THE IMPLICATIONS OF MODERNITY:
Globalisation, Anthropophagy and Contemporary Brazilian Culture
Peter Grimes:
Captain Balstrode:
I am native, rooted here
By familiar fields,
Marsh and sand,
Ordinary Streets,
Prevailing winds…
And by the kindness
Of a casual glance.
You’d slip these moorings
If you had the mind
Benjamin Britten / Montagu Slater: Peter Grimes
***********************************************************************
‘We have not moved beyond modernity but are living precisely through a phase of its radicalisation’
‘Living in the modern world is more like being aboard a careering juggernaut
rather than being in a carefully controlled and well-driven motor car’
Antony Giddens, in: The Consequences of Modernity, 1990
According to British sociologist Anthony Giddens (1990) globalisation is the global
expansion of Western modernity. Globalisation is seen as tied to modernity not only by Giddens, but
also by the Dutch Professor of global sociology, Jan Nederveen Pieterse (1995). The latter indeed
recognises that many views on globalisation interpret it as the final consequence of the globalising
quality of modernity. He also adds that the phenomenon is most commonly interpreted as the world
becoming more uniform and standardised through technological, commercial and cultural
synchronisation emanating from the West. Pieterse remarks have two central implications. Firstly, they
imply that if globalisation is seen as rooted in modernity, a mode of social life, values and organisations
that originated in the West, globalisation therefore stands for a planetary expansion of Western
institutions, values and developmental processes. Consequently, globalisation may be seen as the
current stage of the historical path of increasing hegemony traced by particular central cultures along
the trajectory of modernity. For this reason, from the 70s onwards, globalisation has been associated
with standardisation – a process of homogenisation of politico-economic institutions, symbolic practices,
consumer habits and life-style across the world. Modernity is indeed ‘inherently globalising’ – and, I
would add, inherently westernising (Giddens, 1990, p. 63). This leads sociological and development
theory discourses to couple globalisation with the theory of Westernisation: a narrow window on the
world opened by those that believe Western influences are not interpreted by the receiver. Secondly, it
highlights the multidimensional traits of the phenomenon of globalisation, which encompasses the fields
of economy, technological progress under its mediatic and non-mediatic forms, and cultural
manifestations.
Hence, on the one hand, it is possible to maintain that globalisation is theorised as an extension
of the modern expansionistic urges expressed by hegemonic countries under the form of colonialism in
the 16th century, and imperialism in the 19th century - and that globalisation stands for late 20th century
neo-imperialism. On the other hand, it becomes clear that the huge processes of economic and
technological transformation that globalisation triggers ‘cannot be properly understood until they are
grasped through the conceptual vocabulary of culture; likewise that these transformations change the
very fabric of cultural experience and, indeed, affect our sense of what culture actually is in the modern
world’ (Tomlinson [1], 1999, p. 1). The tight interrelation between global capitalist expansion and culture
is undeniable. Given that globalisation, as an economic project has lost its universalising ethos - that it
has been ‘replaced by new-imperialism as humanity adjusts to the realities of the…violent reassertion of
geographical competition’; then, discourses that interpret the globalised culture that follows as a mere
planetary installation of a culture born out of the privileged historical experience of Western modernity
are plausible1 (Held and McGrew, 2007, p.7). In recent years, some of these discourses have
nevertheless assumed a less pessimistic and radical position. It has, in fact been recognised that
globalisation, although being a consequence of modernity, cannot only be a one-way cultural flow.
During the 80s and 90s, academic debates opened up space to formulations that saw globalisation as
an increased contact in between cultures, rather than as an imposition of dominant cultures upon
others. This sort of thinking established that cultural multiplicity and reflexivity, or, in other words,
cultural hybridity, are indeed possible.
