Talk:Korowai
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I strongly suggest the claims of cannibalism be removed. There are no other sources other than the 60 Minutes program that verify this, not even organisations that run tours to the area. Popular thought is that there has never been any conclusive evidence to suggest cannibalism ever took place as part of a cultural ritual *anywhere* in the world. So for a tabloid current affairs program to be the only evidence for this is to look decidedly intellectually shaky.
- There's also this link : http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2006/september/cannibals.htm
An article about the Korowai by an anthropologist who had visited them was published in the Reader's Digest in August 1996. He said one of them had told him that they practice cannibalism. What makes you think the ONLY source is 60 Minutes? Michael Hardy 22:15, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
First, please "sign" your name after a posting by adding four tildes (~) at the end. Second, I understand and sympathize with the concerns of the first poster who was understandably dismayed at the salacious tabloid "journalism" of Australia's 60 Minutes program. Having spent several weeks as a guest of the Korowai in the early 1990s, my sense is that the 60 Minutes story is as factually dubious in its particulars as it is in being in bad taste (pun not intended) generally. As poster #2 points out, and as I can personally verify, the Korowai themselves acknowledged this was part of their recent past. So while there is a strong basis for concluding that cannibalism did occur in the region at least until relatively recently -- as been documented in the 1994 film "Lords of the Garden", produced by the A&E Network -- I am highly skeptical of the particulars of the story pursued by 60 Minutes. Cannibalism is/was not indiscriminate but rather was part of a system of "criminal justice" -- whereby those who had made severe social or moral transgressions were "sentenced" to death by cannibalism. This explanation is not to give my moral approval to this practice -- though I do not consider it "shameful" either; it was what it was -- but rather to put it into some cultural context that makes sense at least in the abstract. Generally, however, such a sentence was imposed swiftly, and in direct bearing to the actual culpable persons, thus casting no small amount of doubt onto the 60 Minutes story. In any case, denying that cannibalism ever was practiced in New Guinea seems as dubious as media over-hyping its extent (it definitely was neither universal nor indiscriminate) or exoticism (there are plenty of cultural "practices" in the modern Western world that are equally or more barbaric -- witness drive-by shootings). In short, while I agree that hyping the cannibalism of the Korowai is loathsome (who are the real cannibals -- the Korowai or the 60 Minutes people?), white-washing or denying certain facts does no one any good. My two cents. Arjuna 00:47, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
