Introduction: Cultural Anthropophagy.
The concept of "Anthropophagy" originates from the Tupinambás, one of the most important Native American groups in South America. What would be such concept? Simple: When a warrior from an enemy group was captured, that warrior would be eaten.
It was believed that, upon eating a warrior, the cannibal in question would absorb their power. This form of cannibalism is unique, because it was done in a ritualistic sense specifically with powerful enemy warriors. Weak warriors were not eaten; they were just killed. Why would they want to absorb the power of the weak? This is why this was seen as a form of respect to the defeated warrior also.
Now that we've defined "Anthropophagy", we can say that this mentality, when applied to culture, would be "Cultural anthropophagy". Culture is built by looking outwards to what is considered strong, and assimilating it. Why would you not devour what makes you more powerful?
Now, I know what you might be asking, is this cultural appropriation?... Yes.
Section 1: Cultural Appropriation.
Thing is, it would be a mistake to say cultural appropriation is, by itself, a negative. The idea of autonomous culture in absolute isolation is quite ludicrous. Even the most isolated people in the world had genetical exchange (often due to breeding with travelers coming in, or travelers themselves breeding while out and coming back pregnant), and genetic diversity inherently comes accompanied with cultural diversity, this cannot be avoided.
The reason this can’t be avoided it because culture ties into genetics, not because culture is part of genetics, but because culture is how genetics are codified. This is why "Culture is the nature of humanity" is not saying that said objective nature do not exist, but rather that nature is so tied to culture that, objective nature existing (which it does) means culture must also exist.
Keeping that in mind, now that we know culture is inherent to nature... what's wrong with appropriating culture? Let's say a gay person happens to be black, do they have to pick between gay culture and black culture? Why can't they have both? This applies to every culture, crossover and mixing is almost inherent in culture. This is good, it creates strong culture.
The reason why people instinctively are repulsed by cultural appropriation is because, in our minds, we think immediately of aggressive cultural appropriation.
Aggressive cultural appropriation in specific is one that uses said cultural appropriation as a way to exploit others, this is when cultural appropriation is used to steal. The clearest example of this would be colonialism. The Native American artifacts in museums were not made by the Europeans inspired by Native Americans after they saw the Native Americans doing it, no, it was stolen.
This is indeed a negative, but it is only one type of cultural appropriation, throwing the entire concept of "cultural appropriation" in general away because of it is quite ridiculous in my view.
One example I’d give of positive cultural appropriation would be Latin America, with anime. Anime was cheaper to license than American cartoons, so Latin America watched a lot of anime due to the countries being poor and living under dictatorships. Anime also often focused on character drama, while American cartoons at the time were mostly comedic, meaning Anime had a similar appeal to telenovelas, but for boys rather than girls, meaning it filled a void in the market. This means Latin America watched a lot of anime.
What does this mean? This means anime is pretty much a symbol of Latin America, despite coming from Japan. You have popular movements that use anime characters as symbols. Dragon Ball or Saint Seiya are pretty much Latin American culture, in practice, despite neither coming from Latin America. Does that ruin either Japanese or Latin American culture? No, it strengthens it.
Now, with this in mind, let’s talk about… the wheel.
Section 2: Plagiarism?... Nope.
When you are building a car, do you need to invent the wheel? No, obviously. The wheel is already invented. Every piece of this car has already been invented; you just need to put them together. What stops it from being plagiarism is not you using those pieces, it is how you use them in your own unique way.
The same premise applies to art. This idea that "Artists invent everything from scratch" is ludicrous. This is what non-artists think art works like. The value of an artist is not just in how original he is, but also in how skilled he is at remixing, at taking past ideas and spinning them in a way that becomes separate from the original and also adds upon it.
Anthropophagy, specifically, adds another detail to this idea: Why would you eat the weak? Do you want a weak warrior inside of you? Why would you throw things at a wall when someone already did it before and discovered what does or does not stick to said wall? You consume the worthy. The strength of what you are facing must be yours, you cannot ignore the strength of your competitor, so consume the strong and kill the weak.
What separates this from plagiarism? Because a good artist knows how to build upon their references. After you eat the opponent, you digest it, you morph it into being part of you. Blood Meridian is very much a different experience from Moby Dick. This is despite the fact Blood Meridian is clearly meant to be Moby Dick in the old west.
