Eating and Being Eaten

Description

This innovative book is an open invitation to a rich and copious meal of imagination, senses and desires. It argues that cannibalism is practised by all and sundry. In love or in hate, fear or fascination, purposefulness or indifference, individuals, cultures and societies are actively cannibalising and being cannibalised. The underlying message of: ‘Own up to your own cannibalism!’ is convincingly argued and richly substantiated.
The book brilliantly and controversially puts cannibalism at the heart of the self-assured biomedicine, globalising consumerism and voyeuristic social media. It unveils a vast number of prejudices, blind spots and shameful othering. It calls on the reader to consider a morality and an ethics that are carefully negotiated with required sensibility and sensitivity to the fact that no one and no people have the monopoly of cannibalisation and of creative improvisation in the game of cannibalism. The productive, transformative and (re)inventive understanding of cannibalism argued in the book should bring to the fore one of the most vital aspects of what it means to be human in a dynamic world of myriad interconnections and enchantments. To nourish and cherish such a productive form of cannibalism requires not only a compassionate generosity to let in and accommodate the stranger knocking at the door, but also, and more importantly, a deliberate effort to reach in, identify, contemplate, understand, embrace and become intimate with the stranger within us, individuals and societies alike.

Informations

• Publié par: Langaa RPCIG
• Date de parution: 07 juin 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789956550975
• Langue: English

