A Generous Quantity of Fat

Paul Henley

• Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American South-West by Christy Turner and Jacqueline Turner
  Utah, 512 pp, US $60.00, January 1999, ISBN 0 87480 566 X
• Cannibalism and the Colonial World edited by Francis Barker and Peter Hulme
  Cambridge, 309 pp, £13.95, August 1998, ISBN 0 521 62118 6
• Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne by Frank Lestringant, translated by Rosemary Morris
  Polity, 256 pp, £39.50, April 1997, ISBN 0 7456 1697 6
• Chronicles of the Guayakí Indians by Pierre Clastres, translated by Paul Auster
  Faber, 256 pp, £9.99, June 1998, ISBN 0 571 19398 6

Even before it was published, Christy and the late Jacqueline Turner’s Man Corn provoked media hubbub. Last November, the New Yorker published a long profile of Christy Turner, and soon afterwards the story was picked up in Britain. The Times dedicated half a page to a discussion of the book’s findings, and even reflected on them in a leader. Turner, a biological anthropologist from Arizona with a reputation for being something of a loner, has become such a media celebrity that he now has an agent. Recently, he declined to give an interview to a British television company on the grounds that he was already contractually obliged to a US company making a programme for Channel 4.