This document discusses the concept of the exotic in society and art. It explores how indigenous peoples, immigrants, and other "others" have historically been objects of curiosity and interpretation by artists. It also examines how early European depictions of indigenous Americans ranged from portraying them as semi-human monsters to idealizing them as noble savages. The concept of the exotic emerged in Latin America in association with geography, particularly the contrast between tropical and European climates. In Uruguay specifically, the appeal to the exotic developed later due to the country's greater ethnic and linguistic uniformity. The notion of the exotic serves to foster diversity and originality in art by legitimizing and incorporating representations of otherness. It also acts as a dynamic

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The frontier of the exotic: a reflection on its meaning in society and art
Teresa Porzecanski
Before alluding to contemporary debates about the concept of culture, 1 bound up as it is with the
improbable task of defining features that have remained “unique and exclusive” to a particular human
group, society or nation, within a global context where contact between peoples dates from long
before so-called “globalization” (it can be traced back to trade, wars, slavery, marriage alliances,
migrations and all manner of contact and exchange between groups and nations from very early on in
the course of history), we might simplistically fall back on such “ungraspable” units as idiosyncrasies,
languages, worldviews, subscriptions to belief systems or on the exercise of rights and obligations as
some of the aspects of the collective imaginary to be taken into account in the construction of social
identities.
But, whereas in the past “the nation was the integrating unit in which differences and faultlines
were organized and ‘resolved’”,2 and all these indicators seemed to “take hold” of a territory, a
population that thought of itself as quasi-endogamous, and a particular history that supposedly had not
been altered by other cultures, nowadays the debate centres on the fragility of the notion of autonomy.
Objects of curiosity
Indians, blacks, foreign immigrants have always been the object of curiosity, description and
interpretation by artists and writers in any place or time as a category of “others” or “otherness”,
understood as that which startles, contrasts or clashes with our own way of looking at ourselves.
Indeed, the gaze of the plastic artist, the writer and the artisan has always lighted inquisitively upon
“others” in an unremitting attempt to sketch their ever-unknown profiles, which somehow escape
simple, univocal classification. Botero’s fat men and women, Figari’s blacks, the gauchos and Indians
depicted by so many others, the “little English woman” in José Pedro Bellán’s story, the “gringo” of
tango lyrics, are just some of these “others”, which have always obsessed the creator of art.
Already in the engravings made by 16th- to 18th-century naturalists and artists who arrived aboard
the voyages of discovery and conquest it is possible to discern a note of profound ethnocentrism. The
iconography of those centuries is peopled with semi-human figures with naked torsos and animal
tails, wolf muzzles and webbed feet, foreshadowing an imaginary fuelled by fears and legends,
glimpses of monstrosity and the consequent difficulties in conceiving of tolerance. And that is just the
preamble to a conception of an exotic America, where the excesses of the atypical and superabundant
flora and fauna have always defied the canons of a Europe that was at the time unveiling new
technologies for navigating and exploring the Mundus Novus.
The extensive bibliography of descriptions and interpretations of these “others” includes chronicles
of various councils held in Spain, at which the topic of debate was whether such peoples discovered in
the Indies, whose “pagan” ways of life shocked and bewildered, were composed of human beings or
whether they were in actual fact “beasts” (their animality understood as monstrosity rather than
nature), to what extent Americans belonged to each category, whether these categories authorized this
or that policy of exploitation and commerce, and whether it was necessary or not to convert them,
evangelize them and swiftly transform them into people if not equal to, then at least as similar as
possible to their discoverers.3
Ultimately, it can be said that the history of human societies has been woven from all kinds of
convergences and divergences, confrontations and conflicts of varying degrees of violence with some
“other” on the basis of this “otherness”. This might have involved American Indians at the time of the
Discovery and Conquest, slaves brought over from Africa, gypsies, impoverished immigrants or a
neighbouring people whose way of living or thinking surprised or challenged. In the final analysis, the
label of “other” can be given to any group we have defined as an “other” and placed in the category of
“otherness” at sufficient distance.
