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 francés (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1971 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OqbiWanj4E) illustrates this pattern. It starts with a disjointed montage using the colonizers’ rhetoric from a letter from Villegagnon to Calvin and the images of the interactions between the settlers (French and Portuguese) and the indigenous peoples (Tupiniquins and Tupinanbás). This clash of viewpoints strikes a chord in the conscious and informed spectator setting the tone for the following scenes. The movie makes the viewer complicit in the rejection of the epistemic universe of the colonizers (ego conquiro that leads to ego cogito) to deploy Tupi’s philosophy as a system of resistance, which counters colonization, patriarchy and capitalism through a continuous process of becoming.

Amerindian thought posits that the common condition between human and animals is not animality, but humanity (Viveiros de Castro 50). This can also be related to the Mayan concept of ch’ulel, “the animation in all things, human and non-human.” (Taylor 9). From this standpoint, the ingestion of meat from other humans (in the Amerindian sense) cannot not have a ritualistic quality; it is a form of shared transformation that implies both a becoming and an alliance. Viveiros de Castro, following Deleuze and Guattari, remarks: “[e]very becoming is an alliance” (164), which can be related to what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls “translation”, the work that allows the creation of a reciprocal intelligibility among the different experiences of the world.

Invoking anthropophagy as a sort of assumption of the immanence of the enemy becomes a line of flight, a deterritorialization of Western colonial epistemology. This cannibalistic immanence unites Oswald de Andrade, Deleuze and Guattari and Suely Rolnik’s thought. The latter proposes to neutralize the colonial unconscious characterized by “antropofaloegocentric-homogeneous-identitarial-colonial-capitalistic thought” with an ethical (not moral) compass composed by “anthropophagic-heterogeneous-relational-perspectivistic thought.” In Rolnik’s view, insofar as we all share the colonial-capitalistic unconscious, this anthropophagist reference is a lição of Tupi cosmogony to the rest of the world, “a structure of thought that defines another relation to knowledge and another regime of truth: cannibalism, perpectivism, multinaturalism.” (Viveiros de Castro 192). Tupi or not Tupi; another step in the endeavor of decolonizing our minds.