In this book, Abdel Hernandez San Juan proposes and develops his own theory and empirical practice of what he defines as a new modality of urban anthropology. Starting from a critique of the textualized representations of cultures in anthropology museums in the United States in which he discerns the usual disconnection of the museum with respect to the empirical experience in fieldwork, he proposes the analysis of two modalities of anthropological research projects. In which conversely the museum is inseparable from the work in the field, one, his own, based on the study and understanding of the popular urban-modern markets in Venezuela –three essays on these urban markets according to his own exploration of a phenomenological and hermeneutic modality of participant observation that includes proxemics and kinesics, as well as the results obtained in this regard in an exhibition staging on the markets of his authorship museographed and presented in Houston, the other, a film and two exhibitions that permeated his vision of Mexico from the United States both on anthropology between the United States and Mexico, Mayan culture and tourism in which he participated as a lecturer and Co-curator/comi-museographer invited by the US-Guatemalan anthropologist Quetzil Eugenio. The book discusses both projects, his own and Quetzil's.
Contents
Museum Theory: anthropology of the Market and tourism
Cultural recreations of consumption: The Quids of the Market, Phenomenology and hermeneutics in participant observation
The Market from Here: Staging and experimental ethnography
The Equinox Film: Travel Incidents
The Mayan Culture Market: Mayan Art in Ancient Tradition on the University of Houston Campus
The Ah Dzib Pízté Exhibition: A perspective from ethnomethodology and cultural anthropology/the visual expression of field work in Quetzil Eugenio
The Ah Dzib Pízté Exhibition: Exploring interdisciplinary displays, exhibition and workshop at duran gallery
Aknowledgements
General Bibliography
The Interweaving of language, of what in language is purely language, and of the other threads of experience, constitutes a fabric. The word Verwebung leads to this metaphorical zone: the strata are woven, their imbrication is such that the weft of the warp cannot be discerned. If the stratum of logos were simply laid on top, it could be lifted and allowed to appear beneath the underlying stratum of non-expressive acts and contents. But since this superstructure acts, on the other hand, in an essential and decisive manner, on the unterchichts, we are obliged, from the beginning of the description, to associate with the geological metaphor a properly textual metaphor, since fabric I mean text, Verweben here means say texere. The discursive is related to the non-discursive, the linguistic stratum intermingles with the prelinguistic stratum according to the regulated system of a type of text.
Jacques Derrida
Notes on the phenomenology of language
Museum Theory: anthropology of the Market and tourism
By Abdel Hernandez San Juan
In 1998, living in Houston, Texas, I spent a month in Berkeley. At that time, I was doing field work in the city as planned in my individual ethnography and performativity laboratory program, and for long hours, actually several days, because I focused on By walking through it several times and taking, where possible, photographs, he analyzed the museographic forms that characterized the textual and visual staging of the Berkeley Anthropology Museum.
The artifacts representative of the cultural forms in question, indigenous cultures in their entirety quite primitive, were treated in two ways, the arrows, spears and elements of hunting or other utilitarian instruments of culture, were treated in large glass display cases one one, dedicating enough attention to each one to notice the art of its confession, the specificities of its elaboration, the total image of its conformation, the ceramic vessels and elements related to food, cultivation and other forms of culture. vegetable collection or transportation, were displayed on wooden pedestals without glass coverings with emphasis, as in the display cases, on each artifact with its characteristics one by one well spaced and with accentuated punctual lighting, the references to culture , human groups, their societies and forms of grouping, both community coexistence, families, homes, clans, on one side, and ceremonial or rituals, rites, celebrations, on the other, were treated in the form of typographic texts printed on panels of wood and on the walls at the same time with the use of large photographs distributed in panel mode.
Nothing in the Berkeley Anthropology Museum, with the exception of the notable emphasis on the meticulous attention to the peculiarities, especially of the objects, due to their levels of elaboration and their final art, with accentuated lighting, no longer alluded to the field work that should have been done to find all that, the textual and visual exhibition was itself already the text on the culture in question, excluding as ethnographic museography, references to field work, but not even to the relations between the museum in its inside how it museographed and offered viewers a representation of all that, and that culture as an outside of the museum towards which in some way the museum had to turn its attention for that exhibition.
From the elements that were offered to the viewer, it was not possible to know if it was direct field work done by the same curator of that exhibition, whose curating and museography would itself be, as a textual form, its ethnography developed on the museum display, or if These were traditional museum curators who carried out curatorial work and museography on cultures based on archival material that became purely textual material, very far removed from those forms of field work that, understood as simple utility, once served as a basis.
The Berkeley Museum of Anthropology thus offered itself, at least with that exhibition, as the paradigm of culture encapsulated by the text that textualizes it, that is, encapsulated in the textual forms of the absolute interior of the museum's displays, no sign, no reference, alluded to the fact that between that museum and the culture it represented in its exhibition the distinction could be assumed between the museum inside, its building, its exhibition rooms, its visual graphics, its ways of museography and the museum outside that there would be. of being assumed in the fact that that culture was something more than a simple bookish motif, something somewhere in the world and geography.
Unlike this idea of the museum in its absolute interior, what I am going to discuss below are forms in which we have, on one side, the museum display inside and on the other, the museum displays outside the museum, as well as forms in which these relationships between inside and outside the museum are in very different ways deconstructively and critically explored by the nature and characteristics of a variety of projects and experiences.
What makes these project experiences different is that in one of them the museum is not an anthropology museum, but rather an art museum in what it defines in its interior and in its displays, which certainly required me to resort to the field of art to another museum, which I will talk about later, and what was done outside it defines the spaces in which those displays outside the museum will have to relate.
In both cases, as in the Berkeley museum exhibition, it is not about a culture defined by an ethnic group and its geographical location, but rather one is a wholesale and food market that destroys goods in a city, while in the second, it is an anthropology museum or many, but one as a whole, which is actually the archaeological museum of the pre-Columbian or Mesoamerican culture of Mexico, and more specifically of the Mayan culture inside its buildings and of its museographic displays for the spectators, while the outskirts that unfold outside the museum is an archaeological park of monuments which continues to be a museum but under the ceiling and which, as in the previous example, functions as a market in where goods circulate and are trafficked at the same time as an entertainment park related to the programming of the archaeological park, which is an expression of the museum's displays, related to mystical events that the Mayan culture organizes for tourism.
In the first example, markets are wholesale suppliers, but also sites in which cultural rituals related to the activity of consumption take place, on the one hand, buying and selling, that is, modern rituals of a largely urban nature, and rituals of visual and material culture closely related to images of the merchandise that is marketed therein, such as those of the stamps and vignettes of the Christian religion and its cultural reinventions for consumption and tourism.
Urban markets that are staging ceremonies of an entire material culture in which barter circulates and the relationship between the concrete market and the abstract market, the first, requires the cultural anthropology of markets understood as an anthropology of cultural recreations. of consumption and its relationship with culture and religion that I have developed, less so of the anthropology of tourism, the second refers to a cultural anthropology that must be of tourism and the market related to it.
Both examples, however, require a sociology and a cultural anthropology of the museum and its displays, in one the art museum, in its relationship between fine arts and arts considered naive or primitive, in the other between the archeology museum and the archaeological park.
Specifically, I will focus on discussing two forms of this relationship between the museum display inside and outside, very different from each other in terms of the cultural and thematic specificities of each one, and yet, due to the ways in which that relationship occurs between the museum inside and the museum outside, significantly related in terms of the methodological and critical problems that arise in research in sociology, anthropology and ethnography.
I am referring, on the one hand, to my own individual and only practice of field work and research of theoretical and cultural anthropology of the market, and of the relationship between the museum and the market, in which I overlap sociological and anthropological research, theoretical , and the empirical field work, with theoretical and curatorial research questions given in the fact that I began that work through the relationship between my position at that time as curator of the museum of high art, at that time Alejandro Otero and my theoretical seminars interweaving my museum theories with sociology and anthropology taught in other museums such as the Petare Popular Art Museum in Caracas and the Mario Abreu in Maracay
These are, on the other hand, my theoretical lectures on sociology and anthropology in anthropology panels at the faculties of anthropology at the University of Houston and sociology and anthropology at Lake Forest College, occasions in which I began to theorize a similar relationship but with respect to to the museum of Mesoamerican and pre-Columbian cultures in Mexico and in relation to this a film made by Quetzil Eugenio and an exhibition of anthropology and Mayan art curated and museographed by me with regard to the curatorship and museography of anthropology, and by Quetzil, in regards to the curatorship of Mayan Crafts, and the whole between the two.
What makes these project experiences different is the first of my own field work and individual research with its two physical settings, first in Caracas, then in Houston, Texas, and the scenes in which I gave this lectures, Faculty of Anthropology in Rice, LASA Congress, the second, panel at the University of Houston, Crafts exhibition there, exhibition in Lake Forest, panel in Lake Forest, visualization of film and photographic material in Texas and Chicago, and the field work carried out by Quetzil in Yucatán is given from the cultural anthropology of the market itself and from the theory of the museum, in the following fact
In the first, the topic of the market in question, as well as the literal forms of the markets in question, are urban and city markets located in significant sites and places in the great metropolis, markets then understood as agricultural intended for sale and distribution. of food merchandise, extended to markets for clothing and furniture for life and to markets for other functions of the body, healing, spiritual life and religion.
Now, these markets, however, are not standardized or corporate supermarkets nor do they properly form chains or stores, nor are they, in the form of the corner supermarket, warehouses or establishments within reach of which a population has depending on the area, the block. or the block where you live, these are rather markets where you go shopping, which are in known and designated areas in the city in the same way that you go to moles or standardized supermarkets, but which They still maintain, in their physical form and in the way they are deployed in the city, a direct relationship with the way of life and subsistence of their sellers as well as a relationship with live popular culture.
These markets include stationary forms of sales that always have the same space for a long time in areas in which sellers are assigned their own spaces or own them or rent them continuously, forms of ephemeral sales that either spread on the peripheries of those explained above, occurring in its surroundings or improvised within it in the form of more informal displays of the merchandise on the floor, or displayed on panels that can be assembled and dismantled on the same day which do not have, like the previous ones, a covered and stable place where they sell continuously, or they are obtained as markets in themselves located in high traffic areas and times of the city, such as at the entrances and exits of the subway, at the entrances and exits of the terminals. capital and provincial buses
In the first case, the metro, deployed in themselves as ephemeral markets that arrive, unfold and at a certain time of day they leave, that is, without stationary covered markets around them, in the second, interprovincial terminals, these still survive. As peripheral forms to the stationary market, they can also occur in well-chosen points of the city such as boulevards, halls and places where many people circulate.
The stable or stationary forms of generally roofed markets do not occur, however, only in the local area market such as the car market, the Katia market or the Quinta Crespo market, usually deployed around some architectural conglomerate that offers their civil engineering blanket, but they also spread stably on the streets with their own roofs made up of very strong and well-made architectural systems of metal, tubes, fabric, plastic and canvas to protect themselves from the rain and persist in the area. as long as they are authorized to do so,
It also includes a very different type of covered market, which is the Freeway market, generally made with direct wood from tree trunks and systems of bags and uses of plumes and plants which are permanent, fixed and daily, deployed on one side and the other. on the way to and from the highways that go from one city to the other, usually destined for the sale of cocoa, cassava, fruits and cachapas.
So, although the cultural anthropology of these markets must undoubtedly be first an urban anthropology and second an anthropology that cannot fail to be about the cultural recreations of consumption, in this, due to the intensity of its relationship to folklore and the experiential fabric of culture, due to the continuous barter in which its commercial transactions occur, due to its typical free market character formed by a direct relationship between seller and buyer as a real scene with its visual expression, as well as by the simultaneity of forms of merchandise and commerce, require this cultural anthropology of the market and consumption to move towards issues relating, on the one hand, to the relationship between an abstract theory of the market and a visual empirical theory of its expression, something that could be summarized in the theory of barter as the first form of relationship of purchase and sale expressed in the meeting of seller and buyer, as well as in its abstract financial form with its less empirical expression in credit, and from this to the anthropology of carnival and polyphony as disseminated expressions of the market because all the references are juxtaposed beyond the palimpsest.
It is necessary to figure in addition to these two stationary and ephemeral forms superimposed on each other, a third that is taking place at the same time and whose visual expression, like that of the previous two, is preponderant and is imposed to be that of the street vendor. who sells by moving without a precise place, who comes to you to sell you things without you going to him, who hawk their products throughout the market, a modality that we find both in the same areas where the other two are located, such as the You can find it spread throughout the city unexpectedly, including your residential neighborhood.
Although they may include modalities or expressions of tourism, they are mostly markets for those who live in the city and less for the foreigner or visitor, despite this, due to their proliferation, as free markets that, without ceasing to be popular, they are in the most eminent sense of the neoliberal capitalist free market, including advertising, relations to tourism are not excluded in some of its forms.
As a closing point on this distinction, it is also, at the beginning of the research, a sociological and anthropological research not only on the markets where we go and that I have just described, but before and first, on the relationship between the art museum, which has its own art market, on the one hand, and those markets, since it was bordered at the community level for the Alejandro Otero museum by a wholesale market, the car market, and the investigation began around that relationship, investigation which led me, before extending myself to field work and market research there in all its expression, to a first field work of two years that focused on studying simultaneously, that is, at the same time, the market in the museum and the museum in the market, a meticulous survey that I did both through collecting and visual research as well as in writing, of how the market had been represented in visual culture since the 15th century, consultation of libraries, newspaper archives, video libraries, collections of paintings, drawings and photographs from the colonial era to the present, reading literature books about the different eras of the market, field work that I combined with my visits, tours and meetings at the car market, with writing in theory of the museum and in theory of the market which took me towards the city of Caracas.
The relationship between the inside of the museum and its outside is given here in the sense of the question about how to relate, on the one hand, those two markets, one the market here, the art market, the market of the same museum in which the works of art are merchandise, another, the market over there, which being a food market and other forms of habitation and life, is still, for the reasons explained, a clear form of symbolic and visual culture expressed in artifacts. , forms of material culture, customs, customs, linguistic and visual expressions of culture ranging from ceremonial rituals to images of the liturgy and religious imagery.
The relationship inside and outside the museum also occurs in the sense of me as the curator and researcher of the museum that I am doing research for the museum there in the markets, reaching the latter as an expression of the museum and in turn touring the museums and their collections now to investigate the market in them, resulting in an anthropological theory on how to theorize the museum according to the market and how to theorize the market according to the museum, which also led me to work with several museums, not only the one in which I developed the project. as a curator that is a museum of high art, but also to give anthropology seminars on collecting, visual culture, museography, criticism and postmodern anthropology in the museum of naive art whose visual culture in itself is much closer than high art to the visual locations of the market in the city.
The relationship then between the museum and the market is not given in an intrinsic way in the first case, in the case of the museum of archeology and anthropology of the Mesoamerican and pre-Columbian culture, on the contrary, the relationship is intrinsic,
The market we were talking about in it is not a market there that is foreign to the museum and not related to the museum to which we go or go because a simple research project determines it or because it is treated as a market in a close community in physical terms. to the museum, but the market in question is a market that is formed and becomes a market in itself due to the existence of the museum.
In my case the market was there before the museum for other reasons not related to the museum, the museum arrived later and was located nearby, but what that market sells, distributes and markets is not related to the museum or its programming, In the second case, everything that is sold, traded and trafficked in that market is related to the museum of pre-Columbian culture because the market itself acquires physical form around the programs of the museum on the outskirts of it, the open-air archaeological park outside the museum where the pyramids and other monuments are displayed that, being part of the museum, are not inside its building but in its surroundings or in distant areas of monuments around which a variety of guided or non-guided tours are developed guided, programming around mystical events of the culture expressed in them,
Therefore, in the museum of Mayan culture, it is a market that is formed to nourish those same museum events, this market, which also includes Mexicans and people from local cities, is to a large extent a global tourist market that attracts and in which they meet, the consumer activity of tourism, the sales of the museum and the sales of thousands of street vendors who are deployed in its spaces selling, on the one hand, objects and visual elements related to the museum itself and its events, culture Mesoamerican, such as necklaces, bracelets, seals, accessories, decals, crafts, wood carvings and, on the other hand, food items and items related to the needs and comfort in the area of people who enjoy entertainment, tourism and cultural programming, snack and eat.
From the point of view of the theory of the text and the textual, both projects are also different; in the first, the museum text and the cultural text do not have anything between them, neither as a visual text nor as a cultural text. relationship between each other that was previously given out there in the pre-established codes of culture, but it is myself as a field worker, as a researcher and as a curator who am creating that text for the first time by choosing to do an investigation of the market in visual culture since the 15th century he built a text about the market in the museum tradition that the museum itself did not have before, this work of investigating the visual culture of the market in the visual tradition related to the art museum, begins the to construct a textual form that did not previously exist and was not codified in the culture at the same time that by relating a market from here, that of the museum, and one from there, that of those markets, I constructed a text not previously given in the culture, about the market in its contemporary expression including advertising and the visual forms of the neoliberal advertising market.
In the Yucatán project, however, it is the opposite, we have a visual culture that before corroborating it or going to it in its expressions within the archaeological park and around the museum in the form of people who come for its programming or settle At times of the year, it itself forms a bookish form and a text in culture and of culture, a text of both literary and visual culture which in itself forms the reason for being and the reason why that museum exists. .
In fact, the museum of pre-Columbian culture is itself an expression of the fact that this culture forms a sedimentary and sedimentary cultural text as a written and visual textual form collected in thousands of catalogs of artifacts, symbols, objects related to rituals, confections in fabrics, pottery, symbols and images of an ancient culture, a high percentage of which is in extinction, but at the same time established in the imagination in the relationship between the archaeological text of the museum, with its catalogues, books, museographies, exhibitions and collections within the museum, and with its programming outside for the archaeological park and contemporary or current culture, both Mexican and Mayan in the United States, --my own perspective on the matter because I investigated the phenomenon through film and exhibitions in the United States. united and not directly in Mexico--, as later properly Mexican and Mayan.
The differences, however, although necessary for the analysis of the specificities as well as to specify the cuts of the clear modes of their relationships, are not as significant, as relevant are, in the opposite sense, the similarities between both in terms of all of theoretical problems to be discussed in research methodology of both sociology and anthropology.
In both, a cultural anthropology of the market and consumption is required, in one less of tourism and more of the market, in the other more tourism and less of the market, in both a cultural anthropology and a sociology of the museum are required for the discussion of the ways in which in both projects the relationship between the theory of the display of the museum inside and the theory on the relationship between the museum and its outskirts works and works, defined as those in both cases, although with their specificities, as markets at the same time as In the end, both are linked.
In one, mine, what I have defined as Performativity in theoretical and empirical research, a concept that I work in the sense of sociology and anthropology, although coming from linguistic theory, has to be developed as the discernment of constructive relations of the object in the sense of the theory of the text, where it is more about creating that text by investigating relationships that were not previously codified in the culture but which the project brings to light and in language, thus working in a phenomenological sense that preserves some aspects of structuralism to relate the visible or apparent with the underlying in the manner of a theory of hermeneutic stratification, also interpretivist and symbolist in several aspects, in mine the work of interpretation does not read a text that was already in the culture or in terms of visual textuality nor in terms of the codification of cultural relations, but that I am constructing that text as a researcher,
The relationship to some structuralist aspects is given here, as occurs in studies that distinguish linguistic competence from knowledge of the laws of grammar and phonological laws, in which what will be put into the language in the rather interpretivist way of a hermeneutics of stratification, creates a text previously inaccessible or, accepting, not without reservations due to its pre-Lacalian character, the distinction of Claude Levis Strauss on the importance that the relationship between the conscious and the the unconscious, something in which Boas precedes.
Levis Strauss said that anthropology, like semiotics, continually works with signs and symbols and that it should be a study of them like that, but at the same time he recognized that it was about finding out what was exchanged beyond them by exchanging them among themselves, that is That is to say, in the place of non-explicit or unmanifest relations in the exchange of those signs and symbols, the exchange of other phenomena took place, these if relevant at a sociological and anthropological level beyond that precise symbol or sign which is what, to Ultimately, semiotics is circumscribed in a much more limited way.
Although in semiotics we can read some aspects related to the broader or general text of culture, in this we always proceed according to what these signs and symbols are in themselves and how among these, according to their metonymic contents, we deduce and infer relationships. of significance, in sociology and here more specifically in cultural anthropology we are concerned not with what those symbols are in themselves due to their supposed meanings being implicit in what that symbol contains as its own content, but rather with understanding how in In the exchange of these symbols, men and culture are exchanging other things whose place they, as forms of language, occupy.
Around this basic principle present from Czech structuralism, the study of structural phenomena for grammar and yet unconscious to the explicit meanings of the actor, but at the same time post-Lacanianly far from that dogmatic structuralism that then seeks a deep structure around which fix once and for all the discovery of a text about what culture itself is, without distinguishing what it means to interpret it from what it is itself, the work of hermeneutic construction here interprets the text that is being created in its construction of the object by culture. own research.
This Performativity of research is then itself in charge of proposing an articulation of relationships between things previously unrelated and not given in advance as related in that way in the previously accepted text of culture. The reason for this research is to investigate, as in the study of phonemes or the intricate links of grammar, significant relationships that bring to light previously unclarified issues.
This cultural anthropology certainly, mostly a sociology, establishes whether in the construction of that textual form previously not codified in culture something that in Gadamerian and Todorovian terms, first requires that this created relationship work in the hermeneutics of culture as a theoretical construction and requires Also, that this text be confirmed by the culture itself in terms of experience.
The riddles in the theory of common sense are crucial here, a text is constructed that establishes some previously uncodified cuts and relationships with it, once created, developing a hermeneutics that demonstrates working in terms of common sense riddles first and foremost in sense. Shutian, but then why not in some percent, in the terms in which Geertz refers to common sense as a cultural system.
There is, however, although resorting to Shurtz's riddles as corroborations, a difference between a world of common sense predated as the reality of the world of the system of culture and a world of common sense named in its collections by the textual form created that in the Construction of the object makes explicit relationships previously not codified in the culture and not formed as textual forms of it.
In the second case, the museum of pre-Columbian culture and its archaeological parks, as the museum itself said, forms a text of culture, both visual and literary, and structured in the graphic and museographic modes of the museum displays, therefore the theory of Symbolic works differently, it deals with symbols that are previously encoded as visual forms in a text that is pre-established as an archaeological text and that as an archaeological text about a museographed ancient past is interpreted in its symbolisms.
I am not referring here only to the literal interpretation of those symbols, such as in terms of cerlaut, saying that these symbols mean or meant for those cultures, such as saying that the images on a mask mean or references to certain gods, deities, myths. or beliefs according to the symbolism of certain images for the meanings of that ancient and disappearing past.
However, despite this difference with respect to the theory of the text and the way in which the hermeneutics of the interpretation of the symbolic works, in my case as a phenomenology of stratification that constructs a text and with it an object that was not previously established or codified as a text of culture or as culture itself as a text, which is then in turn hermeneutically discussed in its relations of meaning, and in the case of Quetzil as an interpretation of the symbols of a text previously given as a codified text of culture expressed in visual, literary and museographic forms, there are other aspects that bring us closer especially those related to the fact that we are both practicing a way, although different from each other, of doing anthropology and in my case also sociology, between the display of the museum inside and its outskirts, which retheorizes and rethinks, in each one its way, what I explained at the beginning in my references to the Berkeley Museum of Anthropology about a text encapsulated in the absolute interior of the museum text without any relationship between that text and the culture it represents, on the one hand, and less still, with field work, like the forms of its outskirts, a problematic which, in a few words, is what explains how and why Quetzil has begun to participate in programs such as those of my individual laboratory of Performativity and ethnography in which I theorize my own individual fieldwork alone and my research, as well as in panels in which I have discussed and theorized one of the expressions of elicitation of the museum display outside the museum that I have experienced, which was my work The Market from Here; Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography and because I began to do the same in reverse, giving lectures on his film at the equinox panel and later in 1999 developing together a curatorship of an exhibition of anthropology and Mayan art.
Before moving on to this, I would like to emphasize the fact that this pre-Columbian culture is, although it is an archaeological text and produced by archeology itself, above all, first and foremost, I would even say a good example of a form of culture established in what gives it its stability and in what makes it culture, as a textual form of culture and as a text.
The emphasis I am placing here between a prescriptive textual mode as relatively fixed in the text of culture and another based on the construction of the text refers here to my previous theorizations of transtextuality.
When I spoke of a transtextual ethnography I was referring to the fact that beyond the world in a text that Geertz referred to around Claude Levis Strauss as the typical example of an anthropology that replaces the world with a text about the world, there are investigations in which, like this mine, the matter of research is not limited to the out there in the form of a clearly coded text as a pre-existing pretext in the collective culture, the markets are undoubtedly recognized in their visualities and as an experience by the culture, but There is no previous museum of the markets that collects their visualities in textual forms, nor is there a collection about the visuality of the markets, when you go to a collection among hundreds of thousands of painters, draftsmen, engravers and vignettes from all centuries since the present backwards, you can get for each century at most one or two at most three who among an endless number of their images once drew markets and made vignettes or sketches of them, therefore, this collection has to be created I myself, in fact, at the level of collecting, did a research and built a previously non-existent survey on market images according to collections.
When you go to a library and search in different centuries for who once wrote about markets, you hardly find material; in travel writers, you find a chapter or passages of several chapters; in another, you find a writer from the 20th century who offering images of the customs of the city of Caracas, costumes, customs, idioms, body styles, etc. from different eras of women or typical characters in society, such as in Caracas Physical and Spiritual by Aquiles Nazoa, you get to go shopping and go out market was always a custom and between one thing and another you begin to find an infinite number of unforeseen forms in which, without that being the center of your attention, the markets appear and social customs around their images,
When you go to non-artistic collecting, that is, to a visual culture of collectors who do not collect art but signs and other things in culture, you find that no one collects the market itself, but by collecting other things you can raise that visuality through an investigation of how and in what forms signs, icons, images appear here and there, which come from markets such as those of advertising, among others, although the attention was not focused on them nor was the reason that groups them together. the images.
In the drawings of Dutch and English travelers you find that some not only had seascapes and landscapes, but also vignettes of social scenes that caught their attention due to their typicality of the culture in which the Sunday public square of the market appears, in the same way the you get among cartoonists of manners scattered but reiterated among another variety of themes, when you go to a newspaper library, a video library, some film archives or to the literary tradition the same thing happens, it is difficult for a novel, a story or a film to base its plot or center its plot on a market or on the markets, clearly you have to immerse yourself in the plots in novels from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries to get scenes in which someone met in a market or in which the latter prowled the landscapes of drama, a monograph focused on markets for each century is already a lot to find, without excluding that those in social sciences who dealt with them before have been a few accountants with their fingers and in such different ways that they not only refer to diametrically different forms of understand them, Malinowski, canoe crossings in the Melanesians and the Trobriands archipelago of New Guinea for the exchange of ritual objects, Bourdieu, how people are distinguished according to the symbols they carry represent a symbolic capital, but also in none of them is the concrete and popular urban markets diametrically different from all that and, although not established in a previously formed text of culture such as collections, museums or other textual modes, without a doubt very clearly cut out as an unmistakable visual imagery within a visual culture that remains , like the markets themselves, spread in the opposite direction to what is retained and collected, throughout a continuous traffic and an incessant barter in which one tries at all costs to sell and buy, which paradoxically Not only is it cut with maximum precision in the expression of its urban visualities, but it is also the most privileged staging that people have in a city to decide how they spend their time, go shopping, go out to the market and, while passing through, make an appointment with a community that does the same, becoming one of the most significant plots, if not the most, that configures the warp of our daily life in large cities
Although a classification or order of materials previously collected and grouped, collected and inventoried according to or according to the theme of the markets is not achieved, immediately the first conclusion of the research is that this order, that articulation and that text must creating it yourself is more than that, the research consists precisely in the proposal of that construction, although the culture of common sense in everyday life can recognize its visualities once placed in front of it, I had to do all that work by doing the research and articulating those relationships which, although the culture in my research continues to be interpreted and treated as a text, makes a part of the research fall into a research that constructs the text and creates its own pretexts articulating them as not previously related or given in advance in the textual encodings of culture, a dimension in that transtextual sense
But other exact and deeper precisions are also required at a scientific level, governed and regulated, of course, for the verification of their accuracy from the philosophy of science and theoretical linguistics since we must not forget either sociology or anthropology, although the most advanced aspects of the social sciences have even been able to acquire the status of exact sciences, such as the philosophy of science and linguistics, and for this reason, in countless ways, they often cease to have corroboration in the most rigorous positivist terms.
When I speak of a phenomenology of stratification in the case of my individual research on this topic, my project in which I implemented it, and the resulting textual forms that I constructed for its purpose, I am not referring only or no longer solely to the phenomenological question of the relationship between the appearance or what is present in the forms and the senses, whether visual, written or auditory, and an underlying level that stratified would have to be found in the form of a single surface or a single instance of presence spatially and temporally. simultaneous in its presence, something that I do practice as research with respect to a variety of topics, assuming that it must be found within the planes of that same presence in its phenomenology, but that it is a simultaneously phenomenological and hermeneutic stratification, the fragments of visual texts, for example, that the active memory of culture does not use recurrently, such as the vignettes or drawings of local customs artists since the 15th century or those of strangers and travelers on the market square, are visual forms that a Once brought to the foreground and shown in some way, the culture recognizes in the experience of its visual memory, whether recreated by literature, or by cinema and television, well known in graphics from books about the colonial past, but they did not form a whole related nor did they make a system from a theoretical point of view, with experiences, experiences, questions and current empirical corroborations on the urban, commercial and financial realities in the urban expressions of the neoliberal free market, is the investigation of those visualities contrasted in the compilation of visual material on these expressions of the current market as seen urbanly with its advertising, its visuality and its symbols, and the articulation of previous visualities collected after an investigation of its forms in the following centuries until modernism in the first half of the century, which establishes a relationship which is, moreover, not very different from the one that can be established between the colonial past of the visuality of the market and its current expressions in the United States and Europe. Ultimately, it is about a relationality articulated under the same principles.
