The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) presents a nightmarish vision of an America, metaphorically and literally devouring itself. ‘Home, sweet, home’ becomes the slaughterhouse and consumers become the consumed as ‘cannibalistic capitalism’ (embodied by a family of unemployed but murderous abattoir workers), wreaks havoc on the lives of a hedonistic group of youths, as the ‘Age of Aquarius’ comes to a bloody end. Chain Saw offers a model of horror that is both deeply rooted in American ideology, taboos, (...) and the key (and interdependent) institutions of the family, the worker and capitalism, yet produces aberrant and transgressive versions of these same social units. In this paper, the film’s representation of ‘cannibalistic capitalism’ will be explored in relation to Georges Bataille’s theory of taboo and transgression. While Bataille asserts that the ‘main function of all taboos is to combat violence’ (thus maintaining the power, integrity and conformity of social institutions), he also suggests that the taboo paradoxically begets its own violent transgression. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , capitalism’s transgressive excesses both ignite the taboo’s prohibitive power while revelling in and glorifying its violation. This paper offers a ‘taste’ of a Bataillean approach to the theorising of horror and the spectatorial ‘pleasures’ of submitting to the anguish it provokes. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, archaeologists and physical anthropologists investigating the prehistoric Anasazi culture have identified numerous cases of suspected cannibalism. Many scholars have suggested that starvation caused by environmental degradation induced people to eat one another, but the growing number of cases as well as their temporal and spatial distribution challenge this conclusion. At the same time, some scholars have questioned the validity of the osteoarchaeological indicators that are used to identify cannibalism in collections of mutilated human (...) remains. To address these concerns, this study attempts to reconstruct the behaviors that produced the Anasazi skeletal trauma by first examining ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological material for analogues useful for interpreting mutilated human remains and then correlating these analogues with the evidence from the Southwest. The patterns suggest that different behaviors are responsible for the Anasazi skeletal mutilation seen in different time periods. To explain these differences, the study employs game theoretical models that examine how changing social and physical contexts altered the sociopolitical strategies that Anasazi groups would likely have employed. The results suggest that violent mutilation and perhaps cannibalism was an intentional sociopolitical strategy of intimidation used during Pueblo II (A.D. 900–1100), while environmental changes after this period promoted resource-based warfare and the incidental skeletal trauma associated with this behavior. (shrink)

The outbreak of syphilis in Europe elicited a variety of responses concerning the disease's origins and cure. In this essay, I examine the theory of the origins of syphilis advanced by the 16th-century Italian surgeon Leonardo Fioravanti. According to Fioravanti, syphilis was not new but had always existed, although it was unknown to the ancients. The syphilis epidemic, he argued, was caused by cannibalism among the French and Italian armies during the siege of Naples in 1494. Fioravanti's strange and (...) novel theory is connected with his view of disease as corruption of the body caused by eating improper foods. His theory of bodily pollution, a metaphor for the corruption of society, coincided with Counter-Reformation concepts about sin and the social order. (shrink)

Common sense dictates that cannibalism—eating another person—is immoral whether because of the harm done to the other person or because of a violation of human sanctity. Some Christian traditions interpret the Eucharist as the actual flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. Hence, on its face, communion would involve a form of cannibalism. As human beings, is it morally permissible for us to eat the flesh of another in a sacred ritual? According to many Christian theologies, this is one (...) of the most important ways that human beings relate to the divine. This constitutes a conflict between what is ethical (to not commit cannibalism) and what is divine (to participate in a sacred ritual). Søren Kierkegaard’s _Discourses at the Communion on Friday_ illuminates the ethical tension between communion and cannibalism. For Kierkegaard, communion is an exception to the ethical, ‘a teleological suspension of the ethical.’ There is no resolution to the fact that Christianity calls its members to commit spiritual cannibalism, but the ethical is suspended by a higher power, a direct divine mandate. Furthermore, Kierkegaard’s understanding of the human-divine relation emphasizes that cannibalism is necessary in order to maintain a right relationship with God. It is through the act of communion that humans affirm their relationship with God, and to reject this relationship leads not only to despair but to auto-cannibalism. While other forms of cannibalism may be unethical, ritualistic cannibalism, in which the human and divine come into relation, supersedes any moral rule against cannibalism. (shrink)

