That it was sometimes a lie and usually an intended defamation is demonstrable. One postcolonial scenario, as I suggested, claims that it has always been imputed, but never actually carried out as a tribal practice, and that this imputation is a chronically recurrent lie, with an imperially motivated objective of ethnic defamation. It seems always to have existed, or to have been said to have existed, usually in "other" places. This isn't to say that anthropophagy was unknown in the ancient world. It was invented, or, as postcolonial persons say, "constructed" by Columbus. In one sense, then, "cannibalism" did not exist before 1492. On a wider historical canvas, conquerors and invaders traditionally impute it (whether accurately or not) to those they conquer or invade, or to the domestic mob, or to political enemies. The Arawaks told him the Caribs were man-eaters, enacting a standard scenario of tellers of cannibal tales, in which one tribe (whether itself anthropophagous or not) tends to impute cannibalism to its neighbors. Columbus' informants were purportedly a rival indigenous group, the Arawaks. It is a corruption of the term "Carib," the name of an Amerindian people from the Caribbean islands and northern South America, which also means "bold" or "fierce" in their language. To be quite specific, we owe the word "cannibal" to Columbus. The prosecution had sought a life sentence for murder. January 30, 2004, self-confessed German cannibal Armin Meiwes is sentenced to 8 years and 6 months' imprisonment for manslaughter (). Individual cases in other countries have been seen with mentally unstable persons, criminals, and, in unconfirmed rumors, by religious zealots. The Chaco Canyon ruins of the Anasazi culture have been interpreted by some archaeologists as containing evidence of ritual cannibalism. Among humans this has been practiced by various tribal groups in the past in the Amazon Basin, Africa, Fiji, and New Guinea, usually in rituals connected to tribal warfare. humans eating humans (sometimes called anthropophagy), or dogs eating dogs. One of Goya's more famous works is "Saturn Devouring His Son", which displays a Greco-Roman mythological scene of the god Saturn consuming a child.Ĭannibalism is the act or practice of eating members of the same species, e.g. Saturn Devouring His Son (1819) - Francisco de Goya