Cannibals Recycling Otherness

Of Cannibals and The Recycling of OthernessAuthor(s): Rogrio BudaszSource: Music & Letters, Vol. 87, No. 1 (Jan., 2006), pp. 1-15Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3526412 .Accessed: 31/03/2014 12:58

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Music & Letters, Vol. 87 No. 1, ? The Author (2005). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/ml/gcil63, available online at www.ml.oxfordjournals.org Advance Access publication 16 December 2005

OF CANNIBALS AND THE RECYCLING OF OTHERNESS

BY ROGERIO BUDASZ

The origin of cannibalism is the origin of culture. Marshall Sahlins

S6 me interessa o que nao 6 meu. Oswald de Andrade

AN AVID TRAVEL BOOK READER around the mid-sixteenth century, eager to meet the fierce South American cannibal depicted by so many adventurers, could always take a short trip to Normandy. For some years, the ports of Rouen and Dieppe sheltered a small population of Tupinambas and with a bit of luck that reader could even find one of them walking down the Rue Malpalu towards the house that locals used to call L'Isle- du-Bresil.

Norman sailors and traders visited the Brazilian coast regularly throughout the sixteenth century. Their main interest was brazilwood, from which clothmakers obtained a highly prized red pigment, and the business of extracting and loading the wood required them to make an alliance with the Tupinambia-a branch of the Tupi that was hostile to the Portuguese, who claimed ownership of the land. On several occasions, the Normans brought back to France guests from those parts. Some of these might have been helpful in the training of interpreters; others were brought as exotic ambassadors, to participate in events such as the entry of Henri II and Catherine de' Medici into Rouen in 1550.

It was in Rouen, in the autumn of 1562, that Michel de Montaigne met three newly arrived Tupinamba. His impressions of the encounter and the short conversation that followed-though somewhat blurred by the incompetence of the interpreter-are at the core of his essay 'Of Cannibals'.1 Here Montaigne not only praises the Tupinamba as living examples of the triumph of nature over art, but he also raises the Brazilian cannibal 'to the status of an orator and philosopher, a free and fraternal citizen of a back-to- nature utopia'.2 Cannibalism was also a kind of speech. Rather than arising from hunger, it was motivated by a sort of noble revenge and the will to take a name that, for some Europeans, seemed to resonate with those familiar values of honour and courage found in chivalric literature.

Many ideas expressed here were developed after a reading of Manuel Veiga's article 'Marcos aculturativos na etnomusi- cologia brasileira', ART, 6 (Dec. 1982), 9-50. I am indebted to Bruce Alan Brown andJames Tyler for their assistance during the process of expanding and shaping those early thoughts.

Michel de Montaigne, 'Des Cannibales', in Essais de messire Michel seigneur de Montaigne (Bordeaux, 1580), i, ch. 31. 2 Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibalfrom Columbus to Jules Verne (Berkeley, 1997), 110-11.

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The historian Frank Lestringant warns us that, after Montaigne, so many situations have been compared to cannibalism-totalitarian regimes, interest on loans, matrimo- nial law, the relationship between father and child or master and pupil-that one could reach the erroneous conclusion that 'cannibalism existed only as a figure of speech'.' Nevertheless, a very particular use of cannibalism as metaphor has played an important role in Brazilian artistic and literary circles during much of the twentieth century. For Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954), a key figure in Brazilian modemismo of the 1920s, anthropophagy was the only true Brazilian philosophy. Andrade's ideas, summarized in his 1928 Manfesto antropdfago, argued for a critical ingestion of European culture and the 'reworking of that tradition in Brazilian terms'.4

To some extent, Andrade's anthropophagy was itself a reworking of European avant-garde currents, namely Dada and the short-lived 1920 literary review Cannibale published by Francois Picabia. However, if parallels are evident between Andrade and his French counterparts-the spirit of cynicism and anarchy, and the use of such 'cannibalistic' devices as collage and parody-his aesthetics were not concerned with emulating so- called 'primitive art'. Anthropophagy was to be taken more viscerally. Brazilian artists should immerse themselves in the early native's thoughts, looking at the European as they would-as a source of nutrients. They should not mimic their food by emulating European modernists. Instead, they should devour what was useful in the civilization while maintaining their natural, 'primitive' state.

Of course, Andrade and his modernist friends-sons of Italian immigrants and members of Sao Paulo's richest families-were culturally as far from the Brazilian native as they were from the European primitivists. The first goal of Andrade's cannibalistic metaphor was to shock the local elite, firmly rooted in nineteenth-century artistic and literary canons. After Andrade himself abandoned it, later generations reworked his anthropophagy and made it more palatable by associating it with nationalistic ideals. After all, the cannibal was a powerful symbol that could be used as a national response to recent European 'isms'. In tune with the idea of racial democracy-the Brazilian counterpart of multiculturalism-the concept flourished above all in the musical avant-garde, such as the musica nova movement in contemporary music of the 1960s and the 1970s tropicalia in popular music, both linked to Andrade through the 1950s poesia concreta movement.5

If Andrade's famous catchphrase, 'Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question', illustrates the irreverent and parodistic nature of the movement, it also expresses his doubt about the suitability of the metaphor itself. More recently, S6rgio Bellei has identified two interrelated meanings in Andrade's anthropophagy, one specifically associated with the

3 Ibid. 8. In his polemical book The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York, 1979) William Arens stirred up a bitter controversy among anthropologists, arguing that in the absence of any credible first-hand account, ritual cannibalism has never existed. Recent research in archaeology, ethnography, and genetics has produced a large body of data that makes Arens's main assumptions questionable. See Peggy Reeves Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cul- tural System (Cambridge, 1986); Aparecida Vilaca, Comendo como gente: Formas do canibalismo Wari (Rio deJaneiro, 1992); Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, From the Enemy's Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society (Chicago, 1992); Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margareth Iversen, Cannibalism and the Colonial World (Cambridge, 1998); Laurence Goldman, The Anthropology of Cannibalism (Westport, Conn., 1999); Beth Conklin, Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society (Austin, Tex., 2001). 4 Interview with Haroldo de Campos, 'Concrete Poetry and Beyond', Review: Latin American Literature andArts, 36 Jan. June 1986), 38-45.

