Disclaimer: This Bienal is not about identities and their politics, not about diversity nor inclusion, not about migration nor democracy and its failures ...

Claimer: It is about humanity as a verb and a practice, about encounter(s) and the negotiations upon the meeting of varying worlds, it is about dismantling asymmetries as a prerequisite for humanity as a practice, it is about joy and beauty and their poeticalities as the gravitational forces that keep our worlds on their axes ... for joy and beauty are political. It is about imagining a world in which we place an accent on our humanities.

Fragment I: Da calma e do silêncio

Quando eu morder
a palavra,
por favor,
não me apressem,
quero mascar,
rasgar entre os dentes,
a pele, os ossos, o tutano
do verbo,
para assim versejar
o âmago das coisas.

Quando meu olhar
se perder no nada,
por favor,
não me despertem,
quero reter,
no adentro da íris,
a menor sombra,
do ínfimo movimento.

Quando meus pés
abrandarem na marcha,
por favor,
não me forcem.
Caminhar para quê?
Deixem-me quedar,
deixem-me quieta,
na aparente inércia.
Nem todo viandante
anda estradas,
há mundos submersos,
que só o silêncio
da poesia penetra.

[When I bite
the word,
please,
don’t rush me,
I want to chew,
tear between my teeth,
the skin, the bones, the marrow
of the verb,
so I might versify
the core of things.

When my gaze
gets lost in nothingness,
please,
don’t wake me,
I want to retain,
within the depth of the iris,
the faintest shadow,
of the slightest movement.

When my feet
slow their march,
please,
don’t push me.
To walk—what for?
Let me stay,
let me be still,
in apparent inertia.
Not all travellers
walks roads,
there are submerged worlds
that only the silence
of poetry penetrates.]

—Conceição Evaristo, ‘Da calma e do silêncio’[1]

The concept for the 36th edition of the Bienal de São Paulo is a proposal to think, listen to, see, feel, perceive the world from the vantage point of Brazil—its histories, landscapes, philosophies, mythologies, and complexities, for the fiction that is Brazil is a culmination of many worlds and their tangents. That said, the emphasis will be laid on listening as the fundamental ground for practising humanity. As Jacques Attali wrote in his seminal essay Noise: The Political Economy of Music, ‘For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.’[2] We seem to have inherited a world crafted by people who have tried to see the world and read the world. One could say that, to conjugate humanity as a verb, one must learn to listen to the world, listen to lands, listen to plants and animals, listen to people, listen to the voices of the waves that caress the shores, to the grumbling of waters, to the winds that carve the sand and the contours of the Earth, listen to the murmurs of stones and hills and mountains, listen to the plethora of beings that make up our estuaries. It is safe to say that there is a correlation between the impossibilities of listening and dehumanization, as well as the disenfranchisement of people, the appropriations of lands, and ultimately the destruction of the environment.

In this proposal, the physical and philosophical space of the estuary will be used as a metaphor for spaces of encounter, of negotiations, of exchange, of living, of survival, of nourishment, of struggle, of despair, of repair, of rehabilitation, of needs ... spaces in which practices of humanity could acquire new meanings.

From the Santos Estuary or the Bertioga Estuary in São Paulo to the Capibaribe Estuary in Recife and the Patos Lagoon Estuary that extends from Porto Alegre to Rio Grande, the moment when two waterways meet each other, like a river meeting the sea, is a moment of negotiation of physical and chemical asymmetries that creates an extraordinary ecosystem flourishing with crabs, crocodiles, fish, migratory birds, mangroves, oysters, phytoplankton, snails, seagrass, sea turtles, zooplankton, and even humans. The particularity of an estuary is its interdependence. Each being has a role, a niche (for example, the niche of oysters is filtration, with each oyster filtering up to fifty gallons of water per day), in the sustenance of each species, in the ecosystem at large, and in the blossoming biodiversity, especially thanks to the varying salinity levels that arise when sweet water meets salty water. Estuaries are thus important for a vast spectrum of beings as habitat, resource, space for reproduction or transition in our ecosystems, and their existences are crucial for our environments. Estuaries serve as coastal buffers in times of erosion, floods, or storms, just as they help in filtering freshwater. But due to massive urbanization, dredging, overfishing, pollution, oil and gas drilling, etc. on a planetary scale, the ecosystems of estuaries are losing balance, just as humanity is losing its grip on itself and the world.[3] By invoking the plurality of beings and their coexistence and contingencies within the space of the estuary as a metaphor for human relations with themselves and others, the project tangentially alludes to the 27th Bienal de São Paulo in 2006 titled, How to Live Together, curated by Lisette Lagnado, as well as the 2nd Bienal, in 1953 (also called ‘Guernica Bienal’), in terms of the agencies and urgencies at stake.

