Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies,

Vol. 9, No. 1, 2003

“Anthropology” and “Literature” Intersected:

Female Roles and Identities in Todas las sangres
by José Marı́a Arguedas
Melisa Moore
University of Exeter

Feminist epistemology and the position of women in non-Western contexts

In recent years feminist incursions into the social sciences have emphasised the
importance of empirical research methods, focusing on the social subjects
themselves and the latter’s own versions of events. This ethnomethodological, or
phenomenological, approach has given primacy to a system of knowledge based
on experience which ultimately validates not only the personal and contextual
nature of the former but its gendered qualities also.1 The problem with positing
a feminist science or epistemology, however, is that it can run the risk of
becoming, like many of the theories or practices it faults, too universalist and
ahistorical. Non-Western feminist critics, therefore, have begun to criticise what
they perceive to be its ethnocentricity, questioning the racial or ethnic assump-
tions on which it is based. Arguing that capitalist society is not only gender
(patriarchal) and economically (class) structured, but is also racially constituted,
challenges many feminisms, whether Marxist, liberal or radical, opening the way
to deconstructing “woman” as a category by exploring the heterogeneity of
subordination. In their analysis of the ways in which gender, race and class
interrelate to construct social subjects, Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis
(1992: 20) emphasise the need to focus on the “intersection” between these
organising principles, simultaneously articulating the varying forms of social
differentiation and oppression in order to avoid privileging one form, such as
race, over another. This posits both a contextual and intertextual approach since
not only must the viewer position him/herself in a particular historicised network
of social relations, but must also negotiate with the multiple discourses operating
on the individual.2
State repression and market forces in Latin America have redrawn the
boundaries between public and private spheres which have traditionally sepa-
rated male and female roles and identities. This has meant that political parties
and trade unions, traditionally male dominated and built around the notion of
separate spheres, have had to accommodate an emergent voice with not only a
different form of participating but also a new conception of what is political
(Arizpe 1990: xviii). According to Elizabeth Jelin (1990: 3), the appearance of
these political actors represents the development of new forms of social relations
and organisations, resting on the politicisation of the private sphere. In her view
ISSN 1470-1847 print/ISSN 1469-9524 online/03/010039-17  2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1470184032000115436
 MELISA MOORE

this constitutes “a profound change in social logic” (1990: 3), coinciding with
the rise of populist groups challenging traditional class-based parties no longer
seen to be representative.
The emergence of women’s organisations from popular sectors of society also
poses a challenge to traditional middle-class feminist groups (Franco 1989: xxi).
Today, Latin American feminist movements, recognising the need for a distinct
set of values from their Anglo-American and French counterparts, have turned
to autochthonous figures such as the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Rigoberta
Menchú or Domitila de Chungara and as such have found themselves espousing
the socio-political objectives of the wider community. The shifting rural–urban
boundaries, due to economic growth and large-scale migration, have meant that
many women have been pushed to the frontier of socio-cultural and public–
private boundaries and, as a result, have found themselves in a position to
negotiate new roles and identities.3 Responding to transformations in their
societies, many have themselves become agents of change.
Gender identity and role configurations in Peru share much in common with
the rest of Latin America but retain some specificities of their own, namely the
highly stratified ethnic nature of the country where women are widely differen-
tiated from other women, as well as other men. This is particularly the case with
women from rural, or semi-urban, areas. Since the 1960s, many anthropologists
using a Marxist theoretical framework have regarded socio-economic issues,
such as landownership and the division of labour, as key concepts in understand-
ing the position of women in Andean society both past and present. In their
study on Andean women, Susan Bourque and Barbara Warren (1981) explore the
ways in which proximity to urban areas influences class and patriarchal relations.
Their thesis rests on the premise that the further a community is from a town or
city the more rigid its class and gender relations, whilst closer proximity allows
for the greater mobility of women and more fluid class structures. According to
them, women near urban areas are less affected by male-favoured inheritance
lines, stemming from communal land bases, due to the greater quantity of
privately owned land. This limits their role in the sphere of domestic consump-
tion, releasing them for the management of cash crops aimed for the market.4
If market forces and occupation allow women to resist the constraints of
patriarchal structures in the ayllu and offer them a degree of ethnic mobility,
other forms of resistance have also been available to them. By focusing on the
psycho-social or symbolic field, feminist historical studies have shown that
long-term strategies of resistance are embodied in the roles and identities of
Andean women within their communities. This has led Irene Silverblatt (1980:
176) to speak of a “female culture of resistance” in the Andes, the origins of
which she locates in the early colonial era when curaca women began to keep
the memory of an Inca past alive in their dress and weaving codes (1987: 123).
The Taller de la Historia Oral Andina (THOA) (1990: 167) has also linked
Andean female resistance to weaving, with women preserving a sense of ethnic
identity by encoding their histories into textiles. These woven accounts, with
their highly symbolic and non-linear form of narration, reflect the pattern of
indigenous oral history. THOA has also detected an indirect line of contestation
embodied in women’s agricultural activities. This links them to the larger
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 “ANTHROPOLOGY” AND “LITERATURE” INTERSECTED

indigenous community which attributes cosmological significance to tasks relat-

ing to the work-cycle. These and other studies suggest that female roles and
identities inscribed in the private or domestic sphere, where symbolic production
and reproduction converge, become repositories of ethnic identity and vehicles
of resistance.