This articulation, which is certainly neither historicist, diachronic, nor genealogical in the sense of finding the unsaid under or after what has been said and established, but is cultural anthropological from the synchronic and sociological point of view of the social now and here and corroborated as effective in the work of updating, that is, as finding out what meaning they make from the current and current questions of the markets today, their forms of yesteryear, something corroborated by experience and common sense, nor has it been achieved solely with the simple and direct relationship of visualities of the same and unique cultural cut,
Here the market as a theme and empirical and experiential reality, it has been necessary before and simultaneously to do the work of constructing a hermeneutics of the market that is not speculative but is assertive in terms of phenomenological sociology, relating a phenomenology of the world of life that takes as sensory and sense data and material, the reality of real markets in their urban expression without excluding from it their abstract expression in the way in which both things are disseminated, one in the other or one according to the another and verifying them in their scientific positivity, the fact that the textual construction of the object coincides in everything with the way in which that market functions, both in its objective reality of barter and exchange there in urban markets and in its symbolic reality, of exchange of symbols as forms of exchange of other phenomena of anthropological and sociological relevance, and makes the hermeneutics of that phenomenology, through and in relation to the relationship between the museum and the market that I discussed before, theorizing the museum according to the market and the market according to The museum then built, as an object of my sociology and cultural anthropology, a museum market before my research, not codified by the museum, while conversely, I built, by theorizing the market according to the museum, a way of understanding the market from its reality. current towards the ways in which its previous forms make sense of its current reality, which otherwise would not have been possible to articulate in the anthropological theory of the market.
The museum theory that is then developed according to the market theory offers, articulates and brings a new phenomenological light on the museum that otherwise would not have been found, for this it has been necessary to work with phenomenological stratification, experience confirms it, but without having previously been, like grammar or phonological laws, an articulation of relationships explicitly brought to textual construction in textual or visual constructs previously codified by culture.
It is necessary here to expand on some questions about what I have defined in the absence of other concepts as a superficial unconscious, because I consider that it is not exactly an unconscious, as this concept has received its traditional meanings before Lacan, it has also been required to retheorize it. and expand his post-Lacanian discussion. Being, then, a superficial unconscious—my reader will find moments in many of my recent books and essays in which I expand on this specific—from the anthropological point of view here various strata of experience and accessibility between each other have been brought closer together and updated. the forms of presence in culture and spatial and temporal levels or planes that are stratified and therefore not explicit.
In its difference, returning to the issue that I have highlighted when saying that the visual and textual, bookish text of the archeology museum of Mesoamerican or pre-Columbian culture, is in itself a clear example of a textual form of culture, some additional theorizations are required. about what concept of code and codifications in culture we are referring to as well as adding some questions about in what sense we are talking here about the relationship between text and culture.
To the extent that the visual text of pre-Columbian cultures refers, as archaeological text, museographies, exhibitions, catalogs and books, to a very ancient and, above all, extinct past, the visual system of images, forms of writing, artifacts and symbols, although it impresses by its richness and variety, as the visual texts of oriental traditions, especially archaic Japan and China, similarly impress, but even as it has been collected more because of how this archaeological text has come to evoke the complexity and richness of an entire civilization, becomes the conformation of that text itself, in the same way in which we read textual forms of civilizations that have already disappeared in the ancient past, such as the Greek or, in a certain way, also those of the ancient Middle Ages, a text in the most precise sense that this concept contains, the precisions required to explain what makes a symbolic set such as writing text and not something else.
If we could imagine for a moment our own current Western civilization with its academies of living languages as if they were dead languages whose dictionaries lay in the museum of archeology as curious collections and inventories of the ways of writing and communicating, given in that case that our languages collected by those dictionaries and academies, were not in continuous use in speech as the living and current languages of culture, we would have a self-perspective image that is as complete as possible, of how an entire system of graphic, visual and scriptural coding could be petrified in the stone of an extinct civilization, to evoke as a dead text what, however, in that case formed, properly speaking, a text. This text, like the visual and symbolic text of pre-Columbian civilizations, would therefore in any form be a text about and of that civilization even if it were in disuse.
It is in this sense that I say that the visual discourse of the archaeological museum of pre-Columbian culture refers to a textual form in its strictest expression. Although pre-Columbian languages such as Mayan, among others, continue to be spoken today among minority cultural groups and although in no way, as we do not do in the study of Japanese, Hindu, Chinese oriental antiquity, we can completely disconnect that visual and scriptural text from the fact that it refers to the ancient forms of civilization of the same men and women who today are Mexicans, Central Americans or Andeans, who are the survivors as well as the current cultural exponents of what remains of that archaic civilization, a very high percent of that visual, symbolic and scriptural text makes up the text of archeology, which is only an eminently textual form.
When I speak of code here, I am referring not to the fact that those symbols archaeologically retained in the museum of pre-Columbian civilizations may or may not be read in their precise symbolic meanings, like someone trying to find out the meanings of words in a language in which , for the rest, is largely limited to the domain of archaeologists, but to the fact that, understood or not in their precise meanings by the current Mexican and Mayan, reinvented by them from their contemporary conditions or simply, seen by the tourist as in general by all contemporary Mexican and world life, in the same way that the iconographic forms of pop and other symbolism of fashion and the culture of the most media, is highly codified as a textual form in the culture provided with its own autonomy and its own cut in what distinguishes it and separates it from any other iconographic, scriptural and symbolic form in culture, whether or not they can, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the expertise, realize that it means an image of a god or a ritual object, a drawing or a Mesoamerican calligram, that text, understood in itself, is recognized for what it is in itself as a textual form of the visual that is cut out and separated in its iconographic autonomy from the rest of visual culture as the visual and iconographic text of pre-Columbian civilization and is as such codified by culture in hundreds of museums, collections, catalogs and books.
The popular urban markets of the city in my project, in their difference, do not constitute in themselves a visual form of culture dissected and retained as the textual symbolism that creates the text of some precise civilization or culture, they in turn or on the contrary the still existing forms through which what today's abstract and financial market symbolizes is no longer devoid of actors who come together to exchange among themselves through purchase and sale, the exchange of goods and merchandise for expressions of the money, the urban settings of human nature in which they persist in today's reality, the visual expression of that exchange, they are related, on the one hand, to the customs of the city but overlap in the continuous exchange that defines them, as well as in the staging that they display, the ways in which contemporary society reculturalizes consumption.
This reculturalization of consumption is given by the fact that the staging of the market are themselves cultural ceremonies of the way in which the market is anthropologically an expression of culture and, above all, of the ways through which consumption is culturally recreated, in it they come together, as mise-en-scène certainly as its generating principle, seller and buyer, but both at the same time display their mise-en-scène as part of a broader exchange whose visual expression the market itself reflects.
To observe a staging of an urban market in these settings of neoliberal capitalism is to observe a scene in front of one in which a seller and a buyer carry out their transaction in an open space in which, while you observe the transaction they carry out, Around them hundreds or thousands of others do the same, paying an amount for a given number of vegetables, choosing a product and talking about it while it is being selected, the seller talks about its benefits, what makes it exclusive. , the buyer asks between options until the transaction is made, the seller does it from a covered and walled place that is his individual place, in the case of covered markets or he can do it sitting on the floor if the merchandise is distributed more informally,
Observing this scene is at the same time, from a single perspective here and now that cuts out the scene, observing how behind that bartering scene, many others of the same type are taking place simultaneously, that is, that many other sellers and buyers they do the same thing at the same time and within your visual frame, the sound of what all those pairs of seller and buyer are talking about are all heard at the same time, the forms of seller and buyer that you see in your visual frame can be diverse, in one a middle-aged individual ready to go to work has stopped and bought just to take his car, in another an elderly man is preparing to go to the market with more time, in another it may be a young family with their children and the seller be one or several who sell the same thing, but when you turn your body these scenes are happening not only from that frame, but they take shape and happen to all your surroundings.
The photographs, for example, capture in clouse up and in the foreground the legs of a salesperson in a setting selling clothing on sale, that is, on sale, selling pullovers and shorts, the merchandise is displayed like a mountain of clothes on a wooden platform of six meters by six meters and the seller is standing on top of the merchandise barefoot hawking it at the same time as selling, but while this scene takes place, just a few centimeters ahead, forklifts carrying merchandise, mobile street vendors who move with their products hawking them, the photograph captures the legs of the pullover seller in a clouse up and tries to move very quickly to capture around oneself and what the street vendors who are a few centimeters away are experiencing , you then go from legs on clothes, to images of hands that give a pullover and hands that pay for them at high speed, and from these to the face of a forklift driver that you have a few centimeters away, then to his body and his wheelbarrow a meter away. and when you move away while in the background of this box, you see other platforms in which sellers of other merchandise do the same, of those shots of forklift drivers and street vendors whose bodies and faces you capture very close to you, when you follow them with your eyes their bodies lead you to other settings in which you no longer see platforms and vendors standing on the merchandise, now a variety of kiosks full of plants of very different colors everywhere, bottles, jars and religious vignettes with plaster figures catch your attention after the fleeting and rapid passage of the mobile vendors, a succession of older gentlemen, some of whom set their places with sound, spread out in front of you and far from hands that exchange shorts and pullovers, you now have people who calmly and calmly smell herbs and observe them while asking questions and receiving explanations to decide which one they will take home and whether they will stop just purchasing the herb from a condiment or also bring little bottles, stamps and religious vignettes that afternoon.
With only three panning movements between closed shots of the box to medium shots and wide shots in a single 180-degree movement of your body, the idea of the observer that for a moment you thought possible is immediately discarded, not only because the market disseminates it visually. and sensorially there in the reality of how all these exchanges occur at the same time, some superimposed on the others, but because you yourself cannot complete an understanding of what happens in trying to establish a point of view, the market requires you to get into him and leave the idea of a point of view, the point of view understood in the physical sense, place of gaze and understood in the hermeneutic sense, understanding a reality, they are related here, it is not possible to understand it assuming a single physical perspective, In framing the camera here and taking photos in the frame that is chosen, it is no longer possible hermeneutically, one thing within the other, you have to move letting the camera be overwhelmed by the transience of the situations at the same time. then knowing how to let the ways of framing and osturating adapt to the ways of understanding what it is about.
The relationship with the camera is only its superficial expression, more than to the camera, it works in the same way on a theoretical and empirical level for the eye, despite this it is significant that if somewhere it mattered little or almost nothing, not to mention It will be immediately forgotten, that you walk around with a camera taking shots is precisely in these markets,
Unlike the solemnity of the camera placed in front of a human group in their home or work environment, or around a ceremony that draws attention to itself due to its scenic or spectacular nature, in the market the superposition of many small scenes of seller-buyer barter happening all at the same time in the visual and sound, while hundreds of sellers extend beyond the cubicles with the merchandise informally or walk around you like mobile and street vendors cancels in itself the presence of the camera, deconstructs and relativizes the fact that a camera can be something more than a symbol trapped in the traffic of the market, there is no way to capture or collect an image that can alone complete what happens in the market, nor with the result of hundreds of photographs taken in a single visit, the market can be exhausted by the osturator and by the eye, both at most can be overwhelmed by the polyphony of the market and come together later in editing to understand what has been discussed and what has been learned.
The relativization of the camera's point of view is also, moreover, that of you as an observer in any of your forms, because even if you immerse yourself without a camera, exactly the same thing will happen to your eyes and your understanding of the world around you.
The first part of my field work consisted of finding and finding how this principle of barter expressed in the visual staging of the markets in its relationship to social and cultural customs, is itself a hermeneutic and phenomenological explanation, respectively. here to the hermeneutics and phenomenologies given before there in that world of life, that the market is a polyphonic and multivocal phenomenon contrary to the very logic of the observer who is ultimately put on stage by the free market in the museum anthropological that this same staging makes explicit as soon as we interpret it, of observers who, like the symbols in whose exchange we exchange other things, lifestyles in the objects, affective meanings in the elements, customs, manners, idioms and slang in the images , are exchanged for each other in what ephemerally positions them for a moment of the exchange as observed observers,
The deconstruction of observation restores in the markets an absolute concept of participation and in the deployment of that participation the free market is therapy, although we do not celebrate in the celebration of its symbols, as in the ritual of the carnival, the celebration of the symbol itself. According to which, the images of the time invested in culture are exaggerated, abstracting our relationship with the real in the symbolic, in the ritual of the market if we attend the staging that ritualizes in its basic principles such as the genesis that organizes in its therapy our participatory world, the visual staging of the market, with its market men and its artifacts, is itself, in its visual expression today and there in the streets, the most complete image that we can have, about the common sense logics that organize a significant percentage of our surrounding world according to the market.
It is also necessary to add some elements of theoretical weight to my previous distinctions about what a form as a text in culture is, this time in my research on urban markets, something that will bring even more precision to what was previously discussed. Certainly we cannot completely deny as I said before that to a certain extent and in certain ways we have, thanks to common sense, a certain involuntary but relatively established memory in the heritage of what images, what types of scenes, artifacts and even what types of men make up and They surround the markets, but this visual memory established in the collection does not refer to a textual inscription fixed, like the texts, in the petrified textual forms of a given textual-cultural formation.
So, although we can say that always in some way typical individuals in the worlds of common sense will recognize what types of visualities correspond to the market, those visualities are themselves in the way in which they occur and survive there in the culture and in its urban settings, memories of an activity of traffic and continuous barter and exchange in which precisely everything, including symbols, texts and images are in continuous circulation, in permanent barter and in constant detextualization.
Although the concept of imagery that allows us to distinguish the way in which certain visual sets are cut according to their visual typicalities in culture, the liturgy of the Catholic Church, for example with its costumes, objects and images as different from that properly profane colonial period collected in furniture, ways of decorating, costumes, hairstyles, colors collected today in its museums and the latter from that which, for example, distinguishes the visuality of the carnival, could help us say that the free market to which my research refers also It appears as a certain visual imagery that is separate and autonomous from others, but that imagery does not form in culture, nor collections in museums, nor inventories in private collections, nor repertoires classified in industries, much less instituted codes as the aforementioned examples could establish them. Rather, it is, precisely because it is about markets, the clearest present and visual image that we can have of that which, unlike what it fixes and retains, what goes through its traffic and its continuous exchange in the opposite direction to what we consider text in culture.
And it is understood in this way that my investigative survey on the visuality of the market according to questions that we ask ourselves from the museum and conversely my survey of the visuality of the museum as we ask ourselves about it from the market, begins to construct a textual form not only not previously existing as codified in the text of culture, but also, as theorization of the market according to the museum and the museum according to the market, constructs an object that, rearticulating the cultural anthropology of the market and the museum, rearticulates in turn the specificities of that dynamic set that are the markets, making the hermeneutics of that once stratified inaccessible relationship between the abstract market and the concrete and empirical market, between markets today and markets yesterday, between visualities of the market in situ and visualities of the market in its colonial representations, traditional, modern and postmodern, between the traffic of goods and that of visual culture, between the staging of barter with its interlinguistic, intersubjective, objectual give and take and its visual settings, both objectual and non-objectual, material and immaterial.
It should also be added to this that despite the market itself, including this one here, the popular free market in all its visual and urban expression, the example of what is disseminated far from being accumulated, is recirculated far from being stored, is distributed far from being collected, it is exchanged, far from being possessed, that the cultural anthropological hermeneutics that I have developed thereby proposing the theorization of the market as staging, does a lot to relocate the perspectives and coordinates of sociology and cultural anthropology in a new sense, these carried, in fact, for quite some time before with the weight that it assumed in the same objective reality of science, with the increasingly decisive influence in the modern present of economics and business, marketing and the culture of consumption on the studies of culture tending to diminish and diminish not only the latter but with it also the researcher and the research itself, dispersed and weakened throughout the length and breadth of the economy, my phenomenological rearticulation of both around the market understood in this new sense that brings out and puts in front, as Derrida says, within reach of the gaze, the even cultural markets, in whose visuality even and perhaps for a long time yet, they are collected at the culture in the expression of its living markets, themselves expressions of material and visual culture, be not only a topic that I have investigated and not only a set of sites, settings and scenes in which I have done empirical research and field work, but also the object built over a long time required to be able to re-improve them, at least in the terms in which I understand them.
While in the second project of the pre-Columbian and Mayan archaeological museum, the market goes after and is formed as a market in itself around the mystical events that relate the archaeological text of the Mayan culture, with the contemporary present of tourism and entertainment developing around it. of religion, in the first project of mine, we witnessed the opposite, the spectacle of how culture and religion are present in the reality of the market.
We will therefore assist with the thematic selection of essays that follow the discussion also of how two researchers and field workers, we have decided to develop and experiment in my case the sociology and the philosophical and cultural anthropology of the market, in Quetzil's the anthropology of tourism. , in both the dissimilar forms of ethnography, the relationship between the museum displays inside and the museum displays outside between museography, curating and doing field work and research at the same time as two different modes, but related in various ways and in several scenes together mentioned above, Quetzil invited in mine, I invited in Quetzil's, to elicit from field work and research, possibilities for the implementation of a sociology and a cultural anthropology that not only has generated in each one as a theorist and author an infinite number of books, but has also occasionally given rise to the experimentation of visual displays whose logic is intertwined in different ways with the reinscribed past and the future elicited by its occasional presentationalities, staging, museography. , curating and films as some of these forms.
Bibliography
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Schutz Alfred, El Conocimiento en los Mundos de la Vida Cotidiana, editado por Schutz's wife Ilse Heim con Thomas Luckmann, Amorrortu Editories
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Cultural recreations of consumption: The Quids of the Market, Phenomenology and hermeneutics in participant observation
By Abdel Hernandez San Juan
The question of cultural recreations of consumption that will focus the whole of this essay, acquires more interest in my perspective for anthropological and theoretical research, carrying out field work for two years in its first moment before beginning to do my work of experimental ethnography The Market from Here, in urban markets which do not constitute themselves, from a physical point of view, as may be the case of towns, villages, or precise social groups, human groups linked together by kinship relations or social affiliations such as clans or tribes, but of human groups that meet in urban spaces to deploy their businesses, their bussines and their sales, I am beginning to become aware of this.
In a society like the Venezuelan one, in the years in which I did this research, the neoliberal capitalist culture of that time was governed by the transnationalization of economics, the incorporation into the global monetary and financial system, urban markets as a form of material and visual culture expressed in barter. and transactions, reflected in the image of urban traffic, the more general traffic in which the general processes of the economy took shape.
The aforementioned, however, does not mean that, as in finance and the credit system of abstract capital, these markets dissolve into abstractions. If something makes them attractive and unique for sociological and anthropological work, it is that they are precisely the only ways culturally tangible and visible in which the market is expressed as a form of culture with its enclaves, its sites, its locations and its forms of assimilation and deployment of social groups.
The question that I intend to focus on in this essay, as I said, is that of cultural recreations of consumption in their relevance to theoretical anthropological research, but I will do so, however, not to refer to what these markets are in themselves, as I did in others. times, but rather to discuss the specificities that arise for the research methodology in the relationship between the forms of the epistemological cut between the subject and the object, on the one hand, as a problem of theory of knowledge, epistemology and the modes of textual construction expressed in its two forms, as forms of writing that oneself writes into text, once again what Geertz calls self-locations in the ways of solving the relationship between the textual modes of writing and the scriptural mise-en-scenes of the work of field, and as forms of textual construction in the production of hermeneutics of culture between the text of writing and that of culture, as well as the relationship between the latter, and the very problematic of the ways of elucidating well reconsidered in reflection , well taken up by their ways of occurring in the experience itself and in the direct relationship from and with the markets, the very question of field work around the question of the forms of participant observation.
But since the markets themselves in question do not make up, in what cuts them out there and there in urban and social reality, totalities whose whole can be cut out as the set of some social formation considered in the traditional sense, that is , given that these markets, although they do make up conglomerates in urban and visual terms, are not themselves, which limits them as ways of meeting human beings in the activity of bartering and exchanging goods for money, social groups that We consider groups cohesive by links of consanguinity, lineage, race, ethnicity, or even social groups in the sense in which we define this concept in urban sociology, the traditional problem that has been posed to field work both for contemporary urban sociology and for Anthropology is in question.
In the urban popular markets where I did field work, it is not about social groups united among themselves by relations of ethnicity, race or lineage, nor even about traditions that can be considered those of a Persian culture, but rather it is about first and foremost last instance of the market itself as a form of culture, the market as a cultural tradition, a type of market that expresses visible human beings involved in transactions of objects in its societal levels of economic barter, the most concrete visual image that we can have. and money, which at another level in the abstract market of the financial system are economic transactions.
In order for what I want to discuss to be understood in the least complicated way possible, it will first be necessary to refresh with details what types of markets we are talking about and what types of diatribes are presented in these to participant observation.
As I explained in another essay, these urban markets are generally of two types, either they are deployed within and around architectural buildings that are assigned to them as legal areas in which they can do so, an occasion in which generally the The seller has a cubicle or space that can be rented, purchased or owned at once, which is part of the architecture of a large building that has been emptied or arranged for that functionality, or is treated, as it begins to occur already from the very peripheries of those legal locations, of construction systems devised and created by the same vendors designed to camp in an area under the ceiling by installing tubes, usually mountable and dismountable, around which with various materials such as strong tarps, coils of double-reinforced transparent plastic and fabric, which usually, through the use of wires and other tie-down systems, provide them with roofed huts created by themselves in which they sit and display the merchandise on counters and tables.
This type of markets built by the same vendors in the open, as I said, begins to occur in the surroundings and on the peripheries of those architectural buildings that have been assigned by the government in power as the area in which sales can be made. legally, within which the sales activity generally occurs in the form of cubicles of greater or lesser size which are either rooms or fragments of rooms belonging to those constructions reused for the purposes of the sale or They are built with sementó in relation to that architecture, many of them have a shape or appearance that recalls the image of the closets in which clothes are stored, only that they would be like a collection of many closets all open without doors next to each other inside. of each of which, with added counters, stands the seller with his merchandise displayed.
It is around this type of markets that open markets self-built by vendors are deployed on their peripheries, which on the outskirts of these buildings start from their very doors, on the outside they cover that block but can then be deployed in their surroundings. up to almost five hundred meters around, highlighting the entrance and exit area of the large market,
This principle, which can be clearly seen in the Quinta Crespo market, is the same one that is repeated in the interprovincial terminals; in the latter, the terminal building itself is the one that has been architecturally arranged for the legal deployment of vendors in areas of the building that usually surround and form part of it, the part where passengers sit waiting for the buses and through which the latter enter to be boarded, this principle is repeated because then around the sales niches that are displayed Within the same architecture of the terminal, systems of vendors who build their own covered campsites where they sell their merchandise begin to unfold from the moment the streets begin.
Between one thing and the other, the seller who sells inside a secluded cubicle that is part of the architecture and the seller who is deployed in its peripheries with his own roofed outdoor construction systems, then the other two types of sellers take place. , the peddlers, who take advantage of the situation to display the merchandise in an improvised way in areas they choose where they put fabrics, nylon or canvas on the floor and display the merchandise there, or the street vendors who walk with the merchandise on their bodies and hawk it. and selling it from the same places where the passengers are seated, to the areas through which consumers and buyers circulate when they buy from the sellers in the sementó cubicles or when they buy from the sellers who have their self-built and roofed markets on their peripheries. forming together the stallholder, the vendor camped in the open air, the peddler who improvises his merchandise on the ground and the street vendor, the main visual and urban configuration of an area of around five hundred square meters that makes up what we call popular urban markets.
There are, however, significant differences between these two markets just described, the Quinta Crespo market and the interprovincial terminal markets and a wholesale market such as the car market. In the latter, it is not a multi-story building with two blocks at a time. round that has been arranged in its entirety so that this type of markets can legally occur therein.
The wholesale car market, by its very nature of being a wholesale market and above all because it is the main wholesale market in Caracas, through which all merchandise arriving from the rest of the country to the capital must necessarily pass, has very different characteristics. , the latter, which, moreover, does not occur like the others, in the very center of the city or in the terminals, but approximately fifty kilometers outside the city, consists of an area of streets made up of warehouses, These large warehouses are generally each owned by a distributor. This distributor receives from the rest of the country the type of merchandise that he distributes weekly in his warehouse and on one side of the warehouse, which is usually, from the point of view of the streets through which one travels, the same side for everyone, a large warehouse mat is deployed openly, through which the interior of the warehouse with all the stored merchandise to be distributed becomes visible to the visitor.
The buyer in the car market is generally not a person walking but is usually trucks of very different sizes driven by their private owners, small and large trucks, small vans or vans that come to the warehouses to buy the merchandise stored by them. the distributors in those warehouses, in this sense it is a wholesale relationship between distributors, the one who stores it is a distributor owner who has bought the merchandise from the one who brings it from the rest of the country in trucks, the one who comes to buy it from him It is then a smaller distributor, not a wholesaler but a retailer, who will generally distribute that merchandise in Caracas or sell it directly.
Now, because these warehouse gates do not generate sales and purchases to people who come directly to buy, but only sales to trucks that will redistribute the merchandise, through the back of those warehouses, which is where their owners receive the merchandise. From the rest of the country, temporary parking spaces are created by the same distributors who have brought the merchandise from the rest of the country. The latter, in addition to selling their merchandise wholesale to the owners of the warehouses during the days in which they have made the long trip, they stop their trucks or vans and prepare to sell, in this way people come from Caracas to buy directly from them and, especially on weekends, a sale and a purchase is generated that also includes the circulation of people walking, They barter and buy around which, then, and this is a main characteristic of the car market, there circulates a forklift dealer who is continually moving with forklifts full of merchandise, these forklifts, central in the visual warp of the car market and who There are thousands of them, they continuously communicate to the truck driver who arrives from the rest of the country that after selling his merchandise to the warehouse owners, he is preparing to sell the rest to direct pedestrians, to that direct buyer, to the owner of the warehouse that is selling to trucks. retailers and the latter.
Three more types of markets must then be added to the characteristics of the quinta crespo market and the interprovincial bus terminals, on the one hand, and to the characteristics of the car market, on the other, and these three additional types of markets will be decisive if not central to the analysis and understanding of the popular urban market, it is now the culturally strongest of these markets, which is a market similar to the one that is deployed in the outskirts or peripheries that I described before, the one made up of sellers who have themselves created the market. construction system of your stall or place of sale formed by large tubes and wood that act as a structure which they cover with canvas, plastic and fabric, tying it with wire and other roofing means, but which are no longer deployed as the periphery of a defined assigned legal area by a masonry building in architecture, but now they enjoy the possibility that they can freely dispose of an entire area of the city that is granted to them so that they can legally deploy.
This area that is given to them generally makes up a large boulevard and can cover approximately two square kilometers. It includes hundreds of thousands of these vendors who can be deployed camping on the streets, in the parks and on the boulevards of that area of the city, the The characteristics of this type of market, the most important at an anthropological level, are given in that its legality is defined not by a principle of urban engineering and civil architecture but by a relatively recreational and festive ceremonial principle related to cultural traditions but not, as It occurs in carnival and other forms of cultural celebration in the sense of celebrating a cultural tradition that is itself foreign to the market but in the sense of celebrating the market itself as a popular cultural tradition. Examples of this market are the Barquisimeto market in a province so called several hours from Caracas and in Caracas the Katia market that takes place in a residential area characterized by central pedestrian parks between streets but that is spread along the tangents and branches of streets for several kilometers around.
And this is one of the main conclusions of the first stage of my field work alone, it is the same urban cultural tradition, shopping, going out to markets, meeting the community in places of purchase and sale, the small public square of the market, as in the sense in which as a tradition it is intertwined with customs, customs, folklores, lifestyles and the ordinary sense of the daily life of the people, a phenomenon that after concluding it, the investigation Regarding the fact that popular urban markets are ritual ceremonies that have barter as their basic principle, I began to investigate it not only live but also in the visual archives of the cultural memory of Caracas.
These are contemporary forms of markets in the sense of their urban character in which a neoliberal capitalist sense of the merchandise governs, the private owner of his business and his business without any type of intervention from the state, whose sale is governed by a free monetary and economic system but it is, however, at the same time, although they are not exclusively agricultural and food markets, but include a wide array of merchandise focused on clothing, decoration and adornment of the body, the sale of artifacts for domestic setting and props and in different forms of visual symbolism of culture including bodily health and religion, of a market that is itself a cultural tradition, a ceremonial and ritual form of culture, in fact, from the point In view of their characteristics in the relationship with the type of seller, the city and the culture, they are very similar, if not almost the same, to the agricultural markets of the city of Los Angeles as I was able to know and do field work in the latter when They were deployed in the area around the Los Angeles Public Library between the months of January and February of 2003.
I will call these last boulevard markets because it is generated around them, although that area of the city is not considered a boulevard in itself, a type of pedestrian traffic of shoppers who walk through them, this is the current expression of the once a public square of the Sunday market intrinsically related to the cultural tradition of the market as a form of culture in the city which itself forms a boulevard from the moment it unfolds in the form of hundreds of thousands of these vendors who camp on both sides of the street for kilometers around, it certainly stops forming that boulevard at times of the year when the market is not deployed, but it maintains certain relations anthropologically with that other one that, before being a market, is in itself considered a boulevard on which markets are then displayed.
