420192905

Cannibal talk : the man-eating myth and human sacrifice in the South Seas / Gananath Obeyesekere

Obeyesekere, Gananath,i1930- [Verfasser]

Berkeley : University of California Press, 2005

Birmingham, AL, USA : EBSCO Industries, Inc.

1 Online-Ressource (xx, 320 pages) : Illustrations, maps

Includes bibliographical references and index

Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002.

978-0-520-93831-1 ; 0-520-93831-3 ; 978-0-520-24307-1 ; 0-520-24307-2 ; 978-0-520-24308-8 ; 0-520-24308-0 ; 0-520-24307-2

BE 5305 LC 33675

 

Ozeanien  Kannibalismus 

In this radical reexamination of the notion of cannibalism, Gananath Obeyesekere offers a fascinating and convincing argument that cannibalism is mostly "cannibal talk," a discourse on the Other engaged in by both indigenous peoples and colonial intruders that results in sometimes funny and sometimes deadly cultural misunderstandings. Turning his keen intelligence to Polynesian societies in the early periods of European contact and colonization, Obeyesekere deconstructs Western eyewitness accounts, carefully examining their origins and treating them as a species of fiction writing and seamen's yarns. Cannibalism is less a social or cultural fact than a mythic representation of European writing that reflects much more the realities of European societies and their fascination with the practice of cannibalism, he argues. And while very limited forms of cannibalism might have occurred in Polynesian societies, they were largely in connection with human sacrifice and carried out by a select community in well-defined sacramental rituals. Cannibal Talk considers how the colonial intrustion produced a complex self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the fantasy of cannibalism became a reality as natives on occasion began to eat both Europeans and their own enemies in acts of "conspicuous anthropophagy."...