Download or read book Cannibalism written by Bill Schutt and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Surprising. Impressive. Cannibalism restores my faith in humanity.” —Sy Montgomery, The New York Times Book Review 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.
Download or read book Mother for Dinner written by Shalom Auslander and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the author of Foreskin's Lament, a novel of identity, tribalism, and mothers. Seventh Seltzer has done everything he can to break from the past, but in his overbearing, narcissistic mother's last moments he is drawn back into the life he left behind. At her deathbed, she whispers in his ear the two words he always knew she would: "Eat me." This is not unusual, as the Seltzers are Cannibal-Americans, a once proud and thriving ethnic group, but for Seventh, it raises some serious questions, both practical and emotional. Of practical concern, his dead mother is six-foot-two and weighs about four hundred and fifty pounds. Even divided up between Seventh and his eleven brothers, that's a lot of red meat. Plus Second keeps kosher, Ninth is vegan, First hated her, and Sixth is dead. To make matters worse, even if he can wrangle his brothers together for a feast, the Can-Am people have assimilated, and the only living Cannibal who knows how to perform the ancient ritual is their Uncle Ishmael, whose erratic understanding of their traditions leads to conflict. Seventh struggles with his mother's deathbed request. He never loved her, but the sense of guilt and responsibility he feels--to her and to his people and to his "unique cultural heritage"--is overwhelming. His mother always taught him he was a link in a chain, thousands of people long, stretching back hundreds of years. But, as his brother First says, he's getting tired of chains. Irreverent and written with Auslander's incomparable humor, Mother for Dinner is an exploration of legacy, assimilation, the things we owe our families, and the things we owe ourselves.
Download or read book An Intellectual History of Cannibalism written by Ctlin Avramescu and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-28 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Consuming Grief written by Beth A. Conklin and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-10 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Mummies Cannibals and Vampires written by Richard Sugg and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2012-04-27 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribed, swallowed or wore human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin against epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression. One thing we are rarely taught at school is this: James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine. Ranging from the execution scaffolds of Germany and Scandinavia, through the courts and laboratories of Italy, France and Britain, to the battlefields of Holland and Ireland, and on to the tribal man-eating of the Americas, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires argues that the real cannibals were in fact the Europeans. Medicinal cannibalism utilised the formidable weight of European science, publishing, trade networks and educated theory. For many, it was also an emphatically Christian phenomenon. And, whilst corpse medicine has sometimes been presented as a medieval therapy, it was at its height during the social and scientific revolutions of early-modern Britain. It survived well into the eighteenth century, and amongst the poor it lingered stubbornly on into the time of Queen Victoria. This innovative book brings to life a little known and often disturbing part of human history.
Download or read book The Man Eating Myth written by William Arens and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1980-09-25 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating and well-researched look into what we really know about cannibalism.
Download or read book Cannibalism written by Hans Askenasy and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychologist Hans Askenasy has put together the first comprehensive history of a subject combining violence, horror, and exotic customs. In Part One of his study, Dr. Askenasy gives a historical and geographic overview of humankind's practice of and attitudes toward cannibalism. Part Two discusses motivational factors for cannibalism, including famines (natural and man-made), survival in extreme situations, magic, ritual, and madness. Among the people and events covered are the siege of Leningrad by the Nazis; the wreckage of the frigate Medusa; the Donner Party; the notorious nineteenth-century "Colorado Man-Eater," Alferd Packer; the Andes plane crash of 1972; Elizabeth Bathory (b. 1560), the "Vampire Lady of the Carpathians"; and Georg Haarmann, who ground up his victims and sold them as potted meat. In Part Three, "Cannibalism in Culture and Society," Askenasy addresses our continuing fascination with cannibals, man-eating witches, werewolves, and vampires in literature, myth, and the media, ranging from Francis Ford Coppola's film version of Bram Stoker's Dracula and Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles to the blood curdling events surrounding the cases of Issei Sagawa, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the Russian schoolteacher-turned torturer, Andrei Romanovitsch Chikatilo.
