Abstract:
In Tristes Tropiques, one of the most hauntingly beautiful and thoughtful works of anthropology ever written, Claude Levi-Strauss suggested that ‘primitive’ societies deal with their danger-carrying strangers with the help of a strategy different from (though not necessarily inferior to) the one which we practise and consider normal and ‘civilized’. Theirs is the anthropophagic strategy: they eat up, devour and digest (biologically incorporate and assimilate) the strangers who carry powerful, mysterious forces – perhaps hoping to avail themselves in this way of those forces, absorb them, make them their own. Ours, on the contrary, is an anthropoemic strategy (from the Greek EU,ETV, to vomit). We throw the carriers of danger up – away from where orderly life is conducted, out of society’s bounds, either in exile or in guarded enclaves where they can be safely incarcerated without hope of escaping.
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