Can the subaltern eat? Anthropophagic culture as a Brazilian lens on post-colonial theory

Moment one: indigenous anthropophagy

Current anthropological descriptions often describe the anthropophagic hunter as assuming a non-human position, separating himself from the community and not partaking of the feast (Cocco, 2009; Vilaça, 2005). The anthropophagic hunter may self-identify as a jaguar (Vilaça 2005; Viveiros de Castro, 1992), as dehumanized but not victim, and other depictions have noted that the human-jaguar distinction is often breached during anthropophagy (Vilaça, 1998). In Vilaça’s (1998) analysis, the act of devoration symbolically aligns the anthropophage with a predatory identity, rather than that of prey. The ability to position the dehumanized as predator offers an insight into how a culture may absorb or devour an alien culture without thereby slipping into the role of subaltern or inferior.

Digging deeper, the definition of ‘jaguar’ in Tupi culture is central in this respect (Agnolini, 2002). The carnivorous side of a duality, the jaguar contrasts to the ‘herbivorous’ tiny-mouthed tamanduá, or giant anteater (Arcand, 1991). The distinction carnivore/ ‘herbivore’, moreover, maps onto fundamental distinctions between hunter/gatherer, masculine/feminine, sexual/asexual and mortal/immortal. The hunting jaguar, according to Agnolini (2002), lives a short and passionate life of desire. What the jaguar loses in early death, he gains in the pleasure of ‘good appetite’, forgoing immortality for sexual reproduction. Interestingly, Shipman (1987) notes the co-occurrence of cannibalistic with incest taboos in Brazilian tribes, where both involve mediating inner-outer group boundaries, and who may be eaten depends on the correct kinship distance, distances that also inscribe mating rules.

Holanda (1994) notes that jaguar hunting rituals closely parallels anthropophagic rituals. The death-symbolizing jaguar is neutralized by the hunting and ritual symbolic consumption, and just as cannibalized enemies, the jaguar’s bones are used as amulets (Holanda, 1994). In consuming the jaguar (or the outsider), the Tupi become jaguars (or outsiders). And because ‘the dead are jaguars’ (Clastres, 1995: 218), the anthropophage identifies with and overcomes death.

The view of anthropophagy as identification with and desire for a dangerous other is recurrent. Clastres (1972) analyses Tupinamba raids resulting in a form of endocannibalism of brothers-in-law and the sequestering of village women. Her analysis suggests that anthropophagy emanated from the desire to rid the world of affine relationships, devouring one’s in-laws in order to undermine dependency relationships on those who are at once interconnected yet ‘outside’.

In sum, rather than barbary, anthropophagy may represent a way of affirming a life of desire, negotiating social connection from a non-human and predatory space, and dealing with mortality by consuming the powerful, sexualized other. It is a sign of vengeance, yearning and respect. As the work among native groups (e.g. Vilaça, 1998) shows, there was nothing particularly European or colonial about this ritual, but the colonial encounter became interpreted using native cosmologies. That the anthropophagic relation was transferred to European colonists by the Tupi may have been an accident of history, of mixed economic ‘cosmologies’, to use Sahlins (1994) term. That it was later self-consciously appropriated by Brazilian intellectuals in the 20th century demonstrates that the metaphor remained fertile in the wake of ongoing intercultural contact.

Moment two: the modernist anthropophage

If 16th century anthropophagy marked an encounter with the first wave of colonial globalization, the 20th century anthropophagic redux marked an encounter with a European modernity in crisis. Contemporary to cultural critics in Europe, Brazil’s European-educated elite searching for a national identity while sensitized to the value crises occurring in a post WWI Europe (Rolnick, 1998). Anthropophagy, described by Rolnick as a ‘renaissance’ in Brazilian thought embodied both a drawing upon European ideas, and an aggressive move for autonomy from the vulnerable European cultural hegemony, now easy prey for revisionist manifestos.

