Violence and Cannibalism: Considerations on Cannibalism in Pre-Modern Societies: The Case of Mesa Verde

Cannibalism refers to the phenomenon of eating one own species for certain reasons that widely exists among living things of this planet. In nature, animals eat the same kind of meat mainly for individual survival and gene continuation. For human beings, although one should not deny that cannibalism caused by a series of specific reasons is an objective phenomenon, which runs through the whole history of this species. The validity of the appalling rumors about cannibalism brought back by sailors and travelers heard for a long time, and even ethnographic data collected by modern anthropologists, need to be verified. Today, cannibalism for social and cultural reasons is a thing of the past in most societies. This paper takes Cowboy wash’s case as an example, relies on authentic ethnographic materials from various perspectives and uses the cross-cultural comparison method of anthropology. It aims at sorting out the possible causes of cannibalism from the perspectives of history and social-cultural imperatives, and tries to sieve through the relationship between violence and cannibalism.