Abstract
The short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “Death and the Compass” (Collected Fictions, 1942), stages the life and death struggle between a detective – “a reasoning machine” – modelled on classic detective stories and a killer who follows the rigid rule of societies bound by a strict honour code (brotherhood, blood vengeance, death). The aim of our ethnocritical study is to show how two contradictory worlds (that of writing and literacy and that of folk knowledge) fatally collide through the cunning intelligence of an honour-bound criminal who is a master in the art of cultural syncretism [metis]. Our approach is different to those based on the formal rules of narratology. By examining several examples of cultural and narrative heterophony, we can show how a traditional literary analysis hinders an anthropological interpretation of the story and its structure, as well as the values and beliefs it reflects.
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