A taste for otherness: Anthropophagy and the embodied self in organizations

Gazi Islam

Scandinavian Journal of Management, 2015, vol. 31, issue 3, 351-361

Abstract: The current paper contributes to organizational thinking about cultural mixture as an embodied, sensory process, by examining the concept of organizational anthropophagy as a metaphor for a particular mode of organizational understanding. An emerging Brazilian literature on anthropophagic thinking combines a focus on the body, the passions and ideas of physical desire and aggression with cultural notions of hybridity and mixture, making the notion ripe for debates in contemporary organization theory. To develop these connections, I give a background to the anthropophagic movement, an artistic and cultural vanguard movement, discussing how this movement provided a unique angle on embodied forms of knowledge that can be applied to understanding dynamics of self-and otherness in organizations. Next, I examine how the body can be understood anthropophagically, linking issues of selfhood, authenticity and relationality to the bodily emphasis in anthropophagy. Finally, I discuss directions and limitations of anthropophagic thinking, suggesting that metaphorical and local movements like the anthropophagic movements can have ramifications for the literal and general in organizational theory.

Keywords: Culture; Embodiment; Critical management studies; Brazil; Otherness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956522115000263
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:scaman:v:31:y:2015:i:3:p:351-361

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/872/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... me/872/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.scaman.2015.04.001

Access Statistics for this article

Scandinavian Journal of Management is currently edited by Janne Tienari

More articles in Scandinavian Journal of Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().