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

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.