Fifty Years of Cultural Cannibalism: Contemporary Attitudes Towards Globalization in Ceará

This paper focuses on the influence of Tropicália—a Brazilian art and music movement of the 1960s and 1970s—on contemporary attitudes towards cultural globalization in Ceará, Brazil. This paper examines the influence of one Tropicalist ideal in particular, the concept of antropofagia, or cultural cannibalism. Cultural cannibalism promotes the consumption of foreign cultures with the goal of internalizing and synthesizing with local cultures, and subsequently creating something wholly original. The goal of the paper is to assess the impact of antropofagia on modern attitudes towards globalizing processes and globalized phenomena in Ceará, particularly related to music. Few of the key actors in Ceará explicitly recognize the influence of the Tropicália movement. However, I argue that antropofagia and the Tropicalist manner of interpreting and processing globalization have transcended the legacy of the Tropicália movement itself. Traces of the Tropicalist interpretation of antropofagia are in fact present in daily life in Ceará and continue to shape ways of thinking about globalization.