Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Semantic Elucidation

Semiotic theory, sociolinguistic and semantique of culture

Complete works

Book XIII

Individual Authorial Work/Theoretical Writing

Free school for advanced studies in hard sciences

Western thought

Book information

Author: ©Abdel Hernandez San Juan

The author rights of this book belong to Abdel Hernandez San Juan, its author, conceiver, writer and composer

Title: The Semantique Elucidation

Subtitle: Semiotic theory, sociolinguistic and semantique of culture

Type of Work: Literary of theoretical essays/book

Destination:  Books Libraries and biblioteques

Sides of Covered and Print Publications Sides: 22.5 cm x 15 cm

Number of Pages: 200, Reproduction: from 1 to 5000 exemplars, Covered Conservation and Protection Sides: 21.59 cm x 27.54 cm, Covered Lectures Sides: 21.59 cm x 27.54 cm

Contents

The Two Dialectique of Town: Cultural Analysis in urban readings

The semantique Elucidation: A Sociolinguistic análisis

Textual inference: The object language

Semiotics, sociology and semantics of culture

Material and inmaterial culture

Semantics of culture

Yoruba Imagery: Signs, Semes and narrative correlates/a semiotic perspective in sociology of religion

Introduction

   It has not been usual for me to develop semiotic theory in the analysis of general cultural phenomena that move beyond the empirical analysis of signs and symbols in concrete forms of art and within the latter the analyzes of semantic theory in the analysis of the cultural , with the exception of certain semiotic and semantic theoretical elements retheorized from new perspectives that I have considered in my books on the mass media and, above all, the priority place that I have given to proxemics and kinesics – considered areas of semiotics, within a phenomenological conception of my field work, for example, my studies of urban popular markets in Venezuela, otherwise I have ventured into the theory and semiotic and semantic analysis of signs and symbols above all and almost exclusively in my empirical studies of art

   It is time, however, to begin to do so, different reasons motivate me to do so, to extend the analyzes of semiotic theory and semantics to culture beyond and outside the empirical constraints of art.

    This book explores the possibilities of semantic theory - considered here as part of semiotics - within the sociology of culture. In fact, after a general introduction to the subject, I include both theoretical and empirical essays on from sociolinguistics on forms of idiolects and dialects in oral speech and bilingualism studied in a semantic sense and cultural analyzes on main dialectics of the modern town elucidated from semantic urban readings of the city, reflections on ethnicity, the relacion between sociology and semiotic, material and immaterial culture of urban popular markets, sociology of religion and  semiotics and semantics of culture and religion.

The Two Dialectiques of Town: 

Cultural Analysis in Urban readings

©Por Abdel Hernandez San Juan

   In 1998, I found myself, at the height of my life as an immigrant living in Houston, with a phenomenon that I would like to reconsider for the purposes of this essay.

   At the Poe elementary school where my son studied since his first grade, social psychology was becoming increasingly common among teachers and administrators, largely as a preventive attitude and partly also as an adaptive response – largely unconscious. -to the new transformations that at that time began to be accentuated in the relationships between the commercial and technological spheres, on the one hand, and between those related to the home and the entry into it and its habits of mass culture with the indirect effects of that interactions between commerce and technology, warn parents in order to prevent them or diagnose, often without effective basis, an increasing number of children as suffering from what was then called attention deficit disorder.

   It was my turn, first as Marcel's father, second as a member of the school and urban community, and finally as a thinker and theorist, to deal with the fact that my son was one of those warned about this disorder. Forewarned of the fact, I began to pay attention to Marcel's attention on a daily basis, starting with his ability to concentrate on schoolwork and continuing to observe him in general.

   I concluded in a matter of one to two months by observing that Marcel did not have any problem with attention deficit disorder and I communicated and explained this to his teachers in that way, but at the turn of that same year, it already became a fait accompli in me, the sociological interest in the consequences of the new relationships between the market and media technologies such as the Internet, on old household habits.

   To the extent that, starting with children, more and more individuals within the home become cybernauts, it progressively spreads until it is almost completely extinct, the habit, established for several decades and forming itself a long cultural tradition, of being viewers, a notion or concept whose cultural relevance has been underestimated.

     Even where within the home, through the mediation of grandparents or obstinate viewers of the past, individuals continue to repeat the ritual of being viewers, the latter, the television stations themselves, due to the increasingly constant corporatized entry of market advertising within the television as well as the proliferation of channels and programming, even sitting in front of the television screen as before, in those years he could no longer be a viewer of programming planned and controlledly directed to his attention.

   The sociology of publics and tastes, therefore, which from the sixties to the eighties, had governed, both from the point of view of preventive surveys of attention, that is, as put to the public service of television stations, and situational sociology focused as social psychology on the home and family, which had governed the entire old conception of consumption studies by age, according to habits and according to preferences, together with the culture turned tradition that had supported it, it was collapsing.

   As happened with the sociology of companies, instead of focusing the analysis on production and merchandise, it had to do so on consumption and customers, but with the additional peculiarity that the same culture of marketing and customer service as regent, would transform, in its interaction with new technologies, the very culture to which it was directed, making it unpredictable to allocate studies to warn viewers through programming

   The space of the home has been transformed through the relationship between new technological media and the free market, on the one hand, netizens instead of viewers, with all the consequences that this entails in terms of habits and customs not only about the home. , but about the relationship between subjectivity and culture in general, and transformed by the unpredictability of the viewer through the manipulation of programming, the first modes of what I later studied and deepened with a sense took shape at that time. positive and optimistic, like the new phenomenology and the new forms of subjectivity that all that meant to us in terms of memory, subjectivity, self, being, interaction, etc.

   However, if I draw attention this time to the adaptive reaction of teachers and school directors in Poe, it is only to now focus my attention on other aspects of the same phenomenon.

   It is not a question of instead of seeing the positive, as in many of my books, now of seeing the negative, but rather of drawing attention to the fact that a priority for the study of the new sociology of culture is precisely the consequences that this has in the rearticulation of our understanding of culture

   Attention deficit disorder, without a doubt, reflected nothing more than the adaptive response of the community to the consequences that at a first level all those changes implied, from an individual concentrated in a continuous and repetitive activity, to an individual who cannot and to concentrate on a single stimulus neither as a viewer nor as a netizen and who has to learn to symbolically coordinate their relationship with the external world from new guidelines and principles.

     The adaptation took, of course, time and as the years went by, fewer and fewer children were diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, but what I am interested in putting to the foreground here is not that, but rather the question about how many other phenomena specific to culture have received their effects from those changes, requiring from us new axiological, semantic and reflective parameters for their approach.

  I am referring here to the fact, on the one hand that is unavoidable, that to the same extent that the new media coordinate in a different way the relationship of the individual to the external world and to the city, on the other hand, they accentuate the separation or division between culture of the media, that is, of the urban expressed in them, and the properly urban spaces of the city now spatially understood, that is, those in which our repetitive rituals take shape regarding the neighborhood, society and the horizontal community, the You see the old man getting out of his Chevrolet every day to buy his coffee while his car is being washed, the people we already identify with their car the same every time they always go to the same cafes, etc.

    Since the studies on the mass media in the era of television viewing, this fact has been acquiring relevance for the understanding of culture, phenomena such as kitsch, that is, the new culture of consumption that was generated in the form of resulting aesthetics of taste. of the reification of television content such as entertainment genres would not have been possible without these new interactions,

  In fact, kitsch itself was born from them and is their consequence, but the new phenomena that tend to disseminate television culture have their correlation both from the subjective point of view of the parameters of understanding and from the objective point of view of forms of culture, in those urban spaces,

   in the same way that through television mass culture we were able to understand kitsch, new results in the cultural field that encompass both subjectivity and, in general, the cultural expressions of urban spaces, the city and, in general, the customs and social habits, take shape

   In short, just as kitsch was the cultural expression of the television era, the new conditions that began in the eighties but acquired their complexion since the end of the nineties, have consequences on subjectivity and the relationship between subjectivity and different cultures. to those of the culture of television viewing even if they suppose it,

    On the one hand, television itself becomes part, like the old genres in cinema, such as cowboy movies, of an inventory of memory or a museum of the history of television through which what is done Barely two decades ago, the modern era seems nostalgically ritual to us today. The world of television, which until not long ago was part of the generalized standard culture, now passes into the domain of antique houses and cultural museums.

   On the other hand, the new urban space – understood in its character of visual and spatial expression, the city, but above all in terms of its meanings and meanings for subjectivity – is left at a new halfway point as if it were abandoned between on the one hand , the downtown, which concentrates all commercial activity towards itself, resulting, for the purposes of urban vernacular traditions, in a kind of extraterrestrial ship dropped into the city from another planet, and on the other, the internet and new digital technologies, thus appears the urban space of the city as a great desolate vastness – abandoned by commerce and the media – something that for the purposes of subjectivity has remained as if it were a world foreign to ourselves, as Kristeva said, while, paradoxically, On the other hand, this world now becomes the sole receptacle of new forms of ritual.

    This begins to form the space of what we could understand as new antinomies, it becomes the receptacle of a whole number of new cultural neologisms that were once related to what I have called the cultural recreations of consumption, but that today take the form -without stop presupposing them, of new islands or archipelagos of meaning,

   I think here of all the white Victorian American culture of Houston, of wood, cement and metal, but also and above all of the African American neighborhoods that develop precisely on the slopes or in the intercircuits of those same communities, here a whole series of inventive vernacular modes of material culture--including dances--encompassing the aesthetics of automobiles, modes of dress, bodily attitudes in the neighborhood, lifestyles, preferences, tastes, and ways of producing material culture and symbolic

   All these phenomena have acquired new configurations in the social and cultural fabric through which urban spaces have been abandoned halfway between commerce and media, they are transformed into spaces in which culture seeks its ritual dimensions, this has resulted of those same interactions that alerted Marcel's teachers of a possible situation of attention deficit disorder.

   I don't think only of Houston, obviously, although it is my most important reference for reasons of long years of life and experience, I think in general of the entire border culture in Texas, as a literal culture in physical terms, but also with its effects on subjectivity, ways of feeling in the -from the sensitive and sensitivity, and of feeling the city, senses of belonging, habits, cultural resonances, from Galveston and corpus cristi, to el paso and monterrey, but also in louisiana, Berkeley and San Francisco, as well as to the north, Chicago, New York and finally why not also in Florida and the Miami phenomenon.

   What differences could we point out as relevant to subjectivity and the city, between what we previously called studies of syncretism, studies of kitsch, studies of vernacular culture, and what we understand today as a new ritual culture located halfway between downtown lunatic and extraterrestrial commerce and the transterritorialized orbital universe of the internet.

     The objective of this essay is to outline a discussion about these new modes of subjectivity now analyzed outside of media culture, that is, how they take shape once the relationship between new media and markets transforms the home and social space of the former television viewing, without excluding the ways in which it continues to exist, elucidate some conclusions about the reculturalization of the memory of television in the new museum of antiquities of subjectivity while examining what are the parameters that for the purposes of subjectivity They take shape as much as they did before, pastiche, imitation, among other forms, and what consequences are derived for the sociology of culture, specifically after the analysis of this new culture, in terms of what I understand here as, also in reference to the bilingualism, multiculturalism and even reserves of Indian culture, coexisting or merged within that urban culture, as impure anthropology from the sociology of culture.

  When I say impure anthropology I confront an antinomy that I would like to consider.

   From my point of view, the genesis of anthropology before it separated or became independent as something in itself, we found in classical philosophy as a section within phenomenology and the philosophy of consciousness as understood by Jacques Derrida and before Hegel, something that I have discussed in my book Thinking Science when I cite the moment in which Derrida maintains that phenomenology and the study of the soul are the truth of anthropology, this conception, which refers to philosophical anthropology, and that we should consider as purity of anthropology, -- Cassirer's studies on philosophical anthropology and philosophy of symbolic forms, for example -- contrast with the definition of Levi Strauss who maintained the opposite, for Levi Strauss pure anthropology could not be about our own Western society but about other cultures. different from ours like those defined as primitive.

   We speak therefore of impure anthropology to refer to analysis of culture within a sociology of culture that focuses on our own Western culture. This perspective – which in Levis Strauss referred to his analyzes of English and French cuisine, for example – does not mean, however, that it excludes ways in which within our own culture as a consequence of folklore, traditions, migrations and the multiculturalism, syncretism and other cultural phenomena, we have expressions that are part of it and that simultaneously carry the highly differentiated Western lifestyle along with beliefs, rituals and customs that in some way refer to archaic cultures.

   I am thinking here of five readings that are very different from each other regarding the city of Houston. In one of these readings, which looks at Houston from Riveroaks, the city is presented as a central and compact nucleus of cultural traditions that has at its center settlements of sedimentary tradition whose community cultural expression ranges from Kirby at the height of Riveroaks to Mountrouse and its surrounding developments, the developments that range from Alabama, covering the entire museum area to the rice village to the east and west to the river, encompassing, from Montrouse in the opposite direction from the museum area to the most modern self-constructed higways, where a large number of artists have moved, as well as the urbanizations around Project Row House, both white Anglo-American and African-American.

   This sedimentary reading continues to read Houston as a great cultural settlement of traditions and customs, when perceiving it in an eminently spatial sense, that is, focused on its visuality, a component of subjectivity that is important in this reading escapes, however. , the way it is present in it from the point of view of sensitivity and its constrictions in subjectivity, its relationship with the culture of the edge, on the one hand, and the sea on the other, is a reading of the city located in the earth, earthly --landculture, which includes not only Galveston, corpus christi, marfa, padre island, el paso and the border with Monterrey on a physical level, but also, a cultural expression of border perceptible also in presidio and of course in Saint Anthony and Austin

   All this established reading understood as cultural tradition closes its eyes, of course, and lives with its back turned---it omits in its subjectivity, the entire culture on the economic side of commerce and technocratic that is symbolized by the lunatic downtown, as well as by Commercial floating economy areas that begin on Westheimer after the first lup, including the gallery and the developments that follow, omit and exclude in subjectivity developments that are autonomous and separate worlds closed on themselves that remain at the heights of sugar land after the second lup, omits the outlying neighborhoods formed by migrations, looks towards the multiculturalism that has been inscribed in that traditionally urbanized center, as complementary services or accessories that are not part of that primary set,

   I think here of the Japanese restaurants in the center on the rice village and on Kirby before the first lup, the Indian restaurants on both sides, the Arabs, the Thais, all of this is felt as external services to that primary set, and of course it omits all The rentier condominium culture that has proliferated on the other side of the medical center and the river, in this main complex, the collecting of antiques, the collecting of art and culture, both American art and culture and other cultures, have been crucial. , includes, as we said, an important and significant vernacular culture that encompasses not only kitsch as a recreation of television culture, but other modes of vernacular culture related to local traditions, many of which have been studied by my friend and colleague Surpic Angelini who By the way, she is an excellent urban planner and architect who has developed several urban design studies on Houston and Matamoros.

   This reading from Riveroaks is essentially native and its view or perspective on subjectivity includes only what from a long-standing perspective could be considered native traditions that participated ethnologically in the formation, on the one hand, of the American national, on the other, above all of the Texan regional – and in the first place Houstonian, look then when it goes beyond itself towards the vestiges of it, jumping from these groups to those others that, not located within the town, are related to the same cultural phenomenon, small towns for example rural, jumps to the outskirts of the town following the route of Galveston, Kimas, the small towns on the edge, but excludes everything that over time has been attached to the city that we mentioned before

   Everything that this reading---which in a certain way is even though with nuanced differences--the reading from braeswood at the height of the river above Kirby---from this a certain university autonomy specific to the proximities of the rice village and its surrounding urbanizations, however, excludes and despite the fact that many tend to understand Houston as a medical city, everything that happens after the medical center on the other side of the lup and behind the latter, a countless number of urbanizations rentals made up of condominiums that, although they are not as autonomous as worlds closed on themselves like those that remain after the second lup, we mentioned Sugarland, are self-sufficient and therefore do not need to relate to the rest of the city other than in the mode of a utilitarian coming and going, the people and families who read Houston from this side, go to that part of Houston that we saw before in an instrumentalized way to look for something, to enjoy something occasional and come back, they have all their needs from this other side covered, to get from one side to the other, two main roads are required, which are usually congested due to the high density of traffic. These are beginning to be urbanizations of average professionals who live off consumption and who lead a life mostly focused on the commerce to which the reading from Houston turns its back, or to which it disposes in the manner of a no evil that comes for nothing, in the latter all ritual has been diluted and extinguished and in the same as in the outskirts , they are no longer in contact with what is properly cultural, they are however, and I understand it here from Cambridge and from Holly Hall, residential and therefore lack something that happens to the center in a reading from Timmons Lane something after the Buffalo Speedway from Kirby opposite the museum area.

    From Timmons Lane the reading of Houston is different, here the nightlife places come to the foreground, not only countless purely commercial and bussines buildings, but also bars, casinos and nighttime restaurants related to certain idiosyncrasies such as the food of the sea, the western clubs with stuffed house animals and billiard game rooms, the bowling areas and the western night styles, Texan cowboys and cowgirls, caguas and booties, also appear in this reading desolate places but that are immersed in new urban rituals

   It is therefore not my objective to complete an exhaustive reading on each of these perspectives, just to highlight how within the same urban reality as a whole there are different cultural stratifications that presuppose differentiated hermeneutics of a city in cultural terms.

   The five readings, however, are in turn surrounded by the general topic that I discussed at the beginning, all of them have been abandoned in different ways as urban spatialities by two formations that attract to themselves the entire attention of subjectivity, the new technologies mass media, on the one hand, and the culture of marketing, business corporations and commerce on the other, the latter two tend to capture the center of subjectivity's attention, equally absorbing those five readings that we stratified understood at the level spatial as differentiated, seen from this perspective, commerce and technology, tend to bring subjectivity towards a space that reconciles homogeneity or homogenization - also understood as standardization - including its post-industrial and industrial components - with heterogeneity, homogeneous is understood as that which in subjectivity helps to deal with the resulting heterogeneity on one side of the level of fragmentation that technological fractality contracts, on the other, of the level of dissemination and multisensory that constant advertising implies, especially on television but in general everywhere. , as well as finally the consequences of heterogeneity implied by multiculturalism that is expressed as multiethnic diversity.

   Therefore, in this perspective it has a sense of antidote to the heterogeneous, but at the same time it is a conjugation that, by bringing all the attention to itself, leaves those urban spaces desolate as we understood them before, with their forms of vernacular culture, their residential nature. , its urban rituals and its established culture

    There are therefore without a doubt several Houstons within Houston.

    There is a demographic Houston, which we have not mentioned before, whose center of attention is the population density, this Houston, seen from the outskirts towards the center, paradoxically it no longer reads the way the growth of the city was read from its center. Towards its progressive expansion, demographic growth was so accelerated that it is now read from the outskirts to the center, that demographic Houston is defined by the culture that has been generated out of the lup which by the way tends to become more and more functional. independent, like worlds closed on themselves, that do not need to go to the center of Houston, that function as if they were small country towns in the sense of their self-managed character, being nevertheless modern residential areas of the city, this is a Houston of middle professionals and its main logic is the price per cubic meter of land, both owned and rented, it is a largely floating Houston in the sense that it concentrates emigrations to Houston from other cities in the United States, but it also includes a lot of native culture from both Houston as an American state—who for different reasons, especially economic ones, have renounced the possibility of reculturalizing Houston from its traditional centers—a culture, therefore, that is disconnected from the established, territorial reading that we saw at the beginning from Riveroaks, although it has belonged in the past.

   It is important here to note that this stratigraphic reading is completely demarcated from merely economic understandings, Riveroaks is not so important both for being an area of ​​economic abundance, and for its connection with Houston understood as a cultural tradition, which in no way means that it is The economic tradition that Riveraks symbolizes, rather, is about the fact that the traditional and the vernacular, what refers to culture understood as tradition, generally has a tendency to weaken due to the other phenomena analyzed, which is why which, as everything that tends to weaken or become extinct becomes more expensive, here the notion of increase in price, as I said in my essay the intangible, is contrary to the notion of profit or ostentation, it is about the opposite, spiritual and moral values, as well as the fact that economic capital only tends to become culturalized and symbolized around symbolic culture.

   This part of Houston, or this Houston that we could consider original, therefore has immense importance, it processes and translates, it forces in a certain way and pushes for all other expressions of Houston within Houston to be its expressions.

   Is this possible? The question here would be, yes and no, yes because the commercial and standardized Houston will never be able to advance without being culturalized, not because the cultural Houston will never be able to be culturalized without being commercialized, undoubtedly it is a tension, not in the sense of something dramatic or tense. for reasons of conflict, but of a dialectical tension through which Houston tends to symbolize itself in one sense or the other or at the intersection of these different senses, to become commercialized it has to progressively become culturalized and conversely, to become culturalized it must be commercialized.

   This Houston, for example, is struggling to save downtown for itself since the latter has completely disconnected from the cultural fabric of urban symbolism and traditional culture, transforming itself, as I said, into a lunatic and extraterrestrial area of ​​mere commercial corporations.

   But because corporate commerce rules downton, the tension is dialectical.

   The culturalist Houston that we read from riveroaks, braeswood, Alabama or mountrouse, that we saw before includes different urbanizations to the east, west, south and north, pushes to reculturalize downton through public and university programs, through cultural activities, trying, for example, to reculturalize the waste and scrap that borders Downton as its immediate periphery, thus expressing the dilemma between economic capital and cultural capital to which Habermas and Lyotard referred in their debate in the eighties about the new interactions between the state and the market, public institutions and economic capital as the main cultural dialectic of modern advanced capitalist development.

    Tax evasion plays a leading role here, as well as the new ways that non-profit initiatives and cultural volunteering, donations and NGO initiatives have acquired.

   And here is the dialectical importance of multiculturalism.

    The latter and that traditional settled reading that we saw from riveoarks are different things, the first is global, economic and transnational although it is expressed communally as a new short-term formation within the regional culture and is assimilated in different ways to local cultural fabrics, the second, it is regional, local and national, it refers to native cultural formations, it incorporates the native Texan culture itself in long-standing ethnological terms with its Anglo-American, Mexican and African-American matrices - some European migrations, others participated in it, such as the Irish among others -, but For the purposes of the latter, multiculturalism pertains to being transnational and economic, by expressing itself communally as a multiethnic conglomerate, tends to contribute to the more general dialectic of that main tension between specificity and homogeneity, that is, it helps to enrich the fabric of the process of reculturalization that that first Houston performs with respect to the homogeneous, commercial Houston, governed by the interactions between market and technology.

   But this last Houston, in turn, as we said, is a meeting point for all the Houstonians who live within Houston, where the other dialectics are reconciled in subjectivity, thus completing the two main and complementary dialectics of the town, the of the relationship between homogeneity and heterogeneity, all the forms of subjectivity that govern Houston pass through it, self, memory, being, interaction, etc., also necessary to compensate and reconcile the cultural difference to which diversity tends.

Grades

These five readings unfold from my residential living areas in the city, Apartments, 8055 Cambridge Street, 83, Houston, Texas, 77054, 2111 Holly May, St. Apt 418, Houston, Texas, 77054, 8020 Braesmain Dr Apt 2, Houston, TX, 3131 Timmons Lane # 419, Houston, TX 77027 as well as Kirby drive where Surpik lives or where I lived for the first few months, it is obvious that such an understanding includes not only the itineraries between coming and going from the living spaces and work, but also countless other spaces that one develops between places where friends live and other places where one moves for business and vacation reasons, but I consider that routine references are the most important to establish stable perspectives, as well as Routine internal routes of the city, I walk on Kirby from Braeswood, the medical center or Timmons line towards the center and vice versa, covering routes such as Bissonet, Hazard, Sheperd, to name just a few routes, are crucial here, I would like to thank here in this sense the help of Mari Jiménez and her husband, the architect Jiménez, since thanks to their real estate rental company I got my housing contracts, as well as Surpic and Paolo Angelini, this essay is actually the first in a new series focused on cities that will cover two other essays on Houston, one on Caracas in Venezuela, and essays on San Francisco, Berkeley, New Orleans, New York and Havana, the essay excludes for the moment Other readings that, in the coming and going, could imply other perspectives such as They are those from the street where the transart foundation is located, 1412 west Alabama office, transart foundation of Houston where I had one of my offices and from rice university where I had two of my offices, between one space and the other it has also developed in the coming and going my everyday understanding of the city,

Semantic Elucidation: A Sociolinguistic Analysis

©Por Abdel Hernandez San Juan

     In this essay I propose to discuss my theoretical and empirical analyzes on the relationship between structural stability and astructural asymmetries in sociolinguistic understanding, that is, through the analysis and study of specific forms of language such as those that occur between the ruling language and bilingualism, between United States and Venezuela.

