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Mortuary Cannibalism Within the Wari Culture

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Autumn Carney

E

Beth A. Conklin

  • Author of "Thus Are Our Bodies, Thus Was Our Custom": Mortuary Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society
  • She has a Ph.D. from the University of California at San Francisco & Berkeley
  • She is a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee
  • She is a "cultural and medical anthropologist specializing in the ethnography of indigenous peoples of lowland South America" (Department of Anthropology 2017:1)

Mortuary Cannibalism

  • The Wari people
  • They are an “indigenous population of about 1,500 people who live in the western Brazilian rain forest, in the state of Rondonia near the Bolivian border” (Conklin 1995:75)
  • They practice this to pay respect to the deseased person.
  • "For dying individuals, the idea of being incorporated into fellow tribesmembers' bodies apparently had considerably more appeal than the alternative of being left to rot in the grounf alone." (Conklin 1995:84)
  • They also believe that when eaten, a person's spirit leaves the body and the person is regenerated as an animal.

The Practice of Mortuary Cannibalism

D

  • The Wari practice both exocannibalism and endocannibalism
  • Starts at dusk, ends at dawn
  • Eat as much of the body, including brain, liver, heart, and flesh. Cremates leftover flesh by dawn.
  • Immediate relatives don't eat it. The community does.

Reasons for Pactice

  • "The Wari’ disliked any sign of the deceased being eaten avidly, as though it was game meat"
  • "reshaping emotional and spiritual relations between the living

and the dead" (Conklin 1995:76)

  • More for the deseased than for those partaking; this was to help the deseased move on while also helping the commmunity grieve

C

"Pacification"

  • Mortuary Cannibalism in this culture was only practiced until early 1960's, when this culture started having contact without outside cultures.
  • Government and missionaries saw the practice and began to put a stop to it
  • Pacification teams
  • Brought disease over and would not provide food or medecine until cannibalism stoppped

Implications

  • This is important information in order to gain perspective on funerary practices of other cultures
  • Also to learn about cultural intolerance and how government can force cultures to abandon their traditions

B

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths

  • I thought this article was written excellently
  • The author was respectful and did not express harmful bias
  • The author explained in depthly terms that may not be familiar to people outside of the culture

Weaknesses

  • There really was not anything I disliked about this article or the way it was written

Bibliography

A

  • "Biography." Department of Anthropology. Accessed October 12, 2017. https://as.vanderbilt.edu/anthropology/bio/beth-conklin.

  • Conklin, Beth A. ""Thus Are Our Bodies, Thus Was Our Custom": Mortuary Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society." American Ethnologist 22, no. 1 (1995): 75-101. http://www.jstor.org/stable/646047.

  • "Wari'." Funerary cannibalism > Wari'. Accessed October 12, 2017. https://pib.socioambiental.org/en/povo/wari/865.

Link for picture: https://www.britannica.com/place/Rondonia

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