Abdel Hernández San Juan

Biography

Abdel Hernández San Juan, American theorist, thinker and author of hard sciences of Cuban origin, sociologist and cultural anthropologist who has developed a return of contemporary thought towards the most abstract classical philosophy (Kant, Hegel), while retheorizing the science of semiotics back to logic and exploring new intersections between abstract classical philosophy in a phenomenological and hermeneutic sense, logic (Hegel, Husserl), etc., phenomenological sociology (Alfred Schutz), semiotics of art and culture and cultural anthropology. Very abstract thinker of hard sciences (metatheory and metaempiria), empirically specialized in language sciences, theoretical linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Louis Hjelmslev, Emile Benveniste, etc.), semiotic theory (Charles Sanders Peirce) and in philosophy and theory of art, he has focused on the interdisciplinary development of the new field of anthropology and art, developing it both from the perspective of social sciences, linguistic anthropology, theory of culture, urban and rural sociology, as well as art interpretation and criticism, (art semiotics and cultural anthropology).

Influenced by structuralism in theoretical linguistics and semiotic theory, Hegel's science of logic, the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, and the cognitive anthropology of Stephen A Tyler.

Author of numerous books of classical philosophical thought, phenomenological sociology, semiotic theory, linguistics and cultural anthropology such as

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 Cultural Visual between semiotics and posmodern anthropology,

The Enigmas of the Ground: Introduction to Semiological Sociology,

The Semantic Elucidation: Semiotic Theory, Sociology and semantics of culture,

Rethinking Intertextuality: Research method in 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 self and the heritage and the new media in the United States.

He emigrated to the United States in Houston, Texas since 1997 where he lived many years of his life.

Protagonist from Texas 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, influential in the Scandinavian and Nordic world, England, Canada, and the United States, he has led this trend along 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, the art critic Surpik Angelini Zarikian, the art philosopher Thomas Mc Evilley and the analytical philosopher Alberto Méndez Suarez.

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 research of art and anthropology and main figure of these investigations in the United States since the nineties

Abdel is also the author of several compendiums of his essays in art semiotics and cultural anthropology, leading interdisciplinary intercultural and transcultural research in which he discusses contemporary art from the United States, the Caribbean and the Americas in general.

Visiting professor at the Department of Classical and Hispanic Studies at Rice University in 1996 in his area of semiotic theory, anthropology and art theory, he gave a lecture La Obra Posmoderna at Fondren Library, in 1997 he was co-curator with Surpik Angelini of seven exhibitions focused on the subject of art and anthropology at Rice University as a visiting professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University, the Houston Transarte Foundation, and the Departments of Art and Architecture from the same University, teaching a spring course at the Rice Media Center and for many years serving as artistic director of the transart foundation in Houston and complementary associate researcher of the Department of Anthropology at Rice University, visiting professor of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology from Lake Forest College in Illinois and speaker on panels such as the ethnomethodology conference at the University of Houston, the AAA national anthropology conference in Chicago, and LASA 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: Lenguaje, Pensamiento y Mundo essays on phenomenology, hermeneutics and analytical philosophy. By Abdel Hernández San Juan and Alberto Méndez Suarez.

In 1991 he settled in Venezuela, developing field work on urban and rural popular markets as well as Venezuelan folklore, and developed extensive work as a critic of contemporary Venezuelan art, curator at the Alejando Otero Museum of Visual Arts and Researcher at the Research Center and Development of the Armando Reveron Higher University Institute, and ventured into the development of an experimental museum of anthropology of the popular market that he presented at Rice University in 1997 with the collaboration of the set designer Venezuelan Fernando Calzadilla and the theater producer Elaiza Irrizarry, an experience about which the art philosopher Thomas Mc Evilley writes in art in América. 1998

In the tradition started in anthropology by Writing Culture, he is one of the most innovative and original young theorists and exponents. George E Marcus, co-editor of Writing Culture and editor of The Traffic in culture, refiguring art and anthropology, maintains that there has never been a more radical exploration of performativity in anthropology than in Abdel Hernández San Juan who has erased and refigured institutional limits and borders. of art and anthropology

As a prominent exponent in the new generation of postmodern anthropology from Texas since the nineties, his books The Correlate of the World, Thinking Science and Anthropology of Archeology have been published in English by the social sciences session of the publishing house Gyan books, New Delhi, India, which has also published India: an anthropological perspective, The unspeakable: discourse, rhetoric and dialogue in the postmodern world and Cognitive anthropology by Stephen A Tyler, as well as Anthropology as cultural criticism by George and Marcus.

In 2000 he was guest editor of the Texas magazine artlies editing the issue numer 28 od the magazine that he co-edits with John Bryan, Sussie Kalil and Surpik Angelini.

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.

In the 1980s, Abdel was in Cuba one of the main and most influential theorists of the Cuban intellectual and academic avant-garde developed around the visual arts movement of the decade and one of its main exponents as a critic and conceptualist.

From Havana, he develops his “theories of the maker”, field work projects and participant observation in urban and rural sociology involving the exploration of new experimental means of conceptualism in field work, developing ethnographic studies of urban and peasant cultural groups as well as well as religion, which generate an influence that persists to this day in the development of sociological art forms in Cuba.

He has worked in collaborations with the German theater and dance theorist Johannes Birringer as well as participated in his theoretical dialogues and collaborations with both the latter and the anthropologist Lisa Breglia and the anthropologist of ethics James Faubiam.

