The influence of Joaquín Costa in the ethnographic approach of Latin America and Peru: José María Arguedas

Abstract

Joaquín Costa was known outside Spain more due to his disciples or followers (above all Unamuno, Valle-Inclán and Altamira), who often travelled abroad (mainly to México and to Argentina) or whose writings were read in their daily newspapers. Perhaps that is why his Krausist theses were popular in the Hispano-American generation called 900 (specially in the hands of Víctor Andrés Belaunde, a lawyer from Arequipa who became president of the United Nations General Assembly in 1959-1960). We place emphasis on this collective popularity to explain the exceptional case of a recent success in Peruvian anthropology, which took place when the well- known writer and anthropologist José María Arguedas, a pupil of these Peruvian costistas, thought he saw an inspiration in Costa and visited Spain in 1958, thanks to a grant from the Unesco, to choose a traditional community that could be compared with another community in Perú as a topic for his doctoral thesis. And he found it in the region of Sayago, an old part of Zamora, subject to mockery in classical Spanish theatre due to its country bumpkin style, that helped Costa reflect on the modern fate of these archaic enclaves.