Civilización y barbarie en el pensamiento de Gamaliel Churata

This article analyses the oppositions between ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’, and ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in the Resurrección de los muertos of the peruvian writer Gamaliel Churata. The reflection on these dichotomics terms is central in the thought of author. This work demostrates how Churata realises its overcoming, using different discoursive strategies in a dialogue with the Western tradition thought. The author discutes the frontier that defines the wilderness and the civilised, and the criteria that marks the civilisation itself, such as writing, progress, ‘race’ and patriarchy. Furthermore, it shows how Churata resemantises the figure of the cannibal and the concept of anthropophagy, rhetoric constructions of the colonial discourse used in the context of conquest and colonisation of America to delegitimise the indigenous ontologies. Through a discourse that embrace an aesthetical, ontological, and political level, Churata try to destructuring dominant/dominated hierarchies.