english 130
genre of Caveza de Vaca
autobiography, travel narrative, captivity narrative, self-vindication narrative, survival narrative, proto- ethnography, advertisement/manual for settler colonialism, bureaucratic report, legal testimony
Intimacy
being in the same time (albeit structured as anachronistic) and space as the ingestible "Other"
culture translation
can be also defined as a practice whose aim is to present another culture via translation. This kind of translation solves some issues linked to culture, such as dialects, food or architecture
The Man-Eating Myth
cannibal narratives certainly have and continue to circulate within Native American communities
anthromorphobic
deities represented specific human concepts, such as love, war, fertility, beauty, or the seasons. Anthropomorphic deities exhibited human qualities such as beauty, wisdom, and power, and sometimes human weaknesses such as greed, hatred, jealousy, and uncontrollable anger..
Education
disciplinary (children will learn not to drink alcohol or smoke after seeing degraded organs)
Henrietta Lacks
"Immortal" cell line from Lacks' biopsied cancerous tumor without her consent (1951). These cells have been instrumental in enabling gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, cloning and the polio vaccine
Gender in de Vaca
"he appeared among them, sometimes in the costume of a woman, and other times dressed as a man" (120) "In the time I was among these people, I saw a wicked behavior, and it is that I saw one man married to another, and these are effeminate, impotent men. And they go about covered like women, and they perform the tasks of women, and they do not use a bow, and they carry great loads. And among these we saw many of them, thus unmanly as I say, and they are more muscular than other men and taller; they suffer very large loads" (132)
cannibalism by trickary
"surprise cannibalism" used by ruling elite to "humilat[e]" and "provo[ke]" their enemies (Mexica agency)
corporeality
"we went about naked, and since we were not accustomed to it, like serpents we changed our skins twice a year" (123) Reference to Satan's appearance in the Garden of Eden (Genesis), bringing evil into the world/ postlapsarian
Taxidermy
(Greek for "arrangement of skin")—simulacrum of life as personal trophy, scientific information, and display/ art (Victorian era)
Endocannibalism
(eating an individual from one's own group as reverence for the dead)-- commensurability
Exocannibalism
(eating the enemy to absorb his/her power, life force, etc.)-- incommensurability
"Consuming Grief"
- conklin -Exocannibalism (Tupi): ingestion of the other in order to gain power and keep inside (family) and outside (enemy) alive in a cannibal economy -Endocannibalism (Wari/Tupi): witnessing the community eat already-dead family members in order to understand the finality of death and ritually obliterate the deceased -the Wari practiced endocannibalism "out of a sense of respect and compassion for the dead person and for the dead person's family" (xvii)
Hans Staden
- was a German (Hessian) mercenary (like Castillo and CdV) who contracted with two Portuguese ships, the second of which was shipwrecked off the coast of Brazil -"Misrecognized" as a Portuguese soldier and captured -Colonial economy of diplomatic alliances: Tupinamba/French and Tupinquin/Portuguese Spent roughly nine months in captivity among the Tupinamba of coastal Brazil (human gestational period; literary allusions to rebirth), although he'd already been in the "Americas" for two years Escaped captivity and returned to Germany in 1555. Published text in 1557
Slide Show USA
-Adams -revisiting the terror and fascination the original freak shows provided for their audiences, as well as exploring the motivations of those who sought fame and profit in the business of human exhibition.
Pathological cannibalism
-Associated with mental illness; more or less universally believed to be abnormal -generally a solitary act and the participant generally understands his/her practice to be illegal and a violation of society's mores
"'Death's Lifers': Anatomy Exhibitions and the Trouble with Looking"
-Atkinson -Author's experience witnessing a Body Worlds exhibit "certified specimens from China" and "unclaimed' cadavers from Russia" (4)—Giorgio Agamben's "state of exception" -Stream of consciousness list of comments in von Hagen's guestbook (7)
History of the conquest of New Spain
-Bernal Diaz del Castillo -Describes the beauty of Technochitlan -Describes Montezuma -Describes la Malinche
New World encounters
-Christopher Columbus -letter also provides observations of the native people's culture and lack of weapons, noting that "they are destitute of arms, which are entirely unknown to them, and for which they are not adapted; not on account of any bodily deformity, for they are well made, but because they are timid and full of terror." Writing that the natives are "fearful and timid . . . guileless and honest," Columbus declares that the land could easily be conquered by Spain, and the natives "might become Christians and inclined to love our King and Queen and Princes and all the people of Spain."
