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Article: Cannibalism: a white colonist fiction?
- Article from:
- Quadrant
- Article date:
- May 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 Quadrant Magazine Company, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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RECENTLY IN THE Weekend Australian Philip Jones, a distinguished scholar and curator at the Adelaide Museum, deplored Daisy Bates' "insistence on the prevalence of cannibalism in Aboriginal society". He claimed that she "conflated Aboriginal hearsay about cannibalism and mythological accounts". It is hard to fathom why Jones should have chosen Bates as a significant influence on current thinking about cannibalism in Australia, but his comments led one reader at least to look again at some issues.
Herodotus, the "father of history", claimed to have met Indians, probably Parsees, who were horrified to learn that the Greeks buried their dead parents, whereas the ...