This fascinating book situates the moral panics of recent witch-hunts aimed at so-called cannibals in western Uganda in the context of a longue durée in which royalty, missionaries, and local Christians have contested the moralities of consuming the human body. Behrend's text centers on the efforts of the Uganda Martyrs Guild (UMG), a lay Catholic movement, to identify and expel satanic spirits possessing cannibals, who are said to pervert normative practices of feeding and growth by bewitching relatives and neighbors only to resurrect and kill them once more in order to feast on their flesh. Recent crises involving AIDS, the kidnapping of children by rebel armies, and unaccountable police and courts have contributed to a popular sense that the world is out of control, and that familiar appearances disguise a reality of local and global cannibal networks. Under these circumstances, the UMG has launched ‘crusades’ against so-called pagans who own occult objects that make them open to possession by cannibalistic spirits. Yet for all the ostracism and accusation that the UMG fosters, its crusades also limit mob violence by organizing mass exorcisms of evil spirits from supposed cannibals. Thus the key problem raised in this book involves how violence is both provoked and contained within a political imaginary based on ingestion.

While the principal ethnographic material and the accompanying DVD (made in collaboration with Armin Linke) center on the crusades of the Uganda Martyrs Guild, the organization of the text reflects what Behrend terms the ‘dreadful symmetry’ whereby colonizers and the colonized have attributed cannibalism to one another. Thus, the opening chapters focus on the ambiguous boundaries between exploitation and nurturance within conceptions of royalty in the precolonial kingdom of Tooro. Behrend takes a comparative perspective on the socially constitutive nature of exchanges of food and bodily substance in western Uganda, engaging particularly with the literature on the Eucharist. In Tooro, the health of the king's body was seen as crucial to the fertility of the land, and a king's successor would imbibe fluids from the dead body of his predecessor in order to incorporate the power of royalty into his own body. Yet in recent years, local consciousness of the nurturing qualities of power acquired through ingestion has been subsumed by struggles against cannibals as figures of perverse consumption. Stimulated in part by a Charismatic Catholic missionary from Texas who tape-recorded confessions of cannibal spirits, the crusades of the UMG reinforce the sense of all-pervasive evil that they purport to combat. The crusades also serve to consolidate the authority of the Catholic Church, which is in competition with Pentecostal and other religious movements in the area. A remarkable central chapter considers, in conjunction with a video recording of a crusade staged by the UMG for a global audience, the mimetic awareness of UMG members as they confront persons and things possessed by satanic influences. Even as they are possessed by the Holy Spirit, UMG members make themselves vulnerable to harm by coming into contact with such objects and persons, and often need to be healed by the ministers.

The concluding chapters consider in historical perspective the perverse resurrections carried out by cannibals, which Behrend likens to negations of the Eucharist in that cannibals annihilate the other through consumption. Drawing on a wide range of materials on African encounters with missionary medicine and the trade in skulls and bones, Behrend concludes that ‘colonial violence and domination were translated into the “culinary” idiom, the cannibal assuming the position of a master figure’ (p. 173). Some readers may feel, as I did, that this formulation has a rather flattening effect on the richly ambiguous politics of ingestion, which have historically involved efforts to promote growth and contain violence as well as to exert domination. In this vein, Resurrecting Cannibals may be productively read in conjunction with The Land Is Dying by Wenzel Geissler and Ruth Prince (Berghan Books, 2012), which deals with analogous politics around touching and social continuity among Luo in western Kenya. Behrend's book is a major and very welcome addition to the expanding Africanist literatures on religious reformations, the nature of power, and the impact of colonial and postcolonial governance on the felt body.