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 between the two texts, and the similar motivations behind their writing. Even today, probably more than ever, this way of thinking is necessary. For Andrade the “Cannibal Manifesto” it’s a statement of purpose, a declaration of “new” practices of culture and art, that “feed” themselves from the culture and the literature written in others parts of the world to create something that is “Brazilian.” The metaphor of cannibalism, eating, digestion, and regurgitation involves a double movement, a first one that recognizes the tradition, knowledge, epistemologies and metaphysics of the indigenous population of Brazil and a second movement, that uses that knowledge and practices (as eating) to create with the West and reappropriate, own the material. Creating as cannibalism, is a collective work, that involves the body, and an acknowledgement of other cultural production. And Cannibalism would take, eat and digest whatever it “needs” to produce.

Viveiros de Castro proposes an anthropology method that builds from indigenous perspectivism, something that looks very similar to what New Materialism has proposed in the past decade in the Humanities, but Viveiros de Castro makes it explicit, this way of thinking has being around us for centuries, and it shows that different beings look, learn and interact with the world in different ways. There is no “truth” or “right way” but a constant “feeding” and movement, for creation, and for the purposes of our class, of learning. These are some of the reason why the Manifesto is one of the texts that has inspired our final project for this class, and I want to further propose, what if we all write Manifestos? How is a Manifesto a way of doing? (in opposition to a “static” paper)

I would also like to further problematize the concept of “perspectivism” as a way to deal with different agents, cultures, and subjects. As well as the idea of “Shamanism”, “Cannibalist Thought” or “Savage Experience” as methods to understand different embodied experiences and processes of “becoming”. I want to propose the reading of a short story by another great Brazilian thinker and writer, Joao Guimaraes Rosa, the story is called “Meu tio o Iauarete” and its about a men that can communicate with the jungle, his uncle is a Jaguar, and he can, like the Jaguar, see the world from his perspective… he walks in 4 feet, and can hear the rumor of the trees. What if we could, for a second, swallowed someones else’s positioning or embodiment, would we see different? what could we create?