5 Besides several books and articles by the brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, see also Bina Maltz, Jer6nimo Teixeira, and Sergio Ferreira, Antropofagia e tropicalismo (Porto Alegre, 1993) and Antonio Eduardo Santos, 0 antropofagismo na obra pianistica de Gilberto Mendes (Sao Paulo, 1997). For a demystifying discussion of Brazilian antropofagia, see Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda, 'The Law of the Cannibal, or How to Deal with the Idea of "Difference" in Brazil', paper given at a conference at New York University on 20 April 1998, available online: http://acd.ufrj.br/pacc/literaria/ paperlhelo.html. See also her article 'Parking in a Tow-away Zone: Women's Literary Studies in Brazil', Brasil-Brazil: Revista de Literatura Brasileira-A Journal of Brazilian Literature, 6 (1991), 5-19.

2


modernist tradition of rptura (disruption) and the other related to a certain Brazilian cultural ethos: 'Andrade's evil anthropophagous, eater of Whites and of their cultural products, was radically different from the Romantic's good, submissive savage to be converted to civilization by the European colonizer.' Bellei refers here particularly to the tamed Indian hero of nineteenth-century works such as Jose de Alencar's 0 Guarani (introduced to European audiences by the opera composer Carlos Gomes). On the other hand, anthropophagy could be read as a 'cultural practice aimed at displacing frontiers'. Bellei links this meaning to an 'abiding dream', found in many Brazilian cultural practices, 'of a world in which frontiers should be abolished or at least made unstable and vulnerable to trespassing'.6 The present article is primarily concerned with this interpretation, and how Andrade's ideas of recycling and incorporating otherness could help explain the rationale behind some Brazilian cultural phenomena during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Different forms of interaction between Europe and Brazil were at play, motivated by a variety of factors, provoking a range of responses, and almost always featuring music as one of the primary cultural products to be borrowed, assimilated, or recycled.

II Cannibalism was always a fascinating subject to the European reader. It was constantly mentioned in reports of voyagers and in Jesuit letters. The literature generated by the short-lived French colonizing enterprises in Brazil also addressed the topic. In two sixteenth- century best-sellers Andre Thevet and Jean de Lery described their experiences in La France Antarctique, founded in 1555 by Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon in the location already known as Rio deJaneiro. At the beginning of the following century, the Capuchin missionaries Claude d'Abbeville and Yves d'Evreux recounted their missionary work and impressions of La France Equinoxiale (1613-15), located on the northern island of Sao Luis of Maranhao. Thevet, Lery, Claude d'Abbeville, and Yves d'Evreux were also among the first to describe the musical practices of both natives and European colonizers in Brazil, and the results of their interaction.

In chapter 15 of his Histoire d'un voyage (first published in 1578) Lry describes how, after roasting and eating their enemies, the Tupinamba 'very carefully save the biggest bones of the thighs and the arms for making fifes and flutes'.7 As for their music, Lery even transcribed a number of short melodies (see P1. 1). He explains how he learnt one of them: These ceremonies went on for nearly two hours, with the five or six hundred men dancing and singing incessantly; such was their melody that-although they do not know what music is- those who have not heard them would never believe that they could make such harmony. At the beginning of this witches' sabbath, when I was in the women's house, I had been somewhat afraid; now I received in recompense such joy, hearing the measured harmonies of such a multi- tude, and especially in the cadence and refrain of the song, when at every verse all of them would let their voices trail, saying Heu, heuaure, heura, heuraure, heura, heura, oueh-I stood there trans- ported with delight. Whenever I remember it, my heart trembles, and it seems their voices are still in my ears. When they decided to finish, each of them struck his right foot against the earth more vehemently than before, and spat in front of him; then all of them with one voice uttered hoarsely two or three times the words He, hua, hua, hua, and then ceased.8

In his Histoire du Canada (1636), Gabriel Sagard presented one of Lery's transcriptions in a four-part harmonization with the Tupinamba melody in the superius, immediately

6 Sergio Bellei, 'Brazilian Anthropophagy Revisited', in Cannibalism and the Colonial World (Cambridge, 1998), 93-5. 7 Jean de Lery, Histoire d'un Voyage, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley, 1990), 127. 8 Ibid. 142-4. For a detailed study of these melodies, their variants, and later uses byJ.-J. Rousseau, see Helza Cameu, IntrodufCo ao estudo da mzsica indigena brasileira (Rio deJaneiro, 1972), 83-101.

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p.174

p. 191

p. 322

?bie * cberdar-iew b,d ,tr

fox a. Seb &

?H~, trd~r#, heli , bexrWxre, i~~~~~~__ll_,, .n

w

hcglre.curuireh PL . 1. ery's transcriptions of Tupinamba melodies, from Jean de Lery, Histoire d'un voyage (Geneva, 1611), 174, 191, and 322

following three similarly reworked Native Canadian songs. The features of this harmonization-note-against-note style, a few passing notes, and lightly ornamented cadences-link it to the late sixteenth-century French chanson (see P1. 2 and the tran- scription in Ex. 1).9 Dressed with a fuller, more impressive sonority, this version may be a reinterpretation influenced by reports such as Lery's. Given that Sagard was a lay member of the Recollect order, there is also the possibility that for him the single-line melodies could acquire musical significance only when recycled in European terms, harmonized in the familiar style of sacred polyphony.0l

Another example of Tupinamba-French musical interaction was described in the correspondence between Francois de Malherbe and Nicolas de Peiresc, tutor of his son Marc-Antoine. On 15 April 1613 Malherbe comments on the arrival in Rouen of six Tupinamba brought over from the French settlement in Maranhao:

While passing through Rouen he had them dressed in the French manner since according to the custom of their country they all go naked, except for a black rag they place before their shameful parts: the women wear nothing at all. They danced a kind of branle without holding hands and without moving from one spot; their violins were gourds like those pilgrims use for drinking, in which they had placed something like nails or pins."'

