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.

摘要

本文考察了一种倾向，即假设若泽·玛丽亚·阿格达斯 (José María Arguedas) 在研究秘鲁土著文化时依赖于被称为抢救民族志或紧急人类学的人类学实践。考虑到拉丁美洲的土著居民巧妙地将西方文化元素吸收到他们的印度文化体系中以保护它们，该分析借鉴了 Arguedas 对挽救民族志是否适合拉丁美洲表示的怀疑。这种抵抗策略，由 Ángel Rama 通过术语“混血儿文化抗体”概念化，成为 Arguedas 关于秘鲁印第安文化话语的核心，并产生了革命性的结果，包括对技术、资本主义商业化和大众媒体可能产生的广泛影响的先见之明。民间传说和流行文化。他工作的这一方面克服了詹姆斯·克利福德在挽救民族志实践中发现的主要关键缺点，甚至可以被视为这位人类学家从 1980 年代开始倡导的所谓后现代民族志的先发制人的中心原则. 因此，尽管他的民族志与 Arguedas 不一致，但一些批评家一致将救助民族志学家的标签归于 Arguedas，这一事实似乎是另一个例子，表明普遍化话语的主导地位基于来自大都市学术中心的理论假定的优越性。它甚至可以被视为这位人类学家从 1980 年代开始倡导的所谓后现代民族志的先发制人的中心原则。因此，尽管他的民族志与 Arguedas 不一致，但一些批评家一致将救助民族志学家的标签归于 Arguedas，这一事实似乎是另一个例子，表明普遍化话语的主导地位基于来自大都市学术中心的理论假定的优越性。它甚至可以被视为这位人类学家从 1980 年代开始倡导的所谓后现代民族志的先发制人的中心原则。因此，尽管他的民族志与 Arguedas 不一致，但一些批评家一致将救助民族志学家的标签归于 Arguedas，这一事实似乎是另一个例子，表明普遍化话语的主导地位基于来自大都市学术中心的理论假定的优越性。