Cultural Icons: Edited by Keyan Tomaselli and David Scott

Cultural Icons is an edited volume recently released from Left Coast Press.  I had the opportunity to review the book for the ARD website (Anthropology Review Database) and that should be up in a few weeks.

The book is comprised of some papers presented about the semiotic analysis of cultural/national icons.  It does this quite well, giving you the background information about the icons as well as the important information about how the icons have changed as national, international and social needs and experiences alter how the icons are framed in the culture.  Each of the papers cover an icon:  Nelson Mandela, The Eiffel Tower, The Little Mermaid, The Holy Lance, Britannia, etc.  What is nice is that once you finish this book, you have some idea how the theoretical applications of semiotic analysis can be brought to different icons and symbols.  That makes the book a very fine choice for students, who might learn alot of history of anthropological/culture studies/philosophical thinking but not learn how to apply such conceptual tools to the process of thinking about a subject.  That can be a very hard thing to teach.  For that reason I think the editors of Tomaselli and Scott have assembled a very good book.

Anthropological Reference In A Comic: Wow, I Found One?

Anthropology doesn’t come up much in comics, except in bizarre archaeology and biological/evolutionary concerns that are usually pretty bad.  But I found a reference to Mary Douglas in the cover to this Wonder Woman comic and had to imagine that Wonder Woman creator William Marston would have been familiar with many relevent anthropologists.  He would have also not gotten along with her, since she would not support Marston’s kinky ideas.  The other women listed on the front are prominent female academics.  Despite having some pretty mean political views, Douglas was a good anthropologists and her theories can be applied to situations she would have objected to (meaning her own political causes) and work quite well.

Global Metal – The Best Documentary Available In Every Country But The US Evidently…

Sam Dunn is a filmmaker/anthropologist who made an excellent documentary called A Headbanger’s Journey. You might not have known that he followed it up with a documentary about how metal has spread across the globe as part of globalization. He traveled to Brazil, Indonesia, China, Israel, Dubai, Japan, India. The reason you have not seen this movie is that it seems to be available in every country but the United States. If you are close to Canada you can pick up a DVD there. Why is not available in the US? I am guessing it has something to do with the cost of the rights for the music used in the films. So what has been the result of this? The whole movie is available (at low quality) on youtube.

Here is a link to the video channel on youtube it is available on.

Here is a trailer:

Here is a pretty good interview with the filmmakers.

New Publication

I have a new book review up at the Anthropological Resource Database…well it was published in December but I haven’t put anything up here yet.

Click here…

Jameson , John H. (ed.)
2004 The Reconstructed Past: Reconstructions in the Public Interpretation of Archaeology and History. Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press.

Top 10 Bad Archaeology and Science Stories of 2008…

Click on the link to read about some of the worst archaeology and science actions committed in the 2008 calender year:

http://archaeoporn.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/top-ten-pseudo-archaeological-subjects-of-2008/

New Publication, albeit an electronic one…

Got a book review published. This one is over at ARD, an electronic anthropology research database website. Say that one fast. It is on Emma Baulch’s book on death metal, punk and reggae in Bali. That means if you go to the ARD site and search “death metal” my name and review comes up. I can’t help but feel some success in that fact, both for myself and death metal.

http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=3201

FAQ about Cannibalism

I cheated and just copied and pasted this. All credit goes to Robert Lawless.

“Published in Encyclopedia of Anthropology. H. James Birx, ed. Pp. 435-436. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 2006.

