Arguedas and Taki Unquy

Abstract

José María Arguedas’ narrations can be read as a representation system that evokes the strategies of ‘Taki Unquy’, a 16th century indigenous movement of cultural resistance. Like the movement, Arguedas seeks to recover in his tales the traditional views of the Andean man and their religious relations with the mountains (‘apus’, ‘wamanis’), rivers (‘mayus’), and establish a sort of ‘negotiation’ with modernity as a form of cultural resistance. In fact, Arguedas’ texts privilege a fictive orality and incorporate non-narrative texts (prose and poetry), and even non-verbal discourses (melodies, songs, dances, fabrics and garments) with which heterogeneous visions are constructed. The axis of the relationship between Taki Unquy’s semiotic-religious practice and Arguedas’ narrative practice is the figure of the dancers who, in both cases, are able to establish links with their divinities and embody the cultural survival of the old Andean world.