Abstract
Although the poetico-ideological designs of the authors on whom this study focuses are connected to very different projects, it is interesting to note that both frequently engage in similar modes of reflection, confronting comparable dilemmas related to the representation of Peruvian society and culture.
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Notes
- 1.
The study of material culture was developed principally in the USA and in Europe during the twentieth century, although it first emerged in the previous century. As an interdisciplinary enterprise, the study of material culture is concerned with history, the uses and meanings of objects and artifacts belonging to distinct cultural and historical contexts, as well as the social relations that are established around them. In this sense, the field of material culture is linked to consumer studies, environmental studies, the circulation of commodities, the establishment of value, the uses of the object, the construction of identities, commercial transactions and exchange, the preservation of cultural legacies, the institutionality of museums, and other related themes. The principal disciplines which converge in the study of material culture are anthropology, history, archeology, sociology, philosophy, cultural criticism, economics, and others. For an example of general studies with this orientation, see, for example, Thomas J. Schlereth, ed., Material Culture: A Research Guide; Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things; and the Journal of Material Culture. In some cases, the study of material culture rests completely on the analysis of the circulation of commodities, recognizing as one of its theoretical foundations Georg Simmel’s early study, The Philosophy of Money, from 1907, and Marx’s work on capitalist production and political economy. In other cases, the orientation has more to do with Bourdieu’s analysis of social behavior or with the more semiotic orientation of Baudrillard.
- 2.
On the significance of the zumballyu, see Huamán 286–92. His book is also useful for comprehending the meanings of other Quechua references in Arguedas’s work.
- 3.
Moore highlights the unifying importance of the zumballyu as a hybrid element and as a “magic mediator,” indicating that, “as with the bull and the bullfight in Yawar fiesta, the zumballyu dramatizes both the socio-cultural diversity of Andean society and the possibilities of its integration” (En la encrucijada 305).
- 4.
Julio Ortega emphasizes (although he is referring strictly to the literary world created by the author) Arguedas’s condition as the communicator of a plural model appropriated in order to represent a highly stratified and culturally differentiated society. In this sense, Los ríos profundos constitutes a fictional representation of the social drama that derives from the tense coexistence of different systems of communication which assume diverse models of perception as well as different ways of transmitting, hierarchizing, and processing information—hence, the plural configuration of the narrator and his tendency to redouble into an authorial “I,” a witness “I,” and a protagonist “I.” Some of Ortega’s observations on the theme of communication can be applied to Arguedas’s anthropological work as well as his work as a cultural critic more generally.
- 5.
Ann Lambright works the useful notion of “hybrid intellectual,” understanding it to mean a member of the lettered city, generally white and of urban origin, who identifies with indigenous communities and whose social conscience prepares him to struggle on their behalf (56–57). Lambright studies this hybridity not only in terms of ethnic exchange or co-belonging, but also in relation to nationalist ideology linked to the notion of gender, the representation of the feminine in Arguedas’s work, and the functions that are assigned to it, at an aesthetic as well as an ideological level, within the author’s fictitious world. Used in this way, the notion of hybridity, which ends up encompassing too many levels, is expanded toward other territories, broadening the possibilities of analysis but also diluting—and at times easing—access to the possible theoretical valences of this notion.
- 6.
Castro-Klarén has proposed the notion of “indigenist realism” with regard to thinking about Arguedas (El mundo mágico 21), an author whose commitment to historical reality is not diluted by the undoubtedly poetic dimension of his texts, which are always rooted in a worldview strongly influenced by indigenous epistemology.
- 7.
Rowe concludes his article on “El novelista y el antropólogo” [“The novelist and the anthropologist”] with a reflection that, in and of itself, could guide new readings of Arguedas from a postcolonial perspective: “Insofar as the Andean response is displaced from an imaginary praxis to a real praxis and the borders between the two worlds are disappearing, the mythological universe is entering a crisis at the same time that capitalist Peruvian culture is losing its monolithic and impenetrable appearance. In spite of—but also because of—its use of myth, magic, and religious symbolism, Arguedas’s work stages the necessity and the difficulty of going beyond mythology” (116). I think, however, that Rowe’s last assertion is debatable since myth carries out an articulating function of significant ideological import, as Mariátegui already pointed out, making the world intelligible and incorporating categories of perception and analysis that Western rationality relegates to the margins of accepted knowledge.