   Broadly speaking, the central point under discussion here centers on a sociolinguistic paradox regarding the stability of language structures and the asymmetries expressed in that same language now considered from the point of view of speech, analyzing sociolects, dialects and idiolects. , through which it is made explicit how the culture expressed in the oral communication of the language, receives and processes cultural material with which that ruling language is permeated, which is asymmetric with respect to the stability of that ruling language.

   This analysis, carried out around some dialects and form of oral culture that is an expression of my own culture, since the references to both the United States and Venezuela are based on long years of life in which I have spoken these dialects as my own form of expression in a culture that became my own culture as an immigrant on both sides,

    The main paradox is the fact that these transformations of the language in speech come from reservoirs of culture that are asymmetrical with respect to the parent or ruling language; these are not always, and most of the time they are not, an expression of direct contacts. between languages, although this also in a lower percentage, but rather expressions of how the culture of the ruling language recreates in its imagination the ethos of the cultures of asymmetric languages ​​as ways in which the latter are ascendant in the processes of creolization that make up the culture of that ruling language.

   In short, from the structural point of view in linguistics it is assumed that a language is stable as an institution due to its invariability over time at the same time that it is assumed that this language is modified through its uses in speech. However, this logic, which only very slowly assimilates to that language the modifications caused by its use in speech, presupposes that what is transformed into the uses of speech are modifications coming from that same language as it is instituted, which For situational, contextual or other reasons, they are modified from within itself as a language, but in its speech.

     The research I'm talking about here assumes something that moves beyond that.

   In fact, when we talk about asymmetries, we are maintaining that that language is being modified in speech in a sociolinguistic sense with material that it does not receive from itself. In short, we will see below that these are not modifications of that language itself. from it, but from modifications that that language receives from cultural material that it receives from cultures that practice other languages ​​and that coexist with it spatially. The modifications, however, do not result from merely bilingual processes because, as we will see, the culture of the ruling language does not is properly bilingual in its great generality with respect to the language of cultures that are asymmetrical to it, but rather bilingualism in reverse is experienced by the culture of non-ruling languages ​​while at the same time we will analyze that the way in which The culture of the ruling language receives modifications in the latter from the culture of the other languages, not by speaking the languages ​​of asymmetric cultures but rather by assimilating the latter into their imaginaries, in a few words. , through cultural ethos.

   The above refers us to allosemiotic processes of cultural transformation through language which cannot be understood without a cultural anthropology of urban popular markets since it is precisely in the latter, from their logic of cultural recreations of consumption, that that process acquires form, is conveyed and made possible as a relationship between cultures.

     At the same time, it is an analysis not only or only sociolinguistic, but rather, because I found the phenomenon and began to study it carefully not through the observation of dialects, towards which for a long time I had no distance because be my own and those of my daily life with friends and colleagues, but rather as a result of my field work in urban popular markets when I begin to understand how the cultural recreations of consumption reproduce within them in the imaginary of the culture, ethos and visual imagery of those asymmetrical cultures, it is therefore a research resulting from my field work in popular urban markets through which I objectified how this traffic occurs that later transforms the language and with it to culture, this is, in short, an example of research on the scope that what I have defined as cultural recreations of consumption can have in cultural terms, a research that I began to study in the markets and that I have subsequently developed In the manner of a self-analysis I extended it to the sociolinguistic field.

     As I have argued elsewhere, my study of markets from the phenomenological point of view, that is, in terms of sociology, from life worlds and common sense, and in terms of phenomenological sociology, that is, from analysis of the phenomenological modes that occur in the market at a literal level, intercorporeal and intergestural relationships, distances between bodies, ways of giving and receiving an object, simultaneity of activities, ways of seeing and being seen, intersubjective dynamics of give and take around to buying and selling, speeds of movement and communication, among other things, the phenomenological objectification of markets led me to analyze how that Phenomenology expressed at a spatial level, between my body and urban places, itself contained a concrete dimension and another abstract one in which the hermeneutic dimensions of the understanding of a world and the abstract dimensions of the theorization of a symbolism that connect logics of life worlds and market abstractions were made phenomenologically equivalent, regarding these phenomenological conclusions on proxemics, the Phenomenological theory of the market required a hermeneutical theory of its understanding - which at the same time had to be made inclusive of the mode of participant observation - my notion of the observed observer as worked in that research - since one thing could not be achieved without the other.

    From this perspective, I move from data and results obtained in the understanding of markets, to sociolinguistic analyses.

       Starting from the Saussurean distinction between language and speech, as I said before, that is, understanding the first as the academy of language, and the second as its use, on the one hand, and its transformation on the other, a use which, without However, Saussure defined it as relative from the moment in which the language itself ultimately originates in speech, it is about developing a series of analyzes on relations of asymmetry in bilingualism and its equivalences in the market from which I actually began. to investigate the problem.

   I understand the concept of asymmetry not only in the sense of something that is not accommodated or reduced to the two symmetrically distributed sides of a form or structure, but also as the relationship between a structure and something that is asymmetrical to that structure, Specifically, I am interested in discussing how a structural language that I will define in a sociolinguistic sense as the ruling language in a given cultural reality and an astructural language are related to that ruling language, that is, asymmetrical with respect to the one which, however, has its expression in the culture of that, as well as, of course, also the other way around.

     The empirical parameters that I take as reference are very different from each other, but they also refer to my own experience as a bilingual in the United States.

     I write, speak and read English, a significant number of my essays are thought and written in English without having a Spanish version, and since at least 1997 the majority of my career has been in English as I am immersed in life in I have spoken English in Texas daily since at least 1998 to the present, although my English will never be like the English of bilinguals who settled in the United States since the sixties or seventies among whom I have many friends, nor will comparable to that of my own children who have received it from a very young age, I believe that the empirical experience that I accumulate is sufficient because it not only affects me but I have also been able to learn about a wide variety of experiences of others, I know Spanish from bilinguals born in the United States, as well as the Spanish of American Anglo-Saxons, and also the English of bilinguals who settled long before me and who therefore master it in a deeper way

   However, the issue that focuses my attention this time, although of the same type, does not refer to a culture in which people of both languages ​​speak one language and the other, but rather that few people of the ruling language speak the asymmetric language while Many people of the astructural language do speak the ruling language, that is, they are bilingual. I am referring to the relationship between Spanish and the Amerindian languages ​​in Venezuela.

    Returning to English and Spanish to highlight some striking aspects, both are beautiful languages, but very different from each other.

    Their deepest logic explains both things, their respective beauties and their differences.

    If we were in a space in which there would be a certain number of probabilities to travel from one point to another, we could say that English is a language through which the probabilities can be traveled with more agility and ease from any point in that space. towards any other as well as towards their entry and exit.

   The possibilities of reaching a point taking one path or another are greater, because the semantic field of the words and their conjugations is more open, each word in English radiates a combinatorial potential that allows us to give and construct a whole of meaning within a margin of greater number of alternatives, if I want to get from one point to another to give a meaning, I have more relational and combinatorial possibilities to achieve it, this makes both the words, the sentences, the paragraphs and in general English grammar if you want, more random, more relational and more playful, but for that very reason paradoxically more concise, in the same way that the combinations are more, the path to giving a direct, practical and concise meaning is also shorter.

    Spanish in its difference is a baroque language, full of ornaments and ornaments, the combinatorial possibilities to give a meaning are less and the effort is greater to give concise meanings, but at the same time Spanish has greater prolixity and versatility, it is a Gothic language, which allows more elaborate routes, there are no more possibilities of different routes in a random sense of relationalities, but there are more elaborate paths and sinuosities through which the language adorns itself in its forms, contributing from the complexity of the forms usually unforeseen meanings. In the plain or direct senses, this fosters although fewer combinatorial possibilities of routes, more possibilities of sinuous, surprising, unexpected routes, in English the spectacle of the richness of the language lies in the acrobatics of multiple possibilities, in Spanish the spectacle of the richness of the language lies in the voluptuousness

     In the United States, however, given that English is the ruling language, Spanish is astructural and asymmetrical with respect to its structure, and it does not have nor is there its own structure in the structures of the English-speaking culture, but the fact that More and more Spanish speakers are bilingual and the fact that more and more English speakers are Spanish speakers is creating new relationships not so much in both languages, although of course they influence each other, but in culture.

    Spanish obviously comes from cultures in which it is the structurally ruling language, but in the United States it is a migratory language, although among migratory languages ​​it tends to be the most important.

   A relationship has been created between English and Spanish in the culture that, although it does not alter the structure of English as the ruling language, it does acquire an ascending dimension in the culture of that language.

   The reverse, of course, is out of the question. Being an English-speaking culture, Spanish is not only in a subordinate astructural and asymmetric relationship, but also influenced by English, but these mutual permeabilities are not expressed in the institutionality of each of the two languages ​​but are first expressed in speech. and second, most importantly, in the non-linguistic that I called before in the alosemiosis of culture, in its imaginary and in its ethos.

    The example that I am going to discuss therefore focuses on the relationship between Spanish and Amerindian languages ​​in Venezuela from the sociolinguistic point of view and largely taking myself as an experience, since as I said it is a vocabulary that is my own vocabulary culturally speaking because my Spanish permeated and transformed into Venezuelan Spanish due to the long years of life in which the Venezuelan culture became my culture, as I said it is different because people who speak Spanish do not speak those Amerindian languages ​​and bilingualism tends to be only among Amerindians, but despite this something very similar happens from a cultural point of view, only in this case instead of expressed outside the linguistic framework, it is expressed in the language through speech.

    We can make a structural separation between the synchronous language and its performance in speaking. From this analysis we observe how although the structural and general language spoken in Venezuela is Spanish, not all idiolects and dialects of Spanish come from modifications that the language receives as a consequence of its speech, but astructural or asymmetrical modifications are also produced, regarding which many of the idiolects of Venezuelan speech in Spanish are not transformations that Spanish receives directly from the relationship between its form in the language and its spoken uses given that the latter occur directly in the culture, transformations of Spanish also occur that come from living cultural reservoirs of other cultures not collected by the institution of the language.

    In short, although these are ultimately also modifications of the language according to speech, the latter collects and receives material that does not directly modify that language but rather incorporates material whose modifications come from cultures that are asymmetrical with respect to Spanish. In this way, the clues or etymological traces of countless Venezuelan words understood from a sociolinguistic point of view come from conjugations between Spanish and Amerindian languages.

   Many words are used in Venezuelan Spanish directly in Amerindian, although the largest number of them are new inventions resulting from constructions in Spanish from a grammatical point of view but incorporating consonantal and vowel modes, especially phonetic ones from Amerindian languages.

     The etymological problem not only refers to dialects such as names of Amerindian foods proliferated throughout the Venezuelan culture or of domestic utensils and supplies, such as the woven hammock for sleeping that is hung tied from columns or wood, This is called chinchorro in Venezuelan Spanish, which is exactly its Amerindian etymology, a word that in itself tends to replace hammock in the ordinary uses of all Venezuelans.

     The hayaca is another example, this is a food paradoxically related to the Christian Christmas festivities but its etymology in the word is exactly Amerindian, the cachapas, flour tortillas with cheese are just like the hayaca and the hammock named in Amerindian within the Spanish not having a name for them in Spanish, casabe, for example, is a food that all Venezuelans consume exclusively Amerindian and named in Spanish in Amerindian etymology, arepas is another example, also names of objects and elements such as cachicamo carapace, name of the turtle, or chimo, name of tobacco, or curare, name of a preparation or ointment, the three are named within Spanish directly in Amerindian, with no words in Spanish available for them and therefore in the speaks words that have become part of the Spanish word, all these Amerindian words used within Spanish without being reflected in the established language are expressed in a non-Amerindian dialect and cultural idiolects and function at all levels of Venezuelan culture

     But the most impressive thing about these cultural recreations is not the direct use of Amerindian etymology, but rather the way in which an infinite number of new words begin to be invented in Spanish for an unlimited number of senses and social and cultural semantic meanings that are They make intricate the worlds of Venezuelan cultural understandings relative not only to physical things or objects but also to semantic processes specific to those cultural understandings and the ways of giving intrasocial and intercultural meanings in the semiosis of culture.

   It is, in a few words, an infinite number of invented words that do not previously exist in the Hispanic language, all of which are conformed to the phonetic, consonantal and vocalic way of the Amerindian ways of naming. In principle, the phenomenon takes shape in eminently linguistic terms, invented words, some of which seem to preserve or conserve something of old Amerindian words but already very far from the specific form of those in Amerindian words and words which, and these are the most number and proliferation, no longer have any origin in Amerindian languages, but are created in Spanish in the Amerindian way or manner.

     The latter, although from the point of view of a social archeology of the language, would apparently be less relevant for cultural anthropology because they distance themselves from Amerindian etymologies and even being inventions in no way related to them, they are, paradoxically, the most important in terms of cultural anthropology of the market and culture, from the moment that, since they are not conjugations that through inferences lead to precise Amerindian etymologies, the way in which they bring with them gestures, conjugational modes, sounds and other indications of the Amerindian modes of meaning and giving meaning to the world and things, more clearly explains the ancestry of Amerindian culture in the Hispanic imagination and ethos, a relationship that they have as a linguistic phenomenon with the cultural recreation of consumption in the form of allosemiostic recreations of semiosis collected in The form of visual imagery and forms such as the culture of Spanish as the ruling language retains and reproduces within itself a sense of the Amerindian ethos in the modern and contemporary imagination.

     These contritions of words invented by urban dialects offer a wealth of elements that are present both in urban popular markets and throughout society, pod, for example, means anything, it can be an object, an activity, something that was done or is about to be done, give me that pod here, it can refer to an ordinary object, or it can refer to an activity, leave that pod, as if meaning stop what you are doing and pay attention to what we are telling you, it can refer to a communication a topic that is being talked about, what do you think about that pod, or in the form of a question, have you already thought about that pod? Did you finally write that pod? Did you bring me those pods?, so that although it is not an Amerindian word or Precise etymological clues can be inferred from it, its sound, its vowel and consonant conjugations are formed in the Amerindian way to designate things so dissimilar to each other that they can refer to physical things and objects as well as to immaterial, spiritual or other meanings, and at the same time the way in which the word radiates meanings around countless things that are very different from each other, come from the recreation of the Amerindian ethos in the imagination.

   Pana, means best friend, this is my pana, he is my great friend, come here pana, what was pana?, or this is my pana, presenting him to another person, the word extends in its conjugation to panita and bakery in a humorously, it is said here we have a bakery, a group of good friends who talk or share

  Guachafita, a word with an Amerindian phonetic sound, is a relaxing discharge, the moment when people relax or relax and the guachafita is formed, the guachafita is not exactly a party, but it is like a moment of fun or enjoyment through the which a group of friends or acquaintances begins to have fun with what they do and this can be transformed into a moment of enjoyment that can reach the party, the guachafita was formed, a kind of party or relaxed enjoyment began among a group of people .

   Corotos, are the elements and objects that one brings with oneself such as suitcases, but it is used more in references to a number of objects and artifacts that people have stored in disuse, they are the accumulation of things that one does not know what to do with but can also be what one carries and goes with one, put there the Corotos, for example arriving from a trip, corotos, in fact, is a good example, expressed in sociolinguistics of how phonological forms and sound modes of conjugation of consonants and vowels , that is, lexicological residues, of the pronunciation in certain Amerindian languages, persists and is recreated and reinvented in a vocabulary, it would be worth the effort to investigate to what extent they are words that still retain some semantic relationship with vocabularies in Amerindian languages ​​such as, for example, transformations of an original word that contains a part of the new phonetic and semantic transformation, but whether or not it means something from the point of view of a sociolinguistic archeology, something in original etymologies the most relevant thing is that they are transformations, many of which are not can already be understood through a simple comparison between the stability of the language in its convention, and the transformations resulting from its use in speech, first of all, they convey and assimilate gestures and phonetic articulatory modes that, when assimilated into Spanish, are not transformations. of original meanings in the Amerindian language, nor transformations of Spanish in the uses of speech, in fact, no word in the academy of the Spanish language includes corotos - nor any of the words mentioned above and that we will discuss here - as the meaning of objects or tarecos so that it is not a transformation of an originally Spanish word caused by the uses of speech, but neither is it a word whose etymology has a precise semantic origin in the Amerindian language.

  And yet it brings ways of relating consonants and vowels, Amerindian phonetic sounds, thousands of words used in Venezuelan Spanish are the result of these inventions from Amerindian phonetics and other directly Amerindian ones.

   We therefore have at a sociolinguistic level an infinite number of words and etymologies that have formed new formations of the vocabulary of Venezuelan culture which are current, contemporary and current, alive in today's culture, such as cultural recreations of consumption in urban culture through whose study We observed that Amerindian modes persist and are reproduced in non-Amerindian procedures, forms through which Venezuelan culture reinvents its vocabularies, moving towards semantic zones to be designated from Spanish, modes, manners, articulations and phonetic consonant and vowel conjunctions constructed in the Amerindian way. , this fact, contrasted with the reality that there are many Amerindian languages ​​in Venezuela, would of course require doing an archaeological reconstruction of which of these cultural reinventions of consumption simply reinterpret and reinvent Amerindian ways without any longer being related to original words and even What point are they modifications of existing words as we said before, but our emphasis is not only consonantal, vocalic and phonetic in the sense of a way of dragging the tongue and percussing sounds at the labial level, but also on the semantic level, we focus on the fact that these are words that, although invented, bring with them ways of meaning and giving meaning to both the surrounding world and the relationships of intricate infrasenses in the culture that are Amerindians.

   A significant number of words maintain their literal Amerindian meanings as we mentioned before, such as chinchorro as the name of the Amahacas, but others such as coroto maintain Amerindian principles without being Amerindian words. The center of my analysis here is that these reinventions are not so related. Well, to a linguistic matrix they are actually related to the ethological recreation of culture, that is, to the way in which it is redistributed, reconstructed and new modes of cultural ethos are formed.

  This cultural theory risks the thesis that there are threads through which intercultural communication is produced that work from the point of view of semiotics from a field of allosemiosis, which means that there are an infinite number of extraverbal aspects, that is, of a visual and musical sound character, expressed in imagery, co-presence and spatial co-existence in the same territory, the relationship of Amerindian fabrics and utensils with the earth and other telluric techniques, pottery, architecture, and others. processes that influence the fact that one culture assimilates the other into itself as part of it.

      This is not, of course, an extrinsic phenomenon in the sense that there exists in the culture of the ruling language an exogenous relationship through which this material is available, it is an endogenous process since the Amerindian culture is part of what the culture of the ruling language recognizes as its own autochthonity, but from the sociological point of view, as well as from the linguistic point of view, the Amerindian cultures in Venezuela continue to live in their own communities largely as cultures in themselves. self-distinguished and have their own languages ​​so that, per se to this endogenousness, it is also a phenomenon of interculturality

   And despite being something different, I maintain here that from the point of view of the relationship between language structure and asymmetry or structurality, in bilingualism in the United States we experience something similar in relation to ethos and the imaginary.

   The analysis of how North Amerindian cultures are present in the Anglo-Saxon American imaginary and ethos in the United States is not far from this understanding since it is ultimately a similar process.

   The Anglo-American culture, like the Hispanic-Hispanic-American culture in South America, is an ancestrally migratory culture that initially comes from Europe but, being the ruling culture like the Hispanic one in South America, it becomes American in all its cultural senses and from this moment in which the Amerindian culture Americana represents its own autochthonity, we are therefore, both in the north and in the south, Euro-Americans thanks to it and only as an expression of it

    However, in the United States we do not know of a phenomenon similar to the one discussed here from a sociolinguistic point of view. In short, for reasons that are not insignificant, we know little about the ways in which the Amerindian dialects and languages ​​of North America are influencing English. Anglo-Saxon through allosemiotic means such as those discussed here above, we observe a process similar to that analyzed between Spanish and English although, as we said, in Venezuela the majority of Spanish speakers do not speak Amerindian languages, it is rather the latter that tend to to be bilingual.

   In short, in the same way that Anglo-Saxons do not learn Amerindian languages, but rather Spanish, the Hispanic speaker from the south does not learn Amerindian languages, on the other hand, the Spanish-speaking immigrant in the United States learns and speaks English, becoming bilingual, in the same way that the American Amerindian and the South American Amerindian become bilingual, the former speaking English, the latter Spanish.

   In the United States, between English and Spanish, the two cultures are in relationship within the same English-speaking culture, but they are permeated through the relationship between language and culture. I am not referring here to Anglicisms within Spanish or Hispanicisms within English, Although they also exist and are significant, I am referring rather to the fact that the asymmetries of one with respect to the other have a function of redistribution, reconstruction and conformation in the ethos and in the imaginary first within the same culture in which we are bilingual, in our continuous English, as in Anglo-Saxon culture, and second, back to Spanish, in the Hispanic ethos.

   The original etymology does not persist in many of these nomenclatures, but an ideal or an ideality persists through which modern and contemporary culture feels to designate its surrounding world as the culture would do from its value systems or its attitudes towards objects, the areas and the things.

    And this is the center of my essay, more than specific words, it is about the attitude towards language and above all about language towards objects, environments and people, through which the culture of a language feels recreated. and in fact reproduces and recreates within its language the values ​​of the culture of the other language, it is not so much something to be explored in etymologies, even less so, although its vehicle is expressed like this, in phonetic and conjugational modes, but rather of the cultural attitudes of the language of one culture expressed in the other through which the performer of that language, whether we are speaking continuously in English, whether we are doing it in Spanish, or in the case of Venezuela between Spanish and the Amerindian languages, they feel they name the world in one language as it is named in the other, they feel they grasp certain meanings in one language as in the other, it is thus less, in the case of asymmetric relationships, a relationship between languages ​​and more through language, a relationship between cultures, the English of Spanish bilingual speakers is thus permeated by Hispanic attitudes towards the world and conversely, the Spanish of those of us who are Spanish bilingual English speakers is filled with Anglicist cultural attitudes towards the language and towards the relationship between language and the world, it is the values ​​of one culture and the other that are exchanged, forming an ethos and a new imaginary that is born from the ideals that one culture feels as values ​​in the language of the other.

   It also occurs, of course, among Anglo-Saxons who speak Spanish and includes Hispanic ways of making sense of things in native English.

    In both cases the relationship between the structure of the ruling language and the asymmetry with respect to it governs, in one we speak of Anglo-Saxon culture and in the other of Venezuelan culture, but the cultures of the ruling languages ​​do the same with respect to the culture of the language. asymmetrical, they are permeated with it in various ways, recreating it in the ethos.

    Cachucha, for example, like corotos, phonetically seems like an Amerindian word in all aspects of its sound, it means cap, but it is more a transformation of reinvented phonetic modes than a transformation of Spanish as a language through speech, chinchorro, Curiara, guayuco, onoto and totuma are, however, words with a direct origin from the current Amerindian vocabulary and in use by contemporary non-Amerindian Venezuelans, especially chinchorro and guayuco in the same way as hayaca, arepa and casabe.

  Chamo, for example, to say to a small child, is a word that does not exist in Spanish and does not exist in Amerindian languages ​​but is recreated around the phonology of the latter.

   Angry is another example of this type of words. It could be something that is very good, that movie was angry, it was good, and it could be someone who is very angry, I am angry with you because you didn't arrive on time, or this person was angry with someone else, she got angry

   Chiguire is a directly Amerindian word that in all probability retains even the denotation or is at most a very close transformation of the proper name, it is a mouse the size of a very tall dog and the thickness of a pig, its image is finer than that of a mouse or rat, it is a backyard pet like the rabbit can seem like a giant curiel,

      The fuck or the fuck, a fuck is a child, a fuck can be an older child or a young man, but a fuck can also be anyone, leave that fuck, who wants the fuck,

      sifrino or sifrina, is a very light person who perceives himself as superficial or snow, attracted by fashions and not by more justified reasons, he tends to see himself in a certain way of dressing and also a way of intoning the way of speaking and slipping phonetic sounds into an attitude that exacerbates lightness to the point of seeming intentional, also due to body postures, the sifrino or sifrina move according to a social pose but closely related to the tastes and customs of a certain society very attracted by enjoyment and material tastes in general It means a very light or snobbish person but it has a whole expression in social appearances, being a typification resource. People who are not syphrines can often be called syfrinas due to appearances, it can be seen as a pejorative expression but it can also be seen as a sign of glamor and chic or social status and acquire non-pejorative connotations.