Two more types of markets are added to this type of markets, which also acquire anthropological relevance for other reasons, on the one hand, in the same way that the seller who camps with his own construction system has the autonomy of his market form in The latter, which I have described and defined as the most significant for anthropological research, are very distant and not at all related as the first described, to issues of civil engineering and architecture, also the peddler or improvised salesman, who before we saw only on the peripheries of the first and second type of markets discussed, there are autonomies for their market forms and this autonomous form is then deployed in the form of high social density markets around areas of high traffic and pedestrian traffic in the city such as the entrances and the subway exits, and some pedestrian enclaves in the colonial and old part of the city such as Baral Avenue, as well as pedestrian crossings such as arcades and tunnels.
Finally we have the rural highway market that we cannot consider an urban market since it is directly assumed by sellers who live in the towns surrounding the highways and whose main buyer is the people who travel in cars or buses between one province and another, these markets , built of wood and directly with tree trunks, as well as with thatched roofs and different types of plant leaves, are essentially cocoa, casabe and cassava markets on the avenues that connect Caracas with the eastern part in the direction of Anzoátegui. fruits, also include the sale of cooked foods based on corn such as cachapa with cheese, and on the avenues that connect Caracas with the west of the country in the direction of Mérida and the páramo pottery markets, essentially ceramics intended for household utensils such such as ceramic cups and pots, Andean and indigenous crafts and fabrics such as hammocks, blankets, bedspreads, tablecloths and other types of weaving such as basketry.
What characterizes man in this type of circumstances according to the different types of market that I have referred to and what are the challenges of sociological, anthropological and ethnographic research of these markets both from the point of view of research and its cuts for textual and from the point of view of field work and forms of participant observation out there.
We are not investigating a village or a town, but a clan, a tribe, or a family. In some cases, the situation may arise in which a particular cubicle belongs not to an individual owner-seller but to a couple with children or a family, but nothing guarantees that the seller who will be next to you on the left and the one who will follow on your right do not have any type of family relationship, but rather that they are sellers associated by ties of friendship or simply people who run their businesses individually, so that nothing allows what relates to these conglomerates as human groups that meet in their spaces, to be referred to questions of kinship.
In the same way, the seller from whom you are buying may be black, but the one next to him is white, the next one after him is mestizo, the next ten cubicles are carried by whites, the next two are Indians and the next three are black. , there is no way to study these markets according to kinship or racial principles, but even if one wanted to force one's hand to study these markets in an ethnic-cultural sense, in no other place than in the markets is the human being further from the elements ethnic-cultural in that which brings together other human beings and relates them around buying, selling and bartering, rather than in a market.
To discuss here the modes of participant observation, I have concluded, based on my direct experience, to superimpose and contrast the relationships between two ways of asking questions, for which, in a first modality I am going to assume, which happened to me with continuous frequency, that when you go to the market with the intention not only of buying as you have done before most of the time in your life, but this time also of trying to understand them and write about them, it is difficult to stop going that time too. shopping among other things because it becomes almost impossible to immerse yourself in these markets surrounded by offers and products for sale, not to feel tempted and often more than seduced in need of shopping, the question that this raises then places us for the discussion of the forms of participant observation first and foremost in the face of the relationship that this diatribe raises, that of how to resolve in one's own experience that relates and distinguishes the experience accumulated in the pure life of having gone a number of long years from its life to the markets by the sole need to go shopping without even having considered research on it, of those times when from a certain moment onwards a research project begins to aim for something more than just going shopping to do field work on them.
This fact, which in itself brings to the foreground and validates at an anthropological level the fact that the project in question activates in one and in one's own experience to take up, revisit, go to and resume the interest that this new way of seeing one's life has. in relation to the markets, the accumulated experience that one had had before without asking research questions.
From the first time I saw myself in one of these markets, visiting them with an additional intention to the mere fact of spending my weekend shopping as a simple necessity of life, my first question and the first thing that came to my mind was around of this diatribe that was not yet about how to relate to sellers and buyers but about how to relate in my own collection a previous accumulated experience, previously not considered in that way, but now made relevant by it, and a way of being in the markets in which the question of wanting something more about them was added, knowing them, understanding ourselves, developing a theory about them, writing a sociology and an anthropology.
The first thing that occurred to me from the moment I was now going with something more to look for than just shopping, but at the same time it became almost impossible to avoid the fact that each time I had something more to look for, it also ceased to be and did not cease to be. never, once again also going shopping, was the theoretical problems that posed me the relationship between ways of revisiting an accumulated experience of being in the markets for many years without wanting anything more from them than spending my weekend in one way. and bring home a lot of purchased things, as a form of previously acquired knowledge about a cultural reality about which I was beginning to wonder in terms of writing a theory.
But although that accumulated experience was itself a knowledge, having lived it without additional pretensions also meant for me a way of attending to it that I would not have paid attention to the type of things in which one begins to repair or accentuate and ask when the question begins to modify .
In this sense, without even adding to my reasons, what I later concluded after studying the markets well for several years, about the observation and the point of view in them and about the polyphony that characterizes them, at that time it was about find out why initiating a mode of participation to which something more was added than just shopping, pretending a theory, understanding a reality, getting to know it and in some way communicating something about it to a number of readers, would have to stop being a true participation in what makes markets in everyday life.
This fact, which I have previously referred to the theories of the late sixties to early eighties on the semiotics of extraverbal communication, when in order to thoroughly investigate the semiotics of non-verbal signs, situations were taken in which individuals did not communicate. with each other under research conditions but simply when they did it without wondering about it in the ordinary situations in which this type of communication occurs in life, he began to call for analysis, which means studying something, just as it happens when people do not pay attention to looking. I did it in a different way than what I usually do, however, I did not go beyond referring to the idea of a silent observation of what was happening around me, an attentive observation, detailed in some cases, in some cases an eminently visual observation although also sound that had to attend to the details regarding how things are from a physical point of view, objects, construction systems, materials, ways of unfolding, environmental and habitation solutions, manners and customs expressed in body languages and clothing of the sellers, ways of sitting or positioning oneself for the sale and during its breaks, noticing what was reiterated and made ordinary as frequent or stable for a significant number of possible situations and furthermore, separating in my attention on one side what makes up the setting in a market scene that encompasses in principle only the sellers with their constructive and merchandise displays in the visually analyzed space as something in itself, imagining taking something away from the buyers in reality possible only very early in the morning before arrival of pedestrian traffic of buyers, and then pay attention to the latter, the buyers, as the ritual or ceremony in which this staging is completed and becomes a continuous intersubjective give and take between buyer and seller of which due to The relationship between the market and recreation could not exclude the enjoyment that markets ordinarily mean for the senses.
The latter, the fact that markets are and never cease to be, above all and first, highly sensorialized worlds in which the enjoyment and recreational component of selling as much as buying govern, certainly has not ceased to be present since those first times when I began to see them differently, until today, my sociological and anthropological theory of markets is, undoubtedly, a theory about sensory worlds until today, no matter how much the type of Things I focus on.
But the idea of an impatient and attentive silent observer who only oscillates between two variants of bodily postures in being there in the markets, simply continuing to be the usual buyer - although in his career and not infrequently in his life he has had one who, almost always, also offers their professional services for sale, what we call freelancers, but referred only to the perimeter of these formations, enclaves or conglomerates that we call popular urban markets and their culture like this is cut out in the city fabric, a body that oscillates between that which goes shopping and that which spends time on its itinerary to pay your attention and fix its observation on what is around it, if it was modified until later it completely modified.
Remaining as a silent observer as if one were a camera that retains details of what one sees and observes is so limited and lacks understanding in the markets and of the markets that it does not go beyond communicating a relatively orderly and typified description of the types and characteristics. typologies of sellers, buyers and market forms, but it does not manage to immerse itself at all in what defines these markets as worlds nor does it understand what is actually happening around it.
The idea of the surroundings as well as the surrounding world helps to understand something that not only has a physical and descriptive sense but also begins to be nourished by a hermeneutical and interpretive sense that begins to be based on an infinite number of meanings that make markets worlds and universes. loaded with meaning, on the one hand, and in which the very problem of what happens to the observation is much more complex than a discernment between observing carefully with descriptive detail and walking distractedly without paying attention.
In these markets, in the first place, the staging of barter is already taking place because of what shapes and makes them, an intersubjective give and take between people all of whom are in the same situation that defines them themselves in the face of diatribes of communication. , choosing a merchandise among many that you review among those that the seller offers, mediates in the markets the type of situation that peculiarizes the communication that is generated between the seller and the buyer, the latter wants the buyer to buy a certain merchandise and wants to sell it to him by convincing him of its quality, your interest and the security in your good purchase, at the best possible price as long as you want to obtain the best merchandise at the most economical price as much as possible.
But that one-to-one relationship between each seller and each buyer in the scene that goes towards the realization of the barter has a development and an evolution as a staging. I have reintroduced the concept of staging here again. It is required to distinguish my different uses of it. I call staging in the first place the way in which the sellers deploy themselves with their construction systems in which they live and inhabit while they display their merchandise and sell.
The latter are put into scenes not only because the seller literally exposes himself to a scene that presupposes the buyer, that is, when we analyze that display of a seller that includes the way in which each one has created the originality of his own way of solving its autonomous construction system and its way of displaying the merchandise, we see, without even putting the buyer there, in the same way that we see a book that does not yet have a reader but presupposes one, a staging for an anticipated audience,
The buyer is not exactly an audience, although at a significant level of his itineraries he also only contemplates before deciding to buy, he is actually a client and someone who is going to purchase a merchandise for money, but the seller's deployment is the same as an implementation. scene, now, the moment of the exchange is also a staging and it is staging, I said, it has a journey
A buyer can choose a seller for a merchandise that has caught his attention without the latter realizing it, but a buyer and a seller can meet in many ways and these ways are in themselves what initiates that staging that goes from the moment they look at each other where the seller can give the potential buyer a gestural expression with his eyes or with his hands inciting him to choose it and buy in his establishment, until the moment when after many avoidance, the buyer decides to approach to a merchandise and prepare to buy, there are sellers who directly tell the pedestrian passing by something to buy from them, something that is not always an advertisement for their merchandise or referring to it, but can be a trick or a simple gesture that It is taken for granted that it is about attracting because it is pre-established for the buyer that the seller wants to attract him to his merchandise.
This scene can occur in silence from the beginning to the end, with the entire transaction taking place without the seller and buyer exchanging words until the moment of payment, but it can also occur while the seller and the buyer talk and what they talk can refer directly to the specific event. of his own immediate relationship, talk about the merchandise, what the buyer wants, what the seller suggests, or he can digress into other topics according to which while the buyer chooses the merchandise the seller talks to him about any other topic or to the Conversely, these dialogue settings are important in themselves and I will return to them later because many times I took advantage of them and immersed myself in letting myself be carried away by those dialogues simply taking part in them.
First, it is necessary to remember that the transaction that defines the barter scene is not situationally correlated or influenced by a one-to-one relationship between a possible buyer and a possible seller, but that the probabilities of a buyer approaching a seller and choosing him are also correlated with a competition, many sellers sell the same merchandise with different characteristics and compete with each other to be chosen and to be the ones from whom they buy, for which they follow different strategies; therefore, it is necessary to notice not only the occasional barter that begins in the exchange of glances until the buyer chooses a place but rather in a broader and earlier dynamic through which many sellers with similar merchandise are on the lookout for buyers and the latter for the best and most economical merchandise not without adding The purely economic details: the seller wants to do the best possible business by selling at the highest possible price and the buyer wants to acquire the best merchandise at the lowest possible price.
There are then two kinesthetic and synesthetic dynamics that organize the corporal and intercorporeal modes of communication within these large human conglomerates. The first assumes that going to the market in itself is generally, and as a dominant subjectivity, a sensory activity of enjoyment and a accumulation or a considerable part of the spatial movements are relaxed by this recreation, the buyer can spend long hours just looking without buying much or not everything that the buyers would want, the seller in turn does not risk everything in one day or a single buyer but rather he takes stock of the whole of his day, his week and his month and since he spends a large part of his year there in his tent he also experiences it as an activity of enjoyment for the senses, the second dynamic that governs is the one before Having evoked the fact that the staging of barter as a moment of intersubjective give and take is preceded and regulated by a competition between many who have the same merchandise, both dynamics are interrelated.
But as I said before, it is not just about many stagings of the barter happening all at the same time, but it is about the relationship between different forms of sales happening simultaneously, some superimposed on the others, there is a seller parked, camped with a system constructive and roofed, but also a street vendor who preaches and there is also an improvised vendor who is deployed informally. These last two, especially the street vendor, tend in turn to supply merchandise intended for needs that people have and are created for them by themselves. shopping, from having a snack, having a juice or eating something, to taking with you some type of cheaper item that, for unforeseen things, is not sold in the campsites.
A market, as I said before, is a surrounding world and since it is, the dynamics of communications that can occur between people, although governed by this basic principle of the staging of the seller and the staging of the barter, have a wide margin of possibilities, a dialogue can be generated around a commodity that goes from being about that merchandise to being about any other topic in the life of the buyer and the seller, individual to their lives, or about culture and society, a person can be accompanied from another at the time of purchase, their partner, a friend or a child, thus not being one buyer but several who go together, and these people at the time of purchase can come to talk about any topic so that in the At the moment when one is inclined to buy, one buys while the dialogue continues and this dialogue is heard by the seller who now sees the buyer buying while talking with his friend, his partner, his son or his nephew.
While one of them is choosing the merchandise, the seller can enter with something that he says in the dialogue that they bring and this diverts attention from the bartering scene, making the seller join in with what he says in the dialogue that they were bringing, a seller can also be in dialogue with someone else who is next to you in your place where you sell and conversely the opposite occurs, one of the people who make up the group that buys intervenes with a comment, question or observation in a dialogue that the seller brings with another person Within its construction system, or any other person around it, in the markets in fact dialogues are generated that are not always about the markets themselves and the merchandise but can also discuss mundane topics.
He said that a market is a surrounding world in which to be able to understand at a hermeneutical level what is happening, one must immerse oneself and get involved in respect to which distanced and silent observation stops providing the necessary insides to capture the meaning and understand. What it is about, is required, because the market itself demands it in its polyphony to abandon the point of view and remove oneself from the observation which should occupy only a moment of the research and from which it is required to distance oneself, it is required in turn to immerse oneself but Diving into the market, although it is a surrounding world, has its regulations, its guidelines and its requirements.
It is not strange for a man who is exposing himself from a staging to other men and for a staging in which a barter will take place that a surrounding world defined by many who do this while others walk around contemplating and deciding, That someone wants to take photographs because if something defines the markets, it is that in them men are continually looking at each other, in a market everyone is exposed to be seen by others and not only seen but also to go beyond the arrangement of a business,
In this sense, the attitude of the camera that wants to capture images is not, as it could be in a church, something that stands out as strange but rather it is something that very quickly dilutes and tends to be disseminated in its occurrence by the polyphonic traffic of the market, this offers the camera a chance to play by moving quickly between situations and capturing angles, scenes, gestural moments, facial expressions, body displays in the sale, attention to construction and color details, and even relationships to its own presence as camera,
If you approach a seller to buy merchandise and when you are close to paying or choosing the product, you tell him that you want to take some photos, he will normally react by preparing to do so in the same way if you move along the pedestrian paths where buyers pass and You take photographs of the sellers, of different scenes of bartering and of things that surround you, you go unnoticed, some body expressions may explain a first reaction of astonishment but it immediately dissolves, in the market facial communication is highly expressive and is closely related to body expression with a reflexive activity of seeing and being seen, this relationship of seeing being seen is the main warp of the market, if somewhere it stops caring about being seen and seeing, it is in the markets that they consist precisely of it and given that in the end this process is aimed at a transaction
It is in the markets where seeing and being seen is disseminated in an economic sense governed by the same commercial logic of the market, someone who walks with a camera is also doing a business even if they accumulate another type of product and where everyone who is doing their business matters. Little does it mean that for someone their business is taking images, but the human situations that occur in a market are in turn for the camera of a very high expressive value with respect to the material that can be gathered about a culture, especially about the market as a culture.
Now, I said that it is a surrounding but regulated world and one of the ways in which this regulation is expressed is that in that being exposed to seeing and being seen, the general dynamic that governs is presenting, contemplating, choosing, selling and buying. , a camera that is not overwhelmed in its spatial logic by this dynamic will immediately be alien and will lose the hermeneutical sense in question, in the market there is always a quickness grasp, something that must be captured and understood and a camera must surrender to that pertinent sense of the quickness grasp, learning to become part of the logic of the market within its own hermeneutics, that is to say that one should not get rid of or ignore the situation but must adapt to it to find its possibilities because he takes and takes from the market It offers the same possibilities for a camera that, integrated into the logic of the market, will be able to operate hermeneutically within it, passing, as it were, unnoticed, obviously it is not about going unnoticed in the literal sense, someone is taking photos and possibly there are others who also do it, but in the sense that the intercorporeal mobility of the market and the ways of moving within its itineraries admit intercorporeal relationships, postures, attitudes, a way of looking at things and being looked at within them that offer the camera avenues for a specific way of experiencing the essayistic, investigative and hermeneutical possibilities of the eye and the shutter, photographic or video, the crucial thing about a camera within the market is that it is a registration resource with which you can later make an appointment or meet outside the market to observe the results and then go to the work of analyzing what was obtained, selecting and editing.
A session of critical analysis of the results of a camera immersion can provide an interesting setting for anthropological theorizing about the market and at the same time offer guidelines to improve or enrich the subsequent forms that will be experienced in a subsequent immersion.
It is necessary to say that most of the time I immersed myself without a camera and that it was my eye that was working on theorizing a sense of the relationship between the visual and the hermeneutic so that more than ninety percent of my work The field trip was without a camera, but because I experienced the camera on several occasions when I was able to bring with me a photographer determined to immerse myself in my field work and put his images at the service of my research, I make these observations,
The main thing that the camera contributes in field work is that it inscribes and leaves a memory of the visual retentions of that day that later allows one to see what was seen again and organize it from a short distance, at the same time the camera although it can be diluted in the situation of the market, going unnoticed as another element in the visual and sound traffic, it does not stop getting involved in the give and take of seeing-being-seen relationships and therefore limits or circumscribes the hermeneutical scope from the moment it limits and circumscribes the radius of body action,
With a camera you cannot enter into a dialogue or certainly not in a dialogue well diluted in a hermeneutic dynamic because no matter how diluted it is, it is always like something seen punctually, a way of being less or of being in a different way in the situation and that It limits it in its ways of becoming part, it can become part and become part, but in a way that, while offering its possibilities, also limits it.
This concept of the possibilities between what is a potential and what is a limitation, apparently so simple, is not at all and is of importance to me in field work. For me, field work is always a relationship between inscriptions, the The inscription that one brings carries with it its possibilities and its limitations, the possibilities are themselves avenues that are understood by theorizing your inscriptions, the latter include several planes and levels, several strata since the inscriptions are also stratifications, you bring some inscriptions with you , which you bring for yourself, they enable you and limit you at the same time that they create your avenues of relationship with a culture. According to my inscriptions, a unique range of relationship possibilities with a culture opens up for me, which are impossible for you and difficult to access for you because you do not have my own inscriptions but others other than mine, but mine in turn are limitations, on the other hand, the inscriptions are not only those that one brings, but those that inscribed like you They have meant that culture before and are inscribed in its acerbs,
We have here then that the inscription is relevant in field work in any field work but that in field work in the markets for the theorization of participant observation, the analyzes that I am developing on the impossibility of immersing oneself in the logics of meaning common and in the hermeneutics that can give quickness grasp of the market while maintaining the position of the distant and silent observer, are essential for the theorization and understanding of the specific ways that registration acquires within the markets.
Firstly, the intersubjective give and take do not have the same intensity in the markets in all their settings, with the exception of the specific staging between the buyer and seller when the barter is carried out, which is the form of communication in the markets within which the intersubjective give and take acquires its densest and most climatic moment in which dialogues are generated, etc., there is a give and take of translations and intergestural and intercorporeal communications in the markets in which the communications do not manage to form dense plots, I mean. to the fact that the intelligibility that shapes the intergestural and intercorporeal relevances in the market can occur in a general sense of displacement and the relationship see being seen observer always observed that makes the market a matter of exposing oneself to others and moving between them in accordance to which we are all doing more or less the same or something similar subject to similar reasons and motives
There are understandings in the market, but not in the sense that a heritage of accumulated culture lends itself to the interpretation of a dense content loaded with meanings, but in the sense that the generality of a situation is prefigured as what makes the dynamics of that surrounding world, in a surrounding world in which many are exposing themselves to each other, letting each other know what they want by showing themselves and showing themselves and in which some buy and others sell while not a few simply sensory enjoyment, bodily exchanges do not They often require resorting to continuous explanations.
As I have said in other essays, I assign great hermeneutical importance to the concept of explicitation. It is a concept worked on by Habermas in the first version of his theory of communication, but certainly within the markets if we follow the plot of their dynamics immersed in them, not so many Things are required to be made explicit as before being made in some way intelligible from a generality. This could refer to my previously discussed idea of a certain superficiality in the markets. This idea of superficiality refers to a phenomenology of the market. Becoming intelligible is enough. In markets that adhere to the hermeneutics of their visual and interpretive logic within the meaning-making of what makes markets surrounding worlds, becoming explained is actually something that presupposes and requires a type of intersubjective give and take that is somewhat deeper or denser in regarding the pragmatics of less common communication in the markets,
While in an unforeseen dialogue there would always be something to be made explicit as well, it will generally not be very frequent, rather it will be more frequent to make it intelligible, which can stem from a significant number of gestural and interbody exchanges in just processes of legibility relevant to the exchange of glances. and bodily expressions without necessarily requiring resorting to the spoken word.
The latter undoubtedly intervenes but in rare situations, the above offered me the possibility of abstracting and at the same time considering these extraverbal communications as part of the field work, no longer only between me in my being there between them and the dynamics that were generated in my relationship with people in general and with the staging of the seller and the barter, but also in the sole appreciation of its own logic, extraverbal communication not only gave me a sense of the quickness grasp of the market, the how move and advance in the relationship between my research, the field work and what I was collecting from the immersion work, but also a quickness grasp on the communications between them, in the market itself the sellers communicate continuously in a gestural way using the body both around their market objectives, to sell, to buy, to attract clients, to achieve what they want, to function in the way they prefer, but also as the ruling mode of hermeneutic intelligibility in the surrounding world, which was for me The construction of that hermeneutics based on the phenomenology of the market and my possibilities in the situations, was in a certain way also something that I grasped from the governing logics in the markets despite my presence.
The cultural recreations of consumption are then, ultimately and at the last level, the instance around which the entire meaning of the market is gathered as a staging and as a ritual ceremony that makes it a cultural tradition, beyond the immediate mise in scene. of the seller with respect to the buyer and of many at the same time with respect to many potential buyers, and beyond the mise in scene of barter that governs its logic in situ, the cultural recreations of consumption explain the overall symbolic meaning of this implementation. scene, an urban and popular market is the same a sales scene governed by the activity of consumption, but at the same time the market as a visual staging of a culture that includes material expressions, self-created constructions, ways of camping, mooring systems , uses of materials and colors, ways of positioning oneself in space and dressing, ways of arranging merchandise, types of merchandise for sale and intercorporate communications, it is in turn a cultural recreation of that consumption, the market culturally reinvents itself as a location and enclave consumption by reassimilating it culturally.
This concept of cultural recreations of consumption explains not only the spectacular nature of its scenic nature, but also brings up a complex distinction in culture between what we consider authentic and what we consider once influenced by a consumption activity because it is The latter, governed by business and by the massiveness of people's taste and preferences, simultaneously symbolically recreated by advertising and the rhetoric of sensory seduction around products, tends to bracket the sense that objects, artifacts or Symbolic products may be something more than convenient adaptations for sale and in this move away from culturalist parameters understood in a sense that refers to the original or original form of symbols in a culture, but placing emphasis on this supposed dichotomies distances understanding of the fact that what makes the market cultural tradition is precisely that recreation and that cultures in the last analysis are always inventions of this type, there has never been in an anthropological sense a culture in which commerce did not regulate symbolic exchange and production of goods that in order to be reproduced have to be sold
Cultural recreations of consumption in this sense deny the dichotomy and with it the idea of a native point of view established in a rigid or inflexible way, in the market the symbols are recreated to adapt to consumption and therefore stop responding to a idea of an original sender that does not presuppose, in what makes it cultural reproduction, that commercial activity in itself.
An Englishman, an American, a Dutchman, can walk through these markets and see in them merchandise, objects and goods of English, American or Dutch origin and wonder if perhaps the men in the market are appropriating what, according to them, comes from their cultures. , but according to this meaning they are presupposing that the culture of that market man can be retained and referred to a number of symbolic objects or goods that would in themselves make up the authentic ones of his culture with respect to which those coming from his would then be appropriate.
This logic is not only naive but also unaware of what makes and shapes the culture of this market man, not only does it ignore that since the goods of their cultures are on the free market they begin to be assimilated by new cultures, This, which is expressed in the market of food, clothing and first-rate goods, also occurs in intellectual and theoretical culture.
Cultural recreations of consumption alter and dislocate cultural presuppositions about the native point of view at the same time that they relativize them, show that cultures are within each other and belong to each other, transform the referents of their own cultures or well of universal issues, but what makes my field work in these markets peculiar, among many other things that give peculiarity to my field work, is that cultural recreations of consumption are not a topic or something to be versed but rather the center The same thing that I am investigating when doing field work in these markets, that is, that these recreations are themselves one of the phenomena that focus the attention of my field work.
Up to this point I have completely theorized the way in which I understood and did the field work only when it came to immersing myself in the markets, I am referring to that period of two years prior to starting to work with Fernando and Elaiza,
Notes
-For a previous analysis in anthropology on markets, the reflections of Stephen A Tyler in his essay A Point of Order on the matter are significant, I quote Stephen:
On the analogy of physics, we focus on transactions that signify just the objective movement of things, forgetting that exchange may also affirm the moral basis of society.
Transactions do not just signify~ the movement of goods, they symbolize mutual obligation. The objective movement of goods can only signify the fact of exchange, and because it thus implies nothing more than exchange, it cannot by itself reveal its meaning, cannot speak of what it symbolizes. We must distinguish then, between transactions that merely signify and those that symbolize. Thus, when an Indian farmer, from his hard-won crop, gives a traditional share of grain to the blacksmith who fashioned his implements of production, it is not just a payment for goods and services but an affirmation of a continuing relationship which recognizes the fixed pattern of statuses and symbolizes the performance of mutual duties. His act symbolizes the moral obligations of the social order. It symbolizes dharma in both of its senses as duty and order, The mutually implicated acts of the farmer and the blacksmith are simultaneously expressions of their respective duties (dharma) and affirmations of social order (dharma).
Significantly, economic transactions are but one of the many possible settings in which these group relations may be symbolized. The giving and taking of food, the exchange of women in marriage, precedence in ceremonies, patterns of respect and deference in speech and behavior, and performance of religious observances serve equally as appropriate settings in the Dharrna S6stras nothing is more clear than that the moral or cosmic order (dharma) dominates the economic and social orders. This view contradicts our notion that "business is business," the predominant presumption distilled out of the historical circumstances of the Western experience of the industrial revolution.
We first see this conception of society as a transcendent unity created by transactions between egoistic atoms in our idea of the market, and we trace this purely cognitive transformation of the idea of the market from that of a concrete locality to a transcendental abstraction in the writings of proto- economists of the eighteenth century who both effected and documented it. In its earlier concrete form the market was simply a neutral place of ex- change, the brief meeting of strangers solely for the purpose of handing over natural goods, goods which had not been culturally transformed, which had not become symbolic.
They were places set aside, immunized as it were, from the surrounding culture-not just secular places, but places of pure objectivity. They were concrete localities where objects of one kind came together in exchange for objects of other kinds. They were meaningless places where disparate groups could meet without incurring moral obligation, places where citizenship, persona, and soul could be forgotten. because they implied amorality it is not surprising that they should so often have been associated with carnivals. Fairs were, and anyone who has in his youth walked a midnight midway can affirm that they still are, both places of exchange and settings in which everyday morality is temporarily set aside. Fairs, and early markets too, combined exchange with the atmosphere of a carnival.
This leads us to ask: "What then is the basis for a metaphoric identity be- tween exchange and sacrifice?" There are several, such as for example, the giving of gifts (cf. Tyler 1973:164-165), but more importantly, both sacrifice and exchange imply something about the transformation of one thing into another, the assignment or reassignment of meaning. The root metaphor for this whole process is the idea of creation, that original formation of order out of chaos, that first transformation of the natural world which changed it into a meaningful cultural world. I am suggesting that this process of establishing order out of the disarray of natural phenomena constitutes the basis for the homology between sacrifice and exchange in general.
Stephen A Tyler, A Point of Order, Rice University studies
Bibliography
de Certaud Michael, The Practice of Every Day Life, The University of California Press, 99
Eco Umberto, La Estructura Ausente, Lumen
Gadamer George, Estética y Hermeneutica, Tecnos
Habermas Junger, The Problems of Understanding in Social Sciences, Pp, 144-196, Theory of Communicative Action, Beacon Press
Habermas Junger, The Problem of comprehension in social sciences, the Theory of communicative action, Beacon press, Boston
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Self and Acervo: The Phenomenology of the Self in the Hermeneutic of Culture, Scholars’Press
Schutz Alfred, El Conocimiento en los Mundos d ela Vida Cotidiana, editado por Schutz's wife Ilse Heim con Thomas Luckmann, Am orrortu Editores
Tyler Stephen A, on the markets in India, A POINT OF ORDER, Pp 133-135, Rice University studies, 1973-1974, USA
The Market from Here: Staging and experimental ethnography
By Abdel Hernandez San Juan
The question that I am going to discuss in this essay is theoretical in itself although it involves issues of rhetoric and refers to the staging of field work and the elicitation of cultural anthropology in visual displays. I will therefore discuss The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography as a professional practice of ethnography; a form of cultural anthropology elicitation.
