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Paper short abstract:

Through the figure of the antropófago, the wo/man eater, the aims of this presentation are twofold: to account for the strategies and tactics that the young of a favela undertake so as to meet their desires, and to explore the potentialities and relations between anthropology and anthropófagia.

Paper long abstract:

"I am only interested in what's not mine. The law of men. The law of the cannibal." (de Andrade, 1928)

Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, in his Cannibalist Manifesto, or Manifesto Antropófago employed the figure of the anthropófago, from the greek anthropos, for man, and fagein, for eating, so as to designate, or further instigate, an inversion of the power relations between the culture of the colonizer and the colonized, the masters and the slaves, the authentic and the mimetic. The favelas of Rio de Janeiro have ever since the 1980s been going through the 'territorialization' of the cocaine trade, implying socio-spatial control therein being conducted by armed traffickers, feeding further into their material and symbolic marginalization. With the raised influx of tourists during past and upcoming mega-events, the governmental interest in taking control over such territories came to result in the 2008 law enforcement programme, or the 'pacification'. At the interstices of the conflict and cohort of armed drug trafficking and crime prevention and containment projects, in this presentation I invoke the (albeit gendered) figure of the antropófago to account for the ever shifting strategies and tactics that the young of a favela have undertaken so as to augment their prospects and meet their material and symbolic desires and make themselves. I also explore my own role as an (female) anthropological antropófago, and ultimately, of the practices of social scientists as anthropófagia, an act unmooring axioms of power, creation and representation.