Cannibalism
CANNIBALISM is both a concept and a practice that may involve diverse themes of death, food, sacrifice, revenge, aggression, love, and destruction or transformation of human others. The many and varied examples of cannibalism are difficult to summarize, except in terms of the widespread idea of the human body as a powerful symbolic site for defining relations between oneself and others and marking the boundaries of a moral community. In violating the bodily integrity that prevails in ordinary social life, cannibalism signifies an extraordinary transformation or dramatization of relations between those who eat and those who are eaten. When it occurs in religious contexts, the act of consuming human substance commonly represents an exchange between people and cosmic powers, promoting union with the divine or renewing life-sustaining spiritual relations. Such religious meanings may overlap with the social and political significance of consuming enemies to mark one's dominance and superiority—or consuming kin to express love, to distance the spirit of the deceased from the world of the living, or to acquire physical or spiritual qualities contained in the corpse. Thus sacrifice, the aggressive destruction of enemies, and the devoted incorporation or anxious destruction of a loved one's body are all facets of cannibalism that may be present in different cultural contexts.
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