Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Anthropophagy
Carlos Juregui
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ing the outdated neoclassicist clock of national literature and arts trapped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
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-
Klan~n). 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). ~or 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
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)
I.