This matter of otherness has always provided the essential structure for human societies. There is a
host of terminology in the documents of 15th- to 19th-century Europe that illustrates how men have
1
See, for example, Geertz, Clifford, Reflexiones antropológicas sobre temas filosóficos, Barcelona, Paidós
Studio, 2002.
2
García Canclini, Néstor, Latinoamericanos buscando lugar en este siglo, México, Paidós, 2002, p. 35.
3
Ortega y Medina, Juan A., Imagología del bueno y del mal salvaje, México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma
de México, 1987.

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regarded this “otherness”. To summarize, for the purposes of this brief exposition, it can be said that
there were, on the one hand, idealized and apologetic positions (the example being Rousseau or
Montaigne, who in a kind of retro-utopia wrote that the “savageness” of this “other” had preserved the
“pure” untouched ways of a supposed “original man”, an individual as yet uncontaminated by what
would later be called “civilization”); on the other, thinkers of the stature of Voltaire, Hegel and
Buffon regarded American man as an inferior being full of “vices” and “perversions”, less intelligent
and equipped for life than Western European man.
In both cases, either the vision of the “other” as a descendent of hell or as perfect and virtuous, the
problem existed of “what to do with this other”, with the “otherness” of this “other”, where to insert it
in a system of categories representing a non-homogeneous social reality. The challenge was to
legitimize this “other” as an other, not a semi-human monster, nor a perfect being above all the rest.
This ambiguity and contradiction sum up the traditional ways of regarding the “other” on the basis
of bipolar positions within philosophy from the 16th to the 20th century, which over time generated
social distance and influenced the emergence of different forms of racism, discrimination and specific
ways of establishing frontiers and limits. Even the most idealized perspectives on this “other”
constructed the clearest of boundaries and in this sense they have been just as dangerous and
discriminatory as those that demonize this “otherness”.
The countries of America: the background of an exotic imaginary
The fact is that America already existed in the minds of Europeans as a place of legends fuelled by
superstition, imagery and sagas set in stony flatlands lost on the outermost fringes of the ocean.
Seneca had announced that “Centuries will come in which the ocean will loose its chains and a great
land will be discovered”.
The descriptions of chroniclers and travellers then turned the Mundus Novus into a thrilling stage
on which to play out hopes, conflicts and tragedies which over the centuries would bring about a
substantial change in the European mentality: the slow, gradual decentring of Europe and the
European way of life. For the European, assimilating America was not only an epic journey of
conquests and confiscation but above all a long process of incorporating and inventing meanings that
had to overcome the old established European centralism.
The first of these meanings was the extraordinary, the incredible made flesh, that which inspires
fascination and captures the gaze under the heading of excess. Ethnocentrism in the guise of
exaggeration, the raptures of enthusiasm that Pedro Mártir de Anglería described in a letter to his
friend Pomponio Leto in the 15th century:
…of the eighteen ships that my King and Queen gave to Columbus himself for the second sea voyage
[…] twelve have returned. Those who return from that previously unknown world recount that that land
naturally breeds vast forests of cochineal, cotton and many other things of great value to us including
no small amount of gold. It is an admirable thing, Pomponio. On the surface of the land nuggets of raw
gold, native to the region, are found, of such a weight as one dare not tell. Some have been found
weighing two hundred and fifty ounces. It is hoped to find much larger ones, judging by the signs made
by the natives to our people when they learn that they value gold highly.4
Many chroniclers’ descriptions are in the form of an endless inventory enumerating the plants,
trees, animals and people that have to be named, and specify their uses in detail. The older task of the
botanist, the geographer and the naturalist is to name and by naming to give existence to a previously
unknown reality. In these descriptions adjectives relating to exuberance and size predominate,
alongside the hunt for comparisons with similar forms in the Old World, without ever really finding
them, for things in the New World appeared ambiguous and difficult to classify to the Europeans:
both similar and different to the ones they knew.
On 19th May 1520, in his Primer viaje en torno al Globo [First voyage around the Globe],
Antonio Pigafetta described a tribe of giants [sic]: “this man was so big that our heads barely reached
his waist”, and a species of “strange animal with the head and ears of a mule, the body of a camel, the
hooves of a deer and the tail of a horse” (p. 57). In other descriptions the animals are too big or too
small, the people are either “beardless and feeble” or gigantic. “Let us see why there are such large
reptiles, such fat insects, such small quadrupeds and such weak men in this New World,” says Buffon.
