Bernabé Mallo
Doctor en Filosofía por la Universidad del País Vasco (UPV/EHU)
Investigador
en neurofilosofía, evolución humana y origen del arte. / PhD in
Philosophy – University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
Researcher in neurophilosophy, human evolution, and the origins of art.
A review of La belleza de los otros: Arte indígena del Paraguay by Ticio Escobar (2012)
Introduction: the challenge of naming the unnameable
How can we speak of "art" in cultures where that word does not exist? How can we apply a category forged in the Western tradition —with its cult of the individual, its separation between form and function, its fetishisation of the unique work— to objects and practices that respond to radically different logics? This is the question running through La belleza de los otros, the foundational book by the Paraguayan critic, curator, and thinker Ticio Escobar, whose second, corrected and expanded edition appeared in 2012 (the original dates from 1993).
The challenge is enormous. As Rodrigo Montani notes in his review, using the term "art" to speak of the artefacts, attire, and ceremonies of the Indigenous peoples of Paraguay seems "an impossible task". Yet Escobar finds "good intellectual and political reasons to do so". His aim is clear: to survey the Indigenous art produced in Paraguay in order to highlight the presence of expressive universes "generally not inventoried in the country's artistic heritage".
What makes this book a singular contribution is not only its ethnographic erudition but its methodological wager: a "mestiza methodology", eclectic, navigating between art criticism and anthropology, combining first-hand ethnographic and museographic knowledge with the published information on each subject. It is, at bottom, an exercise in Surgical Philosophy avant la lettre: a precise cut into the surface of a badly posed problem in order to excise inherited dichotomies and suture a broader, more habitable conceptual framework.
The "mestiza methodology": a surgical cut into the dichotomies of art
The traditional model of Western art, Escobar notes, is characterised as a dualistic system that separates function and form, major art and minor art, art and craft. According to these dichotomies, popular art —associated with craft— is considered "minor art" because function predominates over form. Indigenous art, which Escobar places within popular art, subverts this hierarchy: its purpose is not a deficit but an essential dimension bound up with "the complete social experience of communities in religious, economic, political, and cultural terms".
The "mestiza methodology" Escobar proposes is not a soft eclecticism but a strategy of oblique approach. As he himself notes, "the mestiza methodology that the treatment of Indigenous artistic production demands hinders a coherent approach to its object, which is easier to access through oblique approximations and crossed perspectives than through direct paths". This oblique approach is, in essence, the surgical gesture: one cannot access the object head-on, with pre-established categories, because those categories distort it. One must circle it, cut in from the flanks, suture a new framework from which it can be understood.
Escobar does not reject the word "art"; he uses it strategically. "It remains fundamental to speak of Indigenous art", he writes, because it is the best term for translating a reality and a problem. Although it inevitably betrays, to some degree, Indo-American sociologies and cosmovisions, it enables "a poetics and a rhetoric capable of penetrating them" —something that terms such as "material culture", "craft", or "folklore" fail to achieve— and it is capable of "fissuring the ethnocidal and ecocidal narrative that has been and continues to be the condemnation of Indigenous peoples".
"The aesthetic is equivalent to the symbolic": the Y dimension in its purest state
The first chapter of the book, "El arte otro" ("The Other Art"), establishes the fundamental position that defines the whole work. Escobar asks: "Is it a piece of art? How can the edge of the aesthetic be defined in cultures that mix pure beauty with the encoded labours of worship, the prosaic efforts after food, and the complicated exercise of the social pact?"
After some provisional answers, he arrives at a conclusion that is at once a surrender and a discovery: "the aesthetic" is equivalent to "the symbolic". This equivalence permeates everything —art, religion, politics, law, science— and dissolves the boundaries that Western naturalism had erected between supposedly autonomous domains. The dichotomy between the utilitarian and the non-utilitarian does not hold in the works of "others". Indigenous "art" is not an individual creation, nor a transgressive innovation, nor an odd work. But it is art, precisely because it is symbolon: an act of recognition through shared codes that creates and confers meaning.