  Gafa or gafo, for example, is a usual mode through which the supposed sifrinos whose limits, as I said, tend to be imprecise, qualify those who do not understand the sifrino, gafo or gafa mode as a boring person, in a certain way retrograde, or more precisely chea or cheo, and in that direction balurdo is the worst thing you can say to a person like the opposite of Silfrina

    cool is a happy person, it does not necessarily have to be a person, it can be and often is not an adjective on top of another saying that it is cool, but rather it refers to something or some situation that is pleasant, turns out to be okay , which is welcomed and liked, something cool is something else that is pleasant, that happens to you in a certain way as it should happen in the best supposed or expected way, cool, that's cool, how cool

   Naguara is a directly Amerindian expression that is used to mean that something is good. Balurdo, as I said, is something that is poorly made or that was incomplete, this balurdo or simply to say balurdo can refer to a situation or something that was done or brought, it means that it was done without desire or that it was half incomplete, it tends to It can be seen as a synonym for unfinished, but it is not necessarily negative, but rather it means not paying attention to it or leaving it that way and not continuing it, or not doing it at all.

        The catire or the catira, one who is blond and one who is blonde, is an excellent example of the phonetic modes of the ways of putting the tongue and sliding the consonants and vowels in the sounds of the Amerindian languages ​​but to designate exactly the opposite. , a blonde or a blonde.

      fly, for example, is a word that is used in everyday life continuously to warn another person that they must be attentive and careful, fly with that, can refer to anything, the same to something of work in the professional field, fly with what you say, fly with what you write, fly with the afternoon meeting, fly with the visit that comes tomorrow, or it can refer to ordinary areas, fly with where you park the car.

     being on a good note with everyone, a good note, is another of these constrictions of language that are entirely incomprehensible without getting deeply into the culture that, like all the previous ones, will never be found included in a dictionary of the language or in its grammar, or in its etymologies nor in its lexicon or vocabulary and it means to be good people, a good person

       Pea, means when someone is drunk for which the word scratching can also be used, the scratcher is only a little dizzy, the one who has a peo is very drunk, but the word peo is also used in reference to the fact that a tangle has formed in a social situation or some type of problem that can be an argument or something difficult to fix, sucking socks is a way of being very generous towards another person, like pulling their balls, sucking socks is complimenting someone a lot or going after them insistently to get something, beaten can be someone who worked a lot and was very exhausted, beaten, exhausted, chimbo is also an Amerindian phonetic word, it is like balurdo, but less bad, more acceptable.

   None of the words that we have discussed exist in the Spanish language, they are all urban dialects and idiolects that are used continuously and they all have an Amerindian sound.

      The same thing previously analyzed occurs in the markets from where I came to my observation, not having first distanced myself from myself and my words in it, since it is through the urban popular markets that the Amerindian culture is reproduced in the non-Amerindian culture, generating recreations. cultural in various directions.

  An infinite number of foods from the Amerindian tradition such as cachapas, arepas, hayacas, and other varieties of products are today produced by Venezuelan families that are not of Amerindian origin, as well as in general by many Venezuelans, thus giving continuity to a tradition. outside the geographic and community enclaves in which Venezuelan Amerindian cultures live today.

     The urban popular markets, and with respect to this point also the less urban ones aimed at rural areas, are themselves the best expression for the understanding and analysis of how this phenomenon occurs, in which products that have been prepared according to tradition are sold. and Amerindian procedures but that are no longer directly elaborated by them, but are culturally recreated from a distant urban imaginary that interprets Amerindian culture and reinserts it at other levels in the contemporary forms of cultural reproduction of a visual and material culture that is through its services, it immerses itself in the worlds of daily life of the entire Venezuelan society, ceramics that supply tableware for the kitchen, vessels for storage, cups, elements for domestic culture, fabrics that range from clothing to blankets and quilts, amahacas, among other artifacts whose material and visual expression also communicates the Amerindian intangible culture, that is, its spiritual and ethical values ​​as well as its relationship to indigenous sources of Venezuelan culture in its two forms, made and commercialized.

     We must distinguish here two types of reproduction, one that refers, as in language, to ways in which non-Amerindian culture reproduces within itself Amerindian culture but reinvented in non-Amerindian expressions that range from ways of making, weaving, , embroidery, sewing, etc., made in the Amerindian way by non-Amerindians but preserving and preserving from them an artisanal or culinary tradition, or entirely reinvented but that like the words preserve gestures of the Amerindian way in forms of culture and visual and material not Amerindians, or, as happens continually, in many of these markets, direct reproduction of original Amerindian products, that is, even today made by Amerindian communities, but which circulate, are distributed and sold in non-Amerindian markets, we cannot exclude here, of course, that directly Amerindian markets also exist, that is, in which the sellers are themselves Amerindians who sell their merchandise directly.

    Focusing attention initially on how popular urban markets are themselves cultural recreations not only of global and regional market consumption, but also of native ethnic cultures, allows us to understand in what ways this culture is reproduced at the same time as in Ultimately, direct Amerindian-made products are also available in the same type of markets with the only difference that they are usually obtained in regions closer to where the communities live.

   In fact, on the one hand, the non-Amerindian culture that reproduces Amerindian traditions and procedures in preparation, in many cases comes to really know their art of preparation with great precision, especially in the food field according to which foods are not very different from one another. of Amerindian origin made by non-Amerindian people of what they directly make, on the other hand, only through these markets, can geographical dislocations be understood, finding products from one region in another region that is at the opposite end of the country.

    At the same time, as I said, it is not only about products, but also about etymologies and forms of speech, the sociolinguistic analysis of Amerindian culture in the speech performance of Venezuelan culture in general and the specific ways in which that phonetic culture is expressed. in the markets.

   It is in this sense that popular urban markets, although essentially Christian and far from being conglomerates for the direct study of Amerindian culture, nevertheless offer an ideal vehicle for the elaboration of a hermeneutics and cultural theory that truly understands the cuts , the disjunctions, the rearticulations, the spaces of indetermination, the places of reconfiguration and the refigurations in the imaginary through which the Venezuelan Amerindian culture can be discussed in two ways, spread and disseminated throughout the length and breadth of the culture. non-Amerindian Venezuelan, while also being understood directly in the community enclaves in which they live.

   The analysis of how the configurations of popular urban markets redistribute images and with it the reproduction of the legacy of Amerindian culture offers a clear and clear example of how the theoretical and empirical cutting of markets for sociological and cultural anthropological research benefits and it helps the hermeneutic theory of culture as well as the analysis of one of its poles, that of Amerindian culture, among other things, also because the market is in itself a spatial way of entering into a relationship with the cultures that it offers in itself. in its very phenomenology a unique modality of participant observation.

       In fact, when one comes into direct contact in the succession of days with this form of cultural recreation of consumption through which visual culture, as well as phonetic and etymological culture, and Amerindian food culture are reproduced in the of markets that recreate it but where the producer and reproducer of that culture is no longer that one, but people of any other ethnic characteristics within the Venezuelan culture, one can have the impression, for those cultures in which the Amerindian culture was notably extinct as may be the case of the Caribbean and some parts of Mexico, that these are Amerindian traditions to which the contemporary present is related in the form of archeology, that is, as contemporary interpretations and reinterpretations of a past in extinction.

    In Venezuela it is not about this, unlike the archaic cultures that endure in the form of archeology discourses and unlike the forms of archeology of Amerindian culture in other parts of the Caribbean, Amerindian communities in Venezuela have a contemporary expression as geographically located community social enclaves, that is, they are living cultures that coexist today within the same geography, we are talking here, of course, of the Wayues, with their Arawak languages, but also of the Yuxpas, the Baris, the Amerindians of Zulia, the Añis and further south the Yanomami

     To come into contact with the direct production of the Amerindians, you have to move to the geographical areas in which their communities are located, but at the same time, in extreme places in the country, there are markets for direct products from extrapolated areas, that is, products in direct that it is assumed that they belong to an ethnic group from a certain geographical area, consumed in geographical areas of extreme remoteness, very distant from those reservoirs,

    In the extreme east of the country, in the culture of the plains, weaving and baskets are consumed that come from the extreme west, that is, from its geographical antipodes, and this occurs throughout the length and breadth of the country in such a way that, thanks to the popular markets, urban markets, including the Freeway markets as well as the interprovincial ones in the terminals and on the highways, one gets the impression that without them the recreated culture that these markets generate and reinvent could hardly be reproduced as a visual, phonetic and food culture.

   The visual, food and craft productions of the Amerindian culture including pottery, textiles and ceramics can be obtained first-hand, I was in several of these direct markets several times, and without the slightest doubt they are dazzlingly beautiful and beautiful, such as the popular markets from Mérida in which I got direct Amerindian products that I later brought to Caracas for my own home, ceramics, tableware, cups, fabrics and amahacas.

    This direct material culture, needless to say, is surprising for the richness and fineness of its fabrics and its visual symbolisms, its enamels and its cooked foods, moving for its beauty and authenticity, it speaks of a vitality and a rebirth. , of an exponential boom without limits in many cases and on a greater average stimulated above all by the boom that popular free markets make possible and guarantee, the economic incentive that their sales mean so that the Amerindian cultures that have protected and conserved their traditions continue producing its material and visual culture

    Venezuela is an immensely large country, getting a product from Mérida or Zulia in the plains is almost like getting a product from San Francisco in Texas or Louisiana, areas so distant that there could be several countries between them. And despite this, it is precisely these markets that make these extrapolated presences possible, products from Mérida and the Andes in Caracas, from Zulia in the east, etc. although we should not exclude that there are people who drive around the entire country looking for them in their cars. where you know they are.

       The concept of contemporary ethos is the only one that offers support for a comprehensive cultural theory of these phenomena, both sociolinguistic, phonetic, etymological and related to material and immaterial culture in the markets from the visual and sound, intercorporeal and intergestural point of view of a kinetic and proxemic.

   In short, I am referring to the fact that the Phenomenology of markets and their hermeneutics must also include a proxemics and a kinetics in which I mostly base my field work both in the sense of research and in the methodological sense.

    For example, the Wayues are a precise cultural formation with well-defined communities in Zulia between Venezuela and Colombia, which itself is susceptible to analysis and study that sees and discusses it in its own contours as the reality of a specific social and linguistic group. but beyond that, without the need to study its circumstances, the visual culture, the material culture and the immaterial Wayuu culture participate and are a living component in the ethos and in the imaginary of modern Venezuelan contemporary culture, once analyzed in this The same happens with the rest of the bilingual and multilingual Venezuelan groups, so that we look at them according to their cultural resonances that are present in the ethos and imaginary of contemporary and modern Venezuelan culture.

    This understanding, which from a certain point of view could be considered to ignore or turn its back, for example, on the situation of Amerindian cultures in Venezuela, specifically ignoring the plurilingual and bilingual character of many Venezuelan communities, proposes, on the contrary, to discuss how values cultural aspects of those participate in the general ethos of contemporary Venezuelan culture in an ascending manner in their own structures of ruling culture, it assumes at the same time that one culture is part of the other and that one and the other cannot be studied extrinsically or by separately, but at most it is required to make cuts from the research through which the relationships between the interpretant and the structure in cultural theory can be worked on.

   For example, if we take as a parameter the Wayuu culture of the Guajira Peninsula on the border between Zulia and Colombia with its Arowak origin, its bilingual character, Arawak language and Wayuunaiki and Lower dialects, and its rich and impressive colors of weaving, basketry and ceramics, We want to develop a project aimed at its stimulation and direct study in Wayuu communities, it will be necessary to make a cut that removes the precepts according to which the Wayuu culture is externalized as something isolated in itself, failing which, for example, privileging the point from the point of view of bilingual Wayues who have studied in non-Wayue colleges, schools and universities and who have preserved their relationship with their community, on the other hand, in the understanding and study of the Wayuu culture it will be necessary to recognize that their culture is expressed upwardly in forms that are structural to their culture and that from the moment their markets and general markets are related, it is less about thinking about conservation and more about thinking about cultural reproduction.

      But we can make other cuts because ultimately it is not a question of, on the one hand, necessarily referring only to bilingualism or necessarily dispensing with a cut that focuses on the Wayue communities themselves; if it is the latter, the cut could pay attention in the research to the relationship between the Wayue languages, the symbolic and visual artifacts produced by their material culture and the way in which the Wayues represent for themselves the external relationship to their culture from the moment you propose a research on the Wayuu culture and you externalize it to others, both the Wayuu culture and the cultural phenomena related to it inscribe you in the inscriptions that they already bring with them of what it means and in what ways previous experiences or projects are usually undertaken that put their attention on they.

    You must foreground the understanding that from the moment attention falls on them they begin to speak a language that they have identified or incorporated as the language that in their cultural proximity refers to them and they begin to speak that language, to avoid those common places that will once place you in front of the Wayuu as inscribed in the inscriptions that they bring and have about what it means to want to study or know the Wayuu culture and that will once decide the way in which they will speak about themselves face to face. You would have to start a research on, to use the symbolism that I discussed before with the face mask among the phenomenal and the living sculptures in New Orleans, to objectify the symbolism of those face masks when in fact the face mask face is contemplated as a symbolism within the visual expressions of the Wayuu face in its painting, let us remember that the face mask is not a disguise or a concealment of identity, nor is putting on the symbolism of something else in the form of a parody. of the face in favor of its replacement, but rather of a mask that is created with the face itself, that is, showing the face, this idea of ​​showing the face, however, in its double meaning, saying something, taking the word, but also to offer it, to give it in courtesy or attention, it itself involves the fact that culture brings with it the memory of your inscriptions in the body of its own and define your research by making these understandings inclusive in order to win in your favor wayues that, for the reasons explained, either contribute to you doing your research as a critique of previous representations or, conversely, to being able to avoid them by avoiding as much as possible the limitations of those inscriptions to immerse yourself in dimensions that make a more attractive cut viable for you. Your research examining how the representations that the Wayues make of the representations about them are yet very possibly much more interesting than those representations themselves.

     If the Wayuu culture is capable of producing a material and visual culture, immaterial also included in it, which has similar structural ancestry in the cultural reproduction of the ruling cultures around it, Venezuela and Colombia both through language and through material goods with great probability they themselves will have a reading, that women have a main matrilineal place, that they are harassed by the gas industries and oil pipelines and that they are affected by border traffic weakening their culture will clearly be commonplaces that you must avoid, not because they are things that are unimportant but because clearly if the Wayues talk about it usually to the culture that externalizes them, they will have a lot to do with ways of relating to the Wayuu culture that they have typified as externalized ways of addressing to them from which you will want to differentiate yourself and with respect to which you as a researcher will have very little to offer

      Venezuela, on the one hand, shares as a country with the Andes and, therefore, in a part of its Andean culture, with the rest of the continent, having a South American perspective that is not and moves away from the Central American perspective, unlike Colombia, which still maintains a Central American relationship and if you want, intermediation and translation between Central America and South America, from the Venezuelan culture that Central American perspective that is still significant in Colombia is now very far away, so much so that its remoteness and non-belonging to Venezuelan culture becomes significant. Central America, the remoteness of Mexico and the rest of the Central American countries, is expressed in Venezuela only in its relationship with Colombia which precisely lies as a cultural difference in the fact that Venezuela is already internalized from the Andes to the south, on the one hand, while on the other hand, its relationship in the north to the Caribbean is not only continental land, the northern line of a vast and extensive South American continent that reaches Brazil.

    This sense of being the northern expression of that vast continent no longer related to Central America is not, however, experienced only as the northern expression of that extension from which a way of seeing and understanding the rest of the planet is configured, since it is not It is a culture cut between the Andes at one end and a narrow formation that runs in parallel around the Caribbean, being the north from the south, but rather it is a culture that submerges and is internalized towards the south or more clearly that emerges from the south and that is experienced in subjectivity from the bottom up, due to being a dry land of a much more extensive continental formation on all sides, the sea is experienced as a limit that is to the north into which it flows, The phenomenological genesis of culture in subjectivity and in the hermeneutic plot of its configuration comes from the south and from the Andes, covering almost half of the continent towards the deep south, sharing territories with Brazil, including the Amazon.

      In fact, in the same way that the United States lives in subjectivity the sea in the south of the Gulf of Mexico, assimilating that sea to continental subjectivity as the southern limit of an extensive formation of continental land, the character of continental land Seen from the south and from the Andes, it governs and dominates the ways in which that northern limit to the Caribbean is metabolized into subjectivity in Venezuelan culture and the ways in which the Caribbean is in it. The analysis of the processes of subjectivity related to this type of consideration of geographical issues generally tends to become pluralized as specific regional phenomena are analyzed.

     The matrices that relate Andean reading, South American reading, plains and desert reading, and Caribbean reading find dissimilar expressions in literature and the arts, but the Venezuelan Caribbean is incorporated and metabolized by a continental mainland subjectivity that is Andean by on the one hand, South American in its greatest extensions towards the border with Brazil and which is also a decisive component of Venezuelan culture, plains towards the east along extensive cultural and social formations that extend to the point that only Guayana remains between Venezuela and the Atlantic, Venezuelan culture therefore extends from the Andean mountain range of the Pacific to the very middle of South America from the south, to Guyana in plains culture towards the Atlantic, without excluding extensive deserts and the area of ​​the great savanna and Ciudad Bolívar.

    It is a continental mainland culture in large areas that is defined more by the relationship between mountain ranges and plains than by the relationship between the mainland and the Caribbean. The mountain ranges-plains relationship dominates the cultural imaginary of Venezuelan culture because the majority Part of the country is mounted on immense elevations, the Venezuelan Andes access the 3,500 kilometers of snow-capped altitude and Caracas, the main metropolis of the country and one of the most thriving, developed and modernized metropolises incorporated into technological and economic globalization not only of all South America but even the entire developing global world is elevated over fifteen hundred meters high, developed on a plateau surrounded by another thousand meters higher,

      For example, the Pacific Sea makes up the entire main coast of California at the end of San Francisco, but it is not assimilated to subjectivity as an eastern perspective despite the belonging of some Pacific islands to the United States, but rather it is assimilated as a continental reading from the north and from New Mexico, while the Florida Sea, due to its character as a peninsula that extends into the Caribbean, is experienced in subjectivity more directly related to the Caribbean, that is, to the universe of archipelagos and islands. continental that makes up the Caribbean due to the fact that, although it is a peninsula of that mainland continent, it has very close coasts on all sides, at only one of its ends it does not have a sea and the rest remains, although as land subjectivity. firm related in some way to that other surrounded by sea on all sides that represents island subjectivities.

     Unlike the relationship of Texas with it, the southern sea that assimilates it to subjectivity as a southern limit of the continental mainland that receives its echoes from the mainland's relationship with Mexico, despite the existence of small towns in the west such as Kimas, Galveston and Corpus Cristi that generate a fresh and fishing culture around the sea, the knowledge of these cultures as they are in their lifestyles, architecture, aesthetics and traditions makes explicit how, however, they are obviously assimilations of the sea to subjectivity from the point of view of Anglo-Saxon traditions native to Texas, for establishing several comparisons about different ways in which subjectivity and geography intertwine.

Grades.

My experiences with Amerindian heritage in Venezuelan dialects and idiolects were all obtained empirically in the neoliberal capitalist period of Venezuela during which I emigrated to that culture, among other additional ones: languages,Rumor, Wake up, He came, pemón,Eat the bread, Japreria, Carina, Pemón, Wanai o mapoyo, Yavarana, He's a child, Yukpa, Live, Dry, Saliva, Piaroa,Yeral, Sanema, Yanomami,Yanam, among other

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Textual inference: The object language

Semiotics, sociology and semantics of culture

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

      At the turn of more than half a century after having exhaustively developed the program of semiotics as a rigorously formed science, Eco, the absent structure: introduction to semiotics, treatise on general semiotics, semiotics and philosophy of language, Barthes, The System of fashion, Rhetoric of the image, Todorov, theory of the symbol, symbolism and interpretation, genres of discourse, among other authors who have shown the precisions of semiotics and its possibilities around empirical studies, the mass media, advertising, rhetoric of the image, the semiotics of the visual, the iconic sign, the semiotics of cinema and architecture, proxemics, among other areas that semiotics has ventured into, one comes to the conclusion that just as semiotics has proven to be a science highly specific in its own methods and cuts, the sign, the indication, the icon, the interpretant, the connotation, the denotation, the syntagm, the paradigm, culture as communication, culture as code, this has however, due to that concentrates its efforts around areas mostly related to our own Western culture, taking a distance from ourselves that at times it seems that our culture is dissected as if it were something dead instead of something alive, this has been, however, the weakest and most vulnerable side of the semiotic project,

    Although since Peirce, isolating signs and understanding them as units in themselves, put an end to rationalization processes that were essential in terms of enriching our knowledge about language and culture, semiotics is in fact essential for the study of language. in contemporary art—--without excluding Peirce's own vision still present in Derrida, that our thoughts are also signs, on the other hand the semiotic program applied at an empirical level to his objects of study, or to define it in a strictly semiotic language to its object languages, they have also split the sign of social hermeneusis in a way that in its generality, as I said in my essay epistemology and performativity becomes neurotic

   But despite this criticism that requires us to retheorize semiotics, when we take the concept of culture as a parameter we reach the conclusion by listening to existing and possible methodologies, that with all its shortcomings, it has not yet existed in the entire tradition of thought. , a discipline that has until now been more suitable for understanding culture than semiotics

   What then is the challenge we have if semiotics has gone too far in dissecting our own culture in a way that tends to see it dead, removing it from the hermeneutic fabric and the sensory flow in which it develops as an immediacy of world and experience, but at the same time It is the only science that has shown to be able to really deal with culture, while on the other hand or in the opposite direction, anthropology, called to be or defined as the one that should deal with culture, has mostly done the opposite, dealing with cultures that are not our own cultures, the study of which lacks the knowledge, rigor, richness and methodological specificity that semiotics offers to study it.

   Semiotics, studying our own culture, has shown to be the science in which we have learned the most about what culture is and above all about how to study it with scientific rigor, while paradoxically, at the same time it has returned to us a dead image of our own culture. own culture, anthropology, on the contrary, which was announced as a science of culture, has not had rigorous scientific methods to study culture, and has thus left us with a distorted and invented image – fictions or, as Stephen told them, fantasies--from cultures different from ours

    Seventy years, more than half a century, have passed since Levis Strauss gave his first lecture proclaiming relations between anthropology and linguistics, maintaining that anthropology would be semiology, going so far as to say this in two paragraphs of his inaugural class for the chair of social anthropology at the French school

   which is social anthropology, no one, I believe, has been closer to defining it—even if it is a preterition than Ferdinand de Saussure, when, presenting linguistics as part of a science yet to be born, he reserves for the latter the name semiology and attributes to it as its object the study of the life of signs within social life. Saussure himself did not anticipate our point of view, when he compared language on that occasion with writing, the alphabet of the deaf and dumb, symbolic rites, forms of courtesy or military signals, etc., to another place in the same class to say, it seems that we are dealing here with objects and not signs, the sign being according to Peirce's famous definition, what replaces something for someone, which then replaces something made of stone and for whom?

      The same seventy years have passed without Levi Strauss making a single semiotic analysis of a sign, an icon, an indication, an object, an artifact or a text throughout his books, without a single anthropologist of those who did it. have happened until today I have made a semiotic analysis of something in culture.

    Seventy years taking linguistics and language as a parameter to create metaphors and homological analogies through which, like the mold for the sewing kit, language and linguistics are used to talk about any other thing or phenomenon in which in no way In this case, neither signs nor languages ​​are analyzed, but rather anything else in their place, and in no case through scientifically semiological procedures.

     How is this explained?

     Why has a science that has been announced within the same parameter of semiotics never carried out semiotics analysis?

     It is surprising that the French anthropologist has come to make this statement in two paragraphs and that we do not find a single analysis of semiotics about anything in culture in all his work, nor about signs cut out on themselves such as indications, icons, nor about codes, nor about culture as a text, it is more the myth and fable that most anthropologists have made of linguistics, not just the recognition that it is the only social science that properly bears the name of science, its same continuous references to Jakobson and phenology, to trubetzkoy and to certain cyberneticians and mathematicians, but in the sense of not entering into semiotic analysis, something about which there is a vague and distant mythologized sense

    As I argued in one of my essays about the canoe and Malinowski, when thinking about the museum, one immediately responded that taking the canoe to the museum was removing it from its ethnographic reality, because Malinowski did not ask himself, as filmmakers do when creating a rectangle with the fingers as a way of framing a fragment of reality that will later be recorded with the camera and separated from that reality as a cinematic sign, the inverse, which could cut out the reality that he had in front of him as if he were looking at it with the eyes of the museum, Bringing the parameter of the museum to field work in reverse?

  because he did not think that he had in front of him, a sign, a seme, a denotative and connotative unit, a syntagm, a text through which, cut out against the background of the rest of the culture, the semantic elucidations of the culture could be made legible. as a text, relating that sign text - the canoe - with other cultural texts in the rigorous form of a semiotics of signs/texts and then putting that sign/text in an intertextual relationship with other differential signs/texts and with other textual stratifications with respect to the culture cut out as text, between the sign/text cut out in its differential unity, signifier/signified/substance of the expression or morphe if they are not expressive signs since a canoe is not the same as a tattoo, a pottery vessel than a religious writing, a figurative visual icon than a fabric, a narrative seme, cut out as a unit against the background of a collection of material extracted from oral memory than scriptural or inscriptural inscriptions on a house or a pyramid, a canoe than a chinchorro

   Isn't the canoe ultimately taken out of its ethnographic reality and displayed in the museum for the purposes of the strange visiting spectator a sign in the strict sense defined by Peirce? I put here, again, as in my book, the correlate of the world, the example of the gayo on the roof of a house, which moves in one direction or the other as the wind blows, the movement of the rooster being a sign of the direction the wind has, and if one does not want to remove the canoe from its ethnographic reality, one cannot Is it perhaps obvious that the opposite can be done, bringing the synecdoche of the eye that cuts out the sign in the museum to field work as a way of reading that sign there in the culture without removing it from its ethnographic reality?

