Indigenous Art: The Challenge of the Universal

Abstract

This chapter elaborates on the prospects for the continuance and affirmation of popular, indigenous art, within the strange setting of a globalized world. The author addresses the question of popular culture in Paraguay by asking how artistic practices that emerged from native cultures have survived and grown in conditions dissimilar to those in which they were conceived. Historically, native cultures dwelling in diverse regions of Latin America prior to the conquest had developed powerful forms of art. The intercultural encounter that ensued in the colonial period produced not only cases of extinction and ethnocide, but also powerful symbolic and imaginary processes of transcultural readjustment and revival. Based on that analysis, the author claims that modern concepts of culture and art can frame a notion of popular indigenous art in the context of a tradition that disputes the artistic validity of non-Western systems and the very notion of universal art.

This chapter was first published in Una teoría del arte desde América Latina, ed. José Jiménez Badajoz: MEIAC, Madrid: Turner, 2011.

Translated by Gabriel Horowitz.