section_path: Society and culture/Giraffe liver
section_name: Giraffe liver
paragraph_text: Giraffe liver
  
  The Humr are one of the tribes in the Baggara ethnic group, native to southwestern Kordofan in Sudan who speak Shuwa (Chadian Arabic), make a non-alcoholic drink from the liver and bone marrow of the giraffe, which they call umm nyolokh. They claim it is intoxicating (Arabic سكران sakran), causing dreams and even waking hallucinations. Anthropologist Ian Cunnison accompanied the Humr on one of their giraffe-hunting expeditions in the late 1950s, and noted that:
  
  Cunnison's remarkable account of an apparently psychoactive mammal found its way from a somewhat obscure scientific paper into more mainstream literature through a conversation between W. James of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford and specialist on the use of hallucinogens and intoxicants in society, and R. Rudgley, who discussed it in a book on psychoactive drugs for general readers. He speculated that a hallucinogenic compound N,N-Dimethyltryptamine in the giraffe liver might account for the intoxicating properties claimed for umm nyolokh.
  
  Cunnison, on the other hand, writing in 1958 found it hard to believe in the literal truth of the Humr's assertion that the drink was intoxicating:
  
  The study of entheogens in general – including entheogens of animal origin (e.g. hallucinogenic fish and toad venom) – has, however, made considerable progress in the sixty-odd years since Cunnison's report; the idea that some intoxicating substance might reside in giraffe livers may no longer be as far-fetched as it seemed to Cunnison. However, to date, proof (or disproof) still waits on detailed analyses of the organ and the beverage made from it.