This equivalence between the aesthetic and the symbolic is the purest manifestation of the Y (Symbolon) dimension of our thesis. Symbolon is not an ornament of experience: it is the very fabric of social life. In Indigenous art, beauty is not an end in itself but the vehicle through which bonds with ancestors are actualised, relations with non-humans are negotiated, the person is constructed, and the cosmos is reproduced. Form is inseparable from meaning, and meaning is inseparable from communal life.
"Art and things": the S dimension in ritual materiality
The second chapter, "El arte y las cosas" ("Art and Things"), addresses movable artefacts —baskets, wood carvings, textiles, pottery, pyro-engraved gourds— and establishes a fundamental premise: "Indigenous art […] envelops things, shakes them out of the drowsiness of routine, and promotes in them the fulfilment of their transcendental and utilitarian, political and ludic functions".
This formulation is key to understanding the S (Survival) dimension in Indigenous art. Objects are not mere utensils, but neither are they autonomous works of art. They are operators of survival in a broad sense: they not only allow food to be transported or seeds to be stored, but sustain the social and cosmological life of the group. Their function is at once practical and transcendent. The basket being woven is not only used to gather fruits; its weave reproduces the order of the cosmos, its designs refer to animals and spirits, its form embodies a way of inhabiting the world.
Escobar's analysis of each technique —its forms, its designs, its colours, its underlying aesthetic principles, its symbolisms and mythical resonances— shows that materiality is the substrate of symbolic life. There is no symbol without a material body to support it. The survival of the group depends on those objects fulfilling their function, and that function is inseparable from their meaning.
"Art and rite": the C dimension in cosmic integration
The final chapter, "El arte y el rito" ("Art and Rite"), addresses the sensory dimension of ritual: "that moment which tears through everyday time and dilates space until it communicates with the impossible places inhabited by gods and the dead". Escobar pauses on four great ceremonies —the male initiation ritual of the Páĩ Taviterã, the jeroky ñembo'e dance-prayer of the Avá, the "great ceremony" or debylyby of the Ishir, and the arete guasu of the Chiriguano— and describes them in a prose that Montani calls "suggestive, intriguing, or wounding".
In ritual, art reaches its fullest expression as a force of cosmic integration. The Ishir debylyby, for example, is a "resounding synthesis" in which each group of men represents a group of divinities through the tihá, the characteristic cries that define the differences between divine species. "Emitted from the ankles of the Anábsoro, they are most powerful: in mythical times their mere force sufficed to strike birds dead […] mortally wound wild beasts and paralyse fish". Art, in ritual, does not represent power: it exercises it. It is the C (Wholeness) dimension in its most intense form: the integration of the human and the divine, the living and the dead, everyday time and mythical time, into a coherent and efficacious totality.
Connection with research on the origin of art (S/Y/C)
La belleza de los otros offers a privileged case study for observing the functioning of the Law of Biological Coherence S/Y/C (Mallo, 2023, 2025, 2026a, 2026b). The three dimensions unfold here with a clarity rarely found in Western aesthetics.
The S (Survival) dimension manifests in the functional materiality of objects and in the ritual efficacy of ceremonies. Indigenous art is not a contemplative luxury; it is a technology of social and cosmological survival. Baskets, carvings, songs, and dances sustain the life of the group, regulate relations with the environment, and guarantee the continuity of tradition.
The Y (Symbolon) dimension reaches here its most radical formulation: the aesthetic is equivalent to the symbolic. There is no autonomous domain of beauty separated from meaning. Beauty is the mode in which the symbol becomes present, is embodied, is shared. Symbolon is not a mental representation: it is an act of recognition carried out in the materiality of the object and the corporality of ritual.
The C (Wholeness) dimension is expressed in the cosmic integration of the rite. Indigenous art does not seek the individual masterpiece but lived totality: the community gathered, mythical time actualised, the entire cosmos present in a gesture, a song, an object. Wholeness is not a property of the work but a quality of experience when it manages to articulate all the dimensions of existence.
