Magical Andean-Amazon landslides between Los zorros and Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo

Abstract

Through the analysis of the role of shamanic practices in José María Arguedas’ \textit{El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo} and César Calvo’s Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo, this essay explores a possible alternative way of producing mestizo identities that is neither part of nor a result of the Western intellectual tradition but is instead supported by an indigenous knowledge system. Fueled by the fluidity Shamanism offers to its practitioners (a potential to become another being/entity, and to be located in a liminal space where one may dwell in a foreign epistemological horizon without leaving his own) as well as by the Andean and Amazonian indigenous belief that the spirit is common to human and non-human, the mestizo identity-making machines in these novels show the stealth ways that indigenous people produce a mestizaje that works as a tool of cultural resistance. For instance, in Arguedas’s work, the characters Loco Moncada and the Peace Corps member Maxwell are affected by shamanic practices that create cracks in the Western intellectual tradition and foster dialogue across different cultural realms. In turn, these characters acknowledge that there is a logic behind statements considered irrational within Western cultural epistemology. In Calvo’s work we see similar shamanic movements. Ino Moxo and the jíbaros, while making their shrunken heads, reveal Amazonian Indigenous ways of negotiating with otherness, even if that Other is a Western subject driven by violence that aims to suppress and transform everything that is different from him.

Keywords: shamanism; human/non-human; upside down mestizaje; cultural resistance