Extrait

Publisher:
Langaa RPCIG
Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group
P.O. Box 902 Mankon
Bamenda
North West Region
Cameroon
[e-mail]
www.langaa-rpcig.net
Distributed in and outside N. America by African Books Collective [e-mail] www.africanbookscollective.com
ISBN-10: 9956-550-96-5 ISBN-13: 978-9956-550-96-8
© Francis B. Nyamnjoh 2018
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher
About the Authors
Chapter 1
Francis B. Nyamnjoh is a professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His most recent books include #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa (2016) and Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd: How Amos Tutuola Can Change Our Minds (2017).
Chapter 2
Andreas Buhler is a Ph.D. candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. He is doing research on the relationship between entrepreneurship and land. His previous research was on the housing crisis in Cape Town.
Chapter 3
Dr Artwell Nhemachena teaches Sociology at the University of Namibia. He has studied Sociology and Social Anthropology. His current areas of research interest are Relational Ontologies, Sociology and Social Anthropology of Science and Technology Studies, Decoloniality and Transformation. He has published eight books and several book chapters and journal articles.
Maria B. Kaundjua teaches Sociology at the University of Namibia. She holds a Masters Degree in Population and Development Studies. She is involved in research on Sexual and Reproductive Health, Demographic Studies, Climate Change, Environmental Health and Development. She has published a number of journal articles.
Chapter 4
Walter Gam Nkwi holds a Ph.D. from the University of Leiden. He has published books, articles in journals, book chapters and encyclopaedias. He is currently the Secretary General in the Faculty of Engineering and Technology and also a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, Faculty of Arts, University of Buea, Cameroon.
Chapter 5
Ayanda Manqoyi is a Ph.D. Student in anthropology at the University of California, Davis, in the United States of America. His research interest is to understand how the family obligation, known in South Africa as ‘black tax’, mediates when one ascends to institutionalised middle class.
Chapter 6
Veronica D. Masenya, is a social scientist and a graduate of the University of the Free State, South Africa. She holds a B.A. degree, B.A. Honours Degree (Anthropology) and M.A. Degree (Sociology). She is currently a Ph.D. candidate and her research focuses on ‘funerary practices in contemporary Bloemfontein, South Africa’.
Chapter 7
Dominique Santos was born in Cape Town, bred in Johannesburg and buttered in London. Her Ph.D. explored the intersections of popular music and experiences of social change amongst various multi-racial communities in South Africa. She currently lives in Bloemfontein, where she is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of the Free State.
Chapter 8
Moshumee T. Dewoo has spent the last decade researching post-independent African modes of identification specifically as these relate to access to political power. She has written and published various pieces on the subject and is currently focused on the case of the ‘Nasyon’ community in Mauritius, with the intent of submitting her primary findings thereon by way of a Ph.D. thesis to complete at the University of Cape Town.
Chapter 9
Akira Takada is currently an associate professor at Kyoto University, Japan. His academic interests include language socialisation and the transformation of ethnicity. He has published many books and articles, including Narratives on San ethnicity: The cultural and ecological foundations of lifeworld among the !Xun of north-central Namibia (2015).
Table of Contents
Foreword
Harri Englund
1
Introduction: Cannibalism as Food for Thought
Francis B. Nyamnjoh
Introduction
There is more meat to cannibalism than meets the eye
Compassionate Cannibalism
Being Human as Eating and Being Eaten
Humans and Animals as two sides of the same Cannibal Feast
Cannibalism in Camouflage
Contributions to this Volume: an Overview
Conclusion
2
The Violence of Translating People into Cannibals: The Man-Eating Anthropologists
Andreas Buhler
The violence of translating people into cannibals
Anthropology, cannibalism and colonial violence
The problematic notion of cannibalism
The ethnography of cannibalism: representing the other
Ethnography and the violence of making a text from data
Cannibalism: beyond the modern world and towards a new anthropology
3
Incorporated or Cannibalised by Posthuman Others? Sanctions and Witchcraft in Contemporary Zimbabwe
Artwell Nhemachena & Maria Kaundjua
Introduction
The Capture and Cannibalisation of Zimbabwe: on the Imperial Leviathan
Luring and Incorporating ‘Delicious’ Africa in a Cannibalistic World: Zimbabwe and Sanctions
Conclusion
4
‘The Body of Christ? Amen’: Christianity and the Cannibalisation of the Bamenda Grassfielders (Cameroon)157
Walter Gam Nkwi
Introduction
Eating up Traditional Rulers: the Projection and Delegitimisation Argument
Ex-soldiers or ‘Fernando Po Repartees’ and the Licence to Consume Grassfielders
The Ex-servicemen and Cannibalism
Consuming and being Consumed: ‘Love’ and ‘Sex’ in the Church Compounds
Domestication of Western Christianity by the Bamenda Grassfielders
Conclusion
5
Researching Cannibalising Obligations in Post-apartheid South Africa
Ayanda Manqoyi
Introduction
Background on Black Middle Class in South Africa
Cannibalising Black Middle Class
Cannibalising Obligations
Media on Cannibalising Black Tax
Citizenship and Cannibalism
Cannibalising Systemic Obligations
Conclusion
6
Lehu la gago le ya mphidisha ‘your death nourishes me’
Veronica Dimakatso Masenya
The investment of ‘life’
The saga of human ashes
Conclusion
7
Rainbow Nation of the Flesh
Dominique Santos
The Kitchen
Appetisers
Main Course
Dessert
Gluttony
In Lieu of a Conclusion: After Dinner Mint, Coffee & Brandy
8
My African Heart: The Obscure Gourmandise of an Enlightened Man
Moshumee T. Dewoo
Introduction
The Pale Tale of Extraction
The Path of the Dying Heart
Conclusion
9
Consumerisation of cannibalism in contemporary Japanese society
Akira Takada
Introduction
Exploiting the suicidal
Fantasising reality and realising the fantasy
Fetish to rawness
Consumerisation of cannibalism
Concluding remarks
Index
Foreword
Cannibalism is freshly palatable to scholarly tastes. Much more than a source for puns of variable ingenuity, cannibalism uncoupled from its connotations of human beings devouring human flesh has great potential to re-engage some of the most profound questions in what it means to be human. Once consigned to the dustbin of anthropological (or racist) fantasies, cannibalism has in recent years attracted new critical thinking, much of it philosophical or essayist in nature. To that body of scholarship the present volume adds a rich set of impassioned studies of intellectual history and current life-worlds. The promise here is not only to subject a rethought cannibalism to the rigours of empirical analysis, worthwhile as such an effort undoubtedly is. The promise is also to chart ways in which the understandable horror evoked by cannibalism can be qualified by the recognition that human beings necessarily partake of the lives of others, whether human or non-human. The challenge is to identify moral resources in the rethought cannibalism.
The promise and the challenge appear less startling if an important piece of disciplinary history is borne in mind. Reaching beyond the tiresome scapegoating of anthropology for crimes committed by incomparably more powerful agents of history, the present volume reminds us of how often the elementary structures of kinship have turned out to be its alimentary forms. In other words, the well-documented uses of means of sustenance in making people feel related to one another underline the close connection between eating, being eaten and being human. Equally well-known and widespread are the metaphorical links made between sex and food. Sigmund Freud’s forays into the darkest recesses of intimacy might also have been prefigured by certain aspects of witchcraft and sorcery the world over. Those closest to oneself are also those capable of inflicting the greatest pain.
The present volume, spearheaded by Francis Nyamnjoh’s remarkable essay, takes an important step further from merely bemoaning the misrepresentations of various others by European colonial powers. If the studies assembled here did little more than restate the humanity of a narrowly-conceived cannibalism’s victims, they would themselves reassert victimhood as the register in which the debate on cannibalism has to be conducted. Instead, Nyamnjoh develops his key observation that ‘to feed on someone’s life chances is tantamount to feeding on someone’s flesh’ into a far more challenging prop