[Sca-cooks] Fw: Response to Crusades and cannibalism

[Laura C. Minnick]

At 10:38 AM 12/12/02 -0800, you wrote:
>
>Years a good I read and enjoyed _The Man-Eating Myth_. At that point,
>judging by the book, the orthodoxy among anthropologists was that
>(non-starvation) cannibalism did exist or had existed in a wide
>variety of cultures. The book was an attempt to debunk that belief,
>and argued that there was no good evidence for it anywhere.

Yeah- I remember reading a review of it in... nuts. Can't remember the name
of the journal. It's in a box 180 miles from here... Lit Crit rag, IIRC.

>I thought the author probably overstated his claim, since there was
>one substantial body of evidence (Fiji, I think--somewhere in the
>Pacific) that he mentioned but made no serious effort to explain
>away. But he persuasively argued that most reports of cannibalism
>were evidence of the credulity of anthropologists (and others). I
>didn't realize that his position was now accepted by many, and a
>center of controversy, as Paul seems to be implying.

Well, as I mentioned before, the basic line of thought in the dept when I
was there was that it was basically a topos- you accuse your enemy of the
atrocities you are most afraid of, which most disgust you, or conversely,
are the most secret, ugly urges that you have yourself.

The Pacific Islander accounts of cannibalism are in a very different vein-
they are highly ritualized, specific acts (of only specific parts, I might
add), mostly having to do with ingesting the qualities of the person being
eaten, be it bravery, loyalty, or garlic. ;-) It is also the most
humiliating thing you can do to an enemy (and therein is the resemblance to
Hannibal Lecter- the desire to demonstrate power and control).

Those are specific cases however, of which have little bearing on the
alleged acts of cannibalism by crusaders. Eating someone becasue you're
starving and eating someone's heart or liver or such to gain his bravery is
very different. I think we do either a disservice by lumping them together.

'Lainie
-was hungry, now I'm not so sure...
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