Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América

by Rodolfo Kusch, María Lugones (Translator)

Originally published in Mexico in 1970, Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América is the first book by the Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch (1922–79) to be translated into English. At its core is a binary created by colonization and the devaluation of indigenous practices and cosmologies: an opposition between the technologies and rationalities of European modernity and the popular mode of thinking, which is deeply tied to Indian ways of knowing and being. Arguing that this binary cuts through América, Kusch seeks to identify and recover the indigenous and popular way of thinking, which he contends is dismissed or misunderstood by many urban Argentines, including leftist intellectuals.Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América is a record of Kusch’s attempt to immerse himself in the indigenous ways of knowing and being. At first glance, his methodology resembles ethnography. He speaks with and observes indigenous people and mestizos in Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. He questions them about their agricultural practices and economic decisions; he observes rituals; he asks women in the market the meaning of indigenous talismans; he interviews shamans; he describes the spatial arrangement and the contents of shrines, altars, and temples; and he reproduces diagrams of archaeological sites, which he then interprets at length. Yet he does not present a “them” to a putative “us.” Instead, he offers an inroad to a way of thinking and being that does not follow the logic or fit into the categories of Western social science and philosophy. In his introduction, Walter D. Mignolo discusses Kusch’s work and its relation to that of other twentieth-century intellectuals, Argentine history, and contemporary scholarship on the subaltern and decoloniality.

Genres: Philosophy, Indigenous

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Günter Rodolfo Kusch fue un antropólogo y filósofo argentino.

Obtuvo el título de Profesor de Filosofía de la Universidad de Buenos Aires. Realizó profundas investigaciones de campo sobre el pensamiento indígena y popular americano como base de su reflexión filosófica. Además escribió varias obras teatrales y una amplia colección de artículos y conferencias sobre estética americana. El tango fue uno de sus temas predilectos.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the interesting things about the growing debates about decolonisation, about rethinking empire and about the dynamics and relations of colonialism, at least in the English-speaking world, is that much of the key thinking and writing in the field is emerging from the former Spanish Empire in central & south America. This means that not only are we engaging with some exciting new ways to think about the world, we’re doing so from what for many of us is new places as well – and are beginning to look at a line of thinking and analysis that goes back half a century or more. Rodolpho Kusch’s intriguing and challenging philosophical work is one such set of work, if this is anything to go by - including showing that the line of analysis goes back hundreds of years.

There has, at least in English, for some years now been a growing body of work exploring modes of thinking amongst peoples indigenous to what we now call North America. Some of this has been the anthropological view from the outside, but increasingly we’ve been seeing insider view – I’m not talking here about the New Age inflected romanticisation of indigenous cosmologies that are as settler colonial exploitative as any other kinds of appropriation, but works that explore ways of making sense of the world. Kusch is an important contribution to the field because he engages explicitly and directly with the politics of the status of indigenous world views to cast a three-fold dynamic between what he calls the indigenous, the popular and the scientistic. Despite this tripartite form, there is a binary logic here between object/event centred scientism of colonial modernity and relationship centred affective forms of the indigenous and the popular. This isn’t to say that he preserves this binary form, but that it shapes his argument.

There is an ethnographic sense to the case – he ventures into the field, talks to and observes world-making in indigenous settings with community spiritual figures as well as in conversation with people in various locations in Peru, Bolivia and Argentina. He discusses spirituality, farming techniques, house design and a whole array of other practices, not to report them in and of themselves but to explore how and why decision-making occurs. This, then, is ethnography in support of philosophy. Alongside this ethnographic method, Kusch brings a tightly cast analytic approach to case – that is to say, this is methodologically very much in the British tradition of analytic philosophy. Much of the discussion then unpacks and unravels discourse as terms in Spanish, Quecha and Aymara are explored, compared and given meaning in relation to each other and within the dynamic of the language(s) in question.