When Conceição Evaristo writes in ‘Da calma e do silêncio’ that ‘Not all travellers / walk roads / there are submerged worlds / that only the silence / of poetry penetrates’, one can think of estuaries as the epitome of those submerged worlds penetrable by the silence of nature’s poetry and at the same time as the path of coexistence that is woven when the different worlds of sweet and salty water encounter each other, as a path that humankind as travellers could take.

Brazil was birthed by the violent encounter between Indigenous people, European colonizers, and enslaved Africans. Every civilization stems from an encounter, no matter how violent some might be, and some take more time than others to germinate. For the germination and proper cultivation to happen, one might need patience to bite and tear words to the marrow of verbs, stamina to stare into the distance so that clarity of the smallest movements in the far can be impregnated inside one’s iris, as Evaristo insinuates. Which paths do we take in the practice of humanity as a verb? How do we afford ourselves the privilege of going off track, off the road, embracing errancy, getting lost, finding other worlds?

Fragment II: Une Conscience en fleur pour autrui

Ma joie est de savoir que tu es moi
et que moi je suis fortement toi.
Tu sais que ton froid dessèche mes os
et que mon chaud vivifie tes veines.
Ma peur fait trembler tes yeux
et ta faim fait pâlir ma bouche.
Sans ta force d’être un feu libre
ma conscience serait plus seule
que la terre morte d’un désert.
Ma vie offre des clefs émerveillées
à la perception de ta propre essence.
Lorsque tu veilles sur ma liberté
tu donnes un ciel et des ailes
au mouvement de mon espérance.
Mon désir d’être heureux, s’il cessait
un instant de compter avec le tien
tomberait aussitôt en poussière.
Quand tu saignes au couteau mon identité
nos consciences vont ensemble à l’abattoir.

[My joy is knowing that you are me,
And that I am deeply you.
You know your cold dries out my bones,
And my warmth brings my life to your veins.
My fear makes your eyes tremble,
And your hunger pales my mouth.
Without your power to be a free flame,
my awareness would be more alone
than the dead earth of a desert.
My life offers enchanted keys
to the perception of your very essence.
When you guard my liberty,
You give wings and sky
to the motion of my hope.
My longing to be happy—should it cease
to reckon with your own, even for a moment—
would fall at once to dust.
When you cut my identity with a knife,
our minds go together to the slaughterhouse.]

—René Depestre, ‘Une Conscience En Fleur Pour Autrui’[4]

The artist Leo Asemota once asked the question: ‘When you look into the mirror, who do you see?’ He went ahead to respond to himself that there is, of course, the possibility of seeing only yourself, but when he looks in the mirror, he sees all the people who came before him and all in his keeping. This spirit of vertical and horizontal interconnectedness might be another crucial element in the conjugation of humanity.

In this era of deep political and social crisis in which we find ourselves in the world, the question of who we see when we look in the mirror becomes even more important. To see a multitude in the mirror is to recognize the existence, the concerns, and eventually care for its well-being.

The nation-state is one of those constructs that seems to see only itself when it looks in the mirror. That’s why we fortify our borders with walls, fight wars, expel migrants, destroy the environment, etc. Could we actually look into the mirror and see humanity? In all its shapes and colours, with all its long and shortcomings, with all its shades of grey, and all its imperfections? As it stands, the mirror in which we seem to be stirring is shattered into pieces, and instead of a reflection we seem to be seeing infinite refractions that lead to oblivion. But even a broken mirror can be mended. To engage in that process of mending, however, one must allow oneself to be guided by and consent to René Depestre’s maxims in ‘Une Conscience en fleur pour autrui’: ‘My joy is knowing that you are me, / and that I am deeply you’ or ‘My life offers enchanted keys / to the perception of your very essence’.[5]
Humanity is a practice.
Humanity is a verb.
It can be conjugated.

Fragment III: The Adamant Beauty of the World

Rising from the abyss is the sound of centuries.
The song of Ocean’s valleys.

