4/14/2021 0 Comments Consuming Grief Beth Conklin Pdf
The Wari are native South American Indians who live in western Brazil and eastern Bolivia in the Amazon rainforest.To Add to Your List, choose from options to the left classa-button-group a-declarative a-spacing-none data-actiona-button-group roleradiogroup.
![]() By removing and transforming the corpse, which embodied ties between the living and the dead and was a focus of grief for the family of the deceased, Wari death rites helped the bereaved kin accept their loss and go on with their lives. Drawing on the recollections of Wari elders who participated in consuming the dead, this book presents one of the richest, most authoritative ethnographic accounts of funerary cannibalism ever recorded. Beth Conklin explores Wari conceptions of person, body, and spirit, as well as indigenous understandings of memory and emotion, to explain why the Wari felt that corpses must be destroyed and why they preferred cannibalism over cremation. Her findings challenge many commonly held beliefs about cannibalism and show why, in Wari terms, it was considered the most honorable and compassionate way of treating the dead. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. ![]() Conklin inserts herself into the book just enough to avoid seeming like an omniscient author whose argument and data was somehow miraculously discovered. She discusses her reasons for focusing on the subject matter and provides enough discussion of methods and context that students relate to her journey as much as to the lives of the Wari about whom she so sensitively writes. Conklin is also candid about how her relationship to the subject of cross-cultural notions of grief changed over time and when her brother passed away, leaving her questioning American societys response to illness and death. Such inclusions are nicely integrated into the text so that the focus remains on the Wari, however, they do provide some insight to students as to how long-term research and ones relationship to the people in the field are complex and infrequently find expression in academic discourse. Consequently, this books is a good introduction to fieldwork, ethics in the field, and of course cultural relativism given its subject matter and Conklins own brief discussion of European medical practices that can be considered cannibalism in their own right. Kin relations and reciprocity are central to the practices of funerary cannibalism and also to the belief the Wari possess in relation to the lives of ancestors as they become peccaries who offer themselves up for prey for those still living. Thus, the book provides excellent illustrations of or starting points for discussions on kinship systems, reciprocity, the body and its place in constituting social relationships, religion and worldview, as well as culture change. In sum, the book is deftly written and engaging as well as can serve multiple purposes for the instructor in an introductory course. My experience has been that students are initially captivated or repulsed by the subject matter only to become quickly moved and invested in the lives and worldview of the Wari. My teacher provided us with examples of books we could read and this was one of them. I have always thought cannibalism was an interesting subject so I chose this book to critique. I find it to be excellently written and accessible to a lot of readers who are interested in cannibalism, not just anthropologists. The following is the introduction of my paper that I wrote to critique the book: Cannibalism has often been a taboo subject in Western culture. In Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society, Beth A. Conklin explains the funerary cannibalistic practices of the Wari and gives underlying causes as to why they participated in this.
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