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Résumé
The conceit of culture as the cultivation of human abilities comes from the act of cultivating land. An immediate bloody paradox appears because we must hurt the Earth with a knife – the plow coulter – creating both a groove and a border. Drawing the edges of a field with a plow, our ancestors established spatial divisions, and gave a meaning to boundaries. The boundary stones and the walls of towns divided town and country, citizen and peasant, civilized and savage people, separating identities and cultures. One way to cross boundaries is cultural digestion, a concept articulated in the Manifesto Antropófago by Brazilian intellectual Oswald de Andrade in 1928. Ingesting the meats allows the cannibal to incorporate the entire world of the enemy and initiate a process of transformation in the other, symbolically feeding on the viewpoint of the devoured, digesting the good, and expelling the waste. The example of samba/bossa-nova musical genre is reported. The typical Brazilian music merged “white” music of European immigrants and “black” rhythms of African slaves producing an original new genre. Educated musician Tom Jobim and João Gilberto eventually used the cannibal bossa-nova to colonize the musical empire of North America and other Western countries.