Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies

UN !VERSI'J'Y PRESS OF FLOHI DJ\

Florido A&M University, Tallahassee

Florida Atlantic Univers1ty. Boca Raton
Florida Gulf Coast University, Fl. Myers
Florida International University, Miami
Florida State University, Tallahassee
New College of Florida, Sarasota
University of Central Florida, Or lando
University of Florida, Gainesville
lJ1tivcrsily of North Florida, JacksOIIVille
University of South Florida, Tampa
Universtty of \tVesl Florida. Pensacola
22 Carlos Juregui

Anthropophagy
Carlos Juregui

Cannibalism, as a trope that sustains the very distinction between savagery

and civilization, is a cornerstone of colonialism. However, from the Euro-
pean visions of a savage New World to the (post)colonial and postmodern
narratives of contemporary cultural production, the metaphor of cannibal-
ism has been not just a paradigm of otherness but also a trope of self-rec-
ognition, a model for the incorporation of difference, and a central concept
in the definition of Latin American identities.
The Brazilian modernist anthropophagy movement, elaborated in the
late 1920s by Oswald de Andrade (18901954) and others in the Revista de
Antropofagia (o

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a central reference in literary and cultural studies. Canonized as an avant
la lettre Latin American cultural theory on consumption and a counter-
colonial discourse, anthropophagy has become an obligatory genealogical
foundation for contemporary academic debates on hybridity and postco-
lonialism. However, anthropophagy was not an academic movement, a
theory of identity formation through consumption, or a social emancipa-
tion program. It was a heterogeneous and often contradictory aesthetic
venture. As Antnio Cndido indicated in 1970: It is difficult to say what
exactly anthropophagy is, since Oswald never formulated it, although he
left enough elements to see some virtual principles under the aphorisms
(8485, translation ours). So rather than being the only original Brazil-
ian philosophy (A. de Campos), the most original meta-cultural theory
ever produced in Latin America to the present day (Viveiros de Castro
25, translation ours), a Latin American translation theory (Barbosa and
Whyler), or even a counter-colonial proposal (Santiago; Vieira; Cocco),
anthropophagy has become these things and more as it has been appropri-
ated, resignified, and transformed; paradoxically consumed and devoured.
The relation of 192829 anthropophagy to consumption is less theoreti-
cal than symbolic and historical. As Andrade himself recognized, Brazilian
modernism originated in the mentality created by So Paulos industrialist
push for an export-oriented capitalism. At the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, So Paulo initiated an accelerated process of modernization and ur-
ban development based on government-protected coffee exports (Fausto).
 Anthropophagy 23

Between 1890 and 1920, the population of Sao Paulo increased from some
65,000 to 580,000 and the city gained a modern face: buildings, electric-
ity, phones, trains, public transportation, automobiles, and social unrest.
The development of a labor-intensive industrialization was accompanied
by immigration, the growth of an urban proletariat, and an exaggerated
enthusiasm for industrial development, all of which occurred within a still
predominantly agricultural economy. This enthusiasm for progress had its
aesthetic complement in the formation of small groups of cosmopolitan
intellectuals, consumers of modern cultural artifacts of Europe and North
America. They imagined Brazil to be on the verge of modernity, yet they
were confronted with the reality of a country still treading in the waters
of underdevelopment. The emblematic Semana de Arte Moderna in 1922
is often cited as the beginning moment of Brazilian modernism, although
such origins could be traced to the 1917 debate over Anita Malfatti's ex-
pressionist paintings, or even to the controversial reception of futurism
in 1910s. The Semana tried to offer a modernizing shock therapy to local
literature and arts with a series of events, concerts, exhibits, conferences,
and recitals sponsored by millionaires of the coffee economy, such as Paulo
Prado. Brazil exported coffee and other raw materials and imported the
latest trends of European culture, including futurism, dadaism, cubism,
modern architecture, and psychoanalysis, together with expensive cars,
fashions, and technological wonders (not to mention cheap labor).
A frantic modernist marathon of events, publications, and conspicuous
consumption sought to produce an aesthetic modernity by-as Andrade in-
dicated in his earlier "Manifesto de Poesia Pau Brasil" (1924)-synchroniz-
ing the outdated neoclassicist clock of national literature and arts trapped
by academicism and traditional cultural institutions. Modernization pre-
sented both an economic challenge and a cultural dilemma for a lettered
elite within an overwhelmingly illiterate society. How to be modern without
surrendering one's Brazilian cultural specificity? The definition of national
culture was, as throughout Latin America, divided between cosmopolitan-
ism and several fo.rms of localism marked by nationalistic or regional cul-
tural anxieties. Pau- Brasil had tried to mediate between these two extremes.
Assuming the name of the dye-producing brazilwood of early colonial ex-
ports, modernists claimed to have "rediscovered Brazil:' Baroque archi-
tecture, religious festivities, and other local "anachronisms" represented
a sort of raw material to be processed by national modern art, using the
cosmopolitan aesthetic tools of cubism, cinematographic language, and
so on. Pau-Brazilian modernism was supposed to transform the timeless
24 Carlos Jauregui