To put fieldwork on the scene of the text, what Clifford Geert calls self-locations, referring to the strategies we follow and choose in composing textual modes that reflect, make reference to, self-refer to or represent what has been a fieldwork experience. , the usual resource has been the writing of essays and papers, on the one hand, and the writing of books on the other, as in my case it continues to be the continuous, permanent and recurring way of doing it in an incomparably higher percentage, books and papers.
Unlike the written essay and the book, the only other known way in which the textual staging of fieldwork has been practiced has been in two modalities of what Stephen A Tyler has called displays.
Either a curated and museographed exhibition is made in a museum of anthropology and ethnography, or a film or video is made, this is what we usually call displays. The display in general, however, be it the museum or the film, has had great limitations in anthropology in the past, these have been given for various reasons.
When it comes to an anthropology museum, whether we are talking about an independent curator and museographer who achieves or obtains a contract to make an anthropology exhibition in a museum, or whether it is an exhibition curated by curators from the same museum, the exhibitions are They are usually forced, due to the contingencies that the museum usually has for its audiences, to refer its textual and visual forms to the properly representational fact towards a culture or society in question.
Even when it is a public anthropology museum, such as the Berkeley Museum of Anthropology, although it still has the privilege of being relatively related, although architecturally independent, to the University of Berkeley, the above is usual and frequent.
With great difficulty, a museum can offer anthropology as a display the freedom of experimentation that the field worker requires to make the museographic staging an opportunity aimed at deploying textual and visual ways of making references to it because this distracts the public attention towards self-disciplinary issues that refer to self-referential and meta-textual entelechys that distance themselves from the cultural references in question.
For this reason, as much as the curator and the museographer are interested in not only museographically representing a culture or society but also in making references to the anthropologist, the work of the latter tends to be used as a basis by the curator who himself becomes the anthropologist of the sample for that museography doing second-hand work based on the material provided by the work of anthropologists who have studied that society or culture, assuming a case in which an exhibition is made empirically referred to the work of an anthropologist Precisely, references to field work tend to be relegated to a simple vehicle, a simple instrumental resource intended for the purpose of offering a certain representation of that culture and less, to say almost nothing or nothing, to put on the textual scene. and museographic visual references to field work in the form of the experimentation of a self-location as a textual strategy of the anthropologist himself, because the museum maintains a contingent relationship as a representational institution, with the cultures on which the samples are about, the possibilities Although the exhibitions become occasions to represent field work, they are minimal and at most extremely limited.
In the same way, anthropology films, although they tend to expand the range of possibilities a little more to open the referential diameter not only to the culture in question but also to allow references to the anthropologist and field work to enter the film product, Even the possibilities are very limited because the film must, as a phenomenon that deals with or refers to a specific cultural location, offer as a textual form an interpretation, an image or a representation of that culture or society and less so or in general to subordinate it to that purpose, references to field work.
However, with the increasingly widespread proliferation of what we have called the crisis of the representation of cultures in anthropology, what has initially been in terms of displays, museums and films, a moral prejudice and a limitation in making references to the worker field, has also extended to a growing crisis of ethnographic and anthropological authoritarianism to impose representational versions of cultures.
In this way, although in no way does the display of the anthropology museum give up its resources to, in the face of the crisis of the representation of cultures, become spaces for the staging or representation of the anthropology worker. field and the work carried out by the anthropologist at least it is beginning to be recognized that if representing the work of the anthropologist diminishes attention to culture in favor of representing something even more instrumentalized, the ways in which the anthropologist has studied it, also using the display of the museum to offer representations of those cultures, is in doubt.
Faced with this diatribe, exploring and experimenting with the possibilities of a new display at least allows us to pay greater attention to the fact that the textual and visual staging can free up its ways to make references not only to culture but also and to a greater extent to to become itself as a textual and visual fact a staging of fieldwork or at least to develop modalities in which strategies for staging fieldwork in textual modes and ways of offering representations of culture can go more together. and relate in richer and more interesting ways.
Although certain obtuse methods, mostly deconstructed today, would tend to generate, in the museographic display of field work, an even more instrumentalized and debatable image of the way in which a culture was studied, epistemological explorations and the renewal of new avenues of experimentation to the practice of research and field work such as those that I carry out or have discussed in many of my essays, could on the contrary significantly help to offer better and more adequate representations or evocations of cultures to the extent that they come together with and interrelated with the staging of that research.
The possibility to expand the experimentation of this fact, the display between the visual and the textual as one that facilitates and makes possible other possibilities to the relationship between staging of field work and representations of culture, and the relationship between both things. , was what focused, as a theoretical, research and practical approach, on my conception and elaboration of The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography.
Firstly, as in any textual staging of field work, in the same way that an essay as a textual form and a book never exhaust and always refer to partial aspects in which everything is never collected. which has been a field work, which is enough for many books and essays, the staging of the field work in a limited physical display is even more partial and refers to only one aspect
I have discussed the experimental ethnography in question before alone and in comparative relation to other forms of anthropology, it is my work The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography, a work of Anthropology and experimental ethnography that I conceived and composed as an author's work. in Caracas in 1996, the work itself, however, it must be said, is only one, with respect to a much broader field work and research that he developed on the markets and in the Venezuelan markets starting in 1994.
As a work, it does not refer to, nor thematize, nor textualize, all the field research that I carried out for three years in the markets before conceiving it, but rather it refers only to a period of three months of field work which acquired a specific form. very specific aimed at that specific work.
While before, my field work consisted of touring and visiting the markets, on the one hand, and meeting with their authorities on the other in the car market - a wholesale market that distributes goods from the rest of the country to Caracas, adjacent to the arts museum. Alejandro Otero visuals--, as well as meeting and reviewing visual material, newspaper archives, photo libraries and iconographic, literary, visual collections, on the image of markets from the 15th century to the contemporary present, when I conceived The Market from Here I did a work of specific and concrete field aimed at that work itself which focused on other markets and lasted three months.
When I say that it is a work of anthropology and experimental ethnography, I focus from the beginning on the problem of representation and observation discussed in the paragraph cited above by Clifford Geertz in Being Here, the problem of how to find, in the face of the realist genres of naturalistic representationalism and in the face of representational ways of approaching a cultural and economic reality, other possibilities that here would be, for this work, those of evocation as a variant and possibility instead of representation.
The center of my fieldwork and research, previously alone, in fact, had focused on how in markets there is no privileged point of view of an observer, but rather the relationship between observer and observed is changed and the market itself offers itself. as a polyphonic and multivocal reality where the dynamics of the seller and the buyer, on the one hand, and of both in the broader and continuous activity of merchandise, commerce and consumption, do not give space or possibility for a point of view to establish itself as reality of the observer.
This conclusion led me to write an essay related to that research in which I developed and discussed it. It was an anthropological and ethnographic essay focused on deconstructing the concept of observer and observation developed in theoretical terms, but also stylistic, aesthetic and visual based on my conclusion of the markets as stagings and polyphonic rituals, that previous research then nourished the subsequent conception of The Market from Here as a new work, it was in fact that, that conclusion of the field work previous only, the one that made me, already based on Composing The Market from Here, choose the theme in anthropology and ethnography of the crisis of representational and realistic modes in favor of more evocative forms and modes of giving the result of my anthropological investigations .
Based on this, I conceived the work as a whole as a visual staging of that textual form that I wrote so that once I had this text, the first thing I did was decide that it would function as the text that would direct the work, it would be, on the one hand , the first text that viewers would read both in the work's catalog and in its initial foyer illustrated with well-chosen photographs of the markets taken during my fieldwork.
The text as a whole discusses the markets in the 15th century from the Sunday public square in the times of customs as they were represented by local writers, draftsmen and painters of customs in Venezuela, including the point of view on those settings given by travelers and outsiders such as those expressed in drawings of Dutch and English visitors, to the forms that that once small market square later acquired in the contemporary form of the modern and postmodern markets in the city with their neoliberal capitalist expressions in advertising and the visuality of consumption, the text , however, is not in itself a theorization of the markets, but also and at the same time, of the point of view in them, it is, as a whole, a text about the relative and dissolved position in polyphony, as in the carnival, from the point of view in free markets and with it as an essay of anthropology and ethnography a deconstruction of the observer and the relationship between observer and observed how it is we have it in the empirical field research of those markets, anthropological research that I did of very specific phenomena specific to the markets, so that it oscillates between talking about the markets in different periods in terms of their visuality, theorizing them up to the present, at the same time that it theorizes the polyphony in them and within this it discusses aspects of my field work and that deconstruction of observation in the discussion of an idea of anthropology and ethnography
For my purposes, of my own field work, the difference that the new three months of field work destined to be staged by the play made came from several things, first, on the one hand, in the years prior to those For three months I visited and toured the markets alone, while for these three months I did it with three people with me, second, my field work prior to those three months not only included tours, visits and dialogues of mine alone in the locations of the markets. markets but also included, as I said before, also meetings of mine alone both in the market with market authorities, as well as in museums and, above all, visits to collections, as well as review of visual, textual and literary material from archives, such as consultations of books, review of visual photo libraries on markets, research on the market topic in collecting, among other things.
While before these three months my field work was defined by the relationship between my visits, tours, meetings and dialogues in the market alone and my visits, meetings and research of my own alone about collecting, archives, photo libraries and literary references to the market, field work carried out entirely alone, from these three months, my visits and visits to the market began to be with a set designer, a theater producer and a photographer, the three months therefore defined a very specific and delimited moment of the Field work.
These three people were not and were not related to that previous work, but from the moment in which, two years later, they began to participate, the field work would change in its form and nature, to be carrying out a work that would be a concrete display of in textual and visual scene, and doing it with a set designer, a theater production company and a photographer was the main fact that modified its previous form, made my attention focused on the new moment that my field research acquired for those three months and how I could theorize, analyze and contemplate issues related to the expertise of my three guests within the new form that fieldwork would take.
It must be said that the fact that the Market from Here includes a room in which a relatively fictionalized ethnographer is discussed, in the same way that the different rooms evoke the world of market men, does not mean that the work itself does not have its ethnographer.
The anthropologist and ethnographer of the work is me, Abdel Hernandez San Juan, as author, as theorist, as anthropologist and as ethnographer, my own field work and my research in the markets on which, with respect to a specific period of three months, the work is about, it is not a fictional character or an invented ethnographer, going in one of the rooms to the image of a relatively fictional ethnographer, does not refer to an invented character, it refers to the ethnographer as a conceptual instance that In that part of the work it was necessary to bring it to the foreground to discuss it
In a more abstract way, in the same way that the other rooms in the work are recreations of the living and working environments of market men in their different forms, that room should, at the same time, be self-referential to work. of the field and the physical realization of the work, that is to say to me and Fernando, to also be one in which, by abstracting into itself a work that has simultaneously discussed from its same text of catalog and vestibule, the markets and anthropology, markets and observation, markets and ethnography, the one in which a conclusion would be offered about what was happening with the concept of ethnography and the ethnographer once the proposal of ethnography and ethnographer that the work brings to completion is closed on itself, here is the effect that in addition to talking about the two of us and the work, we talked about a generic ethnographer who could give the impression of being like the market men evoked but not literal, a fictional ethnographer
To what extent are those evoked by the other rooms fictions and not in Shurtzian terms ideal types of market men? This is a simple question, which refers to a concept by Max Weber, that is, to ideal types based on real people who each room abstracts, encloses itself what homologates the self-referential room with the other rooms on the markets,
The other rooms in the work speak of ideal types of market men in two ways simultaneously, the first, recreating as a visual staging their sales and life environments in the market, that is, for each ideal type a room: the herbalists (their room), the tinkerers (their room), the merolicos or peddlers (their room which is also the entrance hall), the street vendors and criers (their room which is in turn the exit hall) and the second, interspersing in each of those rooms according to their ideal type, photographs of both those types of places and spaces in the market as they are in themselves, as well as photographs of me and Fernando in the field work, exchanging with them and between them in different ways. The latter, however, in each room, the photographs, is subordinated to the recreation that is made of the world of market men in each ideal type.
In this self-referential room the accent and the foreground are reversed, far from focusing on the men in the market, it does the opposite, focusing on me and Fernando in the field work and on the work as its staging to then subordinate the references to the market from there to that objective,
The rooms are ideal type elaborations about the different market men based on field work with real individuals and people, but they do not literalize any specific person, in the same way that through photography these type environments are related to the scenes in which we are in the market with real people, the room that evokes the world of the herbalists, for example, and photographs on the other hand of us exchanging with the herbalists and talking with them where they sell, although the room does not literalize a specific herbalist, it is obvious that it refers to the material seen in the images, this, added to the fact, that with enough precision, each of the rooms, does refer us to specific settings of the men in the market
In the same way, the self-referential room of the work chronotropos brings together the visual, theoretical and descriptive material of me and Fernando in the field work and making the work, on the one hand, and a theoretical and visual material that I made in the that at the same time that I theorize representation and evocation, I discuss anthropology and ethnography in the form of an ideal type of ethnographer who abstracts or deduces from what the work itself has discussed, which is me, Abdel Hernandez San Juan, but it can also be any ideal type or typical idea, hence what is included in the room, given the aforementioned, is the recreation of an environment called the ethnographer's office, which is a non-fiction or non-fictional reference.
That is to say, the work itself includes, in addition to the initial text written by me, a literary piece of anthropology and ethnography, a continuous display of photographs in which I am Abdel Hernandez San Juan, its author, in the market with the vendors, It also includes photographs of me writing inside the work while we were making it, about what I experienced while working in the field.
It is simply a room called chronotropes in which it offered a meta-reflection of the work on the work, that is, a room self-referential to the subject of observation in which instead of offering images of culture, they were arranged as in an inventory and a museographic collection, as in the museum of anthropology and ethnography, the images of the observer, the latter, instead of an observer endowed with a continuous, fixed and distant position according to which the subject of the observation could be distinguished here , there its observed objects, became showcased and transformed into objects of attention.
It is therefore my concept of the observed observer that I had concluded from the analysis of what happens with any observer in the markets, but applied this time to the form of participant observation practiced by me and Fernando in the field work, it is for This is why in that part of the work, which was otherwise where my paragraphs on the concepts of representation and evocation were deployed, the staging of a kind of setting of an ethnographer's concept such as the concept of the ethnographer remained after this criticism or according to what happened to the concept of ethnography and the ethnographer once discussed with The Market from Here.
It was not fictionalizing the ethnographer, it was simply, as Geertz does when he dedicates extensive pages to reflecting on what the ethnographer should be like, who at that moment can be the same but can be anyone when speaking, for example, discussing ethnographic writing about how to sound like the time as a pilgrim and a cartographer, or how to deal with something that has to be at the same time biography, literature and science, in that way it was about dedicating a part of the work to imagining what the ethnographer or the idea of ethnography would be like. which resulted from a critique such as the one that, around the theme of markets, The Market from Here proposed as staging and experimental ethnography.
The very problem of the observer's criticism and its dissolution in the carnivalesque polyphony of the market had been the result of the conclusions of my previous field work, only which was included in the catalog and introductory text of the work, but that work The previous field is not the one that would be visually staged in the work, so it is only its catalog and its introduction, it would have served because I was myself in a new moment of a previous investigation and its conclusions made The Market from Here possible. , but the field work that would be textualized within The Market from Here on a visual level would be a new and specific one carried out exclusively for The Market from Here that, as I said, consisted of three months of visits and tours of the markets which I began at the same time that he began to compose the work in the outdoor spaces of the fifth sheep fountain with Elaiza and Fernando.
It is therefore this new moment of field work carried out by me with Elaiza and Fernando that resulted in the environments that we explore in the work around different types or forms of life of market men regarding which the concept that best What is related is, as I said before, the concept of the ideal type in the way it is given in Alfred Shurt, initially coming from Max Weber, that is, if we found these four modalities of the market man or market men, it is precisely because in some way they can be considered ideal types of market men and this would be the most significant result of those three months of field work.
One might wonder if there were, in addition to these four ideal types of market men, one or more ideal types not discussed in the work, but if there were, which there surely are and a few more, it would be a new field work that would have to be done, these four would remain forever as ideal types of men in the market, perhaps others could be added or nuances discovered between them, but these four are main
These settings of the new field work are included in the work as a whole at a theoretical level of anthropology and ethnography, by the Conclusions of my previous field work collected not only in the catalog of the work and its spatial introduction, but also displayed as its museographic textual circuit present in the form of white on black texts mounted on wood and printed in computer fonts from its entry to its exit
Usually both the set designer and the theater producer receive a text called a libretto or script that is provided by the director on the basis of which they obtain the objects, materials, costumes, production elements, resources, etc., needed to make the scenographic staging. costumes, makeup and lighting.
This time the text they received, as it was not a play, but a work of anthropology and ethnography, was my essay that I have discussed before about markets from the 15th century to the present, their visuality, the point of view in them, the criticism of the observation resulting from that research and about anthropology with everything that the text advanced and nourished with respect to the markets themselves, but far from simply taking this text mechanically to the visual, the challenge was that the In a visual scene guided by that text, I would have to stage a new field work which would develop at the same time and simultaneously as we composed the work, a staging in which the scenographic and theatrical production work would not be alone but related to and intrinsically intertwined with elements of museography, installation and photography.
The fact that Elaiza, Theater Producer, and Fernando, Set Designer for the theater and interior designer, were with me on the one hand visiting the markets and on the other doing the play, gave those three months a new characteristic: theorizing how to read anthropologically both a theater producer and a set designer, it was not something I needed to do just because they were both this time in the field work with me, but also because in terms of the same problem of how to experience the cultural and ethnographic representation of the markets and their culture, the work was now carried out in the conjunction of our expertise
For this reason, Fernando's set design expertise was one of the tools we had at our disposal to resolve the diatribe of how to evoke instead of represent or how to represent in a more evocative way given the fact that The work not only offered a vision of the markets and their culture but also at the same time of the ethnography in them.
From the above it was derived that I began to analyze how to understand and see anthropologically and ethnographically a set design while analyzing the way in which a set designer and a theater production company usually work gave a new characteristic to the way we interacted in the markets.
The above does not mean that it is not of interest in itself once brought to the foreground the fact that a set design can be read and understood anthropologically not only in terms of the concrete physical set design but also in the research and collection work that the set designer has to do. do and that in this sense it was not implicit in the work that Fernando carried out before working with me on this work, that anthropological dimension, the texts written by Fernando show that it is an assertive conclusion, I am referring to the first ones that I cite in my essay on the eye as an omitted paradigm of the postmodern work when I discussed the interrelation of installation and scenography in the work and cited long paragraphs from Fernando talking about his scenography for the theater,
But if Fernando began to immerse himself with me in that possible anthropological dimension of the scenographic experience, it was largely because the teamwork during the process of discussing what the play would be like and its theoretical aspects was a way of participating in an investigation that I brought and from that moment on he began to be part of that research and to reflect on which aspects of it were of greatest interest to define his own interests and where he would go from the work he did participating in my research towards the definition of which aspects would then give specificity to his, his most recent text on scenography as ethnography, is a well-achieved example of the form that that part of him focused on an autobiographical voice has been acquiring due to the significance that these Venezuelan markets had in his life since he was little.
It is my own conception of field work that transforms, on the one hand, the reading of the work of the set designer and the theater producer in an anthropological sense, as well as that which then allows, given their expertise in the field work-play relationship, to be discussed. their expertise in terms of anthropology
On the other hand, the Market from Here as a practice of anthropology was posing an innovation to the question of the previous ways in which stocking displays had been experienced in anthropology, the use of film, video or photography in anthropology, on the one hand, and on the other, the anthropological and ethnographic museographies in the museum of anthropology and ethnography, with The Market from Here; Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography was proposing that this staging, as in the anthropology museum, be developed in the form of a staging that is exhibited outside the museum which, moreover, also given its field work and its research problems. the markets, would be, in the relationship between me as the anthropologist and the markets, a visual and spatial form of both a museum outside the place, the museum outside the museum, and a market outside the place, the market outside the market, fact that in terms of media, defined it as a new modality that combined the visual resources of the installation with scenography, theatrical production and photography, a work that in the end in generic terms within anthropology and ethnography would be in any variant never more than a form of monograph due to the monographic nature of its subject.
Now, the above requires again, as occurs in the catalog and in the introduction or vestibule, to return to my previous field work since the museum-market relationship corresponded with my previous research only prior to the Market from Here which did not It was properly the one that was thematized with the work but which again, like the main text, made it possible and from it in some way the work was born. That is to say, the very problem of how to theorize the relationship between the museum and the market, worked on by me throughout several essays that I had written since 1994, one of the decisive themes in my previous field work, was also crucial to conceive The Market. from Here
In this way, the main anthropological procedure of The Market from Here as experimental ethnography is explained as follows
My writing of an anthropological and ethnographic essay resulting from my previous and previous field work alone
Disposition of this ethnographic essay on my previous field work only as the main text that would guide the theoretical and conceptual problematic on point of view, on observation, on polyphony in markets, on which the Market from Here would then be based.
Based on this text, I begin the composition The Market from Here as a staging and a visual composition through the invitation of a set designer and a theater production company to work with me on its realization
Beginning of the realization of this new visual staging of a new period of three months in which Fernando and Elaiza, with the intention of composing the work, would go with me to the markets, thereby forming a new period of field work in the that now we would be three, which in itself would make up visits and tours of the markets, dialogues and exchanges with sellers, collections of objects and artifacts, and which would be on a visual level what would be textualized and put on stage in the Marker from Here. visually
Composition of the compositional whole of the visual mise-en-scene as a theoretically and literary mise-en-scene based on the anthropological writing of my ethnographic essay about my previous fieldwork alone, but which would textualize and visually stage the new period of fieldwork developed between the three of us since we began to carry out the work.
The conclusion of the three months of field work for the market from here is then the following, which I will expand on later.
Market men in ideal types
The peddler or merolico: characteristics of the peddler or merolico
El Hierbatero or Seller of medicinal herbs and body lotions and religious stamps, ointments and substances: characteristics of El Hierbatero or Seller of medicinal herbs
The tinkerer, seller of items for the body or around the body and furniture: characteristics of the tinkerer
The street vendor and crier: characteristics of the street vendor
In addition to being Venezuelans and their life experiences in the markets as part of their own biographies since childhood, something explicit in Fernando's text, the expertise of both, Fernando and Elaiza, combined with me there in the markets, in the way to relate to the sellers, in the ways of engagements, while before in my field work I was only meeting with directors of the wholesale market, visiting and touring the markets alone and I spent my time from museum to museum looking for visual material in collections, reviewing newspaper archives, reviewing photo libraries, consulting literature books on the markets, etc., now I found myself talking to sellers not only so that they could tell me about the market, but so that they would give me (us) a table or explain to me (us) how they had done it. an object, or because we had to make a setting about them and their lives in the market and we needed their help or suggestions, or because we wanted certain jars, bottles or images and we would want theirs, or we would want to make a piece of furniture similar to theirs, new elements of theatrical production, obtaining a piece of furniture of a certain type for a visual staging on the market, collecting a certain type of stamps for a set, collecting certain plaster figures, now mediated the mode of direct relationship there in the markets. .
It should also not be forgotten that there is an instance that, although new in this period of three months, was located between my previous field work and the new one, since it in itself illustrates my text of the previous field work alone at the same time that it also It unfolds towards the settings of the field work with Fernando and Elaiza, which is here the way I did and conceived the photographic work on the markets to enter into the work.
I carried out this photographic work, under my theoretical direction of anthropology and under my direction as a composer and author, listening to my explanations about what I wanted, reading my ethnographic anthropological essay about my previous field work that would guide the work, participating as a listener in the dialogues between me, Fernando and Elaiza, and participating on the other hand, in this new period of tours through the markets with me, Fernando and Elaiza, ebel González, a photographer who had worked with me many years before on a work about punks and who living At that time in Venezuela he was ready to offer his camera to me exclusively in the markets we visited.
In fact, this syntax, which at the level of the logical order of the composition as a whole, connects what is properly photographic as an instance that would move between my initial text related to the previous field work alone and the staging and visual textualization of the work. of the field that we began with The market from Here, is made explicit not only in that the catalog essay text is illustrated with photographs also in the lobby but that throughout it, also, its museographic text, that is, the text that throughout the circuit of entry and exit of the work, it kept running as its only and main one, with the exception of the texts in the chronotropes room, a textual form deployed in continuous relationship first with the photographs to which it was already related from the entrance and then, as a text put into scene, with the visual settings or small stagings in which as environments the Market from here then textualized its new field scene, also with photographs
The room over the herbalists, sellers of medicinal herbs, was not only a combination of museography, installation and scenography, I also included, as I said, photographs that we took among them, the room of the hardware workers, sellers of handcuffs and body items, not only was a conjunction of museography, installation and scenography, I also include photographs that we took between them, the room or hall of the street vendors, who sell while moving was not only a conjunction of museography, installation and scenography, I also include photographs that we took between them, and The initial room or hall of the vendors called peddlers or merolicos, who are spread out on the floor in settings in which they sometimes sleep, was not only a conjunction of museography, installation and scenography, it also included photographs that we took between them, without forgetting with this the chronotropes room that I discussed before visually stages and textualizes the process in which we made the work in fifth sheep source, the one that included us with them in the markets and the one that then included the ethnographic museography of the observer, vitrinization of optical objects, a place to look through different telescopes from there to different points of the work, showcases, the display of my theoretical texts on representation and evocation, and the conceptual setting on ethnography or the ethnographer that this room as a whole thematizes in reference to me and Fernando, but also to any ethnographer or to the very idea of the ethnographer.
I had written some essays on the semiotics of scenography during several visits that I had made with Elaiza to the El Paraíso theater to discuss calzadilla scenography in those essays. This previous effort involved an investigation into the ideology of scenography expertise that I had been developing for at least a year before inviting them to work on that work.
The research on ideology of scenography on which my attention was focused in those essays was similar to other research of mine on relationships between what is considered high art or fine arts and what are considered minor arts or secondary arts or subordinate arts, The objective of those texts was to theorize a scenography as something in itself, removing it from or separating it as much as possible from that specific play for which it had served as a visual or visual scenic vehicle.
Although in those initial essays the emphasis was not yet placed on discussing how a set design seen as something in itself separate from the theatrical work in which it is staged and to which it is subordinated and subordinated, can be analyzed anthropologically, if they were the basis for Then, analyzing his specific way of participating with me in the field work, I analyzed how scenography and theatrical production could be understood anthropologically, hence I conceived my concept of understanding scenographic work in the anthropological sense that I discussed in my essay, the scenographer as a written ethnographer. in Houston in 1998, in the same way, analyze and theorize how the work of a theater producer should be understood anthropologically.
From these theorizations about how to discuss and understand the expertise of my guests anthropologically, I decided that when conceiving this specific display I would relate my anthropological concept of staging fieldwork, which refers exclusively to what Clifford Geertz calls self-locations of the field. field work in the work of anthropology as textual composition, concept of anthropological staging, its unique relationship to the phenomenon of bringing experience to the text, of inscribing what has been experienced, of textualizing field work and one's relationship with culture , with the concept of staging as understood in the theater.
Given that I had to position myself regarding these three months of fieldwork in the anthropological staging that I would create with the textual mode that I would explore, this time unlike writing, the essay or the book, a visual and spatial display, I would make that textual staging of the field work of those three months in conjunction with a set designer who usually stages not his own field work but the text or script provided by the director of a play, usually a fictional text in which the play consists of and with respect to which the set designer has to be guided in order to decide how to make the set, how to design the costumes and how to decide the lighting, and I would do this staging of my field work in conjunction with a theater production company who Usually, just like the set designer, he works for staging theatrical scenes for which he must supply the utensils, objects, materials of the material and spatial location related to the costumes, the setting, the interior design and the lighting of the theatrical work.
When relating the concept of staging of field work with that concept of staging as it is usually understood in the theater, two concepts of staging were found in my experimentation, one anthropological, mine, which refers to to stage a real investigation in culture and reality in a text that refers to real life not to theater and its fiction, another is that of Fernando and Elaiza, which, theatrical, usually refers to the staging of a fictional text.
This fact was extremely interesting to me for experimentation, how to relate two concepts of staging, one anthropological and the other theatrical.
Both concepts have a fundamental element in common, both refer to the relationship between a text and its staging.
In the first the staging is done in the text, that is, the text of which the work of anthropology consists is the same as the staging of the field work in a textual form, in the second the work is done in reverse. There is a written text which is brought to the scene in the sense that it is translated into its visual and spatial expression.
In the first, it is about putting the fieldwork scene in the scene of the text as a discursive and textual strategy, there is a relationship between two textual forms, texts that are written during the fieldwork that are part of that or material collected from the same one that inscribes it or in which the field work acquires inscribed expressions, and the work of anthropology that is carried out regarding it, which consists of a text, the only one in which it is then placed on the scene of the writing or in the scene of that text-display the field work, in the second, the theatrical, there is a text that usually functions as a script or as a script which will be the theatrical work once it is made which will consist in bringing that written text to visual and spatial expression.
Now, the set designer and theater producer were not here with me touring the markets and then going to put on the scene of a set a play for which I provided them with a fictional text, which is what they had to put on stage, but that both were with me touring markets as a form of field work in respect to which the display we created, the work of anthropology in question, would be their form of textual mise-en-scène.
The set designer and the theater producer did not have here the script of a work of fiction that would be brought to the stage in the theater for which they would make the scenery and the production of its visual expression, an objective for which they would go to the markets to gather objects, utensils and elements destined for the fiction of a play, but the same sites and places that we visited looking for objects, furniture, ways of making things, costumes, environments, lighting, types of icons, stamps, bottles, They were the target of attention in both forms as field work and then because the work would focus on them and the markets as a display of an evoked cultural representation.