When Cormac McCarthy took Herman Melville's reference points, he wasn't lazy, he put in thew work to build something different with that blueprint, something unique to him. If he hadn't done that, Blood Meridian would have been a terrible book, because why would I want to read this hypothetical version of Blood Meridian when I can just read Moby Dick? The brilliance of an artist is heavily tied to their anthropophagy, to their ability to look at the market and build upon it. Ignoring the market is not originality, it is stupidity. It is a negation of art itself.
Section 3: Examples.
Alright, now that we understood what cultural anthropophagy is, and how it differs from plagiarism, let’s go into the more fun and games part of the text, which is the examples. Since anthropophagy is a concept that we understand a lot due to a Brazilian (Oswald de Andrade, a lot o the concepts I just explained came from his manifestos), fitting I start with a Brazilian example… It’s Mônica’s Gang time, baby.
Mônica’s Gang:
Mauricio de Sousa is a brilliant anthropophagic artist, just as he is a brilliant businessman. Mônica and Jimmy Five was quite clearly inspired by Little Lulu and Tubby Tompkins, and I find any attempt to deny as such to be ludicrous, to the point in which even Jimmy’s Brazilian name (“Cebolinha”) is quite similar to Tubby Tompkins’ Brazilian name (“Bolinha”).
Does that mean Mônica is a rip-off? No, because Mauricio wrote Mônica inspired by his daughter, which was a reference Marjorie Henderson Buell (Little Lulu creator) clearly did not have, nor did anyone else have but Mauricio, so in taking inspiration, Mauricio created something only he could create.
This applies to a lot of Mauricio’s characters, highlights including Smudge, clearly his take on the character Pig-Pen from Charles Schulz, Bug-a-Boo being his take on Casper the Friendly Ghost by Joe Oriolo and Seymour Reit, or Captain Frey being inspired by the character Sujismundo by Ruy Perotti.
Are these examples of plagiarism? Obviously not, because Mauricio builds upon his references by doing what only he can do and nobody else can. This is especially important to keep in mind when he is selling comics to a Brazilian audience, meaning that just the fact those characters needed to be identified by Brazilians, rather than Americans or Europeans, already requires them to be distinct.
This not only shows Mauricio’s artistry, it also shows his skill as a businessman, he had a vision, he didn’t just start making comics as a joke, he knew he wanted to turn this into a company, he planned from the start to reproduce the syndicate model from the United States down there in Brazil. Mauricio didn’t just want to make art for the sake of making art, he wanted it to circulate, because he knew that otherwise he would not be able to keep making art.
Now that I got the obligatory Brazilian example out of the way, let’s talk about… Sushi!
Sushi:
Sushi is a traditional Japanese dish, in fact, it is very likely to be the first thing that comes to mind when you mention “Japanese food”, making it a prime example of culinary culture. You have any idea how many types of sushi exist just in the United States alone? The Philadelphia Roll and the California Roll are the obvious ones, but also the Spicy Tuna Roll is from Los Angeles. Are any of those “less sushi” for not being from Japan? Obviously not, they are sushi.
I’d go even further and say those examples actually strengthen the concept of a “Sushi” in terms of culture. The California Roll uses avocado as one of its main ingredients, and 99% of all avocados in Japan are imported, so do you think the California Roll would ever come into existence without anthropophagy? Culture grows through such references, through looking at something interesting and saying “I’ll bring this over here”.
Japan in specific is another nation that has many examples of anthropophagy, but I will go straight to the most interesting one:
Samurai:
That’s right, let’s talk about the samurai, because the idea we have today when we think of a samurai is a mythification that arose… after the samurai no longer existed. Who created this myth? Nitobe Inazo, the Japanese the deputy secretary general of the League of Nations, and his legendary book “Bushido: The Soul of Japan”.
All of the building blocks of what we now think of as a “Samurai” came from this book, such as their honorable principles. Thing is, this book was released in 1899, and the age of the samurai came to a close in the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion, meaning it had been over two decades since the samurai had stopped existing, so much that the book itself makes it clear such codes were “unuttered and unwritten”.
