This essay describes the discursive organization of the "challenge," a motif previously studied by A. J. Greimas as a recit. Here, the narrative unit examined is an Andean ethnoliterary motif. An analysis of the objects in this text allows us to establish the difference between re6nimos, tecnemas, and zoemas. The objects of culture produced in the Americas are frequently studied by using three norms to "apprehend" them: (1) a temporal one, such as a specific moment in history or prehistory; (2) a spatial one, such as an area delineated by the borders of a country or by an ethnic group; and (3) an academic one, such as the disciplinary boundaries of a given institutionalized field of knowledge. These three criteria, regardless of how tenuously they may be employed, reveal an important commonality: they all originate in a confining cognitive point of view which tends to resist any perspectives beyond the given spatial, temporal, or academic zones. For instance, when one mentions "Latin America" or "Latin American" culture, one is usually referring exclusively to cultural phenomena observed south of the Rio Grande (see Instituto 1990: 19) in societies where the prevalent dialects are those of the Romance languages. Thus, large populations in Haiti, in Quebec province, and in the American Southwest are automatiPoetics Today 16:1 (Spring 1995). Copyright ? 1995 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/95/$2.50. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.116 on Sun, 18 Sep 2016 06:29:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 30 Poetics Today 16:1 cally excluded. Such an approach inhibits research in linguistics and in comparative mythology at the continental level and diffuses the parameters of analytical coherence. Thus an effort should be made to depart from traditional literary history and criticism, where analogical and intuitive principles are applied without offering the reader a regulatory frame of reference within which to evaluate the results. For instance, in current historical periodizations and genre differentiations, only the official literary production of Latin American Spanishspeaking communities is considered. This approach marginalizes, or simply ignores, literary works in ancestral languages and the diglossic literature produced by societies that are defined by their multilingualism and pluriculturalism. A healthy reaction against this analytical fragmentation is represented by the interdisciplinary studies of the Centro de Investigaciones sobre Mexico, America Central y los Andes (CERMACA). Although devoted to only three areas, these interdisciplinary studies nevertheless break through the territorial and academic confinement which seems to prevail in current analytical discourse. Nathan Wachtel (1988: 50) describes the Center's guidelines as follows: 1) Not to recognize disciplinary boundaries and to promote cooperation among sociologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists; 2) not to recognize geographical boundaries by developing teamwork projects with experts on the Andes, Mesoamerica, and, if possible, Western Europe (mainly Mediterranean Europe, southern France, Italy, Spain); 3) not to recognize chronological boundaries either, since each study group is formed by specialists in the pre-Columbian, colonial, nineteenth-century, and contemporary periods. (Our translation) In another fresh, integrative direction, Latin American comparative literature studies have been effective in presenting intertextual findings in various sociocultural areas, especially when these findings are accompanied by a description of the formal correlations which allow a homogeneous examination of the given textual planes. This can be seen in the interpretation and explanation of myths, or "matrices of intelligibility" (Levi-Strauss 1976: 16), beginning with minor units of narrative, such as the minimal mythical recit. The analytical procedures in this field have varied considerably, from the formal description of minor narrative enunciates (e.g., veni, vidi, vici) to innumerable categorial schemes (which describe, on the plane of content, the minimal properties of general narrative), such as the well-known diagram of the Narrative Program.1 1. The semiotic terms and their definitions appear in A. J. Greimas and Joseph Courtes (1982, 1986). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.116 on Sun, 18 Sep 2016 06:29:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Ball6n-Aguirre * Comparative Ethnoliterature 31 The formal organization of motifs (defined as mobile recits which migrate from one narrative unit to another either within a cultural universe or outside of it) has become a fruitful field of study thanks to the contributions made by, among others, Joseph Courtes (1986, 1989, 1991), Claude Calame (1990), and Claude Bremond.2 In this essay, we intend to proceed in that direction, focusing on the "challenge motif," a micro-recit that has traditionally been considered a manipulationrecit in the Indo-European narrative corpus (see Greimas 1982). We will also analyze this motif within the context of other motifs found in Latin American ethnoliterary texts. It is particularly important that our corpus/context be a non-Indo-European one because, as we shall demonstrate, it modifies the apothegm that is held to be universally valid for the r6cits of challenge: "It is unthinkable that a knight could challenge anyone who is despicable" (ibid.: 44). In the Amerindian corpus, this apothegm becomes a relative enunciate because "despicable" characters are in fact challenged, although they embody an implicit divine competence. As mentioned in an earlier study (Ball6n-Aguirre 1983), the observation and description of motifs cannot be accomplished, nor their typologies established, outside of the texts in which they are inscribed. In fact, a motif creates a relation of invariance and variance with the surrounding text which contains and contextualizes it. If we consider the micro-recit narrative structure (with its own processes) to be invariable, the motif then appears variable, and vice versa. Therefore, the motif cannot be fully autonomous from the narrative articulations on the structural level, but can be defined only in relation to them. Aside from its relative autonomy, the motif can be distinguished from the functional signification that it attains in connection with the major narrative (or "occurrence text") in which it is inscribed. It is also possible to delineate and analyze the motif as an invariable figurative unit in itself, unaffected by its various contexts and isolated from the functional secondary significations (narrative functions and discursive variables) acquired within a larger narrative unit. In this sense, the motif can be considered a consistent narrative segment, substantive enough to be studied by itself. Turning now to the micro-recit, we can see that it also functions as a transtextual discursive configuration, possessing a self-reliant semanticsyntactic organization and capable of being inscribed in longer discursive units. Thus the evaluation of a series of discursive configurations 2. See Communications 39 (Paris: Seuil, 1984); see also Le Conte, pourquoi? comment? Actes desJournees d'etudes en Litterature orale (Paris, 23-26 mars 1982) (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1984), and Leon and Perron (1987). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.116 on Sun, 18 Sep 2016 06:29:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 32 Poetics Today 16:1 navigating in a given sociocultural universe may allow us to establish a typology of the sociocultural stereotypes which define it. In this essay, we intend to contribute to the formulation of such a typology.3