It is the relationship between these two concepts of staging, the second diluted to the purpose of the first but at the same time for that same reason returning for that specific work to the set designer and the theater producer as participants in my field work, starting both like this to be field workers with me for that work, which I later called in the title of my display work The Market from Here: its subtitle of Mise in Scene and experimental Ethnography.
This has two theoretical and empirical implications, from my point of view when I find myself experiencing three months of a new moment within a previous and broader field work, working with the expertise of the set designer and the theater producer has interesting consequences in the fieldwork theorizing
I not only conceived the concept of staging here by relating staging understood as self-location of myself as I usually do in my theoretical writing books in the sense that Geertz referred to the textual strategies of written discourse, with the relationship between the text and its staging in the theater, but I would also experience a third meaning also related to my previous field work only because as a result of that I had theorized not only that the markets were polyphonic and carnivalesque forms from whose research came my theory of a deconstruction of the observer-observed relationship as I investigate and study how this occurs in market exchanges, not only the question of the relationship between the museum and the market, but also that the markets are themselves ceremonial stagings and rituals and this third meaning is central to understanding how and why in The Market from Here; Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography I propose a relationship between the museum display outside the museum and the market displays understood as staging outside the market because in a significant sense the Market from Here would be a mise in scene of field work precisely because This, because it was about staging a field work relating three concepts of staging that transformed the staging of the work itself into the continuity of an unlimited field work theoretical concept that I proposed and discussed in my essay. theoretical anthropology and ethnography The Eclipse of Evocation.
Although this third meaning continues to be a work about markets to a certain extent, it is still representational about its research theme in the specific work and although the world of men in the market is evoked by the work without assuming that the sellers or the men of the market are in it, the relationship between the three concepts of staging, the anthropological, the theatrical and finally that which discusses the markets themselves as staging, does make the moment of presentation of the display an elicitation. itself anthropological-cultural which then becomes itself in continuity of field work, this idea of continuity of field work, however, does not in any way mean that the field work of The Market from here exceeds its physical limits since it is necessary to add As I have said elsewhere, that just as in the display of the museum within the museum and just as in the display of the film, this also has a physical limitation limited to the physical limits of the work,
Despite this, in the dimension of their evocation, that museum outside the museum and that market outside the market, they do evoke and suggest the possibility of a cultural anthropological elicitation of field work, the market as staging to the extent that that, as I said elsewhere, central to the field work that I had done before was the relationship between a market here and a market there, one here and one there, the relativization of these relationships and the questions regarding Whether there are two markets or a single market, although suggested by the evocation and limited to the physical display of that work, it is still a specificity of the way in which it occurs in the discussion of that work as a physical display. field work.
We must also say that we have here in the work in only one room, that of the herbalists, although we exhibited the image of the Virgin Mary twice more, one at the entrance to the chronotropos room and the other in the peddler's environment, one conjunction in which we put together the things typical of the seller of herbs, decoctions, ointments, etc., with things typical for the sale of stamps and religious images when these two types of sellers are not always together in the market, although they are usually in a nearby or nearby area, and although it is sometimes the case that some herbalists tend to also sell religious images, it does not happen all the time.
It is therefore necessary to note here with respect to this ideal type of the market man that the typical image of the herbalist can oscillate between the pharmaceutical seller more related to a medical vision, the image of the seller of medicinal plants such as teas and decoctions related to a slang wisdom. popular tradition typical of local traditions about the effects of certain substances for purely physical and bodily good, where their accompaniment with religious images such as stamps and plaster figures is related to what is popularly recognized as home remedies, a sense of spiritual in religious terms.
This relationship, then, in some herbalists between bodily healing and religious spirituality can suggest the image of the body that we have in India and Asia, in the Japanese and Eastern vision of the body, for example, and could relate physical and religious healing, suggesting the image of the healer. , but in the Venezuelan markets, at least in the urban ones where we did field work, none of those herb sellers can properly be considered healers, none of them practice spiritual counseling or divination through some oracle or procedure established in a religion. primitive or form of magic,
This phenomenon, which I have studied in my previous field work, did not occur in this way in the men in the Venezuelan market who sell things for the body; these, who are sellers, refer the clients and buyers of their products to a Christian religiosity in its generality sell images of the Virgin Mary, Christ and Venezuelan syncretic imagery alongside and at the same time that in the same establishment they sell ointments for the body, decoctions and liquid preparations, medicinal herbs, bottles with essences, these imagery Syncretics do not come to form polytheistic gods, as in African religion, but rather function as saints subject to Christian monotheism.
I have discussed the question of the relationship between monotheism and polytheism before on several occasions; in African religions the appropriation of images from the Christian religion tends to venerate an African polytheic god within the same image of a Christian monotheic god, the polytheic god. African is under another name accepted by Christianity, as a saint of the Christian monotheic god according to the church authorizes that saint under which Afro-Christians then manage to reconcile venerating their god belonging to their polytheic worldview by venerating the Christian monotheic but in their origin that God is part of an African pantheon in which there are many gods, that is, a polytheistic pantheon.
It is the first case analyzed what occurs in the men of the market, they sell images of the Christian religion through which certain images of popular religiosity have been assumed as saints within the Christian religion although, it must be said regarding To the two cases included in The Market from Here, neither Negro Primero nor José Gregorio Hernandez are official, as Maria Teresa of Calcutta could be, both are only widely venerated and widely recognized in Venezuelan popular culture, and although in Venezuela we have strong Indian traditions such as those of the paramo in which the Andean culture resonates expressed in rich basketry, rich and very elaborate beautiful ceramics and a wide variety of fabrics, we must accept that the richness of the Andean culture and its markets, which were of my individual attention in my field work only prior, as it was also towards the Freeway markets in which cocoa and casabe are displayed, the highway markets between Caracas and Anzoátegui and between Caracas and Mérida, I was not present in the urban markets to which we dedicate The Market from Here in the iconographic and visual form of objects, reproduced prints or elaborations more than by the fact that the multiethnic composition of the people who meet in the markets as sellers and buyers could assume some aspects of these syncretisms at the level of Venezuelan culture in general
In addition to the Andean culture mentioned above with its markets and the Freeway markets, Venezuela has a wide and very rich indigenous culture that reaches its most tribal form in the culture of the Yanomami Indians in the area of the great savanna and the Amazon. The Yanomami are one of the most current and alive indigenous tribes and tribal cultures that can be known in the visual and current memory of a modern and contemporary country like Venezuela, cosmopolitan and incorporated at that time with its markets into the global financial system of the economy and the cutting-edge transnational technologies by which I mean the fact that Venezuela does not see its indigenous tribes as separate from the country's culture, it is not, like the aborigines in the Caribbean or like the ancient cultures of Mexico and Peru, the Mayans and the Incas, or as in the archaic past represented by archeology museums about the pre-Columbian and Mesoamerican world of extinct cultures of which only residues or vestiges remain in the current culture of Mexicans, it is about the rituals, ceremonies and forms of bodily and environmental habitation of a current tribe that inhabits with its independent and autonomous communities the savannahs adjacent to the Amazon jungle
Venezuela is and lives, and was like this throughout the neoliberal capitalist period, proud of its Yanomami tribes which are continually visited through documentaries and films by the mass media and at the same time about which there are continually catalogs and visual material, these tribes that live a certain amount of their time in the spaces of their communities semi-naked - which predominates in the images of their bodies and their habitat - and another part dressed because they practice weaving and basket weaving, characterized above all because they practice a ritual painting of the body and face, very elaborate and sophisticated in color and visual motifs, that is, they live with their faces and torsos painted, they are strong communities very well established in beautiful and large natural areas defined as semi-jungle savannahs, that is, close to the jungle but not interned in those with housing systems and amahacas which could stop living like that if they wanted to and are not seen, felt or lived like others or as primitive savages, but as autonomous and independent communities that are free and very strong. self-centered people who are in fact part of Venezuelan culture, who lead that style and way of life because they want it that way and for which they are deeply respected and admired.
The presence of these springs of indigenous culture is much more obvious in the Freeway markets where casabe and cachapa, which are indigenous foods, are sold or in the páramo where indigenous Andean crafts, ceramics and textiles are sold directly, however, It is not explicit in iconographic and visual terms in these urban markets, being only referred to in relation to the names of certain things in which indigenous words and nomenclatures survive or are present such as, for example, carapacho de cachicamo, the word cachicamo is a indigenous way of saying to the turtle, when in fact we found them in the markets and we included it in the work in the herbalists' room, or the word chimo which is an indigenous meaning for tobacco which we also included in the work,
In this sense, it is more related to the name of certain objects and certain foods whose writing and phonology is directly indigenous in some cases, or whose origin is indigenous, such as, for example, foods made with corn such as cachapa and casabe, which We can say that, within a work, whose images of religion are, like representations of the market in which Christianity predominates, Christian or syncretic iconography aspiring to be sanctified by Christianity, we have references to the Venezuelan indigenous world.
The levels of religiosity present in those urban markets visually textualized in The Market from Here certainly do not include visual and iconographic references referring to the imagery and visual discourse of costumes, basket weaving, pottery, and fabrics of the indigenous cultures of the Andean paramo or of the Yanomami. in a direct way, but the presence of those seems rather diluted as in the rest of Venezuela to a syncretism expressed in the phonetic and scriptural nomenclature of the name of certain ointments, objects and elements, something that is part of any form of culture. general of the country, a country that includes deserts, plains, mountains, savannahs and the Amazon jungle, it is rather the iconographic references of Christianity that are recurrent in these markets,
How this herbalist appears in the markets certainly refers in something, as I said, to suigeneris conjunctions between the pharmacist, the herbal doctor dedicated to home-made and popular remedies for the body and a Christian religious mysticism in which they are combined as in India and certain Asia. idea of bodily health with a certain idea of spiritual health in the religious sense of a Christianity that progressively gives rise to certain syncretic expressions
José Gregorio Hernandez, since those same types of salesmen become a type of white doctor that popular culture wants to sanctify, his image is that of a holy black doctor, first he becomes the image of the possibility of a black saint, this holy black man, by the way he is not a mulatto or a mestizo, he is not a creolized expression of a conjunction of Indian with white or black with white or a type of mulatto, he is a coal black like the jet black Haitian blacks but whose image It has come to form a bust and image of a saint that popular culture wants the Christian church to recognize and accept as accepted into the official Christian pantheon of the church, Maria Teresa of Calcutta.
It is for this reason that I have explained several times that The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography is a work that remains within the parameters of a cultural anthropology of the market and that at most if it were seen in the sense of the anthropology of religion, would be no more than an anthropology of Christianity as we have it, for example, in Max Weber. In addition, the references to religious liturgies within the work do not go beyond referring solely and exclusively to Venezuelan culture and within From this to its urban expressions in the markets, that is, as part of and in relation to the men of the market and the goods for sale, it is a cultural anthropology of the market and at most of Christianity as expressed in the cultural anthropology of the market.
Notes
- My theoretical-ethnographic essay on urban anthropology to which I make references From Modern to postmodern is at the same time the catalog text, it is also the text that introduces the work in its first room illustrated with 15 photographs, the same one that is later distributed as a guide text for the museum room throughout the entry and exit route of the work and which was at the same time the text that includes my previous field work research prior to the beginning of the realization and conception of the market from here used in The mode of the script or libretto as a text to be placed on the visual scene in the mode of cinema or theater was published as a catalog text that we distributed at the inauguration of the work.
- The work includes in its self-representational room 4 about the field work and the process of doing it, along with photographs of it, three theoretical paragraphs of my authorship on the concept of evocation and three theoretical paragraphs of my authorship on the concept of representation . In the center of the work I quote two paragraphs on the concept of evocation as discussed by Stephen A Tyler in his essay The Postmodern Ethnography that I Read and I quote from Carlos Reynoso's compendium The Advent of Postmodern Anthropology published in Gedisa, 1994, in the work I did not include any reference to Clifford Geertz but the reason for citing Geertz in this essay comes from the fact that my reading of his paragraphs on evocation in anthropology are at the basis of my interest, approach and treatment. the theme so that my selection of the cited paragraphs of Stephen has as a precedent the discussion against realism situated by Geertz where by the way Geertz quotes Stephen, Geertz places the theme of evocation against the realistic genres of what he calls realism naive and as an alternative to representation in his essay Being Here. On What Life is its finally about, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as author, Stanford University Press
§ While I am currently getting ready to extend my fieldwork research to do papers on Andino Imageries including waves and ceramics as well as to write on several other issues in Venezuela traditions, I am also currently on the way committed to complexion an upcoming book of ethnography on Venezuelan Amerindians, wayues, yuxpas, Zulia amerindians and Yanomanis, this book based in many years living in Caracas seen films and videos on Yanomamis as well as television programs of several Venezuela private channels as on my direct knowledge on the echoes and impact of Amerindians communicates in Venezuela as a country, including visualizations of books and catalogues made in Venezuela by several private organizations, will discuss visual materials such as films, videos, televisions programs, online sites and printings with discussions of previous books and papers on Yanomamis and a future expedition travel I am currently preparing as a research fieldwork of six months
Bibliography
Habermas Junger, Max Weber Theory of rationalization, the Theory of communicative action, Beacon Press
Guiner, Salvador Javier Muguenza y José Maria Maraval, Max Weber, Teoría Sociológica Contemporánea, Tecnos
Tyler Stephen A, Presenter (Dis)Play, published at The Creative Spirit 31.1 (1991): 122-130
Tyler Stephen A, On Evocation, La Etnografia Posmoderna, El Advenimiento de la antropología Posmoderna, Gedisa
Tyler. Stephen A, On Evocation, “Post-Modern Ethnography.” The Unspeakable, Discourse, Rhetoric and Dialogue in the Posmodern World, Wisconsin University Press
Tyler Stephen A. 1986, On Evocation, “Post-Modern Ethnography.” In J. Clifford and G. W. Marcus, Eds., Writing Culture, pp. 122-140. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tyler Stephen A, Evocation; The Unwrtieable, A Response to Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Sept 9, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997
The Equinox Film: Travel Incidents
By Abdel Hernandez San Juan
A film is a visual and textual whole as a product with a duration and a composition. It is visual because its sequences are made up of filmed shots and frames of a given reality in which bodies, images and presences move and it is textual because it generally includes alphabetic language in the form of speech acts, people speaking or in the form of graphic texts that can be included and read. Between one thing and another, the relationship between the visual and the textual also creates textual relationships resulting from the meanings and senses that arise from superimposing and relating the purely visual and the alphabetic. Taken to the silent, the sole visual composition without alphabetical text is generally itself legible according to presuppositions accumulated in the viewer's heritage about the life world.
In addition to this, however, a deliberation is expected from an anthropology film according to which this relationship between the visual and the textual offers in the product as a whole a representation or a research on a certain theme or culture that is the object of that film. film.
From an anthropology film about the equinox, the same archaeological and ethnographic event developed around the pyramids, ruins and monuments of Machu Pichu in Mexico, there are therefore relatively standardized assumptions about how or in what type of form the possibility of that it was a film on that topic.
By placing as a previous reference what usually makes up a film in textual terms in its visual and alphabetical whole, as well as what the expectations about anthropology films usually are, I propose to discuss an anthropology film about the equinox Incidents of Travel by Quetzil Eugenio that recently We have seen, paying attention to how the relationship between the textual and the visual is deliberate, understood in terms of the filmic whole, on the one hand, and above all, how that filmic whole as a textual discourse about its referent, the event of the equinox , arranges or resolves to deal with the relationship between the parts or elements that compose it, relative this time to the culture in question, its theme, and the ways in which the relationship of that filmic whole as a referential textual form with the idea that will be made is deliberate. spectator about the whole of culture or the equinox event that is its theme.
To focus my theorizing I will discuss from sociology and anthropology what I have called performativity of research, doing both things, demonstrating in my theorizing how Performativity can work in meta-anthropological and meta-ethnographic research, that is, in my own theorizing and discourse in Anthropology. film Theory his film, at the same time in relation to situating issues of Performativity discernible in Quetzil's own film in terms of how he resolves the relationship between the textual and visual whole that his film proposes with respect to what would be expected from a film about the equinox and the culture to be represented in question.
Composed based on different perspectives on its theme, the event of the equinox, I propose to finally discuss how the oscillation of various perspectives that make up the film achieves a form of elicitation which elucidates how Performativity was also in the culture, that is, the fact that each of these perspectives with which the film is composed and that it elicits are themselves ways in which the parties in relation, tourists, street vendors, museum caretakers and museum authorities perform images of themselves.
We therefore have, in relation to Quetzil's field work, the elucidation of two concepts of Performativity, one that refers to what I have called Performativity in the forms of research given in the eliciting exploration that his film achieves with respect to its theme, the event. of the equinox, and the other relative to the fact that we are referring to a cultural reality which is made up of the relationship between a museum, an archaeological park related to the implicit programming of that museum, the monumental area, tourism, market vendors that this generates and the culture with its communities, although they tend to remain separated in conventional representations, they are inclusive of each other and to the same extent they perform the images of themselves between what is not usually said and the inevitable fact of that are related to each other and are inclusive.
The way in which these two forms of Performativity are related, one relative to the form of research that Quetzil's film develops and elicits, and the other, relative to the Performativity that was in the culture, I would like to discuss as the main characteristic of Quetzil's film. Quetzil placing them against what he argued before would be expected or obvious with respect to what an anthropology film on this topic would offer its audience as a textual and visual whole.
As is obvious, the options and possibilities that would have been expected as usual in a film about the equinox would not have been few, but despite this, almost always or most of the time they could be referred to the idea of a film that would deal with only close, detailed and meticulous shots of the pyramid understood as a monument, which went from those close shots and close ups to ancient archaeological texts in close-up, scrolls and manuscripts, or inscriptions on material obtained in archives or filmed directly in the pyramids or museums, on the history of the pyramid or on its physical characteristics as well as informative material on its origin and antiquity in the recurrence of data obtained in the same museum of Mayan culture on the equinox, the filming of direct iconographic visual material on the reasons why the snake is related to Mayan mythology and why it occurs that day, at that time, that year as what defines the event, among other narratives related to the images and myths related to it by previously archeology. published and museographed.
By placing the above as a usual expectation of the precepts about what or how an anthropology film about the Equinox should be, I propose to contrast how Quetzil's film explores other possibilities outside the usual and well-known stereotypes, that is, that Unlike a documentary of this type that focuses on repeating in order to disseminate the same parameters known about the visuality of the Mayan culture iconographically related to the pyramid and the equinox event, Quetzil's film avoids positioning itself on the side of the narratives provided in catalogues, books, museography and information material throughout the museum, to experiment with other avenues.
He thus avoids the archaeological material he himself gathered in this regard directly or in reference to his research on other archaeologists, in order to, in turn, situate himself in a perspective that focuses on the event itself understood as a meeting in a performance. spatial scene the various actors that make it up, that is, on the one hand, the tourist who comes mainly from the United States, but also from Mexico itself and other parts of the world, well attracted by the tourist market of options, cultural tourism in this case, either for being someone interested in the Mayan culture for spiritual, mystical, religious reasons or for simple appreciation of a cultural reality, the Mexican and the Mayan of the communities in which the archaeological park is located with its expression given in the fact that the event provides an opportunity for the free market that supplies it, sale of artifacts, handles, collages, accessories, outfits, images, etc., related to the west and the visual theme and the personnel directly related to the museum and its programming , that is, the museum authorities as well as the personnel assigned to care for and protect the archaeological park.
By focusing attention on the event itself as a meeting of all these actors, and not on the text that makes up the symbolic and archaeological narratives of an iconographic and visual type about the monument and its relationship with an archival or museographic textuality instituted by the museum, Quetzil elicits a way of constructing the textual and visual whole that his film will offer to his audience regarding culture and specifically the equinox, which as a whole will be a composition with all these fragments of points of view and perspectives At the same time, it will mean making visible his very way of being as an anthropologist in the culture and in the situation.
He therefore decides to place his camera as a camera welcomed by the circumstances of the event itself, that is, as much as possible a camera overwhelmed and absorbed by its own dynamics in situ, a camera that is not placed with a pre-established script, we will do this and then that, but surrounded by what is happening and itself forming part of that situation, it begins to ask questions from it and in front of it, it is a camera which could be the camera of any tourist or person among the aforementioned perspectives, among other things because the questions themselves do not turn out to be overintentional but are limited to mundane things given in the same situations.
The event as such presupposes of course the fact that all the actors recognize themselves to be there only and only because the event takes place and in the same way that it is an event for them that explains their presence, also only the event explains the from Quetzil, so it is a camera that tells you, like you, I am here in the event that surrounds us, and for the same reason that all this makes some sense to you, I am interested in knowing what it is. all this and what it means to you which also makes me here, the center of my attention is the event that makes both you and me here
In the same way that Quetzil's ways of being in the culture and in field work in the communities of Yucatán and Pizte come from the beginning mediated by the fact, decided by Quetzil, that he is not doing research on the community , but that it is studying how the archeology museum has produced textual and visual forms about culture, and how other anthropologists have done it, and what it is to study the museum, its programming, its events and its textualities, which What makes him then be in the communities and start doing projects in them, from them and with them, in this film the event as a third instance mediates Quetzil's relationship with the actors that make up the event, including himself, that is, , which in terms of intersubjective give and take, putting emphasis on a third instance that involves the actors, including Quetzil, as a situation, thus eludes the emphasis on the relationship between anthropologist, culture, anthropologist, community, represented representative, observed observer, we the others, to in turn explore other forms and possibilities through which all those concepts are rearticulated.
This analysis of the way of being in the culture in itself then explains in what other ways its study is carried out and the field work of Quetzil is developed in its relationship to those interrelated elements, community, culture, archaeological park, museum, tourism. , markets
What has been said ultimately has a consequence already on the textual level of the film, not only in terms of how to put in the visual scene the references to the event and to himself as an anthropologist in it, but above all in the characteristics of that filmic whole. as a textual form for an audience that, faced with a film about the equinox, receives a material which, far from offering a single totalizing perspective like that authorized on culture by the anthropologist, experiences a mosaic of multiple perspectives that are sometimes interrelated. but not infrequently very different from each other
We therefore do not have the text about the museum of Mayan culture, not the text about the equinox event that the museum would have given from itself, but the text about the equinox event that is formed between what the tourist says, what says the street vendor, what the caretaker of the pyramid says and what the authority of the museum says, none of them is, nor is Quetzil, above the situation itself that defines an event as a whole given by hundreds of thousands. of people and characterized as an event between day and night due to the equinox: an event defined by the fact that at a certain time of day, that day of that year, hence its tourist attraction, the shadow of the snake is projected on the pyramid, a fact that establishes a significant anthropological and ethnographic attraction since we are facing an event that what makes it an event is its archaeological and ethnographic content itself.
What I find most fascinating about Quetzil's film is this way in which he has performatively focused a third instance on the event of the equinox as the one that explains how anthropologist and culture are in relationship. In this sense, it is necessary to reiterate that as a cultural object, this instance, the event of the equinox, is already a sufficient ethnographic reference with respect to which a conventional or conservative conception of ethnography would have been limited to the visual and textual data in Mayan mythology without centering His attention, on the contrary, is on what Quetzil does, far from the pyramid itself as an iconographic motif, the event itself that around it encourages the gathering of the actors, including himself.
Quetzil thus establishes that, overwhelmed by the situation of the event, his very presence as an anthropologist is integrated and part of a situation in which everyone has their attention on the same event that makes them be there in relation.
This fact, notably, and for reasons of what I define as Performativity in the research, then defocuses attention on the same ethnographic reference that makes the event to in turn open to the diameter of everything that is around, tourists, Mexicans, Mayans. , vendors, market, archaeological park, museum, programming, cultures so that if Quetzil in ethnographic writing returned to the pyramid and the equinox as a topic of focused research, he would no longer do so as for the first time, but rather he would return to Once his research on the equinox assimilated in his film the relationship between all these actors, it imbues his anthropology with a notable character that is both urban and the anthropology of tourism in a way through which an exceptional balance is achieved between anthropology of archeology and ethnography at most, drawing attention to the temporality and spatiality of the event rather than to the equinox in its iconographic and visual proximity, is also a way of situating that the spatiality and temporality of an event It can itself be the spatiality and temporality of fieldwork or of a part of fieldwork, this relationship between ethnography and the event, on which we unusually agree since months before I had written my essay The Eclipse of Evocation in which theorized that ethnography should be the event of unlimited field work, acquires relevance in terms of what I have called with respect to Quetzil the oscillation in ethnography, the encounter with the material some time later in editing so that The fieldwork setting elicits things with respect to which we do not yet have a precise predetermination of what we will do, but the form or mode of eliciting it offers the appropriate material for a writing, in this case a film, that articulates the elements. in relation to which anthropology on the equinox can be at the same time about the ethnographic specificity of the equinox in the archaeological text of the Mayan culture, at the same time as about the museum, as I said before, inside and outside, that is , an anthropology that is at the same time theory of the archaeological museum, anthropology of tourism and culture.
At the same time, it is worth highlighting that it is a casual, desacralizing camera,
From the event, a film would be supposed to do what it said at the beginning, while this camera has desacralized all of this in favor of what the actors themselves have to say. At the same time, it is establishing a type of intersubjective give and take that does not enter into reality. of the event as something exogenous but is discouraged from being part of it, the distraction about the fact that a single perspective will be dominant, places the fact that each perspective develops in conditions of a certain unpredictability about the whole, the activities in question that develop around it and the image that is given about it.
In this way, far from offering us visual and textual material from which we hope that as a film whole it will produce a definitive text or once and for all considered the text on the equinox, Quetzil avoids establishing the film from a position of totalization of the text. of the equinox that would be expected and dissuades his own point of view, making it easier for the film itself to collect all the ambiguities, contradictions, interrelations, paradoxes, points of view, etc., of those same actors.
This perspective, which itself involves the elicitation as a form of field work of a variety of perspectives, ensures that in the end the film as a visual textual ensemble about the culture that has an event at its center is established as a type of text in the oscillation which from the relationship between his own presence as an anthropologist at the event, the camera, and the different perspectives, results in a mosaic of juxtaposed points of view whose superpositions do not always and in reality rarely draw a whole on the text of culture to instead elicit an analysis of how these different perspectives simultaneously relate and differ, become inclusive of each other, or distance themselves, forming together, thanks to the elicitation that his film fosters, an interpretation rather complex and at the same time rich in the subject in question.
It is about the fact that the forms such as the different parties at play, the caretakers cleaning the museum monuments, the tourists waiting for the setting of the serpent spread out on the ground with their food and utensils of travel and life, the vendors of handicrafts, art, utensils of various types and foods, the Mexican and Mayan exponents of the communities, and the museum authorities, all of whom Quetzil was progressively interviewing throughout his film, not only spoke from their perspectives, but rather they reinvented themselves something that implies what I said before about how two performativities are related in the film, that of Quetzil as an anthropologist in relation to how he resolves to deliberate his film on the equinox, and that other understood as a Performativity that It was already there in the culture.
In short, social actors know themselves when faced with an event about which there is not only an entire literature and an entire visual and textual practice that draws attention to it, as in fact also occurs in any event, even of entertainment, from which this is not exempt as it involves recreation, preferences, enjoyment and reveling in something, but above all they know that the event is made up of all these perspectives and although the usual point of view would tend to keep them separate, this does not does nothing other than hide what we all know but never talk about, that the event itself consists of the fact that each of the different parts makes inclusive to its perspective the fact that the other parts are inclusive to his own, the street vendor needs the tourist to sell his artifacts and therefore it would be naive to assume that he sells an artifact that is not intended for that tourist, the tourist knows he is a visitor who is attracted by the event and the culture, but to the same extent he knows that collecting an image of everything is part of the image that the culture makes of itself as it is also part of the image that he makes of himself and that his culture makes of him, the museum a textuality is known that makes itself inclusive that there are tourists and that there is a market and that there are communities in its programming and that the event as such, in addition to market and entertainment, supposes these relationships raised by the programming, for all this Performativity that it was in the culture that the materials on the equinox usually ignore or do not notice about it and which is usually not put in the foreground or simply unknown and not analyzed, is an element brought to the foreground by Quetzil's film.
Ethnography, as I have been arguing for some time, is changing or will change through the same means or meanings that it has in itself and not in the form of obsessing over the greater or lesser political efficacy of the texts. that he invents, on the contrary, opening ethnography towards his own performance and towards his own Performativity.
I have discussed this relationship between two performativities before, Performativity in research that defines the methodology of the way of doing field work and composing textual anthropology or textual ethnography as a product, on the one hand, that which oneself develops in the theorization and in the works, and on the other hand, the Performativity that was in the culture which, if it is ignored or not taken into account, the culture itself cannot be studied, known, understood and objectified in its true dimension because Performativity in Research becomes no longer necessary but imminent and essential when we study phenomena in culture, themselves exemplary about Performativity in culture.
It is therefore about locating how two concepts of Performativity were related in Quetzil's film, one, that related to Quetzil's film practice, the way in which his film was placed in the culture around the event as a form of Performativity in the research, and Performativity that other thing that was already in the culture and that is made explicit in how the actors reinvent themselves,
If Quetzil had not conceived his film in the way he did, it would not have been possible to elicit these different perspectives or to construct a visual and textual whole about the culture that, situated in the situation of the event, would offer that superposition of perspectives that I call in terms of everything that it evokes about culture, like mosaics, hence the perspective given in the research that the film on the one hand complexes in itself and on the other elicits for the theorization of both things the film and the culture, but at the same time , also the mode of his film makes it possible to visualize that
Because you are standing here, for example, the caretaker of the pyramid
Do you make sure they don't touch? Do you take care of cleaning? Where can people go?
