling get retold in a single sentence?