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[relayed post sent to us from Abdel in La Habana)
Thanks for inviting me to give my opinion on your discussion theme; I am
usually not motivated and interested in political themes but if I have to say
something I would say that I am a Cultural Relativist, a classic one.
I am especially interested on how the implosionist and abortionist
institutional model proclaimed since the eighties in the art field is
sociologically unsustainable in EUA, England and Europe and anywhere around the
world including Cuba too. I am not individually worried about chaos; I think we
need to learn to work and live in a world of heterogeneity and complexity in
the age of cybernetics; we are not out of control, I am not in agreement with
that, we are controlling and being controlled by science and technology, and
this is something enabling new potentials to communities’ value formations and
reproductions directly between science, technology and communities. Controlling
and being controlled by science directly is all we need, it is sufficient to be
rational in the right way. We simply don’t need representation. We can afford
our future and our children’s futures without science and technology, science
is sufficient to education and educational institutions, and beliefs as in
religion don’t need representations.
I recommend my essay “Artists Entrance: Five Exhibits at Rice University
[The Market from Here], on the horizons of the critical exercises of the ready
made… [http://www.digitalcultures.org/Library/despues.html]
I centered on this experience of the spring exhibits [The Market from Here]
on the Rice campus, the interdisciplinary relation and communication between
high art/sociology-high art/anthropology precisely as a cultural relativist; my
actions as curator centered on and approached a relativist concept of culture
that discusses and opposes Islamist ethnocultural fundamentalism, meaning
ideologies of each cultural ethnicity as a closure, an essence impossible to be
transethnically and transculturally communicating and participating together as
friends, humans, communities, brothers, etc, etc, products, initiatives and
developments from a variety of different perspectives together, rationality
endeavors, media and publications by persons of various social and cultural
backgrounds together, heterogeneity and communities mixtures (pluricultural
relativism), multiculturalism and so on.
As a cultural relativist with this series of exhibits I discussed and
opposed culturalist essentialism which can’t imagine anything between several
ethnicities without figuring to eliminating one ethnicity with the other or as
eating each one in between as in cannibalism, or only becoming an ethnical
mixation by biological reproduction. With my cultural relativist position as
curator, explicitly by each one of the exhibits I produced, discussed and
presented, I proposed that the ideologies of cannibalism between cultural
ethnicities are hidden, both between anthropologists who believe in such
ideology as in culturalism, the ideology of an ABSOLUTE ethnocultural
essentialism which is indeed an ABSOLUTE fundamentistalist ethnocultural
terrorism, it is an ideology about ethnicities as essentialist closures.
Such essentialisms want, for example, that particularized culture relates
only to particularized culture, Italians relate only with Italians, French only
with French, Germans only with Germans, Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Americans only
with Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Americans, Cubans only with Cubans and between
Cubans or Latin-Americans only between Latin-Americans, Latin culture between
Latin culture as ethnicity-closure, and you can apply it to any ethnoculture.
I am sustaining that it is an ethnocultural fundamentalism opposed to cultural
relativism, and expresses segregationism and xenophobia.
As a classical cultural relativist with this interdisciplinary project
series I discuss the very opposite of such ideologies, namely in art as in
anthropology theory.
What is culture?, should be the question, an old one, and with this series I
sustain and discuss as cultural relativist that we are not agreeing with such
essentialist ideologies in answering this basic question.
Best Wishes
Abdel Hernández San Juan
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