national "native originality" and "innocence" into global cultural com-

modities: primitivist-yet-modern "poetry for exportation:' For Andrade
the problem was how to "be regional and pure in our time," reconciling
localism with modernity, against the problematic archaism of academia and
the arts. Like Martin Barbero or Garcia Canclini today, Andrade conceived
Latin American modernity as a heterogeneous ensemble of the primitive
and the modern: favelas, tacky colors, carnival, shamans, and tropical lazi-
ness together with futurist references to airplanes, skyscrapers, and electric
turbines. Anticipating anthropophagy, Andrade declared: "Just Brazilians
in our own times .... Everything digested:' Thus, Brazilian modernists em-
braced a modernity produced by cultural consumption, first of European
symbolic goods and then of the vernacular national culture reprocessed
with cosmopolitan techniques. Before being a "cannibal;' the modernist
artist was indeed a cultural consumer with his taste split between the cul-
tural signifiers of Western modernity and those of the local color, with no
choice but to embrace the "double and present base" of Brazilian modernity.
Yet modernist cultural consumption was still regarded as a passive stance
toward foreign cultural influence. The "digestion" of European suits, books,
theories, and high art did not look very Brazilian to many traditionalists,
even with the "local spice" of Pau Brasil's master trope. The Recife Group
of Gilberta Freyre and Jose Lins do Rego exalted Luso-African culture and
cuisine, rejecting "foreign preserves, Swiss pharmaceuticals, and U.S. nov-
elties" in their "Manifesto regionalista'' of 1926. A movement in 1926-29
even called itself Verde-Amarelismo from the green and yellow of the na-
tional flag. For Andrade this kind of uber-nationalism basically advocated
"the closing of the ports:'
As a conceptual character, the cannibal evoked imaginary indigenous
"origins" for Brazil, inverting the negative connotations of the colonial
stereotype and rendering a very "Brazilian" consumer of the foreign. An-
thropophagy appears as yet another modernist attempt to offer a symbolic
answer to the questions and anxieties posed by both cultural influence and
the asynchrony of Brazilian modernity. Not surprisingly, anthropophagy
has been seen as a "misplaced idea'' and a triumphalist aesthetic interpreta-
tion of Brazilian underdevelopment (Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas; R. Ortiz, A
moderna cultura).
Anthropophagy had at least two historic moments during Andrade's life,
first in 1928-29 as a collective modernist movement around the Revista (in
turn divided into two distinct periods), and later in the 1950s when An-
drade revisited his modernist utopian roots. Cultural studies usually refers
 Anthro[Jophagy 25