(Con-)Textualising femininities in Todas las sangres

In Todas las sangres,5 Arguedas’ female characters are situated in complex
systems of stratification reflecting the fluidity of an increasingly urbanised area
in the Andes, where contact with communication links and markets has weak-
ened ethnic and patriarchal lines. This is clearly the case in the unnamed
provincial capital (and in Lima), where the presence of market women (cholas)
and migrants reveals that the lines between ethnic groups and between public
and private spheres which previously demarcated feminine roles and identities
have been redrawn. It is also evident in San Pedro (where the novel is set) and
its neighbouring haciendas, where the characters Matilde and Asunta reflect the
socio-economic and cultural heterogeneity of the vecino group, the latter com-
prising mistis, mestizos and cholos with their increasingly plural roles.
As has been revealed by various critics, such as Sara Castro Klarén (1983),
the female characters in Arguedas’ narratives follow a dualistic logic where
opposites are counterpoised and the tension between them dramatised. This
pattern coincides with what feminists would call a “patriarchal” framework
where women are viewed antithetically in accordance with Judaeo-Christian
precepts as Marian or deviant figures.6 That women in Arguedas’ work should
reflect this dichotomy is in no doubt when one views the recurrence of characters
such as Matilde in TLS, doña Felipa in Los rı́os profundos and doña Cayetana,
cast in key mothering roles, posited against deviant female figures such as la
kurku Gertrudis in TLS, la opa doña Marcelina in Los rı́os profundos and the
prostitutes in Arguedas’ last novel. Seen within a temporal framework of
diachronism, where temporal and spatial lines are no longer fixed but fan out like
an expanding circle, it is also clear that these female roles and identities,
reflecting paradigmatic models, are resignified through time, giving rise to
long-term strategies of resistance. As the social sciences have shown, by
self-consciously adopting roles and identities engaging with a symbolic system,
women in the Andes, particularly at times of crisis (such as the early colonial era
or more recently in a time of economic development), find the means not only
to counteract patriarchal attacks to their femininity, but ally themselves with the
wider community when it too is under threat.
Arguedas frequently said that TLS was the culmination of a creative process
which began with Agua. If, as Antonio Cornejo Polar (1973) has suggested, the
novel represents a widening of Arguedas’ geo-cultural panorama with the
expansion of communication networks and capitalism in the southern sierra,
Alberto Flores Galindo (1992) has also revealed the importance of Arguedas’
anthropological work in this. According to him, it was the social sciences which
sharpened Arguedas’ perception of these changes and propelled him to extend
his literary scope.7 If Arguedas’ anthropological work has been valuable in
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understanding the importance of social stratification and cultural mestizaje, it has

also helped to shed light on his conceptualisation of women and their cultural
roles in society. Arguedas’ doctoral thesis on the peasant communities of Sayago
in Zamora, Spain (Las comunidades de España y del Perú), reveals some
interesting comparisons with the Andean region regarding gender relations,
namely the privileging of married women as a means of regulating sexuality
where resources (land) are limited.8 The role of single women in both contexts
is, therefore, seen as a precarious one when the whole social apparatus is
constructed around a married couple’s right to communal and private land. This
highlights just how much emphasis is placed on marriage for a woman, a
situation one could equate with agrarian societies where management of
resources is paramount for survival.
In Andean Peru this goes hand in hand with pre-Columbian structuring
principles, such as ayni9 or more precisely chachawarmi (q’ariwarmi in
Quechua). Olivia Harris (1978) has shown that the chachawarmi model of
complementarity governing male–female relations in Aymara communities func-
tions both at a social and cosmological level, demarcating nature–culture
boundaries such that couples are “cultural”, whilst those who are unmarried are
equated with the “wild”. As well as differentiating men from women, therefore,
it also contrasts married with unmarried women.10 Interestingly, this coincides
with Judaeo-Christian precepts governing women’s roles and identities. Accord-
ing to these, women become both moral scapegoats for men’s wrongdoings and
the focus for Christian redemption. In Peru, Maruja Barrig (1979) links this
religious conception of women to the emergence of the urban-based Civilista
elite towards the end of the nineteenth century whose Positivist endorsement of
sexual difference provided a basis for socio-economic role differentiation, such
as the sexual division of labour and the distinction between public-productive
and private-reproductive spheres. Concepts of female chastity were reinforced so
that women were seen as repositories of purity and virginity, responsible for the
nation’s physical and moral well-being. The cult of the married woman (wife/
mother) which arose from this correlates with the phenomenon of marianismo in
which women’s passivity and subdual are crystallised in the image of the Virgin
Mary. An elision between marriage and chastity is made and the latter elevated
as a model for all women.
In Arguedas’ early work, Marian dimensions attributed to women make them
simultaneously desired and feared, resulting in inhibition and alienation on the
part of the male characters. The stories of Amor mundo, for example, deal with
unrequited love, where the female presence is too idealised to be attained. This
continues in Los rı́os profundos, in which enhanced images of women are
represented through the eyes of an adolescent, Ernesto, who oscillates between
feelings of adoration and fear, (white) women being seen as fictionalised “seres
lejanos” (1973: 75). As William Rowe (1979: 117–18) has revealed, these
women are distanced and idealised through Ernesto’s romantic subjectivity, one
which also underscores his view of the natural world, drastically reducing its
transformative potential at the beginning of the novel. TLS appears to reflect a
similar situation, although the symbolic potential of female roles and identities
and their capacity for transformation gathers pace as the narrative advances. By
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linking certain women, such as Matilde, Asunta and la kurku to symbols from
the natural world (mountains, snow, flowers and birds) representing distance,
isolation and rarity, these women become vehicles for the sentiment of la
soledad cósmica, the thematic current running through much post-Hispanic
Quechua poetry and songs where the loved one (feminine presence or higher
spiritual being) is always perceived as far off or unobtainable.
This sentiment, coined by Arguedas (1961) in his analysis of Quechua poetry,
represents the sense of rupture and isolation endured by native culture in the
wake of the Spanish invasion. It is, therefore, a post-Columbian emotion and is
distinctly indigenous since it is directly linked to the experience of colonis-
ation.11 Arguedas, however, is keenly aware of its ambivalent implications.
Whilst it expresses feelings of pain and separation, it also acts as a consolidating
force, establishing an empathy in suffering which, compared with the mestizo
community which has no such integrative emotional dynamic, may restore
confidence and foster resistance. As such it can be highly subversive. That
certain women in TLS should come to represent it, through the association with
natural elements which symbolise it in Quechua poetry, comes as no surprise
when one takes into account that women, like the Indian community, have also
experienced disruption and marginalisation by patriarchal and capitalist forces,
and some (misti/unmarried women) more so than others in an Andean context.
The fact that these female characters acquire Marian dimensions also reinforces
notions of distance and inaccessibility through images of chastity and gives them
a public role as vehicles of expiation. This again draws a parallel with Quechua
poetry and hymns in which a female presence is often equated with consolation
and catharsis through shared suffering (Arguedas 1948, 1955). On another note,
the fact that Matilde and Asunta are mistis, or vecinas, and are transformed into
repositories of an autochthonous sentiment, suggests a process of
“indigenisation” taking place in the social imaginary of the vecino group and
correlates with Arguedas’ aim to present the reader with a vision of diverse
cultural allegiances, thereby reversing the image of acculturation represented in
much indigenista literature.
Matilde is the daughter of a declined aristocratic family from the coast
(Chiclayo). Her marriage to don Fermı́n, a landowner from the sierra, and her
transferral to the Andes, give rise to feelings of insecurity and isolation in San
Pedro society. Associated by Rendón and his comuneros with Andean images of
purity and rarity, or inaccessibility, such as mountain peaks, snow and the
achank’aray, a white mountain flower which grows just below the snow line, she
becomes a symbol of “cosmic solitude” through mutual identification and
empathy. The image of the achank’aray, therefore, not only reflects her geo-
cultural marginalisation and isolation, the fact that she has been uprooted from
the coast, but allows the Indian community, also marginalised and uprooted, to
see itself reflected in her. The emotional reciprocity between Matilde and the
comuneros becomes firmly established as she acquires a new perception of
reality, viewing her surroundings through the prism of an Andean cosmology in
which she now sees herself to be rooted.
If this character establishes a sense of mutuality through a shared experience
of “solitude” with the comuneros, Asunta parallels this with the vecinos. Her
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precarious socio-economic position as the daughter of an impoverished vecino,

