Between salvage ethnography and transculturation: José María Arguedas and the politics of travelling theory

ABSTRACT

This essay examines a tendency to assume José María Arguedas’s reliance on the anthropological practice known as salvage ethnography, or urgent anthropology, in his approach to Peruvian indigenous cultures. The analysis draws upon Arguedas’s stated skepticism about the suitability of salvage ethnography for Latin America considering that its indigenous populations ingeniously absorbed western cultural elements into their Indian cultural systems in order to preserve them. This strategy of resistance, conceptualized by Ángel Rama through the term ‘mestizo cultural antibodies,’ became central to Arguedas’s discourse on Peruvian Indian culture with revolutionary results, including a prescience of the expansive effects that technology, capitalist commercialization, and mass media can have on folklore and popular culture. This dimension of his work overcomes the main critical shortcomings James Clifford identified in the practice of salvage ethnography, and it can even be seen as pre-empting central tenets of the so-called post-modern ethnography that this anthropologist advocated for from the 1980s onwards. Thus, the fact that several critics coincide in attributing the label of salvage ethnographer to Arguedas despite his ethnography’s dissonance with it seems to be another example of the dominance of universalizing discourses based on the presumed superiority of theories stemming from metropolitan academic centers.

KEYWORDS:

• Andean culture
• José María Arguedas
• Latin American post-colonialism
• mestizo cultural antibodies
• Peruvian transculturation
• salvage ethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A similar image is promoted by Morales Ortiz’s description of Arguedas’s literature as ‘centrada en la vocación de rescatar al mundo indígena’ (2014, 127).

2. Spitta cites two prominent critics in this tradition of criticism, Ángel Rama and Antonio Cornejo Polar, and she acknowledges that they ‘rescued Arguedas from earlier, simplistic versions of indigenismo in which writers had positioned themselves as both exterior and superior to the culture they were writing about’ (Spitta 1995, 140). Both critics argue, Spitta notes, ‘that Arguedas, as a bilingual and bicultural writer, allowed Andean culture to inform and shape his writings’ (1995, 140). While praising Rama and Cornejo Polar for rescuing ‘Arguedas’s works from a much-maligned indigenismo,’ she also claims that ‘they continue to overemphasize his political and artistic compromise with the Indians’ (Spitta 1995, 140).

3. There are several well-documented differences between the colonial enterprises deployed in each region that lie at the root of this difference. One of these was that unlike in the considerably later British colonization of North American territories, the Spanish conquest and colonization of the New World was marked by intense cross-racial sexual relations and procreation between the male conquistadors and Native American women from an early stage. Hennessy explains that whereas in New England family migration was common, during the early part of the conquest, there were very few women among the conquistadors, amounting to a mere 6 percent of all immigrants in the sixteenth century. This meant that cross-racial unions and procreation were common from the early stages of the conquest, and this in turn resulted in the rapid spread of a new social and racial group, the mestizos (Hennessy 1992, 17, 21). Cultural interaction was a clear by-product of this history of Latin American mestizaje, but its intensity in the region also stemmed from the difference between the approach to ‘primitive’ cultures during the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the approach that characterized European imperialism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to Emery, Enlightenment thinkers sought to ‘impose universal, totalizing strictures on local knowledge’ and thus ‘called for the eradication of the superstitious, unenlightened practices of ignorant natives’: ‘What was seen as the work of the devil in sixteenth-century accounts was condemned as irrational barbarism from the Enlightened perspective of the eighteenth century and from the perspective of nineteenth-century positivism as well’ (Emery 1996, 3). By contrast, during the colonization of the Americas it was presumed that ‘knowledge of the Other was required to enslave and deculturize’ and she suggests also ‘a certain fascination with the Other’s irreducible difference’ (1996, 3).

4. Hester also explains that salvage ethnography was configured from conclusions about culture contact derived from the observation of threatened ethnic minorities that had lived in considerable isolation. He describes it as a response to the increasing threat of large-scale area developments for isolated or uncontacted indigenous communities (Hester 1968, 132).

5. As Miller explains, Vasconcelos’s work on mestizaje ‘epitomized a position which allowed biological and aesthetic definitions of race to coexist and envisioned a dual “mission of ethnic and spiritual fusion of peoples”’ (Miller 2004, 30).

6. García Liendo also remarks upon the fact that Arguedas’s thought on the effects that industrialization and commercialization can have on traditional culture could be seen to pre-empt Néstor Garcia Canclini’s scholarship, to some extent (2016, 131).

7. As they note, ‘the term “aesthetic” has been denied to works of popular art, given their embeddedness in ritual and other uses.’ The solution supported by Mirko Lauer (1982, 145-163) of avoiding the term ‘art’ entirely in relation to native productions risks disqualifying them and denying their aesthetic power, according to these two scholars. Instead, they lean towards the strategy put forth by Ticio Escobar who advocates the terms ‘native art’ and ‘popular art’ precisely because they challenge a dominant conception of art based on oppositions developed in the theory of art, such as useful-beautiful, art-society, and form-content (Escobar 1986, 14, 16). From Rowe and Schelling’s perspective it would appear unwise to deny the aesthetic component of popular and indigenous cultural production, or to artesanía, which they describe as the poor relative of genuine art. They identify aesthetic aims and enjoyment as a part of the native ritual celebration, citing Escobar who highlights its use of several aesthetic manifestations in the form of visual, musical, choreographic, and dramatic elements (Rowe and Schelling 1991, 197-98).

8. As William Rowe also notes, ‘institutional power struggles are what tend to make Latin American intellectual traditions invisible. In this case, one is talking – in rough historical order – about stylistics, structuralism, post-structuralism, “French theory,” post-modernism and so on as forms taken by a struggle for interpretive power whose lines of force have by-passed the production of theories and methods in Latin America’ (Rowe 2000, vii).

9. As can be seen, García Liendo actually resorts to the biological metaphor of phagocytosis in contrast to Rama’s antibodies. Phagocytosis is defined as ‘the process by which foreign particles invading the body or minute food particles are engulfed and broken down by certain animal cells (known as phagocytes)’ (Martin and Hine 2015).

10. It may be worth recognizing that Arguedas himself used the term ‘transculturation’ much earlier than Rama and that he already did so stressing its only counter-hegemonic implication as defined by Fernando Ortiz. In his 1953 essay ‘La sierra en el proceso de la cultura peruana’ he refers to ‘el caso de los exindios del valle del Mantaro […]; primer caso de transculturación en masa que estudiamos someramente en las primeras páginas de este trabajo’ (Arguedas Arguedas, 2012d, 358). The essay’s initial pages actually contain the previously cited extract in which Arguedas describes how Indians in the Mantaro Valley of Peru had enhanced the ‘personalidad cultural’ of the region by creatively responding to growing economic and cultural links with Lima (Arguedas Arguedas, 2012d, 345).

11. Coronil bases this statement on the work of Subaltern Studies scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty (Coronil 1995, xl; Chakrabarty 1992).

Additional information

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Miguel Arnedo-Gómez

Miguel Arnedo-Gómez is a Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His research focuses on representations of race and ethnicity and theories and concepts of cultural interaction in Latin America, such as transculturation, mestizaje, hybridity, and heterogeneity. He is currently working on several studies that deal with Cuban literary anthropology, particularly the work of Cuban writer Fernando Ortiz. He has published several essays and articles, as well as two books on Cuban literature with well-regarded university presses