9 Roger Savage, 'Rameau's American Dancers', Eary Music, 11 (1983), 441-52. '0 So concluded Manuel Veiga, who also suggested that the harmonization functioned as a way of purging these songs

of their demonic association in the same way that popular tunes were purified by their use as cantus firmi in the poly- phonic mass. See 'Marcos aculturativos', 33-4.

" Francois de Malherbe, (Euures compltes de Malherbe (Paris, 1863), iii. 297: 'En passant par Rouen, il les fit habiller a la francoise; car, selon la coutume du pays, ils vont tous nus, hormis quelque haillon noir qu'ils mettent devant leurs parties honteuses: les femmes ne portent du tout rien. Ils ont danse une espece de branle sans se tenir par les mains et sans bouger d'une place; leurs violons etoient une courge comme celles dont les pelerins se servent pour boire, et dedans il y avoit quelque chose comme des clous ou des epingles.'

4


S V P E t I V SI

i dou veni, hau hau he h.

Fiel haa-te hci;t; heir*re

ira he'ira oubch. TENO R.

@-35 IT :t.s-+ +

Malherbe's letter of 20 August seems to suggest that this dance inspired the lutenist Ennemond Gaultier to compose a sarabande. Gaultier, who was at this time in the service of Louis XIII (or Marie de' Medici), might have witnessed their entry into Paris: 'I am sending to Marc-Antoine a sarabande that Gautier [sic] composed on the dance of the Toupinamboux; when he has learnt it, it will give you some enjoyment: it is said to be one of the most excellent pieces one can hear.'12 In his reply of 15 September, Peiresc jokes that he stole the tablature from Marc-Antoine to hear it at a social gath- ering at La Floride, the residence of Guillaume Du Vair.'3 That made Malherbe eager to hear Peiresc's opinion of Gaultier's reworking of what was probably the very dance he had witnessed some months earlier.'4 Unfortunately, the answer cannot be found in their letters and all modern attempts to identify this sarabande among Gaultier's extant works have resulted so far only in frustration.'5 As for those six Tupinamba, three died within a few weeks after arriving in Rouen. The others were baptized in a ceremony at which the bishop of Paris officiated, with the King and Queen as their godparents.

III By 1557-the year Lery spent in La France Antarctique the Jesuits were already established in several places along the Brazilian coast. Jose de Anchieta (1534-97),1 who arrived in 1553, and who participated in the foundation of Sao Paulo in the following year, had already finished writing his grammar of the Tupi language (printed in Coimbra in 1595). After Governor Mem de Sa's success in dismantling Villegaignon's small colony in 1560, Anchieta celebrated the event in a 3,000-line epic poem in Latin De Gestis Mendi de Saa. Yet as a missionary, Anchieta was often more interested in the practical uses of poetry as a didactic tool.

Jesuits in Brazil were especially worried by the natives' 'bad habits'-drinking fer- mented cauim and engaging in cannibalism, polygamy, and revenge wars-that could hamper the religious and political project of subjecting them to the Catholic Church and the Portuguese monarch. In order to help convince the natives to abandon those practices-the core of their culture Anchieta, and before him Manuel da N6brega, devised a form of moral theatre featuring songs and dances. Since their target public also included Portuguese colonists, these plays were often written in two or more languages (Tupi, Portuguese, Spanish, and occasionally Latin).

In these plays Anchieta made great use of one of his preferred literary resources, the transmutation of popular tunes into spiritual songs, also known as a lo divino poetry-a fairly old practice that gained momentum in the sixteenth-century Iberian peninsula.7 Some of these contrafacta retained much of their original text, while others preserved only the indication of the melody to which they were to be sung. Thus Anchieta con- verts Venid a suspirar al verde prado into Venid a suspirar con Jesu amado, and Un suspiro did

12 Ibid. 327: J'envoye a Marc-Antoine une sarabande qu'a faite Gautier sur la danse des Toupinamboux; quand il l'aura apprise, il vous en donera du plaisir: on la tient pour une des plus excellentes pieces que l'on puisse ouir.'

13 Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Lettres c Malherbe: 1606-1628 (Paris, 1976), 70-1. 14 'Vous me mandez bien que vous avez oui la sarabande des Toupinamboux. Mais vous ne me mandez pas, ni de la

main de qui, ni ce qu'il vous en a semble. Son auteur, qui est Gautier, est tenu le premier du metier: je ne sais s'il aura reussi, et si le gofit de Provence sera conforme a celui de la cour.' Letter to Peiresc, 10 Oct. 1613; ibid. 340

15 See Veiga, 'Marcos aculturativos' and Robert Stevenson, Music in Aztec and Inca Territory (Berkeley, 1968), 229-30. 16 Although Anchieta's Brazilian biographers have rejected the hypothesis, the Spanish historian Francisco Gonzalez

Luis suggests that he was the grandson ofJuan de Anchieta, chapel master of Queen Isabella. See Francisco Gonzalez Luis, Josi de Anchieta, viday obra (La Laguna, 1988).

