Peripheral perspectivism and reverse urban philosophy: An essay toward a cannibal cartography

Abstract

This essay explores the intersection of philosophy, anthropology, festivities, and youth occupations in peripheral urban areas to conceptualize peripheral perspectivism, reverse urban philosophy, and cannibal cartography. We examine how rolê—understood as the practice of wandering—and other manifestations of peripheral youth culture relate to Michel Foucault’s notion of transhistorical cynicism and Brazilian modernist artists’ anthropophagic framework. This investigation introduces the concept of cannibal cartography as a dynamic process that incorporates, devours, and transforms the objects of study and knowledge subjects. By fostering epistemological drifts and deviations, this approach enables the emergence of alternative perspectives within philosophical discourse. These perspectives act as epistemopolitical insurgencies against epistemicides targeting marginalized cultures, particularly those of peripheral youth. These reflections aim to contribute to the construction of an open, processual, and evolving cartography that informs conceptual production and philosophy teaching based on a decolonial and transdisciplinary perspective.

Keywords
periphery; anthropophagy; epistemicide; cynicism

Resumo

Neste ensaio, propomos uma interface entre filosofia, antropologia, festas e ocupações juvenis de periferia, visando explorar o potencial de tal interface na produção dos conceitos de perspectivismo periférico, filosofia urbana reversa e cartografia canibal. Discutimos como o rolê, entendido como prática de caminhada, assim como outras manifestações da cultura juvenil de periferia podem ser aproximadas daquilo que Michel Foucault chamou de cinismo trans-histórico, bem como de alguns aspectos da antropofagia tal como proposta por artistas modernistas no Brasil, visando ao tensionamento da Filosofia com a prática e o pensamento das quebradas/periferias. Propomos também o conceito de cartografia canibal, um processo que incorpora, deglute e transforma o objeto de estudo e o sujeito do conhecimento, produzindo derivas que permitiriam a emergência de outras perspectivas no discurso filosófico e que podem ser compreendidas como uma epistemopolítica insurgente contra os epistemicídios das culturas marginalizadas, como é o caso das culturas juvenis de periferia, entre outras referenciadas ao longo deste ensaio. A partir dessas reflexões, procuramos agenciar aportes teóricos e práticos que contribuam para a construção dessa cartografia, aberta, processual e em permanente construção, ensejando, com isso, compartilhar alguns apontamentos para a produção conceitual no ensino de filosofia em perspectiva decolonial e transdisciplinar.

Palavras-chave
periferia; antropofagia; epistemicídio; cinismo

Resumen

En este artículo, proponemos una interfaz entre filosofía, antropología, festividades y ocupaciones juveniles en zonas periféricas urbanas, con el objetivo de explorar el potencial de dicha interfaz en la producción de los conceptos de perspectivismo periférico, filosofía urbana inversa y cartografía caníbal. Discutimos cómo el rolê, entendido como la práctica de caminar, así como otras manifestaciones de la cultura juvenil periférica, pueden relacionarse con lo que Michel Foucault denominó cinismo trans-histórico, así como con ciertos aspectos de la antropofagia propuesta por los artistas modernistas en Brasil. Este enfoque busca generar una tensión entre la Filosofía y las prácticas y pensamientos surgidos en las periferias urbanas. También proponemos el concepto de cartografía caníbal, un proceso que incorpora, devora y transforma tanto el objeto de estudio como el sujeto del conocimiento, produciendo derivas y desviaciones que permiten la emergencia de perspectivas alternativas dentro del discurso filosófico. Estas perspectivas pueden entenderse como una epistemopolítica insurgente contra los epistemicidios que afectan a las culturas marginadas, como es el caso de las culturas juveniles periféricas, entre otras referenciadas a lo largo de este ensayo. A partir de estas reflexiones, buscamos ofrecer aportes teóricos y prácticos que contribuyan a la construcción de esta cartografía, abierta, procesual y en constante evolución, compartiendo así algunas orientaciones para la producción conceptual en la enseñanza de la filosofía desde una perspectiva decolonial y transdisciplinaria.

Palabras clave
periferia; antropofagia; epistemicidio; cinismo

Introduction

The perspective of cartography in this essay follows Deleuze’s and Guattari’s traces throughout their work that still produce disruptive drifts and accents in them (hereinafter referred to as broken hoods). This essay deems cartography as a way of following paths, production processes, relationships, and flows that constitute a field or experience. This cartographic exercise involves concept experimentation considering theoretical and methodological intersections and the effects, affections, and problematizations arising from our teaching practice in philosophy in secondary education in peripheral regions in the municipality of São Paulo. Deeming it a matter of experimenting concepts, we propose that such testing is carried out by the agency of conceptual and intercessory components that are produced in concrete contexts. In this sense, cartography outlines what escapes the canon, what is transformed, and what emerges. This teaching activity witnessed and experienced episodes, events, clashes, dilemmas, inventions, solutions, fears, desires, anxieties, and hopes of thousands of adolescents who play a leading rolê in the youth cultures in these territories, whether in the classroom, on the streets, in the squares, on the slabs, or in cultural spaces. It also tensioned the ways of doing philosophy, giving rise to opportunities for difference as a power of creation, rather than to the mere reproduction of what has been said and thought. The essayistic character of this text concerns its work with language, seeking to articulate elements of the philosophical canon with other references from dialects and peripheral idiolects and to resorting to concepts and categories from anthropology and the arts. Thus, this text emerges as a field of immanence that seeks to contribute to a pedagogy of the concept. Refusing dogmatic linearity, essays approach the rhizome, including in its movement digressions, contradictions, jumps, and the plane of immanence:

the plane of immanence is prephilosophical and does not immediately take effect with concepts, it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess.