- 8.
On the theme of North American anthropology and the discipline of anthropology in general as an instrument of imperialism, as well as on the relations between anthropology and “magical” thought in Arguedas, see Marisol de la Cadena, “La producción de otros conocimientos y sus tensiones: ¿de la antropología andinista a la interculturalidad?,” and Degregori and Sandoval, “Dilemas y tendencias,” Saberes periféricos, and other texts. Ladislao Landa Vásquez formulates the idea of “anthropology at home,” referring to the local view Arguedas exercised within his own environs, in which he brought together the observed, the recorded, and the lived. This would give Arguedas the status of “native informant” (“self-ethnographer”), a condition in which first-hand knowledge of one’s own culture is combined with subjective elements (affectivity, desires, etc.) which distinctly affect the anthropologist’s interpretation and account of his or her object of study. In this regard, see Strathern, as well as Geertz on the problems of ethnographic writing.
- 9.
Although the origins of dependency theory are generally linked to the crash of 1929 and to the effort to understand the world crisis of capitalism and the elaboration of regional alternatives, in Latin America this tendency was disseminated by the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, who directed the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) between 1948 and 1962. Thus, in different contexts within Latin America, a debate developed about the protectionist role of the State, the role of international markets, and the center/periphery configuration as a structure of capitalist domination. The principal representatives of dependency theory are Theotonio Dos Santos, André Gunder Frank, Celso Furtado, Ruy Mauro Marini, Enzo Faletto, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Dependency theory analyzes the benefits of state control and rejects the pressures of the international market, promoting instead protectionist barriers and stimulating import substitute industrialization.
- 10.
González Casanova writes: “The definition of internal colonialism is originally linked to phenomena of conquest in which native populations are not exterminated and form, first, part of the colonizing State that later acquires a formal independence or initiates a process of liberation, of a transition to socialism or a recolonization and return to neoliberal capitalism. People, minorities, or nations colonized by [another] nation-State suffer conditions similar to those that characterize colonialism and neocolonialism at the international level: they inhabit a territory they do not govern; they find themselves in an unequal situation, facing elites from dominant ethnicities and the classes they compose; their juridico-political administration and responsibility concern dominant ethnicities, the bourgeoisie, and the oligarchies of the central government or its associates and subordinates; its inhabitants do not occupy the highest political or military positions of the central government except when they have fully “assimilated;” the inhabitants’ rights and economic, political, social, and cultural situations are regulated and imposed by the central government; in general, the colonized within a nation-State belong to a distinct ‘race’ from those who dominate the national government, a ‘race’ which is considered ‘inferior’ or at most is converted into a ‘liberating’ symbol that forms part of the state’s demagoguery; the majority of the colonized belong to a distinct culture and speak a language different from the ‘national’ language” (“Colonialismo interno” 410). See also Stavenhagen and González Casanova, De la sociología del poder a la sociología de la explotación.
- 11.
As Mignolo notes, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui also covers this concept in her studies of the indigenous peasantry in Bolivia.
- 12.
Liberation theology has its origins in the 1960s, and its principal representatives include Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino, who published Historia, política y salvación de una teología de liberación in 1971 [translated as A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation in 1973—Tr.], Brazilian Leonardo Boff, Colombian Camilo Torres, who was a member of the Colombian National Liberation Army, and others. This movement articulated Christian transcendentalism with a Marxist emphasis on economic processes and the struggle between classes as fundamental elements for the comprehension of social injustice. It focused on poverty as a mobilization point for transformative social action against inequality, thus elaborating the notions of the social victim, solidarity, and structural sin, making itself into an alternative to capitalism as well as into a different path toward socialism than the traditional avenues of partisanship and orthodoxy. The relationship between Gustavo Gutiérrez and Arguedas would be documented in El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo and in Gutiérrez’s book, Entre las calandrias, which he dedicated to his friendship with Arguedas. In this regard, see Gutierrez’s A Theology of Liberation, as well as Boff and Dussel.
- 13.
In this regard, see, for example, the section of Klára Schirová’s “Todas las sangres: la utopía peruana” entitled “El dios de los pobres,” in Arguedas en el corazón de Europa 118–26.
- 14.