   The phenomenological sociology of culture has the task of dealing with this great void or more precisely with these two great voids, to reestablish our own culture in the living hermeneusis where semiotics has given it to us dead, and to establish the semiotics that are required in the research methodology of any culture understood as a text, retheorizing culture in terms for which anthropology as we know it has shown to be unprepared.

      In assuming the challenge that we have set for ourselves in this research, we start from two premises: first, we must, on the one hand, renew semiotics, completely rediscuss its limits and scope, modify significant elements within its general configuration, explore and elucidate, making it explicit, new ones. scope for it, retheorize some of its precepts, but at the same time, second, we must accept semiotics as a discipline previously formed around certain scientific premises.

   We actually start from the understanding and position that semiotics is more than a field, it is a discipline, we consider that this discipline strictus sensus has its own epistemological delimitations, that is, in philosophy of science, methodological, procedures and methods of research, ontological, related to the status of its elements and teleological, related to its reason for being, as well as a well-established disciplinary relationship between the subject of knowledge and the object of the latter,

   These constraints that have defined semiotics as a discipline, from its initial formulations, Peirce and Saussure, to its later promoters, Eco, Todorov, Barthes, among others, have achieved sufficient autonomy to establish its character as a discipline, as much or more , in reality much more defined than well-defined disciplines such as sociology and psychology and much more than others less well defined such as anthropology, at the same time, semiotics maintains a feedback relationship with linguistics, but it is a different discipline from Linguistics shares with the latter the fact that, unlike sociology, psychology or anthropology, it does not use language as a pattern, guideline or analogical reference to examine other phenomena that are not language but that could be susceptible to be analyzed as if they were language or in the manner of the latter, semiotics, like linguistics, is not a science according to language about other things, it is itself a science about language, but with respect to the latter it establishes sufficiently different delimitations as to be another science of language different from linguistics, at the same time, it shares with the philosophy of language, in which it has more than half of its roots—especially if we examine that the definition of a sign was already and repeatedly in Aristotle as much as we also have it in Hegel, relationships between language and reality, cognition and reality that we can say are the founders of semiotics.

    In fact, many of Peirce's analyzes that led him to define semiotics have their origin, unlike Saussure, not in distinctions internal to linguistics such as those of language and speech, but rather in strictly philosophical questions of logic such as question about how the relationship between substance and non-substance is defined, which defines the relationship between the name and the thing, between the subject and the predicate, between language and reality, was, in fact, after reflection on these relations that at a given moment Peirce realized that the sign was something in itself separate with a substance that maintained with respect to its object precise relations of reflection on the one hand, the representatement, of reference and indication on the other - the ground and of translation its relationship to another sign as a condition of the meaning of each sign, as the one who translates it,

   All these distinctions through which the indexical sign could be distinguished from the iconic, the symbolic and other modalities, were born from logical observations on ways of naming and functioning the qualifying elements that differentiate an object from a world such as For example, the relationship between adjectives and identifying principles of perception of the object due to its qualities such as color or certain redundant elements.

     In this way, on the side of the relationship between language and reality, semiotics deals with articulations that are outside the disciplinary territory of linguistics, at the same time that it deals with an area of ​​philosophy that philosophy itself even where it is philosophy of language does not adopt all its dimensions and possibilities, certainly the analytical philosophy of language asks about the relationship between language and reality, nominalism and cognition, as well as the relationships with reference, but not to make it an investigation about that language in itself, even less about concrete empirical languages, issues such as, for example, the relationship between denotation and connotation, are strictly sensus the disciplinary domain of semiotics and semiotic concepts that do not correspond to the field of linguistics, the same as the The relationship between the phrase and the paradigm is specifically semiotic, it is also strictly semiotic and non-linguistic, the investigation of the code, as well as, above all, the pragmatics of decoding, that is, of language located in a pragmatics of communication that does not study it. in itself towards its interior, but only to the extent that examined in accordance with the code, that language is decodable and therefore engages in a communication system between message-sender and receiver, unlike the linguistics that deals with of notions such as the phoneme, the lexeme, the morpheme or of relationships such as those between syntax and grammar that are properly internal to the language.

   Unlike sociology and anthropology, especially the latter, which uses language as an analogy in order to understand things that are not language as if they were, semiotics studies language itself, theoretically and empirically concrete forms of language, but unlike linguistics, not towards the inside of that language that is self-absorbed and separated from the rest of the social world, but rather as that language is reexamined or reconsidered once it is understood within a pragmatics of communication between code and decoding.

   These precisions and distinctions are required so as not to presuppose that semiotics is not separated from linguistics due to the fact that both share the sign as their center of gravity and main object, something that would be detrimental to the autonomy of semiotics, in In reality, the autonomy of semiotics as a discipline passes through different very precise lines,

   With regard to the sign, this difference is explained through the differentiation between merely alphabetic signs made up of speech and writing, --which in semiotics we also study but as a theory of text and semantics--towards extra-alphabetic and non-alphabetic signs. alphabets of very diverse type and nature, so that, sharing the concept of sign, we speak of two very different notions of signs, that of alphabetic linguistics referring to writing and speech, and this of semiotics, relating to that sign. as text and semantics, or to any form of the sign from natural signs, through extra verbal signs,

   On this side, however, semiotics has to be retheorized and expanded, as I have said repeatedly elsewhere, extending into the field of a phenomenological sociology that must encompass all forms of the sign, not only those that differentiate symptoms as signs, relative to certain somatic meanings, of natural signs and extraverbal signs,

   It is important to distinguish that the concept of extraverbality, because its definition is with respect to the verbal, leads to areas that are dependent not on the verbal itself, but on the verbal as non-verbal, outside of that dyadic dimension of antinomy. Between two forms, signs function in the everyday and social world in intersubjective spheres and in spheres of relations of meaning and social meanings in a great variety of spheres that move far beyond a distinction between the verbal and the extraverbal and beyond as well. of proxemics and kinesics, beyond the calls for languages

    Once the pre-given spatiality of the social world has been restored, the space of our social interactions is full of processes of coding and decoding, of interpretation and, above all, of elucidations in the scope of which the pragmatics of inference, deduction, and explanation are articulated. and the understanding through which certain principles of semiotics, still disciplinary but extended beyond what previously existing semiotics have studied,

   This, of course, has consequences that return to semiotics, retheorizing some of its bases and principles, but it is coherent with main elements of the semiotic program, without risking its disciplinary resources. Relations between sociology and semiotics not previously raised nor on the side of sociology nor on the side of semiotics but that require retheorizing certain aspects of both traditions to be put into relationship.

   Returning to the device of this brief necessary detour, we arrive here by elucidating that, by sharing the concept of sign with linguistics, this in no way subordinates semiotics to linguistics; on the other hand, as we said, we also have the concept of sign in philosophy from its origins.

   Distinguished from the side of the sign in the terms explained...it does not look towards the interior of the language as an alphabetic language, but towards the relationship between that interior and a pragmatic external to it in which that language is located in effective communication and constrained to practical dynamics of decoding, codification and elucidation and distinguished on the side of the relationship between language and reality, it does not deal with this relationship merely as a cognitive or nominal issue, although it includes them – denotation, connotation, reference, referent, for example. For example, they are forms of that cognitive-nominal question--as occurs in the philosophy of language, but specifically as regards that relationship, it refers to an empirical realm of reality.

   It is not, then, that in semiotics we do not study languages ​​in themselves, in fact, there is only semiotics where we study language in themselves and within them, only that, unlike linguistics, we do not study them considering them in isolation. , but rather we return to them as if we were returning to them after having considered them embedded in a pragmatic situation of communication so that we look inside them and objectify their internal forms having previously considered them interlocked in a fabric of communication.

   In semiotics we do not consider language as a separate static structure whose dynamics have to be found from that internal structure but, conversely, we return to the interiority of what languages ​​are in themselves once we have previously considered them for what they are. weaves them into the warp of a communication situation

   Semiotics in this sense is a theoretical-empirical science whose empiricity is not the same as linguistics in the autonomous interior constitutive of alphabetic language, nor as in sociology in that which makes the properly social, or the subjective interior as in psychology, or culture considered outside the scope of the pragmatics of communication, as in anthropology, does not look at the single relationship between language and reality, but at the triad that completes that relationship with a decoding, thus returning to the analysis of language in its being. in itself and in its interiority to study it as a language once it has been considered from the decoding process. On this side, however, semiotics also requires retheorizations that extend its scope which at the same time, as in the previous example it renews and modifies it, and conversely, the areas related to sociology, which these extensions presuppose, have a scope that resizes and renews perspectives and horizons of sociology understood as phenomenological sociology.

   Once our research has been elucidated, on the one hand, it presupposes a retheorization that renews semiotics, disregarding many of its previous meanings, but that at the same time maintains its disciplinary limits, we are in a position to establish the distinctions of our research with respect to previous perspectives of it.

   We do not in fact consider semiotics a field unlike Umberto Eco who understands its field dimension and that other disciplinary dimension as ambiguous, although we do share with Eco a distinction between the lower and upper threshold of semiotics, although we consider that distinctions relative to points of contact and points of difference around the natural sciences, are all dispensable,

   At the same time, we agree that the concept of code is fundamental and constitutive of semiotics, as well as its affirmation that it is the code that relates semiotics to the study of culture, but we think that the concept of text is as or more important for semiotics than the concepts of sign and code and that to the same extent semiotics more than a field in the sense of saying the field of semiotics, that is, itself as a field, is stricto sensus a discipline and that its relationship to the concept of field is not given in that field that it constitutes or forms, - nor a field that is something substantial or that is substance in the world - but rather in that its empirical dimension with respect to culture requires of field work as we have this concept in sociology

   The field work that is part of semiotics or that expresses its empirical dimension is therefore not properly one made up of empirical-experimental relationships, as occurs with social and clinical psychology, nor by the definition of prior spatialities such as, for example, the social group, the city, the company or the viewer in sociology or the village in anthropology, although as we will see these things can also be territories for empirical studies of semiotics, what makes semiotic field work in its specificity are the concepts of communication. and text, situationally situated in the same terms in which situational micro sociology is positioned, semiotics has its field work around social situations of communication in which relationships of coding and decoding, inference and deduction, elucidation and explanation intervene. , as well as in the understanding of social and cultural texts in their both intersubjective and communicative dimensions.

  The above, as we said, does not disdain or ignore the old areas considered for semiotic research, such as the mass media, advertising, art, rhetoric, proxemics, kinesics, paralanguages, only that it resituates through the theorization of those same specificities that we have discussed before and reconsidered from the broader, also disciplinary, field of phenomenological sociology, --the latter is certainly the one that integrates, summarizes and systematizes that relationship that constrained semiotics to pragmatics but making it depend on the sign and in general on the substance,

  One of the limitations and weaknesses of the semiotic tradition, we had previously mentioned as a weakness and limit of its way of excluding the living tissue of culture through neurotic dissections that treated culture and society as dead, is that of its traditional and habitual subordination. to substance and substantialism, something that certainly does not escape all those who in the past have dedicated disciplinary treatises to it.

   Substantialism and attachment to substance is in fact a vice or evil that semiotics carries from its very origin due to the predominance of the latter in the work of its first founders, both Peirce, Morris and Saussure, all three were substantialists. and a good part of the limitations that kept semiotics dependent on the structuralist study dissected of isolated signs according to their component elements as well as dependent on a pragmatics that I call corsets, that is, constrictive straitjackets around simplified relationships. conceived as abstracted logical formal models or as studies of simple dyadic and triadic propositions, it is related to this substantialism that crossed its traditional development as a limitation, in fact we still have the same substantialism in eco, barthes and Todorov, in my opinion, three classic figures in the revival and development of semiotics in the 20th century.

   At the opposite extreme of anthropology, of all anthropologies that exist to date, semiotics does not define its epistemological contours, that which gives it its foundation as a specific science and discipline, in the relationship between the subject of knowledge and the object of knowledge that , as Levis Strauss said, it must be sufficiently removed from the culture of the subject to be formed as the absolute other of the subject, in the same sense, unlike analytical philosophy as we have it in positivism and logical neopositivism, including neoempiricism. , as well as unlike in general the traditional presupposition about what separates the subject from the object, semiotics as a discipline establishes a completely different relationship, establishes not an object of study for the subject but an object language, completely dismantling with this, the parameter traditional object, especially as it occurs in anthropology

   The concept of object language thus plays, together with the code, the sign and the text, a decisive place, if not the most decisive and important, that defines semiotics as a highly differentiated scientific discipline. Studying objects of study is not the same as studying objects of study. studying object languages ​​and by extension, understanding society and culture, not only as communication, but now especially as object language, is not the same as studying them as objects of study for the subject of knowledge.

   This principle of semiotics as a scientific discipline completely dismantles, demolishes the entire tradition of the object of study in social sciences, especially the entire existing tradition of anthropology.

   In my essay The sensible concept we have already reestablished in the retheorization of classical philosophy what the relationship between subject and object is when the concept and scientific conceptualism mediate with respect to that relationship, we have in turn, in our essay epistemology and performativity, completely repositioned in new terms the relationship between subject and object, it is therefore necessary here to add that the two measurements studied and theorized in both essays have here the final point of their clearances and disassemblies adding to them this decisive reversal of semiotics, let us therefore study object and non-object languages of study for the subject.

   Which is therefore an object language at the other end of an object of study for the subject.

   Let us examine this relationship here in terms of research methodology through an example that illustrates how the relationship between object language and code works, selecting an example that at the same time illustrates to us what to do when our sign to be analyzed is this one. icon, a symbol or an indication, is presented as highly coded in the form of a message as occurs for example in the signs of television, the mass media or art, but a sign in which the code has to be reconstructed because It becomes obvious that if in sociology, cultural studies and anthropology we have lacked theorization and semiotic studies it is above all because with the exception of those social or cultural phenomena around which we master all the necessary understandings to proceed When it comes to decoding, it happens that we generally come across objects, signs and situations in which the code is not always accessible to us in the first instance. Let's talk about how the relationship between object language and code is susceptible to reconstructions, showing that In some ways semiotic analysis is reassimilated and extended from phenomenological sociology.

    Let us ask ourselves, for example, if an open door is a sign, we could undoubtedly consider that in a certain situation, an open door may be nothing more than a simple open door without actually connoting a sign, but we will immediately perceive that it is almost impossible not to consider it. a sign, an open door, as soon as we notice it, wondering why it is open, it is definitely a sign even if this sign has not been motivated, that is, created with the intention of communicating something with it, let us suppose by inferences that if a door is open, it means that someone has entered and is about to leave quickly, perhaps because they have left something behind when leaving,

   By saying this at once we are presupposing that it is a main entrance and exit door and its meaning comes along with the fact that we have previously classified as pertinent that if a main door is open it is not usual since it emphasizes security and safety. inside, in this sense it is assumed that either the person has just entered or has just left, or that he is nearby for something quick in the neighborhood, an open door may also not be just a main door, it may be another type of door, but whatever the situation, there is no doubt that it is a sign, something, an object, it occupies the place of a meaning that has referred to a situation of meaning,

   Now, a door can be open for other reasons, if we dominate a given situation, let's suppose that it is our own door, that of any of us, and that we have opened it because we want to increase the probability that some person, a friendship or a neighbor, communicate with us at the time of passing so that for the purposes of that person getting up or down, passing or roaming around when they see the open door, there are more possibilities for them to approach to ask and start some type of dialogue, to Likewise, someone may approach just to remind us that perhaps we have inadvertently forgotten to close the door.

    Someone could argue that it is a sign that is too polysemous, that is, exposed to a high level of entropy because it is not a highly encoded sign in such a way that we cannot decode precisely what it precisely means, it could be one thing but it could be quite another, we know that the sign itself is never articulated, it only relates to other signs that it has at its side both in contiguity and in the situation of signification and that as such the apparently most highly sign codified can at a given moment cease to be so, thus, in this sense, there would be plenty of examples in which we take a highly codified sign in one situation, take it to another situation and it is transformed into an ambiguous sign exposed to informational entropy or vice versa, a sign apparently weak at the level of its coding, as an open door seems to us, can at a given moment become a highly coded sign,

  Suppose it is the door to the boss's office in a company and that his assistant is not sitting at her desk in the next room, we immediately infer that the door is open because the assistant has entered and they are talking about something without yet deciding. to a meeting for which they would close it, here the open door sign itself becomes highly codified, but what we want to emphasize with this example is that in the case of an object that has not been created with an expressive intention ---unless whether it is an open door in a romantic drama in a film, where the main couple has entered their intimate room—

  but considered as such in an ordinary life-world situation, we generally assume that a door is not opened for the purpose of communicating something—although it could also be the case, someone might leave a door open to signal to another person that they can enter, but even considering that it has not been opened with a communicative intention, our emphasis here falls on the fact that, even in that case, we are not studying the door as a mere object, but rather through its relationship with other elements that around you and the information that we have more or less control about the situation, we are considering it as a language phenomenon,

   The door may or may not be open with a motivated intention to communicate, it may be by mere accident or due to its connection with a specific pragmatic situation about which we can know a lot or know little, have a lot of information depending on whether it is our own door or someone else's. close or depending on whether we have seen people enter and leave decoding what senses the situation is filled with or we have not seen it, but regardless of whether or not it has been opened with a communicative intention, even so we are not considering it as a mere object, we are considering it insofar as it is a sign and insofar as it is a language with respect to a decoding,

  If it is not open with communicative or expressive intentions, we are decoding a sign that has not been intentionally encoded, that is, the code has not been placed within that sign as an internal attribute and therefore we must reconstruct it by resorting to its own elements. situation, this is a good example through which we objectify how the code in semiotics does not always refer to the coding of a message as when we accentuate some aspects and not others to encode the message we want to send so that it is better and more effectively decoded, but the code can be constructed and reconstructed through recurrence to our heritage on certain previously typified situations,

   We therefore resort to our memory and experience about open doors, we put into relationships principles of relevance that can probabilistically progressively codify which of the variants with respect to our previous typifications about open doors is the one we are facing,

   On the one hand, we have an open door, the sign as such, but on the other hand, we have certain physical information, which is a main door of a house, which is the door to the boss's office in the company, or which is the door in the romantic fictional drama, either because we have seen the person enter or because we master elements about the situation

   In this way we can construct the code ourselves by resorting to material from our heritage and from our typifications with respect to our sense of relevance. Here we have a good example of the intersection between phenomenological sociology and semiotics. The door is undoubtedly a sign, but we cannot yet To say whether it is an indexical sign or an iconic sign, it could move in one direction or the other depending on whether we ourselves construct or reconstruct the code where that around which we infer as a sign has not been elaborated with a message intentionality, It is a plus sign, it is above all an object language,

  We are not obviously asking for the door here as a mere object, but insofar as that object is part of a language, that language may or may not have been articulated as is usual in the composition of language, it could be a mere accident, but from the moment in which we ask ourselves what it means, we are studying it not as a mere object but as an object language.

   As we said, a door could even be open as a form of message, for example, we have just had an argument with our partner, after the argument she has gone to the kitchen or another room, and we open the door as a way. that she knows that we are available and willing to give in, that we prefer rapprochement and mutual understanding, while if we keep her closed we communicate that we prefer to be alone until the discomfort that the lack of communication has caused us passes.

  If there are children in the house, the door can be closed in order to protect the intimacy and privacy of the couple so that the children know that it would be a violation of privacy to enter until the parents open the door for them, in the same way. , the door can be open so that the children know that the parents are willing to receive them, that they have not been isolated from the situation that occurs inside the room

   So we speak of object language to say that what becomes the object of our study is always a language or that it becomes an object for us only and only insofar as we see it as language, so that it is not about taking the language as a parameter for via analogy or homologies, we study things that are not language as if they were, but rather we study things that are language, that can be from the very conformation of the message, languages ​​constituted as such with communicative intentions, or that can be so according to how they function in a relationship of inference, induction, deduction and decoding

    So whether or not the open door is an intentional language, we are interested in semiotic terms only and only insofar as it is a sign and a language, and only and only insofar as it is part of a situation around which studying it. As language, we infer meanings about the situation.

   We have chosen an ambiguous example with all intentionality, an example through which to illustrate how even where what we analyze has not been composed with an intentionality of message in semiotics we never take language as a pattern or guideline to via analogies or homologies study things that They are not language, but in all cases, what we study we study as language and only as language are we interested,

   In this way, whether or not the signs are intentional languages, whether they are, for example, natural indications, as occurs in the way, for example, that people orient themselves in the forest according to the positions of the trunks, the way the light hits them. and the way in which the plants grow around them or whether they are indexical signs conceived as footprints and marks, the forests, for example, marked where someone before us has made crosses in the trees to highlight the path that leads to the exit or the appropriate route or Simply the example of Peirce himself of the metal rooster on the roof that, as it moves in one direction or the other, tells us the direction of the wind, whether they are highly iconic or highly codified signs, they always interest us only and only in terms of language and As such, they make up object languages ​​for us.

   It has not been usual for me to develop semiotic theory in the analysis of general cultural phenomena that move beyond the empirical analysis of signs and symbols in concrete forms of art and within the latter the analyzes of semantic theory in the analysis of the cultural , with the exception of certain semiotic and semantic theoretical elements that I have considered in my books on the mass media - which presuppose my retheorizations towards new sensory and multisensory parameters of Phenomenology and hermeneutics, the intramundane horizon, its Overordination and my reconstructive criticism regarding semiotics and above all, the priority place that I have given to proxemics and kinesics – considered areas of semiotics, within a phenomenological conception of my field work, for example, my studies of urban popular markets in Venezuela, in the rest I have explored the theory and semiotic and semantic analysis of signs and symbols in my empirical studies of art.

   It is time, however, to begin to do so, different reasons motivate me to do so, to extend the analyzes of semiotic theory and semantics towards society and culture beyond and outside the empirical constraints of art.

    As I said at the beginning, sixty-one years have passed since Levi Strauss gave his inaugural class for the chair of social anthropology at the College in France in 1960 and sixty-seven years since his essay Place of Place was published at UNESCO. anthropology in the social sciences, since that date, risking certain comprehensive maps as a whole, comparatively little progress has been made in anthropology with respect to knowledge, objectification and understanding of the phenomenon of culture, the texts of Levi Strauss themselves, who then dictated the talk, in the long run they themselves left quite little regarding culture, much more was what we came to know about culture through semiotics in the language sciences, the echo of the absent structure, the Todorov of symbolism and interpretation and theory of symbols, among other efforts, that what was achieved in anthropology in this regard.

    On the other hand, there was even less that we could know about society and the social through social anthropology. In his inaugural talk, Levis Strauss, influenced by his ethnological sieve, mentioned, while acknowledging his merits and highlighting his importance, a single author who with disciplinary rigor we can consider strictly a sociologist and not an anthropologist, Emile Durkeim, whose elemental forms of religion had an impact on Mauss, but not the main part of his properly sociological work such as the rules of the sociological method, conspicuous by its absence was the mention of sociologists of the importance and stature of Max Weber, and of founders of the autonomy of sociology such as august comte these were not recognizable even in the form of indirect vestiges.

   But on that date, when Levi Strauss gave his talk and even the previous six years in which he published The Place on Anthropology, he not only had behind him, as precedents excluded the work of Weber and Comte, he also had all the work of Popper and Those were precisely the years in which microsociology reached its peak, authors such as Alfred Shutz ten years before were writing some of their main founding essays on ethnomethodology and years before the work of George Herbert Mead had found public light, not to mention to Talcot Parson.

   All this was excluded in his talk.

   The assumption of being the social science that would deal with culture as its specificity has been precisely that through which we have come to know the least, not only about who we are or have been, but above all about what culture is.

