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Commensality and anthropophagy as metaphors of power, violence, and conflict in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to explore commensality and anthropophagy as metaphors that connect power, conflict, violence and witchcraft in Sub-Saharan Africa, on the basis of a bibliographic review. The imagery of witchcraft continues to proliferate in all sectors of social life and accompanies the processes of urbanization and modernization. Witchcraft and images of anthropophagic banquets represent an attempt to explain and domesticate traumatic historical events, such as colonization and slavery, urbanization, and rapid social, economic. and political changes, through creative rearrangements that involve cosmology, notion of person and social relations, but they favour, at the same time, the propagation of violence and fear.

Keywords:
Sorcery; Belly politics; Postcolonial State; Violence; Mutilations


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