(Deleuze et al., 2007, p.58).

Concepts and mediators, rather than applied abstractions, constitute tools that emerge of the encounter with the real to guide the navigation on the plane of immanence. A text resulting from cartography cannot be a text that talks about cartography, rather, it must be cartographic itself. Thus, essays seem the most appropriate form for this endeavor since they precisely constitute a text of experimentation, of thought in action, rather than a text that communicates the results of research.

… Intervention is always carried out by a dive into the experience that mediates subject and object, theory, and practice in the same plane of production or co-emergence – what we can designate as a plane of experience. Cartography as a research method is the outline of this plane of experience, following the effects (on the object, the researcher, and the production of knowledge) of the investigation itself

(Kastrup et al., 2015, p. 17).

Thus, following paths, production processes, relationships, and flows follows diving into our field: the peripheral regions of municipalities and the school. A first drift/break concerns the following: this essay constitutes a conceptual production experience plane. If cartography refers to the tracing of this plane and essays constitutes such plane, then cartography emerges as the essay itself and essays configure a mode of cartography¹ of the movements and lines that operate in the production of what the essay proposes to do: invent concepts, including the concept of cannibal cartography: the one that, in the act of devouring and letting oneself be devoured, brings out the march of its enunciation, of its own doing, of its own path, the production of its production, the entrails of its entrails. This approach follows the footsteps of another discipline; since Lévi-Strauss’s provocation, according to which anthropology was philosophy with people in it, anthropology can be considered a tormenting intercessor for philosophizing. Notably, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s anthropology deems philosophy as an intercessor for anthropological thought. In this double movement of comings, goings, crossings, quebradas (peripheral hoods), and imbrications, the words of the Brazilian anthropologist offer some suspicions that may be the intensification of torment for philosophy:

It is necessary to draw all the consequences of the idea that the societies and cultures that are the object of anthropological research influence, or, to put it more clearly, co-produce the theories about society and culture that are formulated based on these researches. To deny it means to accept a one-way constructivism that, under penalty of self-implosion, is forced to lead to the usual narrative pettiness…

(Viveiros de Castro, 2013, p. 22).

The thought experiment in this essay sought to draw some consequences from this idea: rejecting one-way constructivism and thus risking inventing a way of making co-production or inventing means of co-production production, which may seem strange or exaggerated, but it is necessary since it seems very easy and comfortable to remain next to object production. Following his reasoning, Viveiros de Castro describe the objective of his book:

to illustrate the thesis that all non-trivial anthropological theories are versions of indigenous knowledge practices; these theories are situated in strict ontological continuity (in relation to structural transformation, therefore) with the intellectual pragmatics of the collectives that have historically seen themselves in an ‘object position’ in relation to the discipline. It is a matter here – there, in the book we are commenting on – of sketching a performative description of the transformations of the discourse of anthropology that are at the origin of the interiorization of the transformational condition of the discipline as such, that is, the fact (theoretical, of course) that it is a discursive anamorphosis of the ethnoanthropologies of the studied collectives

(Viveiros de Castro, 2013, p. 24).

Following Viveiros de Castro’s warning, we offer the following proposition: the pragmatics of the collectives — cliques and crews — of peripheral youth were, for philosophy, admittedly co-producers of conceptual experimentation. This could lead philosophy to conceive peripheral persons no longer from their position of object – the knowledge practices of peripheral crews could be conceptual components of a minor philosophy, a peripheral philosophy, articulated between the canon of the Western philosophical tradition and the perspectivism resulting from the plurality of other knowledges.

In our conception, transperipheral philosophy would constitute an insurgent translation process: peripheral practices are read as gestures that invite us to question the Western legacy of philosophy. Instead of reproducing the logic that conditions peripheral knowledge to the “popular,” “empirical,” or subaltern spheres, they can be understood as mediators that invite us to warp and reinvent hegemonic conceptual frameworks. Thus, historical struggles, resistance and survival strategies, and the affirmation and construction of peripheral ways of life can be understood as a “movement that constitutes a people.” Capturing these movements and constituting a minority with them is what Deleuze (1992, p. 157) calls the fabulating function: “So, to the established fictions that are always rooted in a colonist’s discourse, we oppose a minority discourse, with mediators.” It is thus that this essay, as a cannibal cartography, far from resembling a portrait or a report of facts, is closer to fabulation.

“Cliques,” “crews,” and peripheral persons, more than “informants” of a social reality, configure interlocutors who demand a radical displacement from philosophy: the recognition that the street, rolezinho (taking a ride), or funk, and these individuals’ survival strategies configure powerful mediators for conceptual invention. In this essay—as a genre that enables wandering, hybridism, and contradiction—, these elements gain theoretical density. In the crossroads between orality, affections, sensations, practices, and writing, essays act as a decolonial bridge: it neither “translates” the streets to academia nor seeks to transpose academic praxis to the streets; it distorts both poles, creating itself as a third space, a crossroads that for us is simultaneously a plane of immanence.

The tempestuous youth. Big municipality: quebradas

Events that became milestones in the recent history of Brazil and the world marked 2013, including the cycle of struggles Brazil conventionally calls “June Days,” which many analysts deem having begun to mark the theme of the right to the municipality and urban mobility. This agenda would have marked the demonstrations that year despite groups’ and individuals’ political spectra. Such cycle referred to subjects’ relationship with the municipality (which became the stage for conflicts and experiments with new ways of living together).

