>Turner's research flies in the face of long-held skepticism of cannibalistic
>accounts. In a 1979 book, The Man-Eating Myth, SUNY Stony Brook
>anthropologist William Arens persuasively questioned the very existence of
>cannibalism in human societies.
*snort*
Obviously he's never heard of the Maori who _themselves_ admit that they practiced cannibalism against their enemies as a gesture of contempt. Where I live, the Ngai Tahu, had a bloody internal dispute early last century that was known as the 'eat relative' war.
>Edgerton calls for eradicating the distinction between ``primitive'' and
>``modern'' altogether, arguing instead for a uniform standard of judgment
>that, borrowing from psychology, distinguishes between cultures that are
>``healthy'' and those that are ``dysfunctional.''
This could be an interesting gloranthan exercise. Ramalia and the Kingdom of War spring to mind as being dysfunctional societies. Personally I find it hard to think of a single absolutely healthy culture - for example Loskalm has a major flaw in that its anal-retentive fixation about being a land of Shining White Knights feeds in some manner the Kingdom of War.
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