Event Title
Cannibalism:Taboo or Culinary Trend
Location
Diamond 146
Start Date
30-4-2015 3:00 PM
End Date
30-4-2015 3:25 PM
Project Type
Presentation
Description
Flesh and Blood are life, or so many ancient cultures thought. From ritual sacrifice to consumption of ones enemy, human flesh has always had a mystical life-giving quality. However, over the past few millennia as cultures developed and changed, western thought has portrayed cannibalism as taboo, a repellent practice often associated with demonic rituals and pathological symptoms. Creation myths, religious doctrines, fairytales, and the visual arts, all paint cannibalism as one of the lowest modes of human nature. My research delves into the inner-workings of cannibalism and the reason we find the consumption of our own species so repulsive and why so often we attribute it to those we want to frame as foreign and primitive. Sixteenth-century depictions of cannibalism in the Caribbean, South America, and Australasia comprise the main body of my research, supplemented by canonical works such as Thodore Gricaults The Raft of the Medusa.
Faculty Sponsor
Veronique Plesch
Sponsoring Department
Colby College. Art Dept.
CLAS Field of Study
Humanities
Event Website
http://www.colby.edu/clas
ID
1754
Cannibalism:Taboo or Culinary Trend
Diamond 146
Flesh and Blood are life, or so many ancient cultures thought. From ritual sacrifice to consumption of ones enemy, human flesh has always had a mystical life-giving quality. However, over the past few millennia as cultures developed and changed, western thought has portrayed cannibalism as taboo, a repellent practice often associated with demonic rituals and pathological symptoms. Creation myths, religious doctrines, fairytales, and the visual arts, all paint cannibalism as one of the lowest modes of human nature. My research delves into the inner-workings of cannibalism and the reason we find the consumption of our own species so repulsive and why so often we attribute it to those we want to frame as foreign and primitive. Sixteenth-century depictions of cannibalism in the Caribbean, South America, and Australasia comprise the main body of my research, supplemented by canonical works such as Thodore Gricaults The Raft of the Medusa.
https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/clas/2015/program/231