https://sites.google.com/view/abdelhdezsjanthropology
https://sites.google.com/view/abdelyvickyteoriadelmuseo/abdel-hernandez-san-juan/teoria-del-museo
https://orcid.org/0009-0008-5507-0977
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Abdel-Hernandez-San-Juan-2
https://sites.google.com/view/semiotic-and-anthropology/home
https://lakeforest.academia.edu/Ahernandezsanjuan
https://www.autoreseditores.com/abdel.hernandez
https://www.bubok.es/autores/abdelhernandezsanjuan
Abdel Hernandez San Juan
Theorist, Cuban thinker and writer, sociologist and cultural anthropologist, art semiologist and art critic, author of books on philosophical thought, phenomenological sociology, semiotic theory, linguistics and cultural anthropology. His books include “The Correlate of the World: Interpretant and structure in postmodern cultural theory”, “Thinking Science: New phenomenological avenues between philosophy and sociology”, “The Metonymies of the Museum: The textual Exegesis of Visual Cultural between semiotics and postmodern anthropology”, “The Enigmas of the Ground: Introduction to Semiological Sociology”, “The Semantic Elucidation: Semiotic, Sociolinguistic and Semantic Theory of Culture”, “Rethinking Intertextuality: Research Method in the Sociology of Culture”, “Rethinking Urban Anthropology”, “Anthropology of Archaeology: A Perspective from Ethnomethodology and Cultural Anthropology”, among others in phenomenology and hermeneutics of the everyday, “The Intramundane Horizon”, “The Self and the Heritage”, several on new media, and on art such as “The Subject in Creativity” and “Borders and Overflows of Art: Sociology of transart.
Invited professor at the Department of Classical and Hispanic Studies at Rice University to give lectures and exchange his theories in his area of semiotic theory, anthropology and art theory, giving a reading of his essay “Postmodern Work: Beyond the Intertextual” at the Fondren Library. In 1997, he taught a spring seminar at the Rice Media Center at Rice University based on an experimental art and anthropology workshop that he directed in Caracas, the results of which he presented simultaneously to his spring course. at the same university in co-curatorship with Surpik Angelini “Artists in Trance: Art and Anthropology in Seven Exhibitions”, a course and curatorship that he develops with the transart foundation of Houston and the departments of anthropology, art, architecture and the Rice Media Center at Rice University, Houston, Texas
Living since 1997 in Houston, Texas, where he is artistic director of the Houston Transart Foundation for art and anthropology research, he is an associate complementary research professor at the Department of Anthropology at Rice University, he resided in Texas in 1998. where he lives many years of his life. From Texas he becomes the protagonist of a generational renewal of sociology and cultural anthropology in a postmodern sense, initiator and innovator of the new field of art and anthropology research in the United States, leading this trend together with other exponents of this trend such as the cognitive anthropologist and postmodern ethnographer Stephen A Tyler, founder along with James Clifford of its first forms, the tourism anthropologist Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda, and the art critic Surpik Angelini Zarikian
Influenced by structuralism in theoretical linguistics, Charles Sanders Peirce, Hegel, the social phenomenology of Alfred Schütz, the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and the anthropology of Stephen A Tyler, Abdel is co-founder with Surpik Angelini of the Houston transart foundation for art and anthropology research and a main figure of these research in the United States since the nineties.
Visiting professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Lake Forest College in Illinois where he lectures on the panel Mayan Art and Anthropology working on the topic of museum theory and cultural representations, ethnography, anthropology, tourism, crafts, art, installationism and culture between Mexico and the United States, he is a speaker on panels such as the ethnomethodology congress at the University of Houston, Department of anthropology on the film of Quetzil's Equinox Eugenio Castañeda and Jeff Impele, as well as at the AAA national anthropology congress in Chicago (American Anthropology Association) and LASA Congress in Florida.
He have several books and co-authored essays such as "Evocation: a philosophical dialogue." By Abdel Hernández San Juan and Stephen A Tyler, "Between seeing and scenes." By Abdel Hernández San Juan and Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda, "Counterpoints: Philosophical Dialogues." By Abdel Hernández San Juan and Alberto Méndez Suarez, "Rumbos: Explorations in cultural anthropology", by Abdel Hernández San Juan and Alberto Méndez Suarez, and "Pasarelas: Language, Thought and World essays on phenomenology, hermeneutics and analytical philosophy." By Abdel Hernández San Juan and Alberto Méndez Suarez.