Captivity/incorporation
-Conversely, many Native Americans were taken captive (Minik, Ishi), enslaved, and exhibited in Europe or incarcerated in federal board schools -Far fewer of these individuals chose to remain in the dominant culture and they were rarely, if ever, adopted as fully fledged members of families or communities
how tasty was my little frenchman
-Dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos -Brazilian film in French, Portuguese and Tupi with English subtitles -Example of cinema novo filmmaking (more later...) -The present features prominently for the director as he uses the figure of the unnamed French protagonist as a metaphor for contemporary Brazilians in the 1970s living under military dictatorship -The disjuncture between both the narrator at the opening of the film and the intertitles signifies the purposeful miscommunications of colonization as well as life under a brutal military regime where one thing actually means another
The anthropology of cannibalism
-Donn Gardener -the authors explore how cultural ideas for humanity are reflected in seemingly universal understandings of our potential for anthropophagy. Whether or not a society actually practices cannibalism, these conceptions are often articulated at the level of folklore and myth, where flesh-eating is imbued with symbolic meanings centered on ideas about regeneration after death, the equivalence between human flesh and food, and the morality of social exchange in and between groups. Thus, cannibalism emerges at once as a resource for political agendas that perpetuate ethnic stereotypes of exotic others;
John de Lery
-History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil -Lery born in 1534 in Burgundy (now known as France) -Traveled to Brazil in 1556 with a mixed contingent of Catholics and Protestants to found the first Protestant mission in the Americas and to proselytize among Native people (returned to France in 1558)
Bernal Diaz del Castillo
-Invaded Indigenous territories and inaugurated terrorism in what is now known as "Latin America." Rewarded for his service -One of the only contemporaneous, written descriptions of Tenochtitlan, "La Malinche" and "Montezuma." Some positive representations -Castillo was a common soldier born in Spain ca. 1496 (an anomaly from a literary standpoint) -He served as a mercenary in the so-called "New World," fighting Indigenous people and establishing Spanish slave colonies in Cuba and the Yucatan before joining Cortes' forces -For his service, he was given an encomienda (slave plantation) in Mexico and later Guatemala in 1522
"The Public Display of Palatinates as a Challenge to the Integrity of Anatomy"
-Jones -At the moment when the subject of anatomy is being taught differently in medical schools (holding ceremonies for the bodies, only allowing "sanctioned" people near the bodies, naming them, thinking of them as formerly human, hoping that the pre-dead had given their consent, etc.), the Body Worlds exhibits perform the exact opposite function
Give me my father's body
-Kenn Harper -was an Inuk brought as a child in 1897 from Greenland to New York City with his father and others by the explorer Robert Peary. - The six Inuit were studied by staff of the American Museum of Natural History, which had custody.
Windingo
-LOUISE ERDRICH -The abridged, headline-grabbing version: wintry cannibal demon kidnaps child in the night. -The slightly less abridged, slightly more ambiguous version: wintry cannibal demon kidnaps child in the night and maybe, or maybe not, devours the child's flesh. -The even less abridged, even more ambiguous version: wintry cannibal demon kidnaps child in the night and maybe, or maybe not, devours its flesh, but maybe, or maybe not, is, in turn, vanquished by the child
"Commodified Cadavers and the Political Economy of the Spectacle"
-Marlin Bennett -The authors argue that while there is public uproar about the global trade in organs, there has been little critical attention given to the global, public spectacles of plastinated cadavers -Particularly relevant comparison since so many of the plastinated cadavers are Chinese
Emergency cannibalism
Non-voluntary form of cannibalism, cannibalism under duress and solely as a protein source & matter of survival
race gender and sexuality in the colonial context
-McClintok -Imperial Leather chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.
The idea of latin America
-Mignolo -The Idea of Latin America is a geo-political manifesto which insists on the need to leave behind an idea which belonged to the nation-building mentality of nineteenth-century Europe.
