In Arizona, a white family buys a Navajo-style blanket to be used on the guest-room bed. Across the country in New York, opera patrons weep to the death scene of Madam Butterfly. These seemingly unrelated events intertwine in Cannibal Culture as Deborah Root examines the ways Western art and Western commerce co-opt, pigeonhole, and commodify so-called native experiences. From nineteenth-century paintings of Arab marauders to our current fascination with New Age shamanism, Root explores and explodes the consumption of the Other as a source of violence, passion, and...