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Good Reasons Or Bad Conscience? Or Why Some Indian Peoples Of Amazonia Are Ambivalent About Eating Meat, Stephen P. Hugh-Jones
Good Reasons Or Bad Conscience? Or Why Some Indian Peoples Of Amazonia Are Ambivalent About Eating Meat, Stephen P. Hugh-Jones
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
Originally written for a conference on meat attended by farmers, anthropologists, people involved in cultural affairs, and other members of the public, and seeking to avoid emphasis on cultural difference, this paper explores common ground between Euro-American and Amerindian ambivalence about meat consumption. Meat-eating raises two shared concerns: an intuitive recognition of the resemblances between humans and animals and an uncomfortable awareness that human life often depends on the death and destruction of other living beings. I suggest that, behind some obvious cultural differences, Amazonian shamanic and ritual procedures aimed at the de-subjectification of meat share points in common with …
Good Reasons Or Bad Conscience: A Postscript, Stephen P. Hugh-Jones
Good Reasons Or Bad Conscience: A Postscript, Stephen P. Hugh-Jones
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
Published in French in 1996, the original article for which this comprises a post-script set indigenous Amazonians’ attitudes to meat alongside those of Euro-Americans. With the accelerating deforestation of Amazonia linked with the cultivation of soya used to feed animals for meat, and with calls to reduce or abandon meat consumption as one way of averting catastrophic climate change, it is topical once again. In this postscript, I reply to two contrasting critiques of the article, the first wary of an excess of ontology, the second distrustful of a deficit of it. Does a focus on ritual and shamanism obscure …