By Abdel Hernandez San juan and Alessandro Morganti Debra

INFERENCE AND ELUCIDATION

Excerpts from Cultural Anthropology

Abdel Hernández San Juan

and Alessandro Morganti Debra

Book information

Title: Inference and Elucidation

Subtitle: Excerpts from Cultural Anthropology

Authors: Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Alessandro Morganti Debra

Publisher: Eliva Books, ISBN: 978-99993-3-719-9

Date of Publication: 2026-02-10

Number of Pages: 202 pages

Category: Hermeneutics and Social Sciences

Keywords: Cultural analysis, cultural theory, hermeneutics, cultural exegesis and interpretation, semiotics of text, cultural anthropology, social archaeology, fieldwork, art criticism, postmodernism in the social sciences, art and anthropology

Table of Contents

Introduction: Interdisciplinary Horizons

Part I

1-Chapter I: Textual Exegesis: Criticism, Cultural Anthropology, and Social Archaeology

2-Chapter II: The Place of Inference in Elucidation: Subjectivity and Objectivity in Research

3-Chapter III: Hermeneutics, Exegesis and Interpretation: Archaeology and Art Criticism

4-Chapter IV: The Origins of Language: Orality, Writing, and Cognition in the Relationships Between Culture and Origins

5-Chapter V: Integral Cultural Anthropology: Originality of Fieldwork

Part II

6-Chapter VI – The Museum Inside and Outside Its Borders: The Eye of the Museum in Fieldwork

7-Chapter VII – Anthropology and Theory of Art

8-Chapter VIII – Subjectivity in the Human and Social Sciences: Between Anthropology and Art Criticism

9-Chapter IX – The Critique of Representation: Cultural Analysis and Cultural Representation

General Bibliography

Introduction: Interdisciplinary Horizons

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan and Alessandro Morganti Debra

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

Good morning, these are a series of videos that we have planned to undertake in the area of ​​cultural anthropology within an investigation that we are beginning to develop towards interdisciplinarity in cultural anthropology at intersections with art criticism, on the one hand, and other disciplines such as elements of social psychology as well as logical universals of philosophy.

This is a project I am beginning to develop with the Italian social archaeologist Alessandro Morganti. He is the co-author of a thesis, a book entitled “Gatherers and Hunters of Monte Cano in Paraguana,” a very valuable archaeological fieldwork that was carried out in this area of ​​Venezuela on the prehistoric period of the Amerindian cultures in this area, especially focused on lithic archaeology.

What’s interesting about this thesis and book, and the reason we’re working together, is that although Alessandro, as an archaeologist and anthropologist, starts from an approach that, after reading the thesis, I summarize as Althusserian—that is, based on a structured but Marxist-inspired conception of the distinctions between “the material infrastructure of society” and “the symbolic and cultural superstructure”—it’s an archaeology that, while it has reconstructive aims about how societies were shaped based on certain universals it presupposes about how human activity is organized, nevertheless, being a lithic archaeology, interpreting remains from prehistoric periods, and inevitably being an interpretive and hermeneutic archaeology that has to read signs, that has to read traces. Alessandro’s is undoubtedly a very empirical archaeology, a very technical fieldwork based on the collection of lithic material. So, this interpretive and hermeneutic aspect… It has created a lot of affinity between us in terms of the type of perspectives, although I am much less Marxist than Alessandro, the predominant and governing hermeneutic aspect in me has united us and made us collaborate.

In any case, the project we are proposing is not strictly archaeological but rather within cultural theory, or cultural analysis, which could be understood as a form of cultural anthropology, provided that cultural anthropology can be defined as an anthropology of the contemporary.

As we know, and this is something Levi Strauss discussed many times, a large part of anthropology since its origins has been linked to the study of primordial, primitive societies, considered within a certain stage of evolution, and therefore the problem of whether or not anthropology should and in what ways address contemporary society is a complex problem in itself within the discipline. I do not want to focus on that topic now, but I will say that in the project we are proposing, it is assumed that anthropology can be an anthropology of the contemporary.

Since the theme that has driven us in this collaboration is the topic of “migratory subjectivity,” not simply as an objectivist study of human and social migrations, but rather starting from an experiential perspective, that is, we have found that taking our own experience as migratory subjectivity is an extremely interesting object of study, since we are both emigrants, as a starting point for the cultural analysis of phenomena that presuppose a subjectivity, ours, which is a subjectivity that is, let’s say, or call it “decentered” in the sense that, although we have embraced new cultures as emigrants, of which we are part as exponents, and to a certain extent we have adapted and assimilated into them, at the same time we can never completely stop being externalized by that native culture since we are a diaporic subjectivity and we carry within us that “double consciousness” as it is called today in “diaspora anthropology”, that bifocality or ambivalence of the “double code” which articulates us as subjectivity that we have a part of ourselves in our cultures of origin and a part of you in the new culture, we think that this problem, or part of ourselves that inevitably runs through us, places us autobiographically as observers in “cultural anthropology” in a position that establishes a very interesting discussion radiating a very interesting discussion towards the epistemological problem of the subject and the object since it places us in a position, let’s say, of vulnerability, in a positive sense, that is, vulnerability because we cannot be an entirely objective subject of study but we are affected by the very problem that we want to analyze, now this does not mean that this is a work necessarily entirely autobiographical, although it goes through that.

As we saw on one occasion when we asked artificial intelligence about this ambivalent position, it responded that it was an ethical problem, and we agree that it is indeed an ethical way of viewing the issue of subject and object.

From those roots, from that experiential material that we have, we have set out to constellate interpretations that can go towards the analysis of cultural phenomena beyond our experience, also encompassing, and well here can come objects of study that have been privileged either for me or for Alessandro, such as specific cultural groups to migrations that Alessandro, for example, frequently analyzes in the European world, or related to the same archaeological studies that Alessandro has done or my studies on art.

In fact, what really, and with this I would like to close my introduction, let’s say that triggered, that is, what motivated us to do this, was actually a meeting we had with Vicky, Victoria Galarraga and Carmen Michelena. Vicky is a museologist, a researcher in the field of arts who has ventured into curating Venezuelan art and is the co-author of a dictionary of visual arts in Venezuela. Carmen is a Spanish immigrant who settled here in Venezuela very early in her life, who is a historian and at the same time has become a very active contemporary visual artist here in today’s scene.

Alessandro and I had a meeting at Carmen’s house with Carmen and Vicky about a project Carmen was working on for a competition where she addressed the autobiographical issues of her mother and father as Spanish emigrants to Venezuela and how this has affected her; it was an installation work that motivated us greatly.

What emerged around this project was precisely the first time we realized that we were delving into a territory of many interdisciplinary potentialities. Alessandro himself was the first to locate the intersection that occurs here between cultural analysis and elements of psychology, and also the one who located the universality that research like this can have between the oneness of an individual experience and the multiplicity that can be expanded to a sense of experience, to a sense of collectivity. So, well, I think with these words I introduce what will be this series of videos.

We are not considering pedagogical or didactic videos per se, although they may of course be useful for students as well, but rather a set of heuristic and experimental videos that we will shape in a way that will allow experimentation into the very creation of the material.

 Alessandro Morganti Debra

Good morning. I am a social archaeologist, graduated from the UCV, Central University of Venezuela, under the tutelage of professors such as Mario Sanoja and Iraida Vargas, who belong to the so-called Latin American social archaeology movement, and also under the tutelage of Luis Felipe Bate, who was also my tutor. I also completed an internship at the Autonomous University of Mexico. At the same time, I worked on my undergraduate thesis with the late anthropologist María Elena Rodríguez, to whom I owe much of my enthusiasm. I would also like to mention José María Cruxent, who provided us with the site to work on my undergraduate thesis at that time.

The peculiarity of this site, I give its geographical location, is the Paraguana Peninsula and within it, on Cerro Monte Cano, where the material consisted of objects carved from quartz. That is to say, we were in the Paleolithic era, as Europeans would define it. This caught our attention because we had never seen carved quartz before, and when we began to, let’s say, map it, we realized that there were very differentiated sectors within the production of points and burins, etc., etc., which fulfilled certain functions within, as Abdel said, the “modes of production,” in which the almost finished points were grouped together in shapes as if to be elaborated or finished with their handles so that they could be grabbed and thrown towards the prey they were going to hunt.

The first thought that comes to mind is, why Monte Cano? Why a hill that is the only hill found on the peninsula?

They should normally have been fishermen, but in that microenvironment there were migrations between what corresponded to a jungle environment—because it is practically jungle—and the coast. The points were also used for hunting fish because there was no other evidence such as net making, etc., etc. We also did not find elements such as fish vertebrae, bone structures, or fish cartilage. Therefore, we concluded that the “way of life,” which is a main concept developed in the thesis, was a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Now, how does this whole process relate to what Abdel spoke about earlier, regarding “migratory subjectivity”? It is actually a long process.

Based on my experiences as an emigrant—having emigrated twice over—I have observed that many things have changed in my worldview, but also many things within my own genesis or soul remain practically unchangeable, particularly regarding my culture of origin. These are things that do not change but remain. This is why Abdel mentioned the aspect of interconnecting interdisciplinarity on the subject of migration with experiences like that of Carmen Michelena.

It’s very interesting because her case involves a Venezuelan father and a mother from Madrid. She was born in Madrid and emigrated to Venezuela at a young age. She developed primarily during the Pérez Jiménez era and continues to do so today. She went to Spain after finishing her undergraduate thesis to pursue her master’s and doctoral degrees, and surprisingly, she returned to Venezuela. The conclusion is that we’ve both had the same experience, or a very similar one, but with different approaches. Ultimately, humankind is an adaptive being, capable of change. The question is, how do we perceive this? How do we interpret it? Do we view it from a Jungian perspective, a Freudian one, or perhaps a Gestalt perspective, to address the gaps that remain with us as immigrants and to articulate those gaps at the end of our development, our new culture, and our new integration into what we might call our current Western ways of life and the ways of life we’ve arrived in, which is Latin America, not North America, which has other characteristics that will be explained. Abdel because he lived for more than a decade in Houston, United States.

The idea is not to conduct a scientific study in the orthodox sense, with theories, variables, and so on, but rather to convey this knowledge from a perspective that is not simplistic in a pejorative sense, but rather straightforward, so that people can grasp what we are developing. Then, they can revisit all this knowledge and, only then, address the scientific aspect of the study and arrive at a blend of a new current of thought. But I find it very interesting, especially because we are living in a very turbulent time where one realizes that individualism is regaining momentum, but at the same time, collectivity is being used as a weapon. Nationalism is one example, as are all those neoliberal processes, for instance. Although they still exist, they are beginning to dilute with new formations like the Chinese People’s State, a model that fascinates me because I want to understand it more deeply. Or the case of Vietnam: how the collective undermines American individualism. Why didn’t the United States win the war? Why did Vietnam remain communist? But on the other hand, we are seeing that Vietnam is blending the two patterns. Ultimately, it’s a bit like that; migration is the product of a transformation whose direction is unknown. Perhaps with more time, things will become clearer, especially regarding the role of technology, which is crucial because it will radically change the lifestyles of this globalized society. It’s also multifaceted, encompassing Russia, China, the United States, Latin America, and almost all of them, but there are ideological structures, like the Chinese, Asian in general, Russian, and Western ones, that are engaged in debate. This is where we will try to understand and explain what’s happening with all this mixing, and see if we can come to understand our own cultural existence as migrants before we leave, so that those who follow us can develop and deepen their ideas.

Part I

Chapter I

Textual Exegesis between Criticism, Cultural Anthropology and Social Archaeology

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan and Alessandro Morganti Debra

Abdel Hernández San Juan

There are some things that I would like to ask ourselves and at the same time develop a little, it has to do with what I was talking about in the initial introduction about the points of affinity and the points of divergence, especially the points of affinity between the hermeneutic and interpretive approach to culture in the social sciences and the perhaps Althusserian, Marxist approach, related to what Alessandro Morganti defines as “ways of life”, with culture considered objectively and materially.

I wanted to ask Alessandro a question that concerns me at this point, that is, regarding the archaeological work you did, both in the development of the thesis you told us about, and in other empirical work experiences you had around certain specific phenomena of archaeological studies.

Let me explain. I start from the idea that inevitably the archaeologist, in this case you and the team you worked with, but in general archaeology cannot avoid the fact that he is facing a, let’s say, sign, a trace, an indication, a fragment of material culture that he is going to interpret.

The idea of ​​interpreting texts that comes from traditional philology, the interpretation of ancient texts, literary studies, or the Bible, religious studies in ancient literature, presupposes this idea of ​​reading, of exegesis, that is, one cannot interpret a work by Shakespeare, or a traditional work of philosophy, in the same way if one reads it in the 15th century, if one reads it in the 19th century or in the 20th century.

In another sense, reading presupposes, on the one hand, what is read, undoubtedly, but also the act of reading itself. I know that the approach you have taken in your studies tries to emphasize the fact that both the reader, in this case the archaeologist, and the society being read, in this case what is interpreted through the clues and signs you find in the excavations, belong to an objective culture. For example, in this case, you as an archaeologist belong to a society, to a specific social and economic stratum that develops within a history and specific modes of cultural and social production. From your perspective, with its Marxist background, this somehow conditions what you interpret or fail to interpret, how you see or fail to see the archaeological material. Conversely, you also presuppose the society you study as an objective world, even though it is no longer present because it is an extinct society, in which, through universals you have about how human structures are organized… and social, about how they function, you presuppose how that extinct society was objectively considered.

The hermeneutic approach I adopt is not nihilistic in the sense that it denies the existence of objective societies that were once materially real, nor does it deny that the interpreter possesses an objective culture of which they are a part, and that this influences their interpretation. Rather, the emphasis is placed more on the fact—let’s call it, not formally, but superficially, in a positive sense—that one is faced with certain texts that are fragments. For example, Jacobson’s idea of ​​metonymy: if you see a fragment of a type of fabric, you infer that it is a festive women’s dress, but you haven’t seen the entire dress; you have only seen a fragment. A half-open door reveals a fragment of a dress, and this leads you to infer what lies on the other side. This is what we call “metonymy” in language theory: one evokes a whole through parts.

From the perspective of “text theory,” the archaeological activity of interpretation is always confronted with this phenomenon; that is, it’s as if we only have remnants, fragments of something whose whole we cannot elucidate. In the example of the dress or a sound we hear outside in the neighborhood, we could try to corroborate what the whole of that fragment is. The fragment in this case is a sound we hear, and we infer that it’s the shepherds from the Apostolic Nunciature, but we could be wrong. Perhaps they aren’t shepherds; perhaps they are children playing. Similarly, in these examples, we also have the sign, the fragment, those sounds that lead us to the idea that they are shepherds, but the difference here is that we can then go out and verify whether or not they are shepherds.

In the case of archaeology, as in philology where one works with texts, the whole that you are reconstructing is absent from presence; that is, there are only remains, fragments of it, only clues, traces, but traces that we cannot corroborate if the whole that we infer or reconstruct around them is extinct societies. How would you calibrate the fact that archaeological activity is an interpretive activity versus the objectivist point of view?

Alessandro Morganti Debra

Well, the fact is that since we have existed as human beings, that is, Homo sapiens, or perhaps before that, Neanderthals, we have always had economic activity in the sense of exchanging goods or to feed ourselves. We formed certain rules of the game. There is, then, a division, which may not yet be very well demonstrated, that is the sexual division of labor. And as you suppose, there is also an idea of ​​being able to put the puzzle together, and that is through the testimonies left by these beings who have evolved and that we are going to reconstruct over time. Now, it is true that the reconstruction itself will not be the same because of the thinking that existed in the 17th, 18th, 20th, or 21st centuries, because the techniques have improved, the technology has advanced.

There is a very important element within archaeology that used to be isolated and is now interdisciplinary. That is, you mention a piece of cloth, that piece of cloth has a design, a texture, a weave, all of that will reflect the cultural participation of the indigenous people at that given time. Why? Because these are designs that are repeated, designs that have to do with the reality of the group. I can give examples: in almost all the cave paintings, you see animals, which are the animals they hunted. Sometimes you can even see the hunting technique, how they surrounded the animal according to the drawing in order to hunt and consume it.

With interdisciplinarity, we are covering a much larger, more complex field of understanding, which helps us to better understand the points that still remain in the dark, such as certain aspects of how writing was created, for example, where does writing come from? We know that they are communication systems, systems that allow access to knowledge. Access to knowledge implies that there is a social caste that dominates the people or the masses, and they are the ones who direct the technological, religious, etc., etc., etc. processes.

But let me give you a specific example of an excavation. We’re at an excavation site, and the first thing we do is divide the space into a grid to determine what we want to look for. In the case of my thesis and my co-author Marielena’s, we were very lucky to find something that was provided to us by the professor who worked at the University of Coro. He was the archaeologist for the area. In short, it was a site where the processes for making the tools were defined. That is to say, the lithics were initially a rare element. Generally, flint is used; there is a red stone found in the Amazon that is also very malleable, but quartz had never been seen before, so that’s something different.

Then I was in the anthropology department and I started studying these things, quartz. Large quantities were found in Monte Cano, where we did the excavations. It was lithic material that was on the surface, so we didn’t really have to excavate much or little. We just had to recognize if it was a point, if it was a burel, but it was within reach. When we arrived and classified the production areas, we started to determine what the processes were to arrive at the final product, which would be a point. We began to investigate if we could also find material that was already in a certain form. So there were excavations because it was organic material like wood to insert the point and be able to use it as a weapon at home, but we didn’t find anything that would allow us to see how the point was used. That was the limitation of archaeology at that time. Nowadays, using computers, using information from other areas where there are certain patterns that are repeated, one can polarize and reconstruct a little of the environment where they developed.

Another very interesting case is in northern Chile, where there was an economic system that combined two modes of production: fishing and agriculture. Fishing took place on the coast, while agriculture was practiced high in the Andes. Determining the lifespan of the people was quite difficult until X-rays were developed, revealing that lung capacity had collapsed. This was because, at a certain altitude, the amount of oxygen at the coast was much higher than at higher altitudes, creating an imbalance. However, it was possible to determine that they were the same people because the vessels they used to store grains were exactly the same as those they used to store the fish they collected.

We already had a line, a pattern; in that environment there were also mummies, so the mummification techniques were determined, dental wear was determined because when you consume grains it is different from the wear on the molars than when you consume fish, and all of this allowed us to decode what type of society it was, and the other important thing was the theoretical part, it was to break a little of that Eurocentric scheme of stages that is the Paleolithic, that is the Neolithic, but rather that they were societies that coexisted as gatherers, as hunters and as fishers, there we did not make an evolutionary division as the Europeans did.

Perhaps I was heavily criticized for this, but I argued that it was through migrations that these people, already carrying a cultural heritage from Europe, crossed the Bali Strait and went to America. Maybe the Polynesian migrations also contributed to the population of the continent. But for me, these people already came with a wealth of knowledge and were adapting to a new environment. Am I an environmentalist? I don’t think so, but culture is showing me that there’s a movement that allows us to determine the reconstruction of groups throughout history. Of course, technology is very important knowledge. For example, to make pottery, you need knowledge to create a vessel or an arrowhead. You need knowledge to take a block of stone, carve it, shape it, and know how to use it. But that’s only part of it. The other part is that within this repertoire of forms, there’s an unlimited number of arrowheads, and that’s what gives you a general and specific idea of ​​how these indigenous people used the environment.

There are studies by a sociology professor, Carmen Michelena, who is known for participating in a project that aimed to demonstrate that the Guarani had populated the northern Caribbean, meaning they migrated from their original Paraguay and moved along the coast and part of the Amazon until reaching Haiti, Cuba, the smaller islands, Grenada, etc., etc., etc., which later formed the basis of the Carib people. In other words, the Caribs are descendants of the Guarani, according to studies. Historical, archaeological, and linguistic sources were used in this research; there was an interdisciplinary approach. Archaeologically, it was possible to determine, through the ceramics—specifically, the firing level, whether it was oxidation-based, and the decoration—but there are other phenomena as well.

And the last point here would be how or for what purpose these pieces were used, or what their function was, the use of these pieces by these groups? And in the Guaraní and the Carebes it was almost identical.

Chapter II

The Place of Inference in Elucidation: Subjectivity and Objectivity in Research

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan and Alessandro Morganti Debra

Abdel Hernández San Juan

Listening to Alessandro, one of the things I would like to point out, and at the same time introduce as a question in all this development that you have made, also returning now to the relationship between this presentation that you have made and the previous questions that I had asked, the parameters that I had established, one of the things that catches my attention in all this is the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, but not understood from the point of view that being perceptive towards the components of subjectivity of the study necessarily negates or is the opposite of the consideration that the study in its claim to objectivity will be less truthful with respect to the object of study, but rather in the sense of paying more attention to the very fact that the interpretive practice, the archaeological practice.

In general, I would say, and it is in this sense that I want to point it out, that within all subjective practices for cultural analysis, archaeology is almost the parameter for understanding and defining the idea of ​​reading, the concept of reading.

I would say there are two sciences that are the sciences of reading. One is exegesis, which is the interpretation of texts found in literary criticism, and which is, of course, present in the practice of art criticism. I would like you to elaborate on this because what you said about it was very interesting. I mean, about that parallel or coincidence between art criticism and archaeology in the sense of exegesis, of reading the text.

The case of interpreting a work of visual art—that is, let’s talk about criticism, interpretation, both of the written text based on writing and the interpretation of iconographic and visual phenomena—we are dealing with a phenomenon of exegesis. Exegesis means reading the text in that philological sense. Archaeology and the text are the two forms of knowledge most closely linked to the concept of reading, from the moment we start with a parameter through which the signs we are working with, the clues, the icons that you as an archaeologist find, collect, discover, whether visible or not—like the spearhead, the way it is crafted, or the mode of production of pottery—all these small details, when we are not immediately reconstructing them in relation to the object of study that we want to achieve in its entirety and with objectivity, but rather dealing directly with these elements in their tactile and visual immediacy, are clues, traces, signs. The way the spear is crafted is itself a sign; the way it is crafted is an indication.

Peirce said, a sign is anything that stands in place of something else for someone. A sign can be a visual thing, it can be a hand gesture, if you are telling someone to come, or if you are saying goodbye, it can be a metal rooster. This last one is an example from Peirce: a farmer has a metal rooster on the eaves of his roof. He looks at it in the morning and at night, and according to the position of the metal rooster, that tells him the direction of the wind. The metal rooster is the sign because it stands in place of something else, the wind, for someone. There has to be someone, otherwise it doesn’t become a sign.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

And the process of daily observation, day after day, will also allow you to form a direction and give an opinion about the phenomenon.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

What I want to point out is that those elements you’ve worked with as an archaeologist are clues, they are signs. If you see smoke, it’s a clue that there was a fire, even if the fire is no longer there. Some signs are indexical, others are iconic. In indexical signs, there’s nothing in the sign that’s the same as what the sign indicates. In smoke, there’s nothing like fire, but it’s a clue that there was a fire, and so it’s an indexical sign. But a sign, like in that example by Eco, a child jumping out of bed making a noise like a helicopter, falling to the floor—if he imitates the helicopter in his arm movements, he’s imitating features of the object—there are iconic signs in which the sign contains features of the signified element.

If I take a photograph of a chair and show it to a third party, it is not the chair itself, it is its sign, and yet it is similar to it, it contains mimetic representational elements, although it is a different material on acetate or paper, unlike the wooden chair, it no longer occupies the same space, and it is in its place. We can talk about the chair through the photograph without the chair being present, understanding each other; therefore, it is its sign.

