Eat in Order to Create

Abstract

The article analyses the Brazilian art movement of Antropophagy (1928–1932) and its impact on modern art in Brazil from an anthropological point of view. Its main hypothesis is that “cultural anthropophagy”, for this movement as well as for the Brazilian culture as a whole, is a creative method per se, rather than a metaphor: by “eating” “what is alien” (the Other), writers and artists create what can be called “the accumulated new”. Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagic Manifest is signed by the date of “374th Year in the Swallowing of Bishop Sardinha” (this is a real event that happened in 1556). Andrade proposes the history of the Brasilian to be counted from the moment when the indigenous people of Caeté ate the first Christian bishop of colonial Brazil, “digesting” the soul of the Other and thus making it their own. Cultural anthropophagy that evolved from the strategy of creating the new, is not a “style” (works created by the “Anthropophagists” differ even in the spirit), but a modus percipiendi proper to individuals of an indefinite (Viveiros de Castro would say “inconstant”) identity.