Field: Semiotic Theory and social sciences, sociology and anthropology of culture and art Trend: Phenomenological Sociology, Semiotic Theory, Postmodernism in sociology and anthropology, conceptualism in art Areas: Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Participant observation, field work

Wife: Victoria Galarraga Gallardo
Childrens: 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 Semiotic of Culture Cultural Anthropology Visual and Graphic Anthropology Anthropology of Art Analitical Philosophy Conceptualism

Similar theorists

George Helbert Mead
Alfred Schutz
Jacques Derrida
Abdel Hernandez San Juan
Stephen A Tyler
Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda
Alberto Méndez Suarez
James Clifford

He was born on October 12, 1968 in a building facing the sea in El Vedado, Calle 16 y Calzada in a humble family. His grandmother was a Spanish teacher, his grandparents were a pharmacist and musician, his father was a chemical engineer, his mother was a chemical engineer and economist. As a child he wanted to be a naval engineer, he was fascinated by the world of ships, he studied primary school in schools in Vedado and studied judo until he was 15 years old, at the age of 13 he began his art studies, graduating first in 1983 at the Experimental School of Art Antonio Diaz Pelaez; currently and later hi graduated as profesor and theorist at the Fine Art Academy of San alejandro, very early during his art studies he became interested and focused in theory that aroused his preference and passions.

Having embraced conceptualism as his tendency, he began to study hard sciences, theoretical linguistics, philosophy of language, semiotic theory, sociology and anthropology in parallel.

Since 1985 he has already decided to be a theorist and writer, he has written his first 30 theoretical notebooks of philosophical writings where he reflects, conceives and theorizes his called Theories of the Maker, a theoretical practice of social sciences designed to develop cultural theory projects in sociology, developing fieldwork immersions, and research methodology as an urban sociology of culture while incorporating art experimental conceptualism, its media and languages such as installation, video, and photography to those social science projects which combine from sociology elements of social psychology, semiotic theory and field work methodology, emphasizing itself as one of the theorists of hard sciences and most significant academics of the moment with a scope beyond the arts towards the field of philosophy, aesthetics, semiotics and literature, which consolidate him as a theoretical intellectual figure at the national level, developing two sociology projects urban DO (six months, 1990) and rural PILON (10 months, 1988).

It is actually a phenomenological and hermeneutical sociology conceived as a cultural as well as an empirical theory based on the formulation of problems, that is, the definition of a research problem, on the definition of social groups understood as cultural groups with theorizing culture objectives, that is, understanding the culture and understanding ourselves in it by knowing its groups, the predominant elements in his sociology of this first period were social psychology, psychopedagogy, methodological field immersion, semiotics, proxemics and cinesic, as well as also team building and the use of art media, videos, photographs, installation and exhibitions in social science research.

The type of this sociology focused on the theorization of the concept of culture and the study of urban groups such as punks and rockers, skateboarders, entertainment groups, bartenders, relevant urban sites, and residential neighborhoods, as for its rural variant. It was about coastal towns and mountain communities studied through the use of semiotics, proxemics and cinesic with a focus on families, bohios, mountain coffee farmers, situational social interactions, in the anthropological and ethnographic study of the religion and the use of photography.

Abdel's main influences in this initial period were the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the anthropological linguistics of Edward Sapir and the structuralism of Claude Levis Strauss. Other important readings and studies of Abdel in this period were the universal syntactics of Noam Chomsky and his grammar. transformational, the linguistics of Martinet, Emile Benveniste, Román Jacobson, the linguistic distributionalism of Hemslef, the literary criticism of Terry Eagleton, the semiotics of Umberto Eco specifically The absent structure and the anthropology of James Frazer.

By that date, concluding his only two exhibitions of conceptual art in the period, his high theoretical level and knowledge underlined him as thinker, theoretician and art critic as one of the main protagonists in the visual avant-garde of the eighties in Havana where theoretical/conceptual figures such as Abdel Hernández San Juan, Desiderio Navarro or Arturo Cuenca, then standing out as an art critic in the writing of catalog words about the generation, conferences, interviews in the mass media and curatorships that consolidate his recognition at the national level.

Like the rest of his generation who emigrated mostly to Mexico and the United States, in 1991 he moved to live in Venezuela in the neoliberal capitalist period after curating an exhibition of Cuban art at the University of Valencia, he then settled down to live in Caracas, working as a theoretical researcher at the Research and Development Center of the Armando Reveron Higher University Institute and as a professor of didactic theory.

From the center he writes his first book Borders and Overflows of Art: sociology of transart. In this case it is a second period of his sociology that can be understood as a transdisciplinary sociology of art, the peculiarity of this sociology is that it develops a configurationalist and autopoietic theory of the field of art based on comparing the different sociological schools on the subject of the individual and the social, the creative author and his work, the internal and the external, individuation and socialization, in this period Abdel develops a critique of traditional ways of addressing the dilemma, proposes and elaborates a configuralist phenomenology focused on the study of the processes and dynamics of subjectivity in conjunction with the axiological study and understanding of the relationship between culture and art, that is, comprehensiveness. evaluative focusing on how values are formed, this against or in contrast with ways of understanding individual and society as preformed or preformed things, on the one hand, it addresses art in the face of technological, mass media and market modernity, on the other it is about of a sociology inherited from the debate on the decline or death of art from Hegel to Stephan Morawski, where he situates and discusses the reconfigurations of cultural identity and art in complex societies and where he proposes interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity arguing the need for a sociology of transart beyond the art that the book complexes, a sociology whose empirical dimensions are the study of the field of art, its mediations, the complexity in the processes of formation of the value of art, as well as the issue of the greater or lesser autonomy of the art.

Abdel's influences in this period were Pierre Bourdieu, George Helbert Mead, Umberto Echo of the Absent Structure, Peter Burguer and Jean Boudrillard. Other relevant readings of Abdel in this period were Jean Francois Lyotard, contemporary sociological theories, Talcon Parson, Mijaíl Bakhtin, and complexity theories such as Gregory Bateson and Edgar Morán, also Clifford Geertz.

In these years in Caracas he continued his readings and studies of hard sciences, expanding to classical philosophy, Frankford and Anglo-Saxon, German, French and European philosophical thought at the end of the century, as well as expanding his studies of semiotic theory.