A sign is anything that stands in place of something else for someone.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

That person also has the ability to interpret; it is the diversity of ideas.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

In this case, in archaeological work, you are faced with a sign that may or may not be mimetic with respect to what it denotes. The object of the ceramic sign is not in the ceramic sign, or the spearhead as a sign. The object that you reconstruct or evoke based on that sign when you say, “way of life” hunting animals or fish, you induce from the spearhead sign or the ceramic sign. What you reconstruct on your own would then be the object of that sign, but we do not see people hunting or fishing in the sign “worked shape of the spear,” or “ceramic.” The object is not in the sign through the way it is worked; we can only evoke it.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

And to infer

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

To infer, exactly, agreed, that’s another thing that seems important to me, the concept of “inference,” because nowadays, including you, who have expressed a certain suspicion towards semiotics, due to a certain reductionism in semiotics, with which I agree, there has been a propensity for what is called the critique of signocentrism. Since semiotics turned everything into a sign, there has been, in hermeneutics and contemporary thought, a questioning of viewing the sign in such a rigid way. And indeed, it is true that there is something rigid in the idea that semiotics has given of the sign, but at the same time that we can deny the sign or criticize signocentrism, we also arrive at the idea that we cannot deny the existence of signs either, since, although we don’t say that it is necessarily a sign in itself, we know that the very activity of inferring works with signs. If we are inferring something, it is because something in place of something else has allowed us to draw an inference. From the moment there is inference, in some way there is a sign; that’s like the problem. From the reading, can we say that those ceramics you read are texts? Are those spears you read texts? They are not texts if we take a textbook as a parameter, the literal idea of ​​text, but if we take as a parameter the idea that every form of reading presupposes reading something and therefore what is read is text for that reading, there is text even if it is another form of text, which is what I find valuable about this interpretive component and in that subjective sense, but not seen in the sense of denying the objectivity of what is going to be reconstructed, but in the sense of following the thread of that form of textual reading that leads to the composition of an idea of ​​culture or society, that is, not to deny that what is going to be constructed is more or less objective or less truthful, but to be aware that there is a mode of language through which that idea of ​​reading will be reached.

It would be somewhat like shattering the illusion of attributing reality to language itself, much like the critique you arrived at regarding evolutionism. I would add and point to the critique of attributing what is a text to the reality it represents. That is to say, now we are going to talk about the situation in Venezuela. We can take the path of our lifestyle, or the lifestyle of the urbanization or the neighborhood, and for these we will understand each other through language. Or, regarding the circumstances we are experiencing, we can overlook the fact that we are understanding each other through language and immediately fall into the illusion that language transports us to the reality we are talking about. And language becomes a mere instrument; we ignore that it is language and go directly to objective reality. In this case, we read the tip of the spear to immediately represent the mode of society, without realizing the interest it has and how valuable it can be in the nuances of the idea of ​​society we are going to arrive at, which we can arrive at by realizing that we are working with clues. texts, signs, because the whole proposal you made about these cultures is an interpretation of culture, not to say that it is a distortion of reality or to diminish its objective value, as you said, the objective is subjective and the subjective is objective.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Now I have a question for you. For example, speaking of linguistics, Canada is Francophone, but it has remained stuck in the 18th century in vocabulary, meaning, and signifier. You go to France and see that French is still spoken, but the symbols used in Canada through language are different. So how do we explain this temporary stagnation compared to all the other former Francophone colonies?

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

Interesting point

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

We’re talking about subjectivity and objectivity, but here we have a case within culture itself. How would you explain it?

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

Well, in the case of French, since I don’t speak French, it takes me a little effort.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

At a theoretical, not empirical, linguistic level

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

Perhaps here we should consider the problem of the relationship between the invariability of structure and the variability of senses and meanings. That is, a language has a structure—French, for example—that fluctuates over time and takes a long time to change. We can abstract this structure in its grammar, in its lexeme, in its morphemic and phonetic composition, as well as in its grammaticality and syntax. In the semantic field, which focuses not on the formal aspect but on the sense and meaning of that language, it becomes more difficult and complex to define and grasp. This has been the subject of discussion in theoretical linguistics: whether or not we should also speak of a structural semantics, just as we speak of the structurality of grammar and syntax. Should we? Well, yes and no.

That grammar and syntax have structure is beyond discussion; now, that semantics has structure is more complex to discuss because, from one point of view, it is true that in dictionaries words already have a meaning. If we look at it from that perspective, and from the point of view of language acquisition, when a child is learning a language, or someone else is learning another language, we presuppose that the language already has meaning; that is, it already possesses a certain set of meanings with a certain structure. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be possible to transmit it. We are transmitting meanings and senses to the child when they learn the language. Similarly, the person who wants to learn it must acquire a vocabulary where words already have a stable meaning. Therefore, if we can transmit the language, then there is also structure in semantics, as Greimas said. But it’s a very complex issue because the semantic field, while being the field of acquisition, is also the field of language use, where it reinvents itself through senses and meanings. For this reason, structural semantics has been subject to criticism. A language is much more about the invention of new senses and meanings than those it already possessed, because in the end, the child has to express what they think and feel. Therefore, not everything is related to how they acquired it; they won’t simply repeat. exactly what they have taught him

Alessandro Morganti Debra.

He talks to himself and answers himself; he creates his own responses and weaves them together according to the structure he is learning to build.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

It could be applied to the area you were discussing earlier, even to the example of French; perhaps it could also be applied there. You are the one who could answer that because you know French, it is your native language, you could try to perceive it in a more abstract, logical context.

Jacques Derrida, an Algerian/French philosopher who has influenced me, in his essay “Genesis and Structure: From Phenomenology,” argues that there is no genesis without structure, but at the same time challenges the idea of ​​structure through the genesis that this structure presupposes. In another essay of his, also on Husserl, he says that before saying something there is a desire to say, the eidetic dimension; at that moment there is a “wanting to say.” Now, the moment you begin to say it, you put it into a structure because you begin to say it within a language or grammar. That grammar has guidelines, constraints, straits, things that create resistance; it sets limits for you—they are principles of composition and writing. On one hand, you have a “wanting to say,” what some call what I have in mind, the idea. That “wanting to say” still has no form; it doesn’t have one if you haven’t said it yet. You have to put it into a structure.

The naive idea here has been to think that I have something I “want to say,” as if what I want to say already had a form. It doesn’t yet have a form; what has a form is the structure of the language in which you are going to say it. But even that structure is not something in itself without imprinting a direction on it when you begin to write and express yourself. You are putting that “wanting to say” into that structure, but at the same time, without a sense of that initial, eidetic wanting to say, the very structure of the language would be nothing; it would be dead. The moment you imbue that structure with that “wanting to say,” then that structure, which is nothing, itself acquires a form, it acquires a meaning, and that meaning it didn’t have as a structure; it has to be imprinted upon it. And therefore, it is new with respect to those patterns or rules. For that reason, not everything in language is mere vocabulary. A simple collection of words that already have a meaning is only an inventory of names; you can’t express anything with it.

Therefore, although the existence of prior meanings leads us to think that there can be a semantic structure as much as there is a grammatical and syntactic structure, at the same time semantics is the plane of meaning and therefore refers to new meanings that we create, to a genesis; you also give that structure a form that it did not have, that form is imbued with the desire to say, so we see how without genesis, without the production of senses and meanings, there is nothing; here we are talking about a language, French.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Even the expressions are different, for example, “it’s raining” they say “it’s wet” or “it’s getting wet,” which is an old French expression; in French, you say “it’s raining.”

Abdel Hernández San Juan

What you’re explaining is also present in the sociolinguistic phenomenon in Venezuela, the dialects and idiolects. I would like to discuss this further at our next meeting…

 Alessandro Morganti Debra:

We can take the path of textual reading that leads to the composition of an idea of ​​reading for society, to constructing that idea of ​​reading

Chapter III

Hermeneutics, Exegesis and Textual Interpretation of Culture: Archaeology and Art Criticism

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan and Alessandro Morganti Debra

Abdel Hernández San Juan

Returning to the topics we are developing, we began with a general introduction to the project we are developing, and then we have developed issues of hermeneutics, interpretation, and exegesis in the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in cultural analysis, taking as a starting point, so far, the empirical experiences that Alessandro has had in the field of archaeology.

Alessandro gave us a very splendid, clear, and complete introduction to the archaeological fieldwork he conducted, and we have been correlating theoretical problems with empirical problems based on his experience. Now, I have some questions I would like to introduce, or rather, some topics to consider for this continuity. At one point during our conversation last week, we weren’t recording at the time, and Alessandro made a comment that interested me; it caught my attention because he related the interpretive and hermeneutical problems of textual exegesis. Let’s remember that I gave the example that it’s difficult to say that objects or things found in the field of archaeology can be understood as text if we take the literal textbook as a parameter, but if we start from the principle that whenever there is reading, what is read is, for that reading, a form of text, we could then expand the concept of text and say that wherever there is legibility and interpretability, we have textual forms, even if they are not referable to the textbook.

I was saying that archaeology and literary criticism are the two forms or sciences within the humanities that have come closest to the paradigm of reading the text as an exercise, and Alessandro applied this to the exercise of art criticism. In particular, he referred to some essays of mine that he had seen I was developing, where I showed him the visual material before the written material existed. He told me that the process is similar, in the sense that in this case, in the exercise of criticism, I have to infer from a set of images that are actually metonymies, fragments of a whole that has to be interpretively reconstructed. In this case, it wouldn’t be the objectivity of the work itself, because the feasible work is there visually. That is to say, it’s not like in archaeology, where the culture to be reconstructed is not in our presence; it’s a vanished, extinct culture of which we only have fragments, remains. In the case of a visual work of art, we see the totality of that work before us; there isn’t something physically speaking to reconstruct. is absent.

In that sense it is different, but we do see it from the perspective of meaning if we are facing the same interpretive dilemma, between a textual phenomenon of a visual nature, the signs, traces, clues and symbols in archaeology, which have to be interpreted and a process of signification that cannot be said to be literal in what we are seeing in the case of our exegesis, interpretation, reading of the visual work of art, that is, when we are reading a visual work, we also work with clues with traces, with signs, with elements that must be interpreted, and we cannot say that literally their meanings are there in what we are seeing in a palpable way.

In that sense there is a point of contact in terms of reconstructivity

I would like, then, regarding this comment that Alessandro made to me, to introduce some elements, in particular I am interested in, and I hope that we can connect all this with the theme of our project, the theme of self and culture, first because Alessandro is an archaeologist and almost all his implicit concepts of culture come from archaeology, from his archaeological conception of culture, when he and I have talked about contemporary issues of culture, the idea of ​​culture that is at the base in the way he applies cultural phenomena to the analysis of the rest of society has a very strong archaeological component at its core, but in principle I am interested in asking a question.

In other words, let me explain. On the one hand, it is true that archaeological reading and interpretation work with current material that is a ruin, or a remnant, or a residue of a culture that is beyond our reach. In this sense, if we see it from a representationalist point of view, it is like a way of constructing, for example, in the landscape. A painter who paints a landscape represents a landscape, but we have there in a tangible way the real landscape that served as the subject before our eyes. That is, we can verify if that representation is faithful or not, if it approximates reality or not.

In the case of archaeology, the source does not come from the senses, from touch or visibility, but from the imagination; it is something that will be reconstructed but that has no correlate in the present time of the existence of that physical fact. In this sense, I consider that archaeology has an important component of imagination, but what strikes me is that, paradoxically, the archaeological text is not only discerned between the imagination and the represented world that this interpretation imagines—in this case, the prehistoric societies reconstructed by these interpretations—but that this discourse has a contemporaneity in the viewer or reader of contemporary culture who will consume an image of the past through this archaeology, which can be made known through museology, museography, or a written text as in your thesis, or audiovisual material, but which is a contemporary material that will be inserted within a current community.

That is to say, it is not only discernment between the archaeological interpretation and the social reality that is imagined, but also how that material is inserted into a community that, from the moment it sees that archaeological product, imagines a way of seeing its own culture and its own past in a different way.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

It’s like a mirror effect

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

I’d like to give the example of an anthropologist of Guatemalan origin, but born in the United States, who does fieldwork in Yucatán. I think I mentioned him to you before, Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda. He did a study on the Equinox of the pyramids of Yucatán, an event that occurs once a year when the light and shadow of the serpent are projected onto the pyramid. This event generates a lot of tourism around it; it’s like a mystical event. Why does this serpent happen to be projected? Obviously, the archaeology museum, of which these pyramids are an archaeological park, explores this as a tourism opportunity from a museographic and programming perspective. Events are organized around the equinox, and people come from all over the world, from the United States, and even people with a mystical bent who wear Mayan attire. At the same time, the equinox event, due to the tourism it attracts, creates a market opportunity for the Mayan communities living in the area. Chichen Itza, the town surrounding those pyramids, because although those pyramids represent vanished civilizations, the communities descended from those ancient civilizations still live there and depend on it for their livelihood. The resulting tourism, which we could call archaeological tourism, reflects on the contemporary lives of these communities, providing them with opportunities to sell their crafts and traditions expressed in objects and artifacts, thus enabling them to build a more prosperous life. In this case, we see archaeology participating in more complex ways in the relationship between the past, present, and future. It’s not just a dilemma of what images of the prehistoric world we can present, but also how the text we are producing about that world is updated in the contemporary context of the interaction of various textual forms. In this case, an archaeological park is part of a museum, but also a tourist event, and it reflects how a community descended from that which is being… Reconstructing, it participates in how that intertwines with the ways in which that community is reproducing itself today.

And finally, I would also like to draw a point of connection, because I see a very interesting point of connection between archaeology and restoration. The interesting thing about restoration, well, although archaeological monuments are also restored, because all these pyramids have to be restored, all these images of civilizations have to be restored through monuments, their remains, what is left of them.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

And decipher them

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

Yes, but what interests me about restoration is that restoration has a broader scope because archaeology is largely limited to certain archaic or ancient, primitive societies, etc.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Not necessarily

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

Not necessarily, okay.

But in the case of restoration, the restorer has to be working at a similar intersection between a contemporary consumerism that will consume the image that the restoration will give of what was a past, a memory—let’s say, for example, a colonial architectural heritage, let’s say of cobblestones, from the colonial era—but which is embedded within the current contemporary reality of a transactional market where tourists go there and take pictures of themselves as if they were there.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Laughter

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

And where they are going to give an idea of ​​memory, the point here is how the restorer has to restore something according to an idea of ​​what it was but at the same time has to update it to a consumption or a reality that will consume a culture through an image of memory, I am trying to complicate or grasp the complexity of the archaeological text or of our sense of exegesis, reading and interpretation in culture by correlating these two phenomena of exegesis, the archaeological reading, on the one hand, and the reading of a contemporary visual art on the other.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

It’s quite complex.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

To complicate the idea of ​​reading, because it is not only one-on-one reading, an archaeological text and the society it represents, but how this is linked to a greater complexity

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

It’s quite complex, well to begin with all science tries to explain a phenomenon, whether it’s a phenomenon that has gone through a long journey through science where science has become more sophisticated, etc. etc., like quantum physics to explain the origin of the black hole. Here I draw a kind of parallel with something you can’t explain, like black holes, which can’t be explained, but are there, as in this case, the pyramids of Chichen Itza. They are there, but the real question is, what function did those pyramids have? Were they religious? Were they actually citadels where there was a certain coexistence, a daily, commercial exchange of culture, a society and its cultural classes, etc.? Of course, there’s a whole dictionary of this that’s practically solved, and you can already read some of the passages of history. One of the characteristics of these ceremonial centers is that they are purely religious in the sense that, let’s take it step by step. The religious aspect is the aspect of domination; the priests are the ones who have the power and the knowledge, and they are the ones who organize societies, whether through a modern, liberal structure or through slavery. Throughout history, we go to the general and find the exploited and the exploiters. The images that can be reflected… The sculptures are a language, definitely a language that allows us to understand those everyday, religious processes, what I call a dictionary, the pictographic part, for example, the legible sculptures.

For example, in the case of the snake, the snake is a deity, it comes from a magical-religious world, it is an element of protection, but it is very linked to religious symbolism. Similarly, if we move from Mesoamerica to Egypt, the image of the dog was first a domestic animal that man could mold, train, and even today it is trained for vigilance; if there is danger, the dog gives a warning. But the dog also has a religious significance that can also be linked to the underworld. For example, in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, it is connected with the son of a pharaoh, but they draw the face of a dog with a human body. Then there are other aspects of what I was telling you, the mirror effect.

History presents events, and these events necessarily have to be deciphered because otherwise, what would be the point, what would be the archaeological justification? By justifying them, we enter the realm of symbolism in interpretation; it is the issue of the researcher’s objectivity and subjectivity.

And here comes the extremely complex problem of how the researcher approaches the issue, under what theoretical/philosophical frameworks they assume for interpretation. Then, as we’ve said in previous videos, technology plays a very prominent and important role because as it develops, we have more access to information. This doesn’t mean that technology is giving us the pure truth, but it will bring us a little closer through historical comparisons with other peoples, other environments, and other living conditions that are not the specific ones under study—very similar characteristics that we can then compare and reach a conclusion. Will the conclusion be general for everyone? I imagine so, and if not, then we have to continue investigating and discarding. This philosophical line no longer leads anywhere; we can use certain concepts, but there are others that are no longer useful and we have to discard them. And through empirical methods, we describe the object itself and begin to compare, throughout history, what the pictographs and icons are like.

In the Amazon, for example, we have petroglyphs. These are carved designs; they have a code that we can’t see. We then ask ourselves, why are these carved images there? Some say it’s to determine territory, others say they were deities, others refer to the origins of life. So, the interpretive aspect becomes diluted and loses its essence. That’s why the archaeologist must also compare, not just interpret. In your case, with the images of artists, when I speak of subjectivity and objectivity, it’s the relationship between what you are interpreting and what you are seeing, while at the same time the artist is internally expressing it through the painting.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

I understand your explanation; what you’re proposing is that it’s also inaccessible in that case, is that what you mean? So, from the point of view of the motivational sources, or the reasons for being that generated that symbol in the case of a visual artist whose work we are interpreting, we also don’t have access to that source? Is that what you’re saying? And that for that reason we shouldn’t just interpret, because interpretation could lose the essence, but also compare?

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

We have proximity but not full access

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

We cannot access that source because we cannot enter the artist’s self, we cannot immerse ourselves in their inner world.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Exactly

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

I don’t think even he can.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Exactly, and what’s most interesting is how an artist changes techniques, changes themes, how they evolve—if you can call it evolution—it’s the creative process, and often their first stage has nothing to do with the later one, and that signifies a historical moment in their life. We would then have to go back and delve deeper, go back, for example, to Jung and enter into the collective unconscious, which could provide a certain connection.

There is an empirical issue that undoubtedly unites or connects the critical researcher and the artist, which is the physical work.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

It can be interpreted, but that doesn’t guarantee that the interpretation will coincide with the author’s motivations, with the underlying reasons; there is always an indeterminacy, a volatility of meaning, meaning cannot be fixed at a definitive point, and the question here would be whether something similar doesn’t also happen in archaeology?

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

If it happens

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

Not to deny that representations are objective, but to say that meaning cannot be fixed, ossified, or made ontological, as when one says it has this meaning and not that one. To say that it is a field of approximation, we can say that there is a hard core, just as in concepts. Concepts have a certain hard core; the concept of evocation, for example, is not the same as the concept of memory. Each has a distinct hard core that makes them what they are, but neither can we say the meaning of evocation is this one and not that one. We can move around that hard core, especially, as you say, comparatively, realizing that each concept has a hard core that makes it different from another. But neither can we say what it means is this and not that one. We can also establish networks of relationships; for example, the concepts of evocation and memory, which are so different, could be connected. We would have to ask ourselves to what extent every form of recollection is not, in a certain way, a mode of evocation, and vice versa, to what extent every evocation does not presuppose… Somehow, memory, going back to this parallel you drew between the interpretation of art and archaeology, although in the case of archaeology we assume we must get a little closer, I would say that it cannot be completely fixed either. In the field of art, we already saw that it cannot be fixed, but we can work with that interpretive field in a measurable, relevant way, trying to be as appropriate as possible, because we have to relate several bodies of knowledge: on the one hand, what we assume the artist possesses through the work, which we cannot fully corroborate; on the other hand, our own knowledge as critics; and on the other hand, the meanings that these forms and symbols have in a culture—what you were talking about with Jung and the collective unconscious—how that connects with a collective imaginary or with a meaning that symbols have in a community, and from there, gradually approximating. I think the relationship is apt, because in a certain way, archaeology deals with something similar.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

It’s compatible, there’s no incompatibility as long as you know how to use it. I can give you another case, for example, I participated in some excavations at Quibok. One of the characteristics that began to be described was that those buried there were very short, not reaching 1.60 meters. Around that, a whole speculation arose that they were descendants of Pygmies, an African ethnic group. I won’t go into all the stuff about them being a migration, etc. A Dominican was brought in who did tests on the bones, and the conclusion he reached was that it was a disease that prevented these people from growing. Then others said no, that it was in their genetic code that they reached this height, just like the Vikings were very tall. In Africa, there’s an ethnic group that reached two meters; well, here it was the opposite.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

But here the data is very physical; sometimes the data is not physical and the interpretive problems are more complex, but it is interesting. Levi Strauss said that one must resort to comparison, as you say.

Alessandro Morganti Debra;

It is the tool to isolate a phenomenon, a fact or an act; you need something that allows you to say A, C as it is with respect to something that is not; there is a pattern, and a continuity that is being expressed in the comparison.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

What I find interesting about all this, recalling the cultural analyses you’ve done on contemporary issues where you’ve spoken to me a lot about the analysis and understanding of culture in the analysis of contemporary society, is that we are both very culturalist, that what’s behind everything are cultural phenomena, perhaps we can move towards the concept of culture

Alessandro Morganti Debra;

Yes, because I am convinced that all of this is a preamble to understanding what culture is, how culture works, what culture is for, and ultimately why culture plays such an important role in all of social science and in the very essence of humanity, called society, called intertwined ethnic groups

Chapter IV

The Origins of Language: Orality, Writing, and Cognition in the Relationships Between Culture and Origins

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan and Alessandro Morganti Debra

Abdel Hernández San Juan

In the last session, a specific problem that caught my attention and with which I would like to start again is the moment when we arrive at the concept of culture, not to enter into all the complex and heterogeneous digressions that have divided the different schools of anthropology and archaeology, of cultural theory around diverse and sometimes divergent concepts of culture, not so much to go in that ambivalent direction but specifically to connect it to the idea of ​​origin.

Recently, I’ve become increasingly interested in the phenomenological relationship between culture and origin, not from the genetic perspective of the chemical, physiological, or informational code that might underlie the idea of ​​genetics, nor from the perspective of origin in a necessarily evolutionary sense, although I’m open to discussing that viewpoint since, inevitably, due to its own conceptual development, it’s more closely related to evolutionism. But I’m interested in the idea of ​​origin here and now; that is, how we can think about origin in a structural and synchronic way. It’s a complex topic, I know. The reference that has interested me is some of Jacques Derrida’s work in his book “Margins of Philosophy” on the origin of languages. He has an essay about the Geneva linguistic circle surrounding Rousseau and Condillac, who specialized in this question of the origin of languages. Of course, their perspective was evolutionary and historicist, but what Derrida does is contract… These questions from the Geneva linguistic circle regarding the possibility of contemporary thought on this dilemma: the question is this: how is something like language possible against the backdrop of nature? How could nature have turned around, made that fold, taken that leap? Could it have revolved around itself in such a way that something like language and languages ​​could emerge? How was language possible from the point of view of nature, and how can we answer the question of the Kantian antinomy between culture and language?