A fact that deserves to be highlighted is that the demonstrations largely had the rising middle class as actors, which, having achieved a certain comfort regarding the minimum of material well-being (including housing and access to basic needs) began to claim rights that were increasingly aligned with the rights of the individual, especially those that refer to freedom, consumption, competitiveness, free competition, and the reduction of the State in their lives. The rejection of the traditional way of doing politics was significant in this period (many parties and flags were literally expelled). This plural movement that began with a “left-wing agenda” — namely, the right to urban mobility and thus the right to the municipality — was motivated by the increase of 20 cents in the fare of buses in São Paulo. However, as soon as it began, the wave of protests took over the country, and the initial theme was pulverized amid the many agendas that took to the streets. Millions of people occupied the streets of several Brazilian municipalities in June 2013. These demonstrations (which first opposed the increase in public transport fares) were soon co-opted by several demonstrations of other nature.

A debate that arose at the time (and which reverberates up to today) concerns the protesters’ social composition. Some analysts have pointed out that, although the protests first consisted of people from several social groups (including the poorest), they were largely led by the middle class. Singer (2013) — analyzing a series of studies regarding the social composition of June 2013 — points to two points of view; the first of which found the predominance of the middle class in the June events and the second of which highlighted what they then called the precariat. For Singer, the June Days expressed both spheres of the social stratum as they gave vent to the discontent of the traditional middle class due to demands that revolved around issues such as the fight against corruption and criticisms of then-President Dilma Rousseff, the Brazilian Workers’ Party, and poor public management; demonstrations that increased the contingent of middle-class individuals to take to the streets². At the same time, these mobilizations also involved the new proletariat (which emerged after the two terms of Lula’s government).

In this brief context, it is interesting to ask: what happened in the urban centers, what happened in the urban hills, favelas, and quebradas, territories that face historical struggles?

*

A remarkable event at the end of 2013, this time led by peripheral youth, helps to answer this question: the “rolezinho”³ phenomenon and funk parties that gained national prominence, drawing attention even from the presidency. Rolezinhos spread throughout Brazil at an absurd speed, gathering thousands of young people in several spaces, especially shopping malls. Suddenly, peripheral adolescents and youths became prominent in the main information vehicles, raising debates about public policies for youth, the way the municipality organizes its spaces, and the segregation due to social and economic inequality. In this context, discourses that tended to marginalize peripheral youth cultures grew. It also included the moment in which “another youth” took to the streets and began to claim (albeit in a different way) the municipality, the space of the collective, of material and immaterial goods, and of the movement needed to reach them.

Simultaneously with rolezinhos, the peripheries held the stage for other manifestations, each with its own specificity, including funk parties and other contemporary manifestations, such as poetry soirées, rap battles, and poetry slams⁴, cultural expressions that, by bringing together leisure and practices of occupying spaces, imply the potential of other ways of doing politics in the municipality by forming networks to exchange ideas and affections that feed back into the strategies and tactics of occupying the municipality. In such networks the peripheries pragmatically elaborate the tensions of social and urban space, inventing modes of survival, resistance, and other epistemes.

In this scenario, the phenomenon of occupations of public schools by high school students in 2015 and 2016 is also worth mentioning as they synthesized many of these tensions and contradictions (after all, the school shows many such differences). Peripheral youth cultures constitute different modes of this cycle of struggles to reclaim and occupy public space and its equipment. The heterogeneous set of cultural manifestations configures networks of production, flow, transport of information, thought, and desire, operating in the processes of subjectivation and production of new epistemes. The occupation of parks, squares, streets, schools, real estate, land in this context constitute spasmodic, untimely, and disruptive configurations that tension the planned municipality, circulating semiotic flows that combine at any time and in any place, favoring — thanks to the materiality of the new means of communication⁵ — the invention and profusion of micronarratives of autonomy, as in the outskirts of the municipality: narratives of emancipation of Black, female, and LGBTQIAP+ people. This historical-social cut shows a new stage of social struggles in which the actors of these social strata resignify themes such as class, gender, race, right to the municipality, leisure, citizenship, sexuality, and violence, which, despite their constant presence in the municipality, are often shadowed by hegemonic narratives: the narratives of the Brazilian white and heteronormative economic elite. Thus, new narratives emerge about Blackness and the condition of women and youth, led by these social actors who moved from the mere category of objects to the place of producers of knowledge. The perspective of epistemopolitics can also encompass these disputes as they would constitute a whole struggle for self-legitimization of the forms of knowledge and know-how in the municipality.

Thus, this discussion has three thematic axes; matrices of thought and theoretical contributions that could help the understanding of this ethos (in which occupation is inseparable from behavior and certain modalities of thought): cynicism, anthropophagy, and the tradition of wandering. We think that this peripheral ethos also contributes to reinventing these matrices of thought, culminating in what we call transperipheral cynoanthropophagy. With this, we suggest that this experimentation, this pragmatics in peripheral youth manifestations would configure a cynical reversal in the municipality.

