Sacred Hunger -- As a Cultural System, Cannibal Valley: As a Cultural System, Cannibalism

Author: Peggy Reeves Sanday
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-01-01
Features: Drawing on and synthesizing ideas from the works of Ricoeur, Freud, Hegel, Jung, and symbolic anthropology, the author argues that ritual cannibalism expresses the ontological structure of human existence in the world based on people's understanding of life and death, and employs this understanding to control what is considered necessary for social reproduction. The presence or absence of cannibalism in a particular culture stems from people's fundamental attitudes toward life and death and is intertwined with the reality of the material world. This book makes original contributions not only to the understanding of ritual cannibalism and the general human issues it determines but also offers some quite pertinent theoretical perspectives on conventional anthropological analysis.