Necrophagy, Cannibals and Animals: Disgust, Shame, and the Power of Knowing in Bali

• Event Date: Thursday, October 20, 2005
• Time: 7:30 pm (CDT)
• Location: Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

• Talk
• Exhibit-Related tag

Laura Bellows, Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Illinois

This talk examines the effectiveness of "knowing" through analysis of three disgusting stories. "Knowing" has the potential to constitute bodies and thus has implications for Balinese personhood and Hindu caste status. The stories discussed depict instances where ideally discrete categories of person and states of being are temporarily ambiguous--resulting in moments of necrophagy, cannibalism, or animalism. Shame, shamelessness, and disgust in response to such ambiguity reveal moments when everyday and esoteric forms of knowing (and not knowing) take on constitutive power-assigning social statuses and categories of person through (re)definition of ambiguous individual bodies and interactions as polluted or polluting, human or animalistic, or redefining live bodies as dead and vice versa. Disgust and shame, thus, become potent ways to articulate differential levels of knowledge and thus to assert relative status.

This talk is presented in conjunction with the exhibit "Visions of the Unseen: Picturing Balinese Ceremony and Myth." The exhibit is co-sponsored by the Atius-Sachem leadership honoraries. It is also supported by the Spurlock Museum Guild and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.