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50| Analía Villagra their role in perpetuating the seductive myth of the primitive cannibal through unwarranted emphasis and selective credulity of unconfirmed (and unlikely) stories. OF CanniBalS anD kin The political and social reverberations of the accusation of cannibalism, and the irresponsible swiftness of so many, intellectuals and laypersons alike, to embrace thin evidence of cannibalism leads arens to reject the existence of such a practice in any place at any time.29 So sweeping a dismissal, while making a valid point about the terrifying ease with which the slightest hint of such a practice leads to dehumanizing unfamiliar people, rejects reasonable evidence of ritual and metaphoric cannibalism and precludes careful attention to these important cultural practices. admittedly, the contentious history of cannibal accusation begs the question of why the idea of cannibalism persists as the most abhorrent of transgressions, a kind of pancultural gloss for the inhuman Other. What is it about the cannibal that strikes such an uneasy note? With its close ties to kinship, suggestions of animality and othering, this question has relevance for the work proposed by animal studies. Setting aside the debates about the historical frequency of cannibalism, the idea of the cannibal presents the most interesting problem for animal studies. animal studies asks us to sidle up next to our animal kin, but many of these potential kin are also potential food, thus presenting an unresolved tension between cannibal and kin. Before we comfortably accept animals as kin we must confront the problem of the animals’ edibility. either we consume our kin and make cannibals of ourselves or we deny their kinship at the moment of consumption. The former breaches historical cultural taboos, and the latter makes a mockery of the sacred relations of kin. i would like to argue for a more challenging vision of kinship that would allow for the consumption of fellow animals not in the absence of or in spite of bonds of kinship, but rather because of them. The question of animal kinship returns us to the previous discussion of chimps and colobus monkeys. We argue for a sense of kinship with the chimp based on physical, social, and genetic similarities, but does the chimp feel kinship with us? and a more difficult question, can we argue for a sense of kinship between the chimp and the colobus? if chimps and colobus cannot be kin then it is only our arrogant imagination that presumes that animals can relate to us as they cannot relate to one another.30 That is not kinship, but kingship, adam once again naming the beasts in the garden. it is in response to this problem that the figure of the cannibal emerges and points the way toward new possibilities for thinking about kinship. an expansive view in which “cannibal consumption is any devouring (literal or symbolic) of the other in its (raw) condition”31 helps us to imagine how cannibalistic practice produces and adjusts kinship relationships. Consumption of a body, human or nonhuman, refigures the relationship between man and other animals as well as between men. and, although food is a basic human need, varying practices of eating become “a means of creating cultural difference,”32 in which “eating produced an alliance among those who ate together and separated those who were, potentially, food for one another.”33 This suggests that the thoughtless eating of people is not an acceptable act, even among societies with an established practice of ritual anthropophagy. While a number of groups seem to have at least a tradition of reference to anthropophagic practice,34 their views on flesh-eating may actually share similar values of human flesh with the Western taboo against cannibalism. The cosmological view of some indigenous South american peoples suggests that no creature, animal or human, envisions itself in the untoward act of Cannibalism, Consumption, and Kinship| 51 consuming human flesh. One of the first descriptions of Brazil to enter the historical record is german seaman hans Staden’s account of his captivity among the cannibalistic natives (see figure 2). Staden quotes his captor, who says that when he eats another man “i am a tiger [jaguar]; it tastes well.”35 in other words, he is not a man eating another man, but rather a member of the animal kingdom, a respected forest carnivore, performing an ultimately natural act.36 While there may have been a touch of facetiousness in the comment of Staden’s captor, the contemporary amazonian cosmology of the Wari’ people suggests...

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