The 1920s saw the advent of the Revista Antropofágica (Anthropophagic Review), a journal of stories, art, poetry and miscellany that flouted existing conservative Brazilian cultural movements (Helena, 1983). Its founder, Oswald de Andrade, led the anthropophagic movement with Manifesto Pau Brasil (Andrade, 1972) and especially, Manifesto Antropofágica, (Andrade, 1990), clear echoes of Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto. Andrade had hit upon the idea of using the anthropophagy concept while reading Montaigne’s (1964) essay on Brazilian cannibalism, which he promptly reappropriated and imported to São Paulo (Cocco, 2009) in a week-long series of readings and performances. This event, which according to Freyre (1946) was of ‘singular importance’ in Brazilian cultural history, drew scandal from the cultural elite of the city with its bawdy and ludic orientation.

The Manifesto Antropofágica is an important artifact, and Andrade (1990) later pleaded for Brazilian thinkers to carry on and develop the anthropophagy concept as the key element of his theorizing of Brazil. The Manifesto captures the ambivalent relation between modern Brazil, and both its European and Indigenous influences. Aphoristic in form, it vacillates between affirmations (e.g. ‘necessity of the anthropophagic vaccine’) and negations (e.g. ‘against the vegetal elites’). This duality maps tensions between acceptance and rejection of knowledge from the North, appropriating concepts popular in Europe (e.g. ‘Anthropophagy. The permanent transformation of Taboo into totem’).

Well-traveled in Europe and member of the São Paulo cultural elite, Andrade was in a position distinct from earlier indigenous peoples to creatively and selectively appropriate European culture in an ironic and sublimated way, rather than directly eating the flesh of Europeans. The irony is that he does this while deriding sublimation and insisting on flesh:

What results is not a sublimation of the sexual instinct. It is the thermometric scale of the anthropophagic instinct. From the carnal, it becomes elective, creating friendship. Affective, love. Speculative, science.

Thus, Andrade carved a territory between the stereotyped center-perifery divide, allowing exchange despite the revolutionary flavor of the Manifestos. This is demonstrated in his depiction of the Brazilian as ‘cordial’, an appellation which later was made famous in Holanda’s (1936) Raizes do Brasil (Roots of Brazil). Andrade himself linked the notion of cordiality to anthropophagy (Andrade, 1976), seeing cordiality as a form of ironic identification with the other. This description links cordiality with Andrade’s analysis of alterity in anthropophagy:

One might call alterity the sentiment of the other, that is, to see the other in oneself, to establish within oneself the disaster, the mortification or the joy of the other (Andrade, 1972: 14)

The anthropophagic movements marked an ambivalent position vis-a-vis coloniality, with its founders educated in European high culture, while searching for a national identity (e.g. Budasz, 2005). Andrade’s encounter with Brazilian natives in Montaigne may be indicative in this respect; ideas drawn from European authors that themselves were drawn from colonial interactions, resulting in a mixture that both emphasized and undermined the distinction between Europe and the tropics. In perhaps Andrade’s (1990) most famous trope, he asks ‘Tupi or not Tupi? That is the question’, transforming Hamlet’s classic formulation of identity struggle into a post-colonial struggle to make sense of one’s historical identity. The generic and non-local verb ‘to be’ is displaced by an indigenous tribal name, localizing the abstraction of being, and refocusing an existential question in terms of local identity. Both insider and outsider, international and tribal, the cultural anthropophage struggled to navigate the space between ‘Shakespeare and the bush’ (Bohannan, 1966).

Rolnick (1998) elaborates how the anthropophagic moment of the 1920s promoted a complex mixture whereby European cultural forms were appropriated without the autonomous state-building tendencies of other post-colonial independence movements. Such a fact would importantly contrast with some versions of South Asian post-coloniality, in which the formation of an autonomous identity went along with a national project (e.g. Anderson, 1991). The anthropophagic movement, by contrast, was both revolutionary and utopian (e.g. Mascaro, 2004), but not nationalistic in the sense of creating a centralized state project. Mascaro (2004), for example, argues that the project was both highly political and international.

Drawing further on Anderson’s (1991) important work on imagined communities, although post-colonial elites embraced indigenous identity strategies, they were often driven (by their education and nationalist imaginary) to think of identity in the very language of the colonizers, recreating local identities using the matrix of social categories (i.e. people, culture, nation) of the metropole. Similarly, Eagleton (1990) emphasizes that liberation movements at least temporarily adopt the language of the hegemon to conceive their own liberty. Thus, a slave can only free him/herself qua slave, a woman, by identifying herself with a ‘women’s’ movement, and an Indian under colonial rule, using the largely colonial notion of ‘India’ to gain independence.