being unmarried and forced to earn her living from a corner shop, are factors
which situate her on the periphery of vecino society.12 That she is proud and
rejects her suitors, however, reflects a sense of social and moral honour,13
placing her firmly within a patriarchal vecino conceptual framework where
honour and sexual chastity foster the image of her (and women like her) as pure
and inaccessible. Like Matilde, she too is linked to symbols from the natural
world: snow, mountains and now a distant white dove. Although in the case of
Gregorio and Perico these reflect a mestizo sentiment where love or grief is
experienced as an individual emotion,14 as at the beginning of Los rı́os profun-
dos, this does not prevent her from gaining symbolic status for the community
of San Pedro through the discourse of la soledad, as her actions reveal.
Asunta coincides with Matilde in being identified with images of inaccessibil-
ity and purity, but differs from her in one important aspect. As an unmarried
woman on the margins of the local socio-economic and cultural system, she is
capable of more radical action. Elevated by the vecinos who come to see her
moral purity as the embodiment of their honour, she acquires the role of
defending the values held by the community, both vecino and comunero. This
begins by her publicly denouncing Brañes as an informer in the predominantly
male cabildo, in so doing also transgressing the gendered code of conduct, an
action which is instrumental in stirring the consciences of the vecinos and
encouraging other vecina women to follow her example. As doña Adelaida
reveals, the growing public role of Asunta and now herself, overturns the
male–female, public–private dichotomy determining sexual roles: “Váyanse a
sus casas, señores, que aquı́ hay sólo dos varones: Asunta y yo!” (1985: 153).15
What is more, Asunta’s open accusation—coming as it does with the appearance
of the “gavilán” (1985: 153)—bears all the weight of a “spiritual” pronounce-
ment, true strength now equated with mountains, or apus,16 whilst the vecinos,
who do not ascribe to this symbolic order, are diminished.
Ironically, vecina women such as Asunta who have transcended the male–
female divide governing sex roles, are now closer to this order than their male
counterparts. In fact, as in the case of Matilde, actions by Asunta are now
paralleled by events at a cosmological level, so that as she speaks at the cabildo
her words gain authority from their association with natural elements denoting
fecundity: “el sol crepuscular doraba todas las cosas […] Asunta hablaba cada
vez con más energı́a” (1985: 217). Asunta is not only implicitly equated with
images usually representing masculinity, such as the sun and apus, but also with
the purifying powers of these, as don Fermı́n admits: “¡Asunta, flor de los cielos;
tu alma se parece a este sol que está purificando al mundo! […] ¡Ahı́ está tu
pureza!” (1985: 218). The denunciation of Brañes, which culminates in her
killing Cabrejos, thus becomes a therapeutic act, “curing” San Pedro of the
moral corruption brought by the capitalist Consortium Wisther Bozart. That only
a woman is capable of such an action is explained by her peripheral position in
the socio-economic system, leaving her “pure” or chaste enough to do so.
Representing an oppressed yet resistant Andean culture, Asunta’s stature
grows as she is transformed into a Marian figure, a “santa” (1985: 391), by the
vecino popular imagination. Her capacity to take a public role in the defence of
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 “ANTHROPOLOGY” AND “LITERATURE” INTERSECTED

