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Cannibal Complex: The Western Fascination With Human Flesh Eating, Devin Bittner
Cannibal Complex: The Western Fascination With Human Flesh Eating, Devin Bittner
Honors Theses
For centuries, Western explorers, missionaries, and travelers have been bringing home tales of cannibals, which became the earliest documentation of the practice. Modern anthropology, however, has identified a serious concern with such early “documentation” in light of the rise of the ethnographic tradition: the authors of early reports did not consider the contexts in which the events they observed occurred. This thesis, in the anthropology of knowledge tradition, explores the debate over the Western idea of cannibalism by posing the question: why are we so determined to believe that evidence supporting cannibalism reflects an experiential reality, despite abundant proof of …