SOURCE: Kauffmann, R. Lane. “Narrating the Other: Julio Cortázar's ‘Axolotl’ as Ethnographic Allegory.” In Primitivism and Identity in Latin America: Essays on Art, Literature, and Culture, edited by Erik Camayd-Freixas and José Eduardo González, pp. 135-55. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Kauffmann offers an ethnographic interpretation of “Axolotl.”

Is it possible to represent alterity without reifying, colonizing, or preempting it? In the diverse modes of ideology-critique prevalent at the end of the twentieth century, the Other is often invoked as though it were an amulet to ward off a host of ideological evils—humanism, sexism, monologism, and the proliferating “centrisms” (Euro-, ethno-, anthropo-, phallo-, logo-)—considered endemic to Western thought and society. But it has always been easier to invoke alterity than to depict or commune with the Other in a nonpreemptive way. This is particularly evident in ethnography, that genre...