Download or read book Eat Thy Neighbour written by Daniel Diehl and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2012-05-30 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book An Intellectual History of Cannibalism written by Cătălin Avramescu and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cannibal - perhaps the ultimate symbol of savagery and degradation - has haunted the Western imagination since before the Age of Discovery, when Europeans first encountered genuine cannibals and related horrible stories of shipwrecked travelers eating each other. An Intellectual History of Cannibalism is the first book to systematically examine the role of the cannibal in the arguments of philosophers, from the classical period to modern disputes about such wide-ranging issues as vegetarianism and the right to private property.
Download or read book Cannibalism written by Mark A. Elgar and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering the contextual and taxonomic diversity of cannibalism, this book explains its costs, benefits, and consequences for a taxonomically broad distribution of species from lower eukaryotes to higher primates. The authors, all experts in their taxon of interest, use theory developed for the analysis of foraging, sociality, demography, and genetics to assess the ecological and evolutionary causes and effects of cannibalism. The emerging picture from recent research challenges the view that cannibalism is either abnormal behaviour or an infrequent addition to the predator's usual diet.
Download or read book Contingency Cannibalism written by Shiguro Takada and published by Paladin Press. This book was released on 1999-05-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This twisted, tongue-in-cheek look at cannibalism as a last-resort survival option analyzes real-life case studies and historical episodes of cannibalism. Then it examines the hard-core decisions and gruesome details one must know in order to partake in this grisly practice. Recipes included. For entertainment purposes only.
Download or read book Cannibalism and the Colonial World written by Francis Barker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-08-06 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cannibalism and the Colonial World, published in 1998, an international team of specialists from a variety of disciplines - anthropology, literature, art history - discusses the historical and cultural significance of western fascination with the topic of cannibalism. Addressing the image as it appears in a series of texts - popular culture, film, literature, travel writing and anthropology - the essays range from classical times to contemporary critical discourse. Cannibalism and the Colonial World examines western fascination with the figure of the cannibal and how this has impacted on the representation of the non-western world. This group of literary and anthropological scholars analyses the way cannibalism continues to exist as a term within colonial discourse and places the discussion of cannibalism in the context of postcolonial and cultural studies.
Download or read book Cannibalism and Common Law written by Brian Simpson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2003-08-02 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cannibalism and the Common Law is an enthralling classic of legal history. It tells the tragic story of the yacht Mignonette, which foundered on its way from England to Australia in 1884. The killing and eating of one of the crew, Richard Parker, led to the leading case in the defence of necessity, R. v. Dudley and Stephens. It resulted in their being convicted and sentenced to death, a sentence subsequently commuted. In this tour de force Brian Simpson sets the legal proceedings in their broadest historical context, providing a detailed account of the events and characters involved and of life at sea in the time of sail. Cannibalism and the Common Law is a demonstration that legal history can be written in human terms and can be compulsive reading. This brilliant and fascinating book, a marvelous example of eareful historical detection, and first-class legal history, written by a master.
Download or read book Mummies Cannibals and Vampires written by Richard Sugg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, which saw kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribe, swallow or wear human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin in an attempt to heal themselves of epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression. In this comprehensive and accessible text, Richard Sugg shows that, far from being a medieval therapy, corpse medicine was at its height during the social and scientific revolutions of early-modern Britain, surviving well into the eighteenth century and, amongst the poor, lingering stubbornly on into the time of Queen Victoria. Ranging from the execution scaffolds of Germany and Scandinavia, through the courts and laboratories of Italy, France and Britain, to the battlefields of Holland and Ireland, and on to the tribal man-eating of the Americas, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires argues that the real cannibals were in fact the Europeans. Picking our way through the bloodstained shadows of this remarkable secret history, we encounter medicine cut from bodies living and dead, sacks of human fat harvested after a gun battle, gloves made of human skin, and the first mummy to appear on the London stage. Lit by the uncanny glow of a lamp filled with human blood, this second edition includes new material on exo-cannibalism, skull medicine, the blood-drinking of Scandinavian executions, Victorian corpse-stroking, and the magical powers of candles made from human fat. In our quest to understand the strange paradox of routine Christian cannibalism we move from the Catholic vampirism of the Eucharist, through the routine filth and discomfort of early modern bodies, and in to the potent, numinous source of corpse medicine’s ultimate power: the human soul itself. Now accompanied by a companion website with supplementary articles, interviews with the author, related images, summaries of key topics, and a glossary, the second edition of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires is an essential read for anyone interested in the history of medicine, early modern history, and the darker, hidden past of European Christendom.