Based on these elements, the religious connotations that Arguedas’s work may have had have been exaggerated in some cases by voluntarist readings, such as that of Gutiérrez himself, who insists on the importance of the Christian God in Arguedas’s work. In any case, the relations between theology and Latin American literature have yet to be exhaustively investigated. In this regard, see Schirová and Rivera-Pagán. On the role of religion in Arguedas’s work, see Trigo.
- 15.
“From the point of view of form and content, Todas las sangres has all the features of a mythic novel or biblical allegory […] Willka’s trajectory symbolizes the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. His pilgrimage to Lima, the awakening, the return to San Pedro, the organization of communities, and the redemption of death together with the signal of messianism repeat and affirm the Christian cycle of suffering and salvation” (Schirová 120).
- 16.
Arguedas’s first anthropological work was his doctoral thesis at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos entitled Las comunidades de España y del Perú, written on the basis of fieldwork undertaken in Spain in 1958. He described this thesis as an “irregular book, a good chronicle [that] is, for all that, somewhat novelesque and peppered with a certain academic nuance” (Millones, “Una mirada” 22).
- 17.
In terms of cultural recovery, it is worth recalling Arguedas’s recuperation of Andean stories based on those collected by Luis Gilberto Pérez, who served as Arguedas’s source on several aspects of Quechua culture. Arguedas published these texts in Quechua with his own Spanish translations in the journal Folklore Americano. It is interesting to note both the proliferation of mediations and the documentary function assigned to literature as a space of cultural (re)cognition and recuperation of marginalized writings. In this regard, see Bueno Chávez’s article.
- 18.
Lienhard correctly notes that “In contrast to Luis Valcárcel’s messianic, indigenist dithyramb in Tempestad en los Andes, the mestizo messianism that animates José María Arguedas’s article [referring to “La canción popular mestiza,” collected in Indios, mestizos y señores]—the definitive conquest is not too far off—does not point to a violent social tempest but rather a change in mentality” (“La antropología” 50, emphasis in original).
- 19.
Examples of these positions can be seen, for instance, in Arguedas’s texts on Puquio and the Mantaro Valley, collected in Formaciones de una cultura indoamericana.
- 20.
On Arguedas’s ethnographic work and his elaboration of the notions of mestizo and mestizaje, see De la Cadena and Kokotovic, La modernidad andina, especially its second chapter, “Del desarrollismo al pachakutiy” (93–131). On Valcárcel, see Escobar (30–35), and on the difference between this latter and Arguedas, see Cortés.
- 21.
I agree with Cortés in his discussion of Manrique and Flores Galindo’s considerations on what would in Arguedas be, according to these scholars’ perspective, a contradictory and harmonizing discourse on the theme of mestizaje. I think Arguedas’s notion of mestizaje is conceptualized from a certain strategic essentialism insofar as he is trying to propose a category that would allow him to delineate a political agent, which is to say, an (in principle) cohesive cultural and ideological structuration that can rise above internal antagonisms and differences to consolidate an agenda for political mobilization.
- 22.
After the considerations expressed by Mariátegui, who tried to analyze the position of the mestizo in its historical moment in relation to other segments of society, the theme of the mestizo has been studied very soundly by Flores Galindo in Buscando un inca. See also Alberto Escobar, “En torno del mestizo,” in Arguedas o la utopía de la lengua (48–56), and De la Cadena, Indigenas mestizos, where on the basis of this concept he studies the condition of individuals of indigenous but trans-territorialized origin, whose experience in urban centers does not change, however, their identification with indigenous culture. See also his article “¿Son los mestizos híbridos?”
- 23.
As was previously observed, with respect to these representations of social change in Arguedas’s work Flores Galindo noted the fact that this narrative seems to follow the itinerary that describes the expansion of the internal market in Peru: “A parallel can be established between the expansion of the road system, the growth of commercial agriculture, and the intensification of exchange as well as monetary and commercial flows with the development of Arguedas’s work” (Dos Ensayos 15). Flores Galindo even connects this Arguedian thematic to the writer’s own biography, the travels of his father (a lawyer) in a fully developed country, young José María’s re-enrollment in schools in Ica and Huancayo, and his further studies in Lima. In this respect, see Cornejo Polar’s studies of the migrant subject as well.
- 24.
Quijano sees this process as an uneven development that cannot be applied without examining the different contexts in which it occurs. See Moore’s discussion of the topic in En la encrucijada (163 and passim), as well as Matos Mar’s foundational book.
