Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana
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La Casa de la Cultura Ecuatorian (The House of Ecuadorian Culture) was founded by Benjamín Carrión on August 9, 1944, during the presidency of Dr Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra. It was created to stimulate, to direct and to coordinate the development of an authentic national culture.
Ecuador was defeated in the Ecuadorian-Peruvian war, a short border war, in 1941, losing part of its territory to Peru. Carrión said: If we cannot be a military and economic power, we can be, however, a cultural power nourished by our rich traditions.
Carrión mentioned the example of small nations like Greece and Israel, considered amongst the most civilized and cultured. He based his ideas on the writings of De Mariano Picón Salas, Arnold J. Toynbee and Keyserling. The theory of the "small nation", was inspired in the resemblance to the "pruned willow" and the "fecundity of the insufficient one" and hoped to demonstrate that a mutilated body can act in the fullness of the physical and achieve unimagined spiritual possibilities. The House of the Ecuadorian Culture, conceived like a true home of the nation’s culture, would do for Ecuador what wars never could: guide it to embrace the expressions of inspiration under whose wings the arts would become the nation’s pride.
