Lo andino en la crítica cultural latinoamericana de los años setenta y ochenta del siglo XX

Abstract:The article is an attempt to contextualize and criticize the notion of the Andean in the works of some of the most important Latin American scholars of the 1970s onwards. It shows that, in the texts of Antonio Cornejo Polar, Alejandro Losada, and Ángel Rama, the Andean serves as a reference and frame for some of their theoretical concepts such as heterogeneity and transculturation, concepts which make use of the Andean in a more ideological way and is a specifically cultural perspective of Latin Americanism. It shows that the Andean serves less as a theoretical notion, but rather could be used as a spacial category or as a concept to describe certain geographical, cultural, and political processes. Cornejo Polar, Losada, and Rama make particular use of this category, and although there are some contradictions between heterogeneity and transculturation, overall their theoretical framework has more parallels than one would have thought of. Overall, the three critics share a cultural perspective. In the end, the Andean serves as a general description of conflicts that are overlapping different geographical spaces (the local, regional, national, and so on) and which increase the complexity of the cultural process.