Diana Taylor argues that “Capitalism has desecrated matter and destroyed the material supports for human life…We are in the land of the production of death” (10). Through a walking through the performance of Bom Retiro 958 metros by Teatro da Vertigem, Taylor observes how the capitalist system consumes us and then spits us out– as commodity, as consumer, as […]
Cannibalism, the “New” Pedagogical Diet
Viveiros de Castro and Oswald de Andrade know Marx and Freud, the ethnographic and blind discourses of “the savage” created in the XIX Century, and the critical paradigms that have shaped the anthropology and the production of cultural artifacts in the West, and by extension, in Latin America. I want to highlight the time distance […]
Subsistence. Knowledge. Cannibalism.
During the performance Bom Retiro 958 metros, Diana Taylor convey a recurrent sensation of estrangement. It seemed an experience of confusion, astonishment, and bewilderment which forced her to stay present, in the active practice of observing. It seems that no previous knowledge could be pertinent to guide her experience; “It’s hard to gauge what matters […]
Discovered Happiness
“Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness.” (de Andrade 94) This one line, phrase, sentence, or whatever you shall call it has been running through my mind since I first read Oswald de Andrade’s The Cannibalist Manifesto. I keep thinking about how so many people from before modernity up until now live/ lived […]
Geléia Geral
O canibalismo ameríndio sempre foi uma das chaves mais usadas durante o período da colonização como forma de demonstrar a barbárie dos povos nativos, marcando-os como seres irracionais e violentos. Essa associação continuou e continua bastante presente nas discussões sobre o índio, e creio que suas as distintas formas de a discutir marcam diversas facetas […]
Towards an eating epistemology
The first time I read Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory,” I dwelt some time on the following footnote: . Without spending too much time on the ball, Wilson is that tricky object-subject resisting full objectification, even in the theater of relationality Viveiros de Castro outlines above. Wilson, Brown—and Taylor—might argue, is a thing, what Viveiros de Castro calls an […]
Keeping Up on Sundays
This weekend I find myself consuming and being consumed, now entertaining the ways in which this state can be one of sordid “glass half empty” or blissful “glass half full” existence. As Diana Taylor says in Dead Capital, we are at once the spectator and the product (15), both the almond milk and the almond […]
Becoming and the Pact
In Cannibal Metaphysics, de Castro writes, “Every becoming is an alliance. Which does not mean, once again, that every alliance is a becoming” . I am fascinated by this sentence because it reminds me of the idea of the “pact,” which I am writing about for my group’s final project. According to the Oxford English […]
Cannibalist Translations
“Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language as a whole, taking an individual work in […]
Tupi Lição
As we read in Cannibal Metaphysics, the Tupinanbá anthropophagic ritual had the purpose of erasing the enemy’s alterity. Throughout the months or years that the captive would spend in the town of his captors, his otherness would disintegrate and he would become a husband, a brother, a friend. The movie Como era gustoso o meo […]