to the first moment, and primarily to Andrade's "Manifesto:' This text is

usually read with a preconceived formula for its interpretation, so the few
aphorisms quoted from it serve the purpose of confirming that anthro-
pophagy "proposed" the creative consumption of European cultural capital
in the tropics in order to produce a national culture beyond the anxieties
of influence. Little of the "Manifesto" supports this interpretation; most of
its 52 paragraphs instead refer to other matters such as utopian visions of
the sexual freedom of the indigenous, the oppressive role of reason and sci-
ence, the allegedly reactionary nature of Catholicism, the outdated postures
of Brazilian romanticism, and the injustices of capitalism. The "Manifesto
antrop6fago" also brings futurist images of technology (including televi-
sion!) together with triumphal visions of Brazilian "primitiveness:' ll1e text
is diffuse and fragmented rather than cohesive; even visually its paragraphs
are separated by long typographical lines (regrettably suppressed in most
editions). Many of the aphorisms simply resist interpretation, such as "A
alegria e a prova dos nove;' found twice in the "Manifesto" and translated
into English by Adriano Pedrosa and Veronica Cordeiro as "Happiness
is the proof of the pudding" (www.agencetopo.qc.ca/carnages/manifeste.
html#manifesto) and more literally by Leslie Bary as "Joy is the proof of
nine" (43)-sentences that do not make much sense, but at least render
the surrealist effect of the original. Critics often quote the "Manifesto" as
an essay, referring to what "it says" as if it were a systemic proposal instead
of a collection of surrealist phrases that work against rational argumenta-
tion to produce a sense of ostranenie, disrupting habitual perceptions of
familiar things: romantic indianismo, Jose de Alencar, cannibalism, Luso-
Brasilian historiography, the authority of academia, monogamy. The "Man-
ifesto antrop6fago" is largely aimed to free thought from the imprisonment
of grammar, philosophical speculation, and logic, and to produce affects
and percepts rather than concepts (Deleuze). This does not mean that these
aphorisms lack ideas but that they playfully explore the poetic dimensions
of those ideas, inv!ting the reader to contrast divergent signifiers: "printed
psychology;' "grammar;' "science;' "canned consciousness;' "objectified
and cadaverized ideas;' "hypotheses;' and "speculative tedium" are juxta-
posed to "pre-logical mentality;' "instincts;' personal experiences, "surre-
alist language;' Synsuality, and magic. The "Manifesto antrop6fago" favors
contradictory sentences and antirationalism: "long life and death to all hy-
potheses" or "Let's get rid of ideas:' Incidentally, this is the "posture" found
in the 1928 painting Abaporu (Man-eater), a birthday gift from Tarsila do
Amaral to Andrade that inspired Andrade's Antropofagia. Abaporu depicts
26 Carlos Jauregui

a sensualist cannibal thinker, a naked savage with a voluminous body and

a minuscule head in the same position as the famous 1882 sculpture Le
Penseur by Auguste Rodin.
Anthropophagy was a collective movement. Besides Andrade, there
were Tarsila do Amaral, Oswaldo Costa, Raul Bopp, Mario de Andrade,
Antonio de Alcantara Machado, and many others, each with his own no-
tion of anthropophagy. They used the cannibal trope to make ethnological
speculations about sexual freedom, monogamy, and happiness, to ridicule
romantic images of the indigenous, to embrace Nietzsche's Epicureanism
and critique of Christianity, to discuss Tupinamba's language, and so on.
Cultural consumption was just one part of a wide semantic spectrum. It
was not even "proposed" in the "Manifesto;' but rather in other articles and
interviews. Yet because of its relevance to contemporary debates, cultural
consumption became the canonical definition of anthropophagy (Jauregui,
Canibalia).
The end of anthropophagy coincides with the economic crisis triggered
by the 1929 stock market crash, the ruin of Sao Paulo's coffee bourgeoisie,
and the rise of Getulio Vargas to power in 1930. International capitalism
devoured modernist fortunes and optimism, together with anthropopha-
gy's answers to the dilemma of modernization. Vargas's national populist
Estado Novo (New State) defined the nation using an ideology of misce-
genation, reediting a fascist-like image of the Tupi Indian, and pushing
mega-modernizing industrialist policies. Andrade, like many other mod-
ernists, became Marxist and abjured anthropophagy (although his writings
maintained a modernist ethos).
In the 1950s, after leaving the Communist Party, Andrade alone revisited
modernist anthropophagy in various monographs in which he imagined
the "synthesis" of natural and civilized man in a techno-industrial utopia
where machines and technological advances would liberate humanity for
creative leisure, love, and happiness and where metaphysical fears, au-
thoritarian patriarchy, and the state would be replaced with the Pindorama
matriarchy. Andrade's utopia expressed both disenchantment with the
Communist Party and Marxism, uncritical Browderism, and an exagger-
ated optimism about post-WWII industrialization. Unlike the modernist
movement, this theoretical anthropophagy was not a collective enterprise.
Furthermore, its academic style sharply differs from the fragmentation, ir-
rationalism, and the anarchic discursive nature of the first anthropophagy.
In the 1960s, after Andrade's death, anthropophagy attracted renewed
interest due to two circumstances: first, the 1967 premiere of Andrade's
 Anthropophagy , 27