As such, the self-conscious appropriation of the ‘cannibal’ identity by Western-educated Brazilian intellectuals is revealing of how these intellectuals viewed European stereotypes of Brazilians. By identifying with the indigenous people, modernists appropriated the language of the metropole, but interestingly, did so while avoiding the discourse of the nation-state (c.f. Anderson, 1991). Rather, they emphasized a pre-state conception of tropical humanism that was international as well as Brazilian. Rather than post-colonial nationalism, the anthropophagic movement gave homage to the ‘matriarchy of Pindorama’ (land of many trees) an allusion to the Tupi name given to pre-discovery ‘Brazil’.

Thus, while Anderson’s (1991) point about colonial self-searching is clearly illustrated in the Brazilian case, the nationalist discourse of institutional statehood was replaced by the emancipatory discourse of liberal humanism, in which the figure of the cannibal no longer served as an abomination to human civilizations, but as the core of liberty. As Andrade (1990) states ‘We want a Caribbean Revolution. Larger than the French Revolution. The unification of all effective revolts in the direction of man. Without us, Europe would no longer have its poor declaration of the rights of man’. Following Mascaro’s (2004) analysis, the internationalism in this statement seems unavoidable, both revolutionary, utopian, and based on a European model, but at the same time expressing its independence from such models (Budasz, 2005). Thus, the vision is neither European nor anti-European, but a continuation of the European humanist project by means of its anthropophagic dark side.

Moment three: the 1960s anthropophage

Moving forward 40 years, Brazil was again caught between a repressive nationalist establishment and subaltern status in a foreign cultural mainstream (Young, 1998). At home, the military regime repressed ideas and cultural products from the left and exiled artists gained exposure to the cultural turbulence of the late 1960s. Again, anthropophagic appropriation coincided with international crises, combining its own self-searching with that of its US and European interlocutors. Artists self-consciously used hybridization as a statement of doubts (Dunn, 1993), doubts which in Europe and the US came under the umbrella of post-modernism. In Brazil, this movement took the name of Tropicália or Tropicalismo, an ironic reaching to origins which was heavily influenced by anthropophagic thinking (Dunn, 1993, 2010). Tropicalismo, according to one of its founders, Caetano Veloso (1997), was the natural outgrowth and most ‘efficacious divulgator’ of the anthropophagic perspective. Although Veloso (1997) notes that the founders of Tropicália were acutely aware of the differences between the 1920s context of Andrade and their own, they saw themselves as a generational continuation of the anthropophagic movement.

The Tropicália movement cut across cultural forms, including the poetry of Augosto de Campos (e.g. Perrone, 1990), and visual art of Hélio Oiticica, with its biggest impact in the musical album Panis et Circencis by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. Often compared to Andrade’s Manifesto, Panis et Circensis alluded to the spectacles of ancient Rome to parody the military regime. Other key figures such as Tom Zé and the band Mutantes promoted ironic performances, mixing absurd renditions of US style rock-and-roll with obscure references to African deities and indigenous figures, often against a background of circus music.

Not surprisingly, Tropicália embraced anthropophagy; as Caetano Veloso comments (Veloso, 1997: 247): ‘the idea of antropofagia fit us like a glove: we were eating the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix’. Tropicália embodied a complex mixture of integration and identity vacillation, with tropicalistas borrowing and making fun of US styles in order to indirectly critique Brazilian nationalism. Veloso (1997) specifically cites Andrade’s athropophagy as a model in this regard, an attempt to establish a Brazilian identity without reverting to nationalism, which Veloso regarded as ‘defensive’ in posture. Dunn (2001) points out, however, it is not always clear where the irony ended; in true anthropophagic form, the Tropicalista movement exploited contemporary trends in rock music, while simultaneously exposing and critiquing those trends.

