Rodolfo Kusch

Works

• 1962Deep America (América profunda)

  Against the “cleanliness” of the city stands the “stench” of America: an indigenous mere being (estar) beneath the European being (ser).

• 1970Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América

  From conversations in the Andean highlands: an indigenous and popular thinking that is “seminal” rather than causal, and that the colonial mind has despised.

Position

Kusch began from a contrast he took from Argentine history, Sarmiento’s “civilisation and barbarism”, and turned it around. The cities of Latin America, especially Buenos Aires, live by European “being” (ser): the urge to be someone, to produce, to master the world through technology and concepts. Beneath it, in the countryside and the Andes, lives a “mere being” (estar): a way of existing that is rooted in a particular soil, accepts an unpredictable world and seeks to survive in it with the help of the sacred. The city experiences this world as “stench” (hedor) and wants to clean it away; yet it slowly absorbs the city in turn, a process Kusch called fagocitación. In Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América (1970) he analysed Andean thought as “seminal” rather than causal, and argued that American philosophy must start from this popular thinking and from its own “geoculture” rather than copy Europe. He drew on Heidegger, whose distinction between being and existence he reworked through the Spanish verbs ser and estar. Philosophers of liberation such as Enrique Dussel and Juan Carlos Scannone engaged with him in the 1970s, and Walter Mignolo made him a precursor of decolonial thought; the English translation of 2010, by María Lugones and Joshua M. Price, carries Mignolo’s introduction. Critics have objected that his opposition of city and “deep America” romanticises indigenous people and fixes them in a timeless otherness.

Life & context

Rodolfo Kusch was born in Buenos Aires in 1922, the son of German immigrants. He studied philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires, where he qualified as a teacher of philosophy in 1948. He wrote essays and plays and from 1963 to 1973 taught aesthetics and the history of culture at the national art school in Buenos Aires. Repeatedly he travelled to the Andes of northern Argentina, Bolivia and Peru, where he talked with Quechua and Aymara peasants, healers and market people and recorded their sayings; this fieldwork became the basis of his philosophy. He sympathised with Peronism and the national-popular left. In the 1970s he settled in Maimará in the province of Jujuy, near the Bolivian border, where he remained under the military dictatorship that began in 1976. He died in 1979.

Further main works

• La seducción de la barbarie (1953)
• Geocultura del hombre americano (1976)
• Esbozo de una antropología filosófica americana (1978)