Another perspective that can be used in order to grasp the complexity of this phenomenon is to
point out some different disciplinary conceptualisations of globalisation. Within social sciences,
Birmingham-inspired cultural sociology ‘has focused on globalization as a recognition of what is
conceived as increasing world-wide interconnections, interchanges and movements of people, images
and commodities’ (Friedman, 1995, p. 69). The field of cultural studies is concerned with the
implications of global communications in relation to the generation of cultural outcomes spanning from
standardisation to postcolonial multiplicity. And in economics, globalisation refers to ‘economic
internationalization and the spread of capitalistic market relations’ whilst stemming from the world
system approach of historical political economy that was developed in the late 60s by Frank and
Wallerstein2(Nederveen Pieterse, 1995, p.45) . In recent years all the aforementioned disciplines have
1
These discourses are centred on what Professor of Sociology and Communication, Mike
Featherstone, describes as ‘two contending hypotheses or models’ (Featherstone, 1995, p. 6). The first
one began in the late 70s under the influence of academics of the Left, such as Herbert Schiller, and
stressed how local difference was eroded by ‘the rise of global cultural preferences (Americanisation)
and administrative systems’ (Smith and Riley, 2009, p. 224). Smith and Riley wrote that, within this
model, ‘particular attention was given to the export of United States-sourced media and entertainment
products, such as Disney cartoons…[; and to]…a generic, rootless and ever-expanding capitalist
rationality’ (ibid). The second one, coined during the 80s and the 90s, emerged to stress ‘the incredibly
complex interplay of the global and the local’ (ibid). Since then, Smith and Riley explain,
‘the “global” refers to the extensive social and cultural forces associated with globalisation (e.g.,
consumerism, satellite communications, culture industries, migration), while “the local” refers to smallscale, geographically confined traditions and way of life (e.g., ethnic traditions, language, religion)’
(ibid, pp. 224 -225).
Although this model is far less pessimistic than the first one, it does not preclude homogenisation from
being one of the outcomes of the global encounter with the local. However, it opens up new avenues to
the collision of the global with the local. One avenue has been named hybridisation, that is, the mixing of
culture and lifestyles. According to Smith and Riley, this theme is ‘exemplified by Lyotard’s notion of
urban cosmopolitanism, …and Homi Bhabha’s images of postcolonial migrants, who share qualities of
both core and periphery. A major theme here can be the way that global forces […] are adapted or
modified by local conditions’ (ibid, p. 225). The other avenue goes under the name of difference, and
implies that the local can be reaffirmed through globalisation. Smith and Riley established that
difference, according to the disciplinary standing point, can be expressed by ‘ethnic revivals, struggle for
indigenous rights, religious fundamentalism, and racist backlashes’ (ibid); or, as in the specific case of
the postcolonial stand point, by a process that has ‘opened up space for […] an endlessly proliferating
babble of voices’ that destabilise hierarchies and hegemonic values (ibid).
2 In the years following the end of the Second World War, economic development specialists and
anthropologists started to formulate theories destined to emancipate ex colonies by emphasising the
state, economic planning, the growth of the market and labour flows, foreign capital supply and
commoditisation. Traditional societies should have gone through a thorough process of development
that would be characterised by several stages of growth – such as economic, technological,
demographic, institutional and ideological.
By the 60s, what was named “Development and
Modernisation Theory” in the 50s, took the shape of “World-System Theory” (Frank, 1969) and
“Dependency Theory” (Wallerstein, 1979). With this replacement, the complexities of peripheral
countries’ development were no longer bound to classic economics, where the world was seen as a
developed a large literature dealing with globalisation and each of them has considered both culture and
economics to different extents. As social anthropologist Jonathan Friedman put it, ‘while it is surely the
case that world-system theorists have been primarily concerned with the political economic phenomena,
this does not exclude an adequate approach to so-called issues of culture in such a framework, nor
even a unified approach in which cultural specificity is an aspect of the other social phenomena’
(Friedman, 1995, p. 69). Most importantly, Friedman’s account not only reiterates that ‘many of the
categories of globalisation discourse are ideological products of a specific form of identity space, often
referred to as “modernity” ‘; it also recognises that these discourses, through their direct connection to
the modern era, are unavoidably rooted in the modern world system originated in the discovery of the
Americas (ibid).
