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Author: Priscilla L. Walton
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252092783
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186
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Book Description
Why does Western culture remain fascinated with and saturated by cannibalism? Moving from the idea of the dangerous Other, Priscilla L. Walton's Our Cannibals, Ourselves shows us how modern-day cannibalism has been recaptured as in the vampire story, resurrected into the human blood stream, and mutated into the theory of germs through AIDS, Ebola, and the like. At the same time, it has expanded to encompass the workings of entire economic systems (such as in "consumer cannnibalism"). Our Cannibals, Ourselves is an interdisciplinary study of cannibalism in contemporary culture. It demonstrates how what we take for today's ordinary culture is imaginatively and historically rooted in very powerful processes of the encounter between our own and different, often "threatening," cultures from around the world. Walton shows that the taboo on cannibalism is heavily reinforced only partly out of fear of cannibals themselves; instead, cannibalism is evoked in order to use fear for other purposes, including the sale of fear entertainment. Ranging from literature to popular journalism, film, television, and discourses on disease, Our Cannibals, Ourselves provides an all-encompassing, insightful meditation on what happens to popular culture when it goes global.
Author: Priscilla L. Walton
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252092783
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186
Get Book Here
Book Description
Why does Western culture remain fascinated with and saturated by cannibalism? Moving from the idea of the dangerous Other, Priscilla L. Walton's Our Cannibals, Ourselves shows us how modern-day cannibalism has been recaptured as in the vampire story, resurrected into the human blood stream, and mutated into the theory of germs through AIDS, Ebola, and the like. At the same time, it has expanded to encompass the workings of entire economic systems (such as in "consumer cannnibalism"). Our Cannibals, Ourselves is an interdisciplinary study of cannibalism in contemporary culture. It demonstrates how what we take for today's ordinary culture is imaginatively and historically rooted in very powerful processes of the encounter between our own and different, often "threatening," cultures from around the world. Walton shows that the taboo on cannibalism is heavily reinforced only partly out of fear of cannibals themselves; instead, cannibalism is evoked in order to use fear for other purposes, including the sale of fear entertainment. Ranging from literature to popular journalism, film, television, and discourses on disease, Our Cannibals, Ourselves provides an all-encompassing, insightful meditation on what happens to popular culture when it goes global.
Author: Beth A. Conklin
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292782543
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
Mourning the death of loved ones and recovering from their loss are universal human experiences, yet the grieving process is as different between cultures as it is among individuals. As late as the 1960s, the Wari' Indians of the western Amazonian rainforest ate the roasted flesh of their dead as an expression of compassion for the deceased and for his or her close relatives. By removing and transforming the corpse, which embodied ties between the living and the dead and was a focus of grief for the family of the deceased, Wari' death rites helped the bereaved kin accept their loss and go on with their lives. Drawing on the recollections of Wari' elders who participated in consuming the dead, this book presents one of the richest, most authoritative ethnographic accounts of funerary cannibalism ever recorded. Beth Conklin explores Wari' conceptions of person, body, and spirit, as well as indigenous understandings of memory and emotion, to explain why the Wari' felt that corpses must be destroyed and why they preferred cannibalism over cremation. Her findings challenge many commonly held beliefs about cannibalism and show why, in Wari' terms, it was considered the most honorable and compassionate way of treating the dead.
Author: Carole A Travis-Henikoff
Publisher: Santa Monica Press
ISBN: 1595809961
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
Presenting the history of cannibalism in concert with human evolution, Dinner with a Cannibal takes its readers on an astonishing trip around the world and through history, examining its subject from every angle in order to paint the incredible, multifaceted panoply that is the reality of cannibalism. At the heart of Carole A. Travis-Henikoff’s book is the question of how cannibalism began with the human species and how it has become an unspeakable taboo today. At a time when science is being battered by religions and failing teaching methods, Dinner with a Cannibal presents slices of multiple sciences in a readable, understandable form nested within a wealth of data. With history, paleoanthropology, science, gore, sex, murder, war, culinary tidbits, medical facts, and anthropology filling its pages, Dinner with a Cannibal presents both the light and dark side of the human story; the story of how we came to be all the things we are today.
Author: Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789144450
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Spanning myth, history, and contemporary culture, a terrifying and illuminating excavation of the meaning of cannibalism. Every culture has monsters that eat us, and every culture repels in horror when we eat ourselves. From Grendel to medieval Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean, and from the Ghuls of ancient Persia to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, tales of being consumed are both universal and universally terrifying. In this book, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. explores the full range of monsters that eat the dead: ghouls, cannibals, wendigos, and other beings that feast on human flesh. Moving from myth through history to contemporary popular culture, Wetmore considers everything from ancient Greek myths of feeding humans to the gods, through sky burial in Tibet and Zoroastrianism, to actual cases of cannibalism in modern societies. By examining these seemingly inhuman acts, Eaters of the Dead reveals that those who consume corpses can teach us a great deal about human nature—and our deepest human fears.