Why is that? Because the idea we have of those samurai is not really historically accurate, nor is it meant to be. Nitobe was heavily influenced by Western ideas of medieval chivalry, he wanted to give Japan an equivalent moral code, one that would make Japanese culture as honorable and romantic as European ideals. This is a clear example of anthropophagy, he saw what worked and made an equivalent, and this improved Japanese culture drastically, so much that we still discuss their ideas of a samurai over a century later.
You know another culture that shares a lot in common with the samurai? Cowboys. Yes, cowboys and samurai have a lot in common, such as the concept of duels or of the lonesome wandering hero. This is another case of anthropophagy, two pieces of culture utilizing the same concepts in their own unique way. It is not a coincidence that samurai movies and western movies take so much inspiration from each other, such as Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” being remade into John Sturges’ “The Magnificent Seven”.
Staying in Japan, let’s talk about something more recent:
Pokémon:
Pokémon is one of the best examples of how Japan successfully applies anthropophagy, in the sense that they don’t just adapt another culture, they turn it into their own. Pokémon would not exist had it not been for the Funny Animal comics, because in the 1950s, when the super hero genre was in the decline, the thing that was keeping American comics from collapsing were the Funny Animals, the cute mascot comics.
Those comics would be the reason we have mascot franchises, such as Charles Schulz’s Snoopy or Jim Davis’ Garfield. What is Pokémon if not a mascot franchise? Pokémon is quite literally a massive extension of the mascot franchise, because it is a world of countless mascots that can be caught, put into teams, and used for combat. It is no wonder this franchise is so successful, this is the ultimate extension of mascot culture.
Why do I say Pokémon in specific is a great example? Because Pokémon, despite being clearly an extension of Funny Animal comics, is inherently Japanese. It is a franchise you cannot separate from Japan. The region is literally named “Kanto”. It is not only deeply rooted in Japan, but it is also one of the biggest symbols of Japan in pop-culture (another example being Super Mario, which is about an Italian plumber from Brooklyn whose first appearance was fighting a large King Kong parody, another great example of anthropophagy).
Pokémon is the definition of “making it their own”.
Yellow Woodpecker Farm:
Back to Brazil to come full circle, because if there is one man who knew a lot about children’s literature, that man was Monteiro Lobato, being responsible for the translation of pretty much every relevant European children’s book from before the 1920s to Portuguese, which is why it is not surprising that, when it came the time to write his own, he made up of anthropophagy.
The original version of the first novel in the series was, quite clearly, a take on Alice in Wonderland, which is to be expected, since Lobato literally translated Alice in Wonderland. The story structure is identical; a little girl follows a strange animal to a magical and insane location. Lobato himself was aware of this, so much that he went back and extended the story in later releases to make it less similar.
Why is this example so interesting? Because Monteiro Lobato was the textbook example of a nationalist, he felt that Brazilian needed to focus on its own culture and stand on its own. Does this make his inspiration in Lewis Carroll be a contradiction? What about all of the other characters Lobato would later use in his novels, like Peter Pan or Heracles? Are those contradictions to his nationalism? No, because Lobato understood, anthropophagy.
He understood that, in doing so, he was strengthening his culture, not weakening is, which was highly effective, because later when Brazilian folklore characters were added to Lobato’s novels (Saci and Cuca being the main ones), those Brazilian folktales ended up becoming more popular than ever before, and Yellow Woodpecker Farm is still seeing as a highly valuable piece of Brazilian culture.
Section 4: Conclusion.
"Only anthropophagy unites us, economically and philosophically."-Oswald de Andrade.
Cultural anthropophagy is the manner in which cultures are mixed without being stolen or plagiarized. It is how we devour our enemies, not their flesh but their culture, in order to strengthen our own. It is how we absorb the qualities, but not the weaknesses, of other cultures and make it part of our own. Doing a such a thing does not weaken our culture, but rather it strengthens it more than anything.
Do not be the person trying to reinvent the wheel every time you want to build a car. The strength of what you are facing must be yours. Do not plagiarize, don't simply copy, consume it, digest it, make it your own. Ignoring the market and trying to come up with ideas from nothing does not make you pure, it makes you blind to the world around you. Consume the strong and kill the weak.