Accordingly, globalisation converges with modernity also under the latter’s colonial
manifestations, which, since the 16th century, established the Atlantic commercial circuit. Globalisation
is coupled with modernity departing from the 1500s by seminal thinkers such as Marx and Wallerstein.
As Pieterse (1995) explains, a large body of work on globalisation theory derives from their works, and
depart from the premises that both these phenomena relate to the spread of the world market based on
the presence of the nation state, universalism and individualisation.
Given that it has been established that globalisation goes hand-in-hand with both Western
modernity and the modern world system since its formation, I want to focus for a while on the period in
which the United States entered ‘the concert of imperial nations’ and began to sketch strategies for
managing the planet (Mignolo, 2000, p. 21). If globalisation can be interpreted as the planetary spread
of Western economic, technological and cultural systems, it is vital to point out that during the second
stage of the modern world – and subsequently to 19th century decolonisation of the Americas – the
United States began to play a central role within what is today defined as the hegemony of the West.
The strategies designed at that time gave to the United State the possibility initially to exercise with
Europe effective political and economic dominion over the rest of the world – and subsequently overtake
Europe in the hegemonic re-mapping of the 20th century. The ascending trajectory of this country has
been discussed by de/post-colonial theorist, Walter Mignolo, who stated that post-independence United
States had ‘a clear perspective of their “manifest destiny” and project of their future imperial power’ –
the latter being fully consolidated within postcolonial nations from the second half of the 20 th century
onwards (ibid, p. 133). Concomitantly, during the second stage of the modern world the United State
became involved with the dichotomy modernity/tradition established by the expansive project of
modernity3. In fact, this is the moment in which modernity started to replace tradition in both Europe and
the USA - the most significant point of European colonial expansion (Tomlinson [1], 1999). Considering
this inclusion of the USA in the geo-political category of the West, it is possible to state that today’s
process of westernisation patronises the inadequacy of the subaltern by affirming the Euro-American
‘particular cultural development and current way of life as universally valid’ (ibid, p. 63).
So far, the aspects of globalisation theory discussed indicate that both globalisation and
Westernisation began with 16th century colonialism and that since the 19th century both phenomena
include the USA as an active agent of the hegemonic strategies of world domination. However, only
after 20th century decolonisation and through the emergence of Modernisation theory, the longestablished process of globalisation is largely articulated as a process of modernisation that propagates
Western originated values in order to emancipate culturally and economically underdeveloped societies.
Without 16th century expansionism the ‘tradition-modernity dualism [that] became the single, universal
collection of national economies; these complexities started, instead, to be conceived in relation to the
emergence of a single global market dominated by giant transnational corporations. Authors across
Development, Modernisation, World-System and Dependency theories have been accused of paying
little attention to culture (Worsley, 1999).
3 In his book Hybrid Cultures, Nestor Garcia Canclini describes the four basic movements constitutive of
modernity, one of them being relevant at this point of my study, namely: the expansive project. For
Canclini, the expansive project stands for ‘the tendency of modernity that seeks to extend the
knowledge and the possession of nature, and the production, circulation, and consumption of goods’
(Canclini, 1995, p. 12). The expansive project is ‘manifested in the promotion of scientific discoveries
and industrial development’, which are at the basis of the politico-economic dominance of hegemonic
countries upon subaltern ones (ibid).
story of human development’ would not have followed (Tomlinson [1], 1999, p. 64). Accordingly,
colonies, such as Brazil, would not have experienced 20th century modernity as an extension of colonial
domination. And the West would not have recognised ‘tradition’ as the economic backwardness and
‘cultural deficit of the “rest” ‘ to be replaced by modernisation in countries such as Brazil (ibid).
