"Considering Anthropophagy in Tibet"

Frances Garrett, University of Toronto

This presentation will examine "cannibalism" as a locus of connection between religious, medical and occult traditions in Tibet. Surveying examples of the consumption of human body parts as articulated in Tibetan contemplative, ritual, occult and medical literature, and in myth, iconography and narrative, this talk will consider how anthropophagy has been controversial not only for Buddhologists and European visitors to Tibet, but also for Tibetans themselves. Professor Garrett draws in particular from the Nectar Tantras canon and its writings on the contemplative and ritual practice called Accomplishing Medicine (sman sgrub), an esoteric exercise that involves the creation and use of "nectar" recipes using human products. She concludes that in Tibet anthropophagous practices and narratives are acts of transgression, generosity, and incorporation that are simultaneously savage and civilized.

Frances Garrett is Assistant Professor of Tibetan Buddhism in the Department for the Study of Religion. She received her PhD from the University of Virginia in 2004. She is intrigued by how Buddhist voices command a growing literary, ideological, social and political presence in the formative twelfth-fifteenth centuries in Tibet. A history of ideas that weaves across sectarian and disciplinary boundaries, her book, Religion, Medicine and the Human Embryo in Tibet (Routledge, 2008) links aspects of Tibetan medicine to expressions of culture, religion, art and literature through a study of embryology in Tibetan literature. Current projects consider the intersections between tantric practice, ritual and occult knowledge, and medical theory, and what these tell us about the processes of institutional and ideological change in "renaissance" Tibet.