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Anthropophagy is the motto of a cultural movement articulated in the end of the 1920’s in Brazil that affirms the urge to ingest the culture of the colonizer and digest it in terms of the local reality. The name ‘anthropophagy’ designates the ingestion of human flesh within typical ritualistic practices of some Amerindian tribes such as the Tupinambás, who used to live at the Northern region of the land that is nowadays called Brazil; these practices played a meaningful role in the intertribal relations and acquired in some of them, as describes the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the sense of a true incorporation of the world-view of the ingested enemy (Viveiros de Castro, 2002, pp. 229–254). These ritualistic practices serve as inspiration for a cultural movement idealized by the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) and whose starting point is the foundation of the Revista de Antropofagia in 1928. The movement contains two major phases: (i) the inaugural phase, whose duration corresponds to period of activities of the Revista (from May 1928 to August 1929), is linked to the esthetical and political discussions of the Brazilian modernist movement and has as its landmark the publication of the Anthropophagist Manifesto (Revista I:1, pp. 3 e 7); and (ii) the mature phase, which begins with Andrade’s return to the theme of Anthropophagy in 1946 lasting until the end of his life in 1954, and which is characterized by an intense dialogue with the history of philosophy and has as its landmark the publication in 1950 of the text: The Crisis of Messianic Philosophy.

First Phase: Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagist Manifesto and the Brazilian Modernism

The Anthropophagist Manifesto, in which Oswald de Andrade presents the conceptual foundations of the movement, is published in May 1928 in the inaugural number of the Revista de Antropofagia. It is important to remark that the anthropophagical practice, or cannibalism, served, since the beginning of the colonization, as a principle of distinction between barbarianism and civilization, and that it was often employed as justification for the colonial practice that presented itself as aiming at “saving the barbarians from themselves.” By turning Anthropophagy into the motto of a Manifesto, Oswald de Andrade operates an inversion by which he affirms as the leitmotiv of a cultural movement precisely that which operated as the principle of exclusion of a whole set of people from the domain of culture. This procedure of inversion, as noted the Brazilian philosopher Benedito Nunes, indicates that Anthropophagy is not simply a metaphor, but it functions equally both as a diagnostic by which the trauma of the colonial violence is grasped and as a therapeutic which, by affirming as a positive value that which was systematically treated as inferior, renders possible the progressive confrontation with the problem (Nunes, 1978, pp. xxv–xxvi). This inversion rendering possible the manifestation of a problem is associated, as indicated by the title of the Manifesto, to an operation of the deglutition by which the standpoint to be ingested (the cultural references of the colonizer) is transposed within the referential system of the one operating the deglutition (within the cultural references of the colonized); as Beatriz Azevedo remarks, such an operation is revealed within the very procedure of construction of the Manifesto, which is built through a true deglutition of some renowned Manifestos of the Western culture, particularly: (i) the Manifesto of the Communist Party, with which Andrade’s text dialogues since its first aphorism where he states “Only Anthropophagy unites us” (Azevedo, 2016, pp. 104–107); and (ii) the Surrealist Manifesto in dialogue with which the political significance of the suspension of the laws of logic for the sake of the manifestation of a supra-real and magical realism is reevaluated in the context of the ex-colony (Azevedo, 2016, pp. 68–75).

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The association between deglutition and inversion is paradigmatically manifested in the way in which Oswald de Andrade situates his Manifesto within the space-temporal coordinates; thus, the text, published in São Paulo in 1928, is identified by the author as done “in Piratininga”, in the “year 374 of the Deglutition of the Bishop of Sardinha.” The replacement of São Paulo by Piratininga brings to the forefront the fact that the city, grounded by the Jesuit Spanish father José de Anchieta, received its name from a determined cultural framework which was transposed to the region of the plateau whose Indian name in the Tupi language was “Piratininga” (Pira = fish; Tininga = dry) – since, in virtue of the constant inundations of the river that crosses the region, many fishes used to beach in the plateau thereby offering food to its inhabitants (Kehl, 2005). The replacement of “1928” (after Christ) by “374” (after the deglutition of the Bishop of Sardinha) indicates that even the framework for counting time is based on the cultural paradigm brought by the colonizer; moreover, it identifies as an alternative landmark both for counting time and for writing the local history, since it stipulates as the initial landmark of the history of the new nation the deglutition of the Bishop Pero Fernandes Sardinha by the Indians Caetés – which took according to Andrade’s counts in 1554, but actually in 1556 (Vasconcellos, 1663, t. II, p. 186). The procedure renders thus evident the fact that the language and the space-temporal framework employed in the Americas was defined based on a specific cultural paradigm, and through the inversion of the referential system, Andrade indicates an alternative description of that same space-temporal point when the I is the Other.