justice and her transformation into a symbol of the community, triggers a

sequence of actions in secondary female characters who, by defying their
husbands, like Asunta challenge a (patriarchal) status quo which not only
oppresses them, but their male counterparts too. Guadalupe, for example, defies
the husband who beats her and also speaks out in the cabildo about the need to
defend the vecinos’ land of La Esmeralda. Like Asunta, she comes to embody
a higher source of justice, represented in cosmological terms by the apu
Pukasira. Significantly, the emergence of the apu as an autochthonous power
symbol in San Pedro contributes to the restoration of the ayllu by don Bruno’s
colonos at the end of the novel.
The position of Matilde and Asunta within Andean and Judaeo-Christian
frameworks governing female sex roles and identities is starkly contrasted by the
character of la kurku Gertrudis in TLS (la opa doña Marcelina in Los rı́os
profundos), but the very positing of this figure alongside the former (Salvinia/Al-
cira in Los rı́os profundos) who, as has been seen, are idealised and distanced,
also testifies to the prevalence of ethnic over racial criteria in determining the
status of women in Andean society. That la kurku (and la opa) is considered a
mestiza, or chola, rather than a vecina or even a comunera, is essentially due to
her low socio-economic position as a domestic servant and her separation from
the endogamous kinship structures of the ayllu. However, unlike the mestizas in
urban centres who acquire social mobility through work, this figure is inscribed
in the framework of the hacienda and experiences no such room for manoeuvre.
Like the landless or “orphaned” colonos and pongos, her economic and cultural
survival is wholly dependent upon the local hacendado.
La kurku, a mute and immobile figure in a novel dominated by short dramatic
sequences, where dialogue and action predominate over interior monologues and
narrative description, poses a serious problem to conceptualisation. This, as has
just been mentioned, is due to the fact that, like la opa, she straddles two
socio-cultural and symbolic spheres. The Judaeo-Christian conceptual frame-
work posits her as a “deviant” female in contradistinction to Matilde/Asunta
whose sanctity is preserved at her expense. As has been seen, in an Andean
framework, this concept of “deviancy”, to which female sexuality is relegated in
the Christian sphere, is determined by the nature–culture dichotomy which
places unmarried women outside the world of the socialised.17 The intersection
of these two evaluative systems in the figure of la kurku, however, ultimately
makes her a figure with which both the vecino and comunero community come
to identify, and this is important for the evolution of her role in the novel.
Through a process of pachacuti, or reversal, la kurku attains the Marian
dimensions of her predecessors, Matilde or Asunta, metamorphosing from a
figure of contamination, or deviancy, and “wildness”, into a Mater Dolorosa or
priestess, a repository of autochthonous identity and a focus for resistance.18 The
Quechua Catholic hymns (Arguedas 1948, 1955), which Arguedas collected and
studied, reveal the predominance of themes concerning sin and salvation in
which “indigenised” Marian figures act as vehicles for communal suffering, la
soledad cósmica, and catharsis. These hymns offer valuable contributions to the
analysis of the role and identity of la kurku in TLS.
The religiously inspired Judaeo-Christian framework offers a useful point of
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entry into the study of la kurku as a character and social actor. A religious
mentality linked to the colonial hacienda system and endorsing a dual image of
femininity is represented at the beginning of the novel by don Bruno with the
words: “La mujer fue creada para calmar o espolear al hombre” (1985: 116). In
this framework, la kurku becomes a model of “deviancy”, incarnating the
transgressive nature of carnal desire for the male characters in the novel. For don
Bruno she is thus simultaneously repellent and alluring: “¡Flor horrible, llena de
dulzura!” (1985: 211), so that soon she is equated with temptation and sin, and
morally responsible for his wrongdoings: “¡Kurka Gertrudis, tú eras el demonio,
no yo!” (1985: 35). If the figure of the “deviant” female is placed alongside that
of the unmarried woman which, according to Andean precepts, is equated with
unsocialised patterns of behaviour, a more composite image of la kurku begins
to emerge. La kurku is unmarried and unable to conceive because of her physical
condition as a hunchback. This denies her a role in the domestic sphere as wife
and mother, her condition taking on ontological significance in the popular
imagination: “Las kurkus no pueden parir” (1985: 54). The denial of a sex role
which socialises her also acquires cosmological significance through an Andean
discourse in which the boundaries between social and cosmological spheres are
suspended. In fact, la kurku’s very role and identity from her first appearance in
the novel are paralleled on the cosmological plane, so that her social marginal-
isation is translated into images which equate her with the asocial or “wild”. The
description of her miscarriage in mythical terms: “parió un condenado; un feto
muerto y con cerdas” (1985: 25), moreover, reveals the confluence of Catholic
and indigenous precepts in the Andean framework, where notions of the “wild”
are also equated with sin or transgression.
But la kurku’s role and identity of deviancy/“wildness” in the first half of the
novel gives way to a new position as a vehicle of collective memory through
song in the second half, a process which potentiates her role at a symbolic level
and which coincides with the reconfiguring of socio-economic and cultural
relations in San Pedro in the face of growing pressures from the capitalist
Consortium. Whereas Matilde and Asunta evoke the sentiment of la soledad
cósmica, through images from the natural world used in Quechua poetry, la
kurku’s songs embody both the collective experience of the indigenous com-
munity and now a natural universe (Pachamama) “orphaned” after the Spanish
invasion,19 her voice, like her physical demeanour, incarnating its very essence
so that she comes to personify the concept of an “orphaned” cosmology: “El
timbre era viejo […] en lo profundo de esa voz extraña, Anto oı́a que toda la
tierra se quejaba” (1985: 53). The play of light and shadow on her body
meanwhile dramatises the interconnection between social and cosmological
levels embodied in her as she sings.20 This reciprocity between human and
natural spheres is commonly represented in a type of song usually only sung by
women: the pre-Columbian harawi in which a mutuality is established between
the atonal sound of the women’s voices and that of the earth,21 as Arguedas
(1957a: 31) points out in “Canciones quechuas”: “Las mujeres cantaban, acom-
pañadas siempre de los wak’rapukus. Yo tuve la impresión de que el mundo
todo, las montañas y los cielos, la tierra, gemı́a, llameando […] Es la expresión
más intensa del hombre por comunicarse con las fuerzas sobrenaturales, por
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 “ANTHROPOLOGY” AND “LITERATURE” INTERSECTED