On the one hand, we cannot imagine how something like a culture could have taken shape, could have emerged, and it is in this sense that I speak of origin, how something like a culture could have had its source, could have arisen, emerged, a phenomenon that is a culture could have occurred without there having been a language before? And at the same time, the antinomic aspect is that the question can be asked in reverse, the opposite can be argued.

The question then becomes the reverse: How could language have arisen without a prior culture? This is a relationship between questions that harks back to Kantian antinomies as Hegel saw them: which comes first, the part or the whole? From one perspective, it seems that the parts come first because no whole can exist without its parts. But it can also be seen the other way around, as in the chicken and egg analogy: we cannot conceive of the parts without them already being parts of some whole.

Alessandro Morganti Debra

For example, I’m going back here, or rather, the expression among chimpanzees comes to mind. They have a range of sounds that I imagine have a whole symbolic interpretation, where one sound means danger, another means affection, but they are sounds and they are very primitive. Now, how is that language culturally assembled or structured, and how are different modalities created, such as the Spanish language or French, which are no longer sounds but symbols that are articulated? This doesn’t mean that the sounds of primates are not articulated, but they are determined by very specific situations, which in our case can also be specific, as in your example of Kant. That is to say, they can go in reverse, or contrary, but there is always a dynamic. I don’t know if I’m explaining myself well, in logic?

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

I believe that what you are saying presupposes the parameter that there was nonverbal language and onomatopoeia, body language, before what we could properly understand as languages?

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Exactly, body language

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

Body language is considered to precede spoken language in the same way that oral speech is thought to precede writing. In Cognitive Anthropology, the Canadian school for example, with anthropologists like Havelog, the idea has been reached that cultures are more or less evolved, more or less differentiated, depending on whether or not they have writing. Supposedly, according to this parameter, cultures based on oral speech are less developed, less differentiated, than cultures based on writing systems because writing is assumed to be a more complex symbolic system than speech, since the latter is more closely linked to body language and thus connects with a primordial sense of gesture as an expressive imprint, which also includes sounds like onomatopoeia. We suppose that the first forms of the sign emerged from body language.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Like pictographs in caves

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

Exactly, they arose from early stages of gestural expression, and that is why you turn to primates to investigate or answer these questions about language and nature, language and culture. As you say, you look in primates for elements of communication that may or may not be present, and to what extent, be understood as forms of a very primitive culture. But at the same time, there are other problems that complicate the question of these relationships between language, culture, and origins beyond evolutionism.

It is true that, viewed from the perspective of the small unit that forms the written sign in terms of encoding, it seems more complex; arriving at it seems much more complex. If we imagine a child, we see that they learn to speak before they learn to write. The writing process is more complex if we view it from the cognitive perspective of the smallest unit that forms language, which in this case would be words, the small signs that make up the vocabulary of a language. But if we view it from the perspective of what Derrida called “deferred presence,” the matter becomes more complex. Derrida argues that in speech we always have a tangible other who is the recipient of our expression. Well, obviously today we have these technologies that allow us to speak orally at a distance, but there is always an interlocutor, whether physically present face to face or telecommunicating. Relationships always presuppose the immediacy of the other to whom that language is directed, who immediately responds, the other counter-utters. Therefore, the formation of articulated oral discourse presupposes, in a more The idea of ​​intersubjectivity, the idea of ​​face-to-face relationships, and the idea of ​​dialogue are contingent upon this. Sentence formation doesn’t arise from nothingness, as something that the voice has to imagine for the first time without an other helping to shape that language. In the case of the intersubjectivity that governs speech, you’re not creating something from scratch, but rather you have another person stimulating you to speak and provoking desires to speak. Therefore, language formation presupposes what the other is saying to you. You are telling me something and trying to make it explicit, and at the same time, I am trying to elucidate what you are saying. This relationship of explication/elucidation then becomes all-encompassing from a generative point of view, serving as the source for the very discursive construction to emerge. We call this a hermeneutic, interpretive relationship. That is to say, language is supposedly formed from small units that we structurally isolate in the Grammatical and syntactic language, like signs, words—the word “table” means “table”—and it’s true that we have to teach a child these things: “table,” “mom,” “dad.” It’s the relationship of naming with the object. But at the same time, the mere relationship between that small unit of meaning and what it signifies isn’t enough. There’s also a discursive formation that transcends the fact that we’re working with particles that have a concrete meaning, and goes further to an intersubjective whole that regulates a relationship of understanding in which there is elucidation and explication, something that begins to participate in the genesis of what is being said. This leads some cognitive anthropologists to think that speech isn’t necessarily simpler or less differentiated than writing. Writing, from the point of view of the other, is deferred, says Derrida; that is, in it the other is absent, uttered, as if postponed, deferred, let’s say. It’s presupposed, anticipated, of course, but imagined, not there. It’s an imagination. In it, you address yourself to A virtual other is as if the moment of intersubjectivity were postponed, and that is also somewhat counterproductive—not anachronistic, but complex—with respect to the very nature of the raison d’être of language. It is true that technologically it introduces a revolutionary element, because what is said can be transferred in writing; first, it can be memorized. Speech is ephemeral, it is lost—what Husserl called the noetic experience, the here and now that vanishes. Writing thus memorizes what is said, fixes it, and inscribes it. That makes it a revolution, technologically speaking, in culture. And at the same time, it is transferable, portable, and it also occupies a medium, different from that of a stone in the beginning with cuneiform or parchment in the earliest forms. Today, it is more so with the book, the printing press, and written reproduction. But at the same time, it is more complex, perhaps from the point of view of memory, as well as from the point of view of institutionalization, which is more differentiated, and also from the point of view of the small units that form it. Its symbolic coding is more demanding, for example, for learning in the acquisition of a child or for learning a new language, but at the same time it can also be understood as more rudimentary, as more atavistic due to a certain connection that it may maintain, and this had to be explored further, since it is as if separated from linguistic expression and this has consequences in culture. Certainly, it is difficult to think that writing could have existed before speech; I agree with this. We have enough elements to think that in reality its genesis comes from gesture, as in the example of chimpanzees, from onomatopoeic expression.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

No, and furthermore, hunter-gatherer societies didn’t have a complete written language structure. It developed later among groups that had developed more advanced technology, advanced agricultural techniques, and a more advanced magical-religious structure. Even mathematics was incorporated into that structure as part of a power system within the globalizing society we are studying. But a question comes to mind. For example, in Asian languages, I understand that the Chinese don’t have a system that reflects the past, present, and future as we do. Instead, they help you understand a situation in the past through the modeling of sounds and the context in which it unfolds. This is what the author wants to illustrate when he uses hexagrams.

Then, in languages ​​such as Slavic, Anglo-Saxon, or Germanic, they also have a differentiation where the symbolism can change with the joining of two words; this is much more complex.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

Although Asians have language in the oral sense, what is seen in them is that the written form, from the point of view of the grapheme, that is, the graphic image, maintains a much more primal connection with the gestural origin of language. In other words, Asian writing is not so conventional; obviously, there has to be convention as well, because a stroke, discontinuous or continuous lines, or a stroke placed vertically or horizontally could not be understood if there were no social convention that says that it means such and such. There has to be convention there as well.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Mesoamerica is also a good example, but in this case more pictographic, but it can be understood as a hexagram, the serpent, for example, returning upon itself.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

That’s a problem not necessarily viewed on a timeline, but rather here and now. This idea you’re raising of a kind of connection between the idea of ​​a pictogram and the idea of ​​writing relativizes things a bit from the point of view of thinking about the relationship between culture and origin. I’m referring here to the question of whether the iconic image or the written language comes first. But what you’re suggesting is that, in some way, written language is a form of pictographic language, which is seen in a table where that pictographic genesis of writing becomes more visible in Mesoamerican peoples, in certain languages, from the semiological point of view of the gestural aspects of the writing in that language. In the case of our alphabetic language, that contact between the physical form of the alphabetic sign and the visual image is less visible because the element is a total convention: a Z, a P, or an A. There’s nothing in nature, no expression of the body, no perceptible mimetic trait in the natural world that gives us any meaning. It has to have the shape of an A, which is, for example, an inverted triangle. In the case of oriental languages, the way words are formed maintains a more mimetic relationship with the world of extraverbal expression. We should consider to what extent alphabetic writing is nothing more than a form of pictography.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

That’s the point, it’s whether it’s a form of the pictographic

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

When we see a palimpsest of writings, ancient parchments or scripts, we clearly see that it is pictographic. This is a complex point because in the society we live in, the more technologically advanced and developed it becomes, the more visual it becomes. Today, I feel, seeing it from a logical perspective—that is, from the logographic point of view that governs writing, in its cognitive principles as scriptivity—that within the multimedia system in which we live today, writing seems atavistic, old-fashioned. It is linear; on the one hand, it presupposes the idea of ​​an archive or memory as accumulation. It is a kind of artifact, also in the sense of text. But in the technological world we live in, everything tends, at a logographic and cognitive level, toward the opposite: toward synchronicity, de-diachronization, de-memorization. Other forms of memory emerge, but memory becomes something interchangeable with something else; it becomes exponential. That idea of ​​memory to which writing referred us is becoming something The idea of ​​how we communicate through writing, according to its earliest technology, is also becoming atavistic, at least until the emergence of mass media. We were still governed logographically within an idea of ​​writing or scripturality, but with the phenomenon of mass media and especially with today’s new technologies that tend to multimediaize everything in communication, the visual iconography, which was supposedly earlier and more primordial or original than writing, which was supposed to be at the pictographic base of the emergence of writing, gains greater importance in its connection with the modern. This greatly complicates comprehension, the fact that the more the world develops, the more visual it becomes.

Alessandro Morganti:

Well, it becomes more mathematical, because we are now entering the era of algorithms, and these are a language that generates complex forms.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

You are referring to the knowledge behind those technologies, cybernetic, etc.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

There will come a time when, if we truly achieve global cultural integration—and I say cultural as a form of extension of different cultures and the creation of a homogeneous culture—this type of language, like algorithms, will greatly facilitate this process, and in fact, they already are.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

But the logarithmic world that lies behind the condition of possibility of new technologies is not properly that by which the layman communicates, nor the professional man, when you have your mobile phone and are communicating or using contemporary platforms and media you are working with what I explained earlier multimedia symbols in which the place of writing diminishes and the visual reigns.

Alessandro Monganti Debra:

We are interacting there

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

But at that point, writing no longer plays the role it once did.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

That’s exactly what I’m saying

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

Either we think there is an intimate connection between modernization and ritual—that is, that as humanity modernizes, it becomes more de-diachronic, and this simultaneous ritualization of the world—that the more modern the technology and the more cultural traditions are mediated, the less linear culture becomes, and at the same time, paradoxically, we return to ritual functions, which is why the visual image returns, and why minimalism returns. There is a relationship between simplification and ritual, or the matter, as a possible field of research and reflexivity, goes in that direction, or, on the contrary, it goes in the opposite direction… but I would say that the first would be the most sustainable, because the idea that writing, which now seems very ancient and atavistic, strange to ourselves, as Kristeva would say, when we consider, according to evolutionary theories, that the more scriptural a civilization is, the more differentiated and developed it is—this is the paradox I am trying to situate, between linear evolutionism versus technological development. Perhaps thinking that writing came before the image seems improbable to me because we have the child and learning. Language provides us with important information about how a language is acquired, but it remains challenging for interpretation and understanding that we might reach a point where our idea of ​​development connects us to a ritual concept of culture that simultaneously makes us perceive, in the idea we had of cognitively connecting writing and cultural differentiation, writing as an atavistic moment in our cultural forms. It is as if societies went through a process of differentiation while they were written, which undoubtedly differentiated, at a certain point or link, societies that were written from those that were oral. The latter lived mostly from oral memory and had more mythologies, more myths, more legends. Those that were more written were able to institutionalize more, to establish social roles more, but at the same time, that written culture, iterated on the other, on the absence of the other, on the always postponed intersubjective relationship that writing presupposes as a technology that today seems old to us for some reason that I find interesting to elucidate from the point of view of… From the perspective of cognitive anthropology, it shares a certain intimacy with the iteration that characterizes these new media.

Now, this is another point I want to make: paradoxically, while all these technological media become more visual and, in that sense, make us see writing as something old-fashioned, at the same time they maintain an intimate relationship with it. Because one of the things that characterizes these new technologies is to emphasize the deferred nature of presence. We have the other person live or in real time at a distance, but at the same time there is a deferred presence. These technologies tend to diminish presence; it is less and less necessary to be physically present. Obviously, if I am talking to another person who is in another country, we are live in real time, but at the same time there is a decrease in presence that is deferred, as happened during the COVID pandemic when schools were online, and sociocultural life increasingly requires less and less physical presence.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Totally agree

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

The sociocultural life that previously required going to activities spaced in the city, attending inaugurations, participating in book launches, being seen at events, going to museums, having a journalist write and say this or that happened, has diminished, and cyberspace tends to replace it with another mode of socioculturality.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

That sociocultural exchange was part of the way of life, a way of sharing cultural information between different ethnicities and cultures. You’d go to a museum and, being Italian, you’d find yourself looking at a Goya painting, and a Spaniard would come along and give you a lecture on Goya. You’d think, “This seems familiar.” There are cultural points of connection, and you’d wonder, “How is this possible?” But it exists—this cultural union, these coincidences between cultures, just like languages. If we look at them through certain time periods, we find that Latin gave rise to many languages: Spanish, Romanian, French, Portuguese, Italian, and then there are the Slavic languages. There are all the groups that came from the north, like the Vikings, who later entered what is now Russia or Eastern Europe. They were creating symbolic forms where writing also contributed to the spread of a language, somewhat forgetting its origins. By this I mean that in this era we are living in, which is an era of In transition, writing, if it hasn’t completely disappeared, is losing importance every day; everything is mediated, everything is image, and everything is word, not writing.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

But these iconological media also have an intimacy with writing in the sense that the technology that writing once began in culture made possible a mode of communication in which there is no other present; this is a problem of the phenomenology of presence. The other is not present in writing. All these technological media depend on that deferred character of similar presence; they are no longer scriptural themselves. In them, writing is just one more medium that participates in multimedia, but they maintain an intimate relationship with things that writing began in culture.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

The media takes center stage, but writing is taking a backseat; that doesn’t mean it’s disappearing, nor does it mean it will disappear.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

I believe I live by writing, I suppose that at some point I will be nostalgic, like for times past, but I will live in that longing, that’s how many traditions were preserved too, there are things that will never disappear but they change their place, for example in the formation of socioculturality, nowadays sociocultural contemporaneity is being governed by these technological means, you were talking about Goya but you had to go see him at the museum, now you have him here.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Without getting up from your chair, and without wasting time

Chapter V

Integral Cultural Anthropology: The Originality of Fieldwork

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan and Alessandro Morganti Debra

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Okay, to pick up where we left off with all these conversations we’ve been building up in small segments, I was proposing a discussion with Abdel about the culturalism of both Lévi-Strauss and Bronisław Malinowski, knowing that this entire theoretical conception was based on the concepts of Marvin Harris, who predates these two authors. But fundamentally, we’re talking about Malinowski and Lévi-Strauss. So, one of the questions I was asking myself is about the idea or concept of “integral culture,” which Malinowski presents as a way to satisfy biological and social needs—that is, the way of organizing oneself for modes of production, for daily life, for symbolic life, and so on. And, adding something new, I think, is fieldwork: the concept of fieldwork and how it should be carried out, under what patterns, in order to later interpret the cultural phenomenon. Since Malinowski did his main work in the Trobriand Islands, and he spent two years there, he was a professor at Oxford, he was in the United States, at Yale—he has a rather interesting academic curriculum. I’d be interested in asking him Abdel, how do you see the concept of integral cultural anthropology?

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

Okay, well, in principle you mention Marvin Harris, about whom I actually have very little information. I haven’t properly studied Marvin Harris’s work, but as we saw the other day when we were reviewing the case of Marvin Harris, we noticed that he used two concepts that are Marxist. That is, when we look for the origin of those two concepts, it was Marx who first used them: the concept of “infrastructure” and that of “superstructure,” meaning understanding society through this correlation.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

He adds another concept, which is that of “infraculture”

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

What concept is that? Oh, okay.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

That refers to the symbolic or psychic part of society.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

And I was telling you that it seemed to me that Marvin Harris’s way of understanding what he defined as “cultural materialism” has a strong origin in the Althusserian perspective, because although Marx was the first to conceive of the relationship between infrastructure and superstructure, it is actually Althusser who focuses on the vision of society from that perspective. The notion of “cultural materialism” doesn’t bother me; that is, it’s a notion I sympathize with. But I understand the notion as more related to the concept of “material culture,” which is a concept that doesn’t necessarily come from a selection of the social whole that intends to totalize a society as an economic, political, and institutional whole.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

As the Marxists would do

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

Exactly. Marvin Harris’s concept of “cultural materialism”—again, making the caveat that I am not a specialist in Marvin Harris nor have I studied his work, but merely because it is based on these two or three notions, as you say—refers to an understanding of the social whole as an organized totality with institutions, a production infrastructure, and a symbolic, political, power superstructure, or also symbolic in the sense of representations. When I say that I sympathize with the notion of “cultural materialism,” I say it more from the perspective of my most current point of reference in cultural anthropology, which is the concept of “material culture.” I will try to explain myself in relation to this concept, how I conceptualize and understand it, the scope of cultural anthropology, or rather, how I define what makes the limits and specificity specific in my most accurate consideration for speaking of cultural anthropology.

But the concept of “material culture” as I understand it does not refer to the entirety of society understood as a macroeconomic thing, made up of institutions, with social groups and with a history and modes of production and life. The concept of “material culture” as we understand it in the field of anthropology in which I work refers to a smaller, closer, more intimate selection, if we were to see it from the perspective of the diagram of cinema with respect to culture. It is a smaller selection if we take as a comparative reference this conception of “cultural materialism” that Marvin Harris has, but it is not so small if we see it instead from the perspective of how we arrive at the concept of “material culture”.

What is the problem here? We differentiate within the whole of a society’s “visual culture” its arts, but also different expressions of “material culture” that cannot always be said to be autonomous like art in its symbolic character.

It is true that in tribal societies the arts were intimately linked, if we see it from your evolutionary perspective, which stems from the origin of man and the periods—although you question evolutionism in your thesis, which views things from the point of view of evolutionary phases from prehistory—but even not seeing it in an evolutionary sense, but rather considering that today, coexisting with modernity, there are cultural groups, Amerindian communities in the case of South and North America, in the Caribbean, in Mexico, in Australia, coexisting with modernity, ways of life of communities that are considered to live in somewhat more tribal conditions. Art is not undifferentiated in these cultural formations but intertwined with other functions of culture, both in the prehistoric past, and I would even say that even in the Middle Ages, art was still fused with religion, with other phenomena that did not make it truly an autonomous phenomenon; it was functioning with ritual, with religion, and also with functionality, for example, pottery in the community linked to The transportation and storage of food meant that art was not differentiated, or perhaps still is not. The Wayuu, for example, have textiles intimately linked to rituals, religious beliefs, and worldviews. When we observe culture from a visual perspective and see autonomous arts in contemporary society, we see that these are symbolic phenomena that have become separated within the process of secularization and social overspecialization. This process began with the social division of labor and then presupposed the separation of science, art, religion, and law as separate and autonomous institutions. These processes are related to the emergence of the state, the process of social rationalization that leads to the state’s rise and then to technical and professional overspecialization, culminating in the gradual autonomy of these disciplines and specialties as institutions. This is evident when we can speak of the “institution of art,” “the institution of science,” and “the institution of religion” as separate entities. In this concept of autonomous art, the autonomous symbolic product, already separated from ritual and religion, is highly contrasted with other forms. of culture that are also forms of “visual culture” but where the visual is still intertwined with other functions such as crafts, ceramics, even in applied arts such as design art is still intertwined with other social functions and it is precisely where more tribal ways of life coexist with us that we find this, there above all, art is still found in ways in which it is difficult to distinguish what is art from what is “symbolic production” and in turn “what is art” from what is “symbolic production” and from what is “material culture”, it is from these distinctions, taking as a parameter these problems of visual culture, that we arrive at the cut that is proper to my concept of “material culture”.

Here we have four concepts that are important to distinguish, those that relate to each other but also differentiate them; these are:

“art”/“symbolic production”/“material culture” and/“visual culture”.

So, from my perspective of cultural anthropology for the definition of the concept of “Material Culture,” the entire visual world that archaeology studies falls within the heading or subdivision of “Material Culture,” acquiring specific forms there in archaeology. But the concept of “material culture” goes far beyond that, encompassing countless phenomena that are not properly those covered by archaeology.

For example, heritage—heritage is “material culture,” it is also “visual culture,” but we cannot separate or limit all the parameters to which cultural understanding leads us through heritage merely through visual culture, because the idea of ​​“visual culture” encompasses other phenomena such as “imagery,” which could often be considered “cultural heritage” and which in some way are also forms of “material culture.” But it is important to note that these notions, to summarize my arrival at the concept of “material culture,” do not come from an understanding of society as an economic and political set of institutions organized in the sense of a materialism that sees the material base as infrastructure that supplies the inputs or resources, the matter for production and its modes of production or life. Rather, they come from a much smaller selection of the cultural expressions of a society, where we are only differentiating the modes of “symbolic production” among them, thus separating the arts from symbolic production. Because although the arts are “symbolic production,” symbolic production is broader than the arts, as it encompasses the Craftsmanship, ceramics, but then where do you put a carved door? Where do you put the columns?” “Where do you put a portal?” “Where do you put the textiles?” “A hammock or a hammock, where do you put it?” These aren’t art, but they are “material culture” and “visual culture,” and they can’t be subordinated to mere “symbolic production.” Crafts are still “symbolic production,” just like art, but the concept of “symbolic production,” as I said, is broader than art because it encompasses forms of the visual that are not autonomous. Art is symbolic production, but there are forms of symbolic production that are not art. And then, symbolic production doesn’t encompass all forms of visual and material culture either. Symbolic production goes as far as symbols are produced, but when forms of material and visual culture are produced that can’t be called modes of symbolic production—for example, those that don’t have an author or a craftsperson—in the case of a craft, even though it’s a tradition and we no longer have an artist creating something unique, but rather a code from a tradition is being repeated, it’s still symbolic production. An artisan has a name, a biography, a history, but there are expressions of “material” and visual culture in which there is no longer even the artisan, such as the forms of memory, the material and visual culture of urban markets, their constructive forms and their aesthetic modes. Obviously, the one who has a stall in the market has also made it himself, just as the artisan makes his fabric, but even though there is a subject with a biography who creates it, that subject does not establish a relationship with that artifact of material culture as the result of his creation, or as his work with an objective in itself separate from functionality.

There are a wide variety of forms of “visual and material culture” that are of great importance for understanding culture that do not have a subject behind them in that way. I therefore arrive at the narrowing of my concept of “material culture” from this smaller narrowing, looking in a more textualist way within that culture. As I said in another video, if we take the textbook as a parameter to define what a text is, we could say that seeing a culture as a text is imprecise because we cannot say that it is a textbook that can be read. But if we take the concept of reading and legibility as a parameter, wherever something is readable and legible, it is a text for reading.

