Cannibalism and the Work of Culture in Bereavement: Commentary on Gottlieb

Visions of fragmented and reunified human bodies are prime imagery through which people experience loss and isolation and project desires for reparation. Richard Gottlieb's insightful essay shows how concerns with bodily integrity, including cannibalistic imagery, come to the fore in diverse settings, suggesting this is powerful imaginative material for confronting existential dilemmas and emotions that are among the most universal human experiences.

As an ethnographer who works with indigenous people for whom cannibalism used to be an integral part of their cultural framework for managing death and mourning, I find the connections Gottlieb identifies exciting and thought-provoking. The Wari' of western Brazil explain their former practice of consuming the dead in terms of an indigenous theory of memory and grief that emphasizes the body's role in relationships and the effect of visual imagery in shaping emotional responses. Gottlieb's model helps make sense of this and other nonWestern practices of bodily destruction, especially in contexts of bereavement and mourning.

Anthropologists often object to applying Western psychoanalytic frames to non-Western peoples with very different experiences of