Latin American Autoimmunity and the Brazilian Anthropophagy

Abstract

How to explain, in an underdeveloped country, the appearance of an avant-garde and justify it not as symptomatic alienation, but as a decisive factor in collective progress?" Helio Oiticica, 1967. At the end of the 1960s a movement in Brazilian culture bloomed, it manifested itself in several sectors, such as visual arts, poetry, cinema and theater, with consequences and repercussions in the whole national panorama and the future of the own country's thinking. It was an avant-garde, culturally exuberant, original and inspiring movement, seen now as a cultural revolution: the tropicalism. The name was given after the installation "Tropicália" exhibited by the artist Helio Oiticica in the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art in 1967 (Basualdo 2005). All happened in spite of the violent military dictatorship which has tortured, killed, exiled or repressed most of the local intelligentsia. Among the many references of tropicalism, one stood for its great importance: "The Anthropophagic Manifesto" written by Oswald de Andrade in 1928, as an echo of the seminal modernist week of art that happened in 1922 in São Paulo. De Andrade proclaimed anthropophagy as the basic principle for the construction of Brazilian identity, to devour myths and ideas that prevent this country from confronting its reality and inventing its history, to rethink its own cultural identity (de Andrade 1928). He evoked the history of the Caraíba tribe of Brazilian Indians who had the practice of eating enemies killed in their territory (Carneiro da Cunha 1992). The second Latin American Congress of Autoimmunity reminded us on the Latin-American scientific originality, quality, and also here, the