Conklin introduction & chapter 1 _Kevin Sims PDF

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Kevin Sims ANTH 220G Professor Kelley September 29, 2020

Journal Entry: Conklin intro & Chapter 1

For centuries, there have been people living outside of the tradition of cannibalism, waiting to exploit the natives of South America for profit and power. Conklin believed that the topic of cannibalism is a hard topic to talk about. A lot of the discussions could lead to invalid facts and not so respectful opinions. In Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society, it states, “ Cannibalism is a staple of racist stereotypes, and one of the oldest smear tactics in the game of ethic politics, it is used to accuse one’s enemies, or people one wishes to degrade or dominate, of eating human flesh, whether or not there is any truth to the accusation” (Conklin, 3). The purpose of this was for Conklin to tell her audience that there are many anthropologists and people alike that will throw their opinions out there with the intentions of slander towards an individual or group of people for having a different way of living from their own. Additionally, people who have talked down on the native tribes in South America for their practices of cannibalism however, in other places, cannibalism has been taught and practiced in different ways. In the text, it states, “The tradition of medicinal cannibalism that flourished in Europe for nearly two thousand years was, like all institutionalized forms of

cannibalism, the product of specific cultural ideas and social arrangements. Beyond its distinctive assumptions about the curative properties of human body substances, perhaps the most unusual feature of European medicinal cannibalism was its impersonality, the attitude of treating human body parts as commercial commodities” ( Conklin, 12). The purpose of this was for Conklin to show people in Europe were doing the same thing as tribes like the Tupinamba but would have a more superficial reason such as treating disease; this was from the belief that because the human body can heal itself, it can also help heal another human body through medical trade(using human body parts) and for pharmaceutical use (selling human body parts for money). Furthermore, This shows how many of the European encounters were biased towards the different tribes in South America and how their actions can contradict their views on the “ people-eating savages”....