The courage of cannibals: toward a transperipheral philosophy

In his course “The Courage of Truth,” Michel Foucault (2011) explores the ways in which the West establishes a relation with truth-telling. Investigating the modes of veridiction and parrhesia — modalities of truth-telling and frankness —, Foucault shows how cynicism is transhistorically constituted as a mode of veridiction that embodies truth in life itself. Going back to the philosophical tradition of the Cynic philosophers, especially Diogenes (its greatest exponent), cynicism shows a defiant life that confronts and refuses the established order. Diogenes and the Cynics appear as philosophers who radically differ from the Socratic praxis of accessing the truth. For them, the way of life and truth-telling are inseparable. In short, cynicism marks a defiant attitude that cruelly and shamelessly contests established values. Diogenes — the mad Socrates — figures throughout tradition as someone who courageously experienced in his own body and life another way of accessing the truth. For him, reducing all useless obligations imposed by conventions seeks to dispel the illusions to which people cling so that truth can emerge from where it is buried. Foucault also observes that cynicism, rather than a specific moment in ancient philosophy, constitutes “an historical category which, in various forms and with diverse objectives, runs through the whole of Western history” (Foucault, 2011, p. 15). Proposing a kind of walk, an excursion, a wandering — a rolê — across the history of Cynicism as a “moral category in Western culture,” Foucault proposes to imagine cynicism, rather than as a doctrine faithful to ancient cynicism, as an attitude and way of being, identifying throughout history three great “supports” that, in the history of Europe, enabled the transmission the cynical scheme in different forms: (i) Christian culture, (ii) political practices, specifically, revolutionary movements throughout the 19th and 20th centuries; and (iii) Art (p. 158).

This proposition aims to approximate cynicism and a specific movement of Brazilian modern art, namely, anthropophagy. In that course, Foucault briefly pointed out carnival as an important component to establish cynicism throughout the ages. Talking about carnival, it is impossible to disregard the case of Brazil. To think of carnival as a profane festival, a festival of the flesh dating to the antiquity, opens the door to a possible relationship between practices such as party, cynicism, and anthropophagy, especially in the manifestations of peripheral urban youth who, with their street parties, funk parties, poetry slams, battle rap, and other festive occupations that appropriate the signs of capital, technology, media, and excluding urbanity remix them into aesthetic and existential expressions. Cynicism configures a kind of cognitive axis that enables a special type of knowing, a carnal knowledge in which the body, in celebration and in a gesture of reversal of values, offers another abject to the municipality that conceives youth festivals as a cynical-anthropophagic attitude. The another abject of the planned municipality presents it its strangely familiar space, becoming a kind of scandal of the truth incarnated in bodies that occupy streets, squares, alleys, and the heart of the ideal municipality. Cynicism, allied to anthropophagy, constitutes a trait of an aesthetics of insurgent existence. Alongside the occupation of such spaces in the municipality, it is essential to move around the municipality, whether in search of entertainment, a piece of land, or a roof over one’s head, or even when commuting to work. Hence the encounter with another youth manifestation, rolê, a practice of wandering around the municipality that can fall into the long tradition of wandering. Rolês configure attitudes that establish the profane time of carnival in the daily life of the municipality. Resisting and occupying are attitudes often confused with the party itself and movement: rolê.

Delegitimization, extermination, and destruction of other ways of thinking and knowing constitutes one of the most striking wounds of the civilizational project (which includes the colonization of the Americas and Africa, essential in the advent of modernity and capitalism). Thus, it is necessary to understand how other logics (described as aberrant or minor) have been configured as networks of resistance in the peripheries of capitalism and in urban quebradas. This, a peripheral ethos as episteme, could give rise to the experimentation of a minor philosophy, a cynical-anthropophagic pragmatics embodied in life itself and that assumes itself on the horizon of decolonization.

It is a way of playing local, discontinuous, disqualified, or nonlegitimized knowledges off against the unitary theoretical instance that claims to be able to filter them, organize them into a hierarchy, organize them in the name of a true body of knowledge, in the name of the rights of a science that is in the hands of the few… They are about the insurrection of knowledges. Not so much against the contents, methods, or concepts of a science; this is above all, primarily, an insurrection against the centralizing power-effects that are bound up with the institutionalization and workings of any scientific discourse organized in a society such as ours.

(Foucault, 1979, p. 22)⁶.

Throughout our trajectory, we have defended the possibility of doing philosophy in the periphery and our understanding that the periphery has its own philosophy. Further researching studies on decolonization and minor epistemologies in anthropology obtains, via Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the propositions of Bruno Latour, Marilyn Strathern, Philipe Descola, Georges Balandier, and, above all, Roy Wagner, who provided the possibility of thinking about the thought of the quebradas as peripheral epistemology, a counter-effectuation of the philosophy in academia (which is notably Eurocentric or Anglo-Saxon). This essay freely took Wagner’s proposition about a reverse anthropology to think about the tense relations between the planned municipality and the periphery. Broadly, periphery comprises all that escapes the planning and bureaucracies of the State and the market. Thus, when we talk about a planned municipality, we refer to dimensions that go beyond the physical territoriality of a municipality and to something in relation to philosophy and science. Likewise, when we speak of the periphery, we refer to forms of the no legitimized knowledge to the periphery, subjugated to hegemonic knowledge. In any case, what is sought with this tension is:

The project of these disorderly and tattered genealogies is to reactivate local knowledges—Deleuze would no doubt call them “minor”—against the scientific hierarchization of knowledge and its intrinsic power-effects. To put it in a nutshell: Archaeology is the method specific to the analysis of local discursivities, and genealogy is the tactic which, once it has described these local discursivities, brings into play the desubjugated knowledges that have been released from them.

(Foucault, 1979, p. 16).

Urban anthropology can enable an approach in which learning and the modes of production and circulation of knowledge in urban favelas configure peripheral epistemologies that operate at the idea and affection exchange network. If, at first, in our work as a philosophy teacher, the cultures of the periphery served as intercessors to do philosophy in and with the periphery, we now aim to build a new intercessor in the realm of the sciences, namely, urban anthropology. Thus, the encounter with the peripheries and with anthropology gave rise to an anthropophagic other of philosophy — which would be, for this discipline, a kind of scandal of the truth incarnated in the municipality.