On the Atlantic Ocean floor sonorous seashells
tangle with skulls, bones, and iron balls turned green.
These depths hold the cemeteries of slave ships and of the
many men who sailed them. Deeds of a greedy Western
world, violated borders, flags raised and fallen. ... But
these transported Africans undid the separations of the
world. They too opened up the Americas’ vast spaces with
violent bloodshed. ...
The remains of these ancestors shipped away to
become the silt of the abysses, all those former worlds,
were ground down until they truly became a new place.
One world made Africa laminary. The Africas impregnated
distant worlds. This fact makes it possible to see the
Whole-World and to comprehend it—the Tout-Monde given
to everyone, valid for everyone, multiple in its totality,
based on the sonorous abysses.

—Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, ‘The Adamant Beauty of the World’[6]

The estuary of Recife is a space of multiple encounters. Not only the meeting of sweet and salt water, but also the first port in the Americas where enslaved people abducted from Africa encountered the so-called New World. Since its founding in 1537 upon Portuguese colonization, Recife has been a remarkable site in which that which has emerged from that abyss, that chasm, despite despicable violences, has been able to manifest its intractable, adamant beauty. A site in which the rumours from and the depths of that abyss still resonate in all engulfing ripples and manifest themselves as that notion of Tout-Monde.

That ‘adamant beauty of the world’ birthed, in Brazil, some of the most important artistic and cultural movements of the twentieth century: the ‘anthropofagia movement’ of the 1920s, that gave form to and informed a Brazilian avant-garde and led both to the ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ and an aesthetics and politics that Oswald de Andrade called ‘Cannibalist transnationalism’ (a philosophy that called for the cannibalization, the ingestion, and the digestion of other cultures as a way of asserting Brazil against European colonial and postcolonial cultural domination, as was so magnificently exposed in the 24th Bienal de São Paulo, curated by Paulo Herkenhoff with Adriano Pedrosa); the Teatro Experimental do Negro [Black Experimental Theater] (TEN), a movement founded by Abdias Nascimento in 1944 to tackle the dearth of Black presence and dignity in the national performing arts, initiating a movement of Afro-Brazilian playwriting that also engaged politically by bringing the anti-racism struggles to the 1946 Constituent Assembly and influencing the proposition of the Afonso Arinos Act, ‘the first legislation geared to curb racism’;[7] the Cinema Novo’s ‘Eztetyka da Fome’ [Aesthetics of Hunger] movement, filmically formulated by Glauber Rocha in 1965, understanding cinema as an important tool and weapon for the revolutionary struggle; the Tropicalismo movement of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Tom Zé, and Torquato Neto in the 1960s, advocating with their Tropicália ou Panis et Circencis manifesto for a ‘field for reflection on social history’ through music, film, and other artistic expressions that synchronized African and Brazilian cultures and found a political voice at the height of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship; or the Manguebit movement of the 1990s in Recife, that stood for a musical revolt against the socio-political, economic, and cultural stagnation, for a resistance against the neoliberal agenda that had usurped most of Latin America, that advocated for a cultural memory that embraced all the aforementioned attributes ‘given in all, valid for all, multiple in its totality’,[8] and that opted for a way-out of the socio-economic cul-de-sac through a pidginization of sonic scapes and genres like makossa, Congolese rumba, reggae, coco, forró, maracatu, frevo, as much as rock, hip hop, electronic music, and funk. The Manguebit movement and its manifesto ‘Caranguejos com cérebro’ [Crabs with Brains], written in 1992 by singer Fred Zero Quatro and DJ Renato L, were brought to life by two legendary bands and two albums from 1994 whose titles betray their intentions: Mundo Livre S/A’s Samba Esquema Noise [Samba Scheme Noise] and Chico Science & Nação Zumbi’s Da lama ao caos [From Mud to Chaos]. This is the crux of Fragment III.

In ‘Manguebit’, the very first song on Samba esquema noise, Mundo Livre S/A sings of the transistor, of Recife as a circuit and the country as a chip; they sing of Manguebit as a virus that contaminates the eyes, ears, languages, sound waves, and this virus is spread through UHF with the help of needle-antennas inserted in the mangrove in the estuaries. They sing of the land as radio and the destruction of the land and the tributaries. This was an anthem for the strange times then and now.