     The relationship to culture, whose knowledge we should have collected during that period of more than half a century, from anthropology, was more than supplied through sociology on the one hand, and semiotics, on the other, sciences with another history. foundational, another institutional past and other scientific foundations, to which it was not appropriate to dedicate ourselves to it, the first dealing with understanding the social and society, not culture, the second with signs and communication.

   But the inaugural class of Levis Strauss not only lacked by mere mention of those sociologists, but also and above all, the knowledge of those sciences obtained between ten and twenty years before Levis Strauss gave his talk, to the same extent, the lack It is certainly not compensated by a very good fate for structuralism in general beyond anthropology which has been relativized by some of the strongest and most influential trends of the end of the last century, the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida, the intertextualism of Julia Kristeva, poststructuralism in general and postmodernism.

   However, since the sixties, structuralists like Umberto Eco himself had been warning that cultural anthropology should be replaced by semiotics and anticipated that semiotics as a science of communication was the science of culture for which anthropology was not prepared.

    It is therefore up to the sociology of culture to deal with this immense void from the autonomous tradition of sociology as a science both in a disciplinary sense - methodologies, epistemology, resources, instruments, etc., and specialized as well as in an institutional sense, chairs, institutes, schools, centers, programs, and authorial sociology

   Now, given that sociology never made culture its own as that which would be proper to its autonomous cut and given that semiotics did not deal with it other than derivatively as a consequence of signs and communication, there is not much that can be said about it. that progress has been made in the development of epistemologies, cuts and clearances required for an occupation focused on culture despite the fact that it was through them that we were indirectly able to understand more about what – and of – culture was.

   According to functionalism in sociology, culture is undoubtedly, understood in highly differentiated terms, a distinct and specific subsystem, differentiated from the individual and the social as independent subsystems.

  According to semiotics, culture is a sign, message, reception, code, language, denotation, connotation, syntagm, paradigm and altogether, communication.

   According to ethnomethodology, culture is intersubjectivity, interaction and symbol, but all these notions, a subsystem that is distinguished from the individual and the social as distinct, sign and other semiological notions, intersubjectivity, interaction and symbol are also and at the same time social and society, individual and individual because where culture is separated from the properly social it does not obtain its own cut except within the social itself and where it separates itself from the individual it does not obtain its own cut except within the individual itself.

   When we say that something is culture and not individual, we say that it is cultural as an aspect or moment of the individual, when we say that something is culture and not society, we say that it is culture as an aspect or moment, as an element or sphere circumscribed within the social, at the same time, sign, code, denotation, connotation, message, communication, etc., are properly individual or collective social and communication phenomena, but it is between them that at the same time or simultaneously culture, another So much happens with intersubjectivity, interaction and symbolization, symbols or the symbolic in general, these are social, individual and relational communication phenomena, but in themselves culture or the cultural simultaneously takes shape.

   Saying that everything in them is culture is of course redundant and vague, a verbiage as Hegel would say, everything in it and all of it is undoubtedly also culture, but in a meaning of the concept of culture so general that it can no longer be ascertained through This is what is properly cultural, since there everything that is individual is called culture, that is, subjectivity, imagination, psychology, and everything that is society, that is, relationality, individuation and socialization, an act of unity, for good measure. of Parson's notion or, even more social, situationality, world, everyday life.

   The sociology of culture therefore has as its objective, as a task and as a summary, to deepen and objectify what is properly cultural within the individual and within the social, encompassing the phenomena of communication, semiotics, but also the phenomena of socialization and individuation. , that is, social including situations, relationships, worlds, everyday life and unity act, that is, act of acting and action. On the other hand, the sociology of culture has the objective and task of establishing which are the cuts that correspond to what is properly cultural in the two main dimensions of epistemology, the subject - of knowledge - methodology, and the object of knowledge , a relationship that, as we said, we have retheorized in thinking science and is closed here by the semiological concept of object language.

   These lines through which the properly cultural in a sociological and semiotic sense passes or where we have to cut are, on the one hand, what was previously given, that is, what was received in a certain way as previously meant, here the experience and the heritage, but not the process of socialization and individuation that makes up the differentiating activity that Piagget defines as specialized in learning and the formation of one's own identity, as well as everything that through individuation and socialization makes the properly social between the individual and the society,

   At the social level, here come the values ​​understood as previously valued or acquired not in their continuous formation or in their dynamics of social mediation where these are subordinated to what is properly social and economic, but rather the side of values ​​that refers to values. previously meant, that is, valued and as such considered values ​​and the area of ​​experience and heritage, are therefore, on the individual side and on the social side, what makes it properly cultural.

   But there are a few other things that we receive in a certain way or that come to us pre-given that are not limited to experience, heritage and values.

   Where we communicate with others through language in the social present of individuals and groups we speak of the social and society, not of culture if we assume a rigorous use of the concept whose vagueness or imprecise generality does not refer to everything for convenience, but Where we receive that language as predated, that is, we learn it as it is accumulated and previously inscribed in a meaningful corpus, we enter into what is properly cultural.

  Let this be applied in general to the entire universe of the sign and the symbolic, where symbols mediate social interactions, whether intersubjective or correlative to groups, we are in the presence of the social, not the cultural, and where the Symbols serve the process of socialization and individuation as well as the self-reflexivity of the self towards itself, these refer to the individual non-cultural and social process, in this way, the sign cut between a message and a receiver is not culture, but communication understood in a social and individual, interindividual and intersocial sense, but where we analyze that sign or message through what is encoded in it or forms a code in itself, we enter into what is properly cultural, the code undoubtedly serves communication, without He, as without the acquired language, communication would be impossible, but once the code serves communication as interaction and as decoding it becomes individual and social, meanwhile, only where it is considered as a raw code in itself , that is, as pre-given and where we analyze why and how it has become a code, we talk about culture.

  According to what was previously discussed, there are undoubtedly three methodological areas in sociology for culture, axiology, typological and generic studies on the world previously meant or codified, the latter referring to the world as we know it and have typified it, So here we are dealing with the studies of typification and typicality, which are a specific area of ​​the sociology of common sense and finally semantics.

   So, in methodological terms we have three areas for the study of what is properly cultural in sociological terms within what we define as sociology of culture, the sociology of common sense, within it specifically the studies of typification and typicality, axiology , the study of values ​​and valuation, and semantics, within which Greimas certainly spoke of a sociology of common sense,

   We lack here only one dimension to cover, experience and heritage, the latter correspond - from the pragmatic point of view - to the field of psychology, the latter, however, has studied experience only as a learning phenomenon, Piagget , not as something properly cultural, learning is undoubtedly part of what we understand as social reproduction, without it culture could not be transmitted and learned, but its synchronous cut is social and individual, not properly cultural, therefore, although it participates in The transmission of culture does not deal with it, a sociology of experience is required that deals with it from the point of view of a world that has been previously signified, that is, of a world that is shaped by experience. It is an accepted world and this corresponds to two areas Phenomenology and hermeneutics, thus completing the circle that delimits the studies of culture.

Sociology of culture

Experience/hermeneutics and Phenomenology

Values/axiology

. Typifications/Common sense

Senses and meanings/semantics

    Now, not everything that we receive as pre-given is accessible to us in the first instance, since precisely because we receive it pre-given it forms a code and a grammar as a language, a custom, a habit and as a collection of experience. a tradition, as values, paradigms, ideals and a telos, a part of it has been inaccessible to us from the point of view of a mere tacit corroboration of its form in presence or appearance, thus, the reflective dimension that corresponds to the specifically cultural when it refers to the inaccessible or unconscious levels that correspond to culture, they refer for us to psychoanalysis, which within psychology is the one to which the cultural dimension corresponds as an individual symbolic and as a social one. which is in psychoanalysis where the scope that completes the studies of culture is closed:

Phenomenology, hermeneutics, axiology, semantics, common sense and psychoanalysis

    It seems obvious, however, that a few things are missing here that in a notable way and without much effort of distinction make up and shape what is properly culture within the general fabric of individual and social human society, and these things are precisely those through which of which we are aware in the simultaneity of the synchronic present that a pre-given world of experiences, values, typifications and common sense has previously been signified, has received or expressed meanings, and these are, on the one hand, material and visual culture , including within it visual imagery, we have within it collections, spatialized urban culture stagings, symbolic productions, art and religions, in which in one way or another an imaginary is expressed or intangibility takes on a tangible form. of a universe of imagination, the immaterial culture of that material culture, without excluding a series of expressions of that material culture that take shape as modes of repetition and confirmation of the tacit character of what was previously given, here rituals, ceremonies and other phenomena come into play.

   and on the other hand, memory, here come the different levels of memory, from synchronous micro memory, semantic or body memory, through episodic memory and including the passive memory of recollection and collection, that is, forms of less immediate and more mediate memory, as well as long-standing forms of memory, here come heritage and other forms of accumulation, culture, well, in that which makes it specific

Material and intangible culture

(visual or not, it can be sound, music, theatrical, cinematic, synesthetic, synesthetic, etc.)

Memory: Corporeal, semantic, episodic, passive, cumulative

  But we have cut the above as what is specific to the cultural as opposed to and although occurring within at the same time the social and the individual, through a systematization of parameters which, although developed to study the cultural, are epistemologically nourished by autonomous disciplinary springs and guidelines of sociology

World-situation: Popper

Act unit or unit of act and functional subsystem: act and action: Parsons

Rules-Collective Consciousness: Durkeim

Axiology, neutrality, valuation: Weber

Self-Social: George Herbert Mead

Typification, experience, relevance, significance, acerbity: Alfred Shutz

Interaction: Mead, Shutz, Garfinkel

Habits: Pierre Bourdieu

   The same is required to develop the same precision cuts with respect to the specifically cultural from the point of view of semiotics where we have up to now as precedents in the definition of code, semantics and repetitive regularities, genres, forms of discourse and typologies of the symbolic. as specifically cultural the previous efforts of Umberto eco and Svetan Todorov

Umberto Eco: The Absent Structure

Svetan Todorov: Theory of the symbolic, symbolism and interpretation, genres of discourse

   We are with what was previously cleared and reduced in its specificity because we are ready to embark on the path of the sociology of culture, a coarse, broad and specific path which, however, has not yet been developed and requires the development of those axiologies, of those phenomenologies. , of those hermeneutics, of that sociology of common sense, of that semantics and of that psychoanalysis where the notions of sign and text have to be retheorized and where anti-structuralist or post-structuralist notions such as that of inter-text have to be retheorized.

    It would be appropriate, however, to ask ourselves what has been or what could be after all these clearances, of the structural itself and of structuralism in general. We have included in our references two structuralists whose work, we consider, is currently in force, by which we mean not only a matter of intellectual fashions but above all of adaptation to their objects.

    The echo of the absent structure, although he took into consideration all of Derrida's objections and incorporated them into what he called the dissolution of structure, he developed a strong criticism of the indistinctions between operational structure and ontological structure in Levi Strauss and structuralism in general. but he reestablished the structuralist dimension of culture from new possibilities through the reestablishment of the theory of codes and the prioritization of semantics as a section within Peirce's semiotics,

   Likewise, Todorov reestablished structuralism through the regularity of genres, incorporating into the structural study of the symbolic not only the genres that make up the diachronic corpus of literature, but also culture in general, showing how the genres of speech and more There, an infinite number of situational genres in culture such as prayers, morals, proverbs, ways of speaking, are regularized in forms of the symbolic through their generic specificities.

   All these efforts, without a doubt, precedent for the sociology of culture, however, require an infinite number of retheorizations and reconstructions as well as new clarifications in the same undeveloped ones without excluding an infinite number of new phenomena that have occurred in the culture that their works have been developed for. five decades did not contemplate.

    In the same sense, we are left with two structuralists, a part of whose work escapes the constraints of the sociology of culture, but another part of which is of value to it, Pierre Bourdieu, the only sociologist who, after Durkeim, we could consider as properly structuralist, although his work addresses phenomena that move outside the properly cultural, overflowing and exceeding beyond the specialized and disciplinary limited scope of the subsystems, such as the economic and the political, the fact that the Bourdieu himself, although he went beyond the cultural, recognized at one point in his work, especially in that period in which he most limited himself to the exclusively cultural, such as in his studies on taste, the importance of August Comte, and finally in the psychoanalysis we have all the structuralist renewal that Lacan's work meant for his past.

  We cannot forget, furthermore, in keeping with this, that the work of Jacques Derrida preserves redefined parameters of structurality, first due to the epistemological importance that the relationship between language and speech continues to have in Derrida, a first-order structural distinction that intertextuality does attempt to dismantle. , but in Derrida they retain all their logic

    My book, the correlate of the world, is with respect to all this the theoretical effort to establish new avenues and clearances of Phenomenology related to semiotics and sociology, the development of new axiologies that both from the philosophy of philosophy, and from philosophy of the sciences, as with regard to the sociology of culture it was required to develop, my most recent book thinking science is at the same time the theoretical effort that was required to develop to epistemologically clear all the avenues that this implies in the philosophy of philosophy , philosophy of science and sociology

   We wonder, however, if something else survives with respect to the structure and in this specific sense it would not be out of place to ask if something is salvageable for purposes other than what anthropology was. It is true that Eco tries as much as possible to preserve certain principles present in Levi Strauss.

  Let us therefore return to the class at the school in France that began our essay and to the essay seven years earlier on the place of anthropology, to ask ourselves if any of that has meaning or significance for the sociology of culture.

   In the mid-seventies, in the United States, Stephen A Tyler made a significant effort to retheorize structuralism in anthropology from new parameters that brought lexicological and semantic studies to the foreground, all of which put an end to an anthropology focused on language. or linguistic anthropology by Stephen A Tyler called cognitive anthropology.

   We consider that we have in Stephen Tyler an exception to the rule, especially if we take into consideration the subsequent development when he progressively moved away from that initial structuralism.

   The lexicological and semantic studies in Stephen's cognitive anthropology, however, although focused on language in a way that moved beyond taking linguistics as a parameter, to bring language itself to the foreground, were generally relegated. to studies of scriptural textual forms such as the study of Sanskrit scriptures, thus not encompassing the study of oral language

   On the other hand, there is in my book thinking science a huge theoretical effort to retheorize in the discussion of Jacques Derrida and Hegel the place that in the Phenomenology could correspond to a not yet existing, but in that book announced possible reconstruction of the philosophical anthropology of We risk redefining anthropology as something that suggests, recalls or goes back to Cassirer's first embryonic efforts in philosophical anthropology, and that we observe could coincide in some aspects with the more philosophical side of Stephen Tyler's post-80s texts.

   We believe that, after all these clarifications, the answer is a maybe, as Surpic Angelini told me in an email from recent years that suggested or alluded to the dilemma that defines us emigrants of being part and expression of our new cultures but being and bring with us also at the same time the memories and heritage of our culture of origin,

Maybe there is hope, Surpic told me.

  In reality I see few,

  At the end of his life Stephen was taking seriously what he called in several of his websides agendas: migration literature,

   along with migratory literatures such as those of Derrida, Kristeva, Todorov and Alfred Shutz himself, perhaps my answer would not be discouraging.

Grades

    We understand the notion of emptiness here when we say these two great voids not in the existentialist sense of a void as when we say that something seems to have no spiritual meaning, but in the sense of a void of language in Lacanian terms by which we define that we have a empty where we have not found a language or languages ​​to refer to it, where we have not named and found a fabric that elucidates and explains, as when we say that there is a void of criticism on certain topics where it is difficult for us to approach ourselves because There is little or almost nothing that has been said and there is no prior criticism between us and this that has brought it to language, the void on the one hand, that semiotics has left in the understanding of our own Western culture when, increased Regarding it, our rationalization has at the same time removed and distanced us from it, giving us the image of a dead culture where that culture is alive in all the threads of its fabric, and the void that anthropology has left us when dealing with the cultures without all the systematic arsenal that semiotics has left us

    I am referring to those parameters from which linguistic anthropology, along with philosophical anthropology, is the only possible anthropology, understandably, not the anthropology that uses linguistics to analyze things that are not languages ​​via homology, or that makes the few metaphors out of them. that we referred to before, but rather anthropology which, like semiotics, must deal with language and signs, and which must be refounded on the disciplinary foundations of semiotics and sociology, not by using them, but by being born from them, that is, , changing its founding tradition in the history of science. This is not the first time this has been done.

   Change the foundations of a science, rooting it where it was not born, as when a plant is taken from a wasteland, and planted in another land, in another climax and with other fertilizers, inside a clay pot, if it is not that perhaps it is about going back to the fetus or even the sperm, looking for it before it was born, when it was just a speculative moment still undifferentiated within philosophy, as there are certain elements of anthropology in Hegel or Kant.

   Levis Strauss and Stephen A Tyler are, within that deviation, of course, the only precedents in considering linguistics and semiotics, especially Stephen, but with the exception of a few passages here and there by Stephen, and a few things that can taken out with tweezers in and around both, the work is completely to be done starting like everything that is done for the first time from scratch.

  Just as we know that art faculties unusually do not include sociology among their compulsory subjects, something incomprehensible, and of course, even less so anthropology, it is even more impressive that anthropology faculties do not include semiotics as a compulsory subject, not the idea of ​​semiotics that other anthropologists have made, but of semiotics as a rigorously constituted science

   Distant echoes of something once read or heard, semiotics and linguistics are things from another world in the faculties of anthropology.

   a few timid and overlapping uses here or there are scattered in the texts without the slightest effort to do not only semiotics, but even non-linguistics, such as analogical and homologous transpositions of certain logics to the study of non-linguistic phenomena where language functions as the guideline or the mold in the seam, something whose edges must be followed, to apply it to something in no way related to it, or something later in two or three meager paragraphs in anthropologists like Geertz who, by saying that anthropology was interpretive, presumably would interpret something, but without ever making a rigorous semiotic analysis of culture, or some few metaphors that are poorly understood and borrowed, such as analyzing a work of anthropology as one analyzes a literary work in terms of writing, asking how the anthropologist is an author. , or think that ethnography is a text that supposes a relationship between what is written as a message and an audience in terms of reception, in the later line of writing culture,

    In the entire history of anthropology, beyond these meager, scarce, timid and occasional metaphors and analogies, there is not a single rigorous semiotic study dedicated to developing a semiotic theory of culture and even less an empirical semiotic analysis of its signs.

Bibliography

Barther Roland, The Fashion System

Muguenza Javier, Salvador Bueno, Miguel Bertran, contemporary sociology theory, Tecnos

Habermas Junger, the problem of understanding in social sciences, theory of communicative action, Taurus

Eco Umberto, The Absent Structure, lumen

Svetan Todorov, Symbolism and Interpretation

Svetan Todorov, the genres of speech

Svetan Todorov, symbol theory

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, El Correlato de Mundo: Interpretante y estructura en la teoría cultural posmoderna, book

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Thinking Science: New phenomenological avenues between philosophy and sociology, book

Strauss levis, introduction, structural anthropology

Strauss Levis, place of anthropology in the social sciences, structural anthropology

Tyler A Stephen, a Point of order, rice university studies

Tyler A Stephen, Ethnography, intertextuality and the end of description, Volume 3, Issue 4, 1985, The American journal of semiotic Pages 83-98

Tyler A Stephen, emails to Abdel Hernandez San Juan, 2013-2014

Material and intangible culture

©Por Abdel Hernandez San Juan

     In recent years, there has been an increasingly recurrent use of the concept of material culture, especially where some material expression of regionalizable culture is designated in two divergent senses: epistemological, region as a notion to delimit the spaces that correspond to a certain form of visual culture, and regional geography, the direct or indirect references of that circumscribed conglomerate, the notion, however, generally appears used as a predicate and not even or sufficiently called to the foreground as a subject,

   We say predicate because it is assumed that we are talking about subjects prefixed in their nominalism and designation according to status of belonging and assignment, such as certain artists or artisans who are the direct executors or creators of certain aesthetic and symbolic objects, artifacts, volumes. sculptural or pictographic extensions that are more or less close or far from the notion of author, sometimes authors, sometimes artisans, are predefined as the mode of subject placed before placing the syllogisms of subject and predicate,

   In this way, the notion of material culture is treated as a form of predication, ways of calling what these subjects do, manufacture, produce, create, that is, as derivations of previous subjects with respect to which material culture is only the general naming predicate of the relationship between the created object and the general culture to which that car or craftsman belong or relate.

   Thus, for example, kraft forms of art and ritual are treated and approached whose creators can more or less be recognized in field work by anthropologists such as Annemieke Van Damme-Linseele in her studies on the sculptures Nkanu and Mbeko art and ritual in the lower congo, the analysis of the tradition of urban textiles in Tunisia by Christopher Sprint and Julie Hudson, the analyzes of contemporary facada studies in Ghana by Doran H Ross, in Artists advertising themselves or the studies on Mayan art and crafts by Quetzil Eugenio in specific works such as Aesthetic and ambivalence of maya modernity: the Ethnography of maya art.

   In all cases the notion of material culture appears in the form of predications, ways of naming the general belonging of certain visual objects, sculptures, carvings, etc., to a culture of which they are then an expression.

   There have been few, however, efforts to bring the notion of material culture to the foreground, first turning it into a concept of axiological scope capable of passing on to the status of subject of culture beyond being treated as the predicate of forms of the subject definable in the mode of individuals known through field work.

   The emphasis on the need to call material culture to the status of concept, leaving the predicate and moving to the position of the subject, is not intended here to disdain, undermine or fail to recognize the relevant subjective place that in terms of expressive object creations, symbolic forms and iconographic aspects of art, the craftsman or artist who created certain artifacts undoubtedly has, in fact, as Annemieke maintains, if anthropological studies on cultural art have suffered from anything, it has been the lack of a true validation of the place that its creators once had. silenced under ambiguous and imprecise notions of ritual in the culture that tended to reduce the role of the performer to a religious functionality diluted in the culture without expressive range or aesthetic appreciation towards the style and qualities of its creator, in this sense the works mentioned are valuable in rethinking tradition, extending the scope of anthropology on these issues to previously unexplored regions.

   But the reason for my consideration lies in the fact that the concept of material culture not only encompasses this type of visual objects, but also other regions of visual culture in which there is no question of diluting or not recognizing an artisan or a creator behind certain objects, but of formations and conglomerates that simply do not bring with them this type of one-to-one relationship between a performer and his object. I am referring here, for example, to notions such as imagery, imaginaries and heritage where, as in the restoration of memory and architectural heritage, an entire region of material culture is susceptible to intertextual understandings where the executors are not in the foreground.

   Undoubtedly, also the objects created by artisans are an expression of material culture, however, the concept of symbolic production is more applicable in that case, a visual art like the one created by the examples of studies mentioned above, is more a form of symbolic production. in the specificities of its cut that a form of material culture although it is also

    The concept of material culture thus has its own cut once it is taken out of the predicative area and moved towards the area of ​​subjectivity, a statute, in fact, broader than that of symbolic production, where far from being subject to textual supplements of type economic or historical contextual –the urban textiles of tunisia, the maya modernity, or data on rituals in which the expressive object is subordinated to religion, lower congo, becomes the subject and refers to epistemological and geographical regions of visual culture within of which symbolic production is only one of its areas, also including bricollage, imitation, restoration, heritage and different forms of palimpsests and artifacts.

   We understand here by palimpsest, although this concept initially comes from literary criticism to textual modes analyzed here as interrelated according to diverse materialities, spatialities and temporalities such as architext, paratext, hypertext, hypotext and transtextuality, forms of juxtaposition. and textual superposition resulting from sedimentary processes in culture through which diverse spatialities and temporalities, corresponding to different stages, are superimposed on each other as a result of dynamics that acquire material form in culture through the recreation of memory such such as stratifications of architecture and civil engineering, superimpositions of styles and social customs, restorations, etc.

  We understand by bricollage, a form of artisanal construction but which does not in itself form an iconographic autonomy in the symbolic sense of an expressive creation but is subject to a certain functionality such as, for example, the furniture store where useful objects enter be arranged in the spaces, also architraves, mezzanines, bridges, divans, among other artifactual modes related to external functionalities such as moving from one place to another, sitting, leaning, supporting, creating a mezzanine, taking advantage of a space, etc.

   In bricollage, functionality is not, as occurs with sacred iconographic symbolic art, understood by the pre-secular or ritual subordination of the visual to a certain form of religiosity to which it is supplied, but rather a form of material culture. that there are among other textual forms which are functionally intertwined - or refunctionalized - and where the work of creation, as occurs with clothing and certain forms of craftsmanship, is disseminated in a more general and standardized compression of design.