To propose a reverse urban anthropology would be a daring thing beyond the scope of this essay but we can experience what could be such a reversion to philosophy. If, as Henri Lefebvre (2001) says, philosophy is the daughter of the city, it would be appropriate to think of which municipality birthed philosophy due to the many invisible cities. Thus, quebradas seem to constitute this kind of reverse urban since the struggle for recognition and rights attests that the urbs has long ignored quebradas. To think of quebradas as this kind of reverse urban of the municipality, crossing and being crossed by several knowledges, configures an exercise in agency or production of a relationship between heterogeneous knowledges. The relationship of exchange of perspectives — the perspectives of the quebrada, anthropology, and philosophy — thus, the exchange of ideas — would enable a questioning of philosophy itself; a kind of reverse anthropology of philosophy that considers its other or its outside as philosophy as well. Doing this from a peripheral perspective can then establish transit by neighborhood areas with other forms of knowledge, which would favor a peripheral perspectivism. As these are rhizomatic networks, one cannot consider a single center, the logic and configuration of the rhizome require thinking in terms of multiple epistemological theories knots (and thus various knowledge modalities according to this rhizomatic architectural notion), which would enable us to enter this theme by any knowledge modality.

This theoretical framework suggests a double movement according to which the Party in the Quebrada configures as a political act of this peripheral ethos: detachment, insolence, boldness, courage, affirmation, and anthropophagy; characteristics that can establish the aforementioned connection with the three traditions in this essay (cynicism, wandering, and anthropophagy) and the behavior, attitudes, procedures, strategies, and tactics of the aforementioned manifestations of urban youth culture, which would help understanding the constitutive cognitive aspects of the thought of quebradas and a transperipheral philosophy. This philosophizing in action is produced to the extent that it is imbricated in the culture of the periphery, close to what Roy Wagner (2017, p. 27) called “cultural relativity”: the notion that “every culture, as such, is equivalent to any other.” Based on this assumption, the experiences of peripheral youth cultures would also influence the formation of the concepts this essay suggested and invented, just as philosophy would somewhat contribute to the process of invention of quebradas in such a way that the term detaches itself from its native use to enter another process of invention, now on the side of philosophy, becoming a component of conceptual invention, a movement of invention and counter-invention of an intellectual relationship between varieties of knowledge. It is thus that, amid the youth cultures of the periphery and the philosophical tradition, the native categories of quebrada (rolê, fluxo, rolo, gato, lazer, zoeira, and others) are reworked and transformed into conceptual components. Such a procedure takes up the anthropophagic gesture of devouring and being devoured, a gesture that would constitute a component of peripheral youth cultures and, at the same time, a component of the philosophy this essay proposed. Gathered by the anthropophagic gesture, the cultures of the periphery and philosophy activate processes of counter-effectation and reversals. The peripheries, marked by constant processes of production of forms that differ from themselves, have as a characteristic trait of identity the production of difference. They produce amid misunderstandings at the origin of these processes of differentiation (and can be considered as the march of thought itself). Thus, rolê configure a wandering practice that encourages estrangement since quebradas (understood as deviation, fold, and difference) resemble incidental mirrors that give us back fractured images of ourselves and of our sciences in which, instead of recognizing ourselves, we estrange ourselves in mistaken images about the Other and ourselves.

Rolêsacrossquebradas may be anthropophagic as it devours the other. In turn, the encounter with this other can swallow the image we have of ourselves, devour our specular image, regurgitating/spitting in the face of society another image of the municipality as it forces traffic precisely by what failed to work: the abandoned unplanned municipality of accidents, chances, random combinations and juxtapositions, precariousness, contamination, crime, desires, and infamous practices that paradoxically produce modes of resistance and survival. Thus, rolê across quebradas would favor a smaller nomadic philosophy as a kind of science of accident. Rolês, a kind of anthropophagic otherness that, in the act of devouring the other, transforms the one who devours into an other. The production of differences takes places in the relationship between assemblages/becomings. Those who circulate — thus in rolês — make up the network of survivals of the peripheries and act in the production of a heterogeneous-common-body in which to produce oneself is to produce the other and vice versa. By bringing such propositions closer to the tradition of Cynicism, this anthropophagic otherness would near a scandal of truth incarnated in a hybrid body, in the scandal of the truth that I am another, I am 300, 350 and that I am only interested in what is not mine (Andrade, 2001).

Thus, this involves anthropophagizing philosophy and anthropologists in the light of the thought of quebradas and of digesting and regurgitating the thought of quebradas via philosophy and anthropology, rolê, tirando um lazer, tumultuando (hanging out, going out, causing a riot), devouring quebradas and enabling one to be devoured by them. The rolê across this cannibalistic quebrada becomes epistemic to the extent that subjects produce knowledge about themselves, the other, the quebrada, others’ quebradas, peripheries, and the municipality that belongs to them. The encounter and tension of philosophy with the practice and thought of quebradas thus configures a transperipheral philosophy, a kind of discursive-pragmatic anamorphosis of cannibalistic quebradas, a pragmatic that constitutes an insurgent epistemopolitics against colonizing epistemicides.

