José María Arguedas (born in Andahuaylas, Peru, in 1911; died in Lima, Peru, in 1969) was an important novelist, ethnographer, cultural advocate, and teacher. In the first two decades of the 21st century, the cultural and political depth of his work has been brought to further light through emergent research areas. Scholars now situate Arguedas’s work under the broader umbrellas of cultural and political theories. In the realm of political philosophy, Arguedas was influenced by the Marxist legacies of 1920s and 1960s Peru, and by such thinkers and activists as José Carlos Mariátegui and Hugo Blanco. Arguedas’s politics, and particularly his challenges to 1960s developmental discourse, anticipates some of the ideas behind the principle of “buen vivir / vivir bien,” a concept developed from indigenous worldviews that has been incorporated into the new Bolivian and Ecuadorian constitutions in the first decade of the 21st century. Arguedas’s insights into the possibilities of dialogue and collaboration between national politics and indigenous cosmologies prove relevant for the Andean contexts of the early 21st century. His potential contributions to ecocriticism, particularly via the intimate connection his novels express toward the natural environment, are also being recognized. In the realm of cultural theory and history, new studies on traditional modes of expression in Peru, such as music, dance, and performance, look back on Arguedas and his pioneer appreciation and preservation of oral traditions as well as his prescience around the impact of migration on the same. The early-21st-century adaptations of his works and ideas into plays or film for children attest to the cultural education that his work continues to promote. Arguedas was recognized in his lifetime as a brilliant teacher, and he personally conceived of teaching and cultural advocacy as one of his main cultural practices. His multifaceted teaching missions—to bring the Andean cultures to the attention of the elites, and to offer the indigenous students access to the necessary tools to navigate the landscape of national modernity—have been vigorously carried out after his death by cultural promoters, artists, and cultural critics with the same idea in mind: to exercise pedagogy to further emancipation. This article reviews both the scholarship on Arguedas and early-21st-century literary, philosophical, anthropological, and historical scholarship on the Andean world inspired by his ideas, as well as artistic productions in the Andean countries in the first two decades of the 21st century, which revisit Arguedas’s oeuvre and give it renewed relevance for the new century.
Synthetic Biology – Towards an Engineering Science