17 For a more detailed study see Rogerio Budasz, 'A presenca do cancioneiro iberico na lirica dejose de Anchieta, um enfoque musicol6gico', Latin American Music Review, 17 (1996), 42-77.

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Lucia into Mil suspiros di6 Maria.'8 The play Auto de Sao Lourenfo probably ended with his version of Mira Nero de Tarpeya, in which he changed the structure of the Spanish romance into one of five-line stanzas with a completely different rhyme scheme. He created a much smoother transition in the Auto da Visitafdo de Santa Isabel, where he changed the well-known song Q.uien te me enojd, Isabel / que con lagrimas te tiene into Quien te visitd, Isabel / que Dios en su vientre tiene.'9 Anchieta also wrote a large number of songs in Tupi, but the original Iberian melodies for these texts are still to be discovered. In these songs Anchi- eta departs radically from the devotional style of his Spanish and Portuguese poems and creates an allegorical realm where Catholic saints live together with some figures of Tupi mythology while fighting against others. As a rule, these figures have their meaning twisted to fit into the Christian notions of the devil, demons, and angels, which have no parallel in Tupi mythology.

Dressing up the structure, sonority, and rhythm of the Tupi language with European stanzas and rhyme schemes was not entirely new. For decades missionaries-and not only Jesuits-had been teaching the natives the Catechism, which also involved the singing of Catholic prayers and hymns in their own languages. Anchieta expanded these strategies by employing Iberian literary forms and structures as well, such as glosas and interlocking rhymes. In addition, instead of keeping certain untranslatable expres- sions in Latin or Portuguese, Anchieta usually chose other solutions, sometimes perplex- ing ones. Thus, if the first missionaries, recalling the apostle Paul's search for an unknown god among the Athenians, decided to name the Almighty with the Tupi word for thunder, Tupan-a scary, though innocuous entity-Anchieta took advantage of this association and extended it to the figure of Mary, now Tupansy, literally 'thunder's mother'. Commenting on an even more curious example, the literary critic Alfredo Bosi pointed out that for the term 'angel' Anchieta created the word karaibebe, literally 'flying prophet'. Karai, however, can mean both white man and the native Santidade, or holi- ness, a singer-prophet who goes from tribe to tribe announcing the Land without Evil. Bosi concludes: 'What would the Indians think of coupling karai to the idea of flying expressed in bebe? Of their own nomad and clairvoyant shamans, now provided with wings? Or of winged Portuguese?'20

Anchieta mastered the creation of myths-in the Barthesian sense-by not denying but distorting the beliefs of the Tupi by removing them from one system and inserting them in another. He did not have any problem with acknowledging the existence of a supernatural being, whom the Tupi called Anhangd-a playful entity, whose tricks could sometimes approach pure evil. Instead, Anchieta used the opportunity to introduce the Devil and a new kind of fear into the lives of the natives by emphasizing some aspects of Anhangd's personality while ignoring others. Likewise, he ignored inconvenient or embarrassing parallels, such as the analogy between cannibalism and the Eucharist: the doctrine of transubstantiation states that the believer eats and drinks the actual flesh and blood of Jesus Christ during the Communion-something perceptively noted by the HuguenotJean de Lery.

Anchieta's plays also incorporated Iberian and native dances, in some cases a mix- ture of both. In a play prepared for the day of the Virgin's Assumption, six Indians, playing the role of savages newly arrived from the jungle, are asked to dance the machatins-the Portuguese word for the Spanish matachin (mattaccino in Italy and matassins in

8 The late 16th-c. Portuguese cancioneiros of Elvas and Belem present musical versions of Venid a suspirar, and Luis de Bricefo printed a setting of Mil suspiros in his 1626 guitar book.

Francisco de Salinas and Antonio Cabez6n registered the music of Quien te me enojd Isabel, whereas MAira Nero de Tarpeya appears in 16th-c. versions byJuan Bermudo, Luis Venegas de Henestrosa, and Mateo Flecha. 20, Alfredo Bosi, Dialdtica da colonizafao (Sao Paulo, 1992), 65-6.

7


Fcint&c.

Taile haulc.

Eltocadc.

Rcucrs hault.

PL. 3. Les Matassins, from Thoinot Arbeau, Orchesographie (Lengres, 1589), fo. 98r

France; see P1. 3). The natives probably replaced the swords and shields of the Euro- pean choreography with their own clubs-the tacapes-and tapir-skinned shields, like those described by Thevet and Lery (see P1. 4). The choreography could maintain some features of the machatins-according to Anchieta-but it would require some modifica- tion in order to represent Amerindian rather than European combats. In another example of a composite dance in a 1585 report, Anchieta describes Indian boys dancing in the Portuguese fashion-maybe afolia or a chacota-and playing drums and vihuelas, while keeping their feather costumes and adornments.21

Even so, the interaction promoted by Anchieta should not fool us. The Jesuits' main goal was not the creation of a mixed society in which colonists and natives would live and work side by side. From the beginning, missionaries regarded colonists as a bad

21 'They teach them [the native children] to sing and they have their ensemble [capila] of voices and flutes for their

feasts, and they perform their dances in the Portuguese fashion, very graciously with small drums and vihuelas, as if they were Portuguese boys, and when they perform these dances they place on their heads some sort of adornment made of bird feathers of various colours, and in this manner they also make their bows and they feather and paint their body.' Anchieta, 'Enformacion de los collegios y casas de la Companhia del Brasil', Evora, Biblioteca PIblica, codex CXVI/ 1- 33, fo. 39', quoted in Paulo Castagna, 'Fontes bibliograficas para o estudo da pratica musical no Brasil nos seculos XVI e XVII' (MA thesis, University of Sao Paulo, 1991), ii. 223.