MODERNITY, MODERNISATION PROCESSES AND ANTHROPOPHAGY
It is now possible to extend the implications of modernity to Brazil and its Anthropophagic
movement. Modernity marked the discovery of Brazil and is responsible for what Brazilian art critic
Benedito Nunes indentifies as the trauma of Brazilian society - which ‘resulted from the colonial
repression that determined its growth (Nunes, 2004, p.57). Brazilian discontent with regard to the
implications of modernity found its clear expression in poet and polemicist Oswald de Andrade’s
Anthropophagite Manifesto, published in 1928. The proclamation of Andrade’s manifesto resulted in a
“cannibalistic” aesthetic-literary movement associated to Brazilian modernismo and both place under
scrutiny Brazil’s cultural identity in relation to the authority of the West. With particular reference to
Anthropophagy, cultural identity was questioned with polemic spirit and redefined by the devouring,
metabolisation and assimilation of European modernist trends. Anthropophagy therefore elaborated its
notions of cultural identity from the specific perspective of high-culture (i.e. visual arts and literature), yet
its proposal of a Brazilian modernismo as hybrid, rather than a copy of the European one implied the
de-authorisation of Western discourses in ways which can be transferred to the whole realm of culture.
Furthermore, we can state that the movement itself had in its agenda this type of aspiration, in fact it
fostered ‘the ideal of a renewal of [cultural] life that would encompass the whole of existence’ whether
artistic or social (ibid). For Andrade - and to name one of the greatest exponents of the movement, for
painter Tarsila do Amaral – to adjust Brazil’s cultural identity was an intellectual challenge indispensable
for the contextualisation of Brazilian culture within cosmopolitan culture. This venture would renew the
existent idea of Brazilian culture, and configure it as finally emancipated and ready to be projected to
the rest of the world as no longer affiliated to European culture.
By 1928 Brazil had already experienced the abolition of slavery; the end of the Empire which
followed the country’s independence from Portugal in 1822; and the beginning of the Republic in 1889,
but the politically ex-colonised was still adopting the customs of the coloniser. Anthropophagy resulted
from the recognition, on behalf of the cultural and artistic elites, of this subordinating influence and
‘produced [within these elites] a violent and systematic reaction to the sociopolitical mechanisms, artistic
and literary expressions’ generated abroad and exported in the guise of valuable canons which, if
unwrapped, would have rendered a form inappropriate to the reality of the importer (ibid, pp. 57-58).
Anthropophagy was born of a need for independence; art critic Thomas Sandfuhr describes it as a
‘programmatic concept […] which postulates the metaphorical devouring of the other, the other culture,
in order to appropriate its strength and to pave the way for cultural emancipation’ (Sandfuhr, 2005, p.
42). In a lecture on Anthropophagy, Sandfuhr underscores that the need for cultural independence was
expressed over a century after the political one; ‘only at that time did Brazilian artists and intellectuals
begin to develop an awareness of the nature of the relationship between their country and the
hegemonic powers, and began to consciously search for ways to free themselves from the restrains of
cultural dependency’ (ibid, p. 43). Anthropophagy was an explicit symptom produced by Westernisation:
it was the recognition that futuristic and surrealistic approaches coming from Europe could not simply be
implanted like any other input coming from the West. These approaches needed to be cannibalised,
hence, hybridised by the Brazilian.