On the cannibals
-Montaigne -was one of adventure and exploration, and many travelers returned to Europe with tales of strange and fascinating people elsewhere. During a French expedition to South America in 1557, the explorer Villegaignon encountered a tribe of cannibals in what was then called "Antarctic France" but what is now called Brazil. Some of them returned with the crew. Montaigne not only met one of these cannibals at Rouen in 1562 but also employed a servant who had spent a dozen years living among them in their native land. -As evidence, Montaigne cites everything from language usage to architecture.
younger brother eludes his sister in law by creating obstacles and liberates by creating obsticles and liberates older brother
-Parker -women has hook to fish the two men and kill the -women is sexualized into trapping the men
A modest proposal
-Swift -satirical essay meant to underline the problems of both the English and the Irish in 1729. Satire is the use of irony, humor or exaggeration to criticize the ideas of others. -eat babies to reduce the problem of overpopulation and poverty since people will be allowed to sell their unwanted babies
symbolic/metaphoric cannibalism
-The less obviously violent ingestion of that which we love, desire, fear, or hate. Cannibalism as metaphor -The process of making what is outside inside
Ritual cannibalism
-Usually associated with non- Western world (particularly the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific) -Interpreted as a practice of inferior, primitive peoples -Seen as dividing line between the human (West) and non-human (Other)
Cabeza de Vaca
-born into an hidalgo (minor nobility) family in Spain mercenary (like Castillo) -shipwrecked in 1527 while on an invasion/ colonization mission to Florida -the four traveled on foot from Florida, through the Gulf Coast, through Texas, across northern Mexico, and south to Mexico City over a period of eight years -functioned as a healer among Indigenous communities, worked as a trader, and faced severe physical deprivation
Body worlds
-is the most successful and popular traveling exhibition in recorded history -Visual cannibalism -Posthumous slavery
cannibal talk
-obeyeskere -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. -considers how the colonial intrusion 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."
"The Lay of the Land"
Anne McClintock, describes "cannibal" and other Indigenous figures as inhabiting "anachronistic space": "colonized people--like women and the working class in the metropolis--do not inhabit history proper but exist in a permanently anterior time within the geographic space of the modern empire as anachronistic humans, atavistic, irrational, bereft of human agency--the living embodiment of the archaic 'primitive'" (30)
Art
Bodies posed to look like they are alive. Neither decomposed cadavers nor performance art by living people
memory
Castillo (less than 5 yrs) v. Cabeza de Vaca (nearly 9 years in captivity) v. Staden (9 months)
Consuming grief
Conklin -Mourning the death of loved ones and recovering from their loss are universal human experiences, yet the grieving process is as different between cultures as it is among individuals. As late as the 1960s, the Wari' Indians of the western Amazonian rainforest ate the roasted flesh of their dead as an expression of compassion for the deceased and for his or her close relatives. By removing and transforming the corpse, which embodied ties between the living and the dead and was a focus of grief for the family of the deceased, Wari' death rites helped the bereaved kin accept their loss and go on with their lives.
vagina dentata
Fear that one would be consumed sexually, as well as through cannibalism. Fear of castration (Freud). Fear of women's sexual agency and speech (language, reason)
cannibalism scholarship
From at least the 15th century onwards, writers and historians (and later anthropologists and academics) took as conventional wisdom that Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, Africans, and some Asians practiced cannibalism and that these practices render them savage, uncivilized, and outside the bounds of the human (and therefore subject to violence and genocide)
Symbolic cannibalism in de Vacas text
Genocide (physical and discursive) of Native people (lands, religions, cultures consumed by the invading Spanish forces)
Erases the past
Indigenous history is elided in favor of settler colonial history
proto ethnography
Information such as language to be used against the Tupi in the future describes ethnography
Aztec cannibalism
Isaac -This article engages the debate about Aztec cannibalism principally through the analysis of three accounts of cannibalism by trickery set in the Valley of Mexico. These three tales are practically the only form in which cannibalism appears in the major Nahua (indigenous Nahuatl-speaking) writings of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The stories portray cannibalism as shocking, even abhorrent, to Aztecs—rather than as customary—and as a stratagem for humiliating an enemy or provoking a community to war. The contemporaneous Spanish writings, in contrast, are replete with allegations of customary cannibalism, while the major mestizo (Nahua mother and Spanish father) authors are divided in their treatment of the subject. The three-way critical comparison (Nahua, mestizo, Spanish) raises the possibility that the idea of customary cannibalism originated in Spanish culture and was then transmitted to the indigenous population during post-Conquest religious conversion and Hispanicization.
shipwrecks
Literary shipwrecks provide opportunities for rebirth (individual loses all worldly possessions, often including clothing, and starts anew among an alien group of people) Shipwrecks are also the occasion for acts of (often survival) cannibalism
Donner Party
Movie about manifest destiny people moved from Missouri to California walked for a whole year only two families denied the use of cannibalism out of 30 people that survived Because of them people from the west were scared to go to California, until the gold rush
Renaming
New England, New York, Santa Barbara, Riverside taking away the name of the land that was originally been given
Contemporary Indigenous interpretations of cannibal "evidence."