llegar a ellas y conmoverlas.”22 These songs may transmit the sentiment of la

soledad cósmica, therefore, but in reciprocal fashion, they also evoke fuentes de
alegrı́a (Arguedas 1961) by reaffirming the links between and within social and
cosmological orders. For la kurku this has cathartic implications, counteracting
the diminishing effects of solitude and restoring a sense of humanity, or alma,
as witnessed by Anto: “Don Bruno la maltrató; le sacó el alma. Pero, seguro, a
veces su alma se le acerca y es cuando ella canta” (1985: 52). If this begins in
the private sphere and constitutes a personal transformation, it culminates in the
public realm with the acquisition of a role with more radical transformative
potential. In Lahuaymarca, la kurku’s songs act as rituals of expiation, restoring
confidence (the fuentes de alegrı́a) by representing alternative sources of
spirituality and justice through autochthonous symbols.
Arguedas’ anthropological thesis, as mentioned, reveals just how closely
gender, class and land are linked in Sayago by highlighting the position of
unmarried women who are denied access to land and thus positioned at the low
end of the socio-economic ladder. But the thesis also highlights the significant
cultural role of these women as vehicles of oral memory conveyed through song,
and it is here that one gets a clear indication of the ability of women in an
agrarian society to act at a discursive level which is symbolic in its content. The
fact that it is only the girls who sing in accompaniment to their games and that
they do so in a clearly demarcated space, away from the boys and in the view
of other women, their mothers, marks their activity as specifically female.
Singing and dancing traditional local dances such as the “jota” and the “charro”
and acting out different roles for up to two hours, the girls fulfil an important
function in Bermillo, transmitting a sense of temporal continuity through
memory, as Arguedas points out: “Las niñas cumplen ası́ un papel singular en
el pueblo […] Constituyen, ya lo dijimos, sus danzas, la única forma super-
viviente, aunque no completa, de los antiguos bailes y cantos populares. Existe,
por eso, un interés emocional, de añoranza real y profunda, en los espectadores
que las contemplan” (1968: 135).
Conveying a sense of historical continuity is particularly important in a
society that has suffered violent breaks due to events such as the Civil War and
market economics. One of the few manifestations of artistic activity in Bermillo,
these songs, which constitute local folklore, provide a vital link to the past.
Interestingly, this link is suggested by Arguedas through Quechua thought
patterns which underscore the text, connecting light and sound through onoma-
topoeia.23 The time of day, late afternoon,24 in which the songs are sung is seen
to be crucial to the semantic content and function of the songs. The interconnec-
tion of light and sound at natural and social levels instils a sense of well-being,
or fuentes de alegrı́a through restored links, in the girls and spectators (1968:
116).25 That Andean concepts should be applied by Arguedas to this context is
significant and justified when one takes into account the common agrarian bases
of both cultures. In fact, this is extended further when Arguedas makes explicit
links between the two countries through personal memory stirred by the songs:
“oı́r el coro de las niñas me recordó el Perú musical de los Andes; las pequeñas
aldeas, las comunidades” (1968: 117). The linking up of human and natural
planes through memory and song causes spatial and temporal boundaries to
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become blurred so that, regardless of geography, a sense of cultural continuity,

or diachronism, what Bakhtin (1994: 251) has called “chronotopicity”,26 may be
fostered. In TLS this becomes crucial for the displaced vecinos of San Pedro.
Attributing a social and symbolic dimension to the songs he hears in Bermillo
(“constituyen todo un lenguaje que interpreta la concepción que el hombre tiene
acerca de la sociedad y del mundo” [1968: 117]), it is not surprising that
Arguedas should attempt to transcribe all the songs he hears and note the precise
effects they have on those who hear them. He does not stop at this, however, for
in a typically assiduous manner he also registers the effect they have on those
who transmit them. Arguedas notices that performing makes the girls less
inhibited and more receptive to outsiders than the boys, enabling them to
transcend previously demarcated sexual, or private–public, spheres of influence.
Important parallels between the thesis on Sayago and TLS can be established,
therefore, through the figure of the unmarried woman and her access to a
symbolic realm through song. As mentioned, la kurku’s songs to the dispos-
sessed vecinos who pass through Lahuaymarca on their way to the capital of the
province, or Lima, animate the fuentes de alegrı́a sustained in dialectical fashion
by la soledad cósmica. La kurku’s intuition is crucial for this since her songs are
specifically composed, by her and the Sacristán, in response to the vecinos’ and
comuneros’ ordeal and in order to restore confidence. This is achieved through
her ability to empathise with their plight by actively participating in it: “con la
cabeza sobre el pecho la kurku lloraba, conteniendo los impulsos de su cuerpo,
inmóvil; lloraba a torrentes” (1985: 410), establishing, like Matilde before her,
a reciprocity which gives her Mariological dimensions. As the “stricken mother”,
or Mater Dolorosa, she becomes a nodal presence with which a divided
community can identify and assuage its sorrows at times of crisis.27
In Andean terms, this ritual form of catharsis through song ultimately
constitutes an act of pachacuti, in which la kurku metamorphoses from a figure
of contamination, or deviancy, to one of purity with messianic dimensions for
the wider community, whilst the latter is transformed from a factious group of
individuals to one with a cohesive socio-cultural, or ethnic, base. When her tears,
as “lágrimas de sangre” (1985: 411), are associated with the concept of yawar
mayu (river of blood),28 indigenous sources of justice embodied in river and
mountain imagery begin to emerge, mobilising the vecinos and comuneros into
defying the coastal authorities. Pachacuti, wholesale transformation or reversal
represented by the yawar mayu, thus replaces the sentiment of la soledad
cósmica normally embodied in la kurku’s songs, not by cancelling it out
completely, but by reaffirming the fuentes de alegrı́a contained within it.
Millenarian dimensions are also established through concepts of time, where
temporal demarcations become suspended.
Like the girls in Bermillo whose performance in singing gives them mobility
outside the private sphere to which they are usually bound, la kurku’s singing is
instrumental in granting her a new role outside the framework of the hacienda.
If performance redefines gender roles, it also adds to the semantic content and
function of the songs. Like Carmen Taripha29 and the mestizo musicians Jaime
Guardia and Raúl Garcı́a (Arguedas 1976: 238), or Gregorio in TLS (1985: 92,
125), who transmit their stories and songs through their physical gestures, la
48
 “ANTHROPOLOGY” AND “LITERATURE” INTERSECTED

