PJ Vogt

pj sandwiches or whatever you are reducing you're lowering the strength of this natural taboo against the sacredness of our bodies and then like perhaps creating a society that you don't want to live in

Basically, yeah, yeah.

The anthropologist who wrote this paper on the foray, the part that I found kind of most like, oh, shit.

Can I read you one more quote from the paper?

So the way they talk about the type of cannibalism that the four-way practice as endo-cannibalism.

Endo-cannibalism is you're eating members of your group.

Exo-cannibalism is eating members of the out group.

So they're explaining like why they did it.

Later works have explained the role of endocannibalism in the epidemiology of Kuru and emphasized that the body was eaten out of love, like grief love, as well as for gastronomic appreciation, which was not the intended purpose of the practice, but its result.

It means that while they were eating their dead to communicate all these things about life and love and grief, the side effect was that they were discovering that people are actually really tasty.

Yes.

I think true but incomplete is like the way out of answering this without having to like horrify him with a bunch of stories about like,

German cannibals, even, like, I think he should have an uncomplicated version of celebrating what he probably knows as Indigenous Peoples Day.

Like, I think the right answer for Otto is you shouldn't eat people because it could make you really sick.

Yes.

That's Califasane, a taboo critic, but sometimes a taboo supporter.

He writes about all sorts of things at The New Yorker.

This week, as we were wrapping the episode, I briefly spoke with Hannah, Otto's mom.

She said in the couple months since we first spoke, Otto keeps changing the way four-year-olds do.

She says these days, they play a game where when he goes to bed, he's allowed to ask his parents a certain amount of questions before he falls asleep.