You are from here? of this community? Or are you also an employee of the museum?
And you sitting here, how are you doing, when does the snake come out?, the type of questions asked to a group of tourists who spread their tablecloths on the floor to sit around with their belongings on the tablecloth, while they talk and wait.
And where have you come from? If you are from the United States, yes, but what part are you from?
Did you know about this before? Do you like the event?
Had you already seen it last year? And why have you come back?
And why do you wear those Mayan outfits on your body? Aren't you from Chicago? Oh, because you've been there before, or you've just bought it.
The questions that I have placed before are not directly taken from the film, they are not exactly the questions asked by Quetzil, they are only in the sense of Weber and Shurtz, ideal types of questions which contain very well as reconstructive parameters the modalities of the forms of questions explored by Quetzil, the type of relationship implicit to the intersubjective give and take that he explored with this film. That is to say, with them I am interested in situating and objectifying, through an ideal type, the way and attitude in the way of approaching people, which makes it notable about how Quetzil was with the camera at the event, in what way The type and modality of their questions implied for the actors or implied a way of understanding why and with what attitude that camera was there.
Bibliography
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, The Intramundane Horizont, The Intramudane Horizont, Complete Works, 98 Lab Books, USA
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, The Intramundane Horizont, The Constelations of Common Sense, Selected Essays, 98 Lab Books, USA
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Sobreordinations in everyday life, The Constelations of Common Sense, Selected Essays, 98 Lab Books, USA
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Sobreordinations in everyday life, The Intramudane Horizont, Complete Works, 98 Lab Books, USA
Hernandez san Juan Abdel, Phenomenological Anthropology, selected essays, 98 Lab Books, USA
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, The Equinox Film. Lecture discussed at the panel on the equinox Film, a panel coordinated and introduced by Quetzil Eugenio with conferences by Abdel Hernandez San Juan and George Marcus, Anthropology Faculty, The University of Houston, Houston, Texas, USA
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Lab of Performativity and Etnography, printed poster program of lectures, travels and dialogues, Houston, Texas, USA, 1998
The Mayan Culture Market: Mayan Art in Ancient Tradition on the University of Houston Campus
By Abdel Hernandez San Juan
I would like to focus again on my concept of elicitation and its possibilities in cultural anthropology, discussing this time a practice whose motive was to elicit a setting of intercultural communications. In 1998 Quetzil Eugenio, then a professor in the anthropology department at the University of Houston, surprised both the anthropology scene and the university campus scene with an outdoor exhibition of what he defined as modern Mayan art in the Ancient tradition. .
The idea of displaying an open-air market on the university campus immediately overwhelmed me precisely because a few months earlier I had exhibited my work The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography in the Sewall Hall Back Yard at Rice University, which, Although it was not a market in the literal sense of being there selling as the sellers would do and as Quetzil did at the University of Houston, it did establish all the parameters required to elicit that at the same time that a museum outside the museum could be also a market outside the market or a new form that acquired the type of markets in which I did field work and with respect to which the work was deployed in a significant percentage, its way of location, its construction materials, etc., as if it were a market.
Quetzil's exposition, however, was much more direct in this, avoiding the textual or representational components of my ethnography, to in turn propose a way in which a market could be directly installed on the campus.
The exhibition consisted of blankets, quilts, bedspreads, fabrics, paintings and wood carvings made by Mayan artists and displayed on a structure created to make their presentation sustainable.
Displaying these artifacts not in a gallery or closed exhibition space assigned for samples, but in the open air near a pedestrian traffic area for professors and students, just by requesting permission from the university to do so, of course, had consequences on a series of ideological precepts about what it means to display, that is, common sense about what types of things usually could be displayed in the outdoor spaces of the campus.
As a collateral transit area to gardens and green areas, the budget to be exhibited in such spaces are usually permanent sculptures placed in the manner of commissions established in advance in a university such as the one in Houston related to the state unlike a private rice university, but the same common sense that assimilated a permanent sculpture or at most a fountain in such spaces, had the evidence to deduce that an exhibition with these ephemeral characteristics, mountable and removable, could be a sales setting for those same Mayan artists who at the same time way in the popular markets they would be selling their artifacts, it was not, however, a live exhibition of the Mayan artists, but rather an exhibition that the anthropology professor gave about the art of those artists among whom he did work in Yucatán. field, thus eliciting a setting of intercultural communications since very similar, if not to say perhaps one of the first times in which Quetzil ventured into what has subsequently attracted more and more attention, his presentation generated people coming up and asking questions and therefore the same situations that Quetzil photographed and that themselves became of interest for the research, dialogues between his students and those who approached, unexpected dialogues with other professors or visitors to the campus.
By displaying these artifacts on campus, Quetzil not only revealed a considerable part of its Mayan art collection and new objects and symbols directly gathered for the exhibition. There is also something in this Quetzil exhibition that I consider related to ethnographic surrealism and something that I have called ready mades in ethnography.
The concept of ready made, used in art to make references to ways of decontextualizing and recontextualizing objects, has broader meanings in the vast field of culture as any way of moving things from one context to another, telling a story where they are not lived, memorizing fragments of something from another group to which what was memorized does not correspond, or moving things that once suppose a community and then audiences not related to that, is a continuous sin equanon in anthropology and ethnography, in a certain way there would be have to say that, although brought to the foreground by art, the readymade would have always occurred in ethnography and anthropology, bringing things about one way of life to insert them into another way of life, as Geertz said that he That alone would be enough, it is something that has always characterized it, but certainly doing it in the form of art objects offered for sale as in a Mayan market but out of their context, gives rise to an impression of ethnographic surrealism, Mayan masks on a university campus. Anglo-American.
Despite this, the decontextualizing effect that, in the impression of students and teachers, made those Mayan artifacts a surreal impression of a cultural ready-made, did not completely make transpositions between cultural contexts as different as would have been supposed and in this I would like to refer to the theory of Alfred Shurtz on the relevance, certainly the photographs and films taken by Quetzil and his students documenting the unusual reactions of the people and the dialogues that were generated as settings for intercultural communications, had a very different effect if, far from seeing them on campus, the same social actors just a few kilometers down Westheimer Avenue would have visited Quetzil in his own home, where the same artifacts are then his own lifestyle, an anthropologist who lives surrounded by his Mayan world in everything, collection of Mayan art in the walls, ways to decorate and arrange your house, books, films, etc.
I think that this is precisely what this exhibition was about, the exploration on the one hand of the effect of estrangement as a surreal readymade of one culture within another versus the relativization of it in the fact that it is about the images and artifacts that They make up the anthropologist's own lifestyle in Texas.
There is also something in this of a healthy joiking without ulterior motives but related to a certain irony restoring ethical and cultural values of interculturality that is a usual characteristic in Quetzil, the sense of a certain ethical humor that is part of the research because Quetzil resorts to it continually just to remember one day Quetzil showed up at my house in Houston unexpectedly and he was wearing black glasses but he had them misplaced as if they were falling off, the fact that he had them that way as if falling off and he didn't say anything to me as if it were normal for them to be So it was an anachronism and of course a game, when I see him arrive I ask him Quetzil, what are you doing with the black glasses on like that and he answers me with a question, don't you like taking heads?, and I said yes a lot so When he entered the house I served him a coffee and when he sat down I played Talking Heads music while we started talking.
Bibliography
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Self and Acervo: The Phenomenology of the Self in the Hermeneutic of Culture, Scholars’Press, 2025
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, The Equinox Film. Lecture discussed at the panel on the equinox Film, a panel coordinated and introduced by Quetzil Eugenio with conferences by Abdel Hernandez San Juan and George Marcus, Anthropology Faculty, The University of Houston, Houston, Texas, USA
Tyler Stephen A, Presenter (Dis)Play, published at The Creative Spirit 31.1 (1991): 122-130
The Ah Dzib Pízté Exhibition: A perspective from ethnomethodology and cultural anthropology/the visual expression of field work in Quetzil Eugenio
By Abdel Hernandez San Juan
The theory of anthropology or meta-anthropology, as I understand and discuss it here, has its beginnings in Clifford Geertz's efforts to understand anthropology as literature and write about it in the mode of literary criticism based on his book Lives and works, the anthropologist as author, however, the kind of meta-anthropology to which I adhere in my theorization of the anthropology of Quetzil Eugenio, although it preserves and brings from that a series of questions about how to understand and discuss the problems of research and methodological in anthropology, is faced with the challenge that, although to a large extent much of what I discuss also takes Quetzil's writing as a parameter, that is, essays and papers of his that I have read and which are implicit in my criticism - the literary criticism of anthropology as literature--, the analysis of concrete practices that represent one, the theorization about his film of the equinox, and the one that I will focus on this occasion, the exhibition that we curated and museographed together at Lake Forest College, represent that what my meta-anthropology discusses are not directly scriptural practices but rather a film and a curatorship, in this sense I see myself situated in developing a modality of metanthropology that in one case is a form of Anthropology film Theory --film Theory research-- and in the other, a modality of Anthropology of curatorial practice or Anthropology Museum Theory.
The possibility of developing the still small field of anthropology as literary criticism or the relationship between literary criticism and anthropology, which I had already ventured into by relating the discussion of a literary work by Twain and the discussion of anthropology in my essay The Eclipse of the Evocation, moving it first towards the criticism of the film and then towards the criticism of an exhibition curatorial practice, becomes more complex and at the same time richer although not less demanding, given the fact that a not limited but rather abundant number of Quetzil's scriptural literature expressed in essays and papers is itself facing the challenge of discussing a fieldwork practice that increasingly combines the idea of practitioner with the exploration of visual displays.
When what we have before us for the literary criticism of anthropological writing is not as easily discernible as a simple relationship between a style and way of writing as the only means of bringing to the text the lived experiences and the staging of the field work on the which we theorize, but also supposes that writing about forms of practicality wrapped in visual displays inevitably turns and moves meta-anthropology from literary criticism towards domains that, although methodologically it does not neglect, due to the exploration of other means, it could not begin to develop either.
Undoubtedly, the film and the visual displays of exhibitions such as the museum are also in contrast to the diatribes to which Geertz referred about the ways of staging both representations of cultures and field work itself, but as I have argued in other essays about my own fieldwork practice and research, in which Quetzil and I continue to be one of the few theorists, if not the only ones in the United States, truly immersed in it, whether the relationship representation of cultures in writing on the one hand, and field work put into a textual scene on the other, has been complex in anthropology as writing in the areas of film and the visual discourses of the museum, it has been no less so.
One of the centers of attention of my criticism on this topic since the late nineties in the United States has been the theoretical and empirical demonstration of which I have no doubt in experimental and empirical terms expressed in clear research results, that Working together on the theoretical problems of staging fieldwork and ways of bringing the research we do on culture to representational modes complements and helps each other much more than could have been assumed in traditional anthropology, at least as it is understood. expresses in concrete results both in me and in Quetzil.
The practice to be discussed on which the effort of this essay is focused is one more clear example in this sense, I propose to demonstrate once again how the experimentation of a visual display in this case an exhibition curated and museographed through a team criterion interdisciplinary that is, between me and Quetzil, in which both things are done at the same time, an exhibition is offered in which the culture is represented, and a way of staging the field work is offered, favors, enriches, It helps, complements, facilitates and, above all, offers ways to achieve results in both senses than otherwise, that is, trying to represent a culture without staging the field work alongside it, or conversely, trying to stage the field work, without offering representations of culture, could not be achieved.
In my previous analyzes in reference to Quetzil's projects I have only placed the emphasis or accent, in order to offer the widest possible scope in the visual and symbolic set that cuts out or delimits the visual culture to which it is based, in terms of material culture. that his field work refers to, --I refer here to my essay Museum Theory: Anthropology of Markets and tourism on both of them--I have not, however, yet discussed what Quetzil does with respect to it and what is the peculiarity that offers an exceptional character to his field work and his anthropology.
There are several and not a few things that offer Quetzil's anthropology an indisputable peculiarity specific to Quetzil as an anthropologist.
Firstly, Quetzil's anthropology is not simply welcoming or accepting that culture as a text to which we have referred before as it simply is and comes pre-given according to the massive overcoding of its imagery, but it is discussing how it Visual culture is produced and generated by the textual practices of archeology museums and what relationship exists between these practices of archaeological representation and the production of images of a culture that, although justified in its character of archaeological discourse, creates and produces it? itself in producing images of an ancient past, images that current Mexican culture - including the strength of the Mayan culture in the latter - makes of itself.
On the one hand, it presupposes a theoretical discussion on how the production of archaeological textual and museum practices confined to the idea of archaeologizing a remote and ancient past, at the same time produces an image of culture towards tourism and towards current Mexican and Mayan culture itself. That is to say, these archaeological museological practices by producing visual forms about the remote past, as discursive practices of the museum inscribed in the spatial and temporal present of a tourist attraction with its markets, the archaeological park of the museum with its programs and markets, continually reinvents that past and produces in the reinvention of that images of how current culture in its relationship to tourism perceives itself in the production of itself—(Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Equinox Film, lecture, The University of Houston Anthropology Faculty, 1997).
It is about unraveling the fact that this self-production, far from being disconnected from authentic living culture, is also one of the ways through which the enclaves of contemporary authenticity of Mayan and Mexican culture expressed in towns are reproduced and self-produced. , communities and archaeological sites.
To do this, it is necessary to theoretically and empirically unravel how the museographic, textual and visual practices of the Mayan culture museum are related to a tourist market of its products, programming and events that is embedded in various settings between tourism and the community, with the modes of production of images of culture for tourism and the modes of self-perception of the latter with respect to itself. (Quetzil Eugenio, letter to Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Lake Forest College, Illinois, 1999)
On the other hand, it is not only about theorizing archeology in the production of images of culture in the museum of culture and its relationship, that of that archeology, with the present Mexican and Mayan culture, but also the anthropology of the archaeological museum It is also the anthropology of tourism and the communities between the two related, as well as the new age culture that frequents these enclaves through spiritual culture, tourist consumption and museum events with their markets.
The emphasis on this accent of new age anthropology, which focuses for the analysis of culture not only on the authentic Mayan, but also in a broader and general way on the believer in different ways in this culture, including Americans, Mexicans, in general and tourists is not at all extrinsic to the discussion of this museum, its locations and communities, the fact that it is a market in which Mayans, Mexicans, archaeological institutions and a tourist market intended for it interact They bring together various contemporary, modern expressions of the ancient tradition, as Quetzil calls them, people from the United States, Mexico and other parts, and who are characterized by being attracted to the Mayan culture and its spiritual and mystical events while later wear their outfits and become carriers of them in different ways
The fact that his anthropology involves not only the Mayan museum and its production of archaeological textuality, not only the Mayan and Mexican man through different forms of his community expression, the Mayan language and his memories regarding which many of his essays written around 1997 and 1998, as well as a good part of the visual expression of his field work that we visualized and discussed in 1997, but also to that new age American state that goes to the Mayan world fascinated by that, it seems to me extreme interest and attraction because it is a way of turning attention towards the expressions of a spiritual culture as it takes shape within the same American culture and extends the reach of anthropology towards subjectivities that are not related to it in the way in which it is It does not become its direct exponent, but rather it becomes its promulgator by wearing its attire in other ways of being assumed for reasons in which the very principles that shape what we understand as postmodern culture are intertwined, from which those themselves are not exempt. teams that have worked on different Quetzil projects both in the United States, including me, and in Mexico.
I mean here that this anthropology of extensive postmodern culture, derived from what was previously discussed, supposes not only the anthropology of the new age towards the lay man, not necessarily focused on anthropology, but also the anthropology of Quetzil's anthropology and his own autoanthropology, its expression. same of that postmodern culture and its new age. This extends the reach towards the modern man of the great metropolis, the fact that doing research on one of these individuals who believe in the Mayan culture or acquire its artifacts, including the anthropologist himself who wears their clothing and visual forms for very good reasons, symbolic, mystical, pure tourist attraction, spiritual, or above all of properly anthropological fascination, it is also a way of continuing to do the anthropology of cultural postmodernism, at the same time as the archeology museum with its production of textual culture and visual, tourism, the archaeological park and the traditions and values of the surrounding communities
This also has a scope for research on the significant presence of Mexican culture in the same mixtures that make up cultural processes of the American cultural identity, at least as it is expressed in Texas according to my own experience, thus encompassing a possibility for what I I have discussed as self-ethnography, or autoethnographies since, on the one hand, Quetzil himself is the son of Guatemalan immigrants born in the United States, the culture par excellence of the Mayan and speaks Mayan at the same time as an anthropologist but also as a descendant of Guatemalan immigrants. , it is therefore also about turning attention towards a new age anthropology, resulting from empirical theorization and research on that anthropological and archaeological market of what he calls the fascination with the Mayan and which in my terms is a visual and symbolic of what we understand as postmodern culture
Postmodernism in contemporary global culture has generated, on the one hand, an increasingly accentuated attention towards expressions of values and philosophies of the world coming from other cultures while, on the other hand, it has also promulgated in a certain way dualism, which I understand by this I concept the relationship between the Western and the non-Western, embedded in each other as the same social and cultural formation that is both Western and non-Western, that is, dualistic.
With the above I mean that in addition to his theory about the museum of Mayan culture in its production of archaeological texts discussed as a textual practice that produces images of culture, the investigation of archeology itself as a practice and of other archaeologists, such as The case in his writings about Steguerda and other anthropologists who have done field work before Quetzil in the same locations, supposes that it is also an anthropology about a single market that is generated around it and that brings with it the relationship between authentic settler, the Mayan of the neighboring communities, the Mexican in his community life, that archaeological and anthropological market that is generated around the museum and for the same reason also an anthropology then of the postmodern culture that in the new age is generated around it
Although the above is mainly visible as a specific characteristic of his film about the equinox, I consider it implicit and intrinsically related to how Quetzil manages to implement his collaborations and the type of teams that have usually been related in different periods to his field work including me in the different settings in which we have worked together, both mine and his in my team, and his and me in his and above all to the foreground how it is expressed and acquires specificity in the anthropological and ethnographic discussion of this sample in lake Forest.
In this regard, it will be necessary to expand on some theoretical questions about research methods.
Regarding all of the above, it is emphasized to resort to a concept by Clifford Geertz when he referred to that invisible miracle through which a form of life enters one and transforms oneself in which our anthropologies, mine and Yours, they are related, I quote Geertz directly before continuing in that beautiful passage that Quetzil has recently evoked with his essay on the invisibility of ethnography in field work.
“The ability of anthropologists,” said Geertz, “to make us take what they say seriously has less to do with their factual aspect or their air of conceptual elegance than with their ability to convince us that what they say is the result of having been able to penetrate (or, if you prefer, having been penetrated by) another form of life, having in one way or another been there and in the persuasion that this invisible miracle has occurred, is where writing intervenes.
What I will discuss more precisely is the fieldwork of Quetzil Eugenio proposing a theoretical perspective in relation to and around an exhibition of anthropology and modern Mayan art in the ancient tradition that we curated together for a trip I took from Texas to Lake Forest as guest of the anthropology and sociology faculty at Lake Forest, with Quetzil at that time as an assistant professor at the faculty, and which we exhibited and musegraphed together in the Duran Gallery, that is, a discussion of his field work in the specific way in which I have been able to get to know it, from the United States and regarding its museography that we display as an exhibition on the visual display.
As I maintained one of the main theoretical and research reasons for the experimentation of new displays for the visual in anthropology that has stimulated our experimentations, I am referring to the theoretical movement of sociology, anthropology, ethnography that we started in 1998 Abdel Hernandez San juan, Stephen A Tyler and Quetzil Eugenio, is to experiment with possibilities through which the staging of field work in forms of textualization and the representation of cultural forms or the cultures of our research can go more together and work more in unison, supported by a to the other within a new balance that counteracts, on the one hand, the usual difficulties of the anthropology museum in our country, the United States, to represent cultures as enclosures within the museological text that textualizes them, almost always excluding from visual experimentation the in field work scene.
But the scope of much of what was previously discussed would not have acquired specificity nor would it have been nourished by elements in my theorization without, above all, the specific characteristics of how we staged Quetzil's field work, which is the part with which I was responsible for dealing as curator and museographer, that is, half of the exhibition, developed in the smallest room of the gallery, and focused on curating and museography the anthropology of Quetzil and more precisely the visual expression of his field work. We dedicated this part of the exhibition to theorizing and conceptualizing the spatialization and museographic and visual solutions of the staging of field work and its relationship with the curation of anthropology displays.
Meanwhile, the other larger room was dedicated to Quetzil's curatorship, consisting of pieces by five Mayan artists that Quetzil brought to Lake Forest, as well as other pieces from his collection, baticks, wood and carvings.
With the exhibition as a whole, it is a very well-constructed and achieved example of what I call an adequate balance between staging field work and developing cultural representations, how they can benefit, complement and help each other to the greatest effectiveness and success of both interrelated purposes in the end actually from the experience itself.
The peculiarity of this exhibition is that it stages a very specific part of Quetzil's field work and above all that had never before been staged either visually or in writing, resulting in a first in this sense. The specific settings of their field work put into the visual scene correlated four main elements, on the one hand, the visual scenes of Quetzil in the houses and studios of these Mayan artists in their own communities in the film image mode of the artists at the time when they carve their wood and paint their baticks or sculpt their masks sitting and Quetzil between them sitting or standing talking about ordinary things of daily life or about the same pieces they carve with their explanations in pizte.
On the other hand, a setting of several photographs of the tourist event around the pyramid in the archaeological park of the Museum of Mayan Culture in Yucatan that generates around it a massive visit of tourists specifically around the event of the moment in which the image of the snake in the form of a shadow on the pyramid for which tourists and visitors from the United States, Mexico and other parts of the world wait all day and in whose spaces one of the markets is generated in which this art is sold and marketed, market that, due to the way it connects the regulations and regulations of the archaeological museum in the programming of the archaeological park, with tourism and the communities, Quetzil defines as an anthropological market of fascination with the Mayan.
The third element visually staged in this setting are printed and bound Quetzil manuscripts with his illustrated theoretical essays of anthropology on and around these two phenomena, the art of pizte, the event explained above and the relationship of both things, as well as a series of objects and elements typical of Quetzil's lecterns such as cameras, laptops, notebooks, among other furniture from his experience,
The fourth and last element that I also had to deal with is a more directly intertextual reference, if you will, implicit to the fact, as I said before that Quetzil's anthropology does not directly take Mayan and Mexican culture as the object of its cultural research. , but rather it is situated before arriving at those, in the discussion of the same anthropology and archeology that have produced textual forms about that culture, taking as an axis of attention the rhetoric and the textual and visual discourses of the museum.
This fact takes on a visual form in the exhibition at Duran Gallery through the staging of slides projected on the initial columns at the entrance to Steguerda's archeology office, since this archaeologist from the 1940s located his office precisely. in pizte the town from which the invited Mayan artists come and the art exhibited in the Quetzil area.
While we staged the three previous settings in the small room between the two that make up duran gallery, the last one, the images of Stequerda's cabinet, were projected at the very entrance of the large room where, after seeing the continuous lup of the cabinet From Stequeda we went to see the exhibition of the five Mayan artists curated by Quetzil and his collection this time with my museographic and lighting advice.
Although in a certain way the visual staging of the event around the pyramid is already a direct allusion to the anthropological and archaeological museum in the archaeological park in the sense of an anthropology of anthropology, due to its character as an event and above all all in the way in which the market, tourism, museum programming and community are intertwined, the emphasis falls more on the latter and less on the meta-anthropological theme which is then more accentuated or punctuated by exposing the continuous lup of Steguerda's office, something that It more directly presupposes the way in which we discuss other archaeological practices and their discourses and is one of the things, if not the main one, that characterizes not only the anthropology of Quetzil as written textuality but also the way in which Quetzil relates to the community.
This fact, which I consider central to their fieldwork, centered my decisions on how to stage their fieldwork – not only the visual settings with the Mayan artists, but also the emphasis on the equinox event as a reference to the relationship anthropology of archeology, that is, museum, archaeological park, tourism and market in which that art is sold, the texts and furniture of Quetzil as an anthropologist, and in the transition from anthropology to culture, the entrance to the art exhibition Mayan with the lup on the archeology cabinet of Steguerda, that is, entry to the culture and the community through the intertextuality of the anthropology of archeology.
Quetzil's anthropology, in fact, does not relate to culture and community as the direct object of study of his anthropology as a subject but rather relates to culture as a result of asking about how other archeology practices are producing images of the culture or have previously textualized it
I am interested in discussing with this curatorship and museography these relationships in their field work while explaining how this enriches the research of culture, the fact itself largely removes the center of attention from their anthropology on the direct study of communities. understood as for the first time in the way in which this has usually been raised in the anthropology of peoples and communities, to in turn situate that the reality that they live from the market itself is affected by those museum practices when at most the The same market in which culture is reproduced is related to that museum and its programming in the tourist market,
With the above I propose an objectifying theory about the anthropology of Quetzil Eugenio, the axis of this theory is based on placing that the anthropology of Quetzil focuses on the definition of a third object that decenters or disseminates the relationship between the subject and the object that It had to be assumed between the anthropologist and the culture or communities he studies. The very idea that he studies or creates a theory about these communities is for this same reason relativized or in between sayings because, although it is in culture in the sense of where and between what places his scenes of life acquire visual and spatial form, field work, the language school, the exhibition projects, the equinox film, his own book about the museum of Mayan culture and his work collecting material, data and documentation, the community and the culture specifically, is That is to say, the specific towns in which this anthropology takes shape, such as locations, Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Machu Pichu, Pizte, among other places, are not in culture in the form of an anthropology that makes communities and peoples its direct object, This relationship in terms of the object of study is not only dissuaded and disseminated but the center of its anthropology lies in relating to that culture and community as someone who is there, like them, studying such as museums, the archaeological park and the practices of anthropology and archeology have textualized ideas about the remote and ancient past of this culture, and how an activity of tourism, markets and recreation is generated around it, of which, on the one hand, those same communities and cultures are formed and of which they consist. both from the point of view of its economic reproduction, and from the point of view of the influence that this has on the ways in which these cultures proliferate and at the same time reinvent themselves in the very relationship between the archaeological museum, the archaeological park and the tourist market.
The aforementioned, my objectification that it is in the first and last instance an anthropology that defines a third object between the how anthropologist and the culture in question, focusing not on live culture but on the written and visual texts that have produced textualizations. about that culture means, on the one hand, that the museum of Mayan culture that was once the subject of his first book, is not only the object of his anthropology but at the same time mediates his presence in the community and in the culture, the object, here the museum, which should be only the object of Quetzil as the subject of his own anthropology and therefore be mediated by the latter mediates in turn the forms of Quetzil's relationship with culture and the way in which his Field work.
Being mediated by the object is not something entirely new in anthropology, but being mediated by an object which itself consists in the production of a textuality about the culture in question, does contract results specific to the latter that characterize Quetzil's anthropology. its specificity and style, its way of being in the culture and working with it. Although it is not a voluntary activity undertaken by the museum and its programs, mediating, as someone who has a programmed objective, the relationship of Quetzil's anthropology with the culture and the community, it is Quetzil himself who dissuades the focus of attention about culture and the community live to instead make the museum and the production of archeology texts the center of his attention, that is, the third object between him and the culture, or between the how anthropologist and the community, he has as a result of self-mediation or remediation,
That is to say, Quetzil mediates himself and his anthropology in relation to culture by focusing his attention on a museum which, by itself being the main agent that generates markets, programming and tourism in these communities, also explains that the relationship between he and the culture are given not in their direct focus, but in their deterred or disseminated co-presence given in which both the anthropologist and the communities are both involved by the same event or by the same sequence of events and experiences and therefore both affected by the same and compelled to know it in order to know themselves.
But the above also has a consequence that explains the meaning and reason of being that in terms of cultural anthropology my meta-anthropology then focuses on the anthropology of Quetzil, while the latter is focused on studying archeology through project practices. that include language school, ethnographic samples and films, among other results in what defines his field work, my meta-anthropology on the anthropology of Quetzil is focused in turn on while I theorize and discuss the anthropology of Quetzil, propose a cultural anthropology of that relationship between markets, communities, culture, tourism that, far from discouraging attention to a third object as Quetzil does, tries to discuss Quetzil and propose a more complex theory about the consequences that this has in terms of the anthropology of culture. not only for the study of contemporary Mexican and Mayan culture, or modern in the ancient tradition as Quetzil calls it, but also for American culture specifically my point of view from Texas, but in general, for the discussion of central issues of cultural anthropology both in terms of research method and in terms of the United States in Mexico and Mexico in the United States.
The problem of how economic processes related to tourism affect the dynamics of the present configuration of culture and the ways in which these cultures are reproduced. That is to say, while Quetzil's attention as a field worker focuses a third instance that decenters attention on culture and the community to in turn generate a theory or ethnographic study of archeology and the relationship between the museum and culture. , my meta-anthropological theorization of Quetzil focuses on the cultural anthropology that is required in the discussion of it itself.
Now, for Quetzil's purposes, this exhibition of the five Mayan artists made up of baticks, wood carvings and wooden masks also covers a significant part of their field work since Quetzil maintains the theoretical thesis in anthropology that the work of field can and in fact contemplates a part or a percent considered as a part of its possibilities, its potential and its own activities of what Quetzil calls agencies, that is, Quetzil considers that field work can itself include a part busy not only in representing the culture in the ways of its staging in writing, but now also in organizing it, Quetzil becoming in this sense not only in the one who goes to know that art and studies its culture in the communities but also in one that can contribute to the commercialization process, understood now as a process of valuing the spiritual, cultural, aesthetic and artistic values of this modern Mayan art in the ancient tradition, as well as, above all, make possible the possibility not only of commercializing it but also and above all, exposing it.
