[extropy-chat] The Funeral as an "act of conspicuous consumption"

[randy]

Recent science seems to show that cannabalism was common in the past:


"The question is why has cannibalism, by and large, stopped? The
answer has less to do with innate decency or moral progress than with
status. For most of the hunter-gatherer period a community could not
afford not to eat its dead or its dead enemies. With farming came a
certain pride in displaying a life of plenty. Human burials and
cremations were (and are) acts of conspicuous consumption.

It is easy to think that what "we" do is what all right-thinking
humans do. And it is hard, in our supermarket culture, to imagine what
it is like to scavenge for food. But the careful procedures of science
can uncover the truth in the face of hardened preconceptions.

Now we know that cannibalism was a widespread norm in the past, we
need to find out why particular societies gave it up. Somewhat
uncomfortably, the reason in Papua New Guinea, after the Australian
government's suppression of funerary cannibalism in the Fifties, seems
to have been a desire on the part of the indigenous population to be
reincarnated as affluent white people."


More here:

http://www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2003/10/15/ecfcann14.xml&sSheet=/connected/2003/10/22/ixconn.html




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