But above all we
must to realize that certain of our usages, if investigated by an
observer from a different society, would seem to him similar in kind
to the cannibalism which we consider uncivilized.
I am thinking here
of our judicial and penitentiary customs. If we were to look at them
from outside it would be tempting to distinguish two opposing types
of society: those which practice cannibalism who believe, that is to
say, that the only way to neutralize people who are the repositories
of certain redoubtable powers, and even to turn them to one s own
advantage, is to absorb them into ones own body.
Second would come
those which, like our own, adopt what might be called anthropoemia
(from the Greek emein, to vomit). Faced with the same problem, they
have chosen the opposite solution. They expel these formidable beings
from the body publicly isolating them for a time, or for ever,
denying them all contact with humanity, in establish ments devised
for that express purpose. In most of the societies which we would
call primitive this custom would inspire the profoundest horror: we
should seem to them barbarian in the same degree as we impute to them
on the ground of their no-more-than-symmetrical customs.
Claude Lévi-Strauss: Tristi tropici, pp. 386
