BIg Fish, Little Fish

I try to be as open-minded as possible when it comes to foreign cultures, they sometimes have beliefs that I don't agree with but it doesn't hurt me to respect their freedom. Cannibalism is one thing I cannot bring myself to justify. It makes me sick thinking about people eating each other, cooking human parts and selling them separately, it simply cannot understand how it ever seemed like a good idea in the first place. Not even after I did some research.

There have been many cases of cannibalism attached to cultural behavior as well as people resorting to it in cases of extreme need. You hear the stories of stranded hikers that end up having to eat one another for survival and facts about bugs eating their hubbies for natural selection purposes but it surprised me to see how many documented cases of cannibalism there actually are. Criminals that have an obsession for human butchering, a rugby team that got lost in the Argentinean Andes mountains and those who eat those who are already dead. Cannibalism is more common than I though it was and it just makes me wonder where the boundaries of human insanity really are.

When the colonialists first saw acts of cannibalism with their own eyes their realities must have cracked. You can't live through something like that, learning about cannibalism is different from having to see it happening. The European men had this as proof that the native Africans were an inferior beast-like community. Anything that is strange or is "wrong" according to our standards should be criminalized and avoided and suppressed because a life time is enough to get you used to certain ideas. They used this behavior as a justification for their own cruel acts of treating people like cattle an treading them like they traded human limbs. Were the natives really that different?

Both tribes, the European and the African, have no sympathy for their fellow humans. They both had a demeaning view of those they "owned" and consumed them for their own benefit. The "savages" didn't put themselves in the position of those they consumed but the Belgians didn't either. "Consuming" has a flexible meaning, in this case it refers to both the act of devouring as well and the acts of slowly killing trough menial work one can't be bothered to do.

Cannibalism may not be okay for me still but I can understand at least the basic idea behind it, one that has a will haunt our behavior forever, the idea that using other humans for our own benefit is simply survival.