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This first phase of Anthropophagy, strongly associated to the Brazilian modernist movement, is unfolded in many other meaningful esthetic productions, among which the following can be highlighted: Tarsila do Amaral’s painting Abaporu based on which the very idea of creating the anthropophagical movement was conceived (Amaral, 2003, p. 279); Mario de Andrade’s roman Macunaíma, considered by Oswald de Andrade as “a purely anthropophagical book” (Revista, 1:5, p. 3); and Raul Bopp’s poem “Cobra Norato” which should be included in the first volume of the “little anthropophagical library”, which was never published (Bopp, 2006, p. 71). The movement is interrupted by the economical crisis of 1929 and by the subsequent radicalization of political positions, and it was only to be resumed in 1946 with the publication of the text A Arcádia e a Incofidência (The Arcadia and the Conspiracy) by Oswald de Andrade, who had recently cut relations with the communist party in virtue of his disappointment with its sectarian positions (Fonseca, 2007, pp. 298–299).

Second phase: Anthropophagy x Messianism

The second phase of Anthropophagy has as a landmark the publication of the Crisis of Messianic Philosophy (1950), in which Andrade presents a sketch of a philosophy of history based on the opposition between Messianism, the culture of the hemisphere of patriarchy, and Anthropophagy, the culture of the hemisphere of matriarchy. Anthropophagy is now presented “as a Weltanschauung” and as linked to “the metaphysical operation of transforming the taboo into totem”, i.e. operating the transition “from the opposite value to the favorable one” (Andrade, 1978, p. 77). The philosophical contours of the concept, already to be found in the Manifesto, are here refined within a more systematic approach, and the procedure of therapeutic inversion, previously applied to a reevaluation of the present, is now employed as a dispositive of reevaluation of history, particularly of the history of philosophy. Oswald de Andrade offers a panoramic reconstruction of the history of philosophy, since Ancient Greece until the French Existentialism, by exploring the relations between structures of social organization, political institutions and world-views expressed within philosophical systems: according to this theoretical frame, the institutions of the Western world – patriarchal family, transmission of patrimony and State as a fatherland – favor the consolidation of world-views that grasp the real as an unfolding process having as its horizon the final reconciliation with the divine father (messianic culture); on the hand, the Amerindian institutions – tribe as the most basic social unity, absence of private property and absence of State – favor the consolidation of world-views that grasp reality as fluid non-static relations (anthropophagical culture); Andrade suggests that the dialectic relation between those two cultures offers the key both to a reevaluation of the history of philosophy and to a new conception of history (Andrade, 1978, pp. 80–84).

Bibliographic sources of the movement

Raul Bopp, one of the most influential names of first phase of the movement, identifies the following bibliographic sources of the anthropophagical movement: “[André] Thevet, with six hundred notes of ethnographic interest; Jean de Léry, who came to Brazil with Villegaignon; Hans Staden; Henry Koster; Karl von Steiner (study of the Xingu tribes); Claude d’Abbeville; Yves d’Évreux; [Nicolas-Antoine] Taunay; [Auguste de] Saint-Hilaire; Koch Grünberg; [Alexander von] Humboldt; Capistrano de Abreu; glossary of indigenous languages of [Carl Philipp Friedrich von] Martius” and yet “the great [Michel de] Montaigne (Les Essais, De Canibalis) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau” (Bopp, 2006, pp. 65–66). To these names, it is important do add as fundamental sources for Andrade’s Manifesto: Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, André Breton and Hermann von Keyserling (Azevedo, 2016). As essential sources for the second phase of the movement, where a more intense dialogue with the history of philosophy is to be found, the following authors are added to the list: Hegel, particularly Alexandre Kojève’s reception of his works which is repeatedly quoted in the Crisis of Messianic Philosophy (Andrade, 1978, pp. 80; 97; 117), and authors who offer conceptual tools to question idealism and to reevaluate the history of ideas in non-exclusively rationalist terms such as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, towards which Andrade “is enthusiastic” (Fonseca, 2007, p. 299). Another source of remarkable presence in the Crisis is theory of matriarchy formulated by Johann Jakob Bachofen (Carli, 2016).

