Cannibal Modernity: Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago (1928) Highlight

But, so far as creating art went, this inclusiveness was the point. Inspiration was to be found not only among Indigenous sources, which would be entirely new to the outside world, but also taken from the European, the African, and indeed anyone at all. This was the cannibalism Oswald de Andrade had in mind. Here, he was informed by what he had learnt about Indigenous practices of anthropophagy, where the consumption of human flesh was not indiscriminate or driven by mere hunger, but strictly ritualized and subject to rules of selectivity. Thus, only certain people were eaten — “Absorption of the sacred enemy”, as Andrade put it — and only certain parts of their bodies were consumed, in order to complete the identity of the victorious consumer. Andrade’s translation of these practices into the world of artistic creation was both an attempt to lift the moral opprobrium applied to Indigenous people by the colonizer and to construct a full identity for Brazilian culture.