… And a half—the organizational anthropophage

Is the current epoch in Brazilian Organization Studies anthropophagic? Although perhaps suspicious of indigenous discourses resurrected by business scholars, we may remember that expressions of hybridity and cultural ambivalence emerge among elite sectors of peripheral countries. Earlier anthropophagic movements came from literary and cultural elites, and previously, anthropophagy was a device of the victorious group, and of the jaguar, and thus, differently from other subaltern perspectives, was never a ‘weapon of the weak’ (Scott, 1985). While Brazilian business education has historically imported western models (e.g. Caldas, 1997), much academic production has been critical (e.g. Motta and Alcadipani, 1999; Paes de Paula, 2008; Viera and Caldas, 2006). If, as Imasato (2010) suggests, contemporary colonialism is ‘epistemic’ and knowledge-based, academia would be ripe for anthropophagic discourse, and organizational scholarship from developing countries might be uniquely poised at the intersections of international and local cultures.

Within Brazil, scholars have stressed the importance of differentiation and hybridization (Calás and Arias, 1997; Wood, 2010) noting the importance of the ‘foreigner’ in developing complex local organizational knowledge (e.g. Caldas, 1997). Similarly, some note the shifting character of cultural and political organizations in Brazil, marked by hybridity and fluidity (e.g. Martins, 2000; Wood, 2010). Analysing Brazilian political parties, for example, Sader (1987) notes the hybrid nature of post-dictatorship politics, combining aspects of democratic and authoritarian governments in apparently incompatible ways, but each of which is ‘quite intelligible in its context’ (Sader, 1987: 97). Using the example of the Worker’s Party, Sader argues that the complex mixture of liberalism, syndicalism, progressivism and religiosity characterizing the party history would only be possible where hybridity was tolerated and ideological purity was not a primary value. Such mixtures and fluidity of influence might be more intelligible through the lens of anthropophagy.

The hybridization theme had appeared in literature on Brazilian culture (e.g. DaMatta, 1991). Brazilian management (e.g. Alcadipani and Crubellate, 2003; Wood, 2010), and in the organizational literature more generally (e.g. Frenkel and Shenhev, 2006). Perhaps closest to the current treatment within organization studies, Spicer (2004) cites Taussig’s ethnographic work in Columbia, where representations of the colonizer (including samples of hair or nails) were appropriated and modified by the Cuna people as a way to appropriate their power. Taussing (1993) describes the function of these representations as the ‘trick of dancing between the very same and the very different’, and Spicer (2004) notes the close relationship between such identity negotiation and corporal contact, an observation that closely approximates the anthropophagy concept.

Such work, however, only recently included the term ‘anthropophagy’, linking these diverse literatures (Faria et al., 2001; Wood and Caldas, 1998a, 1998b, 2002). Wood and Caldas directly cite Tupi and modernist literary traditions, applying them to international business. Using anthropophagy to describe a process of ‘creative adaptation’ (Wood and Caldas, 1998b), Brazilian managers selectively adopt elements of foreign strategy. Faria et al. (2001) recognize that the term ‘anthropophagy’ might open spaces for future interdisciplinary work between management, anthropology, and the arts, leading to innovative social theory from Brazil. However, until now, the anthropophagy concept has remained almost entirely invisible outside of Brazil, waiting to be unpacked in its full social and cultural ramifications.

Although insightful, the incipient nature of the Wood and Caldas’ use of anthropophagy may have prevented a full exploration of its conceptual contribution. Presenting the concept, they cite organizational examples in which selective appropriation took place (e.g. Wood and Caldas, 1998). As described above, however, the creative appropriation of foreign knowledge is not at the heart of the anthropophagy symbolism; rather, the concept envisages the creation of relational identities based on capture and absorption of the other. While it is certainly true that creative appropriation does take place, the current literature does not explore how the act is constitutive of cultural selves. Most importantly for the post-colonial tradition is that the concept of anthropophagy goes beyond a ‘pick and choose’ process of selective appropriation, and reflects a deep sense of historical irony and ambivalence, a fact acknowledged by Wood and Caldas, but in need of exploration.