   The concept of material culture thus allows, for example, to regionalize in an epistemological sense constructive formations of very diverse types that cannot properly be considered as forms of symbolic production, being in its broader axiology, for example, all the visuality and even aesthetic scope of The constructive modes that regionalize the field of visual imagery of the urban popular markets in which I did field work in Venezuela and later in the United States, cannot be considered modes of symbolic production and yes, expressions of material culture,

    I am referring here to all the neologisms and inventiveness that are truly artisanal, artifactual, functional, architectural and even engineering that creates, considered one by one, each sales position with its construction systems of canvas, vinyl, wood, tubes, hanging elements, atmosphere , place where sellers sit and live, as well as the surrounding civil engineering, successiveness and contiguous relationship between sales stalls, halls and travel areas, as well as the more specific kinesics and proxemics related to the way the seller sits with the merchandise around as if surrounded by it, heights at which the latter is situated, ways of the seller being more or less accessible to the buyers, sitting below the level at which the merchandise is situated or in front of it, the latter being located on the floor on areas delimited by plastic pieces, or distributed on wooden elements that are at a certain distance from the ground level such as on certain types of boards or wood with legs, tables or shelves, ways of arranging themselves scenically - and ceremonially - -at the moment of barter, the seller located at a certain height above the buyer's transit level or at the same height as the buyer, if the buyer enters and walks inside the cubicle in which the goods have been distributed or if, on the contrary, he remains outside.

  This type of phenomenon, like in another sense the bricollage of altars and reliquaries, is incomprehensible in terms of symbolic production and nevertheless also has, although in other ways, legible immaterial senses and meanings, that is, susceptible to reading, in them the culture material in a broader sense, overlaps a variety of textual forms that require intertextual analysis

   All these things explain the specificities of urban popular markets as forms of material and visual culture in which bricolages, palimpsests and imitations intervene—inventive and neological modes of refunctionalization—dissimilar of very diverse and varied types not referable in any way to the concept. of symbolic production.

   The relationship here passes, of course, from the semiotic point of view, through the distinctions that specifically differentiate the scope of the sign function as analyzed by Eco in his studies of architecture, not being, however, expressions of the latter.

   The studies of kinesics and proxemics, usually included within semiotics, in the same way as the study of genres in the literary and language field based on typifications, --western cinema, for example, with cowboys, the pueblitos and the indians as a genre, have generally referred to generalizations that can be inferred from typifications, that is, the interspatial and intercorporeal communications of previously given social groups are generally studied as they have been typified in certain cultures—cowboys, Indians on horseback, taverns, etc., and not the synchronous understanding in the present simultaneous phenomena experienced and observed in intersubjective dynamics of empirical research such as touring the markets to study and understand them.

       The objective that focuses my attention and what I want to focus on is to show how the semantic and isotopic explanation of the intergestural and intercorporeal universe intricate in proxemics – a notion that in itself already brings with it my previous analyzes on how a phenomenological understanding leads to an understanding hermeneutics of what that world consists of,—forms of spatial communication, distances, proximities, heights, ways of moving, etc. and kinesics, gestural, corporal, of gestures leads to a modality of overordination of the relationship between explicitness textual and the image that distances and differentiates itself in a significant way from what we have usually understood as description in social sciences, both from the participant description and from the dense description, since it is not about saying what a world is like in the sense of that in which it consists as in any way in omission of the observation that serious world, but rather, in the observation of things in that world that do not intend to expose it in the representation, but rather to understand principles that can be considered crucial logics through which the passage from empirical experience to representation is different

   In the Venezuelan markets we have what I have called the market as mise-en-scène, where the seller orchestrates all the merchandise around her body in order to create a presentational environment, an aesthetic mise-en-scène so that her body is located in the very center of the merchandise as if it were its own world or the world or universe of its affective objects, this gives a ceremonial and ritual function to the staging at the same time that it underlines the way in which with the agglomeration of products The usual meaning that refers them to ordinary merchandise is removed from them to transform them into visual signs of a scene.

    It is the sales scene transformed into a setting of visual culture, the saleswoman surrounded by her merchandise in a way that makes her sales position a staging of visual and material culture contemplated in her aesthetics and in her attitudes towards the market. relationship between products and culture and between the staging of the sale and the anticipation of the barter scene with its components both of transaction but also of communication around other dynamics of life, experience and culture

   We also have the typical market that I have called multisensory which prevails in Venezuela to which I have referred before in which the ways of distributing and placing the merchandise create a universe that encompasses the entire body of the passers-by in the form of a surrounding world, The merchandise is distributed in a way that goes from the floor to the ceiling, creating an arch above the bodies that surrounds them and transforms the movement into passages through which one passes, as if underlining the market as a phenomenological world in itself, we see above the arch, on both sides the stalls as if lined with merchandise from the roof

     It is about the highly sensualized and at the same time agromerated multisensory character of inter-body relations in popular urban markets, on the right young sellers sitting in front of their stall where their goods are, looking at the other end of the aisle of the stalls. itinerary and intercorporate relationships in the give and take of buyers, clients and consumers with other sellers, clothing market, the intense color brings together in the same space highly industrialized merchandise and related to massive codes of Venezuelan culture and the Anglo-Saxon and European cultures, with artifacts and clothing related to fabrics and procedures of the native culture in the Jose Maria Bargas market

   The forms of intersubjective give and take at the same time can be perceived in two distant scenes, one in the markets of Mérida to which I have referred before where a chicha seller offers his chicha to a potential taster who tastes it.

    or we have the moment in which the scene of intersubjective give and take is transformed into a communication about other aspects of daily life with the buyers who smile at the moment of exchanging with the seller, the merchandise not only placed on the table but also hanging pumpkins and bomb fruit called papaya from the ceiling in Venezuela,

   This is the main scene of intersubjective give and take in the markets, the scene of barter, the seller and the buyers when they have engaged in a conversation that, having begun around the merchandise, has transcended beyond the purchase and sale to become a talk about other aspects of the experience reaching the action of introducing themselves to each other like people shaking hands in a greeting of getting to know each other

   We also have Amerindian traditions reproduced as culture through the reinvention of cultural recreations of consumption from non-Amerindian culture in popular urban markets, where the market itself forms a scenic display of material culture in the city, here a succession of portals without divisions between them that have residential houses on one side between which and the street are the contributed spaces that the sellers occupy, ways of socializing or making an interiority exteriorized, the inside of each house, turned outward in the between. -space between the residential area and the street, where the parked cars adjoin, that is, as a way of showing the inside to the outside, we have in these the type of creative inventiveness and neologisms that in itself defines the popular imagination about ways of exploring the principle of showing and presenting, not only placing objects on horizontal surfaces, but inventing ways of hanging and hanging with objects in space, creating scaled ways of showing, generating vertical elements around which the merchandise, the hammocks, are placed They hang from the same roofs of the architecture flush with the edge of the street where the front of the parked cars is, this also gives a sense of the mobility of these markets, how they are located in high traffic areas or where spaces coincide. residential areas with transit spaces coming to constitute that entire conglomerate of successive portals full of vendors as an exhibition complex in a stable form of material and visual culture that we can consider palimpsestual expressions of imitations and bricolages

   We also have the eminently Christian character and related to the recreated colonial imagery revisited by the new generations from the architectural present around the ceramics and merchandise destined for domestic aesthetics, the little tables where the vases made with tree trunks taken from the same region and the exploration of the mosaic and the glazed ceramic mosaic mural limited as material culture to functions in this case decorative

    On the other hand we have the town market, where the sales stalls located at the entrance and the town hall are located on the edge of the street one next to the other as metal construction systems roofed with vinyl and canvas but aesthetically following the architectural logic of the type of small town where the houses are generally with gable roofs, in them we have the relationship of the market stalls with the usual settings of daily life

   We see the main configuration of these markets from a spatial point of view in relation to pedestrian walking, on the right the popular markets with their roofed self-construction systems distributed along their entire length one after the other on one end of the street in a perimeter of several kilometers, on the opposite sidewalk, the ordinary life of the community going on at the same time, passersby, near the market stalls, a passerby who decides to take his course in daily life to the markets to observe what is on offer

  In the popular urban markets in Mérida at 3,500 kilometers above sea level in the Parque de los Aleros we have a way of placing and distributing merchandise understood as a scenic setting of material culture, in this case candy and lollipops but also elements wrapped in corn husks. and placed inside woven baskets, the seller in turn wears a yarey hat from the region

   In that same market we have artisan markets as a form of material culture where all the products are made at home, wines, labels, ointments, creams, tartlets, the necks of bottles wrapped by manual fabrics with rural and country hats on top of the lid. As a way of communicating the origin of this wine as made by the people who sell it or by people close to the town, as a product directly in people's homes from family traditions, we see the famous corn tortillas, none of these products circulate in the general market, they are unique and exclusive products directly from their suppliers, including flour tortillas       

    Also the so-called Craft Market as a form of material culture, this craft market for which a type of room has been arranged is located between several stalls of the general market that is not craft or art, that is, within the general market of consumer goods

   We also have the forms of the fabric of the Amerindian amahaca called chinchorro with the word Mérida as a way of referring to the cultural identity of the Andean mountainous region, sometimes the chinchorro however is not live Amerindian but rather is a recreation as reinvented by the urban culture of singer-songwriters displaying guitars for sale and scarves next to the hammock

    We see how the pacillo is established for the passage of buyers in the market of handicrafts and pottery ceramics, on the left a buyer who is preparing to go through the distribution of the goods

   In the Wayuu culture in the Guajira peninsula between Venezuela and Colombia, we have the typical weaver of a chinchorro who is located inside his house at the time he weaves the chinchorro for which he places the threads around a tube, this Wayuu artisan is in his house and is captured by the camera at the same moment that he is in the process of weaving, and he does so within his communities built of tree trunks that can be seen from behind and around as forms of material and visual culture, we see the use of its fabrics in the creation of walls and divisions as a form of material culture,

    we see at the same time the simplicity of the Wayuu house or home

   In the same attitude of showing their culture along with their artifacts, we later see the Wayuu family showing themselves as a family in front of their pottery and their woven chinchorros, as well as later showing their costumes, their painted faces and bodies, it is noteworthy in this sense as relevant that the drawings and graphics on the pottery are the same ones that are later repeated on the face and even in the costumes, as well as the symbolic importance that the image has in the Wayuu culture not of a mask other than the face, of which the culture does not have, but rather a repetition of the face at another level, painted in black

    All these synesic and proxemic analyzes that are embedded in the Phenomenology and hermeneutics of the multisensory body in the empirical study of markets, refer to post-descriptive modes. See note at the end of this essay, as well as in general underlines the possibilities of proxemics and kinesis in field work against the background of both the limitations to which I referred before, the preponderance of studies on cultures already pre-figured by typified and instituted as its possibilities, the synchronous nultisensory immersiveness that cuts the social space into its simultaneous now and here

I quote echo

According to Birdwhistell 1964, when people make sounds and listen, move and look, touch and feel, emit and receive smells, etc., all these things combine different modes to participate in the communicative system, and it is not strange to state that these modalities They can be structured analogically: if they are learned in a systematic way, they can be modeled in the same way, or at least one can try...if we examine a corpus of data, for example the films with the mayor of the guard speaking Yiddish, Italian or American English, their movement patterns change in such a systematic way that you could eliminate the voice and guess what language they are speaking in.

  Birdwhistell, 62, 63, 65, 66 has developed a system of notations of body movements that reaches extreme degrees of precision and has also indicated a nomenclature of the relevant features and syntagmatic gestural configurations to which we refer when dealing with the code. film

  Regarding the scope of kinesic research, here are some voices from a repertoire suggested by La Barre 64, the silent gestural language of the cloistered monks, the language of the deaf-mute, of the Hindu merchants, of the Persians, of the gypsies,

   The ritual movements of the hands of the Buddhist and Hindu priests, the communications of the fishermen of Patagonia, the oriental and Mediterranean kinetics, in which the Neapolitan gesticulation occupies a privileged place, through the historical gesture of sraffe is mythically at the base of Wittgenstein's problems about meaning, the stylized gestures of figures in Mayan painting, used to decipher written language, in the same way that the study of Greek gestures as they appear in vase paintings can clarify many things. about the period studied, and in the same way the study of Neapolitan gestures can be related to the kinesic uses of Great Greece and thereby clarify Attic kinesics.

   For the same reasons, kinesics studies theatrical gestures, ritualized in classical oriental theaters in mime and dance, grimas, 68, guihot, 62

  The styles of walking, which vary according to cultures, and denote a different ethos, the styles of upright position in which the codification is more rigorous, and also more variable in the military variations, attention and in the almost liturgical styles of the steps. mauss parade s

  The different modalities of laughter, smiling, crying, although elements of paralanguage, are also elements of kinesics. At its extreme, research on highly cultured kinetics reaches the study of the defecatory positions of urination and intercourse, not to mention the positions of beings at the moment of orgasm, which is not only determined by physiological movements but also varies according to the cultures, as demonstrated by several examples of ancient erotic sculpture

  Let us add the studies on head movements, the cultural relativity of the gestures of yes and no, is universally recognized, on the gestures of thanks, on the kiss, which is historically common to Greco-Roman and Semitic civilizations, but apparently It is ignored in the Celtic, and in Eastern civilizations it has diverse meanings

   Synesic semes such as teaching the language acquire different connotations in China or in southern Italy, the gestures of contempt, which in Italian kinesics are so abundant, are codified like winks, which for a Latin American means come here for a American means get out, polite gestures are among the most codified, while conventionalized motor acts change so much over time that it becomes difficult to understand them, even ridiculous, as happens with films from the silent era. The gestures of conversation, which punctuate or replace entire phrases, join the great oratorical gestures. There are studies on the different gestures in a conversation between an Italian and a Hebrew in America afron 41 and we tend to evaluate the conventional value of symbolic gestures, offers, gifts, gestures in sports, style of serving in basketball, ways of maneuvering a canoe, until we reach the styles of archery that, together with the gestures of the tea ceremonies, constitute the pillars of Zen etiquette, finally we have the different meanings of the whistle, applause, contempt, etc., and the ways of eating and drinking

   Now, at the same time, the concept of material culture axiologically disposes us towards differentiated ways of understanding the relationships between the tangible of that materiality and the intangible of its immateriality or, to be more precise, it presupposes another way of relating the concrete tangible. empirical with the immateriality or intangibility of that same material and visual concretion, that is, that the concept of material culture presupposes another way, which I call another dialectic, of relating, of going to and coming from back, the empirical. concreteness of that materiality, and the intangibility of its dematerialization in the ways of analyzing senses and meanings around it that exist in intangible regions of culture not accessible in the first instance in those material concretions.

     Thus, for example, in certain forms of symbolic production, returning to the aforementioned examples, the exchange between the tangible material and the immaterial is given in the fact that these same objects are then iconographically referring to a certain religion or a certain rite, which which requires leaving the tangible physical plane to consider narratives about those religions that are required to search outside the visual in knowledge that is obtained through consultation of written or scriptural textual material, through collections of oral narratives or mythemes or in the mode of recurrences to informants among other forms

    Unlike this, the immateriality or intangibility that is axiologically presupposed in a proper expression of material culture that cannot be subordinated to symbolic production, requires from us another type of analysis of the symbolic, its senses and meanings, since it is not about putting into question. relation the figurative symbolism of a face or a mask, of an arabesque or of a certain iconography with what it refers to as a sign in religion or to situate the image in recurrence to historical or social contextual data, but to put in relation more extraordinary sets,

   For example, the flows and ebbs related to processes of continuous exchange, constant barter of objects among themselves and objects for money that characterizes in terms of visual and material culture, requires relating the materially regionalizable tangible market at an epistemological and the intangible market to analyze the abstract and deconcretized phenomenology of the latter, moving towards other areas such as my essay on the intangible, or the financial system, the abstract logics of symbolic capital, models of distinction, loans, bartering, benefits, credits, advances, but also relations of meaning specific to the types of markets

   Going through the market that is created around the parking situation such as that of gates and automobiles, taking one's own to the small town market where the buyer not only buys a merchandise needed or what he is looking for but also to take with him something from the place visited in occasions taking photographs at the site, seeing and leaving for later, carrying with one as soon as possible, giving something for something, preserving something from a place or culture when buying something to remember or as a memory or collection, the homeostasis of supply and demand, the peculiarities through which each market is situated in relation to the social and cultural situation that surrounds it, type of site, meanings and senses of traffic and traffic in that specific place in which the market is deployed. staging and above all the differences and specificities of the latter that, related to the situations, is then nourished by them to create inventive neologisms that display its specific type of material culture, the palimpsest, bricollage, imitations and refunctionalizations among other concepts. and notions that refer to both literal polyphony, sonorities, and alliterative polyphony, polyphony as heteroglossia -multiplicity of points of view--of urban popular markets

  This is not the same as a market like the one we saw above with the gabled roofs that belongs to a town to which it is assumed that one either belongs or passes through in transit, where the market is grammatically articulated in its character of setting. in a scene of material culture as a staged modality of that culture or town to which one arrives or through which one passes, making the mode of regional construction of its own customs, that a market like the other one we saw where the cars are parked on the edge The same as the cubicles in which the merchandise is displayed, the latter sells what may be needed quickly, the unexpected, what is lacking and may be needed, something typical of a region through which one passes quickly combined with something good for those who are from there, unlike a market like Mérida where we see the high artisanal content, almost sealed, of the unique wine from the area with its own label, the Andean chicha and other curiosities.

   Therefore, these cases are not the same as the multisensory market that we saw at the beginning defined by an arcade and central hall, in this case it is a place that is passed through inside where the merchandise becomes the surrounding world, this is a more type of market. urban, related to work speeds and media speeds much more intertwined in a rapid sense of supply and demand more superficially related to the flows and ebbs of the abstract financial system

   The aforementioned is correlative to what was discussed at the beginning about the subject and the predicate, because the analysis of what cuts out the symbolic productions has its emphasis and at the same time without a doubt its subjective foundation in the relationship of the iconographic elements. -visuals specific to the images in question, in the Congo, the faces and images of the masks and the wooden figurines related to the religious ritual in question, which requires the analysis to alternate between the descriptive of the artistic-craft pieces and narrative areas about religion in culture that are outside that visuality - what I have called supplementary texts - or obtained via informants, in Tunisia, accompanying the analysis of the visual with information called historical-contextual, providing elements about the invasion Ottoman and other phenomena of the area, which explain the reason for certain shapes, design motifs, Moorish arabesques, and Arabs in the prints, in the maya modernity, likewise, the textual supplement on the economic and local history of the filmmakers of this type of carvings, as well as the recurrence to textual supplements taken from materials on religion external to the visual that later help—as in Giotto and Botticelli in medieval painting—to decipher in the inscriptions of the icons, their symbolism and meaning in religion.

   Unlike this, in that which cuts what is specific to the most general concept of material culture, the ways of moving between the descriptive concrete and its immaterialization via analysis of the symbolic work in different ways, the visual iconographic is not made explicit in recurrence to supplementary material coming either from religious texts or from information obtained in culture of a narratological nature such as mythemes or other supplements, but the intertextualities of juxtaposed textual modes are analyzed whose underlying meaning and meaning must be sought, in terms of symbolic theory, in the relationship between the tangible and the intangible, something that the market itself as a form of culture presupposes and enacts but that I have objectified through a Phenomenology of its strata.

   I could, of course, give as an example my own empirical fieldwork essays and books which are in themselves examples of this procedure, as I said, on the one hand, my essay on the intangible, which makes the phenomenology of the market world around the publicity between the aesthetic and the axiological, or on the other hand what I have called the exegesis of the texts of culture where we go and come from one textual mode to another as forms of cutting, or to specific chapters of my own books where I not infrequently resort methodologically to exposing the very process of defining the research to comprehensive explanation, bringing it to the foreground, that is, calling the text to discuss how to do the research or even forming the rehearsal of the process itself of explaining how it is discerned. research, I think of essays such as cultural recreations of consumption, but also of more essays Making Sense and Performativity of research, but I will avoid taking myself as an example as much as possible.

    A comprehensive analysis of this other dialectic between the concrete and the dematerialized in the phenomenological and symbolic analysis brought to full realization in my essay on the intangible, is found in my essay From modern to postmodern market, catalog of the market from Here, where I moved between the multisensory body of the sensual data of the senses in the market towards the explanation of an immaterialized symbolism, that which refers to the understanding of the market as a financial system of traffic, between one thing and the other, the empirical concrete and the abstract, theorize the observed observer and discuss the modes of the eye, of observation, of the point of view, ethnographing the market between the colonial past and the postmodern present of the free advertising market

   This other dialectic is also applied to the analysis of other phenomena that presuppose immaterialities inherent to meaning and meanings, such as the analysis of religion in the market, or of the modes of oral speech.

     It is this sense discussed ---both that first of proxemic and synesic studies of the market, the continued existence of images of religion in the market spaces in the form of altars and reliquaries located in the same place of the sellers' habitation or in the mode of objects for sale--, as in the second, the meaning that the visual imagery of religion makes and covers for the world of riddles, common sense and hunches, of market men in terms of their ethos, their telos and their value systems, it is about the evocation of the meaning that these images make from within a moral imagination, and the externalization of those meanings in the way of locating the images in relation to texts, the one that explains, the grammar, syntax and the way in which the distribution of images of religion is treated in my anthropology work The Market from Here.

   In it the images of religion are located dispositionally, by the way of placing them, and treating them, as part of the installed and staged staging of environments that evoke the world and the universe of the men of the market, the sense that in their spaces these images have, it is not a question of the meaning that these images have for me or for Fernando, or of a recurrence to them as icons for their meanings in terms of expressive intentions of both as authors, but rather of locating that other meaning, that I have discussed before, in that religion means for individuals in the market something more than that which relates them to religions historically or institutionally formed as pre-given corpuses in culture, where the virgin is not the mother of Christ or the icon that with it it refers to certain theological passages that must be sought in books, but rather that other meaning, inscribed in the living imaginary of the culture about virginity, externalized images, turned into material and visual culture, which is linked to senses. of motherhood, of protective femininity.

   I have treated the imagery and the imagery of the Christian religion in the way of placing religious images according to the study of the markets, placing an altar to the virgin right at the entrance to the self-referential room of the work where I theoretically discuss the concept of the observer. observed, the concepts of representation and evocation in printed texts that can be read in the display case that at the same time accompanies the images of field work, that is, there in the markets, we place another as a protective virgin in the peddler's room, vendors who live where they sell and have their life clothes with them, including a little virgin, just as these images make sense to them in their circumstances.

   In the herbalists' room we place the plaster virgins on the shelves as they are usually for sale, but also reproduced in hundreds of stamps and religious vignettes for sale, hundreds of images of saints, also the image of Jesus and that of saints of the Venezuelan culture such as José Gregorio Hernandez, doctor of the poor and first black, a black saint, a room in which we find several references to the Indo-American religion such as herbs, preparations, and objects such as the cachicamo carapace and the chimo

   These images, however, especially the Amerindian ones, refer to levels of social stratification. Amerindian religions generally correspond to the most impoverished sectors of society, which is also expressed around them in the markets. They thus refer, as is made explicit. in the work, to a relationship that, also expressed in popular urban markets, due to the gathering in them in terms of visual culture of very diverse types of goods, from those sumptuaries related to modern advertising, to those related to poorer strata. to the relationship between modernity and poverty, which is why along with the theme of religion comes this other more general one.

     In this dialectic, another characteristic of markets as a form of material culture, we do not go from the specific iconographic via textual supplements to the place of that scripture to a specific religion, but rather certain immaterial principles are abstracted through the logic of the markets. of religion as a way of concluding certain things about the imagination of culture

   I have always been interested in religion in a theoretical sense, but my interest in religion has been peculiar and has varied over time. It began with my reading several decades ago of Max Weber's sociology of religion, a book that I read again a few years ago to discover that despite so much time having passed, my interest did not diminish, but increased.

  Far from focusing on worldviews or what religions say about the origin of the world, about God, about prophecies or sacred texts of mythology, Weber approached religions, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islamism, to analyze how in each one a certain mode of attachment or detachment to the world was implicit or presupposed, that is, in relation to the relationship between the world of the individual person and the world external to him, social or community. Thus, a notion like communion, which in the Christian religion has a very precise religious and devout meaning in its ritual, is for Weber a mode of subjectivity that can be understood beyond religion as the mode that individuals have. of imagining his subjective relationship to the others among whom he lives and of feeling related to them, Weber also explained ecstasy, nirvana and other states of different religions through how in each one a mode of attachment and detachment is presupposed. world

   This notion of attachment or detachment to the world is internalist based, that is, it presupposes the inner world of the individual for whom the world is presented as something external to his subjectivity, it suggests something, due to its emphasis on the idea of ​​a greater or lesser detachment from the eternal or external, the type of parameters that governed for many years, the contrast between abstractionism and realism, on the one hand, between common sense understood as the confirmation of what was previously typified, routinized or ordinary, and the The effect that avant-garde languages ​​had on subjectivity, the issue served for some time to explain the reasons why, for example, cubism, abstractionism, expressionism or surrealism, decomposed, fragmented, distorted or exaggerated the images of reality, as ways of exploring defamiliarizations of what had been routinized for perception, of seeking the extraordinary versus the ordinary, of deroutinizing the stereotyped, common sense could thus be understood as a form of attachment to the world, as the avant-garde languages ​​as an intensified, estranged or detached contemplation that sought its abstracted forms in abstract concepts such as spirit, being, consciousness, etc.

