Word: mundugumor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nearby islands. The conquistadors reported that the Aztecs butchered victims, ate the flesh and fed the entrails to zoo animals. Henry Morton Stanley said he was beset on all sides by savage cannibals during his famous trek through Africa to find Livingstone. Margaret Mead wrote about the man-eating Mundugumor of New Guinea. There is only one thing wrong with all these reports: they come second or third hand, and are probably false. That is the surprising thesis of a new book called The Man-Eating Myth by Anthropologist William Arens, who believes cannibalism may never have existed anywhere...
...origin of the myth, he thinks, is the tendency of every group to accuse its neighbors of cannibalism. The Arawaks and Caribs are good examples, and Mead was told about the Mundugumor by the Arapesh tribe. But Arens finds no reliable firsthand accounts of cannibalism. "Like the poor," he says, "cannibals are always with us, but happily just beyond the possibility of direct observation...
...women's liberation, was "overexposed"; conservative academicians called Mead, who chaired or served on more committees than anyone could remember, an "international busybody." But young people loved her, partly, as Bohannan recalls, because "she never talked down to anybody," partly because she clearly loved young people. Of the Mundugumor tribespeople, she wrote: "It seemed clear to me that a culture that so repudiated children could not be a good culture." Remembering her own youth, she regularly defended the behavior and ideals of youth and decried the efforts of their elders to "keep them in their places." As she once...
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