Food

Describe cannibalism as a system among the Wari according to Beth Conklin. What are their practices and beliefs? What are their motivations? How do they fit and not fit into the major world patterns identified for anthropophagy by anthropologies around the world and by Conklin?

The Wari are an indigenous population with a population of about 1,500 people who live in the Brazilian rainforests and until roughly the 1960s the disposed of nearly all their corpses through mortuary cannibalism (Conklin, 1995). The reasons for eating members of your tribe can be much different for eating enemies. They Wari did not have to eat their dead for sustenance and there was adequate food in their region. The Wari chose to eat their family members as a passage of mourning and their enemies as a show of disrespect. The fact that they practiced both forms of mortuary cannibalism separates them from...
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