Viewed from this perspective, expressions of material and visual culture that are not texts in the literal sense are forms of the textual insofar as they are legible, readable, and interpretable. Therefore, it is a selection of material culture, or of the material aspects of that culture, more controlled by the structuralist vision in its origin. It’s not that I am a structuralist, although I accept the influence I have had from Structuralism. I have moved beyond it and am critical of Structuralism, but I inherit this more micro-methodological selection as well, in the sense that it acquires with phenomenology in sociology and ethnomethodology. More specifically, it is a semiological selection that focuses on a phenomenon of language, or what in semiotics we call “language/object.” In the social sciences, we speak of the subject of study and the object of study. The subject of study is the researcher, and the object of study is the culture in question. But in the sciences of language, we say that the object of study is often, and most of the time, a language, and being a language, it is not just any form of the “object.” of study,” but rather it is a “language/object,” so the concept of “material culture” with which I work and which I have conceptualized, comes by way of the notion of language and language/object, seeking an object of study that is a language, because the way in which a society is structured, the way in which a society is politically organized, the forms of material life that a people may have, population data, all those things that we could consider materialism through the notions of infrastructure and superstructure, as Marvin Harris sees them, escape a textual conception of society. This does not mean that I deny the existence of those infrastructures and superstructures; I do not deny them, but I do consider—and this is where I begin to answer how to approach fieldwork and the topic of Malinowski and Lévi-Strauss—but it does lead us to the problem of how we can be sure that we can be more objective or more subjective in the study of a phenomenon of culture and society when we are taking such general notions as points of reference.

How do you inform someone about the economy of a country or a culture if not through the informational material you have to collect about that society? Is there a way to talk about the cultural materialism that Marvin Harris refers to, and to which Marxism refers, in some way that doesn’t presuppose and require languages ​​and texts? Of course not, except that both overlook the fact that language is there; it’s no coincidence that different reports on the economy of a culture, a society, or a community don’t coincide with each other. Is society as a whole, viewed in that sense, also a material phenomenon? Yes, but the fact that it is material doesn’t validate objectivity because if you can use one parameter to give a report on a society, and I can use another, and another researcher can use yet another, we can create cultural representations of the same society, culture, or community that don’t coincide, even when referring to the same society or reference point.

You rely on the same data as me and another researcher to refer to the infrastructure and superstructure of that society, but it turns out that the way we represent it, the cultural representation, does not coincide. So the fact that we are talking about something that is material in that culture does not guarantee that the cultural representation we are going to make about it will be objective with respect to it.

In these conceptions, such as Marvin Harris’s, I see that the idea is presupposed that reality takes its toll on language; it is as if language were always imperfect and reality were asking for a language that reflected it better. It is as if reality could speak and say, “I am reality and language with respect to me only has to reflect me; therefore, the language that I as reality am asking for is this one and not that other one.”

In other words, an idea of ​​reality without language is approved as if language were not there. I start from the principle that this is impossible; it is not possible to resolve the dilemma that moves us between being subjective and being objective without language being at the center of our methodological attention to relate to that phenomenon.

The opposite example, using the same data and understanding culture as a material phenomenon, shows three researchers expressing completely different cultural representations of that reality, representations that do not coincide with each other. Therefore, the fact that our understanding of reality is material does not resolve the objectivity of the research. This is because in that conception of reality as pre-existing language and subjectivity—as a kind of pre-given reality that says, “Here I am, presenting the bill to language, and language has to be as I say it has to be”—it is being overlooked that anything we can say about reality will be said with senses, meanings, and symbols. Therefore, language is not merely an instrument to reflect reality, but rather it is through language and in it that we understand each other and in relation to reality. Therefore, we cannot approach it without language being in the foreground. Instead of seeing language as a means to represent reality, we see it as our limitation and our potential, our deficiency. It is true that it is limited, but… At the same time, it is also our wealth, and it is what shapes us as a culture. In this linguistic sense, I believe that what defines us as a culture is language, what differentiates us from nature is language, the symbol; what makes us human is language. Obviously, there are more complex philosophical problems here that Derrida has addressed, regarding the antinomies of whether language or thought comes first. Some think that thought is primordial and that language only reflects thought; others think that man could not think without language.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

The Egg and the Hen

 Abdel Hernández San Juan:

Exactly. There’s an interwoven dialectic here; it’s impossible to represent thought without language. Culture arises because language arises. In this sense, it’s clear that I lean more towards Lévi-Strauss than Malinowski, because Malinowski is more of a landscape painter—though I’d say that’s in quotation marks, because I don’t really see him as a landscape painter. I think he’s a very interesting anthropologist. I loved “Argonauts of the Western Pacific”; it’s a book I really like.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

He includes something very important within anthropology, which is the anthropologist’s participation with the object of study. He doesn’t consider himself an outsider; he tries to be part of the Trobriand Islanders and to shake off, to some extent, the Westernizing process. This is where a new conception of anthropology comes in, and where the concept of functionalism also comes into play. To understand something, you have to understand the parts and their functions. Therefore, when we talk about structure and superstructure, it’s an interaction that you can’t separate, and it’s a product of being able to understand, in my case, the “way of life,” or in his case, the Trobriand Islanders’ way of life. He also introduces psychoanalytic or psychological concepts. He explains cultural behaviors through sociology—family, family structure, political and economic structure—through symbolic behaviors. This doesn’t mean that the symbolic is purely abstract, but as an archaeologist, when I analyze, for example, a piece of pottery, I consider many variables to reconstruct, first, who that pottery belonged to, and second… Where does it come from? Third, what influence did that group have on the pottery makers? Because that influences ethnic groups. These don’t come from nowhere, but from a whole tradition. These are things that have been learned and stored within what we call the self and collective memory, and that creates forms, whether they are stable over time. For example, we can see this in the Amazonian indigenous people who have no contact with the West, or in Malinowski’s case with the Trobriand Islanders, who were not contaminated. He draws conclusions to compare and make the scientific community understand that subjectivity is what will predominate, not objectivity or pure truth, because there are many ways of seeing things. And as resources and knowledge increase, theories are reinforced until they reach a climax and then decline. That is, we allow other currents to enter. What I mean is that theories are transformed; they don’t come from nothing, they are reworked. reinvented until reaching what we have defined as the movement of a culture through time, so although needs are changing, going back a bit to linguistics.

In Levi Strauss the question is more stable, as you have mentioned linguistics is more scientific, because it has a stable basis, but they are theories reworked, or reinvented from the empirical, until reaching something new.

Abdel Hernández San Juan

OK. It can be, more scientific; there is the possibility that working with linguistics can make anthropology more scientific, but it doesn’t necessarily become more scientific. That depends on how the research is conducted and how linguistics enters and participates in that research. That is an internal problem in the discussion about the use of linguistics in anthropology. Undoubtedly, Lévi-Strauss was the first to give keynote lectures on the need to intertwine anthropology with linguistics; that is undeniable and must be acknowledged. He was also the first to say that an axe is a sign and that anthropology should work with semiotics. But at the same time, when one reads his books, even though he starts from those parameters and does indeed apply linguistics extensively, he never actually does semiotics, properly speaking. In reality, it is a kind of use—let’s call it that, he called it—of linguistics and semiotics. The concept of homology is a structural concept, but it is a complex and debatable one. That is to say, we assume that there is structural homology between phenomena, but the fact of thinking The idea that a culture speaking a particular language necessarily implies structural homology between its language and the structure of its villages is debatable. Lévi-Strauss often incorporates these homological precepts into his empirical studies. His theoretical lectures are undoubtedly very important because they draw attention to the necessity of this imbrication of linguistics and anthropology, placing it at the forefront as a matter of primary importance. I agree with that. However, when he applies it to empirical study, the results are not, let’s say, unfortunate. For example, his studies of the Bororó village are inspired by Jacobson’s very precise linguistic studies on phonology, which are very scientific studies of the lability of language, as is the case with French and English. The study of a language through its phonemic system yields very precise results, the most precise that can be found in a human and social science. So, of course, he draws inspiration from this scientific rigor and uses it as parameters to try to understand a Bororó village. We shouldn’t say it isn’t interesting or what it achieves; what it achieves is interesting because by helping to structure a way of reading the village, it yields good results. For example, by observing the Bororó village, how it is composed, how the huts are placed and distributed in the spaces, where they walk, what is the internal space and what is the external, what is the center and what is the periphery, it arrives at distinctions about, for example, how the profane is distributed from the sacred, in the way of eating, how the raw is distributed from the cooked. But what it does is not a study of language, or a linguistic study, nor a semiological one; what it does is a study of structural homology. If there is a structure that occurs in language, we would see what homology there is between this mode of structure that occurs in phonetics and this other mode of structure that occurs in a village. That is what it does. Homology is found in structure, but the concept of structure itself brings the ambivalence of not distinguishing whether it refers to how the abstract formal model of structure results in its homologous formality, or whether it refers to homologies there in reality.

 Alessandro Monganti Debra:

That’s a connection he has with Malinowski.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

I think homology has many flaws and components that connect it to tropes and figurative language. It’s a very complex topic at a linguistic and epistemological level, but I am sure that the concept of homology shares many things with figurative language and tropes. That is to say, I’m not going to say that homology is the same as a mere analogy, nor that it is properly a metaphor, but I do consider that all homology is a translation from a direct meaning to an indirect meaning, which it shares with tropes and figurative language such as metaphor, synecdoche, simile, or metonymy, which are distinguished precisely by this: transferring direct meanings to indirect meanings. These are figurative languages ​​for poetry; they are principles of tropological languages. What defines these is exchanging the direct meaning with the indirect meaning, the literal meaning for the indirect one. So it’s not such a precise concept; it reconciles, in a way, the principles that occur in tropological languages. with problems of structurality, such as a metaphor of homological structure if we are viewing the metaphorical through structurality, but it is figurative language, the concept of homology in this sense is debatable, susceptible to criticism, even the very concept of structure is. There is an essay where I analyze the relationship of the concept of structure with logical figures that have one half in reality and the other half in metaphor. I compare the notion of structure with tropological forms. When we speak of a structure, are we talking about something objective in reality, or is the structure a formal model to refer to that reality? We don’t know if it is in reality or in language. I think it is an imprecise concept, by which I mean that although phonological studies helped Lévi-Strauss to study a Bororo village, the results are interesting because they provided a certain structurality to the way of interpreting or reading the village, but that doesn’t mean that anything scientifically proven about a structural universality between phonology and village organization has been demonstrated there. What exists there is homology. And when I say homology, I mean metaphor.

So, yes and no, it depends on how linguistics is applied to the study of culture. If we’re going to see it as a formal model that served as a homologous study of something other than language, well, yes, linguistics is serving to study a non-linguistic phenomenon, okay. But the interesting thing is how to truly study culture linguistically, how to approach culture through language, not merely by homology. And this isn’t only through sociolinguistics, the study of dialects and idiolects—although I also consider the literal study of language extremely important for understanding a culture—but because I think that all culture is itself a symbolic system, a system of language and communication. Therefore, I believe that semiotics and linguistics should participate in a much more decisive way in cultural analysis, not merely as a metaphor that serves to find homologies between language phenomena and non-linguistic phenomena by mere homologous analogy. It’s not a mere instrumental use of linguistics to study phenomena that are not linguistic but rather about understanding culture in a much more linguistic and semiological way.

Levi Strauss does not do that; he is the first to raise the need for the relationship, but he does not advance it sufficiently. In anthropology there is a great lack in that direction because in anthropology departments the teaching of language sciences is scarce; linguistics is not taught, modern semiotics is not taught, Peirce or Saussure are not taught, and this seems to me to be a void.

Now, going back to Malinowski, as I was saying, although it’s an example of a field study where there seems to be no language, coming from a realist tradition that presupposes reality as something predatory, that kind of realism in the way of seeing reality where language is only a means to represent reality, even though it starts from the opposite paradigm to mine, nevertheless I really liked “Argonauts of the Western Pacific,” and I will try to explain why I like it.

Now, perhaps I find in myself something of what you were saying when you say that many of the new things being done in anthropology, including our own, are reinventions. I agree with that. Perhaps it’s my interpretation, my reading of Malinowski, and not something inherently like that in him.

   Alessandro Morganti Debra:

As an aside, when you were talking about homology, you reminded me of 1978 when Argentina won its first World Cup. There was a commentator who said that the best way to understand what it means to be Argentinian is to see how they play football, how the players move, whether they are individualistic or not, how the coach works with the group and the individuals—all the symbolism that you can take up, abstract, and interpret in terms of structures and functionalities.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

It’s a good example of a homologous study; I know you’re more optimistic than I am about the possibilities that homology offers.

Alessandro Morganti:

So far, I’m convinced.

 Abdel Hernández San Juan:

I don’t deny homology, but I’m saying it’s not as scientific a construct as people think, which doesn’t mean it can’t be a useful resource. You can make use of a homologous resource; it depends on what you do with homology. I know you’re more enthusiastic about homology than I am, and I think you should go further.

Returning to Malinowski, I really enjoyed “Argonauts of the Western Pacific.” I must confess it’s one of the books I’ve liked most in my entire life. I’m a very abstract thinker; if you’ve read one of my books, you know I’m extremely abstract, as abstract as the most abstract thinkers. It’s my preference and what truly drives me. But I also have a fascination with empirical studies, with empirical cultural understanding, and I’ve always had to practice it, mainly for economic reasons, because it provides a grounding, a practical foundation. But I must confess that, even though I’m neither a functionalist nor a realist, I really liked this book by Malinowski.

I think that perhaps it has to do with what you were saying before, the fact that many of the things being done today in anthropology, including both of us, in the postmodern approach as well as others, are reworkings or reinventions, as you call them, that stem from things that have been done before in anthropology. I agree with that, and it’s possible that what I’m about to tell you is my own reinvention.

Alessandro Morganti:

Latin American social archaeology is not something new; it has a background in Marxism and other sources. It simply reinterprets and deconstructs both Western and non-Western realities. Evolutionism is no longer relevant; what we are taking is the “way of life” as a starting point to enter and study the formation of a society: Why is it there? Why does it exist this way? Why does it have this language? All these variables are considered to assemble anthropology according to or based on the theoretical structure of the school to which one belongs.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

It seems to me that the result of what you have done, both your research and that of the authors who most influenced you, your thesis, one of the most interesting things about it is that it shows a possibility of working with concepts of Marxist origin that obtain much more interesting results than what Marxism has obtained. We would have to see to what extent. Engel has a book on evolutionism with some interest in primitive society, but the result in what you have done is more interesting than in what traditional Marxism has been; the result in the end is very different.

When I mentioned reinvention, taking advantage of your emphasis on it, I meant that I don’t know if what I’m about to say can be attributed to Malinowski, since I don’t know if he was aware of it or not, but in any case, it’s my reading of Malinowski, based on what I read because I read The Argonauts in its entirety. I not only read it enjoying it without skipping a single paragraph, but I also studied it because afterwards I wrote an essay precisely where I had to discuss it and I was forced to study it, and probably because of that deep immersion I made in the book I have been interpreting, recreating, but possibly in the sense you say.

It is true what you say, that there is a presupposition in Malinowski of a reality that you call environment, perhaps in an environmentalist sense, but Malinowski doesn’t dedicate much time to it. At the beginning of the book, only in the first part, does he give the reader a general idea to understand what the Trobriand Islands are from a geographical point of view, but he doesn’t delve into an objectivist, socio-historical, or geographical vision. The geographical elements he provides are almost picturesque, just enough to tell you what he has to say so that you know where he has immersed himself.

Alessandro Morganti:

It’s the general rule for getting involved

 Abdel Hernández San Juan:

He doesn’t continually move from the specific to the general; he remains within, that “inside” he enters throughout the entire work. For me, this has many attractive aspects. One thing I particularly like about the book is that the research and its results aren’t presented separately from the lived experience within the culture. In other words, one doesn’t obtain all the research results in advance, nor by going from the narrated to the concluded, as if the research were detached from lived experience. Rather, the entire research is structured according to the journeys, the expeditions, the experiences. We would have to examine, in terms of literary criticism of anthropology, as Clifford Geertz does in “The Anthropologist as Author,” the anthropologist as writer. We would have to see to what extent the idea of ​​a diary, a vestige—it’s not a diary at all—structurally influenced this. But there is something in its chronotope, as Bakhtin calls it, in its chrono, in its diachrony, in The story in the melody, in its mobility, maintains a certain connection with the principles of the diary. It is not a diary at all; he actually has another work that is a diary, a work called “A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term.” But the book “The Argonauts” maintains a certain connection with the idea of ​​a diary. The work is structured based on experiences; it doesn’t tell you “this came first, this came later,” but it is structured in the manner of “On the Journey to Dobu,” “Return to Kiriwina,” “Preparation of the Expedition,” “Preparation of the Canoe,” “An Expedition to Kiriwina.”

It begins with the preparation of the canoes, the embarkation on the open sea, and then what happens at sea until they arrive. In one of the expeditions, because you find it in the experience, they suddenly face the threat of shipwreck because there are tremendous waves and the canoe has to fight against them. He is in a situation where the Trobriand Islanders are struggling with the sea, and all their beliefs about death, the possibility of shipwreck, the cosmos, being lost, what the route means, the idea of ​​where we are going, and what this calamity of capsizing is, are manifested there. So he is narrating, and to that extent, he begins to visit the myths, the narratives, and collected stories about that theme, about death, about shipwreck.

It deals with the things he’s experiencing and the rituals for solving problems. At times, it’s very precise; he directly presents the chants and magic spells in the Kiriwina language while explaining what the Toliguaga does, what he anoints the canoe with, and how. The Toliguaga is the one who prepares the canoe; he’s a technician, but at the same time, he’s the one who performs the magic spell to ensure the expedition’s success. I like the idea that the research isn’t announced all at once, as traditional academic treatises dictate, which require stating the hypotheses, objectives, and methods at the beginning and then seeing how they’re corroborated during the process. He completely abandons those parameters. It’s a book that guides the research alongside the experience to understand the culture, and I really like that. Another thing I appreciate about the book is that, despite its realistic approach, it places you in the same dilemmas he faces, reflecting his perspective on anthropology, fieldwork, and participant observation. Participatory anthropology is not all-encompassing; rather, its scope is small. I am not interested in macro approaches in social sciences, but rather in “face-to-face” relationships. I place great importance on intersubjectivity and its linguistic component, as well as on the notion of interaction, the notion of situation, and the concept of interpretation. Although Malinowski was not aware of these things nor did he put them in the foreground, his studies are quite close to a micro-methodology, the canoe, for example, as a phenomenon of material culture.

Now, I disagree with him on some things. When he begins “The Argonauts…” he presents the reader with the fact that it is a canoe. He compares the indigenous canoe with European ships, how much they weigh, what wood they are made of; he almost writes a treatise on naval engineering. And at one point he says, “I’m not going to tell the reader that I’m going to analyze this canoe by taking it out of its ethnographic reality to put it in a museum.” He contrasts the museum paradigm with the fieldwork paradigm. If I were to see it from the perspective of the museum, I would be taking it out of its ethnographic reality. That’s a bit of what he argues in short. I disagree with that. Once he approaches the canoe, he imagines it as an artifact, but as soon as he sees it that way, he refers it to the museum and denies the latter.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Because that’s intellectual training. For example, when Viking ships are described, there are many stages and a lot of specialized labor involved. They were the navigators of that era, just as England later became the naval power of that time. Before England, there were the Vikings, and each had their own specialty. But when they put them in the museum, they no longer talk about how the ship was built, but rather about who led the ship on the expedition. They talk, say, about the ship’s aerodynamics so it wouldn’t sink. They don’t talk about the curves, the architraves, that made them super ships, and how they were a society of naval importance. All that knowledge becomes important in conquests, but people associate Vikings with plunderers, and that’s not the case. Vikings were societies that sought new environments because the environments where they lived were barren. They needed agriculture to feed themselves. They left one area to establish agricultural settlements and develop new technical forms of economy and trade. Here, too, we are separating one thing from another, but the concept of a museum is really… Teaching doesn’t mean giving you a lecture in the sense of a reported history; it won’t give you a complete explanation of the Viking way of life through one of their most important productive means for their expansion or reproduction, their symbolic magical world, etc., etc.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

What I think is that, in short, when he saw the canoe as an object, it brought to his mind, I suppose, that he was seeing the canoe as if it were an object in a museum, and that makes him think that it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense to him because how can he detach the canoe if he must understand it within the ethnographic reality in which it is embedded? I choose that moment when he has that

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Lucidity

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

I agree with the lucidity, but I’m going to oppose it because, what do I think? It’s true that by taking the canoe to the museum, you’re decontextualizing it, but it’s also true that at the same time, for a visitor who arrives at a museum hoping to get an idea of ​​what the culture of, say, tribal New Guinea is like, and you present them with the canoe, you’re presenting a metonymy, that is, a fragment of a whole to which that visitor, in any case, will not have access unless they go to New Guinea. Even if they do go, when you go to a society, you follow an itinerary, as we say in phenomenology. You never experience everything at once. We know we live in the city of Caracas; that’s knowledge we have. But in reality, we never experience the entire city of Caracas simultaneously. We always experience a street or a sidewalk, an itinerary. Therefore, the idea of ​​reaching the whole is always metonymic. We are never in contact with the complete whole; we are always in contact with fragments. In fragments, a metonymy is the fragment of an absent whole.

In the metonymy of the canoe as a fragment, we have an image of material culture that evokes a cultural whole that is absent. Since the artifact is what we have of that culture, it is our tool for reading and interpretation. So what I propose is that the view that the museum offers us towards that material culture, cut by the museum’s perspective, offers us a possibility of reading by understanding how the relationships between fragments and wholes occur, between metonymies and totalities. If we do not resort to the museum paradigm, we would not be able to understand how we are experiencing that same phenomenon in the fieldwork.

If you’re doing fieldwork, you’re already relating to the whole of the culture through metonymies, working with them and from them. When he describes, for example, the moment the log is cut, the log from which the canoe is later made, before making the canoe, the wood it’s made from, he describes the ritual through which that wood is cut and then how it’s taken to Baku, which is the center of the village, how many days it stays there, and what happens around that log—all of this before they begin making the canoe. All of that is metonymy; these are fragments that themselves are the device, the means through which we are evoking an idea of ​​culture. Because I’m not talking about the village through the story of a woman, or through the story of a child or an old man I meet in a ritual, but through the bringing of a log. Therefore, I’m reading and interpreting the whole of a culture through metonymy, the cutting and transport of the log. The reading I’m going to have of… a cultural reality, of a cultural totality or of a set of huts if I approach culture through the movement of a log rather than if I approach it through a dialogue with an old man

The way we always evoke a cultural group is through these fragments or metonymies, like my cousin Robertico who is a theater scholar, and works on the subject of stilts, he has taken the idea of ​​stilts and with it has set about making a book about cultures, it is not the same to arrive in Morocco asking about Morocco in general as to arrive in Morocco asking about stilts in Morocco.

By deciding on a metonymy from which you begin to evoke the cultural whole from the fragments, at the same time you are creating a mode of participant observation. It is not the same to participate in any way as through something that mediates the relationships. It is like saying I give you a gift; the gift mediates the communication we are going to have. In the same way, the metonymic perspective of a museum, if we bring it to the fieldwork, gives us a path of reading. That is, I am proposing the reverse: instead of bringing the canoe to the museum, do the reverse, bring the museum to the fieldwork.