Chico Science & Nação Zumbi’s first song in Da lama ao caos, titled ‘Monólogo ao pé do ouvido (vinheta) / Banditismo por uma questão de classe’, is a fierce double hymn of defiance. In ‘Monólogo ao pé do ouvido’, they sing of their movement as a musical evolution to modernize the past, they sing of how fear gives rise to evil and how the collective feels the need to fight against pride, arrogance, glory, and how demons destroy the fierce power of humanity: ‘Viva Zapata! / Viva Sandino! / Viva Zumbi! / Antônio Conselheiro / All Black Panthers / Lampião’. And in ‘Banditismo por uma questão de classe’, they tell a story of bandits, of the talk of solutions and progress, and how this can be done with the killing of innocent people by the forces of law and order. They sing of banditry as survival, as a necessity, as a consequence of class struggles.

That these bands refer to a free world and to Zumbi’s nation in their names is no coincidence. That they are from Recife is no coincidence either. After all, it was in Recife that the I Congresso Afro-Brasileiro took place in 1934, which included activists like Solano Trindade, who was, by the way, also part of the Frente Negra Pernambucana and the Teatro Experimental do Negro.[9] And even more importantly, it was in the states of Pernambuco and Alagoas that the great Francisco Zumbi (1655–1695) of Kongo heritage, who went down in history as Zumbi dos Palmares, claimed his kingdom, fought against the Portuguese colonialists, resisted against the enslavement of Africans, freed his people, and resettled them in the kingdom of maroons, the quilombos, that Abdias Nascimento later qualified as some of the first democratic spaces and structures in what is today Brazil. The quilombos were the foundation on which movements like Manguebit could be built more than 300 years later.

Fragment III is a deliberation on the Manguebit movement and its manifesto ‘Caranguejos com cérebro’, understood as an exposé of a collective social brain.

In Michael Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich’s 2016 paper ‘Innovation in the Collective Brain’, they reflect on something many in non-western cultures have actually known since time immemorial:

Our societies and social networks act as collective brains. Individuals connected in collective brains, selectively transmitting and learning information, often well outside their conscious awareness, can produce complex designs without the need for a designer—just as natural selection does in genetic evolution. The processes of cumulative cultural evolution result in technologies and techniques that no single individual could recreate in their lifetime, and do not require its beneficiaries to understand how and why they work. Such cultural adaptations appear functionally well designed to meet local problems, yet they lack a designer.[10]

The authors elaborate on the origins and machinations of collective brains by discussing their ‘neurons’ and pointing out how individual brains evolve in accordance with the acquisition of culture—the so-called cultural brains (brains that evolved primarily for the acquisition of adaptive knowledge). Which is to say that ‘our cultural brains evolved in tandem with our collective brains.’[11] Muthukrishna and Henrich show how ‘cultural brains are linked into collective brains that generate inventions and diffuse innovations’, as well as examine the ways in which ‘collective brains can feedback to make each of their constituent cultural brains “smarter”—or at least cognitively better equipped to deal with local challenges.’[12]

The threads with which the fabric, the cultural brain, the collective brain of Recife of the ‘Caranguejos com cérebro’ were woven span from the encounter of different worlds that were forced to cross paths almost 500 years ago, as well as the different social entities, from the family to the plantation to the samba school, to different social networks. As Muthukrishna and Henrich point out:

The most basic structure of the collective brain is the family. Young cultural learners first gain access to their parents, and possibly a range of alloparents (aunts, grand-fathers, etc.). Families are embedded in larger groups, which may take many forms, from egalitarian hunter-gatherers to villages, clans, and ‘big man’ societies, from chiefdoms to states with different degrees of democracy, free-markets and welfare systems, to large unions.[13]

