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Aug 26, 2024 · Cannibalism there is defensible in cases of “extreme life-threatening conditions as the only apparent means of survival,” but conviction on a charge of cannibalism in any other case is punishable by up to 14 years in prison. cannibalism, eating of human flesh by humans. The term is derived from the Spanish name (Caríbales, or Caníbales ...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Cannibalism is the act of consuming another individual of the same species as food. Cannibalism is a common ecological interaction in the animal kingdom and has been recorded in more than 1,500 species. [ 1 ] Human cannibalism is also well documented, both in ancient and in recent times. [ 2 ]
Jul 9, 2024 · The Great Famine of 1315-1317 in Europe saw widespread starvation, leading to reports of cannibalism. Similarly, the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s forced desperate individuals to consume human flesh, documented by local priests. Even prehistoric evidence supports the occurrence of cannibalism. Excavations in England have revealed human bones ...
- Robbie Mitchell
Sep 6, 2016 · Cannibalism: When People Ate ... Control and Prevention, about one in a million people in the U.S. develop CJD--the difference is that others rarely come into contact with infected human tissue.
- Introduction
- Historical Reports of Cannibalism
- Papua New Guinea
- South America
- Africa
- Debating Cannibalism
- Conclusion: The Future of The Cannibal
- References
- Note on Contributor
The term cannibal, defined as eating one’s own kind, is a legacy of Columbus’ encounter in 1492 with the Caribs of the Antilles, said to have been consumers of human flesh. Studies documenting the practice of cannibalism among non-humans, identified in more than 1,500 species (Polis 1981: 225), have led to the distinction between human and non-huma...
Early reports of cannibals can be traced back to ancient Greek and Roman times, where they were often part of stories about mythical creatures in unexplored reaches of the world. They include fabulous and bizarre tribes of men, such as the man-eating Cynocephali, dog-headed people held to be living in Asia in the fifth and sixth centuries BC. Homer...
Francis Edgar Williams, a government anthropologist in Papua from 1922 to 1943, was among the first to publish ethnographic material about cannibalism in New Guinea (Williams 1930), a Trust Territory at the time administered by Australia. Williams suggested that his accounts of the practice provided a long and perhaps ill-assorted menu from which t...
Hans Staden’s The true history of his captivity (2008 [1557]) is considered to be a foundational text in the history of the European discovery of Brazil, and a work of ethnographic significance. While serving as a gunner in a Portuguese fort on the Brazilian coast in 1550, Staden was captured by Tupi Indians. He took notes on their skill in shootin...
Early accounts of cannibalism in Africa refer to the Azande, especially the ‘Niam-Niam’, racist stereotypes of Central African people who were depicted in medieval Arab sources as naked creatures with filed teeth and dog’s heads, living at the end of the known world. Stereotypical accounts of cannibals came also from west-central Africa in the sixt...
For several decades, beginning in the late 1970s, the topic of cannibalism was at the centre of three well-publicised anthropological debates. Marvin Harris (1977) proposed that the endless varieties of cultural behaviour can be explained as adaptations to particular ecological conditions, a materialist theory adopted by Harris from the work of Mic...
This entry has discussed cannibalism in places where the practice was recent, and people who ate the dead could provide detailed information. The reports of cannibalism in Papua New Guinea, South America, and Africa had presented seemingly boundless accounts of the practice. However, anthropologists were said to have been unsuccessful in disturbing...
Arens, W. 1979. The man-eating myth. New York: Oxford University Press. ——— 1998. Rethinking anthropophagy. In Cannibalism and the colonial world (eds) F. Barker, P. Hulme & M. Iversen, 39-62. Cambridge: University Press. Asante, E.A., M. Smidak, A. Grimshaw, R. Houghton, A. Tomlinson, A. Jeelani, T. Jakubcova et al. 2015. A naturally occurring var...
Shirley Lindenbaum is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She was awarded an MA from the University of Sydney in 1971, and a Doctor of Letters from the University of Melbourne in 2016. She co-edited The time of AIDS with Gilbert Herdt in 1992, and Knowledge power and practice with...
Jan 17, 2022 · Some of the most famous acts of cannibalism today have been acts of desperation: faced with the prospect of starvation and death, people have consumed human flesh in order to survive. In 1816, the survivors of the sinking of the Méduse resorted to cannibalism after days adrift on a raft, immortalised by Gericault’s painting Raft of the Medusa.
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Meet The Creators. 15th century Europeans believed they had hit upon a miracle cure: a remedy for epilepsy, hemorrhage, bruising, nausea and virtually any other medical ailment. It was a brown powder known as “mumia,” and was made by grinding up mummified human flesh. But just how common is human cannibalism, and how.