In the first chapter of his second decade Pedro de Anglería recounts:
4
De Anglería, Pedro Mártir, “Opus Epistolarum”, Letter CXLVI, in Escritores de Indias, Zaragoza, Editorial
Ebro, 1981, p. 52.

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The crops and all the vegetables grow admirably in Urabá. Is this not wonderful, Holy Father? They
take to those lands seeds of all things, branches of plants, sprouts, twigs and shoots of certain trees, as
we have also said of quadrupeds and birds. Oh, what admirable fertility! After twenty days or so they
pick the fruit […] they recount that they bear fruit with great speed…5
To a Europe that was for the first time stepping out of its closed world towards a gradual idea of
difference, America was “abundance” personified: all that space whose absolute immensity and
myriad forms could be stated categorically. Paradisiacal or monstrous, infernal or heavenly, to the
Europeans America was the embodiment of the kind of constituent disproportion that gets men
physically and mentally carried away. The chroniclers speak of greed, lust, madness. Lope de Aguirre
was the paradigm of the descent into hell through a bestiality Europeans had long since held to have
been domesticated by civilization.
If the voyages of discovery and conquest form a narrative of excess, it is because they call forth an
imagination that swings from miracle-working to horror and back, an incursion into the exotic.
The function of “the exotic”
One of the least tense and most creative outcomes for artists has been the concept of “the exotic”.
Reconstructing “the exotic” within a society formed by powerfully homogenizing processes is likely
to become a pressing need for any collective imaginary. Artists have always been more willing than
any other social actor to incorporate the representation of “otherness” into the context of an æsthetic
they wish to make more varied and to include surprise and originality. They have therefore been able
to think of difference as an æsthetic value while at the same time legitimizing it.
Unlike other Latin American societies, where the quantitative importance of Native and African
Americans has been much higher, the appeal to the category of the exotic has only developed
belatedly in Uruguayan society. This I suspect is for two reasons: a) the greater ethnic and linguistic
uniformity of the grassroots population at the outset of its organizational processes leading up to
independence and b) the rapid secularization and modernization of the young nation under the ægis of
the hyperintegrating concept of citizenship.
In general terms, the idea of the exotic seems to have first appeared in Latin America in association
with a particular geography.6 This is what occurred with the term “tropicalism”, which the Europeans
used to describe their Caribbean colonies, a model fuelled by the contrast between climates and
ecosystems and which served as a preliminary step in the interpretation of the ethnic contrast between
populations and cultures.
In the case of the old Banda Oriental, which comprised Uruguay and part of Southern Brazil, the
description of the geography traditionally given talks of a “gently rolling” land with no radical
geographical features or cataclysms (volcanoes, earthquakes, etc.). The population, including the
already Christianized indigenous peoples from the Guaraní missions, apparently showed no signs of
subcultures other than those originating from the border influences identified by linguists and those
that have gradually come about as a result of various kinds of productive exploitation (rural/urban,
cattle/agriculture) and their subtypes. Though these subcultures may have preserved and transformed
features that had earlier belonged purely to indigenous cultures, it is clear that, in line with Franz
Boas’s conceptualization of “cultural loan”, these traits have undergone successive transformations
until becoming functional elements in the new syncretisms and configurations.
But even when exoticism was apparently unable to establish itself on the basis of a territory with
no drastic topographies and topologies, it would be able to grow through breaks in the timeline. These
breaks were produced as reflections on moments that were already “closed” viewed from the
perspective of the present as otherness. One example is the classic construction of “the archaic”7 as a
reference considered in relation to the present, which becomes an exemplary model of practices,
ceremonies and lifestyles.
In terms of social dynamics, “the exotic” as “all that which is other”8 or as “the concept of
different, the perception of the diverse, the knowledge that something is not one’s self”9 becomes an
energizing notion for the social and political forces of a nation as a whole, constituting as it does a
5
Ibid., pp. 57–58.
