Peruvian intellectuals debating indigenism in América Indígena and Perú Indígena: from national to continental scope (1950-1954)

Abstract

The current article addresses a debate between concurrent indigenist perspectives held by Peruvian intellectuals throughout the first half of the 50s in América Indígena and Perú Indígena periodicals, both published respectively by the Inter-American and the Peruvian Indian Institutes (I.I.I. and I.I.P.). This paper demonstrates how the indigenist discussions held by Peruvian authors were noticeably marked by a continental perspective, even though they also recognized and highlighted the particular idiosyncrasies regarding the indigenous issues found in the domestic Peruvian scene. An effectively complex analysis of indigenism requires going beyond the national perspective in order to unveil its external connections, especially since the 40s, when the I.I.I. was constituted as a continental character institution which aimed not only to bring together the debates on the topic but also to promote the creation of national indigenist institutes linked to itself – the creation of I.I.P. in 1946 was one of the first examples of that. Therefore, we develop our analysis of the Peruvian debate from the transnational approach in order to simultaneously encompass its insertion into the Peruvian national scenery and its continental dialogues. In this research we combine the linguistic contextualism approach with the methodological tools from the History of Intellectuals in order to emphasize the intellectual sociability dimension involved in the analyzed debate.