Perhaps by framing anthropophagy as equivalent to selectivity, rather than as a fundamental ontological and epistemological position, what was theoretically innovative in the concept was glossed over, and the usefulness of the concept in interpreting intercultural contact was obscured. Within organization studies, the shift from selective use to hybridity comes closest to furthering the project outlined in Frenkel and Shenhev (2006; see also Shimoni and Bergman, 2006), by which essentialist cultural perspectives from orientalism and cross-cultural management are to be replaced by hybridization themes that recognize cultural essentialism as a form of ‘purification in a neocolonial context’ (Frenkel and Shenhev, 2006: 870). Anthropophagy adds to this theme by showing a case where hybridization is affirmed as a part of the appropriation ritual itself, whereas other treatments have suggested the unconscious or implicit nature of hybridization (c.f. Shimoni and Bergman, 2006: 79) or mimicry (Brathwaite, 2003), even suggesting this implicitness as a source of false consciousness (Brathwaite, 2003). Anthropophagy, on the other hand, does not operate by hiding its appropriation of the foreign. Rather, by reveling in this appropriation openly, as well its transformative potential as an agent of cultural hybridization, anthropophagy can engage in cultural appropriation without taking on a subaltern position, To highlight the self-conscious nature of anthropophagy is thus to fundamentally distinguish it from an unconscious mimicry of the colonizer.

Having described anthropophagy at key historical moments, I turn to the fundamental roblematics encoded within this root metaphor (Barley and Knight, 1993; Dunn, 1993), otherness, authenticity and corporality. By its novel contributions to understanding these problematics, I ague, anthropophagy takes on its full scholarly import.

The problematic of otherness

As suggested earlier, a key field of anthropophagic struggle involves positioning oneself with regards to an ‘other’, Scholars note the complex relations between Brazilian organizations and the outside (e.g. Bertero and Keinert, 1994; Caldas, 1997; Chu and Wood, 2008), citing the ‘imported’ nature of Brazilian formal organization as neither integrated with, nor alien to, local actors (e.g. Santos, 2004). For example, Merklinger (2001) uses anthropophagy to describe the organization of the São Paulo Biennial Expo, whose 1998 theme was ‘anthropophagy’. The Expo’s organization was modified by the inclusion within the heart of the Brazilian section of a unique exhibit of 55 diverse international producers, thereby ‘devouring’ the international as focal element of Brazilian culture. Similarly, Imasato’s (2010) discussion of the Brazilian sugar industry emphasizes how a symbol of coloniality (sugar cane, a particularly pernicious symbol of the Atlantic colonial economy) was transformed into a source of local legitimacy by highlighting its use as a source of renewable energy (ethanol).

Another interesting example is Vilaça’s (2005) study of hybrid Christian-Wari identity in the US-based New Tribes Mission organization. The Wari group, in her study, took surprisingly well to the organization’s evangelical movement. According to Vilaça’s, the idea of religious conversion so as to absorb a community of non-believers resounded well with an indigenous group whose anthropophagic tradition involved integration of the body to consolidate social solidarity. In the group’s translation of the book of Genesis, where the animals are divided into the wild and domestic, the text was substituted for those animals that are ‘strange’, and cannot be eaten, and those that are ‘real’, and edible, a syncretic and anthropophagic twist.

The presence of the foreign other, as some Brazilian scholars have pointed out (e.g. Alcadipani, 2010), takes a double sense. As post-colonial scholars have noted, intercultural contact involves a kind of ‘double consciousness’ (DuBois, 2003), in which consciousness is displaced and decentered, and the subject sees him/herself though the foreign gaze. This decentering of subjectivity aligns post-colonial studies closely with postmodern thinking, by examining the power relations by which subjectivity is established.

This line of thought can take divergent paths, either questioning the colonized subject’s ability to ‘speak’ at all in his/her terms (e.g. Spivak, 1993), finding liberation only in the flight toward unintelligibility (e.g. Butler, 2000) or, conversely, insisting on the revolutionary reappropriation of consciousness from colonial domination (e.g. Fanon, 1967). Anthropophagy navigates the same straits as these approaches, but neither rejects intelligibility totally nor fights for its consolidation on local terms.

Leibing and Benninghoff-Luhl (2001) describe cultural anthropophagy as an intelligibility that ‘devours time’, rejecting historical origins for an ‘incomplete’ and remixed conception of history. They cite Derrida’s (1983) chiding of Levi-Strauss, who lamented the incomprehension of the Brazilian Nhambiquara group faced with European written language. Finally adopting the Latin alphabet only to mimic it ritualistically, Leibing and Luhl summarize, the Nhambiquara used the symbols differently than the Europeans, integrating them into an ongoing flow of cultural transmission that embodied an alternate form of intelligibility.