Rolês and the wandering tradition

A philosophical approach to rolês implies discussing wanderings from the perspective of the peripheries (although rolês also take place in urban centers)⁷ since rolês could be inserted in this long tradition in which walking, wandering, and drifting constitute critical interventions in municipalities. Although critical wanderings can be punctually identified with the work of thought and practices of artists, as Paola Berenstein Jacques (2001) shows us, the phenomenon of rolezinhos, funk parties, and poetry slams and soirées (including the circuit and their route) can be inserted in this tradition. Although the peripheral individuals who make such experiences in quebradas do not do so from an intentional critique, it is important to note that such manifestations signal a moment of irruption, ruptures, and insurgencies from within, including against the urban project between the planned municipality and the periphery (deemed built by itself). Paola Berenstein points out “three moments of wanderings in modernity — flaneurs, wanderings, drifts” (Jacques, 2001, p. 36). From the perspective explored here, rolês seem to configure a fourth moment in the wanderings of modernity — or perhaps, the fourth quebrada (broken) wall…

The breaking of the fourth wall in cinema and theater produces an effect of becoming aware of representation. By transposing this idea to the field of wanderings, rolês insinuate a new relationship between individuals and the municipality, another way of thinking, feeling, and experiencing the urban space. The wanderings of modernity represent ways of interacting with the municipality. Rolês, as a fourth moment, seems to obtain a more immediate experience that rupture the modernist urban imaginary as a protagonist rather than a distant observer. Rolês cause a deeper immersion in everyday life, a descent from the stage: the people from the periphery survive in the municipality, which requires inventing modes of resistance. They distance themselves from aesthetically configured modernist wanderings. Rolês would have a more immediate relationship, an immersion that would be closely linked to everyday life, being more engaged in the municipality — those who go out are protagonists rather than mere observers, experiencing the municipality, alleys, and quebradas. If these protagonists become artists, they cross the municipality with these signs (which also cross them). They devour the municipality and are devoured by it, the work of art that emerges from it – including life itself as a work of art – can be considered as an index of a cannibalistic cartography, that is, it offers a set of clues, traces for cartographers, whose task is to build, from these clues, conceptual, relational, affective, and intensive maps, capturing the dynamic interactions between body, sensibility, thought, and the municipality, drawing the lines of processes in progress and producing new conceptual paths from intersections and in sensitivity to trace the forces – effects, affections, and problematizations – resulting from the interactions between bodies and their productions, including the production of the body itself in the territory it constructs and occupies. Cannibal cartography feeds on this production, on the movement and flow of cultural practices. Rather than limited to the representation of a pre-existing territory, it fundamentally consists of a mode of production and of tracing lines of force in a field in constant becoming. What is properly cartographic resides in the action of map out what is being done, undone, and remade, rather than in only what is already done (including the essayistic writing of this process and cartographer’s subjectivity).

If philosophy can be considered as the art of invention, then, conceptually speaking, rolês configure a movement of thought in, of, and with the municipality. Quebradas think. Discussing the tradition of wanderings, resuming some of the texts and problematizations of this tradition by rereading and rewriting authors who thought of wandering as a philosophical practice can conceive rolês as part of the tradition of wandering⁸, bringing it closer to the attitudes and procedures of anthropophagy and Cynicism. Such a rereading/rewriting, based on the reference provided by rolês in the neighborhoods of the municipality and philosophy configure a methodology of listening and research that intervenes in the status of research and writing, a component of this pragmatics that uses the gradients of experimentation of rolês to carry out an operation proper to philosophy (namely, conceptual invention) that operates in the production of the nomadic thought of quebradas. Cannibal cartography as conceptual experimentation traces lines of strength and potential connection and resonances with other ideas, experiences, and the new territories of thought it helps to produce. Such an experiment would map other emergencies — that which arise from the encounter of the concept with concrete experience.

Thus, the practice of peripheral rolês in this essay constitutes a cartography element that, in the municipality planned according to the canons of modernity, seeks to trace and precisely highlight the strangely familiar dimension of the municipality, working on forgetfulness and repression — which in fact are nothing more than euphemisms in the face of death that has never ceased to haunt the peripheries, producing murders, massacres, and epistemicides. A cannibalistic cartography produces maps of intensity and traces of abortions and ruins that mark something of what could have been — unfinished, aborted, and interrupted existences, projects, and lives — and that, although not being still act, pulsate, live, and continue to produce under and with the rubble. The writing process involved in the narrative of rolês brings with it dear themes such as remembrance, memory, the elaboration of the past, and its traumas. Here, the discussion about the contemporary metropolis is inscribed in the discussion about the ruins and embankments of modernity: a dimension of research that could be methodologically understood as a kind of pragmatics of the suburbs, a science of the alleys, a cartography of the wastelands, that archaeology that precisely explores the details, the remains, the garbage, the banal, everything that in the (dis)order of everyday life can be considered indigestible, the bad formations, the silliness, the Nonsense, the irrational, the aberrant.

Insolence and Patience: The Shameless Machine of Peripheral Perspectivism

As we have seen, modern art (a support of trans-historical cynicism) could be thought of as the dimension of culture that turns against itself. A counterculture that has the courage to unmask, denounce, lay bare, excavate, and reduce as its brand. “Art (Baudelaire, Flaubert, Manet) is constituted as the site of the irruption of what is underneath, below, of what in a culture has no right, or at least no possibility of expression” (Foucault, 2011, p. 165).

This is precisely what the youth from the periphery do — whether the “politically engaged,” as in the case of the poetry slams and soirées, or the “immediately driven,” as in the case of funk parties — the peripheral youth has laid bare and unmasked culture, promoting a clash of values that precisely shakes the canons of tradition. Thus, more than ever, the youth cultures or countercultures of the peripheries result from modernity and its crisis, since in the face of the scenario of exhaustion of the utopian-revolutionary ideal of the historical avant-garde and the process of generalization of the aesthetic in the world under the current stage of neoliberalism, youth cultures would embody the courage of truth in the present time. Living, enjoying life, and causing a riot make us think about the limits of the contemporary.

