In April 1924 a group of São Paulo artists and writers — the poet Oswald de Andrade, the painter Tarsila do Amaral, the novelist Mário de Andrade, their coffee-baron patrons, and the French poet Blaise Cendrars — took a comfortable excursion into the Brazilian interior and came back with sketches, specimens, and a Tupi vocabulary. Four years later that trip produced a manifesto that opened: “Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.”

What the Manifesto Antropófago actually argued:

  • The target was the colonial inheritance — Portuguese language, science, law, and land seizures — summed up in the clause “Down with the histories of Man that begin at Cape Finisterre”
  • It also hit modernism’s usual marks: down with “importers of canned consciousness,” down with Memory as a source of custom, renewal of personal experience
  • Carnival was the one tradition worth keeping, because its masquerade and inversion of authority let the colonized appear as master of the European
  • The cannibalism was ritual, not appetite — selective consumption of a “sacred enemy” to complete the identity of the consumer, repurposed as an artistic method
  • The method took from European, African, and Indigenous sources alike, claiming the right to digest culture instead of submitting to it
  • Oswald de Andrade dated it “374 Years since of the Swallowing of Bishop Sardinha,” naming the first bishop of Brazil, eaten by Caeté Tupi in 1556

The pun everyone quotes — “Tupi, or not tupi that is the question” — is the argument in miniature: it steals Shakespeare’s line and swallows it.

The reception is contested. Critics say the São Paulo modernists were already too Europeanized for the message to land, and that the pun concedes the Western canon. Art historian Rafael Cardoso notes that retelling the 1924 trip unironically as a “discovery” shows how durable the structures are that let Brazilian elites live with little experience of the majority culture. The manifesto’s vision of Brazil as a happy, pre-racially harmonious place was partly a European fantasy adopted locally. But Tropicália repurposed anthropophagy in the 1960s against the military coup, and the metaphor is now driven largely by Indigenous creators — with the Andrades as the ones being eaten.

The year 1928 carries its own irony: it was also the year Fordlândia was founded, Henry Ford’s rubber town carved out of the forests of Pará. Foreign empires were consuming Brazilian land while Brazilians were writing about eating Western art.