The savage bites back

Listen to this essay 24 minute listen ‘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. 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. 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. 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? 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.’ 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, but the movement itself had been years in the making. Andrade and Amaral had already developed what they called ‘Pau-Brasil’– a name borrowed from the red-coloured dye brazilin (from the brasilwood tree) that gave Brazil its colonial name and was one of the first commodities extracted from the territory and shipped to Europe. Instead of exporting raw materials, they proposed, Brazil could export culture: art and theory rooted in its own landscapes, colours, rhythms and perspective, committed to a proud primitivism and yet open to dialogue with international modernism. After studying in Paris, Amaral had returned to Brazil determined to look at its landscapes, towns and tropical palette with new eyes. Hills became rounded volumes, houses flattened into geometric blocks, colours intensified. As she later recalled in an interview, ‘O nosso verde é bárbaro’ (‘Our green is barbaric’), and in her hands, it became a source of creative energy. Her paintings absorb many worlds at once. She created a visual language in which European form and Brazilian imagination merged into a new aesthetic vocabulary. Amaral devoured Léger, Brâncuși and Picasso; she devoured Surrealism. Yet these influences do not remain intact in her work; they are digested and recomposed, filtered through her own perspective, her own histories, her own ground. Andrade had given a name to the theory. Amaral gave it an image. One of the most iconic lines of Andrade’s manifesto reads: ‘Tupi or not Tupi: that is the question.’ In rewriting Hamlet’s dilemma, Andrade stages existential doubt as a question of how to inherit culture without merely imitating it. The Tupi were among the largest Indigenous peoples that the Portuguese encountered in 16th-century Brazil, and they long bore the label ‘cannibal’ as a colonial verdict. A name becomes a sentence. And, once fixed, it is rarely questioned – you inherit it, repeat it, perhaps even believe it, until someone places that same word back into the centre of thought and asks you to look again. By inserting ‘Tupi’ into Shakespeare’s most famous line, Andrade performs a cultural digestion: the figure once used to mark the supposed savagery becomes the centre of an identity question. This practice ran throughout Andrade’s work, drawing on Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Montaigne and Freud while rethinking their authority through irony. Montaigne had observed that ‘everyone calls barbarism whatever is not their own practice.’ Andrade’s anthropophagy plays with this insight, turning European accusations of the Americas as being cannibalistic into a cultural weapon. At one point, Andrade declares that even ‘Wagner sinks beneath the carnival parades of Botafogo,’ collapsing the hierarchy between European ‘high culture’ and Brazil’s supposedly ‘exotic’ popular life. Elsewhere, he writes: ‘without us Europe would not even have its poor Declaration of the Rights of Man.’ Here, he exposes the coloniser’s oldest trick: to produce the conditions of injustice, then claim credit in the act of remedying them. Anthropophagy was never a unified school followed by all. It was a shared disposition In Amaral’s later painting Antropofagia (1929), the elongated figure of Abaporu reappears, now turned toward a female figure who occupies the centre of the composition. Her exposed breast evokes Amaral’s earlier painting A Negra (1923), carrying with it the weight of motherhood and Brazil’s history of slavery. In Antropofagia, two figures are intertwined, their limbs crossing in an almost elemental gesture of connection. Behind them unfolds a landscape of broad, varied leaves – a Brazil that is fertile and insistently alive. Forms are absorbed, histories folded into one another and something new emerges, recomposed and irreducibly its own. The gesture, it turns out, was not confined to Andrade and Amaral alone. Around them gathered a wider circle of writers, painters and musicians reshaping Brazilian modernism from within. Bopp, who’d helped name Abaporu, folded Indigenous myth and Amazonian imagery into works such as the long poem Cobra Norato (1931). The writer Mário de Andrade – no relation to Oswald – travelled through Brazil, documenting regional speech and Afro-Brazilian traditions as part of a broader attempt to rethink national culture beyond European models. Artists such as Anita Malfatti and Emiliano Di Cavalcanti were likewise searching for visual languages rooted in Brazilian experience rather than imported standards. Anthropophagy was never a unified school followed by all. It was a shared disposition spreading across Brazilian modernism, linking experimentation in painting, poetry, music and criticism through the question of how to transform inherited forms rather than merely repeat them. The gesture would not remain in Brazil. In the work of the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, the same impulse finds different ground – shaped by another history of encounter, between Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. A contemporary of Andrade’s, Lam studied in Spain in the 1920s, encountering the canon in its most institutional form. At the Prado, he studied Velázquez and Goya with discipline and intensity. But something felt missing. He later recalled the experience as being invited to an extraordinary banquet ‘where they did not give me what I wanted, what rightfully belonged to me.’ The metaphor is telling. Moving through Madrid and Paris, Lam encountered Matisse, Miró and the circle of Surrealism – studying their languages and ways of seeing. As with Andrade and Amaral, what he absorbed, he also altered. Alongside his academic training, Lam carried another inheritance: Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions, the presence of ritual, the sound of drums, the dense vegetation of the Caribbean landscape. In Europe, he encountered African art again – but mediated, displaced, classified as ‘primitive’ and set apart from the so-called canon. In this displacement, he recognised something of his own history. ‘My painting is an act of decolonisation – not physical, but mental’ When Lam returned to the Caribbean in the early 1940s, he began to paint differently. In La Jungla (1943), human figures dissolve into vegetation. Limbs become stalks of sugarcane; faces elongate into mask-like presences; bodies fragment and recombine. The boundary between human, animal and plant is no longer stable. The painting draws on the formal languages Lam has absorbed – Cubist fragmentation, Surrealist distortion – but reshapes them through memory, ritual and landscape. His mask-like faces, the steatopygian figures whose bodies Western anthropologists turned into a category of deviance, are not simply stylistic gestures but carriers of memory and resistance. They unsettle the viewer by sustaining the tension, while opening up other ways of seeing, and of being. Writing in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), the Martinican thinker Frantz Fanon described the pressure placed on the colonised subject to assimilate into the culture of the coloniser: ‘Le colonisé se sera d’autant plus échappé de sa brousse qu’il aura fait siennes les valeurs culturelles de la métropole… Il sera d’autant plus blanc qu’il aura rejeté sa noirceur, sa brousse.’ (‘The colonised is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle.’) Lam’s work refuses such terms, imposed on the ‘savage’ or exotic ‘other’. ‘My painting,’ Lam would later say, ‘is an act of decolonisation – not physical, but mental.’ In Latin America, the past is layered. Explicitly so in Mexico City, where the colonial cathedral was built directly over the stones of the Templo Mayor, the great Aztec temple: one cosmology built quite literally on top of another. In Brazil, a similar process unfolded through the suppression of Tupi language, ritual and memory. To grow up within this terrain is to inhabit more than one way of making sense of the world at once: to speak an imposed language that never fully replaced what it covered, and to recognise, in rituals, in the way people gather, cook or mark the dead, traces of what colonial power could not fully comprehend. These traces persist in bodies, in memory, in the spaces between ‘official’ culture. It is a position without a pure name, and it remains unsettled, shaping how identity is lived and negotiated across the region. Andrade and Amaral worked from within this terrain. Both were of European descent – part of a Brazilian elite positioned between colonisers and colonised, with access to European institutions that most Brazilians, and virtually all Indigenous Brazilians, did not have. Their use of Indigenous language and imagery emerged from this in-between condition: not from strict Indigenous identity, but from a layered inheritance that colonialism had produced and never resolved. It was a choice, a deliberate turn toward Indigenous meanings. That intention matters, and so does its limit. Anthropophagy does not resolve that tension. It inhabits it. European avant-gardes named themselves after formal innovations; Latin American modernism had social roots Lam’s position was different, but no less shaped by these structures. Of African and Chinese descent, he did not belong to a colonial elite, yet his trajectory also depended on access – a scholarship that took him to Europe, opening the doors to its institutions. In societies where colonial structures had concentrated education, literacy and mobility in the hands of a few, that access marked a particular position. The work of such artists was shaped at the edge, but from within sight of the centre. To create under these conditions was already to negotiate that fact. This is what makes anthropophagy something more than a gesture, a stylistic choice or an avant-garde provocation. It was a response to a structural situation in which the margins were not simply peripheral, but actively produced as such. To devour the dominant culture under those conditions is not a neutral act. It is a claim: what arrived from the centre could be taken apart, remade and returned on different terms. In Hybrid Cultures (1989), the Argentinian anthropologist Néstor García Canclini argues that Latin American modernity was never simply an imitation of imported models. Cultural modernism in the region served a different function than in Europe; less a rupture with tradition than a tool for building national identity, negotiating between the local and the cosmopolitan under conditions of economic dependence. Where European avant-gardes named themselves after formal innovations – Impressionism, Cubism, Symbolism – their Latin American counterparts reached for terms that pointed outward, toward social and historical conditions: modernismo, nuevomundismo, indigenismo. The name itself was already an argument. Canclini’s central claim is precise: Latin American modernism had social roots. Its vanguards attempted to intervene at the intersection of a semi-oligarchic order, a semi-industrialised capitalist economy, and in semi-transformative social movements, navigating different historical temporalities that exist simultaneously in the same present. In this light, anthropophagy is one of modernism’s clearest articulations. And Canclini’s own gesture is worth noticing: writing from Latin America, drawing on European theory and transforming it through a different set of