  Later they continued to interest me, but this interest gradually changed in its accents. In 1992 I wrote a book about modern and contemporary society - modernity - in which I analyzed the place that beliefs have in an almost religious sense within of the value system of axiological mediation of society in culture and art, he spoke then of faith in art, he discussed that just as what is considered artistic was relative or relativizable, once considered artistic it is a faith around which , around values, beliefs are generated, and explained that the entire objective world of art was understandable by objectifying and analyzing, developing the axiologies of that belief system, explaining art as an objective world as a form of religion even when in its own institutional and specialized autonomy, art would have been separated from religion, science, morality and law

   In Venezuela, I was surprised by the religious preachers on the boulevards as well as the evangelicals who knocked on the door of my house to profess the gospel and persuade me to read the Bible and follow their premonitions, I usually ended up spending hours explaining to them my theoretical reflections on the religion, as they proselytized, I specifically paid attention to the Pentecostal pastors of the seminary church, as well as in general to the way in which the church participated in the financing of academic research projects that related the mass media to the church and specific communities. with an economic sense of business such as faith and joy,

   Then when I emigrated to the United States I became fascinated with religions again, now what captivated me and attracted my interest was that constant community ritual of going to church as well as, above all, the prominent place that the church has in the fabric of the city. On the one hand, I once again found a way to participate in religion in the lives of people who, although more inclined towards Protestantism and the Methodist Church than towards orthodox Catholicism, almost all the temples and synagogues due to the level of their architectural elaboration , the finesse and richness of the art of its location, reminded me a little of the way the church functioned in the city in Venezuela

       But beyond an external vision, I paid close attention to the rituals within the churches that I was able to learn about through trips I made with Leonor Antoni and with Surpic Angelini, visiting religious ceremonies in a wide variety of churches, especially to the provinces and small towns. on the outskirts of large cities, specifically pay close attention to the striking and expressive Afro-Christian choirs, where African Americans sing praises, Gregorian chants, and other religious melodies exchanging the perspective of the choir with the histrionic point of view of one or two singers who extrovert in a very accentuated physical way, individualizing the singing in the manner of a type of jargon that at times comes to be spoken in terms of a discourse more focused on issues that affect the individual from a social, moral or spiritual point of view

  In Venezuela, the interest in religion, far from moving me towards the interiority of religious systems, something to which, although from a perspective focused on the modes of attachment and detachment to the world, presupposed Weber's sociology of religion, my interest moved towards what there is of religion in the value system of modern and contemporary non-religious culture where values ​​mediate, that is, where repetitive rituals have been intrinsically related to the processes of valuation, beliefs, etc., that make up those rituals. , analyzed, as he said, the art world as a system of beliefs centered on the presupposition of what is artistic and in what ways the ordinary rituals of the art world could be analyzed as modalities of that faith turned into repetitive rites around those values.

   But in the United States I moved away from that perspective in something related to the place that Parson gave to beliefs, and I began to pay attention to the internal relations between hermeneutics and religion with respect to culture, the fact that ultimately perses and independently of the relativism of points of view, as well as regardless of the arbitrariness of the sign, all language, all expression of others and everything that is present before us has to make sense to us, this ontological relationship of meaning to the elucidation of the world, It was presented to me as a form of religiosity or, to be more precise, of understanding phenomena usually not understood as religious, in the form of rituals that ultimately have homology with religiosity, as I discuss in my essay hermeneutics and culture, an analysis of the homologies of religion

  All this is also compatible with the axiological debate on morality analyzed from the micro perspective of action, that is, morality not as a system of conventions that evaluates, but understood as a sphere of orientation towards values ​​of all action and internalization. of values ​​given as premises, that is, the relationship between the telos - the duty that is implicit in the action as oriented towards values, and the aprioris, the premises or previously incorporated values ​​that in themselves go through the orientation to the others and to the world of all action, activity and communication

  It is, however, an understanding of synchronic religion, here and now in the simultaneous world of the social present, which completely eludes the understanding of objectively formed religions in what relates them to a past or a certain history of religion. .

   The relationship between morality and religion has not been sufficiently studied.

    We have found here two principles that explain not exactly a specific religion as previously constituted but what Julia Kristeva called the internal limit of religious experience. –see here my reference to Kristeva and her allusions to Derrida and Deleuze, in alchemies of the Sense regarding the discussion of meaning and animism, Huston, 2ooo

   Even beyond this allusion by Kristeva who, like Deleuze, had as a precept the evaluation of religions according to their cosmovision contents, that is, to the greater or less assertiveness of religion with respect to the world in terms of the interpretation that gives of this—see Deleuze's criticisms of Hume regarding God and the world in empiricism and subjectivity—, but preserving the idea of ​​a certain internal limit not only of religion, but of certain processes in culture in which that values ​​are involved and in which religion can be spoken of as the internal limit of these processes, I understand by religion, or rather, I define as religious in culture everything in whose internal limit we cannot do without or evade the inevitability of certain parameters ontological.

    My examples here are the ones previously analyzed, the first is hermeneutical, we may or may not have these or those interpretations about what others tell us, about their actions or about any communication phenomenon that requires us to interpret, but despite that, things They have to make sense to us to elucidate them and our own action is inseparable from elucidations of this type, as soon as the meaning becomes inescapable from elucidation and therefore ultimately ontologically required to simply orient our expressions and actions in the direction that in definitive open to take, an internal limit is presented to hermeneutics, this limit, insofar as it cannot ultimately be avoided, is religious although it is not a specific, objectively formed religion, it is religious because although we can hesitate or move between options , since it has to make sense to us, one of the options guides the action and interpretation and not another, it is something that alludes to the individualism of that inescapability of elucidation, but that is ultimately presented as a general characteristic of culture. in the sum of the processes that intervene in the future,

   Now, I even understand this in a deontic way, by saying that there is religion in it, I say that, as with respect to morality, regardless of how we position ourselves in terms of moral ideas when we have before us options to think and act with respect to a content objectively given outside of us, what is an internal limit with respect to morality, as I said before, is that our action will be in any variant crossed by premises that are the a priori values ​​that inform the course that our things take and at the same time time will then be oriented towards values, inclusive values, given as premises, and values ​​given as the orientation of action towards an ought to be, the teleological dimension of experience, which Derrida defined with respect to Hegel as the truth of truth, the telos.

   In a third sense, in addition to the relationship between elucidation and religion, and between morality and religion, the question of religion is now presented to us again by understanding culture in its objectivity, through the relationship between values ​​in themselves and beliefs, our The meaning of art is like this, although art is separated from religion in the secularized spheres of specialization and its autonomy in institutions, with regard to what we consider artistic, because once we elucidate what is properly artistic to us , all our axiological and valuation practices, in the way they are structured in instituted principles, are objectively reproduced according to the subjective faith in that belief, the same happens with what we consider scientific as with what we consider being in itself of whatever

   Finally, religion is not only in culture in these ways, as concrete now objective religions have been established for long centuries in culture, the latter has accumulated in its synchronic present, on the one hand, a whole imagery of icons and forms, this imagery as a purely visual phenomenon, in turn expresses an imaginary that would be the immaterialized form of what is reified in that imagery, thus, regardless of the specific religious meaning that the virgin has in terms of the history of religion, it simply symbolizes in an external imagery the imaginary of virginity, alive and present in the culture itself, even in the non-religious one in terms of telluric beliefs.

   In this way, through analysis of the relationship between imagery and imaginaries, it can be analyzed how the forms that religions acquire, whether monotheistic or polytheistic, although as Duvignaud maintains, it is true that even Christianity has hints of polytheism in its angels and in the number of saints and beatified figures, the icons of religion abstract certain principles of the imaginary in culture, in this the Greek religion was quite explicit despite its archaism, it had deities for almost all the emotional states of the human being, eros, the erotic, Venus, love, Hercules, strength, etc.

  Then we see how these imaginaries dissolved in mere values ​​that in terms of objective society land on moral and ethical principles, cross certain structural principles of inclusive morality to action, see in this sense, on the passage or transposition of the subjective as culture to the objectivity of the latter in its internal limits my essay Christianity and structure, where I discussed that this continues to be structural in the cultural reproduction of modernity, for example in the family even where we talk about atheist people, the way they evaluate and They value what is good and what is bad, what should be and what should not be, with respect to, for example, the female daughter, they reproduce parameters of the Christian imagination regarding chastity, virginity, the very conformation of the subjectivity, of the relationship between the private and the public, between the intimate and the social, between prudence and extroversion, between the modest and the immodest, between love and hate, between giving and receiving, between preserving and modifying, in this way, a very atheistic position, contradictory to itself, can be very religious, even unconsciously orthodox Catholic, contrary, for example, to a very liberal position to the extent that liberalism means distancing from the constraints of the orthodox religion regarding to tradition, heritage, memory and values

  Now, beyond the religious institutionality as expressed in orthodox Catholicism and Protestantism, it is true that we have a whole series of neologisms in religion, not only in the sense that we adduced before about the hidden polytheism implicit in the quantity of saints and angels that the Christian religion has, but now in the sense of ways in which religion welcomes the reinventions of culture resulting from the syncretization between cultural assets.

   In the same way that I analyzed in my most philosophical and epistemological texts as subjectivity and being, a subject that ascertains itself, and being that is yes without exteriority towards it, they are parallel series that go hand in hand and at the same time require each other, being that it is only without a subject that ascertains or reasons would crash into accidents and conversely, the subject that ascertains and externalizes being without being would become static and would stop without being able to be, something similar occurs between the relativistic logic of the options that Those of us who consider ourselves cultural relativists recognize the fact that interpretation is multiple and nothing offers a unit of measurement that says that this is the way and not that other, and the logic of elucidation where ultimately things have to make sense to us. and as such, only one of the options finally guides the elucidation that leads to action, where both things occur simultaneously and form parallel series that at the same time are required. On the one hand, culture is religion, because it is required to make sense. taking a path and from that moment on, becoming is in charge of repeating what is confirmed, of guaranteeing the ritual that repeats a structure that is validated by the common sense riddles that have previously meant a world and that as such will intervene in both the interpretation and The action goes in unison with the ritual that they are responsible for repeating, this ritual here is not religious in the sense of a specific religion, but it makes explicit the internal religious limit of elucidation, its function is to repeat a world based on riddles and hunches, while at the same time, without the relativism that shows the arbitrariness of the choice, the adequate relationship between chance and entropy, on the one hand, and between senses and meanings on the other, would not have the balance that a culture inherently possesses. requires between the natural order and the social order

     In a manner similar to that of Weber, Stephen Tyler in A Point of Order makes an analysis of dilemmas of this same type, although from other perspectives related to the order of the cosmos in his analyzes of the relationship between the sacred writings and the objective order of the universe. society in India, the way in which Stephen moves here between a form of material culture expressed on the one hand between the scripturas sancritas as culture that we can consider both material and immaterial and the objective physical order of the material reproduction of society , priests, farmers, castes, varnas, jatiz, etc., responds to a similar dialectic between material culture and immateriality

  Whether we speak in cold mathematical parables of the myths of modern science or relate those of ancient religion in symbols grown smooth and warm to the tongue through long and familiar use, still we speak a language of metaphor and only spin fables of the birth and death of the cosmos. Where we imagine a difference between the language of science and the voice of religion, the skeptic finds unity; and when we seek to abandon language altogether, seeing it as the last wedge of ignorance separating the structure of mathematics from cosmic order, he reminds us that this is

only an ancient urge to compass the cosmos through metaphor and bend nature to analogy, that others have thought their vast, self-confirming systems of knowledge revealed the order of life in the order of the cosmos. Thus reproved, we little care if our object of analysis is a myth of modern science or of ancient religion, for we find in both the same structures of thought, the same dialectical movements, the same metaphors, and the same exalted pride that tempts us to see the order of things in the order of our language. 

The sacred Sanskrit literature of India contains an extensive class of works devoted to dharma. Known as the Dharma Sästras, the "science of order," they detail the nature of the correspondence between cosmic and social order. Like those modern scientists who seek to establish harmony between the natural and social order, the ancient authors of the Dharma Šästras were practical men. 

When we understand the problem in these terms we recognize it as the social reflex of a cosmological problem whose themes can be found in the earliest speculations in the R g Veda and traced through the more sophisticated philosophical literature of later times. I refer here to the well-known Indra myth—a tale of combat between the gods and demons for control of the life-giving waters which make possible the growth, development, and expansion of the universe. The demons want to bind up the waters, to prevent differentiation or expansion, and the gods of course desire just the

In the later system of Sãñkhya philosophy these symbolic values are inverted and the great aim of life is to prevent expansion, to return to an undifferentiated state (cf. Tyler 1973:71-73). The synthesis of these two conflicting solutions constitutes the body of thought that we have come to know as Hinduism. The quest for equilibrium, a dynamic balance between change and permanence, the two contending forces of the cosmos, characterizes not only the Dharma Sãstras but the whole of Hinduism. What seemed at first a rather simple problem of the social order now stands revealed as a restatement of one of the most significant themes of Indian thought, or for that matter, of any thought, namely, "Can the cosmos expand infinitely without degenerating into chaos?

These things appear odd to the empirical understanding because they do not readily respond to material interpretation. They are symbolic values rather than material significances, and as symbols of an idea of order it is no more likely for them to signify its material conditions than it is for those conditions to symbolize the idea of order. This general observation is nowhere better illustrated than in the failure of empirical studies to understand why castes are ranked the way they are without invoking the varna theory. Time and again empirical studies document the facts of hierarchical rank, and as often fail to relate those facts to any determinate set of material conditions which might produce them. They fail because they seek simple links between the symbolic order and material conditions, forgetting that little in the material world directly influences our conceptions of it. We better understand the symbolic order when we recapture it in the immanent forms of its expression—in the categorial and propositional devices of language and thought.

   From analysis of this type Stephen then deduces a symbolic understanding of markets that places emphasis on their moral character. His essay relates the sacred scriptures to the real world in terms of how a cosmological question related to the order of the universe correlates or homology with a question of social order, varnas and jatis,

    Starting from similar relationships between the symbolic subjectivity of religion, in this case the Christian religion, its syncretisms and neologisms in popular culture, and those more or less syncretized that refer to Amerindian religions, the issue in terms of visual culture refers not to classes and castes but in the relationship between the subjective and the objective, social strata, paradoxical relationships between modernity and poverty.

   reflections on modernity and poverty required in order to elucidate why research focused on forms of the neoliberal free market as expressed in the urban popular markets of that period, while aesthetically communicating visual elements of the modern advertising market, also communicate visual elements, formal and aesthetic that refer to poverty, it would be necessary to delve into some issues related to the relationship between social stratification, folklore and religion.

   During my long years of continued life and career in Venezuela, one of my most recurring questions that returned to me from time to time trying to relate theoretical knowledge and empirical experiences, focused on how and to what extent Venezuelan modernity could form part of a well-cohesive project whose different parts and links guarantee not only its irreversibility but also, above all, its congruence and the future of its path towards increasing development.

  The problem of reversibility was undoubtedly out of the question, the project of Venezuelan modernity was not only structural, metabolic, socially and culturally irreversible, but it also emerged in those years of neoliberal capitalism characterized by intense activity of the financial system. world, hundreds of thousands of banks, the exponential and limitless development of the free market based on privatization, through a technological, architectural, civil engineering and media modernization that left no doubt about its irreversibility.

    In fact, Venezuela in the 1990s was not a society that had just begun to modernize, but rather a society and a culture that had been undergoing incessant modernization for no less than four decades.

   But although the process of economic, financial, technological, industrial and social modernization was irreversible, the problem of modernity as we know is not carried out solely with its modernizing aspect, despite the vigorous development of the economy and financial success, modernity is simultaneously a project that to be completed requires simultaneously the development of its cultural modernism and the development of its illustration project, processes which are supposed to go in unison and synchronize with each other.

   Regarding cultural modernism, Venezuela showed a very high differentiation, that is, it was not a society that, in its synchronic sociological present, lived modernism in the terms in which it was expressed at the beginning of the 20th century in literature and the arts. but rather it was a society in which successive new generations could, from the questions of their current culture and art in the social present, revisit and reinterpret their cultural modernisms of yesteryear from perspectives that were no longer diachronic with respect to those, but revisitations from the point of view of new levels of cultural differentiation corresponding to the cultural and social present.

   Expressed in curatorships in museums, in catalogs and the mass media, Venezuelan culture developed reinterpretations of its cultural modernisms that were no longer dependent on them, that is, that contemporary man did not seek in his former modernisms in the form of a to discover a past contingent on its Contemporary situation, but to ask how to reread and interpret from today's perspectives, which in that past, already very distant and surviving only in the form of narratives and texts, could be reread from current questions.

   Cultural modernism, moreover, in such conditions of neoliberal economics, could not be thought of as properly modernism but also as cultural postmodernism. The Venezuelan enlightenment project, on the other hand, had shown accelerated growth and evolution consolidated with the creation of ministries such as the ministries of culture and education, among many others that were perfected in the following decades, finding their moment of emergence in the eighties and nineties. greater boom. Hundreds of art museums contributed to this as well as the creation of a system of art schools throughout Venezuela.

   However, despite these data, the question about the future of Venezuelan modernity did not stop being raised and continually reappearing, although the existence of no less than ten television stations and other powerful mass media produced a plural culture based on a multi-party system essentially defined by democrats, Christians, social democrats, socialists and radicals, other more complex phenomena kept the question in the foreground for me. These phenomena were more complex and could not be characterized with the social and cultural cut of a single element but rather assumed the relationship between several phenomena, which I will discuss below.

   On the one hand, to the same extent that Venezuela developed economically and technologically with a significant participation of mixed university academic projects and the Christian church in the communities, the level of emigration from the countryside and the provinces to the capital generated a situation of uncontrolled agglomeration of a floating population that had no way of acquiring housing on its own and that had to build it informally in territories not designed or foreseen in terms of civil engineering for that purpose, forming hundreds of thousands of urbanizations developed on the slopes. of the mountains with houses made with poor materials and whose lives occurred without adequate river systems and with sanitation difficulties.

   This visually notable population, just by traveling along the highways spread throughout Caracas, created the so-called stripes of poverty; in reality it was largely not poverty in a classist sense, but rather a generalized situation with the economic and social strata that represented this uncontrolled floating culture given the fact that Venezuelan modernity did not, at least in an adequately controlled way, resolve the inevitable process of emigration that this modernity generated by causing the people of the provinces and from rural areas, left their lands to go there in search of better economic opportunities, because although they left well-built homes and a dignified community life in their rural towns, they were destined to live on the poor slopes of the great modern metropolis, changing their relative stability in the countryside in the city, from these strips of urban and suburban ranches, the proximity and coexistence with that modernity was a source of work for them and a way to manage to earn more money than they could get in their rural towns. .

    The massive nature of this emigration was presented as problematic, how to solve it?

     How could Venezuela advance its galloping modernity and at the same time resolve this uncontrolled emigration from the countryside to the city. Faced with this dichotomy, the different tendencies had different responses.

   For the democrats with a neoliberal economic orientation, one thing and the other went together, to the extent that the economic project of modernization is developed, it generates more sources of work for these people and more opportunities to prosper to improve their situation or modify it, by There is market competition, people who live in that situation have more possibilities of using their potential to earn more, diversify their businesses and improve their living conditions.

   The Democrats' entire focus was on creating opportunities for themselves to improve themselves through the free market.

   The point of view of the Christians was less economic and more cultural, not only is it an economically poor population but it is a population that lives in these conditions for cultural reasons as well and therefore the emphasis should be on generating activities and projects aimed at improve their cultural, social and community situation such as those implemented between the church and universities

   For the socialists it was the solution of the paternalistic state, a paternalistic totalitarian and administrative state, which should take control of those neighborhoods and distribute to them at a low price a basic basket that meets their main food needs.

   But since no trend could prevail more than the other for a period longer than five years, none of their points of view definitively or irreversibly solved the problem. During the Christians, these neighborhoods were filled with cultural projects and initiatives aimed at the community. between the church and the universities, but the job market and the free market incentive for them to focus on prospering economically, decreased and deteriorated, with the neoliberal democrats these neighborhoods were filled with companies, small banks, companies, businesses, teams appliances, televisions, and proliferations of free markets of all kinds in which they could sell and work, but the communities and their cultural needs were left adrift in the midst of their unhealthy conditions and their structural problems in relation to civil engineering, some progressed. Families and people had more work and more economic income, but cultural and social conflicts increased in the face of the same structural problems that made them poor.

    Under the socialists, the neighborhoods were filled with lines of people with coupons to get the milk and food that the paternalistic state gave them at a minimum price, but to the same extent they became sedentary, lazy, they stopped working, they did not make an effort. to prosper economically and although everyone had the required food at a minimum price, poverty increased fivefold and unemployment became the predominant and widespread lifestyle.

   With the neoliberal democrats and their incentives, more and more families prospered and either managed to buy housing in better areas of the city with their profits, improved their lifestyles and made their businesses prosper, or managed to improve their economic conditions within those same neighborhoods by building houses. in better conditions, acquiring automobiles and developing their businesses inside and outside those neighborhoods, poverty was reduced, population density in these conditions was reduced, a greater number of families began to live in other adequately urbanized parts of the city and a A greater number prospered economically within those neighborhoods that themselves became sources of countless forms of market and commerce, but cultural and social conflicts increased due to the fact that prospering economically does not always go together with becoming enlightened and almost always goes together with the fact that those who make an effort progress but conflicts increase among those who do not make an effort and want things to fall from the sky

   With the Christians, these neighborhoods were filled with research projects, work between the church and the academy, proselytism and moralization, but the sources of income were reduced and the opportunities to prosper were limited.

   Under the socialists, no one died of hunger, they lived on paternalistic coupons from the state and their basic basket, and social and cultural conflicts controlled centrally by the politicization of social life were reduced, but houses deteriorated, neighborhoods were filled with garbage, poverty became deeper and irreversible, economic living conditions worsened and deteriorated to circumstances of irreversible impoverishment, laziness, sedentary lifestyle, unemployment spread in neighborhoods that became unproductive and submerged in a marginality that went in the opposite direction. to prosperity.

   Venezuelan society was then economically a free market neoliberal capitalist society based on private property at all levels of families, individuals and society as a whole as well as a free economic activity based on small and medium enterprises. of those same individuals, families or consortiums of larger companies made up of businessmen and business groups, with a financial and banking activity integrated into the world bank and the international monetary system, but the government in power had to manage the funds for each five-year period. public goods of the state and the forms of this administration confronted diatribes that provoked for the same working, residential and productive-economic communities, circumstances of uncertainty, continuous variability, the media that expressed this multi-party system, compensated with critical culture for the impression of uncertainty to At the same time, they reflected the ways in which civil society expressed its criticisms and points of view, but the forms of administration of the public goods of the state also generated differences in the way of conceiving and implementing them.

   With the Democrats and their neoliberal orientation, the so-called culture of decentralization became widespread. The cultural and developmental thesis of the Democrats was that the state's budgetary resources must be decentralized to the maximum in their distribution and management, the money must go directly to those who are immediately, concretely and pragmatically related to the projects in which it will be invested, generating at the level of the entire country a management of public budgets that distributed the state budget according to a bottom-up criterion or from the ramifications to the center , far from centrally managing the budget from a government leadership, they strove to get the budget to the local communities and projects where it was needed, this generated a civil form of management that developed mainly around the relationship between professionals that were in charge of the projects and the local bodies most immediately limited to their area in the city, not requiring or needing to go to a centralized body that controls the management,

     This reduced bureaucracy to a minimum, ensuring that resources did not take a year to arrive, never arrived or stagnated in endless processes of signatures, payrolls, power struggles, political games, streamlining the distribution of the budget as much as possible and guaranteeing that it was within reach. time and that its management did not depend on endless processes of subordination, neoliberal decentralization that, as we know, reduces the state to a minimum, is contrary to the politicization of the economy and focuses on a specialized economic language centered on business and free trade without control of the state, then stimulated the productivity of the professional who very quickly found the planned resource for his projects and could concentrate on optimizing efficiency and productivity.

