The savage bites back

Rooted in Brazilian modernism, anthropophagy devours and transforms culture, subverting colonial fears of cannibalism

by Sofia Cándano  BIO

Detail from Abaporu (1928) by Tarsila do Amaral. Photo by Romulo Fialdini and courtesy MALBA, Buenos Aires/Wikipedia

is an art historian based in Mexico City whose practice explores interdisciplinarity, decolonial thought, and narrative as a cultural force. She works as communications director at Village Capital, where she leads global storytelling on impact investing and alternative capital models.

Edited byMarina Benjamin

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‘Antes dos portugueses descobrirem o Brasil, o Brasil tinha descoberto a felicidade,’ or ‘Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had already discovered happiness.’ So wrote Oswald de Andrade in his Manifesto Antropófago (1928), shifting the point from which history is told, and challenging a foundational assumption that colonialism had made to feel like common sense: that European culture was the natural standard against which everything else should be measured. That idea had shaped Brazilian intellectual life for generations. Andrade’s manifesto refused that premise. Not through rejection or imitation, but through transformation.

Oswald de Andrade photographed by Jorge de Castro, c1940-47. Courtesy Brasiliana Fotográfica

A poet and activist, Andrade was born in 1890 into a prosperous São Paulo family with roots that extended far beyond Brazil’s capital. His mother came from the port city of Óbidos, in the Amazon – descended from one of the founding families of the state of Pará. Though she had moved south long before Andrade was born, she filled his childhood with stories of what she had left behind: rivers that seemed to have no end, jaguars moving through the cacao trees at night, a landscape that was alive in ways São Paulo was not. The Amazon he grew up with was not a place he had visited, but one carried in his mother’s voice.

São Paulo was transforming rapidly – industrialising, filling with immigrants, pulling hard toward Europe. Its literary culture was shaped by Parnassianism, a movement that prized formal elegance and looked to France as its model, treating European refinement as the only legitimate model for ‘serious’ art. Andrade began his career as a journalist within this world. But in 1912, at 22, he made his first trip to Europe and something shifted. He returned home, carrying, he said: ‘a new dimension in his soul – he had known freedom.’ Andrade had grown up in a Catholic household whose moral architecture – its hierarchy, its guilt, its claim to universal authority – shaped everything around him. Europe loosened that grip. But it was his return, marked by his mother’s death and a crisis of faith, that broke it entirely.

Largo do Rosario photographed by Guilherme Gaensly. Courtesy Museu do Ipiranga, São Paulo/Wikipedia

In time, Andrade would come to believe that God exists not as a benevolent father but as the adversary of man: a limit to be encountered rather than obeyed – a formulation he found in Kierkegaard and Proudhon, but also, in Indigenous cosmology. The Catholic and the colonial authority were, for Andrade, the same kind of problem.

Back in São Paulo, he became a central figure in the Semana de Arte Moderna of 1922 – a week of concerts, readings and exhibitions that met with booing and outrage from an audience expecting something more respectable. Andrade was delighted. Provocation, for him, was not a side-effect of the argument. It was the argument. Cosmopolitan and deliberately irreverent, he used his position to support artists and publications, helping to shape a movement that refused European authority as the measure of all things. Six years later, he distilled these commitments into their sharpest form. When Andrade wrote his manifesto, he turned the logic of colonial history upside down. Ironic, hyperbolic and provocative, the manifesto proposes a new theory: a refusal of cultural subservience and a demand for intellectual autonomy through creation rather than imitation.

Manifesto Antropófago (1928) by Oswald de Andrade, line drawing by Tarsila do Amaral, published in Revista de Antropofagia. Courtesy Biblioteca Guita e José Mindlin

His title itself was an act of reversal. Anthropophagy – cannibalism – had long been used to mark Indigenous peoples as savage and uncivilised. Andrade seized the accusation and turned it into a principle. But the principle had a specific logic. Indigenous practices of anthropophagy were not indiscriminate – they were strictly ritualised, selective. Only certain enemies were consumed, and only certain parts, in what Andrade described as the ‘absorption of the sacred enemy’.

‘Our green is barbaric’; in her hands, it became a source of creative energy

‘Anthropophagy alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically,’ the manifesto opens (translations my own). Elsewhere, he states the point with characteristic economy: ‘I am only concerned with what is not mine. Law of Man. Law of the cannibal.’ The text moves in aphorisms and fragments – its form enacting what its argument proposes. Taken literally, it asks a great deal of the reader. What would it mean for a culture not simply to inherit the world as it is given by those in power, but to transform it?

Tarsila do Amaral, c1925. Courtesy Wikipedia

On 11 January 1928, the Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral gave Andrade, her husband, a birthday gift: a painting of a disproportionate figure – small head, one skeletal arm, the other swollen, and a distended leg anchoring the body to the ground. Beside it, a cactus rises, and the sun hangs in the sky looking like an egg yolk. When Andrade saw it, he called the poet Raul Bopp and said: ‘It’s a man rooted in the earth,’ and Bopp responded: ‘Let’s start a movement around this painting.’

Abaporu (1928) by Tarsila do Amaral. Photo by Romulo Fialdini and courtesy MALBA, Buenos Aires/Wikipedia

Together, they titled the painting ‘Abaporu’, a word derived from the Tupi language meaning ‘the man who eats’. The image would come to define the anthropophagic movement,........

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