He then gives seminars on theoretical sociology, aesthetic theory, museum theory and cultural theory, as well as conferences in the country's main institutions such as the Federico Brand Institute, Central Bank of Venezuela, Museum of Popular Art of Petare, Ateneo de Caracas, Art Museum contemporary Mario Abreu in Aragua, Maracay, the first encounter of curators at the sectorial directorate of museums of Conac, Puerto La Cruz, and participates with conferences in panels of Fundaayacucho, Banco Consolidado, Higher University Institute of Plastic Arts Armando Reveron, while giving workshops on didactic theory experimental in the newspaper economia hoy, in the iuesapar, in the Arturo Michelena Institute and in the Federico Brand Institute, developing in parallel a continued work of semiotics of art, that is, venturing in that sense into a peculiar art criticism from its weekly page in the italian newspaper Economia Hoy and through catalog texts in museums and galleries, such as the Sofia Imberg Museum of Contemporary Art, La Florida and Okyo galleries, or the Alejandro Otero Museum of visual arts where he is selected as curator of Venezuelan art and the museum/market theme in 1994.

Since 1993 in Caracas he has already chosen his tendency in theoretical sociology, positioning and defining himself within the line of phenomenological studies or social phenomenology between philosophy and sociology initiated by the Austrian philosopher and sociologist Alfred Shutz, which is added as his main school to his profile as an intellectual in itself defined since the eighties by semiotic theory, then phenomenological sociology, a very philosophical/classical tradition within sociology, and semiotic theory, Charles Sanders Peirce, his main orientation as a theorist and scientist .

In the early nineties, already known nationally in Venezuela as one of the main theorists and intellectuals of the decade, having been a juror of the national biennial of Venezuelan drawing, he developed readings and studies of European urban sociology, and began to venture into his studies and investigations of urban field work in the popular urban markets of Venezuela, thus beginning a third period of its sociology defined by the development in them of three years of immersion of field work and by carrying out a study and theory on the visuality or visual culture of markets from the 15th century in the colonial period to its contemporary circumstances at that time defined by economic transnationalization and the neoliberal market, his research at that time focused on the relationship between museum theory and market theory which led him to the elaboration of a theory of the museum according to the market and of the latter according to the museum, focusing on the museum/market relationship.

Here it was an immersion of field work in the popular urban markets of Venezuela, that is, focusing on the study of social groups understood as cultural groups such as cart drivers, criers, chicheros, herbalists, tinkerers, and manufacturers of religious articles.

These market investigations focused mainly on the understanding of Venezuelan folklore expressed in visual and material culture, which led Hernández to an increasingly deeper knowledge of traditional Venezuelan culture, encompassing not only its contemporary expressions but also its traditions in particular. Interested in dialects and ideolects, as well as in the bilingualism of cultural groups such as the Wayues (arawakos) on the border of Venezuela and Colombia, the key to Hernández San Juan's sociology in this third period consisted of a unique attention to the meaning and significance that people attribute to their world, more than interpreting culture, it was about interpreting the interpretations that culture attributes to itself, what Hernández San Juan has called the preinterpreted character of experience, the world and culture, also pays special interest and proposes an understanding of markets as polyphonic phenomena, the cancellation of the point of view and how phenomenology and hermeneutics in field work lead to the observed observer (see being seen and bartering as phenomenological and hermeneutic principles of markets beyond mere participant observation).

That is, the investigation of the visuality and material culture of markets since the 15th century, from its colonial imagery to its postmodern forms, and the study of the phenomenology of its situational interactions lead to a symbolist and hermeneutic theory about barter as a form of of situational interaction of the markets where dialogue governs, reaching the conclusion that markets like the carnival are symbolic phenomena but above all staging.

Hernández San Juan proposes and explores three concepts of staging: markets as staging, museography as staging, (that is, the market anthropology museum as staging of field work) and proposes again the inclusion of art media in social science research such as installation, photography and scenography, in short it elaborates an anthropological museographic staging of the markets that is proposed as an experimental and innovative alternative of anthropology in new media, instead of the written monograph or the anthropology film, the inclusion of other expertise and visual genres to make a museography of anthropology.

The above also deals with curatorial practices, that is, the spatialized museographic display of visual exhibitions.

Another of the characteristics of this period was the attention and focus on the self, that is, in this period Hernández began his interest in the study and research on the subjectivity of the emigrant, the self-perception of the intellectual in diaspora, the cultural theorization of it individually. , that is, individual to individual with the semiotic theory of language at the center of attention.

The sociology of this period is once again, above all and first of all, urban, it contemplates the formation of teams, the use of art media for social science research, the development and proposal of the concept of the workshop as a modality of cultural production of art projects. social sciences, for example, the experimental art and anthropology workshop that hernandez directed in Caracas in 1996, the results of which he later exhibited at Rice University, Houston, texas.

This is The market from here/mise in scene and experimental ethnography by Abdel Hernández San Juan, an exploration of a museography of anthropology of the staging of urban markets but also Pyche ethnography report By Surpik Angelini, where it is explored how self-narratives of experience semiotically related to objects and spatialities can allow a self-reflexivity of the self that is cultural analysis, and finally, why not?, also Installed ethnography. By Juan Carlos Rodríguez, on how pastoral and social work in a poor neighborhood can become a collaborative installed ethnography on the culture of the neighborhood.

Abdel's influences from this period were Alfred Shutz, Junger Habermas, Jacques Derrida and Stephen A Tyler.

Other relevant readings of Abdel in this period were the work of Svetan Todorov symbolism and interpretation, theories of the symbol, the genres of discourse, criticism of criticism, dictionary of language sciences, the sociology of Talcon Parson, the sociology of George Helbert mead, contemporary theoretical sociology and ethnomethodology in general, the sociology of Max Weber, the philosophical work of gillez deleuze, the philosophical work of Jean Francoys Lyotard, analytical and language philosophy, the sociology of Comte and Logical Positivism, Stephen A Tyler and James Clifford.

On this date Abdel concludes his private studies in semiotic theory and theoretical sociology and gives lectures on contemporary Venezuelan art in various museums and panels.

