“Crossing “Deep Rivers”: The liberation theology of Gustavo Gutierrez in light of the narrative poetics of Jose Maria Arguedas” Ph.D. Dissertation by Brett Eugene Greider.

Abstract: Peruvian novelist, poet, sociologist, and ethnologist Jose Maria Arguedas (1911-1969) wrote “trans-cultural” narratives and essays that had a significant impact on the development of Gustavo Gutierrez’s liberation theology. Reading the deeply encoded pluricultural text requires investigation of the socio-literary context and cosmology of the indigenous peasant society of the Peruvian highlands. Arguedas’ analysis of Highland cultures, the strategy of multiple layers of communication, and poetic presentation from within indigenous cultures make his novels significant as cultural texts. Folk arts and popular music, the “huayno” genre, form a musical text ringing with cultural realities. Arguedas’ novels are deeply encoded with the Andean cosmovision, indigenous cultural myths and symbol systems, arising from his wealth of experience in the “pluricultural” South Andes which was once the center of Inca civilization. He was immersed in the conflictual socio-political world, its poverty and class stratification, as seen in his professional non-fiction writings as ethnologist and sociologist. The novels of Jose Maria Arguedas, particularly Deep Rivers, also demonstrate the way that fiction communicates the contours and textures of religious consciousness. The subtleties of religious thinking, the struggle to awaken the relation between faith and social context, are shown as a process of interaction between religious consciousness and human action. The fictive model of a religious mind, in its development of an authentic indigenous synthesis of cultural realities and faith in the Christian God, accurately narrates the process of developing a liberation theology. Gustavo Gutierrez examines theological aspects of Arguedas’ work and reflects them in his writing. Arguedas’ actual theology takes the form of the novel. His essays on ethnology, sociology and anthropology of the Andes enhance its explication. It may be read as a religious text out of which an indigenous theology finds expression.