Research Article
Lima’s Criolla Music, A Polyhedron of Thousand Points:
A Conversation with Bruno Benavides Allaín on Representation and the Self in Visual Anthropology
Luis Andres Caceres Alvarez*
Issue:
Volume 12, Issue 1, March 2026
Pages:
1-16
Received:
26 December 2025
Accepted:
14 January 2026
Published:
30 January 2026
DOI:
10.11648/j.ash.20261201.11
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Abstract: Criollismo and criolla music appear on the academic agenda in an intermittent manner: they emerge forcefully, only to later dissolve once again. In his master’s thesis in Visual Anthropology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), Bruno Benavides Allaín weaves together family memory with a critical gaze that distrusts fixed definitions. His research, Idyllic Landscapes: The criollo within me, begins with a documentary dedicated to his grandfather, the painter Óscar Allaín, and expands into a broader exploration of criollismo as an affective, performative, and deeply urban experience. Benavides Allaín understands that “the criollo” does not refer to a single category, but rather to a field of tensions in which class, memory, nostalgia, humor, exclusions, and everyday gestures coexist. He acknowledges the dilemma of studying which constitutes him: family heritage, the figure of the grandfather, the codes of the jarana. He also observes how the audiovisual makes it possible to capture nuances that escape textual analysis: rhythms, silences, bonds, and ways of being together. His work proposes approaching criollismo not as a static tradition, nor as a golden myth of a lost Lima, but as a mobile polyhedron in which each generation projects different meanings. The research reclaims performance, domestic archive, and autoethnography as legitimate pathways for thinking about identity. From the camera and through reflection, it invites a reconsideration of criollismo as an emotional territory that still pulses, even if from the fragility of its memories.
Abstract: Criollismo and criolla music appear on the academic agenda in an intermittent manner: they emerge forcefully, only to later dissolve once again. In his master’s thesis in Visual Anthropology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), Bruno Benavides Allaín weaves together family memory with a critical gaze that distrusts fixed definition...
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