In 1996 he was invited by the Faculty of Classical and Hispanic Studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas to visit the University to share his knowledge in Semiotic Theory, Contemporary Art Theory and anthropology with the community of Hispanic professors and students, offering a lectures that year at Fondren Library where he read his essay The Postmodern Work: Beyond the Intertextual to an Anglo-Saxon audience.

A year earlier he met Surpik Angelini, a Venezuelan writer, critic and curator of Texan art in Houston, Texas, with whom he shared the experimental art and anthropology workshop directed by both of them in Caracas and a curatorship of seven exhibitions resulting from that workshop, among which were There are the three aforementioned and they both presented in various exhibition spaces at Rice University, Houston, Texas, in the spring of 1997.

As co-curator researchers, both founded the Transart Foundation of Houston in 1996 for art and anthropology research, which they co-directed from 1997 as a theoretical research center in Alabama, Houston, until 2002, during which years he simultaneously worked as a Complementary Research Associate from the School of Social Sciences, Department of Anthropology at Rice University, from where, between 1997 and 2003, along with the reestablishment of its advanced school of hard sciences, he created, founded and promoted a new trend in theoretical phenomenological sociology. of a strong classical philosophical and logical inclination centered on his authorial work, and focused from semiotic theory, Charles Sanders Peirce, and logic, in cultural theorization, cultural anthropology and ethnography in intense philosophical and theoretical dialogue on the one hand with Stephen A Tyler , anthropologist and linguistics at rice anthropology, (1997/1998/2014) and on the other with Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda, anthropologist then at the University of Houston (1997/2000).

He emigrated to the United States formally in 1998, although he has lived continuously in the United States since 1997, after traveling in 1996 and 1997, he offers conferences in the Bag Lectures Main Room of the Faculty of Anthropology on Pierre Bourdieu and on his own theoretical sociology, Cultural theory and field research methodology 1997/1998.

His theoretical developments and the continuity of the implementation of his theory of including media of art in social sciences, generates an influence of national and international scale in anthropology reaching a wide variety of empirical inclinations in Anglo-Saxon anthropology and encompassing publications both in United States as well as in London, Canada and Scandinavian and Nordic countries, establishing himself as an intellectual as a nationally renowned and influential theorist, sociologist, linguist and anthropologist of the new generation in the United States and the Anglo-Saxon world.

In 1998 in Houston he gave a conference at the Houston Institute of Hispanic Culture Living Between Cultures that became a one-year theoretical seminar from which he deepened, expanded and consolidated his research begun in Caracas on the subjectivity of the emigrant, now extending it. to the migratory experience in the United States, his own experience as an emigrant and that of Mexicans/Americans and Argentines/Americans, from this one-year seminar and from a workshop he developed with Cristina Jadick on semiotics, as well as his previous philosophical dialogues on theory of language with surpik angelini, consolidates his theory of the self and elaborates his concept of autoethnography or more properly self-ethnography, this concept is nothing other than a further development towards new possibilities of the self-understanding, autosociological and autoanthropological nature of his sociology since always, that year 1998 he developed, announced and published the program of his laboratory of ethnomethodology in sociology, theory of performativity and ethnography, including trips, conferences and dialogues, a program that is the production base for his later authorial books that begin to write continuously from 2004 to the present 2023, thus opening the fourth and current period of his sociology.

The Subject in Creativity, The linguistic presentational, the being and the monad, the given and the not given, the self and the heritage, the intramundane horizon, rethinking urban anthropology, the correlate of the world, thinking science, rethinking intertextuality, Indeterministic truth and semantic elucidation are some of the books he wrote in this period.

In 1999, then Artistic Director of the Transart Foundation, he traveled as a guest invites by the Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology at Lake Forest College in illinois where Quetzil Eugenio was in continuity with a conference given by Abdel about a video of quetzil at the ethnomethodology congress, Faculty of Anthropology at the University of Houston in 1997.

From Lake Forest College, Hernández is invited to work on the topic of the cultural relationship between México and the United States, the relationship between museums, anthropology and cultural representations, anthropological tourist markets, his idea and concept of ethnographic installations and the analysis of Mayan crafts. where he proposes intertextuality and explores conceptual and spatial museographic design on the anthropology of Quetzil.

He gives lectures in various panels such as the Ethnomethodology Congress, University of Houston, Faculty of Anthropology, Fictocriticism, Anthropology Faculty Rice University, 1998, Beyond Criticism and Countercritique at AAA National Congress of Anthropology in Chicago and Lasa, in Florida, 2000, offering his conferences as a panelist alongside other speakers such as Susan Rasmussen, Steve Mintz, Michael Taussig, Paul Rabinow, Alaka Wally, Richard Townsend, Stephen Eisenman, Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda, George Marcus, Lisa Breglia, among others

From this fourth period in the sociology of Abdel Hernández San Juan, it deals with authorial books on classical philosophy, logic, theoretical linguistics, semiotic theory, phenomenological sociology, theoretical sociology, sociology of common sense, sociology of culture, cultural theory, covering a wide variety of topics.

On the one hand he returns to the sociology of art through his book The subject in creativity which is written recalling the debate of the late eighties on the death of the subject, Hernández develops a sociology of art that proposes a theory of the subject in creativity, that is, self-producing and reinventing itself beyond the usual presuppositions of the sociology of art where the subjects are understood as predated, that is, socially previously formed, the book proposes how the subject creates and produces itself through production of works and meanings in a variety of media creatively while examining what consequences are derived from it for theories on the interpretation of art, that is, literary criticism, semiotics of art, art criticism, proposing to move the concept of interpretation of the art beyond interpretation understood as a point of view towards interpretation as updating and towards the exploration of forms of reading or exegesis that defines free reading, textual reading and archaeological reading.

By proposing a philosophical sociology of the subject in creativity, the book demarcates the presupposed parameters of subject/object relationships that are usually at the base of the epistemological assumptions of theory of knowledge, suggesting that the object is constructed, which is understood as constructivism in sociology. , the object is constructed while the subject himself is in creativity and by constructing the object, understanding it not as predated but as configurationally generated in that same production of the object, the subject produces himself in his self-alterity.