8


PL. 4. The Tupinamba in combat, fromJean de Lery, Histoire d'un voyage (Geneva, 1580), 231

influence and contacts between them and the natives were restricted to the context of devotional plays, feasts, and processions, or when colonists borrowed natives from the Jesuits in order to perform some work. Civil authorities did not see interaction as a good thing either. As early as 1583, legislators in Sao Paulo-notorious for the enslavement of natives-issued a warning against 'Christians who [were] caught in Indian villages drinking and dancing in their manner'.22 With so many Guarani slaves in Sao Paulo, what bothered legislators was not the contact per se, but the conditions in which such

22 19Jan. 1583. Atas da Cdmara da Villa de S. Paulo 1596-1622 (Sao Paulo, 1915), i. 200. I thank Paulo Castagna for bringing this source to my attention.

9


contact took place: in native villages, far from urban centres, natives and colonists would get together and have fun as equals. Judging by the number of prohibitions of gatherings issued in the following decades, that practice was very common, to the dis- may of both secular and religious authorities. One of the reports stated that in those bailes people were committing 'many deadly sins and insolence against the service of God and the common good'.23

The danger of losing control had already been foreseen in 1553 by a representative of the papal authority. Two months after his arrival in Bahia, Bishop Pero Fernandes Sardinha complained in a letter to the Superior of theJesuits in Lisbon that the missionaries were adopting some pagan costumes. He mentioned Father Salvador Rodriguez, who 'played, danced, and jumped with them' in order to be in their good graces. More- over, some Portuguese orphan boys brought from Lisbon were now playing along with the natives, using their musical instruments and singing like them, praising the Virgin Mary with native melodies. But what shocked him most was the fact that they even had their hair cut like the native boys. Sardinha argued that the Jesuits' tactics were not working as planned: instead of converting, the natives were becoming more proud of their practices. After all, theJesuits not only approved their practices but also seemed to be imitating them. Sardinha finished by explaining to the Superior that he had not been sent there 'to make Christians pagan, but to accustom the pagans to the Christians', and that would be possible only if he 'plucked out the old man from the roots, with his deeds, and clad him with the new man created according to God'.24

Sardinha thus exposed theJesuits' strategy of approaching the natives by respecting and even assimilating some of their customs. He understood that they intended to replace them later with European habits, but he found that tactic too dangerous. Indeed, by incorporating Tupi habits and expanding the meanings of their mythology, theJesuits were unconsciously encouraging syncretism, which would result in organized forms of resistance several times in the following decades.

In the late sixteenth century the santidades emerged as a heretical movement targeted by the Inquisition on its first visit to Brazil, in 1591. In the course of several hearings, the father visitor discovered that a group of mixed-race (mamelucos) and Portuguese colonists had declared themselves to be under the guidance of some Tupi shamans, the karai, who were proclaiming the day in which Christian law would be corrected, and the natives would become lords and the Portuguese slaves.25 The Inquisition was able to terminate the heretical outbreak in the city of Salvador, but its actions were less than effective in other regions, as aJesuit visiting the interior of Bahia in 1602 reported:

Approaching the fence's doors, a voice was soon heard throughout the village, saying: 'Here comes the Great Father, come everybody to welcome him' . . . They all went out to welcome him with diligence, and he started singing gibberish, of which we understood nothing, nor do I believe they understand it themselves. And as he went on speaking, the others answered him in the manner of priests who pray in choir. I also went three or four steps out of the house. He was like someone who teaches the doctrine, mixing in a thousand nonsensical things, saying things like Santa Maria, tupama, remireco, which means Holy Mary, wife of God, and other similar absurdities. He was on his knees, with his eyes looking heavenward, and his hands elevated and open, as a clergyman who conducts the Mass ... They use the cross, but with little reverence, and they have other ceremonies in the manner of the Church. They have a sort of clergymen,

23 21 Oct. 1623. Quoted in Castagna, 'Fontes bibliograficas', iii. 55. 24 Monumenta Brasiliae I (Rome, 1956), 358-60. Translated and quoted by Thomas D. Culley and Clement G.

McNaspy, 'Music and the EarlyJesuits', Archivum historicum Societatis Iesu, 40 (1971), 213-45 at 236. 25 The term Mameluco refers to children of Portuguese males and Tupi females.

10


whom they oblige to keep chaste, and if they fail, they soon cast them out. As for images, I did not see more than one of wax, in the shape of a fox.26

Some of these karai had been exposed to Catholic teachings since childhood; a few of them were even raised in Jesuit schools. And now, while mocking some Catholic beliefs, rites, and gestures, they were incorporating and giving new meanings to others-the actual 'absorption of the sacred', to use Oswald de Andrade's words. Even though he did not explore the symbolic aspects of cannibalism in the sixteenth century, it seems that Andrade's concept of cultural anthropophagy was already at work centuries before he conceived the metaphor.27

As for Sardinha's fears, they were proved right after all, but he did not live to see their outcome. In 1562 he was eaten by the Caete natives-a branch of the Tupi. 'The poor guy was actually named Sardine', punned Haroldo de Campos.28 Oswald de Andrade dated his Manifesto antropofago '1928, year 374 of the swallowing of Bishop Sardinha'. For him this was the truly memorable year, and not 1500, when Brazilian history began. Sardinha, the one who wished to prevent the Jesuits from incorporating elements of the Tupi culture, was himself incorporated-in corpore-into their stomachs. Moreover, the event also confirms the rule that the cannibals ate only those prisoners who resisted assimilation-others were simply killed. To deserve to be eaten they had to maintain their difference to the end; that otherness was exactly what the cannibal wanted.