0 rei da vela (1933) by the Group of Celso Martinez Correa, which ridiculed
Brazil's underdeveloped industry and criticized the national bourgeoisie's
alliance with international capitalism, and second, the success of the musi-
cal and cultural movement Tropicalia that took from anthropophagy its
irony toward hardcore nationalism, and its formula for creative appropria-
tion-now of rock-and-roll and 1960s avant-garde counterculture (Perrone;
Dunn). In the 1970s and 1980s the highly influential works of Augusto and
Haroldo de Campos on the Revista and Andrade's poetry framed the con-
temporary reception of anthropophagy as a poetic and theoretical proposal
equivalent to transculturation and cultural appropriation (a modernist an-
tecedent of cultural studies paradoxically anchored in the fine-arts and lit-
erary realms). Since then, the "anthropophagic paradigm;' as Chamberlain
calls it, became a recurrent preoccupation of cultural and literary critics
who linked Andrade's writings with postmodern and postcolonial debates.
Anthropophagy's conflicted desire for modernity turned into a critique of
modernity, colonial reason, and even androcentric culture. Andrade's refer-
ences to matriarchy and pre-logic mentality, for example, have been read
as psycholinguistic denunciations of the Law of the Father that anticipate
Kristeva's theorizations (Vinkler) and as a challenge to the Socratic and
patriarchal reason that structure modern Western subjectivity (Castro-
The anthropophagic matriarchy certainly had an emancipatory
horizon (abolition of property, monogamy, and the state), but the subject of
that liberation remained masculine. The mother occupied the problematic
place of alterity: savage nature, primitive other, pre-logic mind, and so on.
The same could be said of anthropophagy's carnivalesque use of the indig-
enous as an image associated with sexual freedom, unconscious creativity,
and happiness; a cultural fetish derived from romantic ethnographic im-
ages rather than a reappraisal of ancestral heritage for a counter-colonial
project (Rodriguez-Nunez), an "anticolonial" theory (Santiago; Viveiros
de Castro), or an attempt "at freeing Brazilian culture from mental colo-
nialism" (Vieira). was the modernist adoption of the cannibal sign an
artistic echo in solidarity with the social and political struggles of indig-
enous and Afro-descendent populations (Ferreira de Almeida). Given an-
thropophagy's specific cultural practices (within the agenda of an aesthetic
revolution prompted by a cosmopolitan bourgeoisie) and its disconnect
from any social movement or actual decolonization effort (particularly the
labor movement and indigenous resistance toward modernization), the
characterization of this movement as postcolonial seems unsubstantiated.
Today, of course, anthropophagy's importance lies beyond its historical and
''
28 Ana Wortman

ideological contextualization: it is an ethno-poetic model that has become

a "malleable foundational discourse" (Prado Bellei) for contemporary cul-
tural theory as attested by the dissimilar interpretations of its significance
by Haroldo de Campos, Roberto Schwarz, Silviano Santiago, and Renato
Ortiz, among others. Anthropophagys fertile legacy can also be seen in
a large corpus of literature (from the de Campos brothers to Joao Ubaldo
Ribeiro, Antonio Torres, Glauco Ortolano, and Marcos Azevedo), popular
music (from Tropid.lia and Caetano Veloso to Adriana Calcanhoto or Dan-
iela Mercury), and cinema (from Nelson Pereira dos Santos to Luiz Alberto
Pereira). Even highly institutionalized cultural events such as the 24th Bi-
enal de Sao Paulo in 1998 use anthropophagy, provoking some critics such
as Coelho Netto to express some exhaustion vis-a-vis the anthropophagic
"monomania" of this foundational myth in Brazilian contemporary culture.

Suggested Reading
iloaventura. Maria Eugenia. A vanguarda antropofagic. Sao Paulo: Atica, 1985.
Campos, Augusto de. "Revistas Re-vistas: Os antrop6fagos: Introduction to Revista de
antropofagia: Reedi{ao da revista literaria publicada em Sao Paulo, 1-13. Sao Paulo:
Abril, 1975.
Campos, Haroldo de. "Da razao antropofagica: A Europa sob o signo de devorac;:ao."
Col6quio!Letras 62 (1981): 10-25.
Jauregui, Carlos A. Canibalia: Canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consumo
en America Latina. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt-am-Main: Vervuert, 2008.
Nunes, Be ned ito. "A antropofagia ao alcance de todos: In A utopia antropofagica, by Os-
wald de Andrade, 5-39. Sao Paulo: Globo, 1990.
Prado Bellei, Sergio Luiz. "Brazilian Anthropophagy Revisited:' In Cannibalism and the
Colonial World, edited by Francis ilarker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen, 87-109.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Santiago, Silviano. Uma literatura nos tropicos: Ensaios sabre dependencia cultural. Sao
Paulo: Perspectiva, 1978.
Schwarz, Roberto. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. London: Verso, 1992.

Audience
ANA WORTMAN (TRANSLATED BY RUTH HALVEY)

Throughout the twentieth century, audience research on radio, film, and

television aimed to analyze the construction of social meaning by look-
ing at the impact of these emerging cultural industries. Such research was

I.