kurku conveys the meaning of the harawis through her delivery of them, her
tears literally constituting the semantic content of her songs to the vecinos.30
Whilst the content of these songs remains magical, since they still operate within
the framework of la soledad cósmica, their function acquires secular dimensions,
fostering a sense of resistance which will be used to defy the coastal authorities.
In TLS two wankas31 linked to the work-cycle are woven into the narrative: one
accompanying the construction of the new terraces in Lahuaymarca and the other
complementing the ploughing in Paraybamba. These wankas, like the ayla sung
during the annual cleaning of the irrigation canals, constitute erotico-religious
rites in which the work of young men and the singing of unmarried women
parallel and assist in the act of growth in the natural world by harnessing the
“ánimo”, or energy, of the dead buried in the soil along with the seed.32 The
wanka also shares the imploring tone of the harawi sung to the dead during
funerals so that ultimately, like the latter, it becomes a ritual affirmation of life,
that is growth, over, or through, death. In her study of the Laymi community,
Olivia Harris (1992: 72–7) has suggested that unmarried women convert nature
or the “wild” into “culture”, or socialised patterns of behaviour, through the
symbolic discourse represented by song.33 Combined with the men’s work, the
wanka transforms an otherwise barren terrain into cultivated plots of land. Many
of the elements associated with these harawis and wankas were incorporated in
the hymns written by Jesuit priests for the purpose of conversion. The hymns
were intoned in a similar manner and accompanied by women crying. In his
study of Quechua Catholic hymns, Arguedas distinguishes between those written
by Jesuit priests and those composed by mestizos who resemanticised their
content, quechuanising and in many ways secularising it, by employing agricul-
tural as well as biblical imagery. According to Arguedas (1957b: 53), this not
only invests the songs with new meaning but also re-emphasises their indigenous
content: “los himnos católicos más recientes son de naturaleza muy indı́gena,
escritos en un quechua popular, de tal manera que tienen el estilo de los cantos
folklóricos”. Whilst the Jesuit hymns instil a sense of fatality in the community
by evoking fear and guilt, the mestizo hymns promote a sense of release by
enhancing images of a consoling Marian figure (Arguedas 1955: 40, 1957b: 55).
Crucially, whilst operating within a framework of la soledad cósmica, the
fuentes de alegrı́a, are thus re-activated through catharsis, as Arguedas makes
clear: “Estos himnos tienen la virtud de ahondar el dolor causado por los
padecimientos terrenos y de abrir los cauces del llanto, del desahogo final […]
El creyente sale en seguida, del templo al campo, o la plaza, renovado”
(Arguedas 1955: 42).
This description can be compared with that of the vecinos in TLS who, as la
kurku sings and weeps, undergo a similar act of catharsis: “lloraban, no por
desconsuelo, sino desahogándose, despejándose de la oprimente rabia su sangre.
Fueron sintiéndose limpios, decididos, listos para irse a luchar en cualquier
pueblo” (1985: 411), their suffering transformed into a source of resistance so
that they feel “tranquilos, casi felices” (1985: 411). Passing through Lahuay-
marca thus constitutes a rite of passage where la kurku, assisted by the Sacristán,
sings triumphant hymns which restore the vecinos’ sense of confidence and
assuage their rabia (1985: 427).34 This ultimately stems from the re-established
49
 MELISA MOORE

link between the vecinos and their land through memory stirred by the song:
“con la memoria ya pura e inapagable de su pueblo, de su campo hermoso de
maı́z, de ese andén hecho por Dios” (1985: 411), so that just as the wankas
accompanying the building of the new terraces and the ploughing harness the
energy of the dead from the soil and use it ultimately for resistance against the
soldiers, this harawi also provides, or restores, a telluric base for defiance against
the coastal order.35 Framed by the symbolic discourse of la soledad cósmica, the
harawi, and the memory of the land evoked by it, reinforces the cultural bases
of an otherwise ethnically fragmented community.
The condition of double marginalisation suffered by la kurku, gender and
ethnicity separating her from the dominant stratum in the system of stratification
places her, like la opa before her, on the boundaries of what Jean Franco (1989:
xii) has called the “broad master narratives and symbolic systems of society”,
such as religion, nationalism and modernisation. Being ethnically a mestiza and
situated on the margins of hegemonic socio-economic and cultural structures,
however, she acquires a pivotal role, enabling her to move from one socio-
cultural realm to another, so that like certain vecina women (Matilde and
Asunta), she is able to link her personal experience to that of a wider community
which shares it. The fact that she is unmarried but still able to exercise a
maternal role as defender of the community and repository of ethnic identity,
points to the intervention of a symbolic discourse, or more specifically the
popular imagination, which, particularly in times of crisis, mobilises female roles
and mothering images for resistance. In other words, la kurku comes to embody
the suffering of the wider community at the hands of a patriarchal neo-colonial
regime, her lack of a maternal role in the material sphere releasing her for
activity in the symbolic realm. Like Irene Silverblatt’s (1987) priestesses and
witches, this character acts as an autochthonous Marian figure simultaneously
consoling the community and channelling a sense of resistance, often through
ancient huacas evoked through song. Like the figure of the servant in Arguedas’
El sueño del pongo (Arguedas 1987b), the extremity of her affliction radicalises
her discourse of resistance so that, as in the case of the pongo one year later,
concepts of indigenous justice based on pachacuti begin to emerge as a means
of redressing the balance between contenders.