However, Anthropophagy was unable to overcome a major problem. It attempted ‘to assimilate
and to implement the cultural turnaround unleashed by modernism in settings where modernisation was
a faraway promise’ (Ramirez, 2004, p. 2). The 18th and particularly the 19th century had brought a
conspicuous economic development and technological innovation to Western Europe and British settler
colonies. The prosperity of high capitalism meant that in these countries modernisation – as a stage of
social development growing out of an industrial economy – could find its reflection in social change, and
the aesthetic and artistic codes of modernism. Certainly, by the 1920s, Sao Paulo - the city of a large
majority of Brazilian artists and intellectuals, such as Andrade – had ‘begun to lead the industrial
revolution of Brazil’4 ; and the Anthropophagic movement can be described as the avantgarde of
industrial and democratic modernisation (Chaimovich, 2006, p. 81). However, the actual condition of the
country was still pre-modern; marked by the spiritual domination of Jesuit catechesis, by reminiscences
of the subjugation to the Portuguese Crown such as the still dominant ethical code of the landowner who would reign undisturbed over both his family in the Casa Grande, and the peasants in the Senzala.
As Stewart Hall argued, ‘it does not make much sense to say that modern societies started at the same
moment and developed uniformly within a single historical “time” ‘ - and 1920s Brazil’s context, based
on a semi-oligarchic dominant order, a semi-industrialised capitalist economy and a semitransformative social movement, had not developed as much as the West (Hall, 1992, p. 9).
Therefore, Anthropophagy, as a program of renewal that would encompass the whole of social
existence – where Brazilian society would swallow the enemy, ingesting and metabolising hegemonic
influences; or in other words, where Brazilians could ‘marginalise the other’ – was an unsuccessful
venture (Sandfuhr, 2005, p. 42). Anthropophagy indeed underscored the pervasive presence of a
domineering other, envisaging the idea of difference so important to the post-colonial discourse; but it
did not trigger nor reflect a mass-scale digestion of the cultural and ethical values of the West. This type
of digestion was a far too ambitious venture as the unripe, fragmented and uneven socio-economic
realities of the New World could not yet compete with hegemonic grand narratives - from industrial
development and technological innovation; from democratisation of society and self regulated
production of culture and symbolic practice. The Anthropophagic movement could not overcome the
difficulty of applying cultural modernism in a context alien to socio-economic modernisation. This can
be proved by Canclini’s views regarding Latin American modernistas, who on their return from Europe
had to face the dilemma of ‘how to make their international experience compatible with the tasks
presented to them by developing societies’ (Canclini, 1995, p. 50).
It was only after the first half of the 20th century that the elites in the arts and literature
encountered a significant socio-economic modernisation in their own country. After the Second World
War, and subsequent to further decolonisation of the periphery of the world, Latin America was
subjected to a new hegemonic wave destined to re-configure the strategies of domination and control of
peripheries. A new economic/technological determinism was in place in order to impose the path
pioneered by Western Europe and the United States to the underdeveloped world. Modernisation theory
coined an ‘evolutionist model which postulated that any society aiming at ‘development’ would have to
go through several ‘stages of growth’ based on the full set of Western values and social institutions; and
this model led to the economic development of Brazil that found his highest expression within
Desarrollismo (Worsley, 1999, p. 31). This stage of development brought intensive industrialisation
through the installation of multinationals, the expansion of the markets; the increase in school
attendance, and the introduction of new communication technologies – all factors finally able to fully
emancipate Brazil from the dimension of tradition. Brazil was finally introduced to the metropolitan
model of modernity and this model continued its trajectory within Dependency and World-System
theories throughout the 70s and the 80s. Modernism, in Brazil, had finally met modernity.
Anthropophagy, in 1928 was an attempt to process influences coming from the West exclusively
expressed within the aesthetic and literary realm of culture and with limited manifestations within culture
in a broader sense. In the 20s, when writers and artists of the Anthropophagic movement divulgated
their ideals, 75 percent of the Brazilian population was illiterate (Canclini, 1995). Hence, the
acknowledgement of a hegemonic cultural infiltration was indeed restricted to the small cultural elite.