6
Todorov, Tzetan, Nous et les autres, Paris, Le Seuil, 1989, p. 368.
7
Eliade, Mircea, El mito del eterno retorno. Arquetipos y repetición, Madrid, Alianza-Emecé, 1972.
8
Cf. Segalen, Victor, Essai sur l’exotisme, in Todorov, Tzetan, op. cit., p. 369.
9
Ibid.

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dynamic element that fosters surprise and astonishment, and indirectly causes the breakdown of
previously accepted, “naturalized” stereotypes. Of course, for society in general, but also for art in
particular, it becomes a concept that encourages æsthetic variety, originality and new ways of
recombining old elements.
Furthermore, for Victor Segalen, the exotic signifies a revitalization of the senses: “…exoticism
[…] as the fundamental law of the intensity of sensation, of the exaltation of feeling, and therefore of
the life experience”.10
A further element that must be taken into consideration in such discourses is the recovery of
“archaic themes, mythical references or images of the good old days”.11 The recourse to an archetypal
substratum “cyclically repeats what was believed to have been left behind”. 12 The recovery and reuse
of these archaisms interrupts the continuous line of temporality in a process where “self-assured
history gives up its place to a plural and diversified mythology”.13 Consequently new modulations of
time and space appear: territories, specific communities, regionalities,14 localisms, a sort of “folklore
of the particular” that interpenetrates and contaminates the processes of uniformization framed by
cultural globalization.
The quest for new forms of “exoticism” as a reaction to an excessive “homogeneity” of vital
experiences15 leads to a conceptual nomadism in search of “roots” and foundations. The value of this
quest rests on the rediscovery of novel, distinctive, peculiar singularities that serve as new reference
points for new identifications and for alternative, unorthodox ways of life.
Blurring the frontiers
Constructing communities of shared meanings through shared symbols is a slow, gradual process
involving negotiation of the meanings, receptivity and selectivity in exchange, a degree of openness
and the necessary production of new myths. The unifying function of new mythologies becomes
central in processes for integrating distinctive national attachments. Above and beyond national
borders, shared mythologies reconcile substantive imaginaries that include similarities relating to
regional roots, and stir strong emotions associated with belonging and identification.
Moreover, in line with the modality prevailing in most contemporary urban societies, permeated
by global mass communication, regional identities are more a result of the concept of “weak borders”
than of the abandonment of any precise demarcation in terms of political sovereignty.
As García Canclini writes:
Nations are no longer what they were, nor do they have strict borders or customs controls that might
contain what is produced within them and filter what comes in from outside. There are millions of us
who leave our countries and continue to be Mexican or Cuban in the United States, Bolivians and
Uruguayans in Argentina, Latin Americans in Madrid, Paris or Chicago.16
To say nothing of the history of the population of countries that in the late 20th century entered the
category of “country of emigration”, such as Uruguay, formed over just three centuries almost
exclusively by successive waves of migration. 17 Some estimates put the number of Uruguayan
emigrants for the period 1963–2004 at around 440,000, or about 13.9% of the population resident in
10
Ibid., p. 370.
11
Maffesoli, Michel, “Las culturas comunitarias: policulturalismo y postmodernidad”, in Giner, Salvador, and
Riccardo Scartezzini (eds.), Universalidad y diferencia, Madrid, Alianza Universidad, 1996, p. 99.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid. Paraphrase.
15
“The impoverishment of experience, its lack of relief, is in all other respects connected to the intense
opacity generated by the mass media. The schematization of life makes it feasible for it to be supplanted by
the printed word and the journalistic snapshot, the giddy phrasing of the airwaves, the electronic image of the
TV screen,” writes José Jiménez in “Sin patria. Los vínculos de pertenencia en el mundo de hoy: familia, país,
nación”, in Fried Schnitzman, Dora, Nuevos paradigmas, cultura y subjetividad, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1994,
p. 221.
16
García Canclini, Néstor, op. cit., p. 27.
17
I have taken the liberty of using the title chosen by César Aguiar for his 1982 essay Uruguay, país de
emigración, Montevideo, Banda Oriental.