Conclusions
The differential consequences of colonialism, market economics and migration
on women has meant that multiple strategies of resistance and modes of
mobilisation have emerged through time, from an active participation in the
market to the upholding of traditional domestic and agricultural roles. For many
women in the Andes, however, the lines between public and private spheres have
increasingly been eroded so that, for some, public roles in the market are
perfectly integrated with private identities as mothers and wives whilst, for
others, private identities become vehicles for ethnic resistance. These, because
they are usually equated with a larger community, have paradoxically become
increasingly public. As has been seen, the recourse to paradigmatic female roles
and identities, as reproducers and defenders of life, points to the enduring
50
 “ANTHROPOLOGY” AND “LITERATURE” INTERSECTED

presence of a female-led discourse of resistance in defending and mobilising

autochthonous culture in the Andes.36
When one reads a novel like TLS one can see how close anthropology and
literature come to one another, since the novel reveals the importance of taking
both socio-economic, land and labour configurations, and cultural factors,
ethnicity, traditional mind-sets and ritualised forms of conduct into account in
the analysis of female roles and identities. The fact that the former are in a state
of flux in the Andean region suggests the latter are also fluid and changeable but,
within this context, diachronism and a symbolic order emerge as structuring
devices linking socio-economic and cultural elements and establishing spatial
and temporal continuities.
In post-colonial societies where the pace of change in the industrial arena is
not always accompanied by changes in mind-sets or where, as a result of a
mixed economic landscape, pre-modern modes of thought and practices run
alongside twentieth-century technological advances and their secular or
“profane” ways of thinking, the resulting contradictions are those which social
scientists and writers must grapple with at both thematic and methodological
levels. It is only by taking an interdisciplinary approach that the reader can begin
to discern Arguedas’ purpose, particularly in TLS. The very “chronotopic
dialogism”, to paraphrase Bakhtin (1994: 254), of this novel, the arrangement of
interconnecting spatial and temporal frameworks, the simultaneous functioning
of short and long time spans, the continuing presence of ritual thought processes
and modes of conduct alongside the flux and fluidity brought by roads, markets
and migration, presents the reader with an image of myriad elements fitting
together in infinite configurations. The study of these confluences has only
recently entered the academic forum in Peru through the work of Sur and the
Tempo workshops, led by Nelson Manrique and Gonzalo Portocarrero.37 That
Arguedas should have been a precursor to these new ways of perceiving and
mapping socio-cultural realities confirms his capacity for far-sightedness and
innovation.

Notes
1
Women’s experience and women as knowing subjects as distinct from men not only emerged as a branch
of this approach but soon laid the foundations for a more radical questioning of the gendered nature of
scientific theoretical and empirical research (Smith 1988).
2
This is also argued convincingly by Kum-Kum Bhavnani (1993).
3
Tessa Cubitt and Helen Greenslade (1997) emphasise the interrelation of public and private spheres and the
need for a dialectical analytical framework to understand the role of women in Latin American society.
4
These findings have been corroborated in the studies of Florence Babb (1985), Linda Seligmann (1993) and
Marisol de la Cadena (1991). All three have also developed the idea that as well as redrawing the
boundaries between public and private spheres, market forces have given women a degree of leverage
regarding their ethnicity, with women who engage in the market now considered mestizas or cholas.
5
The edition used is José Marı́a Arguedas (1985). The title of the novel has been abbreviated to TLS.
6
Maruja Barrig (1979), Patricia Ruiz Bravo (1990) and Marfil Francke (1990) have explored this dichoto-
mous image of women in Peru.
7
Flores Galindo (1992) shows how Arguedas’ fieldwork in the Mantaro Valley between 1951 and 1955 leads
to the indio–misti dichotomy in his early writings being transcended, his later work revealing greater

