Animismo y chamanismo literarios en José María Arguedas

Abstract

This article traces the relationship between epistemology, aesthetics and nonanthropocentric thought in José María Arguedas’s texts “Orovilca” and The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below. In “Orovilca” the main characters create a fictional-textual ritual, linking magic Andean thought and a system of poetic analogies, and provide nature with a social agency. In The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below, Arguedas imagines an animistic shamanic ritual in which he blurs the ontological divide between humans, animals, and machines. Arguedas uses this ritual to challenge the cosmopolitan aesthetics of the Latin American Boom and to destabilize the ideological grounds of global extractive capitalism. Both texts foresaw the possibility of future post-anthropocentric aesthetics and epistemologies.