Reception

The movement has a rich history of reception. Some important authors have criticized it for promoting a dilution of the social conflicts in benefit of the idealization of a sociocultural mixture based on an acritical deglutition within which all values are positive (Schwarz, 1987; Mello e Souza, 2009), or yet, for implementing a kind of cultural fetish based on a romantic ethnography (Jauregui, 2012). A particularly meaningful criticism concerns the problem of the factual restriction of those who actually play the role of swallowers, since, if the deglutition is practiced without the inversion of the pair oppressor-oppressed, it tends to become an assimilationism of the oppressed by the oppressor, tending to eliminate from the existential horizon of the devoured ones all the aspects which do not fit in the referential system of the devourer; Anthropophagy therefore could only work if it is realized from to the bottom to the top, which means, in the case of Brazil, to be realized not only from the perspective of the indigenous people, but also from the perspective of the afro-descendants (Paixão, 2015). In other words, Anthropophagy tends to degenerate itself into an acritical assimilationism if the practice of deglutition is not associated to the procedure of inversion of perspectives put into practice within the Manifesto.

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Anthropophagy as this critical procedure of inversion has had a remarkable cultural impact in Brazil. Indeed, it has become an obligatory referential point of almost every big Brazilian cultural movement, among which it stands out: José Celso Martinez Corrêa’s Teatro Oficina whose performance-manifesto is based on Andrade’s text O Rei da Vela (Corrêa, 1998); the internationally known movement of Tropicalism, whose direct relation to Anthropophagy is reported in detail by Caetano Veloso in his book Verdade Tropical (2012); and the cinematographic Brazilian movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s Cinema Novo, whose third phase, known as cannibal-tropicalist, dialogues with the main themes of the anthropophagical tradition – in films such as Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1969); Arnaldo Jabor’s Pindorama (1970); the adaption of Hans Staden’s story in Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Como era gostoso o meu francês (1971), among others. Such a constant cultural presence is a sign of the fact that Anthropophagy, as the writer Augusto de Campos remarks, is “the most radical of our [i. e. Brazilian] literary movements” (Campos, 2015, p. 154).

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But Anthropophagy cannot be reduced to this cultural dimension. In the words of Augusto de Campos himself, it is “the only original Brazilian philosophy” whose “great sin” is to have been written “in Portuguese”, since if it had been “written in English, in French or even in Spanish” it would already have been “enthroned in the constellation of original and unorthodox thinkers’ ideas” (Campos, 2015, pp. 153–154). The anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro adds yet that, despite being “a genuinely Brazilian concept,” Anthropophagy “aims nevertheless at a supra-national anthropological and metaphysical (or counter-metaphysical) truth” (Viveiros de Castro, 2016, p. 13), and it can even be characterized as a decolonial dispositive avant la lettre (ibid., p. 14). Such as dispositive – or as Andrade says himself, such a “metaphysical operation” – offers the conceptual schema within which Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s recent book Cannibal Metaphysics is constructed; indeed, the author operates an inversion that brings to foreground the referential systems oppressed by the colonial trauma, thereby rendering possible the reevaluation of the colonial process and its remaining operative structures from the perspective of the conceptual framework (or, in his words, of the cosmology) of the oppressed. Anthropophagy offers thus the key based on which the relation between Amerindian and Western cosmologies can be reassessed (Viveiros de Castro, 2009).

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This decolonial or counter-colonial usage of Anthropophagy was emphasized by many other consecrated names of the Brazilian intellectual community – such as Silviano Santiago (1978), Haroldo de Campos (1962) and Benedito Nunes (1978) – as well as by some more recent authors – such as Giuseppe Cocco (2009), Maria Cândida Ferreira de Almeida (2005) and Luis Fellipe Garcia (2020). The Cuban poet Roberto Retamar called moreover the attention to the proximity between the conceptual field of Anthropophagy and the Shakespearian figure of Caliban (an anagram of cannibal – more precisely, of ‘canibal’), which, since its famous decolonial reinterpretation in the Aimé Césaire’s play (Une Tempête, 1969), as a constant motto within latin-american decolonial thought (Retamar, 2005). Despite all this cultural and philosophical fertility, the concept of Anthropophagy remains yet a treasure in a crude state and its exploration in an intercultural world may still engender various fruits.

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