Reeently, a man in Germany was put on trial for killing and consuming another German man. Disgust at this incident was exacerbated when the accused explained that he had placed an advertisement on the internet for someone to be slaughtered and eaten-and that his ‘vietim’ had answered this advertisement. In this paper, I will argue that this disturbing ease should not be seen as morally problematic. I will defend this view by arguing that (1) the so-called ‘vietim’ of this cannibalization (...) is not in fact a victim of murder, and that (2) there is nothing wrong with cannibalism. (shrink)

Reeently, a man in Germany was put on trial for killing and consuming another German man. Disgust at this incident was exacerbated when the accused explained that he had placed an advertisement on the internet for someone to be slaughtered and eaten-and that his ‘vietim’ had answered this advertisement. In this paper, I will argue that this disturbing ease should not be seen as morally problematic. I will defend this view by arguing that (1) the so-called ‘vietim’ of this cannibalization (...) is not in fact a victim of murder, and that (2) there is nothing wrong with cannibalism. (shrink)

Post-colonialism and orientalism have inspired literary scholars to study various aspects of literature and literary translation in the post-colonial era. One of the implications of post-colonialism for literature as a discipline is the idea of cannibalism and cultural manipulation. This corpus-based study aims to analyze the notions of “cultural manipulation” or “cannibalism” in the Persian translation of Haji Baba by Mirza Habib Isfahani, to explore the translator’s strategy, as an intercultural mediator, in modulating the source novel’s colonial stance (...) and adapting it to the religious, literary and cultural tastes of the Iranians. Our findings reveal that two main techniques—of omission and euphemism—have been applied in rendering the novel into Persian. Using these techniques, the translator has attempted to challenge the imperial stance of the main writer and come up with a version of the source novel which is much less insulting to Iranians’ cultural values. That is why this translation has been widely received as a literary masterpiece in Persian literature. One implication is that it might be claimed that cannibalism and cultural manipulation can be used to explain the trend of manipulating western literature in countries which have never been colonized, but that have suffered from the colonial stance of colonial writers. (shrink)

: Developed here is a Confucian balance between two key democratic ideals, liberty and community, by focusing on the Confucian notion of li (ritual), which has often been considered hostile to liberty. By adopting a semiotic approach to li and relating it to recent studies of ritual in various Western disciplines, li's contribution to communication and its aesthetic dimension are explored to show how emphasizing harmony without sacrificing reflective experience and personal fulfillment renders li a concept of moral empowerment of (...) free individuals in community. (shrink)

In this essay an attempt will be made to trace the origins and history of the accusation that Jews are cannibals. Its origins go back much further into history than most people know, and for that reason it is this aspect of our topic that will receive the most attention. At the same time, it will be demonstrated that this anti-Jewish myth has an unprecedented tenacity, since it is still readily believed in by millions up until the present day. Part (...) I: Antiquity1Frist Encounters The encounters between Jews, on the one hand, and Greeks and Romans, on the.. (shrink)

Developed here is a Confucian balance between two key democratic ideals, liberty and community, by focusing on the Confucian notion of li (ritual), which has often been considered hostile to liberty. By adopting a semiotic approach to li and relating it to recent studies of ritual in various Western disciplines, li's contribution to communication and its aesthetic dimension are explored to show how emphasizing harmony without sacrificing reflective experience and personal fulfillment renders li a concept of moral empowerment of free (...) individuals in community. (shrink)

In this paper I take up the claims of a number of recent commentators who have argued that there is no rational basis for a moral judgment against cannibalism because no successful argument against it can be articulated within the dominant consequentialist or neo-Kantian deontological approaches in normative ethics. While I think cannibalism is clearly morally repugnant, it is surprisingly difficult to explain why. I argue not only that a rational justification of the moral wrongness of cannibalism (...) can be given in terms of a broadly Aristotelian virtue ethics, but also that this requires a broader conception of moral value, and corresponding moral obligations, than is typical within the dominant approaches. (shrink)

In this paper we build a prey–predator model with discrete weight structure for the predator. This model will conserve the number of individuals and the biomass and both growth and reproduction of the predator will depend on the food ingested. Moreover the model allows cannibalism which means that the predator can eat the prey but also other predators. We will focus on a simple version with two weight classes or stage and present some general mathematical results. In the last (...) part, we will assume that the dynamics of the prey is fast compared to the predator’s one to go further in the results and eventually conclude that under some conditions, cannibalism can stabilize the system: more precisely, an unstable equilibrium without cannibalism will become almost globally stable with some cannibalism. Some numerical simulations are done to illustrate this result. (shrink)

How can anyone consent to being eaten? This was, and still is, a common question and response to the cannibalism case that took place in Germany in 2001. It was a case that took 6 years to resolve because the notion of 'consent' entailed, at the time, legal and moral complications.