Surgical Philosophy finds in Escobar's "mestiza methodology" a methodological precedent. His oblique approach, his rejection of inherited dichotomies, his capacity to cut into the surface of the problem and suture a broader framework —all of this is an exercise in conceptual surgery. Escobar does not limit himself to applying categories; he dissects them, shows their historicity, their contingency, their particularity. And then he sutures a space where Indigenous art can be thought without being betrayed.
Final considerations: the beauty that refuses to be caught
La belleza de los otros is an unsettling book. It unsettles because it forces us to renounce our certainties about what art, beauty, authorship, and the work are. It unsettles because it shows us that our aesthetic categories are not universal but situated. It unsettles because, in the end, we cannot go back to looking at a basket, a mask, or a ritual dance with the same eyes with which we looked at them before.
Escobar does not offer a closed theory of Indigenous art. He offers something more valuable: a way of approaching that respects the irreducibility of its object. His "mestiza methodology" is an acknowledgement that there are realities which cannot be caught by inherited concepts, and that thought, when it is rigorous, must invent its own tools.
For our research on the origin of art, the lesson is clear: art was not born as an autonomous activity, separated from life, confined to a specialised domain. It was born —and continues to be born in Indigenous communities— as a total practice, integrated into economy, religion, politics, and ecology. Art is the language of symbolon, and symbolon is the fabric of social life. As long as there are communities that weave, sing, dance, and paint to sustain their world, art will continue to be what it always was: the fullest form of survival, symbol, and wholeness.
References
Escobar, T. (2012). La belleza de los otros: Arte indígena del Paraguay (2nd ed.). Servilibro.
Escobar, T. (2015). La belleza de los otros: Arte indígena del Paraguay. Edhasa.
Mallo, B. (2023). La construcción neuro-simbólica. Una aproximación al funcionamiento del cerebro desde una perspectiva multidisciplinar [Doctoral thesis, University of the Basque Country - Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea]. ADDI Repository. http://hdl.handle.net/10810/62701
Mallo, B. (2025). Arte y biología: Una aproximación neurofilosófica al origen de la experiencia estética. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0E8Y5WZMK
Mallo, B. (2025). Art and biology: A neurophilosophical approach to the origin of aesthetic experience. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0E8Y6C2XN
Mallo, B. (2026a). De la filosofía quirúrgica a la ley de coherencia biológica S/Y/C: Hacia una investigación sobre el origen del arte en la especie Homo. https://isbn.bibna.gub.uy/catalogo.php?mode=detalle&nt=57196
Mallo, B. (2026a). De la filosofía quirúrgica a la ley de coherencia biológica S/Y/C: Hacia una investigación sobre el origen del arte en la especie Homo [Kindle edition]. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYGTJD5C
Mallo, B. (2026b). From surgical philosophy to the law of biological coherence S/Y/C: Toward a study of the origin of art in the Homo lineage. https://isbn.bibna.gub.uy/catalogo.php?mode=detalle&nt=57197
Montani, R. (2014). Escobar Ticio, La belleza de los otros: arte indígena del Paraguay. Journal de la Société des Américanistes, *100*(1), 288–294. https://doi.org/10.4000/jsa.13816
Autor / Author
Bernabé Mallo
Doctor en Filosofía – Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU)
Investigador independiente en neurofilosofía, evolución humana y origen del arte.
Bernabé Mallo
PhD in Philosophy – University of the Basque Country / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU)
Independent researcher in neurophilosophy, human evolution, and the origin of art.
Enlaces / Links
Página de autor Amazon / Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/bernabemallo
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9002-9728
Plataforma EHUenRed / Link EHUenRed: https://www.ehu.eus/es/web/masterrak-eta-graduondokoak/red-latinoamericana-de-posgrados
Canal YouTube / Channel YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@neuroideas815
Canal YouTube / Channel YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBsf6OZ482NjST6QA-hvYtQ
Publicaciones y proyectos en desarrollo / Publications and projects:
https://www.amazon.com/author/bernabemallo
https://ehuenred.theglocal.network/ideas/el-origen-del-arte-en-el-cerebro-de-makapansgat-al-moma-del-primate-al-sapiens