Anthropophagy did not correspond to a societal reaction against these invasive forces. Within
modernity, art and literature have been emancipated to the position of pioneers and agents of social
change, and Brazilian modernists were well aware of the fact that their society had to fight against the
threat of Westernisation. But how could these intellectuals disseminate their creeds if, for instance, ‘the
average print run for a novel was only a thousand copies as late as 1930’? (ibid, p. 42). Brazilian socioeconomic modernisation since the second half of the 20th century not only brought the literacy index to
67 percent by the 60s, it also marked the flourishing of the cultural industry. Even if fostered by
domineering strategies, cultural reception and assimilation was finally filtering out to a wider audience
4
All translations of Felipe Chaimovich text by the author unless otherwise specified
particularly due to the commodification of culture and its simplification into mass-media symbolic
languages.
What I am implying here is that the phenomena of cultural imperialism - even if set in order to
support hegemonic interests by using means other than economic mechanisms of control over the
periphery - generated an active interconnection; a dynamic interaction between external cultural
influences and local cultural practices. Structural development, foreign economic admixture, the
advance of global telecommunication; all implementations that reached Brazil in order to both establish
a new form of capitalist subjugation of the Third World, and replace the death of colonialism (Letchener
and Boli, 2004) gave to the country’s population the possibility of having extensive knowledge of the
nature and values of the West. Finally the acknowledgement of ‘an immaterial, protean, and multisided
enemy’ that at the time of the anthropophagic proclamation belonged to elitist theorising could be
experienced also by the masses (Nunes, 2004, p. 57).
Although I recognise Anthropophagy to be an attempt to oppose resistance to artistic and literary
Westernisation, some art historians, such as Saul Yurkievich interpreted Latin-American modernismo as
homogenisation to European modernism – as ‘ “transplants”, “grafts”, disconnected from [Latin America]
reality’ (Canclini, 1995, p. 43). According to him, Cubism, Futurism or Surrealism have been imported
by countries such as Brazil ‘without having entered the “mechanical kingdom” of the futurists, without
having reached any industrial peak, without having entered fully into the consumer society, without
being invaded by assembly line production or restrained by an excess of functionalism’ (ibid, p. 43).
Anthropophagy, it is submitted, stands for cannibalism. As proved by Spanish essayist, Eduardo
Subirats, in his From Surrealism to Anthropophagy (2001) “cannibalism” was a term metaphorically
associated with art and culture within the Parisian artistic avantgarde. ‘At the beginning of the 20s
Picabia had already published a magazine called Cannibale’5 (Subirats, 2001, p. 27) and Dali (Fig. 6)
subsequently adopted the term in order to depict ‘a systematic and civilising artistic program [which
would convert] aesthetic surrealism into an edible one’ (ibid). Using his argument as a basis, Andrade’s
metaphor both sounds unoriginal; and seems to limit Anthropophagy to an attempt to align Brazilian art
theories and cultural productions to the Western modernist trends that at the time reproved the
savagery of industrial society by celebrating primitivism.
However, Yurkievich analysis is simplistic and fails to grasp the depth and complexity of the
Anthropophagic project. The stance with which he rescales Latin American modernism to the limits of
aesthetic-literary homogenisation mirrors the one of cultural commentators who, few decades ago, have
interpreted the latest waves of Western influences that have invaded peripheral countries consequent to
globalisation as shallow Westernisation. Yet, Andrade’s Anthropophagy stands upright against both
claims. Even if 1920/30s Anthropophagy was a form of cultural intermingling between a recipient culture
and a transplanted one limited to high-culture circles; it proved that cultural transplants were not
received passively. Contrarily, these transplants were deliberately metabolised and syncretised.