This connection between Cynicism and modern art occurs in the various phases and strands of the Brazilian Anthropophagic movement, especially in Oswald de Andrade’s work. Although such an approximation is possible, this fails to mean, in any way, equivalences, but, perhaps, complementarities – not least because modernist anthropophagy has as its motto precisely its relationship with the Other, in this case, the questioned and affirmed European art and values. If Foucault considers modern art as the Cynicism of culture that can shamelessly lay bare its repressions, it also seems to us that anthropophagy is — since, as Benedito Nunes reminds us when referring to the Anthropophagous Manifesto — in an important preface to Oswald de Andrade’s work:

Using it for its power to shock, this Manifesto uses the word 'anthropophagy' as a scandal stone to wound readers’ imagination with the unpleasant memory of cannibalism, transformed into a permanent possibility of the species. This obsessive image full of magical and sacrificial resonances and a background full of almanac anecdotes but also with a gloomy and Saturnian aura, this word functions as an offensive verbal device, an instrument of personal aggression, and a war weapon of explosive content that distends when handled, the tense springs of ethical, social, religious, and political oppositions and contrasts, which are compressed in it

(Nunes, 2001, p. 15, free translation).

The approximation between anthropophagy and Cynicism mediates attitudes of insolence in culture: by showing their teeth and biting, eating, digesting, and regurgitating the Other, peripheral persons constitute themselves and recognize the other as part of their constitution. We could speak of a kind of peripheral perspectivism as a set of differential points of view, a synthesis of disjunctive points of view — a kind of constitutive workaround of the person, a brazen machine that devours and transforms the perspectives of Eurocentric thought. This brazen machine has as a relative in the ‘unequal philosophy’ of Brás Cubas: “an unequal philosophy, now austere, now playful, something that neither builds nor destroys, neither inflames nor cools, and, yet, it is more than a pastime and less than an apostolate.” (Assis, 1998).

This reflects the insolence and patience of those who dare to do philosophy in quebradas, impregnating the colonizing thought with the inconstancy of the peripheral soul⁹.

Becoming-Macunaíma: spurts of joy between pain and affirmation

Rolês could now be understood as a cynoanthropophagic attitude: the mut’s rolê, the colonized turned producer of knowledge and of philosophy in riding across alleys and quebradas, devouring the indigestible regurgitated by tradition, mixing and tangling everything one finds on their way. Rolezeiros’ and their collective’s motion and the mutiny: the clique that makes it happen, causes a riot, and disturbs the established order reverses the modes of enunciation and the canonical modes of philosophizing. The anthropophagic gesture as a characteristic of a trans-historical cynicism enables us to think of the Brazilian counterculture as a great machine of affirmation; one without character or one of shameless production, a kind of becoming-Macunaíma: the one that always undoes his own face (faciality) and thus draws the inconstancy of its traces, threads, and lines that intersect but which suddenly burst and end up in a skein of unpredictability.

The anthropophagic rolê, proposed as a practice and as a kind of aesthetic-artistic paradigm of research-intervention would make it possible for roots to become wandering, self-moving, flowing; such would be a task of a cannibalistic cartography that proposes to elaborate the past aiming at the becoming and germination of a community to come rather than a nostalgic and idyllic remembrance. Elaboration would resemble the movement of making/constituting a memory-flow that devours itself in encountering difference while devouring difference when it turns to itself.

Bringing peripheral youth cultures closer to anthropophagy and Cynicism requires listening to what they have to say about our own knowledge. Carnival, cliques, the flow of funk dances, the anthropophagic banquet, the Dionysian drunkenness that dismantles piece by piece, chews, and swallows—or, ass Macunaíma, spits in the face of the males the pieces, remains, wreckage of what we could understand as the remains of patriarchy torn apart. If the idea of devouring in anthropophagy is commonplace, Cynicism introduces, whether with Macunaíma or Diogenes, spitting as an insolent gesture, affront, a fight, and the boldness to return the indigestible part of what has been devoured. It is thus that the essay form can be understood as an anthropophagic banquet, a cannibalistic cartography in which the ingredients are recombined. Displaced from the main course, they enter the making of a new menu: the becoming-bacchante, the feast, and the anthropophagic drool that lubricates our glide, make the dangerous streets of the municipality a carnival block in which the sad passions and the denial of life — the wounds that cover the common-heterogeneous body — explode as popcorn, transmuting into spurts of joy and affirmation:

Arriving from a trip to the village where he was born, Obaluaê saw that a party was taking place with the presence of all the orixás. Obaluaê could not enter the party due to his ghastly appearance. Then he peeked through the cracks in the yard. Ogum, noticing the anguish of the orixá, covered him with a straw garment that hid his head and invited him to come in and enjoy the joy of the festivities. Despite being embarrassed, Obaluaê entered but no one approached him. Iansã followed everything from the corner of her eye. She understood Omulu’s sad situation and felt sorry for him. Iansã waited for him to be right in the center of the shed. The xirê was excited. The orixás danced happily with their equedes. Iansã got very close to him and blew on his mariô clothes, lifting the straws that covered his pestilence. In this moment of enchantment and wind, Obaluaê’s wounds jumped into the air, transformed into a rain of popcorn that spread white throughout the shed. Obaluaê, the god of diseases, became a young man, a beautiful and charming young man. Obaluaê and Iansã Igbalé became great friends and reigned together over the world of spirits, sharing the unique power to open and interrupt the demands of the dead on men

(Prandi, 2020, p. 206, free translation).