For this reason, the book discusses forms of the anobjectuality of the object in art. According to Hernández, what is important are the practices of sense and meaning through which subjects construct their reality. Thus, ethnomethodology comes to the foreground as a research methodology in ethical sense, otherization of the self and the subject of art is freed from a pre-established theory in its regard, this results in a sociology of performativity that encompasses both epistemology, theory of knowledge, and performativity in terms of explorations of genres and the rhetoric.

In addition to the sociology of art, Hernández San Juan began to explore the sociology of the mass media in this period. This last sociology of the mass media according to Hernandez was subject for a long time to statistics on consumption by age of television viewing, to aesthetics of television taste or to more ideological criticisms about postindustriality, the numbing or conditioning of reactions, etc. With the transition that the mass media world is experiencing progressively since the second half of the nineties, the advent of the Internet and cyberspace among other new technologies, Hernández argues that the sociology of the mass media must turn its attention towards an analysis of the forms of subjectivity that arise, on the one hand the sociology of the mass media must recover the individual and domestic space, that is, of the habitation in a more interactive way that involves a less passive position, on the other it presupposes the investigation of logical figures that explain the new articulations of that subjectivity with the relationality, aesthetics, pleasure and interactivity that characterizes the new media, this sociology that must be both philosophical and semiotic, carrying out the importance that the mass media acquires in the semiotic theory of communication, recovers a more intimate space while making explicit the need to understand ourselves or what we become in a way that requires abandoning that sociology of the mass media understood as externalized universes according to an objectivity. another external to subjectivity, Hernandez thus proposes an in-depth study of the modes of metatextuality that define the environmentalized presentationality of the new mass media, proposes and develops the phenomenological analysis of concepts such as intangibility, interstitiality, stratification and liminality who, he says, are main logical figures to understand our subjectivity in transformation, this is his book The linguistic presentational as well as others where he examines the media from the habitat, delving into the forms of subjectivity of its ecosystem, the constellations through orbits like planets, the changes of writing, aesthetics, ritual, memory, the monadic, the inside and the outside, The given and the given, Being and the Monad; would be his books here.

Beyond the sociology of art and later of the mass media, Abdel begins in this fourth period of his sociology the development of a theoretical phenomenological sociology of the self as expressed in his book Self and acervo, where he elaborates a new philosophical/classical theory of the self that takes the theory of the self far beyond the point at which George Helbert Mead's theory left off.

According to George Helbert Mead, the formation of the self is social from the beginning, that is, our identity results from the incorporation of a previously given society with which we conform. In light of this, Abdel reviews the parameters of mutual exteriorization that imply the individual and the social as dimensions that are strange, extrinsic to each other because neither of both concepts resolves or specifies the sieve, the filters, the specific ways in which the transition, the passage from one side to the other acquires form and place, the Mead's theory presupposes the social as predated and preformed, but does not explain how one thing and the other pass into each other and are translated. Hernandez then divides the self into three areas, the individuation/socialization area defined by a process. of translation given by internalizations of the social and symbolized socializations of those internalizations, the area of experience and heritage, which unlike the first, makes the extrinsic intrinsic and forms an accumulation that is one and the same with the self, the The first area refers to society and is always current, that is, it is continually updated, it occurs always and now, it is non-cumulative and defines the dynamic transformations of the self, that which permeates itself over and over again. The second area refers to society. to culture and is cumulative, forming a memory between both areas, the phenomenology that is specific to the self is defined in which we acquire a mode of self-perception different from those that we experience through consciousness and mere self-perceptions, since by perceiving ourselves in the self we perceive ourselves by doing ourselves, that is, in relation to our identity, this would then be the third area of the self, the areas of the self are different from the self, the consciousness, the ego or the alterego, in them what is experienced outside becomes united by elucidations of meaning in the experience that is one and the same thing with the self, heritage and experience, that is, accumulated individuated culture, individuation and socialization, that is, translation and continuous self-perception in the self explain the process of phenomenological configurations of the soil of our interiority, Abdel takes this to the scope of what he calls the theory of heritage and backgrounds that is at the base of human mutual understanding as well as of their lack of communication, our relationships with others are defined by acervical correlations according to Hernandez, he also distinguishes knowledge in the life of that scientist and how this relationship should be understood, as well as giving examples analyzing the self in its differences if we talk about the United States or Europe as societies or analyzing it through examples related to narratives of life and experience between Monterrey and Los Angeles, while discerning and separating the notions of positivism versus empiricism
Simultaneously with this sociology of the phenomenology of the self, Abdel widely develops in this fourth period the phenomenological sociology of everyday life and common sense as reflected in his book The Intramundane Horizon.

Alfred Schutz, Austrian philosopher and sociologist, creator of social phenomenology, defined based on the question about how do we know the self of the other?, that sociology should be about our typification mechanisms and recipes, that it should be about intersubjectivity, about reciprocal perspectives and on what he called the world of life, in this way he advanced the first forms of a sociology of common sense and everyday life, but Schutz's phenomenological investigations, based on the ideal types of Max Weber and the phenomenology of Hussel's motivations and intentionality do not explain, nor does ethnomethodology explain, beyond the life world, the very hermeneutic and phenomenological configuration of the intramundane horizon, what makes the intramundane horizon?, what makes a world mundane? and beyond what does its intramundanity do?, this concept conceived and devised by Abdel Hernández San Juan, takes phenomenological sociology beyond the world of life or the mere everyday, towards an analysis of the hermeneutic and phenomenological processes that make up the intramundanity of The worlds, in this way, analyzes for the first time how what Hernández defines as interpretive arrangements and the shared horizons of expectations; are formed through which the intramundane is hermeneutized, becoming a dialectic between elucidation and explanation, where the latter play an ontological role that is welded and woven with the stability of senses that makes the worlds intramundane.