The author discusses the ways in which she finds the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center protocol for procuring organs from "non-heart-beating cadaver donors" medically and morally questionable and irreverent. She also identifies some of the factors that contributed to the composition of this troubling protocol, and to its institutional approval.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.1 (2000) 106-123 [Access article in PDF] The (Mis)Uses of Cannibalism in Contemporary Cultural Critique C. Richard King At least since 1979, when W. Arens demystified what he termed "the man-eating myth," cannibalism, once a fundamental feature of the anthropological imagination and a primary trope for interpreting cultural difference, has become subject to serious debate and lingering doubt [see Osborne]. Even as some anthropologists have sought (...) to recuperate anthropophagy as a tangible symbolic, ideological, and ritual complex [Brown and Tuzin; Conklin, "'Thus are our Bodies'"; Forsyth; Harris, Good to Eat 199-234; Sanday], a constellation of scholarly projects and popular works has complicated cannibalism by relocating it in the West. Perhaps most visibly, Hollywood cinema has reclaimed cannibalism. Although a handful of films have revived well-worn clichés of dark-skinned savages preparing to consume Westerners, as in King Solomon's Mines and Crocodile Dundee, others have cast the Western subject as cannibal to grapple with the horrors of reluctant cannibalism, as in Alive! [see Fiddes 121-31], to work through the transgressive and terrifying desires associated with psychopathic cannibalism, as in The Silence of the Lambs [Fuss; Halberstam], and importantly to parody the normative beliefs and behaviors of white, middle-class, heterosexual EuroAmericans, as in Eating Raoul and Parents. At the same time, an array of scholars, artists, and activists have invoked cannibalism to fashion critical perspectives on Western cultural practices. In his film Cannibal Tours (1987), Dennis O'Rourke encourages his audiences to think critically about tourists who travel to the Sepik River Valley to encounter reformed cannibals, asking implicitly who the cannibals are, the Melanesians who formerly (were thought to/claim to have) practiced anthropophagy or the tourists who travel to New Guinea to consume them [see Bruner]. Others have pushed the metaphor. Michael Ames, borrowing explicitly from O'Rourke, uses the cannibal to reframe ethnographic museums and their practices. Similarly, Jane Tompkins asserts that "Museums are a form of cannibalism made safe for polite society" [533]. More generally, Crystal Bartolovich playfully glosses consumerism as the cultural logic of the late cannibalism; bell hooks speaks of the EuroAmerican desires for and incorporation of things ethnic as "eating the other"; and Rosalind Morris suggests that cannibalism is the essential metaphor for late capitalism. More telling, however, are a set of overlapping critical projects that offer detailed theorizations [End Page 106] [Begin Page 108] of contemporary anthropophagy. Here, I will examine three that have had an important impact on discussions of tourism, museums, cultural appropriation, and consumption. Dean MacCannell, in an exciting exploratory review of the documentary Cannibal Tours, makes explicit what O'Rourke left unsaid: we are cannibals, and contemporary capitalism is neocannibalism. Perhaps more radically, Jack Forbes argues that Western civilization fosters cannibalism as an embodied, psychosocial condition or psychosis rooted in exploitation and consumption. Inspired at least in part by Forbes, Deborah Root rethinks Western civilization as cannibal culture.Although I am terribly sympathetic with these perspectives, particularly their political commitments and theoretical creativity, I am disturbed by the practices and effects that animate them. Indeed, as powerful as this critical field promises to be, it is at the same time troubling and dangerous. Although it defamiliarizes practices of cultural production and consumption, it does not enhance understanding of the contexts in which individuals and institutions deploy them and does less to effectively challenge or undermine them. In reframing beliefs and behaviors to accentuate productivity and power, it reinstates and reaffirms binaries and, worse, often turns on the same forms of appropriation.* * *Arguably, flesh eating has always promoted the elaborations of differences. Works central to the Western canon mobilize cannibalism to make (sense of) the world. Herodotus offers an early anthropophagic distinction:These Scythian husbandmen then occupy the country eastward for three days' journey.... Beyond this region the country is desert for a great distance; and beyond the desert Androphagi dwell.... The Androphagi have the most savage customs of all men; they pay no regard to justice, nor make use of any established law. They are nomads and wear a dress like a Scythian; they... (shrink)