Moreover, anthropophagic intelligibility is ambivalent in both emulating and aggressing toward hegemonic culture, indeed preying on it. The hegemonic institutional order and its cannibalistic deformation are co-productions of each other (Biber, 2005). While much of post-colonial studies seems to lament the dependency of its subjectivity upon the Other, anthropophagic cordiality relishes in it:

… to discover and desire the singularity of the other, without feeling shame in discovering and desiring…without fear of contaminating oneself, because it is through that contamination that the vital powers expand, where the batteries of desire are charged, where a series of becomings incarnates—the Tupi formula. (Rolnick, 1998: 10)

The problematic of authenticity

Recent work has critiqued notions of organizational authenticity and highlighted performativity at the heart of organizations (e.g. Sinha, 2010). Anthropophagic discourse is poised to add to such critiques, since the history of cannibalism discourse has centered on power and colonial representation and the question of realism (Lindenbaum, 2004). Although some anthropologists argue that indigenous cannibalism is a European myth (Arens, 1979), it is well established that cannibalism has occurred in highly ritualized acts; this however, leaves unexplained widespread attempts to characterize cannibalism as the essential defining feature of indigenous peoples (Biber, 2005), also obscuring that cannibalism is well documented in European history as well (Obeyesekere, 1992). In this sense, the representation of peoples as anthropophagic involves a subtle play of colonial representations and counter-representations.

For example, Sanborn (1998) noted that Tupi cannibalistic rituals were not wholly ‘internal’, but rather were used dramaturgically to induce terror in foreign audiences, thus constructing a displayed identity that only functions in the presence of the colonizer. Wood and Caldas (1998a) discuss the incorporation of foreign managerial techniques ‘for the English to see’, that is, the dramaturgical adoption of technologies as power displays, aligning managers with dominant managerialist symbols from developed economies.

In some cases, appropriating anthropophagic labels may be less a search for original, authentic identities than an allusion to the contested and power-ridden dynamics behind authentic identity itself. In the context of anthropophagy, Conklin (1997) argues that the principle of authenticity was largely a European presumption of cultural essentialism, imposed on a local population that did not think in such terms, and thus appropriated cultural practices without regard to authenticity. Andrade (1990), critiquing but embracing the inauthentic gaze of the foreigner, for example, writes ‘Children of the sun, mother of the living. Encountered and loved ferociously, with all the hypocrisy of longing (saudade), by immigrants, by the trafficked, and by tourists’. The encounter, although inauthentic, is not thereby negated, but is positively affirmed, even through the sentimental and hypocritical eyes of outsiders. As Mignolo (2001) importantly observes, the role of colonialism in Latin America was largely constitutive, with the colonial administrative structure going to the core of local institutions. In such a scenario, authenticity seems to make little sense as a fundamental value.

In the context of organizational knowledge, I note Wood and Caldas’ (2002) warning that while Brazilian organizations actively implement managerial techniques from the US and Europe, such adoption must not be taken at face value, and can be deceiving. Perhaps relevant, Perkins (2005) notes the particularly high rate of failure for foreign firms that come to Brazil, even among internationally experienced firms, and suggests an idiosyncratic style in Brazil that favors ambiguity. Managerial techniques, appropriated and consumed as ‘foreign’, may rely for their meaning relies on this very foreignness. Barros (2010), for example, discusses the conflicts over authenticity in a Brazilian communitarian organization, and notes the organization’s emancipatory potential despite conflicts over authenticity. Similarly, studies of religious organizations in Brazil have demonstrated ‘mirroring’ of practices and symbols even when the organizations specifically see each other as ‘evil’ or false (Reinhardt, 2007). French (2004) explores how, in the Brazilian northeast, communities may juxtapose indigenous and African identities with little sense of contradiction or inauthenticity. Finally, in a corporate context, Stephen (2001) uses anthropophagy to discuss HRM policy adoption in Brazilian contexts. Rather than stressing notions of proper implementation and faithfulness to the technology, Stephen emphasizes that HRM technologies should be ‘metabolized’ in their local contexts, leading often to very different technologies, without attempts to retain a sense of authenticity to the original program. Referring to these resultant HRM practices as ‘juxtapositions’, Stephen (2001: 31) argues that the resulting new technologies can produce local innovations, and calls for an ‘anthropophagous model of cultural portability’.