It’s like taking away the naiveté of the realistic idea that there is an existing reality that we can reach without language, and understanding that this relationship is already a relationship of language in the fieldwork itself.

 Alessandro Morganti Debra:

In the next video, we could see an experience in Quibor, an open-air museum in a cemetery where excavations began and the idea arose to build the museum as the excavations were completed.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

Very interesting, is that here in Venezuela?

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

That’s here in Lara state, it would be quite interesting

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

and?

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

If I go, of course.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

Does that museum still exist?

Alessandro Morganti Debra.

Yes, and there were colleagues who graduated after me who were there at that museum, but it would be good to bring up the exploration of the relationship between the environment and the museum as an established entity, but with its nuances that can be good or bad depending on how you see it.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

I love the idea

Part II

Chapter VI-

The Museum Inside and Outside Its Borders:

The Eye of the Museum in Fieldwork

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan and Alessandro Morganti Debra

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

We wanted to pick up where we left off, based on the analysis of Malinowski, when he asked whether taking the canoe out of context and bringing it to the museum might be a way of misunderstanding it outside of its ethnographic reality. I argued that the museum paradigm doesn’t necessarily have to be seen as something that doesn’t fit with fieldwork, but rather, instead of bringing the canoe to the museum, what we could do is bring the museum’s eye to the way we read and understand fieldwork.

In this regard, Alex connected the idea of ​​the museum outside of museum spaces, that is, the idea of ​​a museum outdoors or in the field, to the importance that the museum had in his fieldwork in this area.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

From the state of Lara in Quivor

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

The fieldwork was not in the museum, but the museum was related before and after the fieldwork. The peculiar thing here is that this is taking us back to the possibility of thinking about the museum in the fieldwork. Based on this, I would like to place three experiences that can serve as a basis for us.

On the one hand, there’s Alex’s experience, relating to an archaeological museum located outdoors on a boulevard, which specifically places us in relation to this empirical experience and the concept of the museum inside and outside its boundaries. On the one hand, it’s seen as a museographic phenomenon, designed for staging from within its museological framework for a specific audience. On the other hand, the museum is also seen as an agent that must carry out empirical work because the museographies created must be based on something prior. If you’re going to create a museography related to a specific archaeologically studied period of a culture, you have to relate what you’re going to display to an empirical experience. You can take this experience from the work of an archaeologist or an anthropologist, or from fieldwork if that anthropologist works in the museum and also conducts fieldwork, or if the museum is simply interested in having an empirical basis. In other words, the perspective that Alex introduces adds a very enriching angle, but I would like to complement it with two other experiences, so that we can to explore more possibilities regarding this dilemma of the museum inside and outside its boundaries

One is the experience I had when in 1994 I was called by the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts to be the museum’s curator, an experience of several years in which I also had to curate exhibitions on Venezuelan art and gave lecture series on contemporary Venezuelan art.

The first project I was given was the most complex project the museum had ever had. The museum in question is beautiful, modern, and architecturally stunning, but it’s located on the outskirts of the city. You have to leave the city to get there, and it’s situated in an area that is paradoxically close to the museum, where the Coche Market is located—a wholesale market that is the main supplier of goods from the rest of the country to the city of Caracas—and on the other hand, the racetrack, related to the entertainment industry and athletics, horse racing.

The challenge here was that this museum planned to do something with the Coche Market since it was its immediate community. That is, a museum has audiences that can be drawn from outside its immediate surrounding community, but a museum also has an immediate surrounding community within which it is located. This is also its primary audience linked to the territory in which it is situated, to the spatial communities with which it shares its site location, and it turns out that the Coche Market is the main community that this museum has in its spatial vicinity.

So here the problem of alterity was posed. My question was this: should we consider the urban popular market, with its forms of material and visual culture, its forms of symbolic interaction, its images and symbolism—largely referring, at times, to elements of folklore in cultural tradition—as an alterity for the high-level contemporary art museum? That is, should we consider it as a moment of the museum’s own self, in its own subjectivity, in its forms of the subject—in this case, the museum’s material and visual culture, collecting, the exhibition of art and culture, expressed outside its spaces, or externalized out there, as a moment other in itself? Or should we rather consider it as an otherness, as something radically heterogeneous? Seen from the perspective of the market concept, undoubtedly the contemporary art museum also presupposes a market, in this case the art market, but seen from the stratified perspective of the modes of cultural subjectivity, the market, in its visual culture, refers not only to the urban, but also to what we understand as Material and visual forms of so-called popular culture, that is, related to tradition and folklore, sometimes also, due to the massiveness of its codes and objects, to mass culture, while the museum seems linked to elite culture or to so-called high culture or the culture of fine arts.

The relationship between high culture, popular culture, and mass culture was thus at stake here, something similar to what happens when we ask ourselves about the affinity and difference between, for example, the so-called fine arts versus other forms of art such as those considered popular or naive art, or between the fine arts and functional or utilitarian modes of art such as crafts and ceramics or even architecture, considered as we know from high art as secondary or tertiary art forms, so called minor arts, but beyond that, since the urban popular market not only includes images and artifacts from those social stratifications of the visual related to folklore, it also presupposes modes of exchange of the symbolic and of interaction between bodies, of intersubjectivity, different from those of the museum; barter, for example, governs the ways in which things are exhibited, presented, or staged in markets, although both museum and market exhibit, or expose, the staging on one side and on the other responds to different principles.

This project led me, as curator, to conceive a museology in different rooms that included, of course, a contemporary art room where contemporary artists would address the problem of the Coche Market, but also two rooms: one that addressed the problem of the urban popular market, closely linked to folklore and cultural traditions because the same artifacts or material goods are exhibited there that later enter into the symbolic life of society and culture and that, although they presuppose, when displayed there in the physical spaces of the market, a connection with the world of folklore and regional cultural traditions, are also in a certain way products that everyone consumes, including the producer and the spectator of high art.

In this sense, I was considering doing urban fieldwork that included two areas. On the one hand, what we are talking about, that is, I was working inside the museum but at the same time I had to move empirically outside the museum visiting the urban sites of the market, which by the way put me in the dilemma of whether to remain restricted to the Coche Market or to cover other popular urban markets, because I definitely had to study other markets of the same type in order to also understand the Coche Market, the type of fieldwork that I had to do was in some way being done by the museum because I was curator of the museum and it was an experience outside the museum in the empirical space.

My response to all of this was the following. First, I conducted research on the market as seen or understood from the museum’s perspective. By this, I mean the concept of collecting art and culture. Even though, searching through the collections of this museum and others in Venezuela, I couldn’t find any material that focused on collecting images of the market from the museum’s perspective, I felt this work, this effort, this study, should be done by me.

Thus, for example, I focused on images of the popular urban market in the colonial era and then up to the contemporary era as it could be studied given in vignettes, old engravings, ways of symbolizing the market that society has had since the colonial era expressed in forms of engraving, photography, painting.

There was undoubtedly no work properly done on this by the museum and by museums, but it was potentially possible, so I decided to do it myself, and in that sense I tried to do a kind of archaeological genealogy, I went to the archives of photographs, and of old engravings that were made by Venezuelan costumbrista engravers about the Sunday public square in the colonial era, from the 15th century to the present throughout the centuries, I studied the way in which the graphic imagination around the market was evolving, the study of vignettes, old engravings and other appearances of the image of the market in cultural representations, and led to the understanding of how the market has been symbolized.

That led me to go back and study what Aztec markets were like, how they developed, where they were held, what meanings they had for the culture, also Mayan markets, but it was more regional in this case, and the most in-depth study was how the image of the market has behaved in vignettes, in engravings, in different forms of the visual for the culture from the 15th century to the present in Venezuela.

I thus found painters who painted the market in different centuries and made a survey of this type which also includes photographs, and this complemented what was the empirical fieldwork there in the spatialities of the markets.

It was a project with very peculiar characteristics because, as I said, I wanted the museography to include at least one room dedicated to all of this, focused on this anthropological and cultural aspect of understanding the market from the museum’s perspective. For this, the museographer with their technical expertise wasn’t enough; obviously, they were also indispensable, because there comes the moment when you have to compose the exhibition space, which requires design, assembly, and distribution. But it was necessary to have a closer relationship with the market and imagine a way to present this reading and interpretation, this anthropological understanding of the market’s staging, that would be closer to the market’s visual and material culture. On the one hand, that room would itself be a staging of this interpretation or reading of the market according to the museum, through this investigation of its images or symbolisms in the visual tradition since colonial times: the milk vendors in the colonial past, the objects that street vendors hung around their necks to display and sell their products, the use of the head to hold the sold or transported goods, the The multiracial nature of the ways of understanding markets in a traditional way, but also, in this same room, I should be able to unfold or stage the empirical urban or spatial side, gathered in my travels through the markets, starting with the Coche market, which involved understanding their display methods, their ways of hanging objects to show them or of displaying them in self-constructing systems, in order to stage all this, it made me think of the theater, of complementing the technical skills of the museographer with those of the set designer.

For example, in a play about brothels in 18th-century Venezuela or about traditional villages, when a play with a historical component is produced, the theater producer has to go out and find that material culture wherever possible. They go to antique shops looking for objects related to the customs of the time, they go to film studios to find costumes, to see when a film was made, to see if there is any costume that represents the moment. They have to study how things were lit, the interiors and exteriors, in order to then stage a script in a scenographic representation. I believe that the museographic staging of this room should also incorporate these scenographic techniques.

This interdisciplinary work between museography and scenography should also relate what I defined as two concepts of staging: on the one hand, for me, urban popular markets are themselves stagings, but on the other hand, a museography about them is also a staging, in one sense museographic, but in another sense also scenographic, as in the theater.

By exploring these intersections, we could create a room that would be like a new kind of anthropological museography. In popular markets, although we have folklore, there are also indigenous Amerindian and African traditions expressed in that material and visual culture. They are not exactly remnants of primitive or tribal culture, but rather express a hybridization where elements, objects, or artifacts of these cultures are found within a syncretic system of conjugation with the mass and with the traditional but not tribal popular. They are also already forms of the financial market, forms of the culture of modernity. As I said before, it is a very peculiar intersection between mass culture and traditional culture, between modernity and tradition.

All of this inclined this room towards the cultural anthropology of the contemporary and therefore the room could not be developed in the same terms as a traditional museum or a usual mode of museography, nor understood from the perspective of a museum of anthropology nor understood from the perspective of a museum of high art, but at the same time it had to have a stronger anthropological component than the usual museography of contemporary art.

Then we would have to see the whole, because as I said, this room would not be alone but in relation to other rooms governed by explorations of contemporary art, installations, etc., on the market.

I had many difficulties with this project among other museum specialists. The work was very enjoyable with all the museum specialists, and it was very interesting and there was a sense of responsibility, but I ran into the stereotypes that a contemporary art museum has towards anything that represents folklore or traditional culture. There’s a kind of prejudice towards anything that represents symbolic, visual, or material modes that express crafts, ceramics, etc., viewed from the perspective of fine arts. Crafts, ceramics, and these types of artifacts or expressions of material culture, both those specific to the market and their symbolic meanings throughout history since colonial times, are all viewed with prejudice.

But speaking with you as an archaeologist, I perceived that you immediately understood the anthropological vision in the same terms in which I had conceived it at that time.

This raises the dilemma that there are no anthropologists in art museums and conversely, no art specialists in anthropology museums, but this leads us to the educational issue of professional training.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Not only archaeologists should be involved, but also ethnographers, depending on what is being exhibited. Specialists should be sought out in an interdisciplinary way to bring it to life, so that the exhibition and museography are not something static, something in a display case that you show as something foreign that is not yours, but rather try to incorporate everything that you are seeing visually so that the viewer creates a peculiar fantasy that connects with their collective unconscious and can understand the why.

For example, they always talk about corn flour, and physically, for example, I had friends in England who spent all their time talking about arepas. How is it possible that they are talking about shredded meat and arepas when they are in an Anglo-Saxon country where the food is completely different, and instead of adapting, they always highlighted their idiosyncratic side.

The purpose of the museum in this new vision we have is to incorporate the viewer with what is set up by specialists in a closed space and to recreate as much as possible the everyday phenomena, ways of life, etc.

I remember a museum I visited, I think it was the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, when I did my internship there. They recreated the Teotihuacan way of life. There were pyramids, and through representations of priests and the display of their writing systems, codices, and so on, they transported the viewers to another dimension, both inside and outside the museum. On one side, they recreated their way of life and visual culture, but on the other, you had to go up and down the pyramid stairs as part of the experience. Then you went down to a central space, which was the market, and things were arranged there in such a way that there was interaction between the viewers and these evoked ways of life, showing how all the members of the Teotihuacan culture interacted. The religious aspect was reflected there, the wise men who maintained the functioning of this society, but on the other hand, you saw what they consumed, how it was processed. It was something that helped you understand a world, but at the same time, they put up signs that said no Touch, because when you delve into this phenomenon the impulse is to participate, to touch, to take you to the experience, but there is the traditional part that you cannot touch, you cannot pass by, but there is a reason for this and that is that what is being presented must be protected.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

In the case of an object of study such as the urban popular market seen from an art museum, it is even more complex because, unlike Teotihuacan, this was a relatively ephemeral contemporary culture. These urban popular markets are forms of visual and material culture, forms of culture of today which, moreover, are set up and taken down in the city. It is true that the construction systems in these markets are very creative and come to form a phenomenon of material and visual culture.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Exceptional

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

For anthropological study, undoubtedly, but those tarpaulins, those things invented by the men and women of the market, all those unique setups, ways of arranging things in space, ways of hanging objects—it is in itself a form of installation art, but at the same time, they are ephemeral. It is true that some of these markets are built in old, abandoned buildings, like the Quinta Crespo market, where one has a masonry architecture within which the urban popular market is inserted, as if attached, as if inserted, as if scrutinized. But this architectural modality is not the dominant one; it is subsidiary. In reality, the majority of these urban popular markets are formed by autonomous, self-managed construction systems, invented by the market men and women themselves—systems based sometimes on tubes, other times on wood—which are self-built to the point that they can be assembled and disassembled in the same day. They are generally open spaces in the city that are enabled and made available for these markets, which unfold within them. Sometimes they are the entrances to small towns, other times the streets themselves, with a mostly modular and improvised character, they are set up and taken down, sometimes they remain set up for weeks, sometimes for a month, occasionally for a year, but usually in many cases they are taken down on the same day.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

There you have the Chacao market which has several floors with the products classified and you go directly to what interests you but the infrastructure is maintained and it is always open in this there is no improvisation but a rotation.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

That’s true, but the Chacao market falls under the modality I mentioned earlier: the popular market embedded within a masonry architectural structure. Certainly, these elements occur—the use of porticoes, for example, or covered urban walkways—but as I said, it’s not the most common, at least it wasn’t back then. The autonomous market was the dominant one, whose construction system was entirely invented by the vendor, who created artifactual forms that were themselves treasures of material and visual culture. The Coche Market is a hybrid in this sense; on the one hand, it has large warehouses that are indeed made of masonry, but it also has a whole open-air display. Even the trucks that transport the merchandise are used for several hours as spaces for exhibiting and showcasing. But most vendors don’t have this type of building; instead, they are self-managed, artisanal constructions—a display of craftsmanship.

What I experienced there were healers, who link physical and spiritual health in what they sell and who are full of religious items, sellers of traditional herbs, cart drivers, for example, or the mobile street vendor.

They are like ideal types of approach to the different forms of subjectivity that define the popular market and other principles that I discovered such as dialogicity, polyphony, both in the literal sense, you have bells, you have town criers, you bring a recording of a market and it is unmistakable, it is a unique sound that is polyphonic, but that polyphony is also cultural, now from the point of view of cultural analysis it is a summary of multivocality, many voices, symbolic interaction is very important in these markets, but also intersubjectivity, the intersubjective give and take under face-to-face relationships, extraverbal expression is also important in them, gestures, I mean there in the places spatially speaking, in the scene of the fieldwork.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Regarding these situational or interactive logics, I think of Turkish markets where haggling is crucial; if you don’t haggle, you’re looked down upon. This is a key point to begin studying how a market functions between owners and consumers. It’s one of the fundamental characteristics that allows you to start understanding and to differentiate the forms of exchange, where, as you mentioned, there’s a spiritual element. It’s not just about economic exchange, but also the visual culture of that exchange and what they exchange: the textiles, the ways they store grains, the polyphony that I had never considered, all of which make up this vast and fascinating phenomenon.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

It has great importance in culture; almost all cities have emerged from markets.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

All

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

The market is at the origin of the city, the anthropology of the primordial, where the market scene originates, is important here. On the one hand, the market is a descendant of the gift; on the one hand, there is what Marcel Mauss called the Plotach; on the other hand, when currency did not yet exist, there was exchange, the primordial barter. Malinowski himself, by the way, his concept of the Kula, we cannot overlook here. This concept of the Kula is so central to Argonauts of the Western Pacific that it’s difficult to imagine why Malinowski didn’t title his book “The Kula.” The Kula is a mode of symbolic indigenous exchange. All those voyages and expeditions that set sail in canoes and that form the backbone of the book were nothing other than expressions of the Kula as a form of commercial exchange. They were all organized as exchanges, in which some groups brought certain objects, artifacts, crafts, collages, bracelets to other groups, and exchanged them for what the other groups produced. They were forms In the earliest forms of commercial exchange, when there was still no currency, what was exchanged was logically the symbolic: social pedigree or the status of the group symbolized in the objects, the symbolic representations of the group, the cultural distinction of the groups, the ways in which the groups distinguish themselves by what they harvest or do not harvest, by what they know how to do, by what they treasure as their artisanal tradition, or by what these objects symbolize for them, by their differences. This is how the market participated in the very structure of daily life. This importance of barter in culture is not the only factor for understanding any contemporary form of symbolic exchange.

It is true that a symbolic producer can also make something that is not for sale, a craft or a ceramic, a carved door, something carved or anything that involves a tradition, it can be done without selling, but a cultural producer never finds a greater reciprocity in the way of showing it in order to continue producing it than when it is for sale.

But I would like to jump here to the third example or modality of what we are talking about regarding the museum in fieldwork and the implication that this has in a sense in this idea of ​​the museum inside and outside its borders or its limits, but also of the eye of the museum in fieldwork. I was saying that we have here three modalities: yours, the archaeology museum in relation to the open-air boulevard where people can see the archaeologist doing the excavations; mine, just explained, of the relationship between the art museum and the popular market; but finally the third modality would be that of Quetzal Eugenio Castañeda.

Let’s look at the case of Quetzil. Here we have, on the one hand, the Mayan artisans who live in the communities today but are descendants of the ancient Maya to whom the monuments presented by the museum in the archaeological park’s program belonged. These Mayan communities of today live off the tourist markets that their own cultural past generates for tourists, and this encourages the continuation of the production that preserves the tradition, preventing its extinction. For example, the tradition of wood carving or batik, passed down from generation to generation, is transmitted through generations.

Without this scene where the Mayan artisan and the tourist who comes to consume an image of the ancient world of the artisan’s ancestors meet, these communities today could not reproduce themselves, they would not have the resources and the tradition would diminish, or become extinct, seeing it here in your sense of what you call an economic infrastructure.

The market is undoubtedly of tremendous importance; it is one of the most prolific areas for cultural analysis, but what is peculiar about the reading or the approach here is that we are asking ourselves all this also from the perspective of the museum.

The case in the Quetzil modality is different from the case in my modality with respect to the consideration of the concept of museum and the museum itself in that relationship with fieldwork and in this case the relationship between museum, market and communities or spatial sites.

In Quetzil’s case, as an anthropologist he is not the curator of the museum we are talking about, but he arrives as an anthropologist to that scene, a scene which itself in its characteristics and nature presupposes the museum because that archaeological park where the Mayan artisan and the tourist meet, and where the market takes place, is at the same time the scene of a museum, but Quetzil arrives there, he is not the curator of that museum.

In my case, or in my approach, I am indeed a curator of this particular museum, the very question of the anthropological study I am developing as the museum’s curator, and therefore it presupposes issues of museology and museography. In my project, we are talking about a museum curator-researcher facing a contemporary art project, but from the perspective of the question the museum poses to itself in relation to a popular urban market, encompassing both movement outward from the museum and, conversely, movement inward toward the museum.

Alessandro Morganti Debra.

You were doing empiricism

Abdel Hernández San Juan;

That’s right, it was in that project.

But the case of Quetzil is a different model in the sense that the museum we’re talking about here isn’t the museum where the anthropologist works. He’s not a museum curator, not an anthropologist who works for the museum. He’s an American anthropologist who comes to do fieldwork in Yucatán, but upon entering a scene—in this case, the equinox, like the scene in his video about the equinox, his video about this, which is about the projection of the serpent on the pyramid—it’s, on the one hand, from the museum’s perspective, a program in the archaeological park that involves tourism and the relationship between that tourism and the Mayan community. He did fieldwork in this scene. The museum here is involved in the sense that the fieldwork you’re doing is being done in the museum’s spaces, at the intersection between the museum, which has an inside and an outside, the internal museographic space between walls on one side, but it also has the archaeological park, which is exterior, under the open sky, as a scene where they meet. the actors of an event

The museum is situated in a natural space, which attracts tourists and the local community who come to sell their material culture. When you see these scenes, you see the entrances to the paths leading to the pyramids, the access points, filled with popular urban markets of the same type I studied here in Venezuela, with Mayan vendors displaying textiles, clothing, many painted wooden carvings, many batiks, which are woven and painted fabrics—craft traditions that unfold in the access areas. You have these markets selling chat moles, quetzals, and you have tourists passing by or buying, and you have people sitting on the grass in front of the pyramids in a kind of religious procession, waiting for the magical religious moment of the serpent’s appearance. Some of these people stand and perform rituals; people from Canada, from Mississippi, from Cincinnati, hold hands and form processions. You have to see that strong connection between Mayan communities who live from this market, which is about their past, which is, incidentally, an archaeological market about their dying culture. relatively, because it has syncretized, it has hybridized.

So we have here three modalities of the museum inside and outside its borders: mine, Quetzil’s, and Alex’s

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

My experience was quite interesting, although when I started working in the cemetery, which is the topic here, in terms of that outdoor part of the archaeological museum, I did it purely as a technical matter. I hadn’t yet considered the why, where we were going, or what was going to be done with it. At first, it was just rigorous excavation using techniques that could later give us data when we took the materials to the laboratory. We worked with geological samples to determine the age of the bones we found. We worked comparatively on different burial methods: stab wounds, fetal positions, many types, which could give us an idea of ​​social position. This was also reinforced by whether or not certain material elements were buried nearby. Some were just skeletons, and that determined a social status. On the other hand, as we were excavating, people started approaching us because the characteristics of this cemetery of the archaeological museum are that it is next to a boulevard where a flow of people pass by and they stopped to see how and what we were doing, they asked us and we explained, etc.

Then it occurred to us, why not create an open-air museum with on-site, real-time research? We developed the idea, continued the excavations, and many questions arose about the types of trade these people might have engaged in, where they came from, their age chronologically, and something that particularly caught our attention was their height. It was even thought that they were descendants of pygmies, to the point that the museum brought in specialists from the Dominican Republic in congenital diseases. This gentleman, a physical anthropologist, arrived and, over time, determined that they weren’t descended from pygmies, but rather had a condition that prevented them from growing taller. This led to a new problem: growth. We had to delve into biology, molecular biology, and conduct DNA studies. We then began to explore the idea of ​​interdisciplinarity within the excavations, but this, in turn, was reflected in the reactions of outsiders who asked, “Why are we also this tall?” They drew parallels between what they were seeing and their own experiences.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

How did people gain access to the museum?