Cannibalism
Cannibalism is defined as the ingestion of members of one’s own species. As used in zoology, it refers to species that prey on their own kind. In anthropology it is used specifically to refer to the eating of humans by humans. Around the 16th century in English-speaking countries the term cannibalism began replacing the Latin-derived term anthropophagy. The word cannibal is usually traced to the Caribbean and the voyages there of Christopher Columbus. Richard Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America and the Islands Adjacent (1582) popularized the word in its English form.
Analytic categories of cannibalism vary. A recent archaeological study used the threefold classification of survival, funerary, and gastronomic cannibalism (White 1992). Other categories commonly found in the literature, both anthropological and otherwise, include aggression, criminal, epicurean, nutritional, ritual, sexual, spiritual, and, less commonly, medical and auto-cannibalism.
Anthropologists usually focus on ritual cannibalism and often use the subcategories of exocannibalism to refer to the consumption of members from a culturally defined outside group and endocannibalism to refer to the consumption of members of one’s own group. Hermann Helmuth suggests that exocannibalism was more common among agriculturalists; and endocannibalism, among foragers (1973). In the folk model exocannibalism is usually associated with the effort to strike fear in the enemy as well as to absorb the spirit of the enemy and involves killing. Associated with an effort to maintain the group’s identity, endocannibalism is often viewed as showing respect for the deceased. Obviously connected to burial ceremonies and sometimes called mortuary cannibalism or compassionate cannibalism, endocannibalism rarely involves killing. For example, according to Beth Conklin (2001) the Wari people of Amazonia justified their mortuary cannibalism with the belief that when they consumed the corpse the spirit of the dead was absorbed by the entire tribe.
Cannibalism has a long history ranging from fifth century B.C. writings of Herodotus (1958:266) to Bruce Knauft’s documentation of three cases of cannibalism between 1978 and 1983 among the Gebusi in south central New Guinea (1985:45; cf. 102-103). Probably the first full-scale treatment of cannibalism in English was Garry Hogg’s 1958 Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice. More journalistic than anthropological, the book, nevertheless, was based on acceptable scholarship and remains a useful survey.
Recently archaeologists working in the U.S. Southwest have provided incontrovertible evidence of cannibalism. For example, Tim White’s extraordinarily meticulous account of cannibalism among the Anasazi in the U.S. Southwest uncovered from one site the cannibalized remains of 17 adults and 12 children (1992). The number of cannibalized remains from other Anasazi sites is expected to exceed 100. Christy Turner and Jacqueline Turner concluded that “cannibalism was practiced for almost four centuries, beginning about A.D. 900 . . . in the Four Corners area [of the U.S. Southwest]” (1999:2). In some Anasazi sites human proteins have been identified as residues in cooking pots and in human feces (Diamond 2000). And preserved human waste containing identifiable human tissue was found at an Anasazi site along with osteological evidence of cannibalism (Marlar, et al. 2000).
The Naysayer
William Arens’ oft-cited 1979 book critically reexamined several anthropologically accepted accounts of cannibalism. Although Arens contended that he was simply investigating the connection between anthropology and cannibalism and not the existence of cannibalism itself, the book has frequently been read as a tract proposing that ritual cannibalism never existed.
The charge of cannibalism clearly has been used historically to impugn the reputation of certain groups, but Arens’ notion that cannibalism is primarily a construction of European colonizers seems a peculiar instance of ethnocentrism; since Europeans did not do it, nobody did it. Unfortunately for Arens’ position Europeans did do it. Peggy Sanday briefly summarized the European medicinal cannibalism that existed from the first until at least the 19th century (1986:8-13). And anthropology has never been as obsessively focused on the study of cannibalism as Arens suggested.
Anthropologists before and after Arens have, indeed, considered the occurrence of cannibalism as quite obvious. One of the most vivid eyewitness accounts of cannibalism was written by Paul P. de La Gironi re from his travels in 1820 among the Western Kalingas of the North Luzon Highlands, also known as the Tinguians (1854:106-112). The striking similarities between the details of his writings and the stories told to me by elderly nonliterate Kalingas about what they had witnessed during their youth and the impossibility of any collusion between La Gironi re and my informants convinced me of the truth of ritual exocannibalism among the Kalingas. And as one anthropologist stated, “The case for past cannibalism in parts of Papua New Guinea is no longer an issue for the majority of Melanesian scholars” (Goldman 1999:19).
Psychological, Symbolic, and Ecological Perspectives
After an exhaustive survey the psychologist Lewis Petrinovich wrote, “Cannibalism is not a pathology that erupts in psychotic individuals, but is a universal adaptive strategy that is evolutionarily sound. The cannibal is within all of us, and cannibals are within all cultures, should the circumstances demand the appearance” (2000:vii). Psychologists offer many theories to explain cannibalism, most of them centering around the notion that the cannibal was over nurtured as an infant. Ethnographic evidence does little to support most of the psychological explanations.
Some of the more convincing symbolic explanations of cannibalism focus on the development of the Eucharist and the doctrine of transubstantiation in Europe in the Middle Ages, suggesting, for example, “In swallowing a consecrated wafer that did not merely represent the body of Christ, but was the body of Christ, the medieval believer not only partook of human and divine flesh, but was incorporated into a community of theophagists for whom theophagy was a central and fundamental aspect of the church” (Price 2003:25).
While the ritual cannibalism has been established beyond question, the origins and causes for the practice remain elusive. Previously ranging from obfuscations and elaborations of folk models to the phantasmagoric notions of psychoanalysis, analytic models were significantly advanced by the introduction of ecological perspectives. For example, Michael Harner famously proposed protein deficiency as the cause of Aztec cannibalism (1977). With the careful reexamination of ethnohistoric accounts, the continuing gathering of ethnographies, and the important contribution of archaeology, anthropology and the public may expect still better explanations of cannibalism.
–Robert Lawless
Wichita State University
Further Readings and References
Arens, W. 1979. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. New York, New York: Oxford University Press.