In the above cases, borrowed practices or identities do not reflect inauthentic ‘copies’ of culture. Rather, it may be that the notion of (in)authenticity of Brazilian organizational knowledge runs counter to a principle borrowing whose anthropophagic perspective flouts authenticity.

The problematic of corporeality

Scholars have shown recent interest in the body as a site for the inscription of social meanings (e.g. Aho, 2002; Butler, 2000) and organizational struggles (e.g. Brewis and Linstead, 2000). Corporality has drawn somewhat less attention in the post-colonial and subaltern studies literatures (although see Spivak, 1993). Yet Lakoff and Johnson (1999) frame metaphors of the flesh as ‘challenges’ to Western thought, and Oestegaard (2004) uses the case of cannibalism explicitly in this context. The challenge resides in the fact that the distinction between the ‘primitive’ body and the ‘civilized’ is called into question in rituals where the body takes on complex symbolic significance. Thus, the anthropophagy metaphor seems particularly suited to the context of post-colonial theorizing, by calling into question basic distinctions that characterize European modernity.

Regarding the ‘corporality’ of colonialism, Brazil stands out because of the highly sexualized nature of Portuguese-indigenous relations as a purported foundation for ethnic mixture (e.g. Freyre, 1933). In contrast to English experiences in the South Pacific, Tupi cannibalistic practices seem not to have horrified and alienated the Portuguese, but were viewed as a form of raw, immodest desire (Bucher, 1981; Lindenbaum, 2004), a natural tendency requiring civilization, or Andrade’s term, ‘catechism’. This aspect should be seen not as an aspect of indigenous Brazilians, but as a function of the colonizer’s historical context; for example, according to Shapin (2002), Renaissance views of cannibalism, based on the humor theory of blood, were relatively accepting, while later Protestant and Enlightenment views were highly damning, relating cannibalism to the bloody nature of Catholic mass and images (Rawson, 2001). Thus, rather than dehumanizing, Brazilian anthropophagy was seen as a sensuality and corporality, still a sin, but also a hidden desire. Rather than racial inferiority (as in later English narratives, Biber, 2005), cannibalism was considered a taboo desire, and thus contained a kind of inner truth.

As the anthropophagic metaphor developed, the focus on the body became an important way to represent the relation between self and other (Facchinetti, 2001), where devoration represented the internalization of the other but also the appropriation of the other within the self. Drawing on Freud, Andrade’s Manifesto saw the hidden desire between colonizer and colonized as a principle of encounter that could be raised above, and overcome, the distinction colonizer-colonized. As in DaMatta’s ‘in-between’, and Santiago’s (2002) ‘between-space’, the body’s predicament of being both separated from other bodies, yet needing nourishment from the outside, could be reflected in the metaphor of devoration.

The link between anthropophagy and appetitive desire allows anthropophagy to be differentiated from earlier concepts of mimicry as a tragic copying of the other (e.g. Brathwaite, 2003). Rather than ‘mimic-men’ (Brathwaite, 2003: 203), who, lacking consciousness of their own creativity, copy a metropolitan ideal, later conceptualizations stress the element of desire and ambivalence, with mimicry producing both reproduction and difference from the colonizer (Bhabha, 1994). Anthropophagy follows this later conception in recognizing the desire inherent in mimicry strategies (e.g. Sharpe, 2003), adding that such strategies can be self-conscious and culturally affirmative, and in addition to mimicking the colonizer, can self-mimic, self-positioning as an indigenous cannibal while simultaneously appropriating European cultural forms.

That anthropophagy came to stand for desire may help explain why this metaphor emerged as an affirmation and a project within Brazil As repressed desire, cannibalism was not pathological, but taboo, as alluded by Andrade. The ‘return of the repressed’ creates a space for self-affirmation as the re-discovery of nature in its chaotic libidinal form. Thus, anthropophagic knowledge is embodied, both corporeal and representation, rejecting a distinction between mental and physical central to modernist Enlightenment thought. According to Rolnick (1998: 12) anthropophagic subjectivity involves ‘a body that knows through vibration and contamination and not only through representation’. An epistemology based on ‘vibration and contamination frames subjectivity as a) corporeal, inscribed in bodily experience (vibration), and b) communal, flowing though networks of social interaction (contamination). This view of corporeal, network-dependent epistemology can be seen in Lewis’ (1995) study of Brazilian capoiera dance groups, where the relative social positions of members are based on their ability communicate nonverbally by means of rapid transitions from states of bodily flow to moments of intense concentration. Interestingly for notions of corporality and the hybrid, Lewis notes the ambiguity of capoeira as dance, aggression, or ritual, and theoretically links this to Brazil’s intermediate position between European, ‘Cartesian’ culture and African forms of ‘embodied engagement’ (Lewis, 1995: 230).