Next to the people, the geographical and geological bearings of Recife also play an important role in the manifestation of that cultural and collective brain that birthed the Manguebit movement. Recife is situated at the confluence of the Beberibe and Capibaribe rivers, proceeding in their majesty to empty themselves in the massive body of water, the South Atlantic Ocean, from whose belly, from whose vault, the voices still sing. Topography and climate also contribute to the making of knowledge. With its tropical forest, high rainfall, its monsoon climate, its estuaries, and high relative humidity, Recife has been called the daughter of the mangrove, with its Parque dos Manguezais that too lends its name to Manguebit. But this natural, ecological richness of Recife, which could be a dream for some, became a nightmare for the people of Recife. In Alice de Souza’s article ‘Life Reborn in the Mud’,[14] she writes about Ilha de Deus (God’s Island), an island of Recife that had been generally neglected due to its decrepitude in the 1970s and 80s—there was no water, no electricity, no attention from the government. In the middle of these dire socio-political and economic conditions, the island was called Ilha sem Deus (Godless Island). As if the neglect of Ilha de Deus wasn’t enough, in 1983, two nearby factories provoked an environmental disaster by dumping waste from soap production into the water, thereby intoxicating fish and sea plants, which were the main means of subsistence in the area. This led to starvation and mass exodus of the islanders in search of greener pastures. At the same time, crime skyrocketed on the island, which had become a hiding place for gangs. This was not restricted to Ilha de Deus, as the ruthless construction in Recife, the intoxication of the environment by industries, the dumping of waste in the rivers, and the perishing of lives in the city’s mangroves (that had become oversaturated with plastic and other wastes) led to an auto-suffocation. If the rivers and estuaries of Recife were the veins and arteries of the place, then the city was suffering from a terrible thrombosis.

It was against this backdrop that the Manguebit movement emerged as a cultural revolution in the 1990s, to say ‘no more’, accompanied by several environmental groups that planned to replant mangrove seedlings, folding up their sleeves and going knee-deep into the mud to clear the estuaries from plastic.[15] This new movement came with a new sound: Manguebit.

Fragment III pays homage to the Manguebit movement, as a descendant of all the great movements that ever came out of Brazil. As Melcion Mateu writes in his essay ‘Nação Zumbi: Two Decades of “Crabs with Brains” (and Still Hungry)’:

The term ‘manguebit’ is itself a hybrid, portmanteau word containing a reference to local landscape (‘mangue’ as said, ‘mangrove swamp’, ‘marshland’) and global technology (‘bit’ or binary digit, as in computer science): a movement rooted in its landscape but connected to the global technology. ... A parabolic antenna put in the mud became the concept image to describe a movement that aspired to connect the local culture to the global scene.[16]

Which is to say that the Manguebit is a conceptual paradigm that brings together the notions of maternity, fertility, diversity, and productivity with the notion of a technology, digital media, or computation that can facilitate syncretism, that can bridge the gap not only across the Atlantic, but between those that survived on land and those still locked up in that abyss. Technology in this context serves a double purpose of connecting but also subverting. Manguebit should also be understood as the possibility of creating technologies, sciences, and arts that do not only reflect the quotidian but are also fundamental for the subversions of the terrors of normativity. The technologies and sciences that were conceived to deprivilege the masses are actually misappropriated and perverted from their original purposes, in what we might call weapons of mass subversion.

The Manguebit manifesto ‘Caranguejos com cérebro’ directly relates to the people of Recife, who are colloquially referred to as crabs living in the mangrove. Crabs, like some other lobsters and shrimps, are known to be masters of navigation of their territories and even territories unknown, since they have a sophisticated memory. They have been found to have the cognitive capacity for complex learning despite their rudimentary brains. In the article ‘Clever Crustaceans’, Erica Westly states that crabs ‘can remember the location of a seagull attack and learn to avoid that area. In mammals, this kind of behavior requires multiple brain regions, but a study published in the June issue of the Journal of Neuroscience suggests that the C. granulatus crab can manage with just a few neurons.’[17] The experiments made by neuroscientists at the Universidad de Buenos Aires to test the memory skills of crabs showed that they could retain information for more than twenty-four hours, which is the clinical benchmark for long-term memory in most animals, including humans. And even more: they showed the ability to apply their acquired knowledge to their own well-being and survival.

The researchers attributed this behaviour to the crabs’ lobula giant neurons that might have the possibility of storing information about different stimuli. It is known that crabs learn from their mistakes, that they are ambidextrous, that they have a sense of compassion that leads them to protect their territory, and that crab mothers are very caring, said to place snail shells around their young ones to increase their calcium intake.

This is an invitation for artists, scholars, and people from varying walks of life to reflect on the social and cultural brain of the collective, which embodies the ambidexterity, intelligence, and prudence of the crabs as a way of being in the world, as a way of being better humans. This is also an invitation for them to deliberate on spaces like estuaries and mangroves, spaces that are evidence of solidarity, a coexistence of a variety of beings, plants, animals, and mycelia that mostly assist and subsist each other, if left alone by the human. So, if such creatures with what we, humans, might call ‘primitive brains’ could exercise such proficient memories and such compassion, why can’t humans? Or can they?