Anthropophagy challenged the Old World authority and fought against westernising forces by
problematising the direct applicability of international information (above all French). Its processing of
European avantgarde aesthetic-literary postulates was indeed an early, yet circumscribed, form of
cultural hybridisation that still generates perplexities towards the homogenising properties of
westernising processes
WESTERNISATION, PERIPHERAL EMANCIPATION AND THE DECLINE OF THE WEST
It is now time to contextualise Westernisation within the specific context of the second-half of the
century. Earlier on, I advocated that cultural imperialism, although promoted by politico-economic
interests stemming from hegemonic countries, has initiated a process of global interconnectedness that
favoured a massified awareness of the presence of external cultural influences within peripheral
populations. However, cultural imperialism is certainly more focussed on discourses surrounding
domination of the centre over the periphery; rather than on the one that I have proposed above, namely
20th
5
All translations of Eduardo Subirats’ text by the author unless otherwise specified
the recognition of a subjugating presence on behalf of the periphery. These well established discourses
entail, as John Tomlinson puts it, the control of the ‘ “West over the rest” of the world, of the core over
the periphery, of the modern world over the fast disappearing traditional one, of capitalism over more or
less everything and everyone’ (Tomlinson [1], 1999, p. 80).
By the 60s, the globalising properties of modernity dramatically increased the threat of
homogenisation envisaged by the Anthropophagic movement within the specific realm of high culture. It
has been claimed that cultural imperialism, through the spread of the mass-media and other forms of
mediated communications, was involved in a process of transmission of instrumental symbolisations
which favoured the standardisation of culture to the canons of the West. Since then and as we have
mentioned earlier, the ideal of a global culture has been surrounded by notions that see it ‘as liable to
be a hegemonic culture’ (ibid, p. 79). Yet, the manipulation of the cultural industry and of the means of
communication with which the centre of the emerging world-system order intended to effectively operate
on the new global market was based on a ‘time-space compression’ process (ibid, p.3). What this
implies is that the centre, in order to dominate the periphery of the world, relied on a process able to
shrink cultural distances ‘through the dramatic reduction in the time taken, either physically,…or
representationally (via transmission of electronically mediated information and images), to cross them’
(ibid). This is a Janus-faced process: it triggers formulations that interpret global integration as planetary
standardisation to the institutions and values of the centre – but it is also responsible for the
transformation of local symbolic practices and cultural experiences. The velocity and facility with which
Western values can reach, on mass-scale, cultures such as the Brazilian one, is equalled only by the
dexterity with which such culture can react to the values received.
In my opinion, interpreting the cultural connectivity and proximity created during the globalising
process as weapons with which dominant cultures threaten to overwhelm other more vulnerable ones
expresses the worst connotation of modernity, namely ethnocentrism. Globalisation as ‘a theory of
Westernisation by another name’ only consolidates a new facet of ethnocentrism, torn between selfconsciousness and a reinforced dependency on the cultural “other” – a facet that sustains the myth of
Western cultural superiority by relating to other cultures as if they were an enhancing mirror (Nederveen
Pieterse, 1995, p. 47). The idea of a single, globalised culture gained full strength as a part of the
conceptual articulation of Development theory following the Second World War. It then became more
and more established during the World-System/Dependency theoretical model – until gaining a
dominant position within early Globalisation theory from the 70s to the early 90s. Since then, the global
monoculture argument is primarily based on, as Tomlinson puts it, the following logic:
the globalising culture that is currently emerging is not…a culture that has arisen out of the mutual
experiences and needs of all humanity. It does not draw equally on the world’s diverse cultural
traditions. It is neither inclusive, balanced, nor…synthesising. Rather, globalised culture is the
installation, world-wide, of one particular privileged experience. It is…the global extension of Western
culture. The broad implications…are that this process is…part and parcel of wider forms of
domination – those involved in the ever-widening grip of transnational capitalism and those involved
in the maintenance of post-colonial relations of (economic and cultural) dependency (Tomlinson [2],
1999, p. 23)
What this implies is that the intensification of word-wide social relations generated by the
globalising process is a crude model of one-way flow of cultural influence. This argument ignores the
idea that ‘movement between cultural/geographical areas always involves interpretation, translation,
mutation, adaptation and “indigenisation” as the receiving culture brings its own cultural resources to
bear, in dialectical fashion, upon “cultural imports” ‘ (Tomlinson [1], 1999, p. 84). The argument looks
only at one of the Janus-faces of the ‘time-space compression’ phenomenon described above; and
overrides the reflexive abilities of receiving cultures.
