Latineos - Latin America, Caribbean, arts, culture

Brazil appears to have strong connections with anthropophagy in people’s imaginations, often associated with some indigenous tribes in the new found land, as found in texts from the sixteenth century onwards. One of the first known works on the subject that reached Europe was the account by the German explorer Hans Staden, dating from 1557, only fifty seven years after Pedro Álvares Cabral first reached the shores of Terra Brasilis, which was popularized in the book “Adventures of Hans Staden”, four hundred years later, by Monteiro Lobato. In this children’s classic, Dona Benta, the grandmother story-teller, narrates to her grandchildren the adventures of this blond explorer who, in 1549, was made captive and remained for eight months among the Tupinambás, a tribe that inhabited the southeastern coast of Brazil. According to that version of the story, he eventually managed to escape thanks to the fact that the natives “possessed a level of intelligence far inferior to that of the white people”, while other accounts suggest that Hans Staden was not eaten because he lacked courage, and consequently, not ideal fare for ritual cannibalism.

Ritualistic cannibalism was explored by many writers throughout the centuries, but it was not until the 1920s that it was deployed in a more instrumental manner, i.e., as an analytical tool to understand culture. The modernist movement is part of a period of Brazilian history when there was a coincidence of proposals in the cultural and political arenas, both concerned with the question of Brazilianness. The “Anthropophagic Manifesto”, published in 1928, became a beacon for that movement. In true avant-garde fashion, the poet Oswald de Andrade, author of the manifesto, and Mario de Andrade, with his novel Macunaima, the latter an icon for the content present in the former, created a parody of the ideology of hybridity. Such ideology, otherwise known as ‘the myth of the three races’, was based on the theory of scholars such as Gilberto Freyre, author of Casa Grande e Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves), published in 1933. Gilberto Freyre’s work, describing the historical relationship between the three main ethnic groups in Brazil, the blacks, the native Indians and the white population in delightful prose, is believed by some to be the founding stone of the Brazilian culture, while for others it stands as an infamous attempt to veil the chronic racism in the cultural make-up.

The author of the “Anthropophagic Manifesto” was also interested in the ritualistic content of the cannibal "Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically"practice as narrated by the early travelers whereby the killer can actually be empowered by his enemy’s substance. Oswald explored the idea of cultural anthropophagy as a remedy for making such a diverse country a nation. The opening line, ‘Só a antropofagia nos une. Socialmente. Economicamente. Filosoficamente’ (‘Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically’), suggests that the Brazilian people have to be anthropophagic in order to be one people, for only ‘cultural cannibalism’ is able to unite such different cultures. The author suggests that by cannibalizing Europe’s high culture, representing the colonial force, and digesting it, the Brazilian subject could create something that enhanced the traits that were there to start with. Oswald de Andrade was drawing on representations which populated the national imagination, such as the autochthonous warrior who ate his enemy to assimilate the latter’s force. The line in the manifest “Tupy or not tupy, that is the question”, which is itself a cannibalisation of Shakespeare, refers to the accounts by the explorer Hans Staden.

As observed by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, cannibalism among the indigenous populations can take on different forms, as with the Araweté who have posthumous cannibalism, whereby celestial deities eat up the souls of those who arrive to the sky prior to the latter becoming soul eaters themselves. He concludes by suggesting that such form could be a historical and structural transformation of the form found among the Tupinambás, which served a sociological purpose while constituting a practice of warfare. Furthermore, the cannibalism found in indigenous warfare implied the embodiment of the perspective of the enemy. The same author has suggested that the Amerindian pattern for the relation between subject and object is founded on the notion of anthropophagy, but not necessarily in the literal sense. When A eats B, the act of eating the other could be related to the incorporation of western practices such as clothing or diet, for ‘to turn white’ is to take on the body of the white man, and his corporal affects. In the process identities can be transformed. The cultural anthropophagy explored in the manifesto is metaphorical: one eats the other, not to satiate hunger, but to embody the other’s qualities; this acculturation process being distinct from mere cannibalism. This type of alterity praises difference over identity.

The cannibal as a creative transformer informed a good part of the Brazilian artistic manifestations throughout the twentieth century: the Modernist Movement, the Concretist Movement, in the way it used language, the Cinema Novo, in the way it revisited the decentralizing modernist proposal through a dialectics of centre and periphery, and Tropicalia. Finally, the Anthropophagic Manifesto can be read as a theory for the interpretation of culture, overlapping temporarily with the broader project of the formation of a Brazilian national identity.