What transformed moral citizens into guillotine cannibals during the French Revolution and the Great Reign of Terror? The answer, argues Eli Sagan, is the exact same force which has killed millions of people in the twentieth century--ideological terror. Citizens and Cannibals offers readers the most comprehensive and incisive explanation of the gruesome Terror, its causes, and its consequences for the modern world.
In August 1870 in the French village of Hautefaye, a young nobleman, falsely accused of shouting republican slogans, was tortured for hours by a mob of peasants who later burned him alive. This book is a fascinating inquiry into the social and political ingredients of an alchemy that transformed ordinary people into brutal executioners.
Why does Western culture remain fascinated with and saturated by cannibalism? Moving from the idea of the dangerous Other, Priscilla L. Walton's Our Cannibals, Ourselves shows us how modern-day cannibalism has been recaptured as in the vampire story, resurrected into the human blood stream, and mutated into the theory of germs through AIDS, Ebola, and the like. At the same time, it has expanded to encompass the workings of entire economic systems (such as in "consumer cannnibalism"). Our Cannibals, Ourselves is an interdisciplinary study of cannibalism in contemporary culture. It demonstrates how what we take for today's ordinary culture is imaginatively and historically rooted in very powerful processes of the encounter between our own and different, often "threatening," cultures from around the world. Walton shows that the taboo on cannibalism is heavily reinforced only partly out of fear of cannibals themselves; instead, cannibalism is evoked in order to use fear for other purposes, including the sale of fear entertainment. Ranging from literature to popular journalism, film, television, and discourses on disease, Our Cannibals, Ourselves provides an all-encompassing, insightful meditation on what happens to popular culture when it goes global.
In this radical reexamination of the notion of cannibalism, Gananath Obeyesekere offers a fascinating and convincing argument that cannibalism is mostly "cannibal talk," a discourse on the Other engaged in by both indigenous peoples and colonial intruders that results in sometimes funny and sometimes deadly cultural misunderstandings. Turning his keen intelligence to Polynesian societies in the early periods of European contact and colonization, Obeyesekere deconstructs Western eyewitness accounts, carefully examining their origins and treating them as a species of fiction writing and seamen's yarns. Cannibalism is less a social or cultural fact than a mythic representation of European writing that reflects much more the realities of European societies and their fascination with the practice of cannibalism, he argues. And while very limited forms of cannibalism might have occurred in Polynesian societies, they were largely in connection with human sacrifice and carried out by a select community in well-defined sacramental rituals. Cannibal Talk considers how the colonial intrusion produced a complex self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the fantasy of cannibalism became a reality as natives on occasion began to eat both Europeans and their own enemies in acts of "conspicuous anthropophagy."
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Citizen Bird: Scenes from Bird-Life in Plain English for Beginners" by Mabel Osgood Wright, Elliott Coues. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
This classic and widely influential work brings together the talents of the greatest American ornithologist of his generation (Coues), a pioneering nature writer/editor/ornithologist (Wright), and a young artist whose contribution to the American tradition of bird illustration proved to be second only to Audubon's own (Fuertes); this book features the first substantial body of his work. Directed at the general public, especially children, and written in an entertaining and fanciful fiction style, the work imparts solid scientific knowledge while inculcating conservation values. It exemplifies the extensive literature of popular yet scientifically-grounded ornithology which nurtured the national passion for birds in this era, thereby fostering some of conservationism's most vital and widespread grass roots. Women were particularly well-represented in this literature, often--like Wright--combining literary gifts with serious scientific knowledge (Wright was elected to membership in the American Ornithologists' Union) to bridge the widening gap between professional science and amateur nature-study, and often--as in this work--confirming contemporary expectations of gender roles by directing their writings particularly toward children.
Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribed, swallowed or wore human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin against epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression. One thing we are rarely taught at school is this: James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine. Ranging from the execution scaffolds of Germany and Scandinavia, through the courts and laboratories of Italy, France and Britain, to the battlefields of Holland and Ireland, and on to the tribal man-eating of the Americas, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires argues that the real cannibals were in fact the Europeans. Medicinal cannibalism utilised the formidable weight of European science, publishing, trade networks and educated theory. For many, it was also an emphatically Christian phenomenon. And, whilst corpse medicine has sometimes been presented as a medieval therapy, it was at its height during the social and scientific revolutions of early-modern Britain. It survived well into the eighteenth century, and amongst the poor it lingered stubbornly on into the time of Queen Victoria. This innovative book brings to life a little known and often disturbing part of human history.
