Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América

A work by the Argentine philosopher, published in 1970 and translated into English in 2010 by María Lugones and Joshua M. Price. Kusch draws on fieldwork in the Andean highlands of Bolivia, Peru and northern Argentina, on colonial chronicles, and on conversations with Indigenous and mestizo people, and he treats their thinking as philosophy rather than myth. He contrasts a Western way of being, ser, which aims to be someone, to master and to produce results, with estar, the more basic condition of simply being situated in a place and exposed to forces beyond control. Andean thought, in his reading, sees the world as unstable and sacred, and meets it through ritual, the hope of a 'turn' or reversal, and a way of thinking modelled on seeds and growth rather than on cause and effect. He argues that popular thinking in the cities shares this outlook, and that an authentic American philosophy must start from 'mere estar' rather than from imported categories.

It is one of the most original attempts to think philosophically from Indigenous Andean experience, and it opens questions about being, place and knowledge that Western philosophy rarely asks.