Hernández San Juan also proposes a much more complete and developed development of the sociology of common sense, proposing beyond typifications and recipes. the analysis of the place played by experience, heritage, relevance and significance, while analyzing the phenomenological configurations that establish the distinctions between the world in itself and the phenomenological world or more precisely, between the immediacy of the world and the superordinate character of the worlds, overordination then encompasses not only the sequence of lived experiences but also the references to them, that is, the ways in which we narrate what we have experienced to ourselves or to others, from mere monological self-reflexivity, the soliloquy of life, to intersubjective communications. thus defining what he calls the constellations of common sense.

The book in turn places this theory within the framework of the debate of the late eighties on the death of the subject, proposing a retheorization of the eye in capitalism, as well as discussing crucial questions such as a critique of immanentism in counterpoint with Hegel and Habermas, also an analysis of the concept of interactions outside the parameters of behaviorism and stimulus/response reactionism, as well as analyzing the structural place that still corresponds culturologically to Christianity in the subjective and objective forms of reproduction still ruling in modernity, the latter connects with Hernandez's theories on the analysis of the ontological relationship between hermeneutics and ontology, or hermeneutics and religion, a theory that further develops its developments in the edges and overflows of art on the place of beliefs and faith in the objective reproduction of culture.

On the other hand, it also takes common sense sociology beyond the parameter of ideal types to assume the daily life of the author as a sociologist and writer, focusing on it and not on the daily life of an ideal or idealized type of typical person, in this way Hernandez inverts the recurring meaning of phenomenological sociology and ethnomethodology usually related to the study of social groups outside the sociologist or where knowing or understanding others is not even understanding ourselves, to the same extent he proposes that common sense is not the object of study of the social sciences but the very source of scientific knowledge.

In this period he began the writing, conception and composition of infinitely more theoretical, metatheoretical and abstract authorial books such as The correlation of the world and Thinking Science.

For Abdel, in this fourth period of his sociology, it is not only about investigating the relationships between the world of life in its immediacy of the world and our references to what we have experienced, where there is the intramundane horizon, on the one hand, and the supradiscursive overordinations. on the other, ways in which experience continues in self-reference, but also that worlds can be effects produced by texts, and, most importantly, that there are steps or walkways between the world itself and the phenomenal world, phenomenological or reflected, that is, in addition to the hermeneutic and phenomenological theory of the intramundane horizon concerned with making intramundane a world of monological or intersubjective experience, a theory is required about the passage or the gateways between language and non-language, between worlds when they are effects of the texts and the immediate worlds, between the latter and the symbolic, for this Hernández develops his book "El Correlato de mundo" a treatise on theoretical linguistics that discusses important differences between Sausure's linguistics and the science of semiotics by Charles Sanders Peirce, a treatise on classical philosophy on phenomenology that makes the distinctions between the world in itself and the phenomenological world, between reality and reflected symbolizations, and a work of sociology and cultural theory on how to move methodologically in a research between dimensions that are inside and outside of language, sometimes inside and outside, sometimes either one or the other, theorizing the chains on the one hand of semiosis in Peirce, and on the other of the signifier in Saussure and Derrida Hernández discovers that the chain of semiosis leads us to culture because reality and its objects are replaced by their meanings (or significances) and the chain of signifiers leads to form, morphology and text, that is, to the texere or fabric. textual in that the signifiers replace the signified, between one chain and another Hernández proposes that the correlate and the interpretant allow the researcher to move from semiotic theory to cultural theorization through three methods,

1-hermeneutics and ontology,
2-exegesis and texts, and
3-interpretants and alternation or comparison,

a book in which Hernández proposes and develops an entire neo-symbolist retheorization of the concept of structure based on the study of the interpretant and in which it is revealed in which ways cultural theorization can work as an exegesis of the texts of culture, of culture as a text and of its texts between languages and non-languages, pre-texts, textualizations (textual treatment of the non-textual) and constructions of the text.
Semiotics has dissected the society that we were supposed to understand as communication, treating it as something dead, phenomenological sociology, on the other hand, has treated society through the life world, but between one thing and the other it is required on the one hand to return the theory of the sign to logic, returning it to the hermeneusis in which it exists in its living phenomenological genesis, not thus dissected, as signs are born in the self-perception itself of our interior soil, between the senses and consciousness, and on the other, return the phenomenological sociology of the life world to an idea of common sense that, far from being the object of science, is its foundation, with these precepts Hernandez proposes an avenue or path of phenomenological investigations between classical philosophy and classical sociology of common sense, where the Performatitivity becomes an area in the studies of epistemology of knowledge, rooting it in common sense, on the other hand it proposes and develops a new theory on the relationship between concept, object and subject in counterpoint with the logic of the concept in Hegel and Kant.

This triad is retheorized by Hernandez towards what he discusses as the sensible concept and the restoration of the idea of worlds, the result is a very classic sociological philosophy that elaborates a theory on the articulation of the symbolic in the universe of the self at the same time that examines and works with the dialectic between evocation and representation by philosophizing it, philosophical anthropology is thus returned to its first origins in classical philosophy, Hegel, Derrida, before separating from that and becoming a theory about man or an anthropology of species in its primitive stage.

Finally, in this period, Abdel immersed himself in the development of the scope of his sociology as a sociology of culture.

Phenomenological sociology as conceived by Hernández San Juan is an authentic sociology of culture based on everyday life or rather on the intramundanity of worlds. It is thus a fully developed sociology of common sense, but cultural theorization in a postmodernist sense links textualist issues. and semiotics that require retheorization or rethinking just as Hernandez undertakes in his book El Correlato de Mundo, the consideration of postmodernism as a compositional question of the author and methodological, that is, as an ethical question, leads Hernández to llebar his initial efforts to fuse or unite phenomenological sociology as developed, influenced by Alfred Schutz, with questions of cultural theory or postmodern cultural analysis, a fusion originally and innovatively explored by Hernández in his spring 1997 experiments at Rice University, this is reconsidered by Hernández San Juan in this fourth period of his sociology to lead sociology beyond the installation scope or the production of curatorial and visual museographic discourses, that is, beyond the explorations of the medium of art in art projects. social sciences, the theoretical development of a sociology of culture is required that, without ceasing to be phenomenological sociology, can work methodologically with issues of postmodernism in culture.

