Work · Latin American & Caribbean Philosophy
Deep America (América profunda)
Against the “cleanliness” of the city stands the “stench” of America: an indigenous mere being (estar) beneath the European being (ser).
Introduction
Rodolfo Kusch, an Argentine philosopher, published América profunda in Buenos Aires in 1962. He reverses Sarmiento’s opposition of “civilisation and barbarism”: the cities of Latin America live by European ser, the urge to be someone and to master the world, while beneath them lives estar, a way of merely existing that is rooted in a particular soil and open to an unpredictable, sacred world. He reads this attitude in the writings and the cosmological drawing of the early 17th-century Andean chronicler Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui. The city tries to clean away this world, but is slowly absorbed by it – a process Kusch calls fagocitación. Since the 2000s the book has been reread as a forerunner of decolonial thought.
Connections
Taken up in
- Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América1970 · Rodolfo Kusch
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