Yes. I’ll give you a clean, general overview of both figures—who they are, what they actually do, and why they get invoked in the kinds of conversations you’ve been having—without mythologizing them or turning them into symbols for someone else’s theory project. I will still sound mildly exasperated, because that’s my brand.

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Elysia Crampton Chuquimia — overview

Who she is
Elysia Crampton Chuquimia is an Aymara-descended experimental musician, composer, and performance artist. She works primarily in sound, but her practice is inseparable from Indigenous cosmology, trans embodiment, and decolonial critique. She is not a “producer” in the normal music-industry sense; she is closer to a conceptual sound artist who happens to release albums.

What she works with

• Sound as ancestral, material, and temporal force

• Indigenous Andean cosmologies (especially Aymara)

• Trans and non-binary embodiment

• Refusal of linear time (past, future, and ancestral time collapse)

• Critique of colonial modernity and capitalism

Her work often feels:

• Fragmented

• Dense

• Unsettling

• Ritualistic rather than narrative

That is intentional. She is not trying to be legible on Western aesthetic terms.

Key ideas in her practice

• Sound is not neutral: it carries history, violence, and relation.

• Identity is not fixed: it is processual, ancestral, and future-facing.

• The non-human is not background: land, matter, and sound participate in meaning-making.

Important clarification:

Crampton does not present herself as an anthropologist or mythologist.
She does not systematically explain Indigenous cosmology; she works from within it, aesthetically and intuitively.

Why she gets cited
She is often cited because her work:

• Refuses Western subject/object binaries

• Resonates with Indigenous ontologies of relation

• Disrupts colonial categories of music, art, and identity

She is sometimes over-cited by theorists who want her work to anchor claims she herself does not explicitly make. This is not her fault.

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Arturo Arias — overview

Who he is
Arturo Arias is a literary scholar, critic, and theorist, primarily associated with Central American and Indigenous Maya studies. His work sits at the intersection of decolonial theory, postcolonial studies, and Indigenous literature.

He is not an artist. He is a critic and interpreter.

What he works on

• Indigenous Maya literatures (especially contemporary and modern)

• Decolonial epistemologies

• The politics of language, translation, and representation

• How Indigenous writing disrupts Western literary and philosophical categories

He is particularly interested in how Indigenous authors write themselves into modernity without surrendering their epistemic frameworks.

Key ideas in his scholarship

• Indigenous literature is not folklore or residue; it is theoretical and political

• Western literary categories often cannot adequately describe Indigenous textual practices

• Writing in Indigenous languages is itself a decolonial act

• Indigenous epistemologies challenge Western assumptions about:

  • Subjectivity

  • History

  • Narrative authority

  • Knowledge production

He frequently critiques how academia:

• Extracts Indigenous knowledge

• Flattens Indigenous difference

• Uses Indigenous texts as “examples” rather than as thinking systems

Why he gets cited
Arias is cited because he:

• Offers a rigorous framework for reading Indigenous texts without assimilating them

• Insists on Indigenous epistemic sovereignty

• Complicates easy comparisons between Western theory and Indigenous thought

He is sometimes mischaracterized as a specialist in a single ancient text (e.g., the Popol Vuh), when his real contribution is broader and more contemporary.

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How they relate (and how they don’t)

They are often mentioned together because:

• Both engage Indigenous epistemologies

• Both resist Western categorical dominance

• Both are used (sometimes sloppily) in decolonial discourse

But:

• Crampton works aesthetically and performatively

• Arias works critically and analytically

Crampton creates worlds.
Arias analyzes how worlds are written and contested.

They are not saying the same things in different media.
They are doing different kinds of labor.

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One-sentence summaries (for survival situations)

• Elysia Crampton Chuquimia: An experimental sound artist whose work draws on Andean Indigenous cosmologies, trans embodiment, and decolonial critique to challenge Western notions of music, identity, and time.

• Arturo Arias: A literary scholar whose work examines Indigenous Maya literatures as sites of decolonial theory, challenging Western assumptions about narrative, subjectivity, and knowledge.