- 25.
It is important to see here the substantial change the concept of mestizaje underwent in the context of populism in the inter-war period, not only in Peru but, of course, in Mexico as well, after the impact of the Mexican Revolution. In this period, the notion of national culture and the conceptualization of the Latin American political subject (particularly in the Andean region) substantially changed. In this regard, see Moraña, Literatura y cultura nacional en Hispanoamérica: 1910–1940.
- 26.
Moore reconstructs the terms of both the debate itself and the intellectual horizon of the era in which it occurred, and in which the recent works of Henri Favre on the peasants of Huancavelica and Quijano’s influential study of the emergence of the cholo segment of Peruvian society had circulated. Nugent has written more recently about this latter theme in El laberinto de la choledad. Moore also recalls the fact that the character of Rendón Willka, who raised so much controversy at the roundtables of 1965 for the way he related to other characters that represented capitalism (the landowning patriarch Andrés Aragón y Peralta and his sons Fermín and Bruno), is himself a product of internal migration in Peru, an ex-Indian or cholo embodying both the skepticism and the adaptability of this social category. In spite of his distrust of party politics (including communist politics) as a politico-ideological structure, Willka shows himself capable of responding to the challenges of modernity, accepting of the changes imposed by technology, and negotiating forms of functioning within the new social parameters of the epoch. In this sense, he does not represent an “anachronistic” form of social inclusion but rather illustrates the very ambiguities and contradictions of a new social subject in a setting undergoing profound transformations.
- 27.
On Mariátegui and postcolonial thought, see Moraña, “Mariátegui en los nuevos debates: Emancipación, (in)dependencia y ‘colonialismo supérstite’ en América Latina.”
- 28.
It is interesting to note that, revealing the disciplinary hierarchization of the era, Arguedas defended himself from his critics’ attacks by appealing largely to the same language of social science, indicating the imprecision of particular terms (“Indian,” “cholo”), citing the example of the four servants [“pongos”] from Huancavelica, and maintaining that all social realities and all analytical categories are necessarily relative to the specific place to which they are applied, thus claiming the dimension of the particularity of the local and the need to historicize processes and contemplate their geocultural variations. In this regard, see Moore, “Encuentros y desencuentros.” When Arguedas was questioned by literary critics such as Oviedo and Salazar Bondy, he was even more disconcerted by the claim that they advanced regarding the lack of documentation in Arguedas’s novel.
- 29.
Castro-Klarén considers the unfolding of affect derived from Huarochirí’s manuscript, which presents the shamanic world as a form of knowledge that Arguedas had tried to incorporate into his writing. More than the mere right to “be different,” or the text’s evident thanatic directionality, El zorro de arriba is so excessively marked by affect that it tests the limits of writing and of life itself. On “machinic affect” in the Zorros, see Beasley-Murray.
- 30.
See, for example, Castro-Klarén, as well as Portugal (“AGON: la imaginación melodramática”), Moore (“Encuentros y desencuentros,” 275–76), Fernando Rivera-Díaz (“El zorro en el espejo,” in Sergio R. Franco, ed., José María Arguedas: hacia una poética migrante, 178–82), and Marcos.
- 31.
See Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, especially the section dedicated to divine violence. Žižek reminds us of one of Che Guevara’s most famous quotations: “One must endure—become hard, toughen oneself—without losing tenderness” (204). Žižek’s reflections on Benjamin’s concept of mythic violence (“that [which] demands sacrifice,” 199) can be applied to moments in Arguedas’s narrative work.
- 32.
Arguedas’s prologue to Diamantes y pedernales (the Arca/Calicanto edition which only includes one of the novels to which the author refers in his introduction) is very conceptually rich regarding such topics as the dilemma of language, translation, the affect/ideology/language relation, language as fiction, the links between universality and regionalism, and many others.
- 33.
On literature as exchange value in the Boom era, see David Viñas, and on this literary movement more generally, including its cultural and ideological significance, see Rama, “El ‘boom’ en perspectiva.”
- 34.
On technology in Arguedas see Sergio R. Franco, “Tecnologías de la representación” and Kraniauskas.
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Moraña, M. (2016). Toward a Poetics of Social Change: Truth, Modernity, and the National Subject in José María Arguedas. In: Arguedas / Vargas Llosa. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57187-8_7
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