anthropemic society

is, along with anthropophagic society, one of the two modes of gaining power by incorporating an other, either through actual cannibalism (anthropophagia) or via a figurative type of incorporation through marriage (anthropoemia).

Le vi-Strauss, in the chapter entitled 'A Little Glass of Rum' in Tristes Tropiques (1961), discusses the contrast between two solutions for neutralizing the dangers of the other, the anthropophagic versus the anthropoemic strategy (cf. Bauman 1995:179-80). He notes that the first, the strategy of cannibalism, is repellent to Western sensibilities as the most barbaric of all customs. It is, however, a widely spread notion of native Amazonia that the powers of the self acquire their human potency only by assimilating the powers of dangerous others (Overing Kaplan 1981). For some Amazonian peoples the process must be literal, through the ingestion of the ground-up bones of a relative (otherness itself is a highly ambiguous state in Amazonia), as among the Yanomami, or the eating of a fragment of an enemy corpse as occurred among the Tupinamba. For others, it is the idea of 'cannibalism' (at least from our point of view) that frames their understanding of human life (see Overing 1996a).Thus to marry fits within this structure (one marries a stranger who becomes absorbed physically and socially as kin), as too does the eating of meat and vegetables (they both were human at the beginning of time). The ideal is to assimilate the other, and in order to achieve a life that is human this process of incorporation must be constant.There is the widespread Amazonian message that alterity is the hallmark of this-worldly social living: the achievement of the social state itself, and hence of the world of the interior, requires the force and creative powers of those different from self. Without consuming the powers of others, there can be no fertility and no productive capacity.

anthropemic society, n.All

anthropemic society