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Platforms were put up where people could walk along, and then below where we were excavating, boards were put down so as not to disturb the geological layer. This allowed us to clear the area, but at the same time people could see how we were excavating. There were people who helped us who were part of the museum in an educational way; they came or facilitated it.

Later, other elements were also discovered that allowed us to find many things in the bones. This physical anthropologist determined many things; I won’t go into details, but he did find a range of diseases that occurred at the time, just as tuberculosis or the Black Death killed us at one point. This study was done as part of cultural anthropology and the influence of biology on the explanation of human development plus the sociocultural development of these peoples.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

Was it later, after you did the fieldwork for your book?

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

That’s something else entirely. The fieldwork that I turned into my book came later; the museum project came before that.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

That museum split off; was it not related to your subsequent fieldwork? You mentioned that in that case of your fieldwork you didn’t have to excavate, but then who provided you with the material you investigated?

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Of course, the museum participated by giving us some pieces and vessels, but the museum itself, in the spatial and physical sense of something outdoors, was before the fieldwork, when we were doing the bone excavations, that is, years before the fieldwork aimed at what later became my book about the hunters and gatherers of Monte Cano in the Paraguaná Peninsula.

We also found shellfish, which indicated that they came from the coast to the site. Between one side and the other there is a mountain range, the San Luis mountain range that separates the state of Lara from Falcón, but finding that mollusk that comes from the sea on this other side tells us that there was communication, that there was an exchange or that they went back and forth, so we presume that there was a commercial exchange in the fishing sector and surely on the coast there were certain things that came from that area.

There is a very characteristic pottery from that area that is like a vessel with three legs, and these are designed and the designs can be diversified according to their origin; this pottery also had multiple functions for storing water, for grains, for storing food.

Abdel Hernández San Juan:

So, was he at the museum doing fieldwork?

Alessandro Morganti Debra: Not exactly for my book

To clarify, the Quivor museum focused on a cemetery and its surroundings, while Monte Cano contained tools and lithic artifacts. These ancient communities in the cemetery were sedentary and agricultural, whereas the people in the Paraguayan area where I worked were hunters, but they had contact with the coast through trade and exchange of marine resources.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

Where was the field research material for their book if they didn’t have to do any excavations?

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

It was right there on the surface of the earth; there was no need to look for it underground, because it was on the surface as a result of geological erosion. The material was scattered throughout the earth; we found it on the surface.

My quarry caught our attention because it was the raw material for quartz stone. We found arrows in progress, and many flakes, which are the places where burins and punches are produced. There was another area that was like the finished products section, which were the arrows. I can show you something.

What you see here is a sketch from a completed date. I carved this one experimentally to understand what types of techniques they had used, but I will make another video where we will talk about their pieces.

I would like to resume the discussions with Abdel from the perspective of the topics we want to elucidate, such as subjective migration or migratory subjectivity, as the final product of the study we are working on. But at this moment, regarding the place of the museum in anthropology, I would like to make a sort of digression to talk a little about the technical aspects of pre-Hispanic, Paleolithic archaeology, the archaeology where we study lithics, that is, those technological manifestations that our ancestors developed for daily life, their ways of life, their cultural identities, etc., etc., which are reflected both in the manufacture of these artifacts and in the tracing of the raw materials that were used, because in this way we can determine the exchange routes that took place between groups.

On one hand, we analyze the type of rock used, such as flint. In Mesopotamian and South America, within obsidian, we have one that is black and another that is green. The ones I have seen are the green ones that come from Chilean Patagonia. I have not investigated the origins of the volcanoes that produce green obsidian.

As for the black one, it is found in the Central American region, which means that this stone has a volcanic origin; it crystallizes and is much more effective than a sharp iron blade.

Studying these characteristics can give us clues about exchange networks, as I mentioned, but also about the mobility of cultural groups on the continent.

Manufacturing techniques are used to shape the stone, such as percussion, which is striking one stone with another harder one. Here we refer to the moment when the raw material is about to be transformed to obtain what would be equivalent to a hammer or percussion tool. We must also consider that there are many varieties and therefore that this is also within the classification that will be obtained for a final conclusion. Within the universal sample of the excavation that I have done and the collection of the material itself, when there is percussion, it will generate waste, which are called flakes.

I’m going back to this point to give it a bit more substance; that is, regarding archaeology, I’ve been questioning the approach to European Paleolithic archaeology, how it’s conceptualized, and within the framework of social anthropology in which I was educated.

Paleolithic archaeology focuses on the study of the oldest human societies, from the emergence of the genus Homo to the end of the last Ice Age. Within the framework of social anthropology, this branch of archaeology is not limited to simply excavating and classifying the tools or remains found, but seeks to reconstruct, most importantly, the social life and, more specifically, the way of life of each group that occupied a specific territory anywhere in the world.

Of course, these are extinct groups. The relationship between Paleolithic archaeology and strict social anthropology stems from the fact that Paleolithic archaeology falls under the umbrella of anthropology as a subdiscipline, utilizing its theories and methods. While archaeology might be perceived as merely technical, these are actually used later to explain, through social and cultural anthropology, the lives of these hunter-gatherers and sedentary or agricultural societies. Going beyond material objects, social anthropology focuses on understanding how societies function, their structures, relationships, behaviors, and so on. Paleolithic archaeology applies these ideas to interpret findings and answer questions such as social organization: how were the groups structured? Were they bands of hunters with defined roles? Did subsistence patterns exist? What strategies did they use to obtain food? Did they hunt large animals? Gather plants, or both? We should also consider their belief systems because, ultimately, we are all part of a whole within nothingness, as we have already discussed. Abdel in previous videos and we consider that from the burials, from the rock art that in that case Abdel deals with as an art critic within contemporary art but tries to make connections with the rock art of extinct societies, is that we can develop these cultural analyses.

Chapter VII-

Anthropology and Art Theory.

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan and Alessandro Morganti Debra

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

Throughout these videos we have been able to see that there are intersections of various types, both methodological and epistemological, between anthropology and art, or between archaeology as a science that involves problems of interpretation and art theory and art criticism as a science that presupposes interpretation, reading and cultural analysis based on signs and texts.

In both cases, it is therefore a matter of the interpretation of symbols, objects, icons, images. In the case of archaeology, as we have seen in the examples that Alex has explained to us, we have the interpretation in the form of the clue, which, as Alex says, are not only vestiges, remains or ruins of non-existent civilizations, but through comparative methods, it is possible to reconstruct what he calls “ways of life” of a given culture.

In the case of art theory, it is not clearly a matter of referring to a culture other than the archaeologist’s own, which tends to be the usual or most frequent approach in archaeological and anthropological studies. Although we sometimes also have archaeological studies of cultures that are the same as the archaeologist’s own, or their expressions of some of the ancient components that participate in the current composition of their culture, in art theory, on the other hand, it is not about reconstructing what a certain society was like in the extinct past, but about the interpretive reconstruction of cultural heritages that refer, in those symbols, those ciboloi or images that we are interpreting, to possible narratives of experience, or to understandings of the contemporary culture in which those works of art, that artist, or in this case, the critic’s own culture, are embedded. But as we can see in both cases, it is about cultural analysis based on the interpretation of signs.

Here we are faced with the interdisciplinarity between archaeology and art, between anthropology and art; now, precisely this problem that we are establishing, I believe, creates a new or emerging field, which we could call the new field of anthropology and art, in which the project that has brought us together for the effort we are making is developed.

In fact, the idea for this work actually arose from an experience that brought us together spontaneously through a mutual friend, Carmen Michelena, a Spanish artist who has lived in Venezuela since childhood. She was creating an autobiographical installation related to narratives of migratory subjectivity that encompassed not only the psychological dimension of the individual but also the cultural dimension of the migratory experience. Our interdisciplinary question when we spoke with Carmen was how to deal with the fact that the artist had to make iconographic and visual decisions for her work when the starting point was that the work would speak or express, would focus on resonances of the migratory experience process, and dimensions linked to autobiographical narratives of experience related to that migratory process.

When we discussed this with Carmen Alex, she spoke of the need for an interdisciplinary perspective that, in this case, involved the relationship with psychology. Why psychology? Because it dealt with the subjective universe or the world of experiences of an individual subject, a person and their life experiences. But at the same time, for us, in our cultural analysis, it wasn’t strictly psychology taken literally, because it was a cultural analysis focused on a person, not to study their psychological or internal world, but to conduct cultural analyses.

On the other hand, unlike most anthropological studies, which are mostly situated around phenomena of collectivity, our study did not limit itself to the analysis of a collective phenomenon. Rather, we aimed to arrive at certain conclusions beyond the individual, but through the filter of reading or interpreting an individual experience. Furthermore, this individual experience would not be interpreted as in psychology, based on a direct intrusion into the psychological world expressed in narratives, as occurs in psychoanalysis. Instead, what would be interpreted in this case would be the artistic visual productions in signs and plastic forms of a work of art that mediated between that subject and culture—that is, subject, language, and culture. Therefore, the mode of interpretation and reading here presupposes or requires starting from art criticism, and specifically from a semiological modality of art criticism focused on the interpretation of signs. Thus, we had a triple interdisciplinarity: semiology or art criticism, psychology, and cultural anthropology—a very novel interdisciplinarity.

It should be noted that cognitive anthropology had already explored this intersection between anthropology and psychology. Of course, those studies prioritized the idea that cultural systems are systems of cognition and learning, where the mind plays a crucial role in how a culture understands and interprets things. The perspective we are introducing is also novel in this respect compared to cognitive anthropology. While interdisciplinarity with psychology is a precedent, we were studying based on an individual subject, who is also an artist, and we are doing so through the interpretation of their visual works. This is rooted in contemporary art from within, connecting it to an individualized subject.

The other interdisciplinary point between anthropology and art that we have identified is the museum, museum theory. This unites both disciplines in an incredible way. Art is intimately linked to the museum as a form of cultural memory, to collecting, and to representation, while on the other hand, in the social sciences, no other discipline has such a significant relationship with the concept of the museum as anthropology and archaeology.

So we have one, interpretation and hermeneutics of symbols, signs, icons, two the narratives of experience around the subjectivities in relation to the collection, what I have called the importance of the relationship between the self and the collection for cultural analysis, finally, the museum.

Let us then turn to the relationship between the self and the heritage to define this dimension of the person’s internal or subjective world, the narrative that interprets the artist and the heritage as the cultural category that is expressed in the self that allows us to analyze culture by moving from the individual to the collective.

After this brief introduction, I would like to say that my specific experience has always been through art. For example, in 1998, I gave a lecture at the Hispanic Cultural Institute of Houston, coordinated by an Argentinian psychologist, Diana Gland. It was titled “Living Between Cultures,” and it was so well received by Mexican Americans and Argentinian Americans who had lived in the United States for decades that we held a year-long seminar on the topic, which I also taught in 1998. They were very interested in this dilemma of being divided between their culture of origin and their new culture. When they return, they no longer feel like they belong; they don’t feel Mexican or Argentinian. But they do feel that way, and the new culture they are in makes them feel like natives of other cultures, regardless of the time spent adapting to the new culture.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

It’s like a process where a new form of culture is created, linked to the environment, economic conditions, psychological patterns, etc., etc. What helps to connect all of this is that they always share two common points: human activity, which is very complex and has existed since the dawn of rational life—in quotes, I mean rational when humans organize themselves through the development of certain techniques and technologies for survival, which are composed or integrated through a magical-religious world; the very reproduction of the species develops, and that’s what makes the two points converge. I’ve always focused a bit on the past, Abdel on the present. He works with artists, but these artists are embedded in society; they aren’t isolated. They live in a community with a collective subjectivity, and the specific action is to determine how to rescue and understand the artist’s activity within the context of the exhibition the artist is presenting, and the historical-psychological methodological explanation of the work, which ultimately gives the artist a greater understanding of their own culture.

That is, to understand it not unconsciously but to give it a certain rationale and the reason for its specific creation, why this one and not another, why at this moment and not at another moment; the strokes of a painter determine a lot of communication, a lot of information, texture, lines, thicknesses, these are variables that one has to rescue and again from interdisciplinarity to explain the phenomenon, which is what we want people to be able to understand: their original culture and the culture in which they are embedded at this moment

There’s a feedback loop between the artist and the public. The artist has a story, the public has a story, and they need to intersect. It’s like in a movie, because you cry when you see a scene because it hits a nerve, something the viewer is moved by because they’ve experienced it, and it reinforces that experience. Similarly, in painting, you look at yourself and sometimes you’re transported back to things you don’t know why they come to mind, and they trigger feelings like crying, joy, or feeling good—a whole range of variables, but they do stir things up. So that’s what we’re trying to develop. I don’t know if it’s something new.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

I do think so. On the one hand, we have the understanding that the interpretation of a work of art, when writing about art, is a form of cultural analysis. It means understanding that the art critic has to work like an archaeologist, to a certain extent, because it’s not about reconstructing a non-existent society, but rather starting from something latent or unmanifest in a given morphology, towards meanings that are not explicit. That is to say, there are meanings that are perhaps not immediately apparent, because you can’t say that in this work you are seeing the meaning is this and not that other one.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

You’ll find out.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

You have to proceed layer by layer, uncovering levels that constantly reveal something not entirely present. The icon you’re seeing, reading, and interpreting might be painted in a certain way, as you say. The gestures and strokes can provide information about what the icon is, but that doesn’t mean its meaning can be grasped or determined as something definitive and unequivocal. Just as you can’t define the meaning of a word in the dictionary, how can you find the definitive meaning of a work of art? This meaning and not that one? And yet, despite this, you can read a work of art in such a way that, as you progress, reading clues, you can establish a semantic reconstruction that reaches ever newer layers, discovering ever more layers of meaning, new layers of significance. So, there is an archaeological dimension to interpretation, even if it isn’t literally archaeology in the sense that you’re not going to reconstruct another society objectively considered. But I think that from the point of view of cultural analysis, the interdisciplinary aspect is important. We are positioning ourselves both towards art theory and towards archaeology,

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

And sociology

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

Because, conversely, it also seems novel to me for archaeology and anthropology, the understanding that ultimately, despite the presuppositions of realism that generally omit the reality that you are working with vestiges that are nothing more than decontextualized signs in a way that is not accessible except through that reconstructive process, acquiring a greater awareness of the work of imagination that this entails and the work of interpretation that is being done, is crucial; with this I am not necessarily denying objectivity.

 Chapter VIII-

Subjectivity in the Human and Social Sciences: Between Anthropology and Art Criticism

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan and Alessandro Morganti Debra 

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

Returning to the point, I would like to emphasize how, when archaeology moves towards the reconstruction of a society or culture according to an idea of ​​objectivity, that is, presupposing the ideologies of realism, that this reconstruction can be more objective to the extent that it is more representational, it mitigates or diminishes the role of the interpretive aspect involved in working with signs and symbols that are fragments of totalities absent in that sign.

The ideologies of representation that underlie archaeological science diminish the primacy of that interpretive activity of signs, which in the case of art criticism takes center stage because there is no objectivity beyond that sign that can be reconstructed and that that representation reflects, but rather the cultural totalities that are beyond the work we are interpreting could only be reached or evoked through meanings and senses.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

We are working on two parallel parameters in time, past and future, but they relate to science itself; in both cases it is the same.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

Agreed. It’s the same science in both cases, but we are very advanced in this; very few, if any, have noticed it.

From the perspective of the assumptions of representation, whether we speak of the past or the future, the presupposition that representation refers us to a reality that is itself objectively existing is present in both cases. If we are talking about a realistic genre in art, for example, a landscape, and not surrealism, we are assuming that this landscape refers to an objectively existing reality, independent of the language that represents it. Realism, as an ideology that presupposes that language can represent this objectivity of reality, is stronger in archaeology and anthropology than in art. This is because, although realistic genres exist in art, and students must learn to represent reality, being a symbolic phenomenon less subject to an idea of ​​reality, it is less bound by representationalist ideologies. Therefore, the emphasis on the component of interpretation and reading when interpreting the sign that is the work of art has greater primacy in art criticism than in archaeology.

But ultimately, archaeology interprets signs, clues, traces, vestiges, images, icons, just like art criticism, and vice versa. Although we do not reconstruct objective totalities such as this or that society existing in this or that period now extinct or nonexistent, we are capable of finding cultural senses and meanings for the collections of a certain cultural totality that is otherwise interpreted, and in both cases, we develop cultural analysis.

It is true and crucial to understand that science is involved. But this does not mean that it is not important, both in the field of archaeology and in the discussion of this interdisciplinary intersection, to focus more on that imagination, on that interpretive work inherent in archaeology—not to diminish its objectivity, not to distort the objective referent, or to make the result less objective, but to enrich the methodological imagination regarding how the cultural representation that archaeology offers works. Because it is not the same to treat interpretive or linguistic phenomena as mere means to represent an objective reality, ignoring that it is an interpretive activity with a language and centered around signs. You do not obtain the same result, nor the same way of representing culture, if you ignore language and if you place it in the foreground.

We saw it in Malinowski, a canoe that you’re seeing in the objective world, the moment when they move the log and place it in the village’s Baku, and then you see the Toliguaga performing a ritual for it to go out to sea. If you’re seeing language as a mere means to represent a reality, then you simply miss countless things that could be avenues for reading and interpretation there in the fieldwork, because simply by seeing them as a means you want to see the reality to which it is transported or in which it is enveloped, and you overlook that this object is itself legible and interpretable both in the fieldwork and in the table and laboratory work. If you are more sensitive to the symbolic components of archaeology, you are better prepared to enrich a cultural representation that will ultimately be of a world that we assume to be objective but that in the end is a cultural representation of that world.

So if we have problems of exegesis, of interpretation, of the hermeneutics of the symbolic and of signs in archaeology just as we do in art theory and criticism, and conversely we have archaeology in the interpretation of art just as we do in archaeology itself, it’s simply that this hasn’t been given enough attention—I would say practically not at all. This is something we are discussing, if not for the first time, it is probably one of the few times this aspect has been approached and attempts have been made to delve into this field. It is an unexplored field in which very little has been done; in that sense, it is a novel field. But also, objectively speaking, in the sociocultural context of existing institutions—in this case, universities or museums—where art and anthropology are practiced, the emergence that interdisciplinarity generates presupposes a sociocultural novelty in the way of reading and understanding the cultural field itself.

If the cultural analysis we are exploring can be developed through these intersections, then the way we represent the socioculturality of the field of humanities and social sciences can also be enriched, and can go in one direction or another.

I believe that in both directions we have something new, but at the same time, with the exception of the moment when, through cognitivism, anthropology approaches psychology, which, as I say, is to take elements from psychology that allow us to understand why there is a certain mentality in the culture that makes things mean certain things to the native and not others, things in one way and not another, this one that we are proposing through the example of Carmen and the installation, is indeed new because it is taking more seriously the possibility offered by micro-methodology.

Instead of starting from a macro paradigm—demographic, population, and economic data—we should adopt a micro-methodology as our paradigm. What relevance can face-to-face interaction have in developing a cultural analysis that ultimately involves reflections on cultural issues? In other words, should we start from objective data about a reality with which we have no empirical contact other than the data itself? Or, conversely, should we start from the empirical material provided by what we have—face-to-face interactions—which can then be compared?

And in this case of studies based on contemporary art, where we have a creative individual, we go even further to the micro level than in traditional ethnomethodology, because we are not studying interactions, situations, or micro-scenes of social groups, but an individual with their psychological world, in this case a life story, a trajectory, an autobiographical life experience, narratives of experience, and more importantly, signs of a work. But here, perhaps the key point, since the terrain is the narratives of experience of a concrete subjectivity—both Carmen’s and the one we have seen in our own, in our own experience, mine and hers—is that we go there to that realm of the psychological, which is formed by the experiences lived by the subjectivity of the person and their biography, but not to do a psychoanalysis as pure psychology would. It’s not to study her issues with her father or mine with my mother, or Carmen’s; it’s to do cultural analyses that can also have a therapeutic effect, but different from that of psychology.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

When you approach the study to determine x behavior over time, both psychology and the work of art are capturing an individual act that is not deviated from the past.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

In the case of art, it’s even more interesting. I can narrate my life story, and I have no doubt I’d find something interesting there, but no more interesting than if what I’m interpreting is a work of visual art. I gave a lecture at the Hispanic Cultural Institute of Houston, as I mentioned before, with Mexicans and Argentinians who had been living in the United States for decades. I had only been living in Texas for two years at that time. They asked to continue the topic, and a private course was organized that ran for a year. I spent a year working with migrants in Houston, and that experience wasn’t so tied to art. There, we were directly addressing autobiographical issues; everyone was sharing their life experience. It seemed like psychological therapy, but it wasn’t, because we were doing cultural analysis. It took a lot of effort to develop an anthropological cultural analysis using only autobiography and narratives of experience as a point of reference. It’s easier through art.

In the case of art, it’s easier for me because the symbolic act is mediated by an expression made by the artist; you don’t have to extract the person’s history, but rather the artist is already predetermined to create something that expresses their relationship to it.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

It’s like sharpening a crayon, it’s ready.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

On the other hand, the person who hasn’t done it before has to start narrating for the first time. Furthermore, the artist offers a variety and diversity. In Carmen’s installation, she achieved a result with those travel suitcases, those dresses from the Franco era, those fabrics that belonged to her mother, those videos, and photographs of family members. It was perhaps a somewhat literal approach in the sense of seeking objects that evoked personal, autobiographical memories, including photos of her mother.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

What really caught my attention was that Carmen reconstructed the Franco era, the dictatorship, family letters, the role of women, the morality of the family, men’s rights over women, and then suddenly jumped to America, to Venezuela, where Pérez Jiménez was in power. These periods, which could have been contrasting, were diluted because the ideologies were very similar, and both were dictators. This was an aspect that formed the backbone of her existence: ideology. One grasps ideology from the moment she graduated as a historian until she broke with history and began to make art, but in all of it there is an ideological element, which many people overlook.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

There is a Paraguayan artist whose link you sent me who has worked on the theme of migration, and I have two examples, also women, who are the only two I have known. One is a Cuban-American born in the United States, raised and educated in the United States, her children are American, married to a native-born man. She does not know her parents’ culture of origin directly, but only through her home. She always had Spanish in her home life; she is Hispanic. The customs, the ethics, the spirituality, the ethos, many elements of Hispanicity have been part of her affective life, her cultural memory, her semantic memory, as Stephen Tyler calls it, the passein, the memory of the body and its passions, which is not remembering a scene or a concrete thing but enters through the semantic memory of the body: olfactory, tactile, etc.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

When there was a stimulus, that memory highlights it, but outside of a particular general context.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

She has all that background in her emotional life, but she also has that dual dilemma in her cultural makeup, and she did an exhibition about it called “Cultural Bodies,” in which I was very involved and was able to see the whole process until the exhibition was finished, and the catalog was mine. It included things about weaving that her mother had taught her, things she drew from her autobiographical family history. But then she began to move beyond the autobiographical field and did another one, in which I also participated, called “Sonorous Silences.” This one was about the experience of the sea in Texas versus her family memories, the sea coming from islands surrounded by the sea.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

The metaphor is beautiful.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

The autobiographical pieces were two-dimensional, where I worked extensively with collage, mixed media, printed photos, and engraving. In this other case, it was three-dimensional, using recordings of ocean sounds, videos, and photographs of the sea. I transformed a space, filling it with sand so the viewer had to remove their shoes. All those photographs I took of the Gulf of Mexico were printed on jute sacks and fabrics related to the body, creating atmospheres or photographic environments. It also included ocean sounds and images projected onto textured surfaces—a beautiful installation about the sea through the subjective lens of Texas. It’s a very intimate and personal exhibition because it connects my experience of the sea as a Texan with my memories of the sea in Cuba through my parents and my imagination. It’s a moving work, as you say, in its emotional resonance, very sublime and poetic.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

I can tell you about a personal experience I had with the seas. There was a time when I was a huge fan of Turner, you know, he paints the sea a lot. My family comes from a place in France, on the English Channel, where I spent my childhood. This channel is a very strong sea with a very peculiar smell, iodine. When I saw Turner’s works in northern France, or when I was in London, I would disconnect. I didn’t know if I was in the gallery or if I had actually been transported to my body memory. It stirred up my entire childhood; all the images came like a movie. I didn’t know if I was in reality or dreaming, a jumble of sensations that at one point made me realize what was happening to me. A friend asked me.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

Turner is very strong and ahead of his time

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

It took me back to my childhood when I used to go for walks along the coast with my grandmother.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

Something similar happened to us in a curatorial project I did of seven exhibitions. The project I had about markets at the Alejandro Otero Museum, with the set designer, we created as an experimental anthropological museum of popular markets, and I took it and exhibited it at Rice University in Houston, Texas. We created a museum that was a reconstruction of the market, the era, the clothing; I wanted the museography to have those characteristics of market culture. We had an anthropology student from the University of Houston come, and we had a conversation, and we were recording, and she told us that it reminded her of when she used to go with her grandmother to the small markets in Guatemala. This one was Venezuelan, but there is a certain universality in these markets: the sounds of the little bells, the street vendors, the animals. The market is polyphonic, not only in the literal, sonic sense, but from the point of view of cultural and social voices. It is the opposite of an omniscient or all-encompassing totality, as I mentioned on another occasion; it is a superposition of many voices. I see connections with carnival, although it is different, but from a symbolic point of view

Going back to Cristina, the connection you’ve made across the sea with your own experience is very interesting.

