SOURCE: Columbus, Claudette Kemper. “Oracular Foxes, Archaic Times, Twentieth-Century Peru: J. M. Arguedas's The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below.” Dispositio/n: American Journal of Cultural Histories and Theories 21, no. 48 (1996): 137-54.

In the following essay, Columbus notes that the foxes symbolize art in The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below and are presented as symbols struggling against the bureaucratization of folk art and culture.

In The Foxes (El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo, 1969)¹ the Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas conflates the myth of a failed Andean mountain-weather deity and culture hero, Tutaykire, and the myth of his brother, the shaman-healer and fellow mountain-weather deity, Huatyacuri. Arguedas translates the myths of Huarochirí (Dioses y hombres de huarochirí, 1966) and later, his fascination with them deepening, he brings Huatyacuri, Tutaykire, and the ancient Andean foxes out of the deep...