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the country.18 This shows the extent to which attachments are becoming dualistic, ambivalent and
cosmopolitan for growing sectors of the population.
The old idea that peoples were born in one place and accumulated traditions there that served to
sustain and perpetuate the social collective is now up against intense movements of syncretism and
globalization. The realization that other cultures have always been present in our own in an
irreversible manner produces an ambiguous effect: one of opening and at the same time fear at the loss
of specificity.
When advertisements continually remind us we can travel to far-flung places and back in no time,
or when the Uruguayan coast can receive Argentine and the north Brazilian television, then a new
kind of ubiquity becomes established in our perception of the collective experience: we are here but
we are also there, we can “feel” ourselves to be here and there at the same time.
This new ubiquitous subjectivity prevents us from fully belonging to a single place in any absolute
sense. Ties with places and times, with the future and the past, undergo processes of readjustment and
adaptation. The term “frontier” thus comes to designate an uncertain, perpetually redefined territory
that is the subject of negotiations, appropriations, loans and renewed transactions. Having been
constructed by these new subjectivities, these then become the symbolic territory necessary for
defining mobile, itinerant, migratory, recombining neo-cultures.
Even in view of the asymmetries of Latin American modernity, its social, educational and
economic inequalities, “we should not be surprised if our sense of belonging and even of citizenship
or responsibility tend to become increasingly diffuse”.19 The concept of “confinement”, which
Maffesoli attributes to modernity as a criticism, may be extrapolated to Latin America to express the
impossibility experienced by large sectors of the population of escape from the cycle of
unemployment/poverty/migration, either in terms of migrations from the countryside to the city or
from the city to other cities or countries.
According to García Canclini,
…this translocal diffusion of culture and consequent blurring of territories are now intensifying, not
just as a result of travel, exile and economic migration, but also because of the way the reorganization
of music, television and cinema markets restructures lifestyles and breaks up shared imaginaries.20
The effects on collective subjectivities
With audiences exposed to constant information, global communication and the industrial production
of mass entertainment, models of collective action are produced and reproduced in a self-feeding and
self-homogenizing circuit. Although appropriation of these models is not automatic (for, as Boas has
shown, it involves a degree of selectiveness, elimination and adaptation to the context of cultural
patterns already owned and used by part of the social sector or subculture in question), it is undeniable
that appropriation takes place and has homogenizing effects not only on manifest behaviour but
particularly on collective subjectivities.21
What really makes people similar then in this day and age are these collective subjectivities, which
are magnetized by the homogenization of those models (and their emergence or decline in terms of
fashions and the vicissitudes of industry), whose dense mechanisms erase any trace of their
genealogy, as clearly spelt out by Foucault.
In any case, these collective subjectivities result in concrete lifestyles incorporating specific
practices for consuming material and symbolic goods, technology and cultural productions. As
creators of customs, of ways of doing, ways of living, through a feedback process, become gestators
of ways of being.
Within what can be regarded as a not fully consummate modernity, or as an asymmetrical
modernity, “traditional symbolisms can only offer disperse, fragmented states of consciousness, in
which heterogeneous elements and diverse cultural strata originating from very different worlds
18
Pellegrino, Adela, and Andrea Vigorito, “Estrategias de sobrevivencia ante la crisis. Un estudio de la
emigración uruguaya en 2002”, 2004, accepted for publication in the Nordic Journal of Latin American and
Caribbean Studies.
19
Maffesoli, Michel, El nomadismo. Vagabundeos iniciáticos, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004.
20
García Canclini, Néstor, op. cit., pp. 27–28.
21
See, for example, Gergen, Kenneth, El yo saturado. Dilemas de identidad en el mundo contemporáneo,
Barcelona, Paidós, 1992.

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coexist”.22 Art is the first and foremost resource for putting this across. It is capable both of
representing and addressing this new and complex imaginary, in which reconstructing the exotic is
becoming increasingly difficult and æsthetic values are forced into dissolution under pressure from
the standardization of minds and the mass production of objects and ideas.
22
García Canclini, Néstor, Culturas híbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad, Buenos Aires,
Paidós, 2001, p. 234.