[Sca-cooks] canabalism

[Laura C. Minnick]

At 11:16 PM 5/9/02 -0500, you wrote:
>TIC Elric said:
>> Ok then to keep this on a slant of the cooking list, how about a discussion
>> on how to cook visitors?  There was a small sections of the known world at
>> that time who considered visitors a welcome addition to the menu :)
>
>Which areas are you thinking about? Do you have any evidence of this
>occuring or just stories that one people told about another? It seems
>that the Christians accused the Moslems and the Jews of canabalism and
>they made similar accusations. I'm sure each did about other groups
>as well. But other than some actual occurances, written about by
>both sides, the eating of Moslems by some Christian Crusaders, I'm
>not aware of many other events.
>
>I have collected a few messages for a p-canabalism-msg or some such
>file, but I've not created it yet. If you have more facts on canabalism,
>I'd like to have them.

*sigh*
We talked about this in one of my classes, and I have some materials...
guess where?

The basic thing was that apparently everyone has an innate fear of
cannibalism (no duh!) and so it becaomes the bogeyman for everyone. And it
becomes the things that differentiates the Other- 'That tribe over there-
they're cannibals all right, but we're more civilized that that'... and
then their neighbors say 'Those people over there- they eat those they
conquer and they do human sacrifices, too!'- embodying in each other their
own deepest fears.

So you fin d the Christians  and the Moslems pointing fingers at each
other, and both pointing at the Tafurs (who weren't really part of either
group- weird folks and I can't tell you much about them). Heck, we have
visions of African tribes cooking Missionaries- well they thought
(according to thier historians) that _we_ were coming to eat them!

There does seem to be real evidence of some tribes having a ceremonial
dinner of a vanquished foe- generally the leader- but then selling the rest
as slaves (why eat them when you can use them to buy cows?). And we do know
of cannibalism happening in the most terrible of conditions- the Donner
party, and that plane that went down in the Andes. But the cannibals you
see on a cheesy old Bob Hope movies seem to be that- cheesy old fiction.

And that's what I know, sans my class notes ;-)

'Lainie
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