questions, he enacts the very process he seeks to describe. The theory becomes anthropophagic in the writing. By the end of the century, the gesture had become institutionalised. In 1998, Paulo Herkenhoff structured the 24th São Paulo Biennial entirely around anthropophagy as a method, placing local modernism in dialogue with European painting, African traditions and contemporary practices, without subordinating one to the other. As Herkenhoff wrote, cannibalism can be understood as a way of engaging with ‘relations of otherness’ – a process through which culture itself is formed. By the time curators used anthropophagy to reorganise the history of art, it had already slipped beyond the walls of the exhibition hall. In the late 1960s, it re-emerged in Brazil in an unexpected register: popular music. For the musician Caetano Veloso, one of the central figures of the ‘Tropicália’ movement, anthropophagy was a living practice. Reflecting on that moment, he describes how Brazilian artists embraced cultural cannibalism instinctively: ‘We were “eating” the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix.’ The flow of culture was no longer limited to Europe and its former colonies, but now moved through radio waves, records and mass media. What began as a specifically Brazilian response to colonial cultural hierarchy had become, by the late 20th century, a methodology available to anyone – a way of naming what cultures do when they intentionally absorb, transform and return what reaches them. Each of the figures discussed here is a starting point. What they suggest is a way of looking, placing works in relation to each other that cuts across geography, discipline and time. To engage with art this way is to become an active reader: noticing echoes, following displacements, asking what a form carries with it and what it sheds along the way. Part of what makes art so rich is what it carries without showing – the layering, the multiple histories it’s absorbed, at once collective and deeply personal. As viewers, we arrive with our own layers. Memory, association, the cultural moment we inhabit, the works we have seen before and carry with us. Looking, in this sense, is never neutral. It is a form of contact between what the work holds and what we bring, between its histories and ours. Meaning is never still in that encounter. It accumulates, dissolves and reassembles. Each viewing completes the work differently and incompletely. Which is perhaps why we return. Anthropophagy appears even where it is not explicitly named. By the time it reaches the 21st century, it is something closer to a universal methodology – a way of describing what any artist does when they choose to transform what reaches them rather than simply receive it. What connects practitioners across geography is not influence but condition: the shared experience of inheriting a world shaped by unequal cultural exchanges, and the decision to work through that inheritance rather than around it. Indigenous anthropophagy was not indiscriminate hunger. It was ritual, selective, deliberate The Cameroonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh, appointed artistic director of the 2026 Venice Biennale before her sudden death in 2025, offers one of the most precise recent articulations of this disposition. Her response to the invitation – ‘Venice has given me carte blanche, and I am going to play my carte noire’ – is structurally identical to Andrade’s gesture: taking the language used to contain her and redirecting it from within. The institution is not refused. It is devoured. The exhibition she conceived, ‘In Minor Keys’, opened in May 2026 and carries this gesture forward. It unfolds through quiet, grounded terms: a return to the human scale, to the body, to the rhythms of everyday life. Kouoh speaks of sowing seeds: a practice of patience and care, where meaning is allowed to grow. Against the speed and abstraction associated with the contemporary art world, she proposes a more attentive way of engaging that begins with lived experience, with proximity, with what is made and felt with one’s own hands. Her approach is anthropophagic whether or not it carries the name. Which brings us to the question of what anthropophagy actually asks of us. Cannibalism is not a gentle metaphor. But Andrade was precise: Indigenous anthropophagy was not indiscriminate hunger. It was ritual, selective, deliberate. The enemy was devoured to absorb its strength and be changed by the encounter. The act required attention. And time. This distinction matters now more than it did in 1928. To encounter culture today is to be constantly addressed by images, sounds and narratives that arrive already shaped, already carrying meaning. The dominant mode is not devouring. It is scrolling: the fastest possible movement through the largest possible quantity of content, leaving nothing behind and taking nothing in. Consumption without digestion. Exposure without encounter. Anthropophagy proposes the opposite. The Portuguese verb mastigar – to chew – captures the anthropophagy process more precisely. Chewing implies duration. Resistance. The breaking down of something before it becomes part of you. It is the difference between swallowing whole, and tasting – or between letting culture pass through you, and allowing it to change you. This is not an argument for slowness. It is an argument for transformation. The images and ideas that reach us today are not neutral; they arrive already shaped, silently carrying the values and hierarchies of whoever produced and circulated them. To scroll past is to accept those values and hierarchies on their own terms. To chew is to refuse that. It is to ask what art or music or literature is carrying, where it comes from, what it is trying to make you believe – and then decide what to do with it. For in doing so, we become something else ourselves.