Exposing this Mayan art directly is something that Quetzil had ventured before in his exhibition on the campus of the University of Houston, but at that time a setting similar to those created by Mayan artists in the art and culture markets was created. Mayan, this time, that art has been exhibited and museographed with all the attention, accent and importance required in a formal exhibition space of Lake Forest College, Duran Gallery including the trip and visit of the Mayan artists on the opening day and during the month of the event.
Since I had the opportunity to meet and talk during the preparations for the exhibition, during the inauguration and during the month of activities with each of these artists, I was able to clearly know not only what each of them were like, typical Mexican citizens and individuals of Mayan origin, but above all understand the ethical integrity, values and morals given in the relationship of each one of them with Quetzil, the way they love him and appreciate the work and effort he is making to make known the values of his art and their culture and the fact of how they feel in favor of Quetzil in the way in which the anthropology of Quetzil is developing an anthropological critique towards other archaeological and anthropological practices in their community, or the consequences of this on their culture.
Although this exhibition did not include references to two other significant practices of Quetzil's field work, such as his bilingual Mayan and English language school in Yucatán, and his forays into interactive exhibitions in the same community such as his Chilan Balan exhibition, it is Obviously, this specific part of his field work focused on the art of pizte is also a clear and clear example of what Quetzil has called community collaborations and ethnographic intervention, in short, Quetzil's anthropology and ethnography as one that It supposes an anthropological criticism towards other forms of anthropology, archaeology, market and tourism practice on communities, they undoubtedly have the support and admiration of the community for their values and qualities.
This exhibition undoubtedly restores the spiritual, cultural, aesthetic and artistic values of the art of pizte and its communities, as well as the values of the art of these five extraordinary artists, something that begins to be made visible not only in the exhibition in Yes, and in the experience of that month that we lived with the five artists as well as in the catalog published by Quetzil, it would have been limited, however, to only the evaluation of each of the pieces exhibited and possibly to what each of the five artists said or could say about their works, if the visual staging of Quetzil's field work developed simultaneously and the theorization of it had not made it possible for us to offer the reader all the analyzes that I have developed in this essay, since the majority of these analyzes could not have been made explicit if we had referred only to the analysis of a number of paintings on canvas, wood carvings and masks exhibited by Quetzil and five Mayan artists, these analyzes have therefore been indispensable and have been possible because we put Quetzil's field work was simultaneously staged in the part of the exhibition that I had to concentrate on curating and museography.
When I spoke of a mutual benefit from staging field work and representing culture, I was referring to it, while Quetzil, for his part, published a catalog which mostly focused on discussing the strictly visual symbolism of the pieces exhibited from the point of view of the ancient tradition expressed in those pieces, as well as in offering elements about the artists and to a large extent without a doubt some subsequent development that Quetzil makes about what this experience was, due to the accent of his approach, perhaps it consists in transcriptions of his dialogues with the five artists or other elements directly related to it, the image of culture that we now receive in terms of representation of culture with only the elements on the ancient tradition of the images in the catalogue, although interesting, it is clearly not only limited but also with the risk of suffering, if it were only about that, and not about it, but its relationship with everything previously discussed about the staging of field work makes it possible and beneficial, of the same things that Quetzil's anthropology has criticized in other previous forms of archeology and anthropology of the Mayan world, creating the image that they live in an ancient world disconnected from contemporary life and above all from all the elements whose relationships We have theorized that they peculiarize the culture and that, moreover, if they were planned by Quetzil, I would take care of them as made explicit in his letter of invitation to me.
When at the same time, of course, the mere staging of the field work, without including the work of bringing these five guest artists, exhibiting their art and giving it the importance that we gave it, would also have lacked this part nourished in values ethical, cultural, aesthetic and visual, busy making Mayan art known as the protagonist of a culture, and not simply studying a culture.
The methodology explored and developed by Quetzil also has, and this is the other point that focuses my discussion of his anthropology, unique consequences on the practice of field work and on what we understand by anthropology and ethnography. The above means defining that Quetzil's fieldwork focuses on a bundle of related concepts that is required to be understood, because the object is dissuaded or disseminated in favor of a third object that mediates as an event its relationship to the community, its Ethnography is based on a method of oscillation, this concept of oscillation, which I take from an essay by Gianny Vatimo The Art of Oscillation: from Utopia to Heterotopia, consists of Quetzil's ethnography developing within a continuous oscillatory procedure. between how the observer or subject of his anthropology, as a field worker, and the culture or the various objects that become the center of his attention in the different projects that specifically make his field work a practitioner's experience, this oscillation continuity between the subject and the object given in the very fact that the object of attention is the one who explains as a third instance what makes him and the community be in relationship, then in turn has consequences on the fact that his work field is essentially defined by elicitations.
The concept of Performativity in research that I have proposed is given in a way that is much more related to the epistemological question of the theory of knowledge itself, that is, to how the relationship between research is elucidated or resolved in the definition and undertaking of research. subject and the object, in the case of Quetzil, Performativity in the research is less epistemological, it is less focused on the relationship here and now and on how to deliberate against it in a research, how the subject and the object are going to work in the cut. that will define the mode of research and more related to how each project manages to situate the continuous relationship to its anthropology between a third object, the how anthropologist and the culture or communities, establishing a closer relationship between oscillations, elicitations and performativity .
It is not the same, and in reality it is something very different, Performativity than elicitation, Performativity in research refers to how we decide to resolve the way in which the relationship between the subject and the object that is required to be ordered and preceded is going to work. achieve the forms of objective and subjective knowledge that will give peculiarity and define what a mode of research will be like, elicitation in its difference, refers to how a practice or project elicits something that before or that otherwise would not have been possible, the film of the equinox.
For example, due to the way the film was made, the fact that the film focused its attention on the event as a third object through which the anthropologist and the culture, the self and the community are related, elicits a form of seeing himself as an anthropologist and the culture according to the event that then defines his way of being in the culture, something that, without making the film in that way, putting the emphasis on the event, would not have been achieved and by itself elicited through the film that then becomes part of the continuity of fieldwork (Abdel Hernandez San Juan, unlimited fieldwork, 1997), an event chosen by the anthropologist focuses attention on his way of being in culture, and this event they involve him and the culture together, this elicits both things, a way of doing the anthropology of archeology that brings with it already within the event—which is itself already archaeological—, to the culture, to the community, to tourism to the markets and to him.
Likewise, elicitation refers to how we work on the interrelation between the visual staging of the field work, on the one hand, and the Mayan art exhibition on the other, that is, the way of going from one to the other, of visiting each other. and from one instance to the other, to the sample of Mayan art after prior intertextuality of anthropology on archeology through the lup of Steguerda's cabinet, and to the staging of the field work, through three related elements, the lup on film of the artists in the process of their paintings and carvings in their own homes, the photographs of the tourist event in the archaeological park and the Quetzil lecterns, something that otherwise, without positioning the exhibition in this way, would not have been achieved , so that Performativity in Quetzil is more linked to elicitation due to the practitioner component that focuses its way of being on culture and less on the direct epistemological question between subject and object, text and world, epistemology and reality, subject and cutting of a form of culture in the construction of research.
This interweaving between elicitation and Performativity characterizes Quetzil's projects.
Performativity in research at an epistemological level maintains more direct attention on the cut that we make of a given cultural reality understood in the sense of how this will entail, in the way in which we will do the research, the discernment about the relationship between language and reality, between language and world, between text and culture, they maintain more of an equidistance in which they never cease to be completely extrinsic. This extrinsication is given by the fact that we must be aware of how we are working on the subject-object relationship even if this relationship becomes itself experimental in a more positivist sense, we never lose track of it because it is around it that we can discern whether we will work in a phenomenological, hermeneutical, exegetical or structural sense, if applicable. So performativity in research can work per se and independently of elicitation, although they can also go more together as almost always happens in Quetzil.
The exhibition at Duran Gallery that we curated together, for example, elicits possibilities for both me and Quetzil that before that elicitation neither I nor Quetzil would have been able to count on, and in general the type of written works and theories that later, thanks to that elicitation, we have carried out. , the samples from Quetzil in Yucatán elicit ways of relating archival texts about the archaeological past with contemporary circumstances of the community and the ways in which these communities become aware of the ways in which the archaeological text in its relationship to tourism is part in the same way that they reinvent their past, give continuity to their traditions and prospect their futures that would not have otherwise been obtained, their exposition of Chilan Balan discussed in their essay The Past as Transcultural Space: The Use of Ethnographic Installation in the study of archeology is a clear example of this.
The relationship between constant oscillation and continuous elicitation is given in the eminently projective nature of Quetzil's field work centered on the idea of practitioner, but his anthropology also has an intertextual character that should not be ignored, while my anthropology is more intratextual, although it is also contemplates phenomena of intertextuality given in the fact that I work on the interpretation of culture as a text, either in the way I work on what I call the phenomenological and hermeneutic strata, with respect to pre-textual formations, the pretexts in my sociology and anthropology. are more related to the study of culture as a live text or pretextual forms in it, Quetzil's anthropology is in this sense much more intertextualist in terms of making archeology itself and anthropology the object of his attention.
Against the above, it could be argued that also the fact that I write about Quetzil implies intertextuality, but my concept of the critical practice that implies the problematic of meta-anthropology as has been discussed by Clifford Geertz and taken up in another form by James Clifford , is much more situated in the field of exegetical studies, that is, in the field that moves between literary criticism and visual criticism, that is, the hermeneutical tradition that begins with the new hermeneutics in what we understand from Todorov. as criticism of criticism or symbolism and interpretation and less in the sense of doing an ethnography whose object of ethnography is the anthropology of Quetzil.
There is no attempt in my theory about Quetzil to form an ethnography that ethnographs Quetzil in the way that, for example, Quetzil ethnographs steguerda, ethnographies the archaeological museum, and ethnographies other anthropologists and ethnographers who worked where he himself has worked, first of all. place, because my field work is not in the same place, that is, I am not doing field work in Yucatán, Pizte or Mexico, but between the United States in the present, Mexico from the United States, and Venezuela in the present of a immediate past and for me still present, therefore I am not creating an intertextuality that consists of an ethnography of the ethnography of Quetzil, but I am developing a form of criticism of anthropology that, like literary criticism, film criticism and the critique of the visual, it is a critique of critique, that is, an exegesis of Quetzil's anthropology and with it of culture, in short a cultural anthropology, otherwise Quetzil has also introduced me and several Sometimes therefore the criticism is mutual.
By way of closing the above, it follows that as in all criticism, taking Clifford Geertz in terms of anthropology as a reference, although I do that cultural anthropology, it is still above all and first of all something about Quetzil Eugenio and his anthropology, that is, a literature intended to make known, in a greater scope than it may have in itself, the values, virtues, peculiarities and significance of an anthropology and the work of an anthropologist who has been developing a work of great importance and significance. The anthropology of Quetzil, and this will be the center of my theorizing, has completely rearticulated the ways in which the relationship between anthropology, archeology and ethnography, as well as between fieldwork and culture, was understood, something that Quetzil must be recognized as unique and as an indisputable renewal of his anthropology.
Quetzil's anthropology has characteristics that make it unique in my opinion from the point of view of what I have called the way of being in the culture and the main reason why, in addition to being invited directly by him and institutionally to discuss his projects, I have chosen it based on a true and authentic assessment that I have made of its qualities, its potential and its values.
The first of these characteristics is that Quetzil's anthropology, even many years before he accentuated and emphasized attention to the visual after meeting us at Rice University, has in itself a visual expression of his way of being in the culture. and their way of being in the field.
While it is assumed that visual displays should have more preponderance in my sociology and my anthropology than in yours, paradoxically this is not the case.
A very significant percent, if not the largest percent, of my sociology and anthropology, both in theory books alone, literary works, and in cultural theory both on culture itself and on art, depends to a large extent, and much more than in Quetzil, of what I write, that is, of the textual groups that I write.
While in favor of fieldwork as my priority, I have written critical essays on writing such as The Eclipse of Evocation, it has been related more to an implicit duty to be to the telos of how I want it to be and less to the fact that in In reality, although my field work is strong and predominant, I depend much more than Quetzil on writing to make it explicit, as I discuss in my essay Entre el Acerbo y los Backgrounds when I say that in me, field work is made explicit and intelligible. . Quetzil has achieved in his anthropology something that I always wanted and could never achieve, establishing the spatial settings in which his field work takes shape as an expression and a form of visitable and traversable visual culture, this, directly related to the fact that Quetzil's anthropology is based above all on projects that are defined and established, each around a specific region and area of geography and culture, and had a visible expression in his field work before we met.
Although in later years I have noticed that it has also begun to occur to a percentage of them that for one reason or another, their essays have been moving away from that fresh and lively authenticity in the way of being in the culture given in the fact of having continuous and constant locations in which his fieldwork acquires spatial and visual form, at least during the years to which this essay refers, Quetzil's fieldwork was clearly and clearly established in Mexico, Yucatán.
Obviously I am referring here to a notable and recognized dilemma in anthropology given in the question itself about to what extent field work is an experience that is lived which is then inscribed only in its inscriptions, that is, that it is inscribed only in writing and other ways of inscribing it such as documentation, but in a certain way, by depending on its inscriptions, once inscribed, nothing guarantees that it exists as fieldwork in itself other than in the subjective memory that one has of the experience. lived, on the one hand, and in the objective memory of its inscriptions, writing and documentation, on the other.
According to this way of understanding registration, field work disappears or ceases to be field work as it was in the course of life from the moment it is registered, remaining only as a form that lives in the registration and in the documentation but Not so in that relationship to the culture that field work entailed, which in a certain way is no longer field work.
When I say that Quetzil's anthropology has a spatial and visual expression in culture, I mean the opposite, that is, I mean the fact that regardless of how his field work is reflected in his theoretical essays, inscribed in writing and In the documentation, in their projects, as is the case with many projects that receive support from certain universities, foundations, scholarships or sponsors, the fact that they are justified by what relates them to objective locations in towns and community enclaves in the in which a work is carried out and in which the relationship to a heritage that includes cultural traditions, museums, markets, monuments, events and ultimately the activities themselves that Quetzil's field work establishes in them is assumed.
Although someone could say that this is an idea that I have formed or an impression that has been caused by viewing documentary material such as hundreds of photographs that we have discussed, an impression caused by the way in which in his essays he decides or decides to write and at the same time inscribe, or a sensation that criticism has produced in me based on the viewing of his own film about the equinox, his own collections of what Quetzil calls modern Mayan art in the ancient tradition, or the visual and artifactual material that we display in the curating that we did together in Lake Forest and less the demonstration that such an image of what his field work is there in Yucatán has the spatial and visual expression of projects established in the culture that I have assumed, to in turn argue that the notions of travel, coming and going, being here and no longer there, also dominate his anthropology in the same way as in the common anthropologists, I would go ahead to question this vision, insisting on my point of view.
If the anthropology of Quetzil, we can say that it has indeed had periods in which its being in the culture as field work there in Yucatán and in pizte, have been more intense and prolonged for certain periods of time in which it has had some financing and resources to direct certain projects, and periods in which that relationship has distanced or has diminished, in no way does this mean that in his anthropology inscription and documentation replace a being in the culture that more or less accentuated by one or the other periods, in my opinion Quetzil forms an enclave and a clearly discernible location for his field work.
Like no other anthropologist in the history of anthropology, Quetzil has managed, in my opinion, to establish field work as a permanent visual and spatial reality in what he relates to his anthropology as forms of projects directly located in culture.
There is in this, of course, also a self-perception, that is, with the above I am not saying that it is a simple placement in the culture without perception of oneself in it, certainly, there is a clear and clear self-perception of oneself in the field work and in what relates it to culture which in itself becomes accentuated by it with all intention, in fact, the idea of a project that is established in the spaces of a culture itself presupposes Yes, there is already self-perception, the project is in the culture, located in its spaces, installed in the community, it was not before, and just being there is already as a project, a notion which in itself, by the way, presupposes it, It implies that self-perception.
Being in the culture in an authentic way in no way means that research is not being done and that the latter does not presuppose that very being in it as part of the research.
To understand this fact, it is necessary, of course, to pay attention to how the relationship between the ethnographer-writer-researcher and the pratitioner occurs in Quetzil because the different displays through which Quetzil operates as a practitioner suppose a certain spatio-temporal dislocation or, therefore, use a clearer concept, a certain disjunction between the spatio-temporality of fieldwork expressed in these practices and the work of writing.
There is also a very close relationship in Quetzil's fieldwork between visual and spatial practices and the fieldwork itself, something in which we are different, while my fieldwork is much more related to the worlds of life and the mundane course. of the experience between day and night being discerned and then made explicit and intelligible as a form of theorization between that course, writing and practices, Quetzil's fieldwork is much more intricately intertwined and correlated with the idea of practitioner and the concrete practices that this entails which, although based on being spatially installed in the culture according to the field work, take shape in concrete practices such as his film about the equinox and this exhibition that we curated together in Lake Forest but even before and also , his exhibition on the campus of the University of Houston and there in Yucatán in Mexico, the different projects that Quetzil has carried out in space, such as his Chilan Balan installation exhibition or the activities that his Mayan and English language learning school generates .
Nor could we miss here the emphasis and preponderance that, after meeting us and beginning to work together on some projects, Quetzil gradually acquired not only its anthropology of the museum of Mayan culture, its anthropology of the museum outside the museum in research. about the archaeological park as given in his equinox film, but also an anthropology of the market that it forms, something that Quetzil began to define in his invitation to me for this curatorship in Lake Forest as an anthropological and archaeological market of fascination with the Mayan which progressively extended towards more directly specific field work with Mayan art, which is what we textualize in the exhibition, that is, field work sites directly related to a new search by Quetzil around the batick painters, the made of wood carvings and other techniques whose exponents not only did the exhibition that included a part of their collection and works by five Mayan artists who traveled to Lake Forest, but also visual material about Quetzil in the field work with the artists in their own houses in the community because although Quetzil had ventured into the campus at the University of Houston with an exhibition of Mayan art in free art, it was not until this exhibition in Lake Forest that Quetzil really displayed references to field work for the first time. on this specific topic, as well as the use that Quetzil has increasingly accentuated, of visual exhibitions and visual installations not only in the United States like the one in Lake Forest, but directly there, in the Mayan communities in Pizte and in Yucatán, such as form of communication and collaboration in the community and field work.
We are far from assuming that a Mayan or a current Mexican believes that the rain that falls on Mexico is the tears of Quetzalcoatl whose shadow of the snake is announced in the west or that the Popol Vuh must be his bedside book, but the production of textual and visual archaeological forms museographies exhibited by the museum of Mayan culture within the museum disclosed in exhibitions and in illustrated catalogues, as well as in programs and events that are generated inside and outside the museum, if it produces a tourist consumer market that by consuming Mystical and spiritual images about the ancient past that the archaeological text generates, represent for the tourist an image of their own culture that, although it evokes an ancient and remote past, is current and present in its visual and textual reproduction in terms of the tourist market.
It is in this sense that beyond the autotelic entelechies of the production of anthropological theories about archeology and anthropology, an anthropology of museum archeology and its texts, we must theorize how the relationship to live culture first passes through mediation that this archaeological text already means for the self-perception that this culture has of itself in its relationship to tourism.
It is not, of course, about taking as a fact or assuming that such images consumed by tourism offer some clue to what culture itself is when at most, on the contrary, it refers to how that culture reinvents itself. , but to understand that these markets are intrinsically related, for economic reasons, to how, ultimately, and to a large extent, culture is reproduced.
Where there is an economy, culture receives motives for its proliferation and rise, and although the museum of Mayan culture is not the only institution through which Mayan culture and Mexican culture are developed, it is just one among others, if it must bringing to the foreground the fact that the communities that are in the surroundings and very close to the archaeological park of the monument area, as well as the museum enclaves and their proliferation for tourism, are much more related than other communities in Mexico, to the fact that its own reproduction and economic boom is directly related to the market that is generated around tourism and museum programming and to the way in which this implies the relationship between a Mayan and a Mexican who carries his lives, their forms of habitation, their community traditions and their values, a normative institutionality that regulates privileged activities and a tourism that is at the same time tourism of the fascination of anthropology and archeology with the Mayan but also tourism in general attracted to it,
For this reason, the Mayan and the average Mexican who lives in these surrounding and nearby communities has to relate the traditions that they live or recognize within their communities in systems of customs and values acquired by family descent and by community ties, with a objective and subjective reality through which to produce current symbolic culture around the visual resources referring to the Mexican and the Mayan, is the conducive way for the economic prosperity that arises in the relationship between an archaeological institution dedicated to the memory of a ancient past and a current tourist market attracted by this textual and visual production.
In this way, the Mexican and the Mayan of the communities surrounding the museum not only find in the programming of that opportunity to sell their artifacts and symbolic crafts from which to some extent they live and through which their own culture therefore prospers. , reproduces and survives, but in a certain way begins to relate what comes alive through direct cultural tradition in the culture and what through those tourist market conditions formed by the relationship between the production of visuality of the archaeological museum and tourism, within the ways in which that Mayan and that Mexican make images of themselves and at the same time create current images that recreate the visualities of the archaeological museum.
This concept of images of themselves for tourism does not mean a way of falsifying how they understand their culture, it is simply the fact that their culture begins to reproduce from economic and tourist conditions that presuppose the interaction between a discontinuous memory, that is, that is, oral and living in horizontal traditions, a memory produced by the text of the archaeological museum that refers to an ancient and remote past and a tourism that is economically organized and develops between both things and that therefore its culture is in front of to transformation dynamics.
I have situated the above to discuss the fact that Quetzil's anthropology not only refers to the archaeological museum in itself as a critique of anthropology on archaeology, but also involves theorizing attention to the museum and its programming, as a way to relate to the same community, accepting the fact that in a certain way the museum already mediates that relationship in the same enclaves where the communities develop.
Nor is it a matter of Quetzil simply accepting the way on one side and the other, the tourist on the one hand, the museum authorities on the other with their rules, and the Mayan and the current Mexican in their communities on the other, things have been or are usually represented, rather it is about this setting of interaction between various dynamics as a form of relationship to then find and study phenomena that from none of those sides has been previously foreseen and that nevertheless inevitably involves implicit and inclusive way the relationship between them.
The installations, for example, that Quetzil develops in community spaces, as well as its Mayan and English language school, aim to enter at a deeper level into specificities of the Pizteño and Yucatan culture that are not reduced or limited to texts and self-representations. produced by the museum and by tourism, but his equinox film, developed after writing his book on the museum of Mayan culture, is a clear example of how the previously theorized is required to understand and analyze parameters of its anthropology and field work.
Although Quetzil has more recently begun to pay attention to some questions of research and methodology that we discussed in my ethnography and Performativity laboratory in 1998 in Texas, and that we had also discussed before in 1997, discussing them from new perspectives specific to his current research, I I refer to his essay on the invisible theater of ethnography and the performative principles of fieldwork, the concept of elicitation continues to be essential to understand his anthropology, which I consider can be discussed in his anthropology since before my laboratory.
Although my insistence on the concept of elicitation in fieldwork to discuss Quetzil's anthropology could be understood as my way of avoiding or avoiding discussing the propensity for other types of dynamics that Quetzil refers to in his essay, it is not about of it.
The Invisible Theater of Ethnography is an essay that Quetzil writes very attached to and very in relation to from within the questions that have arisen in the exploration and experimentation with installation forms from which he tries in that essay to extract their consequences for a theory of research, however, has in turn, from my perspective, attention to issues that could distract my attention from the interpretative problematic of culture as a text, that is, what I discussed in other essays as the application of problems of exegesis and literary criticism not to the criticism of anthropology about anthropology but to the theory of live culture, that is, to the theory of how to interpret the text of culture.
As I said before, my attention to the question of culture as a text refers to the fact that the symbols of culture but also in all its expressions must form the material of a continuous exegesis, both for field work and for writing. so that whether or not that text is pre-given in the culture, as occurs with the text of the archaeological museum in Quetzil, or that text must be constructed through the phenomenologies and hermeneutics of the textual strata, as I did in my work. of field studies and texts on urban markets, including the very methodological questions of research that presuppose Performativity in field work, can and should, thanks to the constructivism of the object in post-ethnomethodological sociology, but above all thanks to an experimentation of Performativity in the research that continues working around the reading and interpretation of culture, maintaining its relationship to a textual exegesis.
It is not, as I alluded to elsewhere, a critique of the text in the sense of dislocating the relationship between interpretation and culture, it is about, in my critique of the text, getting the ways in which we can evade how the writing previously given about the culture has produced an idea of text that distances us from the direct research of culture that, from field work in terms of Performativity in research, allows the understanding of it and its symbols, as well as its material and immaterial forms in exegetical terms. and interpretive, more in the direction of the exegesis of culture as a text and less in the direction of accepting the texts about the former in the place of the former, my attention is not to avoid Quetzil's current emphasis when in the main and almost the greatest hundred of the issues we agree on, but rather focus my attention on other issues.
It is from this point of view that, in my opinion, the concept of elicitation continues to be more favorable.
My work with Quetzil, which includes in formal terms regarding him my conference as a panelist in that panel about his film on the Equinox developed in the context of the ethnomethodology congress at the Faculty of Anthropology of the University of Houston in 1997 and this trip to Houston to Lake Forest College in Illinois where we developed together this curatorship of anthropology and Mayan art at Duran Gallery, I ended up consolidating the fact that not only my theorizations and essays on Quetzil were developed from the United States but that my knowledge of Mexican culture and Maya were also developed as an anthropological perspective from the United States.
With the exception of my own experience, a Tejano by life and after anthropological analyzes on the same process of cultural experience that was permeating me and influencing my sensitivity, my subjectivity and my life in Texas on the presence and influence of Mexico in Texan culture, my previous knowledge about Mexican culture and the Mayan culture related to it, had been bookish, that is, known through materials such as visual catalogs of archaeological museums, magazines, television documentaries and films and not through direct knowledge. of a culture which I did not come to know firsthand until many years later when I traveled from Texas to Monterrey in 2001, an experience limited to only one month and three cities, Monterrey, Nuevo León and San Luis de Potosí.
These analyses, however, although they focus above all and first on the sample at Lake Forest College, are not entirely limited to it since it is necessary to consider my inclusion of theoretical and critical material from other settings that, although less formalities, could not be overlooked, such as readings of papers and essays by Quetzil carried out in his own house or in mine in Houston, visualizations and discussions of documentary material from his field work carried out in his own apartment in Gordon Westheimer, as well as Nor can we ignore the fact that, although I focus only on discussing Quetzil, I know many other things that have related us, such as the fact that conversely, Quetzil has also participated as my guest in experiences of my field work such as my ethnography and Performativity laboratory in 1998 in Texas at the same time that we have participated as panelists in panels coordinated by Quetzil in which we are both each discussing our own fieldwork practices or about visual anthropology displays, when in fact, I have previously composed an essay about the two of them together and when, moreover, Quetzil was also my guest during the month of the exhibition of my work The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography during my curatorship in the spring of 1997.
Bibliography
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Self and Acervo: The Phenomenology of the Self in the Hermeneutic of Culture, Scholars’s Press
Hernández San Juan Abdel, 1997- The Equinox Film. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Lecture discussed at the panel on the equinox Film, a panel coordinated and introduced by Quetzil Eugenio with conferences by Abdel Hernandez San Juan and George Marcus, Anthropology Faculty, The University of Houston, Houston, Texas, USA
Hernández San Juan Abdel, 1998- Living Between Cultures. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Conference lectured at the Hispanic Institute of culture, and late developed as a one year seminar of one lecture a week on the same issue developed as a theoretical seminar in auto anthropology and addressed to himself as emigrant in the united states and before in Venezuela and to the participants audience composed by emigrants who taked the seminar including Mexican-Americans and Argentineans Americans USA emigrants, coordinated by Diana Gland, Houston, Texas, USA
1998. Theoretical discussion of Stephen A Tyler Paper prolegomena to the next linguistic, published at alternatives linguistics, with Quetzil Eugenio, Houston, Texas, USA
Hernández San Juan Abdel, 1999- Art Pizte Exhibit. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, lecture discussed at the Faculty of sociology and anthropology lectures auditorium on the exhibit by Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Quetzil Eugenio as co-curators at Duran Gallery, a travel from Houston to lake forest and a program coordinated by Quetzil Eugenio, assistance professor of anthropology of the lake forest college, discussed as part in a panel Maya art and anthropology with conferences by Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Alaka Wally, Stephen Eisenman, Richard Towsend, Quetzil Eugenio and Lisa Breglia, Lake Forest College Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology, Lake Forest, Illinois, EUA, 1999
Tyler Stephen A, Presenter (Dis)Play, published at The Creative Spirit 31.1 (1991): 122-130
The Ah Dzib Pízté Exhibition: Exploring interdisciplinary displays, exhibition and workshop at duran gallery
By Abdel Hernandez San Juan
This letlee paper is about an experience consisting on an exhibit and a workshop I participated as a formal guest of the Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology of the Lake Forest College during the ŵinter of 1999, traveling from Houston ŵere I am established living since 1997 ŵith a fellow and as a research associate anthropology faculty at rice university, school of social sciences, the experience itself ŵas my first travel to Chicago, and it supposed to be practice after several weeks participating at the National Congress of anthropology.
As soon as the congress ended Lisa, Quetzil and me, ŵe established ourselves living in an apartment in the city of Chicago and then daily traveling to Lake Forest which is near to 30 or 45 minutes far away on a train, a beautiful travel and also a beautiful letlee but natural Forest surrounded campus of very England, Victorian kind of architecture during a very could winter under the snow, whiten.
