Anthropophagy in dissonant agreements: a possible indigestuous anthropophagus digestion

Abstract

"Decipher me or I will devour you." Challenge launched by the Sphinx of Thebes, an exotic monster half lion, half woman who launched enigmas to travelers and ate those who were unable to decipher the proposed enigma. In the Greek Sophocles’s tragedy, the knowledge was salvation; as a punishment form, the creature only devoured those who did not appear capable of resolving what was proposed to them. In a context that is temporally and spatially distant, we find the anthropophagic Tupinambá Indians’ rituals the representatives of the exoticism of the new world, which, conversely, devoured only their enemies who had positive qualities. It was, therefore, a way of valuing the other. At the beginning of the 20th century, Oswald de Andrade affirms in his anthropophagic manifest that only "anthropophagy unites us”, clearly proposing that we should “swallow” the European cultural legacy and “digest” it in the form of a typical Brazilian art intends to analyze the reverberations of this anthropophagic shape in another moment of artistic production: the cultural movement “Tropicalismo”. To do so, we will work with the lyrics of the icon song of the tropicalist movement – Caetano Veloso’s composition - based on the dissonant principle that this Brazilian popular music song, with similarities and differences, works as an anthropophagic reverberation in the construction of what we understand as Brazilian identity.