Intensive cultural connectivity and proximity, more than homogenising local cultures to the canons
of the West, facilitate both mass-scale reflexivity within the receiving culture; and an infinite melange of
the implanted culture with the receiving one. More than consolidating Westernisation they trigger
hybridisation. Consequently, Westernisation, rather than being a final stage, is a transitory passage
through which peripheral cultures need to pass in order to emancipate themselves from the historical,
domineering influence of the central ones. Theorising Westernisation as the ultimate outcome of
globalisation denies the complexity of cultural appropriation. It implies that (as colonialism is dead and
direct politico-military control can no longer be practiced by the centre over the periphery) hegemony
has been mass-produced and mass-divulgated through intensified communication media, then ‘shipped
out to the global village, and unwrapped in innocent minds’ (ibid). From this perspective, seeing
contemporary Brazilian culture as a result of Westernisation would nullify the visionary ethos of the
Anthropophagic movement and deny the transformative, yet transitory, nature of late globalising
modernity. However, if we look at the other Janus-face of ‘time-space compression’ - the one
disregarded by those that wish to give to Westernisation totalising qualities - connectivity and proximity
pave the way for the cultural emancipation of the periphery. In Brazil, this process finally allows
Anthropophagy to achieve its highest goal: to trigger a societal phenomenon of devouring and
‘assimilation in the sense of incorporating foreign substances, foreign culture in the own’ (Sandfuhr,
2005, p. 42). Anthropophagy can now be viewed as more than a programmatic concept among artisticliterary elites that by implication involves solely Brazilian high-culture production.
The apex of globalising modernity was indeed reached in the second half of the 20th century through the trajectory shaped by Modernisation, World-system/Dependency theories and supported by
cultural imperialism. But the ubiquitous extension of Western institutions (capitalism, industrialism,
communication technologies, consumer culture and so on) represents ‘the declining grip of the West
over the rest of the world’ (Giddens, 1990, p. 52). Westernisation is not only a transitory phenomena
that lasted only for a few decades, it is an ethnocentric project that went wrong; instead of reiterating the
control of the West it has increasingly empowered the very countries it wished to further command. The
conversion of globalising modernity into fully fledged globalisation is proving this point to be right; and,
as stated by Giddens, after an initial phase which was ‘plainly governed …by the expansion of the
West,…globalisation today can no longer be spoken of only as a matter of one-wayimperialism…increasingly there is no obvious “direction” to globalisation at all [.] … the current phase of
globalisation, then, should not be confused with the preceding one, whose structures it acts increasingly
to subvert (Giddens, 1994, p.96).
One of the latest subversions of the globalisation phase based on Westernisation specifically
involves Brazil. This subversion is showing Anthropophagy to have finally met, beyond conspicuous
cultural manifestations, also economic ones. Anthropophagy is now reaching beyond cultural
manifestations and deep into the economy. Hence, the devouring of the West is now being extended to
the sphere of capital since the latest global financial collapse and the emergence of the BRIC block – of
which Brazil is a leading exponent. Brazil is currently part of the block of emerging economies that after
the 2008 global recession managed to recover while the other countries ‘as a whole…[were] mired in
recession’ (www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory, June 2009). As stated by The
Economist in 2009, the BRICs ‘are recovering fast and starting to think the recession may mark another
milestone in a worldwide shift of economic power away from the West’ (ibid). At the beginning of this
chapter I claimed that the economic expressions of globalisation are interrelated to the cultural ones and
vice-versa: hence if Westernisation in economic terms is proving to have reached a turning point where
Brazilian economy has ingested, metabolised and transformed the enemy into skills with which to
overcome the enemy itself, it is most likely that Brazilian cultural realm is behaving accordingly.