1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910956311803321

Autore

Walton Priscilla L

Titolo

Our cannibals, ourselves / / Priscilla L. Walton

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Urbana, : University of Illinois Press, c2004

ISBN

9786613921635

9781283609180

1283609185

9780252092787

0252092783

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (185 p.)

Disciplina

394/.9

Soggetti

Cannibalism

Popular culture

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [161]-169) and index.

Nota di contenuto

"Donner, party of fifty!" -- The body politic -- "I want to bite your neck" -- Dog eat dog : mad cow disease -- Diet disorders -- "If you love someone, hunt them down and kill them" -- Cannibal culture.

Sommario/riassunto

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.