Author: Ctlin Avramescu
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691152195
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
Annotation Based on the research he undertook in rare book collections housed in Scotland, the United States, Finland, Iceland, Holland, Germany and Austria, the author presents a systematic history of cannabalism as reflected in the mirror of philosophy.
Author: J. Brown
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137292121
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
A comprehensive study of cannibalism in literature and film, spanning colonial fiction, Gothic texts and contemporary American horror. Amidst the sharp teeth and horrific appetite of the cannibal, this book examines real fears of over-consumerism and consumption that trouble an ever-growing modern world.
Author: Daniel Diehl
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0752486772
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
Cannibalism is unquestionably one of the oldest and deepest-seated taboos. Even in an age when almost nothing is sacred, religious, moral and social prohibitions surround the topic. But even as our minds recoil at the mention of actual acts of cannibalism there is some dark fascination with the subject. Appalling crimes of humans eating other humans are blown into major news stories and gory movies: both Hitchcock's 'Psycho' and 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' were based on the crimes of Ed Gein, who is profiled, along with others, in this book. In ' Eat Thy Neighbour' the authors put the subject of cannibalism into its social and historical perspective.
Author: Bill Schutt
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616204621
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
“A masterful and compulsively readable book that challenges our preconceived notions about a behavior often sensationalized in our culture and, until just recently, misunderstood in the scientific world.” —Ian Tattersall, Curator Emeritus, American Museum of Natural History, and author of The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack For centuries scientists have written off cannibalism as a bizarre phenomenon with little biological significance. Its presence in nature was dismissed as a desperate response to starvation or other life-threatening circumstances, and few spent time studying it. A taboo subject in our culture, the behavior was portrayed mostly through horror movies or tabloids sensationalizing the crimes of real-life flesh-eaters. But the true nature of cannibalism--the role it plays in evolution as well as human history--is even more intriguing (and more normal) than the misconceptions we’ve come to accept as fact. In Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History,zoologist Bill Schutt sets the record straight, debunking common myths and investigating our new understanding of cannibalism’s role in biology, anthropology, and history in the most fascinating account yet written on this complex topic. Schutt takes readers from Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains, where he wades through ponds full of tadpoles devouring their siblings, to the Sierra Nevadas, where he joins researchers who are shedding new light on what happened to the Donner Party--the most infamous episode of cannibalism in American history. He even meets with an expert on the preparation and consumption of human placenta (and, yes, it goes well with Chianti). Bringing together the latest cutting-edge science, Schutt answers questions such as why some amphibians consume their mother’s skin; why certain insects bite the heads off their partners after sex; why, up until the end of the twentieth century, Europeans regularly ate human body parts as medical curatives; and how cannibalism might be linked to the extinction of the Neanderthals. He takes us into the future as well, investigating whether, as climate change causes famine, disease, and overcrowding, we may see more outbreaks of cannibalism in many more species--including our own. Cannibalism places a perfectly natural occurrence into a vital new context and invites us to explore why it both enthralls and repels us.
Author: Dina Khapaeva
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472130269
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Popular culture has reimagined death as entertainment and monsters as heroes, reflecting a profound contempt for the human race
Author: Shawn McIntosh
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810860430
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Why have zombies resonated so pervasively in the popular imagination and in media, especially films? Why have they proved to be one of the most versatile and popular monster types in the growing video game industry? What makes zombies such widespread symbols of horror and dread, and how have portrayals of zombies in movies changed and evolved to fit contemporary fears, anxieties, and social issues? Zombies have held a unique place in film and popular culture throughout most of the 20th century. Rare in that this enduring monster type originated in non-European folk culture rather than the Gothic tradition from which monsters like vampires and werewolves have emerged, zombies have in many ways superseded these Gothic monsters in popular entertainment and the public imagination and have increasingly been used in discussions ranging from the philosophy of mind to computer lingo to the business press. Zombie Culture brings together scholars from a variety of fields, including cinema studies, popular culture, and video game studies, who have examined the living dead through a variety of lenses. By looking at how portrayals of zombies have evolved from their folkloric roots and entered popular culture, readers will gain deeper insights into what zombies mean in terms of the public psyche, how they represent societal fears, and how their evolving portrayals continue to reflect underlying beliefs of The Other, contagion, and death.
