Carib - Cannibalism and patriarchy

American Indian groups of the Lesser Antilles and neighbouring South America (the Guianas and Venezuela); also the name of the largest family of South American Indian languages. The island Caribs were maritime people and warriors, who drove the Arawak from the area. Most were slaughtered by Spaniards in the 15th-c, and the survivors mixed with Spanish conquerors and later Negro slaves. The mainland Caribs led a more peaceful existence in small autonomous settlements in the tropical forests. Population c.5000.

Carib or Island Carib is the collective name of a people given to them who lived in the Lesser Antilles islands, after whom the Caribbean Sea was named.

Although the men spoke either a Carib language or a pidgin, the Caribs' raids resulted in so many female Arawak captives that it was not uncommon for the women to speak Kalhíphona, a Maipurean language (Arawakan). In the southern Caribbean they co-existed with a related Cariban-speaking group, the Galibi who lived in separate villages in Grenada and Tobago and are believed to have been mainland Caribs. Several words of Carib origin became part of the English language, including hurricane, hammock, barbeque, and iguana. Over the century leading up to Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Caribbean archipelago in 1492, the Caribs are believed to have displaced the Maipurean-speaking Igneri people from the southern Lesser Antilles. Anthropologists are divided as to how true that was, but the fact that the Island Carib women spoke a Maipurean language gives credence to this idea. The Caribs were the source of the gold which Columbus found in the possession of the Taíno; The Caribs were skilled boatbuilders and sailors, and seem to have owed their dominance in the Caribbean basin to their mastery of the arts of war.

The Caribs were themselves displaced by the Europeans, and were eventually all but exterminated during the colonial period. The Black Caribs (Garifuna) of St. Vincent inherit their ethnicity from a group of black slaves who were marooned in a 1675 shipwreck possibly after seizing power from the crew. The British saw the less mixed "Yellow Caribs" as less hostile, and allowed them to remain in St. Vincent. Carib resistance delayed the settlement of Dominica by Europeans, and the Carib communities that remained in St. Vincent and Dominica retained a degree of autonomy well into the 19th century. The last known speakers of Island Carib died in the 1920s. The number of Caribs in Dominica today is about 3,000; there are several hundred ethnic Caribs in Trinidad.

Cannibalism and patriarchy

Europeans arriving on the Caribbean Islands in the 15th century remarked on the Caribs' aggressive and warlike ways and apparent taste for combat. Island Carib society was socially more egalitarian than Taíno society.

Instances of cannibalism were noted as a feature of religious war rituals, and in fact, the English word cannibal originated from the Carib word karibna ('person') – as recorded by Columbus as a name for the Caribs. The film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was recently criticized by the National Garifuna Council for portraying the Carib people as cannibals.