Rodolfo Kusch: from a psychogeography of barbarism to a geocultural epistemology of the popular

Abstract

In La seducción de la barbarie Kusch, proposes a journey into American social psychology that explores the split between the desire to be (individual and/or collective) and that which (consciously and unconsciously) one is. This dualism, shaped by the autochthonous barbarism and the civilization rooted in the citizen mentality, configures a continental psychogeography in which the authentic and the fictitious tension historically, epistemologically and metaphysically. The reflections that the author subsequently develops in Geoculture of the American Man around the popular and culture as geoculture (which involves a location, which is proper to a community and which presents peculiar characteristics that differentiate it), propitiate a drift from the antinomy “civilization and barbarism” to the search for an authentic cultural expression of the American way of living (being-being). In what sense can this American authenticity linked to a particular way of living the soil be thought or expressed? What kind of inauthenticity would it reveal? Moreover, could not that way of living and that soil contain the guidelines and preconfigurations towards another epistemology? Towards another way of knowing the American?