WORK IN PROGRESS: REPRESENTING THE "OTHER" ACCORDING TO ANTHROPOPHAGIC THOUGHT

CASOS DE ESTUDO - «HANS STADEN» E «LES MAÎTRES FOUS»

Abstract

This article analyzes the film by Luis Alberto Pereira «Hans Staden» (1999), based on the book by Hans Staden «Two Trips to Brazil» (1974), and the documentary/film «Les Maîtres Fous» (1955) by Jean Rouch, taking into account the anthropophagic thought. These works focus on the cultural clash between “civilized” and “wild”, among cannibalistic rituals and anthropophagy, between «Us» and the «Other», a meetings that allows a more concrete conception of the alternity concept. The film allows an approach to the anthropophagic concept of appropriation of a foreign culture. After, a process of analysis, the Western concept plays its own interpretation of the listed rituals. The anthropophagy movement, due to its innovative character, combines the Brazilian origin and simultaneously enhances the irreverence of analysis. This is the theoretical and practical basis for the decomposition of the examples. Cannibal thought and its applicability to the selected examples also allow further study on the European imagination as a recreation of reports dating from travelers and settlers, which maintain a historical stereotype that has become a form of concept “legitimation”. Both works focus on the representation of indigenous and African people - the “savage” - in the construction of the western imagination - “civilized” - a dichotomy that allows us to demystify intercultural relations.