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Cannibalism, marked as infamy in the West, nevertheless proves to the historian as well as to the ethnographer a practice that has been everywhere widespread, with preferred homelands: South America, for instance. There, this practice organised so well many societies —for example, the Tupinamba of the Brazilian coast— that it appears as a “total social fact” (Mauss); still better, the excellent ethnography of the Tupinambas shows that like their conquerors, even the eaten prisoners conceived the ordinary anthropophagic “exchange” in the way of a « gift/for-gift,” even if it was agonistic. The result, far removed from our humanism, was a coherent and “syncretistic” ideology, establishing the human being as meat among others, between spirits and animals."