This rigorous analytic approach allows Kusch to build an image of a wider mode of thought as focused on dynamic inter-relationships rather than on things, and allows him to explore what that means in terms of a range of social spheres – economic life and so forth – to develop a sense of a mode of thinking and resultant social practice at odds with colonial modernity (not that he uses that terminology, but it is easy to see how Walter Mignolo might have been influenced by Kusch in his development of that set of ideas). He wraps up the case by suggesting that indigenous and popular, where popular is influenced by indigenous modes but isolated from the indigenous social world, have an impact on dominant modes of thinking and sense-making. Tellingly the analytic approach, which can sometimes lead to clearly demarcated conclusions, leads Kusch to a conclusion that turns of fluidity and a blurring of his boundaries.

It is in this concluding aspect of the case that his conceptualisation of América becomes important, as a way to present a subaltern world shaped by class and colonisation across the continent as a whole (north, central & south). Although his evidence is drawn primarily from Andean settings he draws on some secondary literature from central regions and the south west of what is now the USA. This allows him to posit some generalisable conclusions, although tentatively – he knows he is on his most solid ground in the Andes.

The case however turns on two key tropes – a distinction between what he calls rhythmic modes of thought and scientistic modes, and between a focus on relationships and a focus on things as his distinctions between indigenous/popular and colonial/modern modes. It is a compelling argument, sustained and given depth by an outstanding introduction by Mignolo contextualising and exploring some of the implications of the text, and a useful discussion by the translators of their approach and decisions. The text was first published in 1970 and the translators have remined true to Kusch’s language, meaning there is some terminology that we would not use some readily today, and tendency to generalise from a male pronoun. For those of with limited grounding in Spanish America’s intellectual and political writings some of the discussions might prove to be a challenge (I had to look some people up along the way – and there is no harm in that).

There is much to relish here, and for this extends and challenges some of the conclusions that have emerged from my readings of the Anglo-phone writing on indigenous modes of thinking (although reinforced a sense that any distinction between ontology and epistemology is incorrect when looking at the relationship-centric, rhythmic modes) especially in the construction of indigenous and popular, challenging the risk of treating indigenous modes as somehow closed off from everyday ways (this is also a useful rebuttal to the New Ageish colonial appropriation).

So, a challenging read, but an important and valuable one worthy of several return visits to key aspects.

[Luis Martinez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rodolfo Kusch's "Indigenous and Popular Thinking in America" is a solid entry point into thinking from an Andean indigenous base, though with some problems like a good number of the middle chapters feeling like they need more particular images to help reference what Kusch is talking about. He'll reference particular shrines as if the reader, who he acknowledges is likely someone who is outside of the Andean indigenous population, were familiar with the exact look and placements of these shrines. He also says "Indigenous people" when referring to specifically Andean/Aymara/Quechua people, which, needless to say, does not mean that the Andean indigenous populations are representative of all indigenous peoples across the continents.

That said, the book is still a good read so long as you bear in mind the "Indigenous" / Andean distinction. If at any point you intend to read Omar Rivera's "Andean Aesthetics and Anticolonial Resistance," this should probably be a required reading beforehand, just to familiarize yourself with some of the Andean concepts and terminology and to see how Rivera shifts their usage (pachakuti in Kusch has a slightly different reading than when Rivera uses it for his pachakuti sensibility, for example). This text also offers through indigenous thought an avenue for critiquing Western modernity, causal notions of the world, and the infantile seminality of certain approaches to Marxism. Kusch rejects the idea of studying indigenous thought as an object of study as if it were not a legitimate locus of enunciation itself. His view is instead that Indigenous thought and categories are legitimate in and of themselves for generating knowledge and the such, taking what we might call an anti-translation stance. In this way he reinscribes Andean indigeneity and its subaltern knowledges, pushing against the delegitimation and finding in them a substantial critique of scientism, the coloniality of knowledge, the coloniality of causation, and the coloniality of being, especially through the recognition of an unnameable world that resists the obsession with naming Kusch attributes to Western rationality. Through these critiques we are better able to grasp the resistance of particular Indigenous groups to "bourgeois democracy or incendiary Marxism."