For the Caete, it was not relevant that in 1558 Governor Mem de Sa ruled that 'no confederate Indian should dare to eat human flesh, or wage any war without his permis- sion'.29 But that would soon change. In a few years, civil and religious authorities were able to terminate cannibalism in the territories under their control-most of the coastal region. Not willing to comply with the new political and religious system imposed by the Portuguese, many branches of the Tupi fled to the hinterland, finding refuge in the distant Amazon, where groups such as the Arawete, Kamayura, Kawahib, and Parakana still thrive today, though cannibalism is only part of their mythology or a distant memory (which is sometimes the same). The Tupinambta-the main branch of the sixteenth- century Tupi-remained on the coast, subjected to Portuguese law and the Catholic religion. It would take some generations, but their distinct culture eventually disap- peared. Their villages became Brazilian villages, their daughters married Portuguese colonists. Yet, even though identifying themselves more with the colonizer, their off- spring would not forget their Tupi mother's songs, stories, amulets, and medicines.

Of course, the process of assimilating the Tupinamba and other groups was not as smooth and painless as it might appear. Missionaries soon realized that when natives were not satisfied with the terms of their relationship they would simply run away, back

26 'Chegando as portas da cerca, correu logo pela aldeia uma voz que dizia: Vem o pai grande, sai todos a recebe-lo,

dizendo isto pelo mesmo principal. Sairam-no todos a receber cor diligencia, e ele comecou a entoar uma aravia, de que nada Ihe entendemos, nem cuido que eles mesmos a entendem, e isto falando ele e respondendo-lhe os outros a maneira de clerigos que rezam c6ro. Eu tambem sai de casa tres ou quatro passos. Ele estava como quem ensina a dout- rina, misturando mil desbarates, como era dizer Santa Maria, tupama, remireco, que quere dizer Santa Maria, mulher de Deus, e outros desprop6sitos semelhantes. Estava posto de joelhos com os olhos no c6u e as maos levantadas e abertas como sacerdote que diz missa.... Usam da cruz, mas com pouca reverencia e teem outras cerim6nias ao modo das da igraja. Teem modo de sacerdotes, aos quais obrigam a guardar castidade, na qual se faltam, os depoem logo do oficio. Imagem nao Ihes vi mais que uma de cera de figura de raposa.' Fernao Guerreiro, Relafao annual da coisas quefizeram os Padres da Companhia de Jesus ... 1600 a 1603 (Lisbon, 1930), 380-2. Similar events were reported in the 1620s and 1630s by Antonio Ruiz de Montoya in the distant Guayra Missions (in today's State of Parana, southern Brazil).

27 For a detailed study of the santidades and other syncretic movements in Colonial Brazil see Ronaldo Vainfas, A heresia dos indios: Catolicismo e rebeldia no Brasil colonial (Sao Paulo, 1995) and Laura de Mello e Souza, Inferno atldntico: Demonologia e colonizafao (Sao Paulo, 1993).

28 Interview with Haroldo de Campos, 'Concrete Poetry and Beyond', 44. 21 Simao de Vasconcelos, Cronica da Companhia deJesus no Brasil (1663), ed. Serafim Leite (Petr6polis, 1977), ii. 34.

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to the jungle. A more coercive approach would have resulted in the dismantling of the villages under their control. In fact, most of the so-called Indian revolts during the colonial period were not aimed at the missionaries. Instead, they reacted against the expan- sionist urge of colonists, which often translated into the killing of natives and enslavement of their women and children.30

Even so, why was it so easy for the Tupinamba to forget a practice so fundamental to their culture as cannibalism? Pointing to Claude Levi-Strauss's thoughts on cannibalism as an unstable and extreme form of identification with the other-the opposite side of the spectrum being indifference or incommunicability-the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro argues that by giving up that practice, the Tupinamba have lost an essential dimension of their society: their 'identification with the enemy'. He sees the Tupinamba as a culture in a perennial state of social incompleteness and thus open- ness-existing essentially through their enemies. When the Europeans replaced their traditional enemies, new values had to be incorporated, superseding those that used to be interiorized through the devouring of their former opposites.3'

IV Myths play an explanatory and contextualizing role in many South American cultures. They help them understand their place in the universe and how they relate to other living beings. They also fix the boundaries of what is and what is not acceptable in their highly categorized world. Still, boundaries can be transposed or dealt with through some ritual intervention. Claude Levi-Strauss has shown how the Tupi-Guarani andJe regard the possession of culinary fire as the single most important event, marking the beginning of their culture.32 Once in control of fire, people are able to transform the nature of things. Lery had a glimpse of that concept when a Tupi told him about their enemies, the Ouetaca, whom they regarded as real barbarians because they did not cook their enemies before eating them; the Tupi could not think of a more uncivilized act than eating raw meat.

The early Tupi always associated cannibalism with cooking, and thus with fire. Pass- ing through fire would be equivalent to a cultural transformation, from raw to cooked, from the natural to the cultural. Not only that, it was part of a cycle-kill-cook-eat- that could not be broken without serious consequences. Moreover, by eating their enemy they would do him a favour, preventing his body from rotting in the cold earth. Likewise, boundaries between nature and culture could be trespassed, or dealt with, through the recycling of otherness. In that sense, the cooking and eating of prisoners would be akin to the reworking of their cultural products.

The anthropologists Beth Conklin and Aparecida Vilaga have shown that cannibalism in the Wari culture of the Amazon embodied symbolic concepts deeper than merely acquiring a name, or assimilating the enemy's bravery-concepts usually associated with the Tupinamba. They had a complex system of beliefs, in which the consumption of enemies killed or captured in combat ('outside' cannibalism) and the consumption of a member of their own group ('inside' cannibalism) were related to the ever present concept ofjam, which could be translated as the spirit, soul, image, or essence of creatures.