The result of this effort is a series of books written, composed and conceived by Hernandez, exploring possibilities for mobility and displacement beyond contexts in a modality of sociology of transcultural and intercultural culture.

And these are Abdel's books Rethinking Intertextuality" an effort to take the theory of intertextuality outside of or beyond literary criticism towards fieldwork in sociology by discussing topics such as detours or triggers in fieldwork of urban sociology around modern social groups such as punks, rockers and boulevard artisans or street vendors between Berkeley and Havana, in urban locations in modern cities, Houston/San Francisco, the analysis of the modes through the which the sociologist is interpreted by his object and as such becomes inscribed in the meanings of the latter and its culture, a hermeneusis that the sociologist must know and study, ensuring that his books respond to it and belong to it as much as to the hermeneusis of his own culture. Depending on whether or not one and the other are the same for one and the other, the analysis of the formation of new transnational, transcultural and intercultural cultural identities between the United States and Mexico is developed both towards one side and towards the other, Hernandez discusses and proposes intrinsic relationships between postmodernism and dualism, also the analysis of the interaction between heritage restorations, tourism and habitation in ancient cities or colonial towns between Texas and Mexico and even in the restoration of colonial Old Havana, it also discusses the relationship between thought, being , writing and inscription examined by Hernandez in a sociological theory that not only exegetes the texts of culture or reads the latter according to those texts, but also an inductive work of putting these textual forms into intertextual relationship.

In The Semantic Elucidation another book in this line of sociology of culture within the fourth period, Hernández proposes cultural analyzes in urban readings, thus discussing the City of Houston, reordering the project of theoretical semiotics within sociology and proposing empirical studies. of phenomena such as bilingualism between the United States and Venezuela, English/Spanish, Venezuelan Spanish and Amerindian languages in the Andean south, the spatialized discourses of material culture in popular urban markets compared to bricollages and palimpests as well as the symbolic productions of crafts in Africa and the Mayan world, the social archeology of some languages in others, dialects and ideolects in the Venezuelan and Cuban cultures, Amerindian cultures on the one hand and Afro-Cuban cultures on the other, or the semiotic and semantic study of a religion such as the Yoruba in the rule of Cuban ocha, are examined from parameters that juxtapose contexts and combine cultures.

Books such as Rethinking urban anthropology, The indeterministic truth and The couples of epistemology also propose the cultural theorization of phenomena such as urban popular markets, the new transculturalized and interculturalized cultural identity formations in Texas, Mexico or Venezuela, the analysis of the diaspora and multiculturalism, or the analysis of the relationships inside/outside the anthropology museum, proposing the parameter of the museum's eye outside the museum, that is, the museum led to field work and not to inversely, as well as the direct study of culture in the field based on metonymies, or the study and theoretical analysis of anthropologies between the United States and Mexico.

Since 2018, Abdel Hernández San Juan has been writing his next book Los Enigmas del ground: introduction semiological sociology which he finished in Caracas during 2024, a book that lays the theoretical foundations of his theoretical and empirical sociology focused on the current development of a series of discoveries of Hernández San Juan around the ground, the book proposes a logical, philosophical and semiological analysis of the dimension of the ground in the theory of the sign that discusses how sign and object are usually separated as exterior dimensions and mutually exclusive, where the first is seen as a substitute for the second, instead Abdel think that there is a common source and the same origin generating one another and being born from the other at the ground level, requiring and needing each other in the dialectics of daily life through,

Among other things, inferentiality, analyzes the ground in the three levels of firstity/nature and everyday life, secondity/culture and thirdness/metaculture, describing how the ground continues in these three levels and what are the specificities that are achieved with respect to it in the formation of semiosis, theorizing at the same time what which Hernandez San Juan defines as the preinterpreted character of experience, culture and the world, a conception that is at the base of his common sense sociology as it is, nourishes and informs from the theoretical his urban and rural modality of sociology, develops and in this sense he deepens his hermeneutic theory on the relationships between interpretation and pre-interpretation in the ontological conformation, on the one hand, the monological soliloquy of individuated subjectivity, as explanation and elucidation, they participate in the intrisection of the extrinsic that welds together the relevant and significant experiences. of the subject with its self and with the pragmatic course of its subsequent courses, how the same principles participate in turn outwards, that is, in the very definition that crosses and defines a subjective and objective situation, that is, either intersubjective or situationally objective between bodies in social interactions shaping the pre-interpreted character of experience, the world and the relationships between semiosis and hermeneusis of culture, Abdel also delves here into the logical, philosophical and dialectical problems to be considered between dialectics and research on genesis and origins, for example the very phenomenological genesis of the sign in the everyday, or of the sign by the object and vice versa, examining in its generality the logical scope of this relationship between dialectics and origins, he discusses what he defines as new neo-Hegelianism, he goes even deeper plus the implications in research methodology with the logic of the interpretant, a topic previously discussed and proposed in his book the correlate of the world now discussed in its most empirical dimensions while analyzing the appropriate balance between subjectivity and objectivity in sociology discussing and delving deeper in this sense into the theory of the so-called middle voice or medial voice. A book that is divided into two halves, a theoretical one about epistemology and methodology in its sociology and another empirical one about first-order issues in its practice of both urban and rural sociology, a book full of examples that retheorizes both phenomenological sociology, including common sense sociology, on the one hand, and semiotic theory on the other, while discussing the problems of subjectivity and objectivity in sociology in counterpoint with Charles Sanders Peirce, Alfred Shutz, Hegel, Derrida and Stephen A Tyler.

