ABSTRACT
Foodways scholars argue that the most immediate response to cannibalism is disgust and that alimentary revulsion sets people and groups apart from one another. As vernacular culture, folktales offer exciting opportunities to explore this deep connection between cannibalism and disgust. Often invoking the carnivalesque in their play with the bizarre, grotesque, and absurd, these stories demonstrate disgust’s nuances and show its cultural imbrication with a wide range of shared concepts about eating and food, gender and kinship. We draw on structural analysis in foodways and folklore theory to connect kinship and cannibalism with ideas of disgust. Crucial is anthropologist David Schneider’s distinction between blood relatives, a genetic relationship like that between biological siblings, and social or legal relatives like husbands and wives. We focus our exploration on folktales of cannibalism collected in Newfoundland.
