Word: myth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...anthropologist says cannibalism is a myth...
...through Africa to find Livingstone. Margaret Mead wrote about the man-eating Mundugumor of New Guinea. There is only one thing wrong with all these reports: they come second or third hand, and are probably false. That is the surprising thesis of a new book called The Man-Eating Myth by Anthropologist William Arens, who believes cannibalism may never have existed anywhere as a regular custom...
Arens, who teaches at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, knows he is taking on the whole profession of anthropology. He feels that the profession is wrong, misled by generations of gullible researchers and inventive travel writers. In fact, he says, cannibalism is a myth used by the West to justify colonialism, slavery and-in the case of the Aztecs-genocide...
...origin of the myth, he thinks, is the tendency of every group to accuse its neighbors of cannibalism. The Arawaks and Caribs are good examples, and Mead was told about the Mundugumor by the Arapesh tribe. But Arens finds no reliable firsthand accounts of cannibalism. "Like the poor," he says, "cannibals are always with us, but happily just beyond the possibility of direct observation...
...Arens, the idea of cannibalism is "a crucial boundary marker" between cultures: those who consider themselves civilized always manage to see cannibalism among those they consider uncivilized. "On this issue, despite other accomplishments," he writes, "anthropologists have emerged as little more than erudite purveyors of a pedestrian myth about other times and places...