There is another experience with migratory subjectivity that I did with Surpik Angelini, daughter of Armenian emigrants, her mother American, her father Armenian, but she was born in Venezuela and trained here at the Faculty of Architecture, but she married an Italian cardiologist and went to Houston and the children were born there, she has also lived this dilemma, she has a longing but at the same time although she wants that connection with Venezuelan culture and seeks it and feels it, Venezuelans do not treat her that way when she comes.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Like the case of Cipriano

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

That’s right, although Cipriano was already established when he went to London, Surpik left very young.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

He says, “I come to Venezuela and every time I get surprises, but I see all the changes.”

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

We even talked about it even though he left as an adult; it’s not the same as you here, or my son Marcel in the United States, or Surpik.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

“I am in England and I am a foreigner,” Cipriano said, “there is a change but unconsciously there is a wall that says you do not belong here.”

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

You end up not belonging anywhere

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Me neither, but that’s what makes migratory subjectivity so fascinating.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

I believe—and this is an analysis that perhaps goes a bit too far, but I consider it assertive—that contemporary, industrial, advanced, late capitalism, whatever we call it, has reached a point as a consequence of the effects that consumer culture has had on forms of cultural subjectivity. This was already present from the earliest forms of industrial capitalism, what Marxism called commodity fetishism, not in the political or ideological sense, but in the sense of cultural analysis. If you have a culture in which commodities occupy such a prominent place in how the imaginary is configured, based on commodity consumption, if there is indeed commodity fetishism, this has an effect on subjectivity. Therefore, there must be forms of culture expressed in modes of material culture—of the symbolic, the visual, even the artistic—that bring with them specific modes of subjectivity related to this fetishistic way of relating to commodities. For example, I’ll give just one example: this fetishistic way of relating to… Merchandise, in the anthropological sense, is what is called reification, which is kitsch as a form of visual culture. It is a mode of culture linked to decoration, adornment, and the way spaces are treated, based on the consumption of a visual culture that has been authorized by the mass media and by consumption and advertising. It is a way in which popular culture appropriates the culture of consumption and re-cultivates it from a lived and aesthetic imaginary. Here we have an example of the material and symbolic expression of a culture resulting from commodity fetishism.

Well, in a similar mode of cultural analysis, I consider that advanced capitalism has reached such a point of free market and decentering of worldviews, of the impossibility of totalizing narratives to which advertising tends as a result of the same iconographic and visual fragmentation, that cultural subjectivity is experiencing a nomadization. The culture of capitalism today is essentially nomadic, even when that individual is a native in his own land, let’s say a native American. Living in a society with these characteristics, his symbolic images are being permeated by decentering that nomadizes culture and cultural identity.

All the images they might have of a sense of land or their cultural roots, for example, those of Native Texans, are exposed to the homogenizing consequences of technology and consumerism, where, for instance, cultural roots in Texas are lost or dispersed. There are artists in Texas who explore or express these complexities, such as Forres Prince, Tracy Hicks, and Mel Chin, and there are others who express them from the perspective of migrant subjectivity, such as Surpik Angelini and Maria Cristina Jadick.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

It’s like a brain reprogramming

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

Migratory subjectivity, for reasons that do not stem from the economic system but from the decentering experienced by the migrant—between rootedness and uprootedness, between what is one’s own and what is not, between forgetting and readaptation, between memory and reinvention—is inherently a type of subjectivity that must grapple with this decentering. Then, as the culture of capitalism in major centers like France and the United States is undergoing a period of nomadization of subjectivity due to technology and consumption, the diastolic figure that symbolizes migratory subjectivity becomes increasingly attractive; it’s almost fashionable. Because if I am a native in my own culture, experiencing a decentering of worldviews resulting from the fragmentation that is nomadizing my cultural references, and then a subject arrives who is an migrant and settles in my native culture—someone who is from here but not from here—this becomes theirs, but at the same time, they have a memory of Another thing is, it’s like the paradigm becoming something with a history of a mode of subjectivity; it’s like saying this seems to be what culture is going to experience anyway. When you talk about archaic peoples and the importance of migrations in those cultures, you said there was a migratory phenomenon behind it. This leads us to the analysis—perhaps we’re not being too optimistic—but to what extent does every form of stationary culture bring with it the reinventions inherent in migration? Could we say that a non-migratory culture exists? That is, would every stationary culture always be a form of migratory culture?

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

It could be, but I don’t think so.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

You say that there is such a thing as a purely static culture? Does it depend on time? For example, Venezuelan culture has been here for a very long time, for centuries, in this land. Therefore, there is an idiosyncrasy and a sense of belonging, an endogenous, emic sense of being Venezuelan. You feel what it means to be Venezuelan, to be Venezuelan-ness. But at the same time, it is formed by migrations. Everything here comes from somewhere, with the exception of the indigenous people, who represent the long-standing memory of being here from before. Everything else came from elsewhere, and we would have to consider to what extent the indigenous people themselves did not migrate.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

We would have to analyze the mixing of cultures that has contributed to new forms of social organization, to the adaptive forms of post-industrial capitalism.

I remembered a film by an American director that dealt with the problems of oil fields in the United States on Native American reservations. In the United States, everything underground is owned by the individual, unlike here where the state doesn’t own it. There was an Indigenous community that owned oil wells, but they were being exploited by white people. The idea was that this society, which had mixed with the white population, was subjected to a strategy by the whites to transculturate Indigenous culture—a kind of brainwashing—and incorporate them into the white culture so they could exploit them. But something goes wrong. Oil is no longer the Indigenous people’s ambition because they believed that with oil they would have a certain status within the political apparatus that made up the state. However, there’s a moment when an Indigenous woman, the mother of a woman married to a white man, dies. The mother discovers that her husband poisoned her, and the whole plot unfolds around this deception. In the end, the woman divorces her husband and begins to organize and… to reclaim all the old cultural traditions in order to expel the whites, and to make their own laws to reclaim their own cultural forms

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

There is something complex and contradictory about it; I am quite postmodernist in this regard, in terms of what postmodernism has implied for cultural representation. The American, the migrant from Europe, England, Ireland, who settled in the United States and has made America his own culture, when he questions his own cultural identity, has to resort to the idea of ​​what it means to be American and has to represent what he means when he says American. And when he tries to grasp the meaning of being American, he cannot, he cannot come to represent Americanness by excluding the Native American, firstly because the Native American is the authentic American, he is truly the native of America, secondly because it is the same territory, and it is the love for the same land.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

I disagree with that.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

It is the same geological, geographical land

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

But the meaning of land for an indigenous person is different than for a colonizer.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

Agreed, but both are Americans, and both have to ask themselves what it means to be American.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

As generations pass, then yes

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

What fills the answer to the question of what it means to be American, what it means in terms of feelings of cultural identity, is that the images don’t matter if they come from Native American culture or not. What matters is whether they can respond to that sense of what it is to be or feel American. If they are rich images capable of communicating this, then the images of the Native American end up being images of the white person, and vice versa. What I’m saying is that transculturation happens in both directions. It’s true that there is acculturation of the Native American, but white American culture begins to be transculturated by Native American culture. I’m not denying the value of a project that tries to preserve Native American languages ​​or safeguard a Native American arsenal, protect it, and help its survival. I’m not denying the importance of awareness of Indigenous cultural values, but it shouldn’t be a dogmatic thing that demands a pure state. Rather, it should grasp the meaning of transculturalism in both directions.

Alessandro Morganti Debra.

We can’t talk about purity. If you have your genome analyzed, it might show you have a Jewish gene. When migration occurs, that genetic heritage is transformed through cultural contact with other populations and technological advancements. The idea of ​​purity is absurd or utopian. It’s like when Hitler spoke of the Aryan race; even the Aryans had Jewish or African genes. Let’s go back further: the population includes Homo sapiens with Northeastern chromosomes, which supposedly disappeared from Earth. But because they mixed with Homo sapiens, these genes were imprinted on the genetic code. Therefore, there is no purity. That’s why it’s so delicate to talk about purity, whether we’re talking about ideology or even truth itself. What exists is subjectivity because true objectivity doesn’t exist; it’s a parameter we’ve invented to differentiate one thing from another.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

Alfred Schütz emphasized that subjectivity is very important for the social sciences. There is a study by a French philosopher called “Spiritism and Subjectivity,” published by Columbia, Gilles Deleuze. I believe that subjectivity should definitely have greater importance than it has had in the social sciences.

Chapter IX-

The Critique of Representation: Cultural Analysis in the Face of Cultural Representations

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan and Alessandro Morganti Debra

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

Returning then to continue our investigation, what we would like to discuss today is the more precise question of what art and anthropology are, their points of connection, how they can be interpreted from a perspective that is not solely Western, through the concepts of modern art or the theoretical baggage of all the great thinkers of the 19th century, and the representations that ethnography provides as a starting point to see the differences and subtleties that these two great fields present.

Ethnography generally deals with objects that are not from Western culture, such as African, Pacific, or Asian culture, etc., and in a way, archaeology also allows us to study and interpret petroglyphs, ceramic drawings, the symbols depicted in these spaces, and the cosmogonic interpretation of these societies.

Ethnography then focuses on a point in time that does not extend further into the future because it is considered a science like archaeology that studies the past but not generally its connections to the future.

The idea that Abdel and I have in this regard is to unite both things, to bring ethnography and archaeology to the study of forms of modern and contemporary art, uniting all this wealth of knowledge that includes, on the one hand, the philosophy of modern art, the theory of contemporary art and the criticism of modern art today, with the wealth of anthropology and generate a new fusion between the two in which neither of the two backgrounds can remain the same. It is about something that considers from the beginning of human life to the complexity of culture in the 20th and 21st centuries and this would encompass the cultural anthropology of the 21st century and give shape to new studies that give us new alternatives of how to approach and interpret our ways of life and therefore our idiosyncrasies that are the culture to which we belong.

There are many authors who have dedicated their efforts to archaic cultures, but I would say there are very few authors who have dedicated themselves to studying art and ethnography in the 19th and 20th centuries, as we are doing now. Of course, new philosophical trends appear, including interpretations of art like those developed by Abdel, but anthropology, solely through ethnography, remains somewhat stagnant in this respect. One of the currents to revisit in our context is cultural relativism. Among its proponents is Franz Boas, who focuses on the evolution of primitive art. He uses technology as a premise for studying it within a theoretical framework. Through technology, forms, textures, ways of life, social organizations, and so on are studied through social transformations. Then there is an author who greatly influenced Abdel, Clifford Geertz, whom I would like you to discuss so we can begin a discussion about the anthropologists and ethnographers of the 18th and 19th centuries and those of the 20th century. And in the 21st century, philosophy is becoming increasingly abstract in the evolution of theories, which we will cover in several later chapters regarding our experiences. There is also another aspect that I find very interesting: the relationship between art and meaning. We know that art is a form of expression at every symbolic level; it’s a language that allows a society to express its ideas and laws. For example, in Egypt, there was a whole development of writing that expressed laws. There are the symbolic laws of the priests, which constitute religion, and this is also expressed through art as a form of language. And then there’s the meaning one gives to it when interpreting it. Now, meaning must be viewed from two perspectives: first, the Western perspective, and second, the non-Western perspective. It’s like in the case of Malinowski when we were talking about the ship. As a member of society, he participated in its construction, where the Western perspective is no longer present. Instead, he immersed himself in the social group he was part of and didn’t question whether… This or that was used; he would take the information and process it according to the same people who built the vessel. So the meaning has a bit of that. After he separates from that society and resumes his role as an investigator, the meaning could then change. It could be that subjectivity and objectivity take different paths in the meaning, but in the end, they are different. What we want is to rescue the subjectivity that has been forgotten. Every society has its way of life, unless we start analyzing the power structures within the West and within the peripheries, but that would be political, which is not the case of interest to Nitrosos.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

What I think is that you have identified a field that is implicit because the interdisciplinary relationship between art and anthropology is central to what we are doing, and what I find valuable is not only doing it but also reflecting on it. It is a topic around which very little has been done. I agree with you; the anthropology of art finds itself subordinated to the study of tribal art and does not extend beyond that, which seems contradictory to contemporary art. Very little has been done to move from tribal art to modern art. In this sense, we have an immense gap in criticism, a methodological gap, and an immense axiological gap.

Without going too far afield, that is, without yet moving from contemporary art theory to the traditional anthropology of art understood as the anthropology of tribal art—that is, without going so far from one extreme to the other—when one focuses solely on the problems of contemporary art today within a given sociocultural context and moves from that context to another, for example, from Venezuelan to Texan or Cuban, in the field of art criticism one already encounters these immense gaps in criticism. Generally, there is no categorical or axiological framework that allows for intercultural and transcultural movement beyond the analysis of artworks in their local contexts or within the separate frameworks of these regionalized sociocultural contexts. As soon as we have to discuss artists from one culture and artists from another, as soon as we have to move within the same research framework from art in Texas to art in Venezuela or Cuba, we already find these gaps in criticism, the lack of theoretical and critical resources for To be able to do so, before moving between such distant ranges as the modern and the tribal, let us first think about the need to work on resolving those gaps just to be able to address intercultural and transcultural phenomena between contemporary forms of relating the understanding of art with the analysis of culture, this would be an effort that would undoubtedly already demand the same of cultural anthropology understood clearly in a renewed, new sense.

But at the same time, gaps in critical analysis, a lack of axiological frameworks or categories, and a lack of methodological resources are not foreign to art itself. In fact, we find gaps even without changing from one cultural context to another, within the art of any region. We find communication breakdowns and deficiencies that prevent us from addressing phenomena such as, for example, visual or material expressions of so-called popular or folk culture, visual expressions of mass culture, and visual expressions of elite culture within the same framework. Among these three instances, we already have gaps in critical analysis that create a disconnect between studies on one side and the other. Very little has been done, in fact, to interconnect these spheres. In this sense, the artist is generally ahead of the critic, since many artists have offered ways to interconnect these spheres through visual language, not through the exercise of criticism. Therefore, understanding and analyzing what certain artists have achieved in this regard is crucial for criticism—for how to address these interconnections.

These are gaps that we have, for example, between what we consider high art and other forms of art that are then relegated or discriminated against, being considered minor forms of art.

These art forms are highly dependent on functionality or utility, and from the perspective of fine arts, this is seen as a lack of autonomy that devalues ​​them within the art value system. Similarly, architecture, being so closely linked to practical matters, is viewed as a third-rate art form, no matter how much an architect strives to make their work art. Any art form, from comics to decoration, is seen from the perspective of fine arts as a subsidiary form of art.

The dilemma we face, then, between modern art and non-Western or tribal art lies precisely in this: in tribal culture, art is largely dissolved into functions that, from the perspective of art’s autonomy, are seen as alien or non-autonomous. The autonomy of modern art, like the autonomy of science—which, through the secular process of rationalization, placed both science and art in institutions clearly differentiated from the other specialized institutions of modernity—means that, in the same way that the avant-garde views the art of the classical past as non-autonomous, subordinate to the church or the aristocracy, modern art and its autonomous axiologies view tribal art as an art subordinated to function, to the utilitarian, to the religious, or to the beliefs or worldviews of a collective and its traditions, which does not correspond to the expressive language of a highly differentiated individual. It is in this way that the void of critique and axiological interconnections we find within modernity itself between fine arts and functional arts arises. utilitarian arts, such as crafts or ceramics, become even greater and more abysmal if that art is tribal.

Thus, if we lack parameters to relate the aesthetic and the utilitarian within modernity, or even the artistic and the testimonial, as occurs in the subordination, for example, of photography to reportage or news, which immediately excludes it from photography considered as art, we lack even more parameters to communicate modern and tribal art forms.

In that sense, it seems to me that perhaps a much more interesting path is the one we are developing in this project. We have, in fact, been discussing several fascinating points of interdisciplinary intersection that question the interdisciplinary relationship by taking other paths, with many more footholds, paths which can in turn have effects regarding those gaps. These are areas of possible interconnections. No matter how diverse the universe of material and visual culture studied by archaeology or ethnography may be, versus contemporary art theory, what matters is that in both cases you are facing cultural forms that have to be read and interpreted, whether seen as signs or as texts. The important thing is that the hermeneutic question about phenomena of visual and material culture integrates that high diversity in a field that we could understand as a field of exegesis and meanings for cultural analysis.

Thus, for example, in all cases it is a matter of relationships between the part and the whole; the signs that we interpret when we read a form of modern art are ultimately fragments, or parts, metonymies of a cultural whole that can only be reconstructed through the semantic interpretation of the senses and meanings inferable in the reading of those fragments. In the same way, when we saw how you read in your fieldwork, how you have to read based on clues, making inferences, here we have a clear interdisciplinary intersection that, I agree, as you said, is ultimately the same science.

In fact, the title of our compendium is inference and elucidation; that is what it is about. We must add to this that art as such does not have a form of knowledge that can be strictly considered a science. The philosophy of art is a modality of aesthetics, which is in turn a modality of phenomenology in philosophy. But insofar as the theory of art that derives from it refers to art as a phenomenon of symbolic meanings, it cannot help but be both a human and a literary expression. For this reason, the scientific bases of the theory of art, without excluding philosophy as the traditional specialty of the exegesis of literary texts, must be understood within the sciences of culture and the social world. This, then, is something that, seen from the point of view of semiology and the sciences of the text, makes the latter, especially semiology, the science for both the theory of art and for archaeology and, in general, anthropology. Levi Strauss often maintained, in fact, that cultural anthropology should be a form of semiology, only he did not develop it in his own work, since he did not have the necessary knowledge of semiotics.

It is therefore a matter of inference based on elements of which we only have clues and traces. Pierce, in fact, assigned to inference an important logical sense for his then nascent science of semiotics, so that through semiology, art criticism, art theory, archaeology and cultural anthropology, their domains can be exchanged interdisciplinarily.

It is about inference and elucidation based on clues to wholes that are absent in those signs, where the relationship between part and whole plays a preponderant place. This connects a prehistoric or ethnographic artifact of tribal culture, such as pottery, a tattoo, or a form of decoration, with contemporary art, where we also have to go from the part to the whole and we also have to read texts through whose readings we read and interpret the culture. The icon we are seeing does not contain the totality of what we are going to reconstruct, and I agree with you that the concept of meaning has immense importance here and in that interconnection; we are dealing in both cases with meaning.

And this is interesting because, paradoxically, the concept of signification, especially the concept of meaning, was in disuse for a period, because the relationships between form and content that have characterized our modern aesthetic forms bring with them the fact that the avant-garde largely denied the representational traditions of the art of the past.

One of the things that defines the experimental avant-garde in film, theater, and visual art is the break with the concept of representation. If classical art was representational, whether towards religion, the aristocracy, or the lifestyles of the medieval Baroque or 19th-century realist era, avant-garde art comes to break with that mimesis of the realistic representation of the natural and social world.

Experimental art thus becomes as abstract as philosophy could be; instinctive expressions in expressionism, concepts in conceptualism, imagination in surrealism, geometry or abstract expression in abstractionism take center stage. All of this has given prevalence to form over content; meanings become dependent on forms. It is in this sense that the concept of meaning has fallen into disuse or diminished, exhausted, and dismantled since the critique of representation.

However, I agree that the way you see it allows us to see it in a different way. At the beginning of your presentation, which I found visionary, and especially within archaeology, your way of seeing it is a symbol of a very pioneering mentality in your field, since very few archaeologists have been interested in this, and your approach is novel.

You speak of cultural representation; it is true that ethnography has been permeated by representation, not so much in the sense of the mediator, not as delegation, but in the psychological sense of the representational act of projecting an image of a world through language.

This is a very important topic because while avant-garde art has been questioning representation, anthropology, ethnography, and archaeology are the only fields in the 20th century where a certain enthusiasm for realism has survived.

Let us then consider the topic of Clifford Geertz in this regard. My preference in ethnography leans towards forms that don’t use certain data about a collective, such as population or demographic data, or other economic or political data, as the basis for offering representations of the totality of a given society or culture. Seen in this light, one would have to choose among Geertz’s works because, while we couldn’t say that he resorts to a descriptive representational realism, he still manages to offer representations of totality about certain cultures or societies. I prefer ethnography that starts from or gives precedence to the phenomenological world of lived experience. Thus, *The Interpretation of Cultures* and *After the Facts* would be his chosen books. These are books in which he doesn’t give an overall view of the culture, but rather starts from lived experiences and situates himself within them. Cockfighting would be the best-known example here, where interpretations are made based on sensory experience.

And seen in this way, if we are talking about an anthropology that is in the sensory proximity of lived experience, then there is a possible interesting intersection with the phenomenon of 20th-century experimental art because, although the 20th-century artist broke with an idea of ​​realistic representation, this does not mean that he is not equally situated within the culture, processing a culture through experience and giving back to it an interpretation of that culture. I agree with Barthes when he says that every work of art is already an interpretation, and what we as critics are doing is interpreting interpretations. We would have to see to what extent the artist is not already an experimenter immersed in the culture who offers us interpretations about the culture. Reading the text of a contemporary work of art is not the same as reading a tribal artifact, because when we read a modern work of art, we interpret an interpretation that is itself the work.

I am not denying that a tribal artifact is an interesting phenomenon from a symbolic point of view; a mask, a sculpture, a carving, a door, a temple, in tribal culture are also highly complex symbolic elaborations, which can also be read in a meta-cultural sense. To think that the artistic expressions of tribal culture are mere ontological repetitions of the being that simply is in that culture would be naive.

