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Im Rahmen der Werkstattgespräche hielt Frau Dr. Melanie Merlin de Andrade am 17. Juni 2026 einen Vortrag an der Universität Bayreuth.

Abstract: Drawing on the Brazilian concept of anthropophagy, not only as a metaphor but as a cultural technique, this article explores how legal translation operates, driven by constellations of desire and embedded in social, cultural, and historical layers making a “law-world”, having as a case study the translation of Robert Alexy’s Theorie der Grundrechte into Brazilian Portuguese. Through an analysis of translation as an active site of legal and cultural recreation, the study highlights how Brazilian legal scholarship does not passively receive external theories but reshapes and recreates – or, in our terms, devours and digests – them according to its own historical and institutional frameworks. As it reveals that Brazil’s Alexy is not Germany’s Alexy, the translation processes are shaped in postcolonial settings, whereby translation appears as the desire of the other of becoming part of the “transnational” or even “global” same, as our loadstar into understanding the intertwinement of embeddedness, informality and equivocation is the signature of anthropophagy.