The corporality of anthropophagy helps understand, for example, the interesting and perplexing case of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (Vilaça, 2005), where indigenous presenters created an artificial copy of their own indigenous village, refusing entry to those not dressed in indigenous dress. While Conklin (1997) interprets the re-appropriation of bodily ornament as a native borrowing from Western stereotypes of the Amazon, Vilaça (2005) points out that such stereotypes spread so quickly among the natives precisely because (a) the body was already a locus of culture and identity transformation, and (b) that such borrowing was not proscribed by a norm of cultural ‘purity’. In this case, it becomes impossible to judge the authenticity of bodily ornamentation, which must be taken at face value and not symbolically sublimated, which, as Vilaça stresses, is exactly the point. The culture is embodied directly, coded through the body itself.

Moving from epistemological to political dimensions of corporality, emphasizing the return of the repressed helps explain the ambiguous status of anthropophagy as a movement of contestation. Similarly to organizational carnival (e.g. Islam et al., 2009), anthropophagy contains elements of both protest and complicity. On the one hand, carnivalesque ritual inverts social roles, using grotesque humor and mockery of power holders to subvert social norms and open spaces for creative improvisation (Islam et al., 2009). However, rituals have also been used to vent social tensions and reinforce the social order (e.g. Rosen, 1985). Like carnival, anthropophagy involves an act of ritual feast (Masters, 1969) and can symbolize social upheaval and reversal, although often without a specified political program. Wood and Caldas (1998b), for example, view organizational anthropophagy as a creative act, not as protest or complicity per se, but as an unwillingness to take received knowledge at face value.

The historical refusal of anthropophagic thinkers to define any specific political program (Andrade, 1990), should not be confused with not being political. Rather, although revolutionary and utopian (Mascaro, 2004), it was antagonistic to the institutionalization of a political agenda (Ponge, 2004). This reluctance to specify a program could be read as a sign either of a search for liberty outside of established categories (e.g. Butler, 2000), or a mystifying technique suggestive of the evasions of ideological discourse (e.g. Zizek, 1989). For instance, in a fascinating yet perplexing study of women’s police stations in Brazil, Santos (2004), shows how women’s bodies became the locus of ‘hybrid state-society institutions’ (p. 35) involving women police officers who were both charged with creating sex-based solidarity and reinforcing ‘macho’ institutional norms. Within the station, the ‘feminist’ ethos involved in setting up special services for women’s protection coexisted with a macho organizational culture, making it difficult to specify a coherent ideological outlook for the organization. She concludes by warning against ‘essentializing’ Latin American institutions, which are marked by ‘complex and often contradictory relationships’ (p. 30). The women’s police department was clearly an ideological and political field of contestation; however, that is different from a political program or a movement.

The corporalized nature of anthropophagy, finally, contrasts with the identity politics of some postmodern discourse. Rolnick (1998: 11) specifically distinguishes anthropophagic social theorizing with the ‘de-eroticized’ discourse of political correctness. Different from political correctness, which sees language as a form of domination, anthropophagy recognizes language as a tool of desire, opens up a hybrid liminal or ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) where the dyad ‘colonizer-colonized’ can be unsettled though changing the meanings of colonial language. While some postmodern perspectives describe how marginalized groups reappropriate negative terms such as ethnic slurs (e.g. Jagose, 1996), to be ‘anthropophagic’ describes an identification with the appropriation act itself. That is, to be anthropophagic is not to call oneself a cannibal, and thus take ownership of or reappropriate a formerly derogatory term. It is rather, to identify with reappropriation itself, defining oneself as an agent of reappropriation of difference in its various forms.