MDDM Ch. 76 Typickal of the People

[Dave Monroe]

"'The 'Forty-five lives on here, a Ghost from a
Gothick Novel, ubiquitous, frightfully shatter'd,
exhibiting gallons of a certain crimson Fluid,--
typickal of the People, don't you see.'
   "'Aye, he means me,' sighs Mr. Boswell.  He picks
up the Bone remnant of a Chop and gestures with it. 
'Soon he will commence with the Cannibalism-Joaks,
pray you, miss it not, 'tis more hilarious than may at
first seem likely.  All his lifelong Enmity, emerging
at last in this way.'" (M&D, Ch. 76, p. 745)

"typickal of the People"

Boswell, the biographer of Johnson, had a keen desire
for witnessing executions, and often accompanied
criminals to the gallows. He had a seat in the
mourning coach conveying Hackman to Tyburn, and in the
same carriage rode the ordinary of Newgate and the
sheriff's officer. Visiting Johnson on 23 June, 1794,
Boswell mentions that he "has just seen fifteen men
hanged at Newgate" (Boswell, "Life of Johnson",
Croker's edition, VIII, 331).

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12565a.htm

The “Picts” or “Picti” were a race that can be traced
to our very early descendents, probably going as far
back as the Iron Age Settlers. They were an ancient
culture that survived the Iron Age and lived on into
the Dark Age, living just north of Hadrians Wall, in a
place we know today as Scotland....

[...]

There is also suggestions that the Picts were a
barbaric race, behind in their social development with
evidence found of cannibalism amongst some ....

[...]

However, Cannibalism was not necessarily a sign of
barbarism and there are those who believe that this
could have been an act of self improvement, in which
the cultural held belief meant that by eating the
bodies of the dead, they were consuming the qualities
and strength of the person who had passed on....

http://www.bloodtithes.co.uk/html/picts.html

On The Trail of Sawney Bean and his Cannibal Family

For as long as I can remember, the tale of Sawney Bean
and his tribe of Scottish cannibals has both
fascinated and horrified me....

[...]

Cannibalism in Scotland did exist. Buckle in his
"History of Civilization" (Volume II, page 176) 1861,
describes cannibals living near the end of the 14th
Century who were brought at length to justice, having
subsisted for many years on the bodies of children
whom they caught and killed, devouring their flesh and
dinking blood. The authorities he cites are Lindsay of
Pitscotties "Chronicle" (Volume I, page 163) 1814;
Hollingheads "Scotichronicon" (Volume II, page 331)
The case described occurred in the neighbourhood of
Perth in the year of 1339.

http://www.girvan-online.net/culture/fpeople/s_bean.htm

"Cannibalism-joaks"

Cannibalism is a narrative of the self and of the
'other'. Dramatising as it does the fear that the
body's boundaries are unstable and can be breached, it
remains the representative barbarism, yet it also lies
at the centre of Western culture, in the form of the
Catholic Mass, for example. From Othello's
anthropophagi to the racist jokes of the 1950s, the
theme of cannibalism in popular discourse has
coincided with periods of high colonialism when
relations with the 'other' are at their most sharp.

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~folklife/Abstracts/porter.htm

The very existence of cannibalism has been the subject
of fierce debate within anthropology, where it is
widely seen, following William Arens, as a racist
myth, such inhuman behaviour being attributed to 'the
other' as a way of stressing 'our' cultural
superiority.  Ironically, Europeans are commonly
accused of cannibalism, as in the Crusades and in the
imposition of colonial rule in Africa, where
cannibalism is linked to witchcraft and witchcraft
provides a satisfying explanation of western
technological superiority.   

Where the existence of cannibalism is accepted, it is
commonly dismissed as an aberration brought about by
extreme circumstances – the starvation cannibalism
model.  Yet there is abundant evidence of medicinal
cannibalism in Europe from the sixteenth to eighteenth
centuries....

http://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/tag/tagjacquimulville2.htm

Cultural anthropologists disagree over lots of
things....

The latest, and perhaps the most bitter, of squabbles
is over cannibalism. Most anthropologists remain
convinced that cannibalism was widespread in the past
and continues to flourish in obscure pockets of the
world....

A growing minority of anthropologists think otherwise.
They are persuaded there is not now, nor has there
ever been, a culture that routinely eats its dead, or
that kills and devours its enemies. The debate
simmered for decades until 1979, when it was blasted
wide open by William Arens, an anthropologist at the
State University of New York at Stony Brook. The blast
was his explosive book The Man-Eating Myth:
Anthropology and Anthropophagy [OUP, 1979] ...

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m2843/n1_v22/20577441/p1/article.jhtml?term=Arens

And anybody know anything about ...

Cannibals and Tourists: The Uses and Abuses of Dr.
Johnson

James Kim (English, University of Virginia)
"Fathers and Footnotes: Commentary as Cannibalism in
Boswell's Life of Johnson"

http://www.engl.virginia.edu/conferences/grad.97/sched.html

Haven't located any actual cannibal jokes on Johnson's
part yet (so if anybody knows), but ...

Where is the first example of cannibalism in the
Bible?
Two Kings Ate One!

http://www.askthebible.com/jokes.htm

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