Myth helps us to lend our pen to the darkness of the contemporary to the extent that it reveals; it neither hides nor ignores the wounds: it gives visibility to them, owning them. It is the revelation of wounds that can transform pain. The wounds turn into Flor do Véio. Seen up close, popcorn is an event: each grain of corn, at first a closed grain, becomes popcorn by an explosive dehiscence. The corn that bursts open in the form of a flower shows the passage from illness to health, from suffering to celebration: it is from the exposed wounds that life returns and grows.

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• Copy Editing services:
  Copy editing and standardization of citations and bibliographical references (7th Edition APA): Pedro Barros [e-mail]
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• 1
  Thus, this essay was proposed as a cartography of cartography which, in turn, contributes to the discussion about the form of essays. As a cartography of cartography, it also multiplies perspectives to produce folds and tries to approach a (neo)baroque procedure, the fold. Mapping one’s own cartography makes these texts a tool and object of its production process, producing an effect that typifies the baroque: recursion or “mise in abyme,” that is, an image within the image, a perspective in which the text is observed and produced in an infinite duplication: the essay is a cartography that maps the essay; producing a continuous movement of production. Thus, the essay, rather than a tool of transmission or only communicates an idea or concept, events, or historical facts, creates a field of experimentation and immanence: the cartography of the process also constitutes the process of cartography in the plane of immanence that is the text itself. Thus, if we propose a pedagogy of the concept, the essay we are producing can contribute to the discussion about the essay as form and to the discussion on how to produce the concept of the plane of immanence to produce concepts, including the concept of the plane of immanence and, thus, again, the fold.
• 2
  On that occasion, perceiving the diffusion and disorder of the multiple agendas and the opportunism of the middle class and right-wing sectors, the Free Fare Movement strategically remained faithful to its agendas.
• 3
  Rolezinhos can be understood as a leisure hang outs with friends to flirt, listen to music, dance, and talk that are organized by social media (on the occasion, Facebook). Their main stage was the public squares but, above all, shopping malls, especially on the rolezinho that took place on December 11, 2014 at Shopping Itaquera, which brought together about 6,000 teenagers, most of whom were adept of the funk culture. On that occasion, the meeting point was the parking lot of the mall (which was quickly taken by a crowd). Security guards tried to disperse the crowd but the teenagers headed inside the mall and the euphoric presence of the huge contingent led some people to believe an “arrastão” (collective robbery involving dozens of people. It gained repercussions after the events that occurred in Rio de Janeiro) was to occur. A generalized confusion ensued, with much running, shouting, and aggression. The police were called and acted violently, using rubber bullets and pepper sprays. The confusion moved from the interior of the mall to the interconnecting walkway with the Corinthians-Itaquera subway station.
• 4
  Slams constitute spoken poetry competitions held in public squares and attended by hundreds of teenagers and young people. They emerged in Chicago, USA, and spread all over the world, especially in Brazil.
• 5
  The demonstrations of the Free Fare Movement that began the June Days, rolezinhos, and other demonstrations, were mostly convened by social media.
• 6
  Although Foucault is not a decolonial thinker, the toolbox of his theoretical framework is strategic for our task. His criticism of a “universal knowledge,” of the “centralization of power,” and thus of the hierarchization of knowledge is a theoretical contribution this essay tactically updates based on the Oswaldian reference of anthropophagy. We continue to devour European theories aware that they are constitutive parts of our history and our knowledge. Thus, rather than turning our backs on them, we subvert the very theoretical tools of modernity (something that Foucault himself undertakes). The criticism from many authors toward Foucault regarding the persistence of coloniality in his work, fails to render some of his concepts useless. Rather, such gaps constitute the horizon of our endeavor insofar as they invite us to think about what our actuality is and in which and for which this absence becomes a space of insurgency.
• 7
  Although most peripheral subjects use the term rolê, the term rolezeiro (one who engages in rolês) it cannot be applied to all since it refers to a certain circuit. Thus, one can go on a rolê without being a rolezeiro, when, for example, the word rolê has a connotation referring to a ride: every rolezeiro goes on rolê, but not every rolê is a rolezeiro. The term rolezeiro is linked to a variant of rolê, namely, rolezinhos. It is important to avoid confusing rolê with rolezinho as the latter consists of a subcategory of the former. Rolês and their practitioners — rolezeiros or otherwise —also comprise “characters of wandering narratives” (Jacques, 2012, p. 17).
• 8
  It is possible to follow this long tradition in Baudelaire, Aragon, Breton, Benjamin, the situationists, the Fluxus group, the Stalkers; Michel de Certau, Henry-Pierre Jeudy, and Nicolas Bourriaud. In philosophy, this long tradition of thinkers includes Kant, Nietzsche, and Rousseau. In Brazil, it features authors such as Hélio Oiticica, João Antônio, Mario de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, João do Rio, and Flávio de Carvalho. Still in dialogue with contemporary researchers, Paola Berenstein Jacques and the Corpocidade study group, Milton Santos, and researcher Ana Clara Torres Ribeiro.
• 9
  We seek to anthropophagize the concept of “inconstancy of the savage soul” by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro who, analyzing the theme in missionary literature, shows how the attempts to catechize the original peoples came up against the instability or difficulty of some peoples in effectively adhering to the set of values, norms, and practices of Christian missionaries. For the anthropologist, a way of being of the Tupinambás manifested itself as a radical openness to the new and to the other: a willingness to absorb Christian messages about God, the soul, and the world, on the one hand, and, on the other, the return at unexpected moments to ancestral practices and customs, defying expectations of definitive conversion.

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References

References

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  15 Dec 2025
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  27 Jan 2025
• Reviewed
  01 Aug 2025
• Accepted
  03 Sept 2025