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Karl Valentin Müller (1896–1963), an amateur researcher, published his first papers on the synthesis of ‘social’ and ‘racial’ issues in the tradition of German Sozialanthropologie around 1930. A decade later, the former member of the German Social Democratic Party had already become a prominent expert on Nazi population policy and Umvolkung. In 1941 he was appointed professor at the newly established Institute of Social Anthropology and Volk Biology (Institut für Sozialanthropologie und Volksbiologie) at the Faculty of Philosophy of the German University in Prague. His professional advancement was strongly supported by high SD and SS officials. In Prague he presented his programme of Umvolkung, or ethnic re-engineering, which was based on the idea of reorganising the national composition of the population in Central and South Eastern Europe. The programme was grounded in Müller’s own theories of Umvolkung with special focus on Bohemia and Moravia. After the Second World War, he became head of the Institute for Research on Intellectual Giftedness (Institut für Begabtenforschung) in Hannover. Later, Müller was appointed professor of empirical sociology at the University of Economic and Social Sciences in Nuremberg and became an active representative of Sozialanthropologie in the early Federal Republic of Germany. Müller never abandoned his basic assumptions, which were rooted in his convictions regarding heredity and racial biology and supported by an eclectic methodological mix. He had never been a creative or innovative scientist but he exerted significant influence on the field of applied policy in three German political systems – the Weimar Republic, the ‘Third Reich’, and post-war Western Germany.
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Attempting to explain the insistence of the image of the cannibal in contemporary popular culture, the author presents cannibalism as a symbolic practice perfectly representative of a proliferation of the symbolic competition on the contemporary marketplace and of other forms of ritualised interaction, where each individual represents a subjectivity that, by its nature, tends toward its own limitless expansion through the absorption of difference and exteriority. The first section of the paper explores the idea and nature of cannibalism, and various ways in which it translates into the structure of consumerist society. The second section looks at recent examples from popular entertainment in which depictions of cannibalism reveal cannibalistic mechanisms at work in commodity production and consumption.
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The essay sets out to explore the ideological dispute over cannibalism during the Wars of Religion in its contemporary academic treatment. A special focus of interest is on the theological and metaphysical involvement of the contemporary discourse of cannibalism, represented here by two recent publications: "Cannibals" by Frank Lenstringant (1994) and "Cannibalism and the Colonial World" (1995), a collection of essays edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen. A glance at the recent discoursc of cannibalism makes it possible to label it „Protestant" as opposed to „Catholic". References to the religious dispute over transubstantiation, and linguistic reformulations of the theological dilemmas do little justice to the metaphysical traditions on which the Catholic dogma originally rested. The much-discussed imputed allegorisation and symbolisation of the Eucharist corresponds to the allegorisation and symbolisation of the cannibal, characteristic of the colonial experience and its cultural appropriation in the Western world, is itself ridden with ambiguities, revealed in attitudes that scholars display towards religious controversies.
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In his essay Stephen Tapscott claims that a postmodern approach to modernist texts can be described as cannibalistic. As an example of that kind of approach he cites the literary history of Latin America and its experience of colonialism as well as postcolonialism. Also, he focuses on the postcolonial discourse present in Columbus's diaries. Then, Tapscott presents the evaluation of the Shakespearean metaphor of Caliban and its reception in South America. Finally, he goes on to discuss the openly cannibalistic poetry of Pablo Neruda. He argues that Latin American postmodernism is cannibalistic in at least two ways: first, in the sense that it derives from the rich tradition of moral and political (not necessarily physical) cannibalism, and secondly, that it cannibalises the very postcolonial discourse forced on America in the times of European domination. The conclusion is that postmodernism (including the Latin American postmodernism) cannibalises the cannibalised.
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This article outlines how the modern cannibal myth functions on the basis of prior references in Western art and literature (mythemes). By tracing the importance of the heart and brain plus the eating thereof, the author points up a semantic shift from 'sacred heart' to 'secular brain'. The cannibal reappears at the body part which represents the ultimate; in other words, ultimate act and ultimate body part, the locus of many contemporary socieral preoccupations (Kuru, CJT, transplants). The article refers specifically to the trilogy of Thomas Harris, in particular, "Hannibal". This is an extract of a broader study of the real act of cannibalism in twentieth-century Western literature.
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Since Swift's notorious "A Modest Proposal" of the eighteenth century, cultural texts have used the images and symbolism of cannibalism to interrogate the behaviour and consequences of capitalism. Swift's political pamphlet and its suggestion that the poor sell their babies to the prosperous landowners as luxury food, takes human relationships under capitalism to a logical conclusion where man becomes a dehumanised economic saleable commodity. The nineteen seventies' film "Soylent Green" and an episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" both reveal how the dehumanisation of mass production provide for the construction of cannibalism. With films of the 1980's such as "Society" and "Eat the Rich" the focus moves from poverty to the excessive behaviour of the rich. In a society where everyone wants more, and more, one can only stay on top by consuming everyone else. In his X-rated video "Rock DJ", Robbie Williams uses footage of his own literal cannibalisation to express his ambiguity about both the use of his image and the music industry in general. Robbie Williams' rise to fame has transformed him into a floating signifier detached from his own body, which is shown violently yet desirably decomposing. Life inside the velvet cage of consumerism means making choices and allegiances, which necessarily involve the ingestion of one group by another.
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The starting point of these reflections is the concept of the „metaphysics of meat", (developed in an essay by Jolanta Brach-Czaina). Metaphysics of meat draws attention to a certain law of man's existence, which says once you eat, you are also eaten, and thus defines life as "the cannibals' feast": the process of exchange when body is flesh as much as meat. One can assume then the affinity between eating and other forms of relating ourselves to others, like the act of love and the act of speech (verbal exchange), the affinity whose visible sign is the mouth with its double function of production and consumption. The article points to the traps of individualism, which excludes one from the processes of exchange and, literally or metaphorically, makes one keep one's mouth shut. In meatology, (the form of logos whose ground is the metaphysics of meat) the words we utter are treated only as food for other words, their value is purely nutritional. The literary examples for the, failed or successful, acts of consumption as an expression of love range from the Marquis de Sade to Lewis Carroll and Patrick Süskind.
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