Acceso usuarios
City of Pittsburgh, Estados Unidos
As the twenty-first century progresses, renewed theoretical developments and critical reflections are broadening explanatory horizons of cultural traditions that seemed to have already been sufficiently studied. Andean culture, consolidated as an exclusively highland phenomenon, offers a privileged field of study for problematizing the status of established knowledge. This paper discusses the Altiplano exceptionalism attributed to Andean cultures based on two masterful interventions, that of the French anthropologist Thierry Saignes, and that of the Peruvian writer Gamaliel Churata. While Saignes first pointed out the urgency of repairing the “radical ignorance that we have about Andean-Oriental societies” (Los Andes orientales: historia de un olvido); Churata explored an inter-Andean cultural circuit that both Peruvian and Bolivian historiography had made invisible: the prolific (and yet uncanny) interaction that since pre-Hispanic times was practiced between the eastern and western flanks of the Andean mountains
