The discourse of cannibalism, which began in the encounter between Europe and the Americas, became a defining feature of the colonial experience in the New World, especially in the Pacific. The idea of exoticism, like that of the primitive, is also a Western construct linked to the exploring/conquering/cataloguing impulse of colonialism. We now live in a world where those we once called exotic live among us, defining their own identities, precluding our ability to define ourselves in opposition to "others" and to represent our own culture as universal. This chapter reviews anthropological approaches to cannibalism and suggests that we may now be in a position to exorcise the stigma associated with the notion of the primitive. If we reflect on the reality of cannibal practices among ourselves as well as others, we can contribute to dislodging the savage/civilized opposition that was once essential to the formation of the modern Western self and Western forms of knowledge.
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Kuru, the first human prion disease was transmitted to chimpanzees by D. Carleton Gajdusek (1923–2008). In this review, we summarize the history of this seminal discovery, its anthropological background, epidemiology, clinical picture, neuropathology, and molecular genetics. We provide descriptions of electron microscopy and confocal microscopy of kuru amyloid plaques retrieved from a paraffin-embedded block of an old kuru case, named Kupenota. The discovery of kuru opened new vistas of human medicine and was pivotal in the subsequent transmission of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, as well as the relevance that bovine spongiform encephalopathy had for transmission to humans. The transmission of kuru was one of the greatest contributions to biomedical sciences of the 20th century.
Recent changes in marriage transactions in Bangladesh have led increasingly to a shift in the burden of marriage expenses from the groom's family of the bride. This reversal in the direction of wealth exchanges, which may not be in the best interest of the bride, reflects social and economic changes that have increased the income potential of the groom, which now surpasses previously valued attributes of the bride. In this paper, anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum examines the effects of these changes on women and their implications for female fertility and mortality. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the New York Academy of Science on 25 February 1980.
▪ Abstract The study of epidemics provides a unique point of entry for examining the relationships among cultural assumptions, institutional forms, and states of mind. The Black Death is said to have contributed to the emergence of nation states, the rise of mercantile economies, and the religious movements that led to the Reformation. It may also have brought about new ways of understanding God, the meaning of death, and the role of authority in religious and social life. Cholera induced a public health approach that stressed quarantine, and venereal diseases led to contact tracing. Western medicine, however, failed to cure the epidemics that resulted from imperial expansion into the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. The focus of this essay is on the impact of two contemporary epidemics considered to be caused by prions, a newly recognized infectious agent: kuru in Papua New Guinea and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (associated with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) in Europe. A close look at epidemics constitutes a sampling device for illuminating relationships among illness, social forms, and social thought. Theories of disease causation provide ways of thinking about the world and sets of directions for acting in it.
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