51
 MELISA MOORE

stratification within the ranks and the emergence of a new type of comunero-mestizo. There is also a
growing emphasis on cultural rather than social conflict.
8
Fermı́n del Pino (1995: 250) has pointed out that thematic and methodological correlations between the
thesis (published in 1968) and TLS (published in 1964) are by no means coincidental, since both were being
written at the same time in 1962.
9
Ayni, or reciprocity, as an organising principle in Andean society, is reflected in the parity between a
married couple, the latter equated with adulthood or socialisation, and a system of kinship ties based on
parallel lines of descent. These lines of descent are also gendered: sons inherit from their fathers and
daughters from their mothers, so that “equal” access to land and the community’s resources is granted,
regardless of gender (Silverblatt 1987: 5).
10
Billie Jean Isbell (1976), Tristan Platt (1986) and Sarah Lund Skar (1993) also highlight how men and
women in the Andes are divided according to hanan–hurin spatial divisions.
11
Arguedas (1961) distinguishes this sentiment from the mestizo community’s which, stemming in modern
times from migration, is probably more acute since it is experienced on an individual level: “La soledad
ha dejado de ser cósmica. No viene ya como de la sombra del universo agobiando a todos por igual; el
destino se ha diversificado […] cada quien se defiende como puede y el uno mira al otro como a un destino
diferente.”
12
This coincides with the experience of Arguedas’ only female informant in Sayago, the owner of the inn in
La Muga, who, because she is widowed and landless, despite an income from her business, finds herself
doubly marginalised in the community (Arguedas 1968: 269).
13
Barrig (1979, 1981) reveals how, since the 1930s in Peru, honour is related to the notion of “decencia”,
regulating sexual and social mobility through marriage.
14
This can be seen in Gregorio’s songs about unrequited love (Rowe 1979: 174).
15
Sara Castro Klarén (1973: 162) describes the subversive role of these women as they challenge previously
held notions of sexuality: “aunque anticuadas, se adhieren a la conciencia que tienen de sı́, a un sistema
de valores más allá de la vida diaria, más allá de creencias fosilizadas o convenencias del momento. En este
sentido son varones no machos, es decir que tienen un lugar en el mundo, en su conciencia de ser y por
eso se rebelan ante quienes quieren reducir su ser a un mero pago.”
16
In her endeavour to show that the nature (“wild”)–culture (“civilised”) dichotomy does not automatically
correspond to a female–male duality, Harris (1992: 91) reveals the masculine identity of certain elements
in the Andean cosmology, such as mountain peaks, associated with the “wild”.
17
Although the unmarried woman suffers none of the religious condemnation of the Judaeo-Christian ethos,
she is situated on the periphery of the socialised (Harris 1978).
18
The duality on which these conceptual frameworks operate: Marian versus deviant; married (“socialised”)
versus unmarried (“wild”), is thus ultimately subverted, together with the public–private dichotomy as in
the case of Matilde and Asunta.
19
Significantly, “solitude” or rupture is experienced at both social and cosmic levels and separation is seen
within these universes, rather than from them (Rowe 1979: 174).
20
The interplay of light and shadow also links up with the notion of pachacuti, as is revealed in the
description of the dance in La agonı́a de Rasu-Ñiti (Arguedas 1987a: 188).
21
In Inca times, these were sung by women to men who were forced to leave their ayllus in order to fulfil
their mita duties. They were also sung during funeral and agrarian work rituals (such as sowing), where
their imploring tone was considered vital for harnessing the energies of the dead and stimulating growth
(Arguedas 1953, 1957a).
22
Time and time again Arguedas emphasises the importance of Quechua, an onomatopoeic language, for
conveying this concept of social and cosmological interpenetration. (See also Arguedas 1948: 48.)
23
That is, illa with yllu. (See Arguedas 1989: 147–9. See also Arguedas 1973: 65.)
24
This evokes the notion of illa, or “luz menor” (Arguedas 1989: 149).
25
This can be compared with a passage in TLS where the puku-puku birdsong at dusk and the huaynos sung
by men establish a reciprocal relationship through the concept of illa (“luz menor”), suggesting the notion
of la soledad cósmica at both social and cosmological levels: “emiten esa voz tristı́sima con la que el colono
esclavo y todo hombre sufriente se compara en centenares de huaynos; porque el puku-puku canta de hora
en hora, como un péndulo que midiera y ahondara la desolación” (1985: 208).
26
For Bakhtin, chronotopes are spatial and temporal frameworks which structure narratives. In the novel,
these chronotopes interlock in a dialectical manner (creating “chronotopicity”), in contrast to the epic where
they are arranged hierarchically.

52
 “ANTHROPOLOGY” AND “LITERATURE” INTERSECTED

27
Marina Warner (1990: 206–23) argues that the Franciscans were instrumental in propagating the cult of the
mourning mother in the thirteenth century, the latter reaching a peak during the Black Death which swept
through Europe a century later.
28
There is a definition of this concept in the first chapter of Los rı́os profundos (Arguedas 1973: 5).
29
The recounting of condenado folklore by this figure is seen as an interpretative and creative act, described
on a number of occasions by Arguedas (Arguedas 1955: 40, 1957a: 34).
30
La kurku’s tears are equated with a regaining of sight, paralleled by the image of the dove which overcomes
its blindness. The implication is that la kurku, in conjunction with the vecinos, has acquired new vision
through catharsis and an allegiance to autochthonous sources of justice. This overturns previous descriptions
of her eyes as “insondables” (1985: 411).
31
As Gose (1994: 273) states, the wanka has its origins in pre-Columbian times and constitutes a fertility rite
in which “undomesticated sexuality”, represented by unmarried women, is transformed into “agricultural
fertility” through men’s work.
32
This, as Gose (1994: 113, 137) reveals, establishes ayni or reciprocity between the living and the dead.
Usually the dead ancestors are reincorporated into society during the sowing season, in November, and are
dispatched before the harvest at the time of Carnival, between February and March. (See also Harris 1992:
81.)
33
Women, like Pachamama, embody the nature–culture duality, Pachamama representing both cultivated and
uncultivated land. As such they are “polysemic” (Harris 1992: 86). As intercessors, mediating between this
duality, and as the Moon or wife of the Sun-god, asking for protection or pardon, they are also “transitive”
(Harris 1992: 86).
34
This reflects the effect of the zumbayllu on Ernesto in Los rı́os profundos (1973: 89) and parallels the
resurgence of the colonos at the novel’s close (1973: 240–2).
35
The importance of land for consolidating a sense of cultural identity and resistance has been discussed in
relation to Rigoberta Menchú by Gordon Brotherston (1997).
36
Significantly, this echoes what Marina Warner (1987: xx) has said about female iconography in Western
societies: “a symbolised female presence both gives and takes value and meaning in relation to actual
women, and contains the potential for affirmation not only of women themselves but of the general good
they might represent and in which as half of humanity they are deeply implicated”.
37
Sur represents the organisation Casa de Estudios del Socialismo and Tempo, the research group Taller de
Estudios de las Mentalidades Populares. Both are based in Lima.

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