To think that in tribal symbolic representation man does not acquire a kind of distance from the culture is naive; I am not creating an informed image of the native with this either, but there is a moment of lucidity.

In Wayuu dances, for example, it would be naive to think they are merely a handcrafted repetition of a tradition. There is a great deal of performativity and theatricality involved; the culture is even reinvented through these dances. For example, in the Trobriand Island dances, in ethnographic books I’ve studied from 1910, there is a photographic record, which I have with me, I brought it with me. Some of these dances were even parodic; some parodied the presence of the camera and the ethnographer. It’s naive to think they were dancing unaware of the anthropologist’s presence, unaware of the camera’s presence. Many were made for photography. It’s naive to think they were dancing without being aware of the camera’s presence, inventing forms of dance that the dance didn’t originally have. Sometimes they almost mocked it, giving the impression of children.

I’m not saying that the tribal artifact is entirely ingenious, but rather that the level of meta-textual elaboration of avant-garde experimental art is infinitely greater. The avant-garde experimental artist makes of culture and sees culture as a field of meta-textual experimentation; tribal art does not. In the latter, at most, because it is a symbolic elaboration, we can infer a certain distance, but that it is either not conscious of it, or it simply does not make it a focus of attention.

The level of metatextuality in experimental art is infinitely higher; I would even venture to say that the level of metatextuality of the experimental artist with respect to culture is also greater than that which defines the anthropologist.

Seen in this sense, the exercise of modern art criticism, where we interpret interpretations, is infinitely more superordinate with respect to culture than the usual position of the anthropologist; if the anthropologist is experimental, they are more metatextual than the anthropologist, and the art critic even more so than the experimental artist. We can arrive at the conclusion with Barthes that it is not a matter of diluting art criticism in anthropology, but rather of transforming the anthropology of art, as a form of cultural analysis, into a modality of semiology, and with this, of art and cultural criticism.

We are talking here about the autonomy of art with its own institutions; the freedom of the experimental artist is even a paradigm of freedom in modern terms compared to the anthropologist and other forms of social science.

There is that difference; I don’t know if I’m taking a different path from the interest of your intervention. On the other hand, art and anthropology are the only two cultural institutions that are structured through the idea of ​​memory, of collection, and of museum. It would be worthwhile, then, to become aware of the importance that the concept of the museum has in the type of humanity that anthropology represents. And art and anthropology are the only forms of humanities and letters that require the museum as an institutional form of being in culture. Both are practiced in relation to collecting and in relation to the museum. There is also a point of contact in the transcultural and in the intercultural. An art can undoubtedly be an expression of a region or culture, but the traffic of art and culture, as George Marcus says in “The Traffic in Culture,” makes it something much more complex.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

I was thinking a bit about what the transitional part is when you talk about elite art, popular art, mass art. I’m looking through history and the Romans of Pompeii came to mind. All the murals they had were designed in such a way that they connected areas of the Neapolitan and Turkish regions, and the similarities. And also how the Renaissance contributed great artists who weren’t from the elite but were rescued by the church or the monarchy because they saw that these artists had exceptional gifts, and they began to break old patterns but with unalterable foundations. When I say “that” I mean composition, color; they maintain a certain homogeneity, but at the same time there is experimentation in the technological aspect: what surface they will work with, what artifacts they will use, what pigments they will add.

Notice that the transmission of knowledge came to me. Throughout history, the Romans, in terms of engineering, have expanded over time and haven’t changed much. For example, the aqueducts and baths of that era were very important. But the wealth of knowledge reflected their forms of organization, how they were centers of cultural exchange, centers of exchange of ideas, centers of bad habits, etc., etc. And another thing: the baths broke down social classes. There, the gladiator or the slave mixed with the high elite. This exchange broke down old customs, and that is expressed in art, and techniques were transformed. But archaeology and ethnography have stagnated; they haven’t gone further. Of course, there are experiences of modern archaeology.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

What we are doing is an example that there are efforts, they are just few. I was saying that I have been identifying several points of intersection between art and anthropology. On the one hand, there is the required interpretive component between the part and the whole, the fragment through which culture is read or interpreted between art theory or criticism and archaeology. On the other hand, both are practices that focus on the museum institution in the sense of collecting art and culture. The theory of collecting and everything that is cultural, material, and visual is the other field. There is a third field, which is the points of contact between the immersive experience of the artist in culture and that of the anthropologist in culture. No experience presupposes this immersion between what is lived and what is expressed, between what is experienced and what is communicated, as much as experimental art on the one hand, and anthropology on the other.

Or as I was saying, every work of art is already an interpretation of culture; we interpret interpretations when we do art criticism. The artist is engaging in a form of cultural mediation that offers an interpretation of culture; it is an interpretation, which is why it requires art criticism, even the anthropology of art, to truly be able to interpret that interpretation. I believe that art criticism and art theory should be an anthropology of art.

The problem is that there’s no tradition; it’s an effort that needs to be made, and it’s abysmal because, just as there can be gaps within the contemporary between the mass, the popular, and the elite, imagine how many there aren’t, or how immense the work that needs to be done is. The other very important point, which we’re focusing on, is the relationship between the self and the heritage, culture. When we see it from the perspective of an individual subject, in this case the artist, who gives us that paradigm, but also the anthropologist, in the same way that we see culture from the artist’s perspective, between their self and culture, in the same way the anthropologist who brings a cultural heritage and immerses themselves in a culture, or in their own culture, well, there’s also anthropology of the metropolis, or anthropologies that study the folklore of the anthropologist’s own culture, anthropology of rural life, or ethnological studies within France itself, for example. But starting from the clichés of anthropology, we have to fill that critical void, I was saying… Self and culture, the anthropologist also experiences an experimentation of the relationship between the self and culture that brings a wealth of knowledge and immerses himself in a culture that may be very different or familiar depending on whether it is a national anthropology between the metropolitan and the rural in which there is an otherness, and more like when Bateson goes to Bali or Levi Strauss goes to South America.

But it’s something that’s expressed even without going to another culture, in the experience of a neighborhood in your own housing development in the big city. You still have the contrast between someone who experiences the same things as you but hasn’t distanced themselves from it by representing it because that’s just how it is, and you, who do ask yourself the question. From there, there’s a difference between the social scientist and the layperson. I have an essay in my book, *Rethinking Intertextuality*, where I talk about the can collectors who make a living from it, and I consider how to approach can collectors in the city. I address the ethical problems: Do I buy cans from them based on how they’re used to being bought, or not? Do I tell them that I’m approaching them not to buy cans, but because I’m interested in the meaning their experience has for understanding the city? This very experience involves an otherness that implies a relationship between the self and the collective.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

It’s a dynamic experience, because if you don’t face something new, you remain isolated, you stick to the same patterns, and there’s no progress; you become like an automaton. Where is the relationship between knowledge? We could also study the stagnation of knowledge because a society gets stuck there and continues to maintain its own customs because it refuses to change or evolve, to mutate, because it doesn’t take risks, while there are others who do, possibly because they’ve had contact with the outside world. Other societies have begun to experience how the needs of an increasingly globalized society are causing nationalisms to disappear. For me, it will disappear at some point, not now, but perhaps in 20 or 30 years. I might not see it.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

There is a Chilean critic who says that the idea of ​​nation is colonial and at the same time was a post-feudal phase of development; it is an evolutionary moment of society that has to change. We cannot think that societies will be eternally national. But at the same time, while the humanist ideal presupposes that cultural relativism of moving beyond ethnic self-absorption and seeking the universal of humanity to foster interculturality, transculturality, and globalized multiculturalism, the paradigms that seemed to be moving in that direction in recent decades, tending towards transnational modalities of economic and social interconnectivity and fostering interculturality, have been stifled by a kind of constraint that comes on one side from religious fundamentalisms, but on the other side from nationalist ethnocentrisms, which we can see very clearly in terms of what is emerging on the contemporary scene as political trends or ideologies in what are called the extreme right and extreme left. Both seek or demand a return to the national; they are cultural forms that resist abandoning the Ethnocentrism: we are at a point where we don’t know where things are headed. They could go in one direction, but they could go in another. Transnationalization and transculturation could continue to advance, but the reverse could also be true: ethnicity could persist because the process of transnationalization as it has occurred has been very limited. According to this, it was supposed to go through a process of wiping the slate clean because these forms of transnationalization tended to homogenize, to erase cultural specificities, and at the same time, they generated traumas. In these years outside the United States, I have been realizing, listening more to the left, that these are things that don’t reach the United States. The moderate, subtle, refined left, which is the only left that exists in the United States, is not steeped in these things, at most in the decolonial and postcolonial problem, but not in this, which is the complex and traumatic relationship between modernity and tradition.

It’s an old topic. On the one hand, I was reading a book by a French sociologist of theater, Jean Duvinaud, who, in writing a history of theater, traces the formation of European cities and the processes that European culture underwent until the emergence of what we know today as the “self”: our idea of ​​the self in philosophy and psychology, and in the very formation of the modern person, the modern individual. He speaks of how traumatic this process of self-formation was for Europe, and how this split toward the formation of the modern person was linked to the crisis Europe experienced between the industrial process of the modernizing Industrial Revolution and regional idiosyncrasies and cultural traditions. It’s a universal problem of the complex and problematic encounter between modernity and cultural traditions. These countries here in South America and the countries of Asia have very strong cultural traditions, and the process of incorporation into modernity isn’t so simple because there’s a problem of axiological spheres; that is, the field of culture is a field of values, and you can’t simply arrive at a cultural tradition with mere new technology. To devastate, or with mere consumption or merchandise, or with a pudding-like solution to certain problems from an economic perspective without taking the cultural sphere into account, you can show that there is a model that can work within the logic of abstract universals but it cannot necessarily fit into an axiological system of cultural values. In any case, it is a complex and traumatic process; it was in Europe, it has been in Asia, and of course it is in South America. This is something I have been learning in recent years listening to the left. You see that the left has a better project for that dichotomy, a better project to solve that dilemma, a better project to solve that problem, a more interesting project and also more conscious of how to resolve that problem. I have come to the conclusion that one cannot ignore that problem; perhaps at its core lies that resistance, in the name of the concept of nation for the moment, tomorrow in the name of something else, but in any case, what it is about is cultural resistance. Here we have the Biennial of the South in Venezuela, which is ending. In inaugurating cultures in resistance, it is interesting to see that there is a resistance, not in the sense of an emblematic or planetary discourse or of protest, but in the sense of cultural values ​​that resist and are not willing to be transformed in any way.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

It’s like the indigenous societies here, the Arawaks, the Yuxpas; they’re embedded within an economic system, but the question is why they aren’t fully integrated. There’s a resistance of values, both cultural and symbolic, especially regarding the concept of what we call green energy, ecology. The stagnation is so strong that it can’t be overcome. So, when you see—it happened to me once while I was doing research and I ran into a brick wall—they told me, “This isn’t your field, you don’t understand our customs.” I was stunned. And that’s where you see how the Western ego is operating, our own ego as Westerners, as owners of the world. By what right? Then the problem of ethics begins. Science has ethics, art has ethics—Goya, for example, “The Execution in May 1811″—where is the ethics?

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

Yes, absolutely, I agree. I agree with Stephen A. Tyler, cognitive anthropologist and postmodern anthropologist, that ethics should be at the center of the anthropology of the future; my position is very ethical in this regard.

A young artist I’ve been writing about recently brought this to my attention. Part of his work communicates cultural ethos, while another part communicates pathos. Returning to the idea of ​​listening to the left, I’ve noticed this unusual and unexpected barrier that has been erected in response to the successful progress of the humanist project of transnationalization and transculturation, which I consider good and progressive. The resistance it’s encountering is related, on the one hand, to the fact that these societies aren’t ready for it yet, even though it’s a good project. But beyond that, the left has a more interesting and comprehensive project for resolving the traumatic encounter between tradition and modernity that this implies. The left has a project aimed at the health of the ethos, recovering ethos in the collective imagination, as opposed to pathos.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

I agree with that

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

What about pathos, as Kristeva says, diseases of the soul? It’s a line of thought that connects with thinkers like her, such as Herbert Marcuse or Eric Front. Front has written books on the pathologies of modernity; he speaks of a pathos of modernity. There’s a certain critique of capitalism that points in that direction of pathos, and it’s true that, to a certain extent, capitalism has tended toward pathos. Its reflection in the processes of cultural forms of subjectivity has tended toward pathos, on the one hand due to the degradation of values ​​and on the other due to the effects of commodities and advertising on the formation of a fragmented subject, or a fragmentation of subjectivity. Cultural identity under capitalism tends to be erased, lost, disseminated. Homogenization destroys the core values ​​that form culture. Commodity fetishism tends to generate modes of cultural subjectivity that lean more toward pathos. Is this entirely bad? I don’t know; I think that Yes, to a certain extent, because there’s a health issue here. It’s like the question of good and evil; everyone believes they’re doing good, but what’s good for one person is evil from another’s perspective. But you can’t play around with the concept of health. You might be relativistic in what you consider good or evil, but you can’t be relativistic in what you consider healthy and unhealthy.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

I can give you the example of Asia: values ​​are homogeneous. Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean societies maintain certain values, such as honor. It’s a tradition, but it can also be an obstacle to societal transformation. However, we see that these societies are modernizing very rapidly, perhaps faster than the West. So, the concept of nationalism remains a matter of honor, where ethics are taken as a normal form of growth through flattery. Or are we saying something wrong?

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

This is a problem

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

It’s very complicated. For example, in Japan, when your honor is at stake, it’s a very serious offense, and the only way to atone is through a ritual. But for us, that’s not normal. Do we have to kill ourselves to cleanse the honor of our family or society? In this sense, I understand that socialism has strong arguments.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

The problem with socialism, which is a European invention, is that it’s an ideology that depends entirely on the state for its implementation. This is a contradiction inherent in socialism. We should study why the state arises in modern society, what moment human society reaches the point of state formation, and discuss how socialist ideologies, when they emerged in Europe, envisioned the state as the redeemer and solver of all problems. This was an important debate in the 1980s between Habermas and Lyotard. The central point of the debate was the state of global capitalism, its oscillation between capital and the state. This is one of the most pressing issues today, and while it’s not a topic for me because I’m not a political scientist nor am I interested in politics, we have to take it into account because the work we do must, at the very least, survive within this context, integrate, and develop. We can’t completely ignore it.

I was situating myself in my memory, the zethesis, the memory of the body and its passions, feeling what I felt living in the United States within the community, the symbolic human and intersubjective interaction, and reliving in my body an ethos, an ethos of the community and of values ​​that exist in contemporary American society, a United States that paradigmatizes the idea of ​​capitalism less dependent on the state. In a society like the United States, we also have ethics and we have values, and we have spirituality and sectors of culture in which ethical values ​​are found, but there is always on the other side that kind of exosphere that refers to that part of capitalism very prone to pathos, to the degradation of values, perhaps Hollywood, entertainment, consumption. There are many cities in the United States that do not allow large consumer malls within the city limits. Perhaps not in Austin because Austin is a university town, with a lake, with many residential areas, and it is accepted that the malls are there, but there are other cities in the United States where it is regulated; consumer malls are not allowed. The advertising is inside the city; to consume in that voracious way, you have to leave the city and go to the outskirts. The city isn’t invaded by consumption, nor is there an uncontrolled relationship between the city and consumption. These are problems that only interest me because they lead to politics, which interests you more because of your own tendency, your cultural materialism, Marvin Harris, Althusser, infrastructure and superstructure. You are more concerned with these things. In my work, I try not to get involved in these issues.

Alessandro Morganti Debra:

No

Abdel Hernandez San Juan:

Not in my own work, I can give my opinion as a person, but I avoid them in my authorial work, in my books. I am more interested in the way you situated how ethics are given in science; this could be an interesting topic.

General Bibliography

Bajtin Mijail, La Imaginación Dialógica, M. M. Bakhtin, University of Texas Press, 1981

Bate LF, Material Litico: Metodologia de Clasificacion, Noticiario Mensual, XV, nos 181-182, Agosto-Septiembre, Museo Nacional de Historia Natural, Santiago de Chile, 1971

_____Sociedad, formacion economico social y cultura, editones de cultura popular SA, primera edicion, mexico, DF, 1978

_____Relacion General entre Teoria y Metodo en Arqueologia, Boletin de Antropologia Americana, no 4, Instituto Panamericano de Geografia e Historia, P,8-54, Mexico, DF, 1981

Binford R Lewis, En Busca del Pasado, Editorial Critica, Grupo editorial Grijalbo, 1983

Cruxent JM, Apuntes sobre Arqueologia Venezolana, Arte Prehispanico de Venezuela, Fundacion Eugenio Mendoza, Caracas, 1971

______El Paleoindio en Taima-taima, Estado Falcon, Acta Cientifica Venezolana, Vol 18, Supl 3, P 3-17, Caracas

Cruzent J M y Irving Rouse, Arqueologia Cronologica de Venezuela, Yale University, Washinton, 1960

Derrida Jacques, La Deconstruccion en las fronteras de la filosofia, Paidos

_____El Pozo y la Piramide: Introduccion a la Semiologia de Hegel, Margenes de la Filosofia, Catedra

______, Introducction to Hegel Semiology, Margins of Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press

_______, El Circulo Linguistico de Ginebra, Margenes de la Filosofia, Catedra

________, The Ginebra Linguistic Circle, , Margins of Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press

______, Genesis y estructura, de la fenomenologia, antropos

Eugenio, Quetzil Castaneda, El teatro invisible de la etnografía: Principios performativos del trabajo de campo, The Open School of Anthropology and Ethnography, Anthropological Quarterly 79 (I)75-104, EE. UU.

_____. El pasado como espacio transcultural: el uso de la instalación etnográfica en el estudio de la arqueología, la Escuela Abierta de Antropología y Etnografía, y la Universidad de Indiana, Public Archaeology: Archaeological Ethnographies, vol. 8, n.º 2-3, 2009, 262-282, EE. UU.

Jelinek Jan, Enciclopedia Ilustrada del Hombre Prehistorico, Editorial Extemporaneos, Mexico, 1975

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Thinking Science; New Phenomenological Avenues Between Philosophy and Sociology, Lambert Academic Publishing

____The World Correlate: interpretant and structure in posmodern cultural theory, Lambert Academic Publishing

_____, El Correlato de Mundo: Interpretante y estructura en la teoria cultural posmoderna, Grin Verlag, Munish

____Las Metonimias del Museo: La Exegesis Textual de Cultura Visual entre semiótica y antropología posmoderna, Editorial Académica Española, 2025, en ingles The Museum Methonims: the Textual Exegesis of Visual Culture between semiotic theory and posmodern Anthropology, Publisher: Our Knowledge Publishing, 2025

____El Sujeto en la Creatividad: Nuevas Veredas de Antropología del Arte, Editorial Académica Española, 2025, en ingles The Subject in Creativity: New Ways to the Anthropology of Art, Publisher: Our Knowledge Publishing, 2025

_____Los enigmas del Ground: Introduccion a la sociologia semiologica, Editorial Academica Espanola, 2025

____Rethinking Urban Anthropology:Semiotic Theory, Phenomenology, and Hermeneutics in Urban Anthropological Research, Grin Verlag, Munish

Hernandez San juan Abdel and Tyler Stephen A,Evocation: A Philosophical Dialogue, Scholar Press

Hernandez San Juan Abdel and Eugenio, Quetzil Castaneda, Between seena and scenes, Department of anthropology Rice University, Department of Anthropology University of Houston, Transart Foundation of Houston for Art and Anthropology, Threshold: A Documentary Catalogue. Edited by Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Surpik Angelini, Houston, Texas, 1997

Hildaldo Jorge L, Niemeyer F Hans, Aldunate del S Carlos, Schiappacasse F Virgilio, Culturas del Chile, Prehistoria, Desde sus origenes hasta los Albores de la Conquista, Editorial Andres Bello, 1989

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Science of Logic, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1929

Hegel, G.W.FHegel, La Logica del Concepto, Ciencia de la Logica, Hachete

Gordon V. Childe, Teoria de la Historia, Editorial La Pleyade, 1981

Gordon V. Childe, Progreso y Arqueologia, Editorial La Pleyade, 1973

Marcus E George y Calzadilla Marcus E. Fernando, Artistas en el campo: Entre el arte y la antropología, Arte contemporáneo y antropología, editado por Arnd Schneider y Christopher Wright, Routledge, 2005, Oxford y Nueva York: Berg. (2006)

Morganti Alessandro Debra y Rodriguez Maria Elena, Cazadores Recolectores de monte Cano Paraguana, Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1983

Leroi Andre Gourhan, L’ Homme et la Matiere, Editions Albin Michel, 1971

Rutsch Mechthild, Las Teorias Antropologicas, El Relativismo Cultural, Editorial Linea, 1984

Sanoja O M, Las culturas formativas del oriente de Venezuela: La tradicion Barrancas del bajo Orinoco, serie estudios, monografias y ensayos no 6, biblioteca de la academia nacional de la historia, Caracas, 1979

Sanoja O M e Iraida Vargas, Antiguas Formaciones y Modos de Produccion Venezolanos, Monteavila editores, Caracas, Venezuela, 1978

Schütz Alfred, El Conocimiento en los Mundos de la Vida Cotidiana, editado por Ilse y Luckman, amorrortu editores

Schütz Alfred, la formulación de nuestro problema: los conceptos metodológico de Max weber, PP, 33-74, introducción a la sociología comprensiva, introducción George Walsh, editorial paidos, Buenos Aires, argentina

Schütz Alfred, Fenomenología del mundo social: introducción a la sociología comprensiva, introducción George Walsh, editorial paidos, Buenos Aires, argentina

Schütz Alfred, la construcción significativa del mundo social, introducción a la sociología comprensiva, prologo de Joan carles melish, ilse Schütz, Paidós, básica, 1993

S

chütz Alfred, Fenomenología del mundo social: introducción a la sociología comprensiva, introducción George Walsh, editorial paidos, Buenos Aires, argentina

Schütz Alfred, el sentido común y la interpretación científica de la acción humana, el problema de la realidad social, el problema de la realidad social. Por Alfred Schütz, compilador Maurice natanson, amorrortu editores, buenos aires

Natanson Maurice, introducción, Pp 1-33, el problema de la realidad social. Por Alfred Schütz, compilador Maurice natanson, amorrortu editores, buenos aires

Schobinger J, Prehistoria de Suramerica, Nueva Coleccion Labor, Barcelona, 1969

Tedlock Dennis and Bruce Mannheim, The Dialogic emergency of culture, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago

Tyler A Stephen, Evocacion: Lo inescribible: Una Respuesta a Abdel Hernandez San Juan, septiembre 9, rice universtity, Houston, Texas, 1997

Tyler Stephen, The Unspeakable, discourse, rethoric and dialoque in the posmodern world, Wisconsin University Press

Tyler Stephen A, Acerca de la “descripción/desescrifura” como un “hablar por”, por Stephen Tyler, 289, El Surgimiento de la Antropologia Posmoderna, compilacion de Carlos Reynoso, Gedisa

Tyler Stephen A, La entnografía posmodema: de documento de lo oculto a documento oculto, por Stephen A. Tyler, 297, El Surgimiento de la Antropologia Posmoderna, compilacion de Carlos Reynoso, Gedisa

Tzvetan Todorov, Mijaíl Bajtín: el principio dialógico, Sello Editorial Instituto Caro y Cuervo