Source: oral narrative and contemporary practice
Kenyan Bebe
Staden leader stated he was a jaguar
cultural misreading
Staden prays when the Tupinamba threaten to eat him and as he prays he weeps The Tupinamba take his tears for a sign of emasculated weakness: "Then I began to sing, with tearful eyes and from the bottom of my heart, the Psalm [130]...Then the savages said: Look how he cries, now he is moaning" (51)
typology
a classification according to general type, especially in archaeology, psychology, or the social sciences. the study and interpretation of types and symbols, originally especially in the Bible.
cultural appropriation
acts on the part of persons in positions of power and privilege to represent another culture with impunity. To make "appropriate" (Rhikki) or subject of ridicule (harm). Also as a series of ongoing microaggressions
Psychological
an attempt to describe and understand a violent and unexplainable historical incident
Agency
an attempt to intimidate others in order to assert power (cannibalism and the cannibal threat inspires fear)
Literary perspective
each version of the story is a unique literary text that can be read and evaluated on its own merits that elucidates not only the narrative being related, but also the thought processes of individuals and communities during times of intense historical and cultural change
homoerotics
homosexual; specifically : marked by, revealing, or portraying homosexual desire
Publication pressure
how to make a text appeal to a foreign readership: addition of Christian inferences, inversion of traditional beliefs (heteropatriarchy, rel. to animal world), disavowal of cultural practices not normative in a western society
Spanish Inquisition
may be defined broadly, operating "in Spain and in all Spanish colonies and territories, which included the Canary Islands, the Spanish Netherlands, the Kingdom of Naples, and all Spanish possessions in North, Central, and South America."
Cross-species relationships
might be an attempt to cement relationships between the human and non- human and to make manifest their interrelationship and possibility of transformation (kinship terms: elder/child, transformation, ingestion)
Science
study of anatomy and human difference
translation
one language to another, one epistemology to another
foucault
origins of scientific discourse as predicated on the subjective, as much as the objective. Science as culturally and historically contingent
Actual practice
outside of Christian/Western circuits of morality, "cannibalism" might not be ethical or immoral. It might also not be something separate or remarkable (there may not be words for this concept in other languages)
Maori haka
physical language
Ethnography
scientific description of the customs and culture of an individual or community
literary taxidermy
text stops "living"—in oral tradition, a collective of individuals or families can retell a narrative in different ways, altering it over time to suit the community's needs
porno-tropics
that European explorers and writers created a "porno-tropics" onto which "Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears"
Normalizes the present
the settler colonial state becomes the regime of the "normal" (Homeland Security, fort/home vs. frontier/"savages")
The mala cosa
travels alone and exists in a state between human/non-human while CdV also travels alone and exists in a state between human/non-human (he is a new, inexplicable being to the Native people; liminal experience of crossing the Atlantic Ocean and being shipwrecked)
Cadaver exhibit
type of exhibit is a part of the historical trajectory linking the earliest reports of cannibalism in the so-called "New World"
Pornography
visual or written (graphe) materials designed to stimulate sexual (rather than aesthetic or merely emotional) arousal (porn=prostitute)
tenochtitlan
was built on an island in central Mexico in Toltec territory in 1325 and was a well- designed, large city divided into zones (campan) that were further divided into districts (calpullis)—palimpsest/cannibalism
ontology of cannibalism
what constitutes as humans
Trauma
wound or injury that manifests itself as physical and psychological -One of the things that disarticulates colonial (or racialized or gendered, generally speaking) trauma from individual trauma is its relationship to a particular form of violence: the collective experience and unspeakable nature of genocide
ethnography
writing about other people
Imagines the future
—science fiction replicates settler colonial "first contact" fantasies Alien contact mirrors settler colonial assumptions: inferior, bereft of weapons technology, easily subdued and enslaved or superior, in possession of advanced technology, will kill, enslave, and/or eat Earthlings
