Appropriating the Abject: An Anthropophagic Approach to Organizational Diversity

This paper discusses the concept of organizational anthropophagy, a metaphor describing a unique relationship between identity and otherness. To show how this perspective contributes to understandings of diversity and difference, I read anthropophagy against psychoanalytic discussions of abjection, a process where individuals are simultaneously fascinated by, drawn towards, and horrified by their relationships to outside "others". Stemming from the global periphery, anthropophagy provides a way to combine psychoanalytic with sociological views of otherness. I stress the implications of the anthropophagic approach for organizational theorizing of the "monstrous", placing monstrousness against the political economic context of post-coloniality and discussing its relations with diversity and difference.