Conklin, Beth. 2001. Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Diamond, Jared. M. 2000. “Talk of Cannibalism.” Nature 407:25-26.

Goldman, Laurence R. 1999. “From Pot to Polemic: Uses and Abuses of Cannibalism.” Pp. 1-26. The Anthropology of Cannibalism, edited by Laurence R. Goldman. Westport, Connecticut: Bergin and Garvey.

Hakluyt, Richard. 1582. Divers Voyages Touching the Discouerie of America, and the Ilands Adiacent vnto the Same. London: Woodcocke.

Harner, Michael J. 1977. “The Ecological Basis for Aztec Sacrifice.” American Ethnologist 4:117-135.

Helmuth, Hermann. 1973. “Cannibalism in Paleoanthropology and Ethnology.” Man and Aggression, 2nd ed. Edited by Ashley Montagu. Pp. 229-253. New York: Oxford University Press.

Herodotus. 1958. The Histories of Herodotus. New York: Heritage (written c. 450 B.C.).

Hogg, Garry. 1958. Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice. London: Hale.

Knauft, Bruce M. 1985. Good Company and Violence: Sorcery and Social Action in a Lowland New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

La Gironi re, Paul P. de. 1854. Twenty Years [1819-1839] in the Philippines. Revised and extended by the author, expressly for this edition. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Lindenbaum, Shirley. 1979. Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands. Palo Alto, California: Mayfield.

Marlar, Richard A., L. Leonard L. Banks, Brian R. Billman, Patricia M. Lambert, and Jennifer E. Marlar. 2000. “Biochemical Evidence of Cannibalism at a Prehistoric Puebloan Site in Southwestern Colorado.” Nature 407:74-77.

Petrinovich, Lewis. 2000. The Cannibal Within. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Price, Merrall Llewelyn. 2003. Consuming Passions: The Uses of Cannibalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. New York: Routledge.

Sanday, Peggy Reeves. 1986. Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Turner, Christy G., II, and Jacqueline A. Turner. 1999. Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

White, Tim D. 1992. Prehistoric Cannibalism at Mancos 5MTUMR-2346. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Robert Lawless
Wichita State University”

A Response to A&E Don’t Know @%@# About Cannibalism

A comment to the post: “Your comments don’t provide a lot of evidence – just subjective rubbishing of a theory.

Is there any evidence of someone from a culture believing in cannibalism and talking to camera and explaining why?