In 1997 he ventured into the development of an experimental museum of anthropology of the popular market that presented at Rice University in 1997, "The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography", with the collaboration of the Venezuelan set designer Fernando Calzadilla and the theater producer Elaiza Irrizarry, an experience about which the art philosopher Thomas McEvilley writes in art in América. 1998
In the tradition initiated in anthropology by Writing Culture, he is one of the most relevant, innovative and original young theorists. George E Marcus, co-editor of "Writing Culture and editor of "The Traffic in culture, refiguring art and anthropology", argues Abdel Hernández San Juan is a Cuban cultural theorist, there has never been a more radical exploration of performativity in anthropology than in Abdel Hernández San Juan who has erased and refigured the institutional limits and edges of art and anthropology.
Abdel is also the author of several compendiums of his essays in art semiotics and cultural anthropology, developing interdisciplinary intercultural and transcultural research in which he discusses contemporary art from the United States, the Caribbean, the Americas in general, Spain and Europe, among the most notable "Cultural Bodies: Art Criticism as Anthropology of Art", "The Interpretation of discourse: interpretation and analysis of rhetoric and visual discourses", "The Reinscription of Culture: Reconfigurations of Art, Culture and identity in complex societies", "The Interpretation of art: essays on Venezuelan art", "Horizons of Exegesis: Archaeological readings and interpretations of contemporary Art", "The Understanding of Art in the post-avant-garde: Essays on Anthropological Semiology of Art/an anthropological approach to contemporary Cuban art", "La Mirada Nativa", "Writing the Intangible" and "Thinking Art" among others in which he develops a unique art criticism where he combines semiotic and linguistic theorizing with cultural anthropology.
He currently lives in Caracas, Venezuela, since March 2024 with his partner, the Venezuelan museologist and researcher Victoria Galarraga Gallardo, co-author of the dictionary of visual arts in Venezuela with whom he develops a new curatorship on "art and anthropology"
He has conceived and developed several projects of what he defines as "self/ethnography", forms of analysis of culture based on narratives of autobiographical experience around the visual arts, (diasporic subjectivity), with Surpik Angelini (Armenian, Venezuelan, Texan, Anglo-Saxon Hispanic training, María Cristina Jadick (Puerto Rican, Cuban, and American cultural training), Diana Gland, psychoanalyst Argentine then established in Houston, (taught her seminar “Living between cultures” (Houston Hispanic Culture Institute), with Mexican-American and Argentinian-American Hispanic emigrants), and is currently working on a cultural analysis project along the same lines with the Italian/French social archaeologist Alessandro Morganti, author of the book “Casadores y Recolectores de Monte Cano Paraná”, an archaeological field study with prehistoric lithic remains from the past Amerindian in Venezuela and the Spanish/Venezuelan historian and visual artist Carmen Michelena
In 1991 he settled down to live in Caracas, Venezuela, as a Research Professor at the Research Center of the Armando Reverón Higher University Institute of Plastic Arts, he gives lectures, courses and theoretical seminars in various universities, institutes, museums, athenaeums and cultural centers in the country, publishing his art criticism essays on his weekly page in the Italian newspaper Economía Hoy, he is curator of Contemporary Venezuelan Art at the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts where he is in charge of the project Museum/Market, develops three years of participant observation and field work of urban anthropology and cultural sociology immersive in the popular urban and rural markets of Venezuela, studying their material and immaterial culture, their visual culture, their folklore, their traditions and their imaginaries, research that he then extends to Amerindian communities such as the Wayues (Arawaks), among others, positioning himself since then as a theorist between semiotic theory, which already characterized his line from Havana, phenomenological sociology. initiated by Alfred Schütz and postmodern anthropology.
In 1988 he wrote his “maker theses”, a cultural theory that combines the philosophy of science, epistemology, sociology, anthropology and conceptualism, conceiving interdisciplinary projects of participant observation and field work that interweave urban and rural sociology with the means of conceptual art, in the development of forms of urban and rural studies on social groups, aesthetics, material and visual culture and religion.