30 Likewise, landowners in 17th-c. Brazil allowed black slaves to work for themselves once in a while, if they had the strength (some even managed to buy their freedom) and let them worship their gods and enjoy themselves in dances and gatherings in order to avoid 'greater evils', such as murdering their masters or plotting rebellions. Even so, slave rebellions did happen every now and then during the colonial period, always reminding the civil and religious authorities of the dangers of enforcing too coercive policies.

3] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, A inconstancia da alma selvagem (Sao Paulo, 2002), 220, 241, 263. 32 Claude Levi-Strauss, Le cru et le cuit (Paris, 1964).

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Killing, cooking, and eating changes the jam of things. At each step of this cycle, preda- tors can become prey, friends become enemies, and dead relatives can come back to life. It places all living beings in an eternal and balanced cycle of eating and being eaten.

Until four or five decades ago the Wari still waged revenge wars that ended up in cannibal rituals. But the Wari used to have many enemies who were not cannibals. As an elder Wari told Vilaca, when they found the corpse of a friend killed by the enemy but still intact in the forest, they brought it back to their tribe and ate it themselves-or at least a little bit of it, if it was too rotten, for the important thing was to preserve the symbolism of the act.33 As death transforms the Wari into unknown others, a relative that was only buried would be kept alive indefinitely as an enemy.

Likewise, for the early Tupi a dead enemy was a kind of relative. After being captured, the assimilation of the enemy into the group began long before he was devoured; living with them for about a year as an equal, he was even given a wife. Comparing them with the Arawete-a modern-day Amazonian Tupi group-Viveiros de Castro sees the early Tupi need for absorbing the other as a way of renovating and revitalizing their society: 'Gods, enemies, Europeans were figures of potential affinity, modalities of an otherness that attracted and should be attracted; an otherness without which the world would sink into indifference and paralysis.'34

Functioning as a revitalizing force, cannibalism neutralized otherness and suppressed boundaries. A type of communion took place, in which both the killed and the killer become a little like their opposites. Nowhere is that confusion of selves more evident that in the Arawete songs of the dead, performed during their cauim feasts. Viveiros de Castro explains that these are all supposed to be sung by the enemy, through the mouth of his killer: 'the victim talks about himself and his killer-who is the one who "speaks", that is, the one who sings the dead enemy's speech-as an enemy. Through his enemy, the Arawete killer sees himself as the enemy.' Viveiros de Castro has transcribed one of these songs by Yakati-ro, an Arawete who supposedly 'learned' it from a Parakana victim before 1976:

'I die', said the late Moiwito, said my prey, said the late Koiarawi. In his ample courtyard, 'Eeh!'-said the Towaho. 'Here is my prisoner, in the big bird's courtyard'.

Viveiros de Castro points out that the victim who mourns in the first verse, Moiwito, was an Arawete, killed by a Parakana and later avenged by Yakati-ro. Both are pictured here through the point of view of the Parakana victim. Moreover, the word Towaho- which refers to ancient enemies of the Arawete and is used as a substitute for the word 'enemy'-replaces Yakati-ro himself here. Viveiros de Castro explains that 'from the point of view of the Parakana victim, his killer is a Towaho: an enemy. Yakati-ro, the singer-killer, speaks about himself speaking the words of his victim, which is a quotation of what he would have said.' The anthropologist concludes: 'who speaks in such a song? who is the killer, who is the enemy?'35

33 Vilaga, Comendo como gente, 217. :4 Viveiros de Castro, A inconstancia da alma selvagem, 207, 268. Viveiros de Castro points to some Arawete gods, the

Mai; associated with both cannibalism and skin shedding, which is a sign or instrument of renovation and immortality in several contemporary Tupi societies.

35 Ibid. 275-7.

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v

In the 1970s, anthropologist Anthony Seeger lived with the Suya, of the Je group-a community not associated with literal forms of cannibalism. He recounts that the Suya learnt many songs from other societies and still sing them, sometimes without under- standing the words. They sing songs from at least ten different societies with whom they had interacted over the past 200 years of migration and during the last few decades in Xingu Park (nowadays they even sing some American folksongs that Seeger taught them). Seeger shows how their enthusiasm for the outsiders' songs is cultural and not simply a result of migration: the introduction of songs should be understood as part of the creation of their own history-the songs and their performance create both past and present and show the parallels between them. Another important reason is that knowledge is power. By incorporating songs, they incorporate the power and the knowledge of other groups for the benefit of their own community.36 Seeger also points out that the phenomenon is not isolated, for some Amazon groups not only know songs but often entire ceremonies from three, four, five, or more different groups.37

Echoing the Tupinamba enthusiasm for the culture of the stranger, the Suya practice of incorporating bits of rituals and songs-cannibalizing cultural products, so to speak-matches many Brazilian religious practices, from the santidades to the twentieth- century Umbanda, that 'triumph of religious kitsch', as Umberto Eco has described it.38 Approaching the model of what some would call bricolage, the Suya deal with otherness by giving new meanings to it-learning, incorporating, and recycling-and that is how they keep their cultural individuality. Whereas they benefit from the contact and are able to neutralize its adverse effects, they are not interested in changing, possessing, or wiping out the other.39

The early Tupi wanted the Europeans because of their otherness, which for Viveiros de Castro was a means of self-transfiguration, a 'symbol of the reunion of what had been lost in the origin of culture'.40 The strange realm that the Jesuits created-neither Iberian nor Tupi-might appear close to performing that reconciliation, fulfilling an 'abiding dream' of abolishing cultural boundaries, which for Sergio Bellei would become an outstanding feature of Brazilian culture.4' However, we should remember that those strategies were part of a global project of religious and political indoctrina- tion. Anchieta's use of native mythology, infusing it with new meanings, was aimed at gaining ideological control over the people who originated those myths. It was to them only that the newly invented Catholic-Tupi cosmology would make sense. But we should not be naive. The Tupi were well aware of that strategy. We know that because they did similar things with Catholic beliefs. Indeed, they were successful to the point of converting whites and mixed-race settlers in Bahia to the santidades-even some landowners, as shown by the Inquisition hearings.