There is evidence that Europeans were only allowed by the Catholic church to enslave those ‘found’ to be cannibals so the ‘evidence’ materialised. But all of it fiction.

These comments from a reviewer on the Amazon website of Arens book expresses it pretty succinctly:

“No group ever claims that THEY eat people. It’s always the hated enemy and/ or those slated for destruction. Arens notes how Columbus considered the natives of Hispanola to be the most docile and harmless people on Earth who could be enslaved easily. The Spanish Crown allowed the enslavement of the natives, but only those who ate human flesh. Of course like most peoples, the “Caribs” got rather insolent when Columbus started killing them and stealing their land and PRESTO! -the once peaceful, docile natives turned into vicious cannibals instantly! This gave Columbus and his successors a convenient excuse to rob, rape, murder, and enslave the natives, who became more uppity… This cycle was quite agreeable to those who stood to make money from genocide.

If man-eating was socially acceptable, one would think someone could have produced a photograph or videotape since the man-eaters would not have gone to any lengths to hide something they weren’t ashamed of. But no such evidence exists for the same reason there’s no hard evidence for fire-breathing dragons, one-eyed giants, giant three-headed dogs, unicorns or other creatures from ancient bestiaries. They only exist in overheated imaginations.

The reason this book caused such a ruckus when it was released, is not just the fact that it made anthropologists look as disreputable as phrenologists: charlatans, shysters and hucksters practicing a crank pseudo-science. Among the highly educated, it’s fashionable to ridicule the bumpkins and yokels for being gullible enough to buy into astrology, creationism and other forms of nonsense. But as W. Arens proved with “The Man-Eating Myth”, the intelligencia is just as easily fooled as what Mencken called “the booboise” and that in many cases, “PhD” means “piled high and deep”. “

If you could substantiate your critic of Arens with some evidence it might help.“

Thank you for your comments to the blog. I unfortunately have to disagree with your point. There are groups that admit to having eaten people: The Asmat, some people in Fiji, etc. They admit to it and it is culturally sanctioned (though not anymore due to national concerns). The problem with a film of the act is that any anthropologist who might film such an activity (recently considering the nature of the technology) would never release such a film if they ever made one. Filming and showing such an act would bring what amounts to a government invasion to the people. The influence of missionaries also result in the practice disappearing. My main complaints were about the way that culturally sanctioned cannibalism (which is oddly not really questioned) is portrayed as a form of deviancy. As for Arens, I could argue all day but it will not change your mind. I know of two pictures, but I cannot give you links from the top of my head: one was a photo by Martin and Osa Johnson that was taken in Africa of some human body parts hanging on a line. The other was a photo among the Asmat that was published in a National Geographic anthology.

Arens attack on anthropology is fine, that made him his name and career. Anthropologists should be critical when dealing with historical sources. My issue comes more from a matter that is embedded in Arens arguement. By proposing the Man-Eating Myth as an Othering/Colonializing impulse he is constructing cannibalism as a universal dysfunction. He does not want to recognize that culturally sanctioned cannibalism might be relative, he sees cannibalism as universally horrible and then claims that cannibalism doesn’t exist. The careful little shifting of the burden of proof onto Anthropologists to prove that people did perform socially accepted cannibalism takes all accounts as false, and then a photographic evidence is required. No anthropologist is going to record an act that will get people arrested if they can help it.

The amazon book review and Arens book don’t really provide evidence, except where it furthers his general argument. The blog was more of a critique about the A&E documentary. That being said I do believe that Arens is coming from a very important point of view. I do believe that alot of the early explorer and missionary accounts of cannibalism are false, and maybe some anthropologists are wrong too. The problem is that when there is evidence for cannibalism he will not accept it or will put forth an argument that will somehow remove it from any culturally sanctioned practice. His theory is a fairytale, it is like a creationist argument that doesn’t really address evolution but uses any weaknesses in the literature as representations of the subject. There is evidence, but there is no way to keep Arens and his following from rejecting it on philosophical grounds. As for the film footage, early film makers in the remote areas of Melanesia usually stayed with the missionaries, using their facilities to develop their film. There are not going to be too many cannibals around the missionaries. With all due respect, Arens will never admit that cannibalism is socially sanctioned even if he sees it first hand. One of the first thing governments or missionaries do is to try and suppress cannibalism, so any people under this colonialism would have denied their practice. Arens fails to recognize that it is possible that the colonializing influence might have been not only to see cannibalism in places where it didn’t exist, but to create such a total power that we will not even recognize it in the places where it did exist.

