A cannibal is a person that incurs in the anthropophagy : that is, that ingests human flesh. The cannibals, therefore, are human beings that eat human beings .
The concept, however, can be used in a broader sense to name the member of any species that feeds on the meat of other copies of his same species .
The etymological origin of the term is found in the language taino . When the Europeans found American aborigines who were man-eating, they named them with a word from the indigenous peoples that, in reality, alluded to boldness or daring.
It is likely that the first form of the word cannibal has been cariba or caniba, and that has emerged as a deformation of the term Caribbean. For the villages arahuacos (also known by the name of arawak), indigenous settlements in the circumcariberal region of the time of the conquest, the term in question meant "enemy", exactly what the Caribs represented for them.
When Christopher Columbus arrived in the current American continent, on the island of Hispaniola he met those tribes and saw anthropophagy for the first time. According to the documents of the time, the Caribs fought against the Arawakes to steal their belongings and took advantage of the attacks to capture their children, whom they later castrated and fed until they ate them.
In ancient times, cannibalism was a practice of different human groups possibly inherited from their ancestors . With the passage of weather , anthropophagy was linked to certain rituals . There were people who were cannibals only at certain times and for a reason linked to culture.
Currently cannibalism is a practice punishable by law , in addition to being convicted on a social level. Among the reasons why a human being can act in this way today are extreme hunger, mental disorders or the involvement of a criminal organization.
The vast majority of people are repulsed by the thought of eating human flesh, and this makes it even more difficult to understand the so-called carnism, that is, the ideology or set of beliefs organized in a system that conditions human beings to eat meat and other animal products. Why can someone devour a steak with pleasure and squirm in disgust at the mere idea of cannibalism? In part, why not hunting With your own hands, do not tear the cow before chopping and cooking.
In recent decades, however, there have been cases of individuals who were forced to act as cannibals in extreme situations. A famous case was the one in 1972 in the Andes mountains , when a airplane that moved players from rugby Uruguayans fell on the mountain and the survivors had to eat some of the dead passengers to survive.
There have also been stories of subjects with mental imbalances who resorted to cannibalism after committing a murder. As Dorángel Vargas , a serial and cannibal killer who acted in Venezuela at the end of the decade of 1990 .
Cannibalism as a concept opposes the ideal organization of a species, since nature expects us to achieve Balance otherwise: by eating the individuals of the other species, whether animal or vegetable, to prevent their populations from increasing disproportionately.
If we look at natural hunter groups, such as wolves or lions, we will notice that their stocks They are usually considerably smaller than those of their prey, and this reinforces what was said in the previous paragraph. If the wolves ate each other, they would not only become extinct, but the animals that were previously part of their diet would reproduce excessively and this would have many negative consequences.