The experience to be developed consisted about an exhibit at the Durant Art Gallery of art Faculty and was possible thanks to the Faculty of sociology and anthropology as I ŵas there invited coordinated by Quetzil Eugenio as assistance professor in the faculty, and it included first a process of designing, museographizing, exhibiting, installing, lighting, distributing, taken spatial decisions, designing the exhibit as a ŵhole visually and conceptually.
Such a process ŵas developed for around two weeks before the opening of the exhibit between me, Quetzil, Lisa and Anglo-American students that year graduating from the art institute or the sociology and anthropology one, and it evolved essentially tŵo kind of things to be spatially resolved, a first half ŵas directly related ŵith spatializing and museographizing Quetzil himself, his kind as anthropologist, his tolls, stuffs, cameras, slides, videos, films, and a second half ŵas defined to be about then also spatializing his collection as well as an or overall an exhibit of five Maya artists from Mexico Quetzil invited, museographizing it, installing it, distributing it, designing it.
Quetzil collection consisted about on Maya Artesanies pieces of batiks and ŵoods, it revolves around a relationship betŵeen Quetzil and the Maya artists
In all my previous experiences as curator, including my previous one letlee serie of seven exhibits I did, conceived, exhibited and presented as curator at Rice University tŵo years before, doing curatorial practices supposed to be overall selecting the artists and the artists pieces as I ever did before, it ŵas then to me a big challenge to participate as curator and museographer about something I did not selected myself, so having to figure out how to ŵork both designing and conceptualizing ŵith things Quetzil selected and collected.
In this sense it remember me a concept I previously conceived and proposed which ŵas that one of tollfully mixing spatially museographizing and stage designing as an interdisciplinary practice of conceptualizing and doing ethnography and in this sense it will be probably better to think about an exhibit experience ŵith three curators, myself focused about designing as a whole the room of an exhibiting of Quetzil stuffs kinds as anthropologist, Quetzil, who stay focused around his relation with the Maya artists and their pieces and Lisa Breglia who stay betŵeen me and Quetzil.
By this reason our attentions as co-curators ŵas compliment both theoretically and practically, even when ŵe did it together in all the details, enthusiastically motivated and fully in agreement theoretically and experimentally discussing each decision to be taken in a successful consensus valuating reasons, and when ŵe both respect each other in doing it, there ŵas evolved participating in every conversation and spatial decision also Lisa Breglia playing a significant role.
I ŵill then define our accents as follow, first myself focused around the experience seen in a general field of curatorial practices that evolves high art curatorial practices as the experience ŵas certainly committed to be exhibited in a high art gallery of an art faculty and theoretically committed to consider things in that sense such as for example Lyotard exhibit The Inmaterials at Pompidou as an example of a readymade of contexts in his case an exhibit of philosophy in an art museum setting, to which I written regarding the inmaterials, lyotard at pompidue and as a guest from a Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology trying to explore the interdisciplinary possibilities of it as an experience in the general field of curatorial practices in the United States, the Anglo-American perspective from an institution in USA.
Second Quetzil, focused on an activity that evolved a direct relation between himself as anthropologist, his batiks and wood pieces and each Maya artists as a practice that evolved to him to be as a merchant one relationship within a market that supposes a touristic market of collecting and exhibiting exploring a relationship betŵeen Artesanies and art from the moment tourism Artesanies are placed at a high art gallery, it evolved to him also, not only a matter of market but also a part, or an specific moment of his own fieldwork activity, that one around his relations and exchanges ŵith Maya artists around the touristic markets and ruins of chichen itza in Yucatan, and finally Lisa Breglia who’s roll I ŵill say can be essentially defined to be a roll of communications in betŵeen me and Quetzil professional specialized expertise’s and that ŵas great also to students.
The experience as a ŵhole can be characterized by a workshop of designing the exhibit ŵith young Anglo-Americans that year graduated artists and or from sociology and anthropology faculty and included as major the documentary of it through a film, the workshop included the Maya artists despite front the fact that ŵe all meet together at certain hours out of work to dinner, relax, enjoy and various activities, it ŵas then a trilingual experience including English, Spanish and Maya.
The exhibit as a ŵhole ŵas defined by tŵo gallery rooms. To the first one room, the letlee one, I proposed to display a conceptual contemporary art environment installation on Quetzil as anthropologist spatially discussed and decided betŵeen me, Lisa and Quetzil in consensus after weeks of analyzing getting as a whole spatial result a general installation discussed and respectfully consulted to Quetzil, so as a collaboration betŵeen me, Quetzil and Lisa
This environment installation included three pieces visually, spatially and conceptually related to a mixture as a whole. A first one piece placed at the background wall seen from the room entrance consisted about showcasing a touristic scene through exhibiting a series of Quetzil photography’s on the touristic market scenes of chichen itza in Yucatan and around the Maya pyramids and ruins, such a setting of Quetzil photos was museographized over a table inside a black box ŵith an orifice for a viewer to look through inside
A second piece, placed on the right seen from the entrance consisted on a table ŵith a display of Quetzil tolls and stuffs as anthropologist including computer laptop exhibited and other electronic artifacts such as Quetzil video cameras, Quetzil photo cameras, Quetzil collected slides, Quetzil photography’s, Quetzil notes books, Quetzil office furniture’s and Quetzil printed and covered copies of visually illustrated papers and books he did on Yucatan, to viewers generally looks at it as a showcased mise in scene setting or optionally sit down yet providing a chair to any curious slowly revise, read, open, wash or read the books.
A Final piece of this installation ŵas unfolded on the main room ŵall on the left seen from the entrance, I proposed it to be an screen projection of a continuum video from the laptop ŵith a constant film about Quetzil in everyday life exchanges and communications ŵith several Maya artists around their rural houses and spaces to carve, shape and engrave their wood pieces including audio so for a viewer to enjoy Quetzil in Fieldwork and the artists doing their pieces and speaking.
In the main and big gallery seen from the Entrance, I proposed in a front column a continuum lup sequences ŵith images of Steguerda Cabinet, his environment Cabinet, an archaeologist who stay doing archaeology fieldwork around the forties, many decades before Quetzil in the same places and about the same issues.
The reason to propose such a lup at the main entrance of the gallery exhibit ŵas a conceptualist proposal committed to evoque a sobreordinated setting about a general contemporary exhibit of anthropology and art that is not about a culture as by a first time, but about a culture that has being already previously many times both textually and visually approached, so as a palimpsestual Sobreordination, something also successfully discussed in consensus by me, Quetzil and Lisa since Quetzil himself as anthropologist explored a book not on Maya culture but on the museums of Maya culture as an anthropology of archaeology and museums practices. It ŵas an spatial proposal based on the fact that Quetzil is being himself ŵriting papers on Stegerda.
Like the previous room this piece can be recognized mainly as a collaboration betŵeen me, Quetzil and Lisa since all we did was conceptually and consensually discussed. to the main ŵalls and spaces of the big gallery room Quetzil asked to be reserved to exhibit his Maya batik’s and ŵoods, I worked as an adviser museographer of Quetzil exhibit with the five Maya artists suggesting light and montages solutions.
However, the Workshops itself ŵas a beautiful experience as I explained before it included tŵo workshops, one around the first half of the gallery, the letlee room, and another one around the second half of the exhibit focused in exhibiting the Maya artists while there was also a general experience evolving film documentary of everything as well as Quetzil explanations to students about the collaboration between me and him, and his explanations about his relations ŵith the Maya artists.
Finally as a result ŵe can say that this workshops relates and mutually benefits from the moment moving to everyday life ŵe ŵere all together enjoying a same life experience, Quetzil, me and Lisa living in a Chicago same apartment enjoying life activities in reciprocity and mutuality, lunch, dinner, daily conversations, or during the exhibit montage, taking time to rest out, inside and outside the art building, smoking cigarettes, enthusiastically theorizing anything motivated us, speaking about books, etc, ŵe experienced for example the Chicago book feria that time, waiting the train under the could snow, having fun on daily things, visiting city places at nights, traveling ŵith Anglo-American artists and students and the five Maya artists guests several times in a same bus, having conversations and life entertainments as ŵell.
Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Theoretician, ethnographer and Writer/author of books such as The Intramundane Horizont: Hermeneutics and Phenomenology of Every Day Life/A Perspective from Phenomenological Sociology. Phenomenological Anthropology. The Constelations of Common Sense: Ethnography of Ontology/Sociology of common Sense and Anthropological Research Theory. Ethnography After the Death of Art: Rethinking Urban Anthropology. The Indeterminist True. Self and Acerbo: The Self and the Social Between Writing, Research and Culture. Behind the Facts: Ethnography in the First Person/The Morals of Individualism. The Given and the Ungiven: Writing and Research Between Technology and culture. Being and Monad. The Presentational Linguistic. between others
Stablished living in Texas as permanent resident since 1998 he is a guest scholar theoretician of the Lake Forest Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology on the issue of the markets of tourism, anthropology and Maya art between the united states and Mexico, lecturer at the University of Houston Faculty of Anthropology at the Ethnometodology congress on the film Incidents of Travel: the Equinox, lecturer on his individual usa cities travels such as san Francisco, new York and louisiana, his individual fieldwork alone and his individual ethnographic and ethnometodological research alone at his 98 lab for performativity and ethnography anthropology faculty at rice university and lecturer at several programs and panels on his fieldwork and research on markets since 1994 between the united states and Venezuela on his work of anthropology The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography such as Fictocriticism at rice anthropology, Texas 98 and LASA, Florida 2000, between others, guest theoretician lecturer and curator of the faculty of sociology and anthropology of the lake forest college and since June 1997 he is a complimentary research associate scholard at the Anthropology faculty at rice university
Notes
The reason, endeavor, motive and purposes about being invited ŵas clearly expressed at the invitation letter, it approached me regarding the areas of research I am working on and accent on several things, ŵill be better then to directly quote the letter of invitation.
Bibliography
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Self and Acervo: The Phenomenology of the Self in the Hermeneutic of Culture, Scholars’ Press
Tyler, Stephen A Presenter (Dis)Play, published at The Creative Spirit 31.1 (1991): 122-130
Notes
- For a previous comparison in anthropology between free markets and carnival, see Stephen Tyler's analysis of markets in India.
On the analogy of physics we focus on transactions that signify just the objective movement of things, forgetting that exchange may also affirm the moral basis of society.
Transactions do not just signify~ the movement of goods, they symbolize mutual obligation. The objective movement of goods can only signify the fact of exchange, and because it thus implies nothing more than exchange, it cannot by itself reveal its meaning, cannot speak of what it symbolizes. We must distinguish then, between transactions that merely signify and those that symbolize. Thus, when an Indian farmer, from his hard-won crop, gives a traditional share of grain to the blacksmith who fashioned his implements of production, it is not just a payment for goods and services but an affirmation of a continuing relationship which recognizes the fixed pattern of statuses and symbolizes the performance of mutual duties. His act symbolizes the moral obligations of the social order. It symbolizes dharma in both of its senses as duty and order, The mutually implicated acts of the farmer and the blacksmith are simultaneously ex- pressions of their respective duties (dharma) and affirmations of social order (dharma).
Significantly, economic transactions are but one of the many possible settings in which these group relations may be symbolized. The giving and taking of food, the exchange of women in marriage, precedence in cere- monies, patterns of respect and deference in speech and behavior, and performance of religious observances serve equally as appropriate settings. in the Dharrna S6stras nothing is more clear than that the moral or cosmic order (dharma) dominates the economic and social orders. This view contradicts our notion that "business is business," the predominant presumption distilled out of the historical circumstances of the Western experience of the industrial revolution.
We first see this conception of society as a transcendent unity created by transactions between egoistic atoms in our idea of the market, and we trace this purely cognitive transformation of the idea of the market from that of a concrete locality to a transcendental abstraction in the writings of proto- economists of the eighteenth century who both effected and documented it. In its earlier concrete form the market was simply a neutral place of ex- change, the brief meeting of strangers solely for the purpose of handing over natural goods, goods which had not been culturally transformed, which had not become symbolic.
They were places set aside, immunized as it were, from the surrounding culture-not just secular places, but places of pure objectiviry. They were concrete localities where objects of one kind came together in exchange for objects of other kinds. They were meaningless places where disparate groups could meet without incurring moral obligation, places where citizenship, persona, and soul could be forgotten. Be- cause they implied amorality it is not surprising that they should so often have been associated with carnivals. Fairs were, and anyone who has in his youth walked a midnight midway can affirm that they still are, both places of exchange and settings in which everyday morality is temporarily set aside. Fairs, and early markets too, combined exchange with the atmosphere of a carnival.
This leads us to ask: "What then is the basis for a metaphoric identity be- tween exchange and sacrifice?" There are several, such as for example, the giving of gifts (cf. Tyler 1973:164-165), but more importantly, both sacrifice and exchange imply something about the transformation of one thing into another, the assignment or reassignment of meaning. The root metaphor for this whole process is the idea of creation, that original formation of order out of chaos, that first transformation of the natural world which changed it into a meaningful cultural world. I am suggesting that this process of establishing order out of the disarray of natural phenomena constitutes the basis for the homology between sacrifice and exchange in general.
Stephen A Tyler, Pp, on the markets in India, A POINT OF ORDER, Pp, Pp 133-135, Rice University studies, 1973-1974, USA
-Currently in Indiana Bloomington where Levis Strauss discussed his classic conference on communication theory, regarding which my perspective is Habermasian, a structural principle would be preserved here around the fact that certainly, returning to Geertz with respect to Levis Strauss, if either in the end or definitively we produce images of the world according to the text and to a large extent neither of us completely escape from it, the fact that our texts produce an idea of the world that they evoke
The urban popular markets in which I did my fieldwork are, in their staging, the most complete and best-complexed expression of how this principle is the same articulator of cultural traditions, the artifacts, forms and symbolic constructs generated by the culture of these men are already their productions, cultural forms that presuppose having been themselves, in the same way that these markets, cultural recreations of consumption but the work with Fernando and Elaiza introduced a new element previously undiscussed, which was dramatization and theatricalization in a way that subsequently moved away from what was previously theorized both in this essay and in others about how I individually practiced and conducted my own work of field alone.
This new dramatic and theatrical component became progressively more predominant since Elaiza and Fernando began working with me, which extended to three months in which we moved away from my previously theorized logic alone and leaned towards Elaiza's logic of which began a learning process due to my few previous experiences with theater and I will now explain. Instead of, as I explained before, adapting to the logic of the market, Elaiza proposed the opposite, transgressing them with a theatrical and dramatic posture, what consequences did this have?
Fernando and Elaiza, men from the world of theater trained for many years in working for theatrical productions and at the same time Venezuelans accustomed to these markets all their lives, generally had pre-established preferential relationships with certain vendors, that is, they went less to the market to deploy in a shopping spree with an unforeseen horizon and more directly to what they already had preselected, they in a certain way already had their sellers chosen knowing which ones sold the merchandise they required and this gave a peculiarity to That period, since not infrequently we went directly to see and talk to certain sellers that they already knew before, which did generate longer dialogues around certain things that were of great attraction to me.
With the above I do not mean that in my fieldwork only certain dialogues were not relevant, but these always occurred in the end as dialogues diluted in daily life and not as dialogues that began to be with Elaiza and Fernando in which from the beginning I told the seller what we wanted and why and why we wanted it, I have talked about this elsewhere, when Fernando, for example, was making the herbalist's table for our room, about the herbalists we went several times to talk to one because Fernando wanted us to I explained to him how he had made the table on which he prepared the medicinal herbs that he sold and certainly on that occasion we spent about an hour or two listening to what he had to tell us. In this same way, through Fernando and Elaiza, we managed to collect certain types of objects. and materials
There is something theatrical very intrinsically related to Elaiza's work as a theater producer, for Elaiza it was important to know what the dramaturgy of something that Fernando and I wanted to do in the play was and from this perspective she very much like the way she does it for her theatrical productions, he went to the markets directly in search of the best options with a well-dramatized accent in his way of approaching these people. By this I mean that in Elaiza there was a certain imagining of the seller in dramatic and theatrical terms as a figure theatricalized by the same perspective that gave to the fact that we were doing a work that, although it was not properly theater for her, could not in any case fail to be seen as it is usually seen in the theater.
In this, although less, Fernando followed her a lot in the sense that he shared with her a similar vision, that is, there was a way in both of them of seeing the seller as the main character of the work that we were going to do and in that sense they came to already to the sellers with an intense dramatic or dramatized vision, regarding this my experience was that of learning, that is, I did not get very involved in it nor did I characterize my own way of doing field work as I had been doing it alone, but Yes, I opened myself up to this new stage beginning and to things once working with Elaiza and Fernando starting to be like this while at the same time paying attention and beginning to analyze it. In fact, I not infrequently told Elaiza that I felt fascinated with her way. theatrical and dramatized addressing the vendors
She approached them directly and head-on, speaking to them, communicating to them a way of seeing their world in some sublimated way, she approached them making them feel that we were fascinated with them because there was something important in them before which we were dazzled, she theatricalized and dramatized the take. and daca intensely drawing attention in a theatrical way to the products, to the merchandise and to them, what they knew, their lives and the interest they had for us, Fernando did second best in this because in a certain way he also saw it So although she tried to stay somewhere in the middle by not getting so deeply into the way Elaiza did because she realized that I experienced it differently, Elaiza's way was as if at the time she I was talking to a seller at that moment, the scene went dark right there and, as in Fellini's films, everything was transformed in the same spaces of the market into a theatrical scene, it was as if a point light in the middle of the darkness illuminated that person. seller with her anatomical features, the color of her skin, the characteristics of her clothing, the color of her chair, the wood with which her table was made, the way she placed her merchandise, she gave a dramatized accent to a merchandise like If the curtain opened and closed around a complete product at the very moment of talking to the seller about where he got that product, he would be praised, it would make him feel that he was the best seller in all those surroundings and that for that reason we We wanted something more than just buying her, we wanted her to reveal her enigmas to us, this was central to the way we worked with Elaiza, she introduced a dramatic and theatrical component, suddenly she transgressed the space that separated seller and buyer, she entered the cubicle and asked her but For the love of God, explain to me how you made this mooring and he stood next to the construction system and told him this is the best mooring I have never seen, explain to me how you achieved it and the exalted salesman was proud of his mooring and explained how he had built his mooring. camping.
I am right now remembering a scene of field work with Elaiza, this time it was a chair because before she had gone for a table since Fernando, after finishing his paintings of the plaster icons and the elaborations of the virgins, was immersed in making the table from the herbalist, but that time Elaiza stood in front of the seller and said, but my son, for the love of God, but this chair is wonderful, please don't even move, she told the seller, let me see that chair, it was simply the banquetica ordinary and humble in which the seller sat but it was weathered by time, it had a certain wood, and Elaiza said I love it, and the seller asked her but how come you want my chair, it is not for sale, it is only where I sit down, I sell these merchandise here, and Elaiza said yes, but what I want is your chair, sell it to me for as much as I can, I can't sell it to you, the seller told her, so explain to me how you made it, she saw something insurmountable in that drumstick. , nothing and no one could achieve or obtain with an effect the purity and authenticity of that ordinary and humble bench, she was in the market and she was already seeing it illuminated on the theatrical scene only that what was illuminated this time was that an object outside the most authentic way he was in the real life of the salesmen, explain to me how you made that chair, I want it, sell it to me, I'll give you a hundred dollars, if you let me have it, and by the way, sometimes I manage to get things that way . These things, of course, we photographed some of them and not infrequently they became relevant given that Elaiza managed to meet with the sellers in another world, a sublimated world absorbed by the subjectivity of the theatrical scene.
Elaiza's theatrical drama was central in many aspects with regard to the object and scenographic aspects of what we were doing in Quinta Fuente Ovejuna and also acquired or gave it there in the markets a unique characteristic to that stage of field work, Now moving away from everything I explained before about my way of experiencing, living and theorizing, my own fieldwork was only experiencing something in which the moment of intersubjective give and take was governed by a relationship that moved away from the logic of the market to superimpose a dramatic and theatrical logic on it, I opened myself to it and explained several times to Elaiza that I was also fascinated with how she did it and that I was very interested in the way she brought those theater techniques and even in analyzing how she did it. Before, when I only produced theatrical works, about which we began to talk and dialogue many times, here began an interesting stage of dialogue between my conception and theory and the experience that their expertise provided.
There is also a component that was fascinating for me in Elaiza and Fernando which I have discussed in another essay, they both have a lifestyle in which, as if the week itself were a restaurant, they have a menu of what they are going to do. to have breakfast, snack, lunch and dinner during the week and for that objective they have a diet that requires a very orderly way of doing their markets each week. This diet or weekly menu was itself an expression of the fact that both had already had a very close relationship before. punctuated with the market in the sense of having reached in their lives a high selectivity of their sellers, in a few words they were already going directly to their chosen ones who, moreover, certainly had the exclusivity of providing them with the type of products that already They bought, this fact also interested me and it transformed the tours and visits to the market each time into a more exclusive activity until at one point our visits to the markets were very selective.
While my perspective was eminently sensoryized and abstract, more focused on the hermeneutics of that immersion and the ways of understanding in it the relationships between the visual and the interpretive, between what it means to be there among them and what it is beyond just observing to capture the quickness grasp of what makes markets first a surrounding world and then a ceremonial and ritual form of culture in a broad sense, while the mode of my field work wanted to receive from the analysis of the logic of markets a theory about observation , on participant observation and on everything previously discussed theorized according to the markets, apprehending their logic and meanings from within, which I have called the polyphony of the markets, Elaiza's point of view proposed transgressing it with a theatrical performance aimed at defining the seller. as the main character of that dramatization.
In fact, while my perspective presupposed a vision, as is made obvious in my catalog essay and introduction as well as in the things I deal with within the work, more focused on markets as polyphonic and carnivalesque conglomerates as they are in its generality cultural traditions and which in turn presuppose a highly sensorialized world of observed observers in which the points of view and the idea of a fixed and privileged observer are disseminated, Elaiza's perspective was oriented more towards the dramatized punctuation of the human being. and more specifically of the seller and his world, the latter became with Elaiza not only the main character of the work, but also the main character of the culture and the markets, her accent was on that man from the market and on everything What thanks to him could be known about a culture of which only he is an exponent and of which only he knows its enigmas, this meant transgressing the logic of the market with the reasons why we were there telling him from the beginning, that is That is, by telling them that we were making a play about the markets as a way of relating, she began a scene of give and take that transgressed the staging of barter to immerse herself in the world of the seller and make him the center of attention, which led to telling him what we did, from ways like those explained before in which without even telling them she expressed herself dazzled by anything that caught her attention, a tie, a chair, an object, to later telling them and asking them. And it is true that without Elaiza's logic we would probably never have been able to finish the work and that from a certain moment since we began to make it on the physical level, Elaiza's logic began to govern until we finished it.
The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography is therefore, as a whole, the conjunction, both in relation to fieldwork and then its composition, of my perspective on my fieldwork and my research in and of the markets. started two years before, the continuity of my perspective when I began working with them and the perspective that they brought, arriving as we did to conceive it as a two-person work to which I would like to add beyond the acknowledgments and mentions of credits that we made in the catalog and other materials to Elaiza's production and Ebel's photography, that Elaiza's production method was crucial if not definitive in terms of the physical form that the work acquired as well as whether its complexion was objectively possible.
Aknowledgements
I want to take this opportunity to thank in a very special way my friends and colleagues who supported me with their sponsors both with my laboratory in 1998 and later with my trips to Chicago and Florida, especially Cristina Jadic and Mike Jadick for their support as sponsors in my laboratory. first and on my trip to Chicago later, To Stephen A Tyler for his support in the development of my laboratory in the anthropology faculty at Rice in 1998, to Quetzil of course, for his support and continued presence at Rice during the development of my laboratory as well as for his invitation and coordination of my trips to Chicago and Florida from Texas, as well as before for inviting me to the panel on the equinox.
Likewise, it is the occasion to express my gratitude to people whose support the beginning of the research was related to, to Fina Weiss and Peran Hermini for their attention and kindness during my anthropology seminar at the Petare art museum for six months, to Vasco Zinetar, vice president, and to Tahia Rivero, president of the Alejandro Otero Visual Arts Museum, without whom I would not have been able to start or develop it. I owe them both for choosing me as curator at the museum for the market theme and infinite gratitude for having started it. Tahia Rivero, an excellent curator of Venezuelan contemporary art, who had previously lived in the United States, and Basque Zinetar, an extraordinary photographer, had from the beginning the intuition that choosing me was once and for all betting on a very theoretical option, on a on the other hand, and, on the other hand, very determined in anthropology and sociology, which is not usual in the museum of high art, despite this I made a great effort during those years to satisfy the expectations of both and of the museum in relation to the attention to my responsibilities as a curator with the topic of contemporary Venezuelan art to which I devoted significant efforts both in conferences and in publications since that same year as a curator at the museum.
Finally, I would also like to thank Surpic Angelini in a very special way, not only for the encouragement he gave me when he met me at the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts in 1995 and for showing that he was attracted by some of my theoretical writings from that time on the topic of the market and my project at respect but above all because later he was the person who knew me closely to what extent I was immersed and submerged in my individual research and only as much about the market and in the popular markets of Venezuela as later when I made The Market from Here, without His encouragement and support first in Caracas and then in Houston, I would not have done The Market from Here nor would I have continued my research and field work in the United States.
General Bibliography
Bourdieu Pierre, Cosas Dichas, Gedisa
De Certaud Michael, The Practice of Every Day Life, The University of California Press, 99
Derrida Jacques, Ousia and Gramme, Margins of Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press
Derrida Jacques, Form and Wishes to Say: Notes on the Phenomenology of language, Margins of Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press
Derrida Jacques, The Supplement of the couple: Philosophy in front of linguistic, Margins of Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press
Derrida Jacques, The Ginebra Linguistic Circle, Margins of Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press
Derrida Jacques, Introduction to Hegel Semiology, Margins of Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press
Eugenio Quetzil, et al., eds. 1999. Ah Dzib Pízté’ Modern Maya Art in Ancient Traditions. Exhibition Catalog. Lake Forest: Lake Forest College
Eugenio, Quetzil The Invisible theater of Ethnography: Performative Principles of Fieldwork, The Open School of Anthropology and Ethnography, Anthropological Quarterly 79 (I)75-104, USA
Eugenio Quetzil, The Past as Transcultural Space: Using Ethnographic Installation in the study of Archaeology, the Open School of anthropology and Ethnography, and The University of Indiana, Public Archaeology: Archaeological Ethnographies, Vol.8 No, 2-3, 2009, 262-282, USA
Eugenio Quetzil, Art writing in the modern maya art world of chichen itza, Transcultural ethnography and experimental fieldwork, American Ethnologist, Open School of Ethnography and Anthropology, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 21–42, Universidad autonoma de Yucatan, 2004
Eugenio Quetzil, Between Pure and Applied Research: Experimental Ethnography in a Transcultural tourist Art World, Napa Bulletin, 23: 87-118
Eco Umberto, El Campo Semiotico, La Estructura Ausente, Lumen
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Guiner Salvador, Javier Muguenza and José Maria Maraval, Max Weber, Teoría Sociológica Contemporánea, Tecnos
Habermas, Junger, The Problem of Comprehension in social sciences, The Theory of Communicative Action, Beacon Press
Habermas, Junger, Teoria de la Accion Comunicativa,Taurus
Habermas, Junger, Max Weber Theory of Rationalization, The Theory of Communicative Action, Beacon Press
Hernández San Juan Abdel, Self and Acervo: The Phenomenology of the self in the hermeneutic of Culture, Scholars’Press, 2025
Hernández San Juan Abdel, Las Metonimias del Museo: La Exégesis Textual de Cultura Visual entre Teoría Semiotica y Antropología Posmoderna, Editorial Académica Española, 2025
Hernández San Juan Abdel, Los Enigmas del Ground: Introducción a la Sociología Semiológica, Editorial Académica Española, 2025
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Repensando la Intertextualidad: Método de Investigacion en Sociologia de la Cultura, Editorial Académica Española, 2025
Hernández San Juan Abdel, The Semantique Elucidation: Semiotic Theory, Sociolinguistic and Semantique of Culture, Scholars’Press, 2025
Hernández San Juan Abdel, The World Correlate: Interpretant and Structure in Posmodern Cultural Theory, Lambert Academic Publishing, 2025
Hernández San Juan Abdel, Thinking Science: New phenomenological Avenues between Philosophy and Sociology, Lambert Academic Publising, 2025
Schutz Alfred, El Conocimiento en los Mundos de la Vida Cotidiana, editado por Schutz's wife Ilse Heim con Thomas Luckman, Amorrortu Editores
Todorov Tzvetan, Symbolism and Interpretation, Cornell University Press, Feb 18, 1986
Todorov Tzvetan, Symbolism and interpretation Todorov, monte avila editors, available monte books
Todorov Tzvetan. Theories of the symbol, monteavila editors
Tyler Stephen A, Presenter (Dis) Play, published at The Creative Spirit 31.1 (1991): 122-130
Tyler Stephen A, On the markets in India, 133-135, A POINT OF ORDER, Rice University studies, 1973-1974, USA
Tyler Stephen A, Postmodern Ethnography, Ed Carlos Reynoso, The Advent of Postmodern Anthropology, Gedisa
Tyler. Stephen A, Post-Modern Ethnography, The Unspeakable, Discourse, Rhetoric and Dialogue in the Posmodern World, Wisconsin University Press
Tyler Stephen A. 1986, Post-Modern Ethnography.” In J. Clifford and G. W. Marcus, Eds., Writing Culture, pp. 122-140. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tyler Stephen A, Evocation: The Unwriteable, A Response to Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Sept 9, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997
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- Abdel Hernández San Juan (Autor), 2015, Rethinking Urban Anthropology, Múnich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1623295
