Cannibalistic civilizations?

[Emperor Joker]

Wasn't at least one of the Iroquois tribes accused of such behaviour by non-Iroquois neighbours?

I've heard about it, but I haven't seen a lot of sources for it. If it happened, it was probably in the context of a "Mourning War", which was culturally important for them.

 

[ComradeHuxley]

Well, Western Europe was for a time cannibalistic in an unprecedented scale. The trick was to call the consumption of human body parts “medicine”. And this goes way beyond grinding some mummies into powder. There were blood jelly recipes, human body fat taken from criminals and the list goes on. There is a pretty neat article on the topic:

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine
The question was not “Should you eat human flesh?” says one historian, but, “What sort of flesh should you eat?
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-of-eating-corpses-as-medicine-82360284/

As for today, we still have a problem with African witch doctors using human body parts in their rituals. One of the better known, visible effects of modern cannibalism is the hunt for human Albino. For more info there is this article for example:

Albinos, Long Shunned, Face Threat in Tanzania
Men waited for help at the Tanzanian Albino Society office in Dar es Salaam. At least 19 albinos have been killed in Tanzania in the past year, victims of a growing trade in albino body parts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/world/africa/08albino.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 

[Tate the Brewer]

How about funerary cannibalism? What if a society believes that eating the flesh of your loved ones after death helps you to absorb a part of their soul so that it can always be with you? Such people might cringe at the idea of burying your dead to be eaten by bugs and worms, who never loved the person in question.

 

[Perky50]

.... state sanctioned cannibalism .... wouldn't this make the diplomatic corps a rather risky occupation?

 

[twovultures]

Maybe. But there is good archaeological evidence for this in the prehistoric US southwest

And in the historic southwest, too. The Tonkawa had a reputation for committing ritualistic cannibalism, which freaked out the neighboring tribes to no end. They tended to gang up on the Tonks, who in turn often allied with the US during the Indian wars since everyone else considered them an enemy.

 

[Tripledot]

The Nazis, in fact, deliberately claimed that their movement was a "barbarian" reaction against the soft sensibilities of western liberal culture. Could one imagine a Nazi-like regime that took this exultation of barbarism one step farther and incorporated cannibalistic feasts (featuring specially fattened Jews or Roma, perhaps) into the pseudo-pagan rituals of an SS-like elite cult of warriors?

Japanese soldiers OTL did engage in cannibalism, though a lot of that was because high command deliberately withheld supplies from the troops so they could "forage".