A&E Don’t Know #*@% About Cannibalism

Watched an A&E documentary on cannibalism. Man, they must have taken pains to talk to the worst social scientists they could find. First they talked about Ed Gein, then a little bit from a bad psychologist who said some nonsense about cannibalism being a common theme of the unconscious (that whole that baby looks so cute I could eat them up). They gave W. Arens a few seconds to make some comments on cannibalism, but if you read his book “The Man Eating Myth” you realize that he doesn’t believe cannibalism is real but was created out of the fears of early explorers. His argument does touch on an important issue of Western “exoticization” of other peoples, but his thesis that cannibalism was an invention applied to people is nonsense. In some cultures there is cannibalism, that cannibalism was a part of the culture and not in a survivalism sense, trying to survive as culture is being broken down.

The documentary takes on some idea that cannibalism is a universal taboo, which is not true. If Arens was involved in the script and creation of this documentary then I understand, but the documentary does not even address that the Donner Party and Dahmer are not the kinds of cannibalism that you find in New Guinea, Central America or parts of Africa. Mortuary cannibalism, like that among the Fore of New Guinea, was a way of respecting the dead. Failure to eat your dead kin showed great disrespect for the culture you live in and the person who died. For the Asmat cannibalism was a way to gain power and prestige. But cannibalism cannot be seen as a cultural pathology.

This documentary presents cannibalism as something deviant, not an occasional part of culture that is often incorporated into belief systems that are not built on the idea that cannibalism is sexualized serial killing insanity.  A &E wants cannibalism to be some kind of universal taboo that horrifies every culture, and where it is practiced it shows a horror of the culture.  But it is not.  Sure cannibalism is something that I don’t want to do.  Cannibalism is also looked on with horror in many cultures.  But that is not the total vision of cannibalism.  A&E wanted to sensationalize cannibalism and they found the one anthropologist, Arens, who would give them the point of view they wanted.  Too bad most anthropologists view Arens’ book with reactions that are somewhere between embarrassment and critically severe distaste. A&E don’t know #*@% about cannibalism. Psychologists who try to pathologize the cultures who practice cannibalism…also they don’t know @#$@$ about cannibalism.

Martin and Osa Film Festival…

Had the showing of the Asmat bisj film (full title = “The Lives of Our Ancestors: An Asmat Bisj Ceremony”). The crowd was small, about 20-30 people. The movie went over well. Alot of people came up and complimented me and had questions. The long section of the Asmat man telling what the preparations for the Asmat bisj went over well, a concern I had. The crowd really liked it.

Lamont Lindstrom, an anthropologist from the University of Tulsa, did a great presentation on Vanuatu and some of the context of the Johnson’s productions. I talked to him for awhile. He did his fieldwork in Tannu in Vanuatu and knows Lowell Holmes and Dorothy Billings from Wichita State.

John Tibbetts, from KU, talked about Buster Keaton (they have a major Buster Keaton film festival in Iola, about 30 miles away). He showed a short that was made by the Canadian Broadcasting Company when Keaton was in his 80s, called the Railrodders. It was excellent.

Now that this is over I will relax for the evening. Then I have to write two papers that are due on Tuesday and another one due on Wednesday. After I tweak a few things on this documentary I’ll get it uploaded onto our museum site and then I will crank out this historical documentary on Samoa in the 1950s for Lowell Holmes. Then it is onto a short film on the Korowai, edited out of last years New Guinea footage. Somewhere in there I need to work on my thesis.