Anthropophagy
The arts week of 22, which took place between the 13th and 17th of February at the Teatro Municipal de São Paulo in 1922, became a historical and theoretical landmark in the development of Brazilian Modernism. This artistic movement created a split in the history of academic art and based on propositions of Portuguese and European classical art, for a new modern artistic production based on the search for a Brazilian identity.
In this artistic and conceptual context, one of the main contributions of the modernist movement to Brazilian art was the concept of artistic Anthropophagy, proposed by the artist, critic and writer Oswald de Andrade in the Manifesto Antropófago.
Oswald de Andrade's idea of Anthropophagy aimed to build a Brazilian and authentic identity through a process of swallowing and incorporating for itself the hegemonic, colonial and imperialist cultures, such as the North American and European and the internal cultures of Brazil, both the the culture of the original Amerindian peoples that formed the Brazilian pre-colonial culture, of the African and Afro-descendant peoples who were part of the Brazilian colonial and slaveholding foundation, and of the Asian migrant peoples to Brazil.
The process of swallowing and absorbing and appropriating a foreign culture imposed on different peoples and on a continent by a colonial process, post colonial and modern motivated by a European imperialist movement, becomes a tool to fight back the war of modernity imposed on these people. peoples of the global south.
The anthropophagy practiced by some peoples originating in pre-colonial Brazil was exclusively ritual. These societies were structured around warfare, these tribes developed a scale of social stratification in which the acquisition of status was fundamentally based on the ability to pursue and kill as many enemies as possible.
The opponent captured alive was taken to the victors' village and held prisoner there during a period when all honors and privileges were accorded him: one or several women were assigned to keep him company and the best food was offered to him.
For several days a feast was being prepared at which the prisoner would be executed according to a solemn ceremony. The execution, with a violent blow of a club, was up to the one who had captured him, and could be transferred to someone deserving of such honor, as a sign of thanks or homage.
It was up to the prisoner to remain haughty and courageous, countering the provocations and insults in a show of total indifference until the end. The executioner then gained the right to use one more name, and his body was indelibly incised so that his courage and valor would be perpetuated. In this way, they believed that by eating the flesh of a warrior enemy, they would acquire its power, knowledge and qualities.
What are you eating? Have you eaten plastic today? Have you given your pet packaged food today? What will it be that so many years later this process of creating new hybrid beings and derived from modernity has become and will become? Anthropophagy or Anthropocene, eating the other or eating the earth?