Of Cannibals and the Recycling of Otherness

Abstract

The earliest examples of musical interactions between Europe and Brazil, as well as the first reports of musical practices of the Brazilian natives, are, in one way or another, related to cannibalism. That practice was a way of recycling otherness: the cooking and eating of prisoners and the reworking of their cultural products express the cannibal’s interest in the other; they serve as mechanisms to assimilate otherness and transform the natural into the cultural. In the twentieth century, artistic and musical avant-gardes in Brazil developed the idea of ‘cultural cannibalism’, urging a critical ingestion of European culture and the reworking of that tradition in Brazilian terms, assuming a sort of national unconscious in which the cannibal mind is still at work, in the masticating, digesting, and rewriting of the outsider. This concept, sometimes defined as ‘anthropophagic reason’, is brought to bear on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and is used to compare the symbolism of human-eating practices and the desire for absorbing otherness, including music, in contemporary Amazonian societies.

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