Abdel's influences in this period are already his current influences, the science of Hegel's logic and his phenomenology of consciousness and spirit, the science of semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, the phenomenological philosophy or social phenomenology of Alfred Shutz, The sociology of George Helbert Mead, the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, the semiotics of Svetan Todorov and the anthropology of Stephen A Tyler

Other relevant readings and studies by Abdel in this period in addition to reading several times and studying Hegel's science of logic, the work of George Gadamer, Heiddenger's courses on Kant, reading more books by Gillez Deleuze and the Deleuze's courses on Kant, the rereading of the absent structure of Umberto Eco, the reading of Julia Kristeva, Henry Bergson, the rereading of Jacques Derrida, the rereading of Junger Habermas's theory of communicative action and more books by Habermas, the rereading of Stephen A Tyler and reading more of Stephen's essays, rereading the sociology of religion by Max Weber and other books by Pierre Bourdieu, reading and studying Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Bronislaw Malinoswky and rereading the structural anthropology of Levi Strauss and other books by Clifford Geertz, Richard Rorty and Pascal Hegel, essays by James Clifford, among many other readings

Abdel is co/author of three compediums of philosophical dialogues

Evocation: A Philosophical dialogue. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Stephen A Tyler,
Counterpoints: philosophical dialogues by Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Alberto
Mendez Suarez, and Rumbos: explorations in cultural anthropology. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Alberto Mendez Suarez

Recomended is the essay of Alberto Mendez Suarez, La Sociologia Phenomenologica de Abdel Hernández San Juan, International University of Florida, 2023, who maintains among other things on Abdel

"a theoretical high-altitude flight, of unsurpassed rigor extensive and complex reflection, exciting for its rigor and depth and for the intensity and masterful skill with which it addresses the different themes and developments in which the threads of reflection on Derrida. Especially about the phenomenological genesis of language, which impressed me a lot due to the rigor and level of detail in the development of the concept of the conditions of possibility of the sign from phenomenological reflection extensive developments on the work with Peirce's interpreters, extensive reflection on the texere and the catwalks in Derrida, very acute, of enormous rigor and complexity

On this date Mendez Suarez maintains elsewhere regarding Hernandez's birthday on October 12:

A coincidence strikes me to say the least: that it is precisely the birthday of the sociologist and anthropologist ---in my opinion---- but important of Cuba at the end of the 20th century (abdel Hernández San Juan) precisely coincides with the celebration, for better and for worse, of the discovery of America and the Conquest And this expression ----daring on my part--- -, from the most important anthropologist; I say it with total conviction, absolutely persuaded by the facts. The allegorical reference to the Conquest also has ---due to its ethnographic bias---- the Lezamian imprint, and therefore Marti's, of American invention and projects a certain magical halo in the style of a story by Borges and even Cortazar on this imaginary prank.

Also the American anthropologist and linguistics Stephen A Tyer in Evocation/the unwriteable, a response to Abdel Hernandez San Juan by Stephen A Tyler and in comments reviews in letters, Houston, Texas, 1997 and 2013 has argued about Abdel
"He has been and continues to be a real thinker, very talented, innovative and creative, I am really impressed by the quality and quantity of his work done going deeper and deeper into interesting areas not well explored before by the Contemporary research, he continues to create beautiful and meaningful things


In another sense, reviews, comments and expressions about his books can be mentioned by Surpik Angelini, Houston, who says in 1995 about Hernandez.


One of those brilliant aviators, capable of taking off towards that wonderland, where even the vision of the world of paradoxes and rational systems is clear and discernible from above, but from where a window opens to another space, liminal time, subtle, apparently ephemeral, although loaded with profound realizations and truths. From there, he has managed to illuminate the traps or dark pits on the path of contemporary structuralism and post-structuralism, the two columns of modern thought, with all the variants of the movements, the isms or stylistic isms contained between them.

But his analysis is so lucid that it relativizes the aestheticism of the art world with true essential paradigms, placing it in front of its distance from the true structure of the philosophical world of this century, or of the social state so fragmented and impoverished in meaning, which is the context of art.

Now I feel that the thought is not hateful, but charming, kind, light, intelligent, playful, deep with skin-deep awareness (Deleuze). Which is precisely the only possible thought for me. The language is so fluid that it escapes through my fingers, so I follow it in its construction and then realize that my memory was not constructing conceptions while I read, but that my imagination was enjoying that juissance (kristeva) so powerful that at the same time In the end I feel the movement of the words, the golden play of their gravity, but to remember or grasp their thoughts I must read again and I return to the text to find again the verbal sleight of hand that hypnotizes me and I love. The profound effect his use of language has on me is liberating. As Abdel says “a multiplicity of worlds in ecological relationship, a new form of contemporaneity for discourses.”

That extraordinary discipline that has been conquered, and I do not reiterate it conscious of the fact that there are many who recognize it, but with the certainty that each reiteration establishes the depth and meaning of things in the course of which is also important.


The same Ernesto Leon, Houston, 2023, maintains He is one of the great philosophers of the continent


George Marcus, American anthropologist in Houston, 2001, says

Abdel Hernández is a Cuban cultural theorist. He has continued his relevant anthropological work in Caracas. The reason why his work should be of interest to anthropology is because he makes explicit and experimentally explores trends that are deeply part of the ethos of the discipline with a combination of professorial distance and a more active participation in culture but still from professional field work, finally we had in the theatrical anthropology of the seventies and eighties the relationship between Richard Schechner and Victor Turner, and the writings of Eugenio Barba, among others. The main inspiration for this was the work of Victor Turner, who early had a sense of the value of understanding ethnographic scenes dramaturgically, however, what Hernandez has done is different from this early effort, Turner was really bringing anthropology to the table. to the frameworks of theater, Abdel instead has developed another opposite move with more interesting and radical results in blurring the borders between anthropology and art as institutions, Turner was less interested in epistemological and method problems and more in universal questions about mind and the emotions that I could explore in the field among the Ndemby people in Kwakiutl, never before has there been a more provocative bringing of performance into field work as in Hernandez's work, I am referring here to the idea of ethnography as performance that "has been one of the key words of possible alternatives for anthropological practice in recent years


The anthropologist Quetzil Eugenio has maintained, the theoretical dialogues with Abdel Hernández San Juan has being major to the development of new experimental ethnography