This essay seeks to examine the problem of explaining religious phenomena which appear very strange by focusing on a specific example, the Aztec complex of human sacrifice and cannibalism which reached its greatest intensity in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Three scholarly approaches to this complex are described and evaluated in regard to explanatory power and evidential support: an approach which explicates the Aztecs' own mythic self-understanding ; an approach which tries to identify conscious and rational policy choices (...) on the part of Aztec leaders ; a materialist approach emphasizing ecological factors that sustained human sacrifice and cannibalism .Though each of these explanatory strategies achieves some success, our puzzlement about Aztec human sacrifice and cannibalism persists. These efforts to make Aztec beliefs and practices appear coherent or rational do not keep them from being an affront to our notions of what it is to be human or overcome our surprise at horrendous violence inflicted without apparent hatred of the victims. There remains little danger that we shall explain away either Aztec violence or any other religious phenomenon. (shrink)

Despite its potential for radically reducing the harm inflicted on nonhuman animals in the pursuit of food, there are a number of objections grounded in animal ethics to the development of in vitro meat. In this paper, I defend the possibility against three such concerns. I suggest that worries about reinforcing ideas of flesh as food and worries about the use of nonhuman animals in the production of in vitro meat can be overcome through appropriate safeguards and a fuller understanding (...) of the interests that nonhuman animals actually possess. Worries about the technology reifying speciesist hierarchies of value are more troublesome, however. In response to this final challenge, I suggest that we should be open not just to the production of in vitro nonhuman flesh, but also in vitro human flesh. This leads to a consideration of the ethics of cannibalism. The paper ultimately defends the position that cannibalism simpliciter is not morally problematic, though a great many practices typically associated with it are. The consumption of in vitro human flesh, however, is able to avoid these problematic practices, and so should be considered permissible. I conclude that animal ethicists and vegans should be willing to cautiously embrace the production of in vitro flesh. (shrink)

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.

Subjective reasoning and chemical composition are not the sole arbiters of our systems of alimentary taste; consumption of food is also defined by cultural orientation and other complex value systems. There are those who choose to consume only plant matter to respect the rights of animals, equally there are those who consume pets without a second thought. What informs these choices depends on how we understand our own place in the world, the values we attribute to the things that surrounds (...) us, the relationships we maintain with our fellow beings and those with living things in general. It is in the space between those variable definitions that we find food taboos and the complex stories which entwine around them. Above all else comes cannibalism, present today not only as a hypothetical act in which only the wildest savages could take part but also as the basis of varying forms of current communication. Cannibalism is at work in advertising and in television programs, in modern rituals and in unconventional marketing campaigns. In this paper we will attempt to explain its meaning in connection with the more general way of how to catalogue and understand the consumption of food. (shrink)

This article considers imperial Roman and German forms of liberal elite consensus on “proper religious diversity” to set the stage for an examination of the contemporary form of liberal consensus discernible in a recent public talk given by Charles Taylor and Rowan Williams. In each case, attention is drawn to the ways in which “proper religious diversity” is defined to serve ideological and theological agendas. Romanitas, Germanentum, and the Taylor–Williams consensus are cannibalistic theological systems: each uses a public stance of (...) reasonable openmindedness regarding “proper religious diversity” to build and police a theological position that arrogates the perceived value of selected “religious” traditions by re-making them in its own image. Imperial Romanitas and Germanentum served in this way to absorb a diversity of traditions deemed palatable and digestible into overarching theological visions which were convenient to those in power. When Taylor and Williams use the platform of Religious Studies to promote the modern liberal view of “diversity in religion” as a source of pro-social order, their efforts serve a similar crypto-theological and imperialist project. (shrink)

