Title: Rethinking Urban Anthropology
Description: 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.
Subjects: Urban anthropology, Semiotic Theory, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology., Participant observation
Places: Lake Forest College, Houston, Texas, Caracas, Caracas (Venezuela)
People: Abdel Hernández San Juan, Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda
Time periods: Posmodern culture