In the Fall I will once again be teaching my course on #earlymodern #cannibalism accusations as justification for racism and colonial violence, and here is some evidence that those accusations have never really gone away https://twitter.com/JasonSCampbell/status/1249780203263582212
Here "Native Americans" and "the Aztec" are conflated, as are Aztec human sacrafice and cannibalism, both of which are incorrect.
On the issue of Aztec human sacrafice - for which there is reasonable evidence - vs Aztec cannibalism - for which there is not - see for example below
@carolinepennock
Pennock, Caroline Dodds. "Mass murder or religious homicide? Rethinking human sacrifice and interpersonal violence in Aztec society." Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung (2012): 276-302.
On the idea of Native American societies engaging in cannibalism, there are a lot of articles, but here are a couple of recent things
@KellyLeaWatson
Watson, Kelly L. Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World. NYU Press, 2017.
@Raherrmann
Herrmann, Rachel B. To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic. University of Arkansas Press, 2019.
This next piece is from Fiji, but it is more broadly relevent because the author is both an historian of Fiji and a native Fijian and so descendent of people whom were accused of cannibalism
Banivanua-Mar, Tracey. "Cannibalism and colonialism: Charting colonies and frontiers in nineteenth-century Fiji." Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, no. 2 (2010): 255-281.
Many of those accusations of cannibalism leveled at Native Americans and other groups are not at all "proven," and a large number have been specifically disproven.
To state the blindingly obvious - accusations of cannibalism are not neutral.
/End
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