6 Anthony Seeger, 'When Music Makes History', in Ethnomusicology and Modem Music History (Urbana, Ill., 1991), 33. 37 Anthony Seeger, Why Suya Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People (Cambridge, 1987). 38 Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays (San Diego, 1990), 103. 39 If that non-confrontational way of dealing with the other helped the Suya culture to flourish for at least two centu-

ries, the lack of prolonged contacts with 'civilized' society should have played a role as well. The late anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, who devised the concept of ethnic transfiguration, has pointed out that in most cases contact and integra- tion has proved disastrous for native cultures. Ribeiro explains that native cultures resist assimilation and keep their iden- tity not by confronting the more powerful invader, which would result in their annihilation, but by change. It is only through change that they can survive in a new, hostile environment. Darcy Ribeiro, 0 povo brasileiro (Sao Paulo, 1995), 257-65. 4o Viveiros de Castro, A inconstdncia da alma selvagem, 206.

41 Bellei, 'Brazilian Anthropophagy Revisited', 93-5.

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Evidently, when Jesuits learned the language, oratory, music, dance, cuisine, and many other aspects of native cultures-in South America, Asia, or Africa-that too was done for the benefit of their community and the empowerment of their ideology. And by doing so they changed themselves. This is not the place to detail all the political and philosophical issues in play around the time of their banishment, but theJesuits and the world around them changed so much, and their interests diverged so considerably from those of European governments and the Catholic Church itself, that in the span of ten years after 1759 they were expelled from Portugal, France, Spain, Naples, Sicily, Genoa, Venice, Malta, and Parma. In 1773, after all negotiations had failed, Pope Clement XIV abolished-albeit temporarily-the Society ofJesus.

Native cultures and those peoples brought as slaves to the Americas have learnt the importance of negotiation and adjustment for their survival. More often than not, they had to learn from their oppressors and to master their ways and weapons in order to challenge them successfully. If in the process they became a little like them, it was a two- way street, as the Jesuit experience has shown. It is in this context of mutual curiosity and seduction-or a dual game of pretence-that one could place the shaping of the Latin-American rationale that the poet and literary critic Haroldo de Campos defined as 'anthropophagic reason': the masticating, digesting, and rewriting of the outsider.42 In the end, we all take part in that big banquet depicted in the Wari view of the world: once we start eating prey, we enter an unbreakable cycle. It is only a question of time until we become prey ourselves.

ABSTRACT

The earliest examples of musical interactions between Europe and Brazil, as well as the first reports of musical practices of the Brazilian natives, are, in one way or another, related to cannibalism. That practice was a way of recycling otherness: the cooking and eating of prisoners and the reworking of their cultural products express the cannibal's interest in the other; they serve as mechanisms to assimilate otherness and transform the natural into the cultural. In the twentieth century, artistic and musical avant-gardes in Brazil developed the idea of 'cultural cannibalism', urging a critical ingestion of Euro- pean culture and the reworking of that tradition in Brazilian terms, assuming a sort of national unconscious in which the cannibal mind is still at work, in the masticating, digesting, and rewriting of the outsider. This concept, sometimes defined as 'anthropophagic reason', is brought to bear on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and is used to compare the symbolism of human-eating practices and the desire for absorbing otherness, including music, in contemporary Amazonian societies.

42 Ibid. 44.

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Article Contentsp. 1p. 2p. 3p. 4p. 5p. 6p. 7p. 8p. 9p. 10p. 11p. 12p. 13p. 14p. 15

Issue Table of ContentsMusic & Letters, Vol. 87, No. 1 (Jan., 2006), pp. 1-185Front Matter [pp. 182 - 183]Of Cannibals and The Recycling of Otherness [pp. 1 - 15]'Late', Last, and Least: On Being Beethoven's Quartet in F Major, op. 135 [pp. 16 - 51]Musicology and Critical Theory: The Case of Wagner, Adorno, and Horkheimer [pp. 52 - 71]Review-ArticleRecent Approaches to Experimental Music Theatre and Contemporary Opera [pp. 72 - 81]

Reviews of Booksuntitled [pp. 82 - 85]untitled [pp. 85 - 88]untitled [pp. 88 - 90]untitled [pp. 90 - 93]untitled [pp. 93 - 96]untitled [pp. 96 - 98]untitled [pp. 98 - 101]untitled [pp. 101 - 104]untitled [pp. 104 - 107]untitled [pp. 107 - 109]untitled [pp. 109 - 112]untitled [pp. 112 - 113]untitled [pp. 113 - 115]untitled [pp. 115 - 118]untitled [pp. 118 - 120]untitled [pp. 120 - 123]untitled [pp. 123 - 126]untitled [pp. 126 - 128]untitled [pp. 128 - 132]untitled [pp. 132 - 136]untitled [pp. 136 - 141]untitled [pp. 141 - 147]untitled [pp. 147 - 153]untitled [pp. 153 - 157]untitled [pp. 157 - 161]untitled [pp. 161 - 163]untitled [pp. 163 - 166]

Reviews of Musicuntitled [pp. 167 - 171]untitled [pp. 171 - 173]untitled [pp. 173 - 176]untitled [pp. 176 - 179]untitled [pp. 179 - 180]

CorrespondenceCharles Avison [p. 181]Grants for Venetian Research [p. 181]

Books Received [pp. 184 - 185]Back Matter

Cannibals Recycling Otherness

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