The relationship between crabs and humans that is central to the Manguebit movement had already been described in Josué de Castro’s seminal novel Of Men and Crabs, published in 1967. By then, de Castro had earned fame for his path-breaking ecological work on the politics of hunger titled The Geography of Hunger, published in 1946. Being a physician in Recife, de Castro had done studies with workers’ and declared that their ‘basal disease’ was hunger that manifested itself clinically as anemia, protein-calorie malnutrition, among other ailments. He linked the socio-economic realities of the people of Recife to their biological manifestation of hunger. In Of Men and Crabs, written while in exile in Paris, he tells a fictional tale of poverty related to his childhood, narrating the tragic life of the young João Paulo. The author interweaves the story of the pathetic condition of the people around the boy with the story of Father Aristides, whose craving for the guaiamum crabs is insatiable. In that space of exile, and hopelessness, de Castro gifted the world a book that paints the reality of ‘the wretched of the earth’. It is no surprise that the main character, João, disappears during a disastrous flood that literally erases the whole settlement. But as de Castro writes, what we take with us is, ‘humans fashioned of crab meat, thinking and feeling like crabs; amphibians, at home on land and in water, half-man, half-animal; fed, in their infancy, on that miry milk, crab broth.’[18]

These relationalities of beings across land and waters, those in the swamps, so playfully and critically put forth by Mundo Livre S/A and Chico Science & Nação Zumbi; these relationalities between different genres, between gods, humans, and other existences put forth by Oswald de Andrade; these relationalities proposed by de Castro; these relationalities that mediate the rumours from several centuries ago to the rumours of today, that negotiate between the voices in the vault and the voices of those who are still surviving, all these relations speak to an exhaustive and resilient brain: the Mangue Brain. The first Mangue manifesto, ‘Caranguejos com cérebro’, was structured as a trilogy: ‘Mangue—The Concept’, ‘Manguetown—The City’, ‘Mangue—The Scene’. Now, we can imagine Mangue—The Exhibition. An exhibition that negates the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest, and instead advocates for coexistence, interdependence, love, and joy as the basis for the adamant beauty of the world.

 

[1] Conceição Evaristo, ‘Da calma e do silêncio’, in Poemas da recordação e outros movimentos (Rio de Janeiro: Malê, 2008), 122. Translated from the Portuguese by Sergio Maciel.

[2] Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, tr. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

[3] Emily Caffrey, ‘The Importance of Estuarine Ecosystems’, Ocean Blue Project, oceanblueproject.org/what-is-an-estuary/.

[4] René Depestre, En état de poésie (Petite sirène) (Paris: Les éditeurs français réunis, 1980). Translation from the French by Sergio Maciel. Translation of the poem’s title: ‘A blossoming conscience for others’.

[5] Depestre, En état de poésie.

[6] Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, ‘The Adamant Beauty of the World’, in Manifestos, tr. Betsy Wing and Matt Reeck (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2022).

[7] ‘O teatro dentro de mim’, Itaú Cultural, 2016, ocupacao.icnetworks.org/ocupacao/abdias-nascimento/o-teatro-dentro-de-mim/.

[8] Glissant and Chamoiseau, ‘The Adamant Beauty of the World’.

[9] Amurabi Oliveira, ‘Afro-Brazilian Studies in the 1930s: Intellectual Networks between Brazil and the USA’, Brasiliana: Journal for Brazilian Studies 8/1–2 (2019).

[10]  Michael Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich, ‘Innovation in the Collective Brain’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 19 March 2016, royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.0192, 2.

[11] Muthukrishna and Henrich, ‘Innovation in the Collective Brain’, 2.

[12] Muthukrishna and Henrich, ‘Innovation in the Collective Brain’, 2.

[13] Muthukrishna and Henrich, ‘Innovation in the Collective Brain’, 4.

[14] Alice de Souza, ‘Life Reborn in the Mud’, Believe Earth, 17 November 2017, believe.earth/ en/life-reborn-in-the-mud/.

[15] de Souza, ‘Life Reborn in the Mud’.

[16] Melcion Mateu,‘Nação Zumbi:Two Decades of “Crabs with Brains”(and Still Hungry)’,Crítica Latinoamericana (5 December 2012).

[17] Erica Westly, ‘Clever Crustaceans’, Scientific American Mind 22/5 (November 2011), 14.

[18] Josué de Castro, Of Men and Crabs, tr. Susan Hertelendy (New York: Vanguard, 1970).