In those years, after giving theoretical conferences at various universities, institutes and cultural centers in the country, he carried out several curatorships of the visual avant-garde and wrote catalog essays on visual artists who were exponents of the avant-garde, conceiving and later developing two international curatorships of the same, one “Cuban Sociological Art”, at the Mañech Museum in Moscow, 1988 and another “Born in Cuba” at the University of Valencia, Ateneo de Valencia, Venezuela.
He was born in Havana, Cuba in 1968, where he lived until he was 20 years old, becoming at that early age recognized nationally as one of the most erudite young theorists, intellectuals, critics and writers of the 1980s, highlighted as one of the main academic theoretical figures of the decade, he is also one of the main exponents of the visual avant-garde of the decade as an art critic and as a conceptualist.
His books have been written about by Alberto Méndez Suarez, analytical philosopher, International University of Florida, "The Phenomenological Sociology of Abdel Hernández San Juan", and "Plexos of Interstitiality: Interviews with Abdel Hernández San Juan", George E Marcus, anthropologist, editor of "Writing Culture" and "The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology", Stephen A Tyler, cognitive anthropologist and ethnographer, Surpik Angelini, art critic, Ernesto León, Venezuelan professor and visual artist: “Abdel Hernández San Juan is one of the great philosophers of the continent.” Harper Montogomery, Cunny University, "Abdel Hernández San Juan: A repositioned conceptualist", Gerardo Mosquera, "A Theory in pursuit of the flood.
He has worked in collaborations with the German theater and dance theorist Johannes Birringer
In the nineties he published essays on art criticism in Sicardy Sanders, Houston, Texas, gave lectures at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and Glassel School of Art and was a visiting professor at the College of Fine Art at the University of Texas in Austin.
In 2000 he was guest editor of the Texas artlies magazine, Epistemes del Arte, number 28, which he co-edited with John Bryan, Sussie Kalil and Surpik Angelini.
Field: Semiotic Theory and Cultural Anthropology, sociology and art criticism
Trend: Phenomenological Sociology, Semiotic Theory, Postmodernism in sociology and anthropology, conceptualism in art
Areas: Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Participant observation, field work
Main alma mater: Academy of Fine Arts of San Alejandro, Havana, 1987
Wife: Victoria Galarraga Gallardo
Children: Marcel Abdel Hernández San Juan and Emile Hernández Mesa
influenced by
Structuralism in theoretical linguistics and semiotic theory: Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce
Logic of Science: Hegel
Social Phenomenology: Alfred Schütz
Deconstructive Philosophy: Jacques Derrida
Cognitive Anthropology and Postmodern Ethnography: Stephen A Tyler
Influential on
Art and anthropology
Experimental ethnography
Urban and rural sociology
Cuban Sociological Art
Semiotics of culture
Cultural Anthropology
Analytical philosophy
Anthropology of art
Conceptualismo
Similar theorists
George Helbert Mead
Alfred Schutz
Abdel Hernandez San Juan
Stephen A Tyler
Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda
James Clifford
Johannes Birringer
Thomas Mc Evilley
References
https://www.arteinformado.com/guia/f/abdel-hernandez-san-juan-244670
https://www.academia.edu/2973737/Artists_in_the_field_between_art_and_anthropology
http://www.digitalcultures.org/Library/despues.html
https://news2.rice.edu/1997/01/07/latin-american-art-encounters-anthropology-at-rice/
https://www.osea-cite.org/class/quetzil/Quetzil2006_Invisible_Theatre_Ethnography_Performativity.pdf
https://www.thetransartfoundation.org/about
http://www.digitalcultures.org/Library/Abdel.htm https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003135487-7/artists-field-art-anthropology-fernando-calzadilla-george-marcus
http://www.digitalcultures.org/Library/transart.html
https://fernandocalzadilla.com/EXHIBITIONS/Market-from-Here
https://www.thetransartfoundation.org/about
https://www.mariacristinajadick.com/review-cultural-bodies.html
https://sites.google.com/view/abdelhdezsjanthropology/posmodernism-sociology-and-anthropology/plexus-of-interstitiality-interview-with-abdel-hernandez-san-juan • https://sites.google.com/view/abdelhdezsjanthropology/the-phenomenological-sociology-of-abdel-hernandez-san-juan
Reading Log
Here are the books Abdel_Hdez_San_Juan is currently reading, have already read, and want to read!