I’ve been digging into the ethnographic evidence for cannibalism over the last few years. Before I started searching, I had a few basic expectations about where and why cannibalism should appear: 1) Opportunistic cannibalism in response to starvation
I was wondering if the accounts of cannibalism have been euphemised by anthropologists.
I am thinking of the way researchers attempted to paint a pacific past, free of war---something that I understand is no longer the case and more realistic/factual accounts are now being produced.
In my reading, war cannibalism comes in two flavors (heh): the kind where you consume your enemy to gain his strength, thus respecting his greatness in order to elevate oneself; and the kind where you chew and digest an enemy with malice to digest and destroy him. I say "you" because chances are that everyone alive today is descended from somebody who ate someone else at some time in the past.
I was wondering if the accounts of cannibalism have been euphemised by anthropologists.
I am thinking of the way researchers attempted to paint a pacific past, free of war---something that I understand is no longer the case and more realistic/factual accounts are now being produced.
In my reading, war cannibalism comes in two flavors (heh): the kind where you consume your enemy to gain his strength, thus respecting his greatness in order to elevate oneself; and the kind where you chew and digest an enemy with malice to digest and destroy him. I say "you" because chances are that everyone alive today is descended from somebody who ate someone else at some time in the past.