Philosophy as well as anthropology is a discipline concerned with what it means to be human, and hence with investigating the multiple ways of making sense of human life. An important task in this process is to remain open to diverse conceptions of human beings, not least conceptions that may on the face of it appear to be morally alien. A case in point are conceptions that are bound up with cannibalism, a practice sometimes assumed to be so morally (...) scandalous that it probably never happens, at least in a culturally sanctioned form. Questioning this assumption, along with Cora Diamond's contention that the very concept of a human being involves a prohibition against consuming human flesh, the present article explores how cannibalism can have an intelligible place in a human society – exemplified by the Wari’ of western Brazil. By coming to see this, we are enabled to enlarge our conception of the heterogeneity of possible ways of being human. (shrink)

This article explores the cannibalistic dimensions of racial disgust and desire in Michel Houellebecq’s Submission. Situated within broader discourses of French déclinisme, Submis- sion offers a melancholic portrait of white nostalgia. Through the tastes and consumptive practices of his characters, Houellebecq depicts white identification as dependent on an ambivalent relationship to corporeal difference. Paying close attention to the mouth’s dual function as a site of ontological triage (sorting out the human from the non-human, the edible from the inedible) and ontological (...) transformation (converting dead matter into living flesh), I argue that cannibalist desire is integral to white nationalist anxiety. (shrink)

Drawing on phenomenological aesthetics and on the haptic aesthetics of eating as a form of everyday aesthetics, I examine the phenomenon of eating our own as meaningful in three dimensions: vital/natural, somatic/individual, and cross-cultural. Usually conceived as a concrete, rare, and foreign practice, I show how cannibalism is present in our daily lives, both symbolically and as a liminal possibility towards which – as Freud noticed in 1913 – we all tended as children. Cannibalism is present not only (...) in cinematic, literary, or visual art, and in anthropological research that situates it far from “us,” but through narratives and carnal dispositifs of differentiation/assimilation of the Same and the Other, fundamental for our subjective constitution. I conclude with a reflection on how the classical aesthetics of the sovereign subject develops towards alternative models like Pelluchon’s gourmet ego that re-establish the connexion and moral engagement lost by solipsism by means of alimentary metaphors, but also romanticizing them, failing to address the problem of voracity and overconsumption, both at a social and at an individual level. This is more suitably addressed by Viveiros de Castro’s idea of a cannibal cogito, but even better understood by Emmanuel Levinas’ enjoyment-contact model of subjectivity. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Cannibal Culpable Cannibalism? Winning the Right Way In Control Even after a Blowout Last Pedal Strokes … Notes.

Starting from two paintings by Salvador Dalì (The Enigma of William Tell and Autumnal Cannibalism), the article explores Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung’s idea of erotic cannibalism. The fear of being eaten is an archetype of the collective unconscious, as fairy tales clearly reveal. Following Jacques Derrida’s reflections, the author suggests that the fear of being eaten is not limited to anthropophagic cultures, because there is a sort of symbolic cannibalism which has to do with the (...) capacity for annihilation. The petrifying gaze of Medusa, described by Jean Paul Sartre, is a good example of this symbolic cannibalism. On the opposite side of the spectrum, compared to the petrifying gaze, we find the recognizing look of a mother toward her child. For the child, the mother embodies the good subject, which is reassuring and nonthreatening (the fairy who stands in contrast to the devouring ogre in fairy tales). Sara Ruddick explicitly refers to this motherhood model in her book Maternal Thinking, where she lays out the methodology for the ethics of care. The maternal, or recognizing gaze, as the opposite of Medusa’s gaze portrayed by Sartre, is well described in a compelling text by the Italian novelist Luigi Pirandello. At the same time, it plays an important role in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit. Finally, the article returns to Salvador Dalì, showing how in his life, the artist experienced the Other’s gaze in both forms: the objectifying one, represented by the artist’s father (portrayed in The Enigma of William Tell), and the recognizing one, embodied by his partner Gala (portrayed in Autumnal Cannibalism). (shrink)

This paper explores the possibility that some cases of criminal paternalism might include among their justifying reasons an appeal to human dignity.