Download or read book The Author as Cannibal written by Felisa Vergara Reynolds and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first decades after the end of French rule, Francophone authors engaged in an exercise of rewriting narratives from the colonial literary canon. In The Author as Cannibal, Felisa Vergara Reynolds presents these textual revisions as figurative acts of cannibalism and examines how these literary cannibalizations critique colonialism and its legacy in each author’s homeland. Reynolds focuses on four representative texts: Une tempête (1969) by Aimé Césaire, Le temps de Tamango (1981) by Boubacar Boris Diop, L’amour, la fantasia (1985) by Assia Djebar, and La migration des coeurs (1995) by Maryse Condé. Though written independently in Africa and the Caribbean, these texts all combine critical adaptation with creative destruction in an attempt to eradicate the social, political, cultural, and linguistic remnants of colonization long after independence. The Author as Cannibal situates these works within Francophone studies, showing that the extent of their postcolonial critique is better understood when they are considered collectively. Crucial to the book are two interviews with Maryse Condé, which provide great insight on literary cannibalism. By foregrounding thematic concerns and writing strategies in these texts, Reynolds shows how these rewritings are an underappreciated collective form of protest and resistance for Francophone authors.
Download or read book Cannibal Island written by Nicolas Werth and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A searing historical account of a tragic episode of the Stalinist terror During the spring of 1933, Stalin’s police rounded up nearly one hundred thousand people as part of the Soviet regime’s “cleansing” of Moscow and Leningrad and deported them to Siberia. Many of the victims were sent to labor camps, but ten thousand of them were dumped in a remote wasteland and left to fend for themselves. Cannibal Island reveals the shocking, grisly truth about their fate. These people were abandoned on the island of Nazino without food or shelter. Left there to starve and to die, they eventually began to eat each other. Nicolas Werth, a French historian of the Soviet era, reconstructs their gruesome final days using rare archival material from deep inside the Stalinist vaults. Werth skillfully weaves this episode into a broader story about the Soviet frenzy in the 1930s to purge society of all those deemed to be unfit. For Stalin, these undesirables included criminals, opponents of forced collectivization, vagabonds, gypsies, even entire groups in Soviet society such as the “kulaks” and their families. Werth sets his story within the broader social and political context of the period, giving us for the first time a full picture of how Stalin’s system of “special villages” worked, how hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were moved about the country in wholesale mass transportations, and how this savage bureaucratic machinery functioned on the local, regional, and state levels. Cannibal Island challenges us to confront unpleasant facts not only about Stalin’s punitive social controls and his failed Soviet utopia but about every generation’s capacity for brutality—including our own.
Download or read book Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles written by Nancy Shoemaker and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Full of colorful details and engrossing stories, Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles shows that the aspirations of individual Americans to be recognized as people worthy of others' respect was a driving force in the global extension of United States influence shortly after the nation's founding. Nancy Shoemaker contends that what she calls extraterritorial Americans constituted the vanguard of a vast, early US global expansion. Using as her site of historical investigation nineteenth-century Fiji, the "cannibal isles" of American popular culture, she uncovers stories of Americans looking for opportunities to rise in social status and enhance their sense of self. Prior to British colonization in 1874, extraterritorial Americans had, she argues, as much impact on Fiji as did the British. While the American economy invested in the extraction of sandalwood and sea slugs as resources to sell in China, individuals who went to Fiji had more complicated, personal objectives. Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles considers these motivations through the lives of the three Americans who left the deepest imprint on Fiji: a runaway whaleman who settled in the islands, a sea captain's wife, and a merchant. Shoemaker's book shows how ordinary Americans living or working overseas found unusual venues where they could show themselves worthy of others' respect—others' approval, admiration, or deference.