   Due to the neoliberal approach, the projects could also combine an agile and decentralized budget, not dependent on activities unrelated to professional productivity immediately related to the efficiency of the projects in the hands of those who were directly affected by them, with other financing initiatives from around the world. private and its own businesses, but decentralization, although it generated efficiency and productivity in the management of public funds, construction projects were started and finished quickly with efficient results, at the same time it produced an atomization, they were seen quickly each year the results of the investment of the state's public funds in concrete results, but the multiplicity of decentralized projects not related to each other produced discord regarding governance, the more decentralization, the more efficiency and productivity but less control and less governance.

    This, as in the previous example, generated social and cultural conflicts that the media compensated with a critical culture.

    To the above we must add that this culture of decentralization only worked in this way when the tendencies were very neoliberal, but there were tendencies within the same democrats and Christians less favorable to decentralization, in this sense, one could speak of an extrapolation At one extreme of this extrapolation is neoliberalism - which corresponded to the most liberal sectors within the Democrats and Christians - whose cultural and social project with respect to public administration is decentralization, the social democrats who establish an intermediate point between central control and decentralization among which were other tendencies more inclined to social democracy than neoliberalism, while at the other end of this extrapolation were the socialists and radicals, which meant the absolutely centralized administration of the state's public funds. .

   The more centralized the administration became in some trends, the longer it took for the resources to arrive, one year and up to two years it could take for the arrival of a resource supposed to be available from the beginning of the year, mired in bureaucracy, the projects of the professionals were broken by a political culture that had to dedicate that year instead of efficiently producing results from the public budget, on the contrary, to spend the year playing political games, strategies and maneuvers because centralized funds are blocked not only by simple bureaucracy, they are also blocked Because being centralized they are subject to ideology and the process of acquiring them becomes entangled between bureaucracy and ideology.

     The same laziness and sedentary lifestyle of the neighborhoods was now repeated in the professional sector that was waiting for these funds. Instead of producing and promoting, the year had to be dedicated to what in Venezuela they call sucking socks, spending the entire year demonstrating ideological affiliations and stratagems to see if what you should have available from the beginning of the year will one day reach you and in what form and under what conditions.

     While the discontent with the neoliberals, once the results of prosperity and efficiency in the productivity of the state's public funds were optimized and visibly tangible, lay in the argument of uncontrolled atomization and the crisis of governmentality, the discontent with the social democratic tendencies and At the extreme pole, with the totalitarian tendencies of absolute centralization, were corruption, bureaucracy, unproductivity, inefficiency and the politicization of management.

       These two phenomena, although there are many more that kept the question relevant to me, are nevertheless sufficient to establish its reasons, to what extent Venezuelan modernity, I asked at the beginning, could form part of a well-cohesive project whose different parts and links would guarantee not only its irreversibility

   Now, the analysis of subjectivity and objectivity, the symbolic order to which religions refer in the terms in which they make sense to the men of the market in Venezuela, versus social stratification, becomes even more accentuated in the reference not only to the contrast between the thousands of images that we dedicate to the Christian religion within The Market from Here, distributed in the environments that evoke their worlds of meaning, and those other less frequent but also included allusive to Amerindian religiosity

 Use

 I made known for the first time in a scripturally externalized way my prioritization of kinesics and proxemics studies as crucial moments of fieldwork methodology in different parts of the first, longer version of my essay The Eclipse of Evocation that I wrote in Houston in 1997 in reference to my consideration of these studies in culture analytics three years earlier in fieldwork in Venezuela, but in reality it is something that dates back to my first fieldwork where I explicitly and communicated to my colleagues, even shown, I focused – in replacement of the use of demographic material provided by the local authorities, on beginning my study of pilón by doing a prior and anticipatory study, from the first months, proxemic and kinesic of the culture, study that I wrote and which included proxemic graphics of the main pylon configurations, proving much more effective than any other understanding of the culture

   I have not seen before another example of recurrence to these studies as a methodological issue in field work, I have only seen two years after 1997, a modality of kinesics in the self-explanatory texts of one of the participants in selt , a school for teaching English and Mayan that Quetzil Eugenio created based on our theoretical discussions about the possibilities of transcultural anthropology and cultural translation, in Yucatán in those years, Laury who expressed that the recurrence of gestural communication was more profitable than even many times the sound aspect, or at least the relationship between the two, for the relationship between English, Mayan and Spanish

  Regarding the Afro-Caribbean references included within the market from here, I will dedicate separate texts regarding which I must say that it was an allusion to them as they occur in Venezuelan culture, not in Cuban culture, --an example in this regard are my studies. about the Afro-Venezuelan religion in the work of Luis Alberto Hernandez... but because these are much more established and strong religions in Brazil and Cuba, it will be more explicit and understandable to analyze them as they occur in the latter.

Bibliography

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Eugenio Quetzil, Aesthetic and ambivalence of Maya modernity, the Ethnography of Maya art, en crafting Maya identity, contemporary wood sculptures in the puuc region of Yucatan, Mexico, edited by jeff karl Kowalski, northern Illinois, university press

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Weber Max, Sociology of religion

Social stratification, speech, folklore and religion

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

      This essay is based and focused on the impressions that Cuban slang made on me in Miami when I traveled from Houston in the year 2000 after more than fifteen years without interactions with Cubans and without moving within environments and habitats in which ethnicity governs. Cuban. During those weeks in Miami, after giving my lecture at the Lasa panel with my colleagues and friends Quetzil Eugenio and Lisa Breglia, I could clearly perceive the strength, nuances and significance that slang has in Cuban culture as it is expressed. in United States. My perspective is therefore, regarding my culture of origin, that of an emigrant separated from that culture from new cultures for almost two decades, and strange in front of it when perceiving it where outside of Cuba it has settled and established.

   Methodologically, my perspective focuses here on exploring the scope of a common sense sociology for the theorization and understanding of relationships between social stratification and culture, focusing on speech, neologisms and religion, specifically, I propose to demonstrate through a sociolinguistic analysis of semantic and lexicological character such as the logic and heritage of common sense, what I have elsewhere called cultural understandings, ways of meaning the world closely related to intramundane meanings that are in social terms exposed to living semantic dynamics, that is, to formations of meaning that have not yet been collected by the instituted corpus of the language, and that we do not know if they will ever be, but that fall within the scope of dialects, idiolects, neologisms and inventions related to the speech act, speaking, as in the worlds of common sense, intramundane senses and meanings are given to meanings of words that related to riddles, hunches, hunches and mundane reasoning of various types that shape routine cultural understandings, explain the ways in which a good part of common sense attributes meanings and contents. semantics to words, repertoires and images of religion, and how the objectification of these intramundane semantic meanings in sociolinguistic terms explains the meanings that religion has for people

    This sociology of common sense intertwined with the sociolinguistics of speech allows us to then advance in the analysis of certain religions but not without understanding that it is in the first and last instance about relationships between social stratification and religion where we find ourselves in the field of an infinite number of linguistic neologisms. and religious, of something that from other perspectives, usually lacking precise linguistic understandings, has been called in a vague and general way, although not lacking in assertiveness, syncretism: it is therefore, in new terms, new avenues that can consider new possibilities within what is called ethnography of speech, or ethnography of speech in the terms discussed by Stephen Tyler in cognitive anthropology.

     In my essay on the ethos and the bilingual imaginary between the United States and Venezuela I have developed a series of analyzes on the relationship between structurality and asymmetry between English and Spanish, between Venezuelan and Amerindian with a mostly sociolinguistic matrix, on this occasion, I propose something similar regarding Cuban slang, focusing on the analysis of culture through the analysis of the language as it is expressed in the transformations of slang and from there analyzing the meanings that religion has for common sense.

    When I say social stratification I position myself once and for all in an anti-class sense, I share with colleagues like Néstor García Canclini - who by the way has a book dedicated to symbolic production and another to popular crafts in capitalism - that capitalism in its phase postindustrial has presupposed processes of decentralization through which the relationship between symbolism, culture and capital has reconfigured, if not entirely transformed, society and culture to a point that notions brought from the natural sciences and mechanically transposed to culture are not apply, classes, much more than species and genera, presuppose watertight classifications brought to society from divisions of the natural world, between whose parts there are no refluxes, traffic, migrations, transmigrations, interinfluences, communications, something to which Clifford Geertz Referring to the transposition of notions of natural sciences that do not apply and do not understand the specificities of culture, I call them the crimes of natural sciences.

   In the culture where everything is a symbol and where capital can no longer be reproduced without being symbolized, with the generalized mass media culture, stratifications replace classes with regard to how to understand the different way in which cultural groups according to their economic capital look at and understand the social world, there is undoubtedly social stratification, there is between conservatives and liberals, between institutions and alternatives, between solvency and lack, between abundance and scarcity,

     Unlike my analyzes on the relationship between Spanish and English, Hispanicity versus Anglicism, Venezuelanness versus Amerindian cultures, as well as my comparisons on Americanness for both as Euro-Americans based on the living presence on both sides of indigenous American cultures. , the monkeys and Yakuts of California, Iroquois, Algonquians, Hopis, Sioux, Hopewellians, Pawnees, etc., among the Indians of the north, Wayues, Baris, Añis, Yuxpas, or Yanomanis in the south, a discussion that led us to a reflexivity On the ethos and the imaginary, the analysis of Cuban slang in sociolinguistic terms leads to the discussion of very different problems that are not reflected in the ethos and the imaginary, but rather in the relationships between folklore and social stratification.

     In fact, unlike in Venezuela where speaking like the Wayues is a code of social distinction that does not affect social status but rather favors a sense of integration, in Cuban culture from a sociolinguistic point of view, slang refers to things that differentiate social groups

    If we analyze, for example, Cuban culture from the point of view of an archeology of the structurally ruling language in that corpus established by Cuban Spanish or Castilian, we find, just as in the study of Cuban architecture, very complex phonological and semantic stratifications. of Spanish culture of Iberia with Arabic and Moorish elements typical of the preponderance that Arabic has in the Spanish Iberian culture itself, this archaeological perspective is concerned with making a survey not only etymological but also glossematic and morphemic of words in Spanish and conjugations themselves. Arabs such as pillow, a word almost Arabic in its structure, reaching the conclusion that the Arabic is as strong as the Latin in Hispanicism, something notable as I said in architecture,

   But if we at the same time pay attention not to the lexical corpus of the institutionally formed language and of course the one that is generally spoken and written in Florida and Cuba by all Cubans, including those who simultaneously use the neologisms of speech that I will discuss here , in order to focus on those cultural neologisms with respect to the language, we find other islands or archipelagos of immateriality typical of intricate intramundane senses and meanings that escape that corpus and require entering into the study of complete dialects incomprehensible in Spanish, we are therefore in the scope of understandings of culture through the study of speech that escape the institutionalized understanding of culture. See in this sense my theorizations about speech versus writing in its relationship with oral memory as the first form of discontinuity of culture with respect to institutions.

    This is a good example of the dialectical passage from the empirical concrete to the immaterial required for the analysis of the symbolic when we work with the concept of material culture, not only that we begin to analyze religion in ways that move away from its referring iconographic meanings. to the inscriptural corpus of theological texts, but towards the understanding of certain ideal types that, via axiological neutrality, put us in contact with the objectification of these processes of subjectivity in culture, such as a certain moral imagination

    A good part of cuban slang is considered by the conservative cuban social strata on both sides of the Florida Strait, that is, without distinction of their political ideologies, both in Miami and Havana, as forms of bad culture, forms of bad speech, and in reality they are not, they are idiolects and dialects of immense semantic richness that are deeply intertwined with ways of meaning the world and things, that is, they communicate semantic meanings that words in Spanish do not. They have, that is, idiolects and dialects that are considered rude and that refer to poor strata of society, mainly to the influence of African culture in Cuban Spanish, both in the phonetic mode and in the expressive and extraverbal mode.

   However, we know well that they are very clearly distinguished and separated from what are considered bad words; they are not in any case rudeness or decomposed ways of speaking, but rather a vocabulary that expresses contents, very subtle intramundane meanings that add semantic remnants, cultural understandings, that is, not mere words that replace existing ones but rather provide nuances of meaning that the original words in Spanish do not possess, which have the purpose of collecting senses and meanings displaced or not collected by the semantic radius of existing words that nevertheless radiate subtle intramundane meanings that certain universes of meaning have for speakers in relation to a world of culture full of new semantic formations

   I am actually referring to neologisms.

   Let's start with the best known, the pure and the pure, more than half of Cubans say this to their mother and father in countless social situations. The etymology of the neologism obviously refers to a replacement of two words with two other existing ones. in Spanish, but whose semantic meaning is assigned or transferred, something pure or pure. We know well the semantic meanings that it radiates, purity versus impurity, it is a word that refers to a spiritual and ethical content, as well as to the soul, although there is purity as well. in states of nature and substances, those that we consider pure, for example, a pure corn sumun is not the same as a corn flour mixed with yeast, in its immaterialized content it refers to the soul, however, when changing being a word that expresses the being in itself of something to occupy the nominal place of an indicative of gender and person acquires other semantic meanings that on the one hand bring a part of its original meaning pure or pure of soul but but he or the, That is to say, the mother is the pure one, the father is the pure one, I think it is not necessary to expand on this, its content is on the one hand the one who is pure or the one who is pure, only the father and the mother can be pure what they are, but at the same time it has an axiological content that is given in the single mother and father and in the indicative of he and she, the transposition of a sense of being like that, to a sense of gender.

   Where are you going, in the form of a question in a given social situation, I'm going to the cigar house, where do you come from, in the form of a question, I'm coming from the cigar house, I called you on the phone and you weren't there, if I was there in the morning Pura, well I'm leaving, I have to see Pura in the afternoon, you already asked Pura, what does Puro say about it, Puro is finally back.

    Now let's look at some neologisms of the same type where it refers to names of people and gender, but in this case where an existing Spanish word such as pure or pure is not brought in, but where the word is completely invented.

    The jeba, for example, is the way one calls one's girlfriend, it has a more ritual semantic meaning than the word girlfriend in Spanish which means more the couple, the jeba is more than one, it is more what one has what to have, the girlfriend may or may not have, the jeba once you have it is like what it had to be, everyone must have their jeba, I can't go to the meeting because I have to go out with my jeba, I couldn't go because I was with my jeba, my jeba comes with me, or the jeba is happy

    In this sense, there are an infinite number of words to name and designate the social other in the second and third person singular, ambia, ecobio, consorte, monina, all four of which refer to a person in all cases male, a gender other, but each one radiates a different semantic meaning and the four are made in the manner of African phonetic conjugations, the first three can be conjugated with mi because the ambia, the ecobio or the consort are something of one, as can be a cousin or a friend, but without meaning anything precise, they are words that connote or communicate the meaning of what one can be about another that are not included in the usual words such as friend or lineage relatives such as brother or cousin,

   The ambia is a kind of friend but it connotes something more ritualistic less formal, an ambia is closer than an ecobio in a sense of the type of things that are talked about with an ambia that are not talked about with the ecobio, but paradoxically at the same time the ambia usually does not have access to the internal space of relationships like family or jeba, it is more someone with whom you occasionally spend time talking, the ecobio wants to connote a certain possibility of knowing the family, an ecobio can know your children, for example, an ambia not necessarily, and a consort that almost alludes as if there were some type of clan tie or link similar to lineage but without consanguinity, it is like a word that alludes to or suggests kinship ties such as For example, the brother-in-law, but in reality there is no link of that type with him, it only suggests a certain type of provisional or occasional brotherhood, none of these words refers to a permanent relationship, nor to kinship or lineage, but it seems that meanings lost or blurred, in the sense of the lost harmonies that Levi Strauss referred to, --thinking of Africa, that is, as vestiges or remnants of uses that evoke certain forms of extinct social relations, of a certain rituality coming from senses such as clan, although very distant, and which do not have nor are they any longer related to that type of social relationship typical of Africa, but nevertheless in a certain way they evoke it, someone who is not a relative of yours, more like a friend, but is not exactly a friend, but someone with whom you can have a relationship, whether neighborhood, or some type of occasionality or frequency of communication, all of them are transitory, occasional, or simply ways of saying that they evoke a momentary meaning but that do not require Try a relationship that will maintain those characteristics, it is a type of evocation

  Now, I maintain, as I argued in a recent essay on the Yoruba religion in Cuba, that many of these things are related to ancestors that have tribalized forms of relationship that are implicit in African religions, I do not mean that these words have a relationship to religion, a religion is not only a cosmovision or belief system, it also presupposes, as occurs with Christianity, a certain mode of social relationship, in this sense, although, returning to my arguments regarding the relationship between governing structures and asymmetrical astructural relationships in my essay on Venezuela, that this type of evocation of social ties, although it does not reflect the social structures of cultural reproduction that in Cuba are governed by a deeply rooted orthodox Catholic Christianity as well as by the Western structures of secularization and the social division of labor, which reflect astructural and asymmetrical modes of social relations but which have ascendancy in slang through folklore and in this way are reflected in the intramundane senses of speech as ways of meaning cultural understandings that evoke subtle semantic meaning relationships, some of course are more used than others, some tend to become extinct, but others remain intact and are frequently used.

   The monina is someone much further away, someone you know from the neighborhood, who you see from time to time, who don't know each other properly, but who greet each other.

     Despite this, they are not designated or denoted the same, no ambia is called ambia come here or my ambia, as a form of greeting, or as a way of telling another person, this is my ambia, ecobio can be used more constantly as a way of naming another by saying ecobio, monina on the other hand is only said to someone who is seen very occasionally, consort is less said to a person or someone else who sees escobio

   Guara, for example, is a type or form of rapport, which in anthropology is called rapport, a way of trying to build trust with other people, a way of sympathizing with other people, making guara with another person or with a group of people. people, or with a girl, is to make gestural and bodily expressions that seek rapprochement or sympathy, make body movements or say things that seek rapprochement, it can also be said in a negative way, in the form of leave that guara, or leave the guara, and in the positive you can say this one has a problem or is doing something

   The jama is the food, what is eaten, leave the jama there, on the table, or give me the jama, or this is my jama, jamar is to eat the jama, to be eating, I can't go now you can say on the phone because I'm jaming, eating, I'm leaving early because I have to jamar, I have to go eat, jamar is literally eating, it can also be used metaphorically. From a semantic point of view, it has two meanings more accentuated than eating: on the one hand, the meaning of getting out of it or finishing doing it, or doing it more like what is relevant, what is eaten is what is eaten. , what you never know is less important than what you never know, the emphasis is on what you never know, and less on what you never know, you have to jam, whoever does not never live, eat, less gallant than having dinner or lunch, puts the emphasis on what is eaten, and even related to the animal sense,

   The DJ is work, one is in the DJ when he is at work, DJing is working, I'm busy DJing, I'm busy working,

    Cúrralo is another way of saying to work but more ordinary and more ritual, more tribal if you will, which emphasizes the sense that it is something you go to every day unlike clicking or clicking which puts more semantic accent. about the very activity in which you are concentrating at work, the pincha is something that keeps you very busy, while the cúrralo is more where one goes with a certain rituality in a mundane sense, as a more familiar way of telling something that is from the house to the cúrralo and from the cúrralo to the house but does not denote or mean the effort or the activity itself in which one is engaged

   Acere is the most used word in Cuban slang, it is used mainly among men but more and more women are using it, acere is a way of saying something to another person without using their name, it is like a subname, or like a substratum of person , an acere is someone you talk to, anyone can be an acere

   The gao is the house, but the word house in Spanish is very external, it almost designates the architectural, the gao communicates more the sense that one lives within it, that it is one's home, it is a way of communicating something about what There is more belonging, a more ritual way of saying to the house where one lives, I'm going to the gao, I didn't go because I was in the gao, let me first go through the gao, through my house, then I'll go there

    A chama is a child, and a kid too

    The guagua, a very well-known and famous slang, no Cuban calls the transport buses bus, bus or bus, everyone calls it guagua and here it is one of the slang words that were colored at the level of all social strata, it will be strange the Cuban who does not say guagua to a bus, the repetition of the same conjugation of consonant and vowel twice in a row, the use of gua in Cuban Spanish refers, for example, to guantanamera, guataca, guama, guácima, almost all of which are very related words. to the rural world, it is possible that its meaning began with some guajiro use since the word guajiro means person from the countryside, not exactly farmer in English or peasant, but emphasizing that it is from the provinces, although the Wayues in Venezuela agree that they are called guajiros for ethnic reasons,

   Putting on your boots, in this case it is not exactly a neologism that comes to form the invention of a new word but rather the conjugation of existing words to give them another meaning in nothing related to what those words originally mean, remember in some figurative language, metaphors, many of which are found in phrases that usually have a moral content as species of popular common sense morals also formed by the type of figurative use of language, here, however, it is not a moral nor an extensive phrase, but rather a way of saying that someone came out with very good luck, for example, a boy who gets a very beautiful girl, his friend tells him, you put on your boots, but it can be used for any situation in which people come out with something very good in their favor in situations, there are other articulations like this such as standing, which literally means not sitting, upright, but which is used to say that a person turned out well in something, put on your boots or putting on boots can be used with far-fetched meanings within its own meaning

    Returning to the neologisms, the tacho, is the hair, a way of calling hair that emphasizes having it with honda, another word from Cuban slang, honda means that it is fashionable, that it is up to date, that it is seen as a sign of modern or forward, the tacho is the hair in a very ordinary sense but it refers to the fact that one has well-groomed hair, it is a way of saying to the hair that it literally means the hairs of the head but with richer semantic meanings than simply saying the hair or hair

   Mamey, is a very exotic Cuban fruit, delicious, but it is used as an exact word as it is saying mamey also to say that something is good, that it is good, let's go to the movies, mamey, as if to say, that's good, perfect, let's do it, this mamey the idea, or I prepare a tea, what do you think of the idea, mamey

   The yunta, the yunta is something that is used to lead the oxen, to keep them grabbed and held, controlled, but it is used in slang to tell a person who is like a kind of partner of one, a yunta is a close friend. with whom you count, someone with whom you have a relationship that helps or complements

  The compliment is the way in which you are called to praise girls, ways of saying seductive things to them when they pass by, a compliment can be a simple compliment, but it can also be a whole phrase or conjugation that at the moment can become poetic.

  Bacilar is looking at girls enjoying their bodies

  Embarked, embarked, means when someone tells you, we'll meet you at such and such a time in such and such a place for some activity, working, going out, talking, etc., and the person doesn't go, they put you on board, for that reason the person who never goes to the appointments and at the time when he says it is called a ship, you are a ship, this is where the ship comes, don't be a ship, it is also exaggerated by telling that person names of different types of ships, for example, ocean liner or merchant ship, or frigate

   Anchar and almendrón, like all other non-existent words in Spanish, are used to name a typical type of taxi in Cuba that consists of people's private cars that are very old, from the 1950s or 1960s.

   Pachanga is like guachafita in Venezuelan, it means the same thing, it is a social situation between people that becomes happy, becomes fun where everyone relaxes and a kind of party is created, it is not exactly a party, but It's like something before a party or similar, the pachanga was formed, a group of people relaxed and began to have fun in a kind of party

   The güiro, masculine form of a type of dry Cuban seed called güira in feminine, which is very large compared to the usual size of the seeds, reaching the size of a fruit, but as a dry seed when it comes off the tree it is used as a well, as a cup, as a jug for water, but in the masculine, güiro, means two different things, on the one hand it is a party,Vamos al Güiro is Let's go to the party, and it also means the head, the head of a person. It's his güiro

   If a güiro is a seed in the masculine, but it is a party and it is the head, we immediately see all the semantic meanings related to subtle and refined relationships of meaning that the word radiates as its field of meanings that cover meanings that the words it replaces They do not have, a party, a seed and the head would never have been related in Spanish, slang puts them in relation, behind these relationships there are sometimes allusions to popular wisdom, other times a certain humor or satire that is behind ways popular means of meaning the world of slang or that slang itself collects and expresses, sometimes simply metaphorizations, figurative turns, and sometimes there are traditions, in the sense that a güiro may have been said to a party in the countryside where these seeds are most frequent, the rural world, although there are güira trees also in the cities, but since they are more common in the countryside, calling a festival güiro either comes from the countryside or is an urban invention that evokes it

    The Yuma or the yumas was the popular Cuban way of calling American people for a long time, a yuma was an American state, but in recent decades its meaning has been changing, it is no longer used only for Americans, but in general for foreigners, but its initial meaning for many decades was person from the United States

    We could not say that with slang words all the words in the Spanish dictionary can be covered and replaced, since there are many words that have no expression in slang and only their expression in Spanish exists for them – let us add to this that all Cuban people who resort to the slang words that we are analyzing speak continuously in normal and usual Spanish, reserving the use of these words for certain types of social communication, I will return to it, the when, the why, the for what, the intramundane intricacies by which resort to these ways of meaning the world.

   but if we make a list of all the slang words we would come to the conclusion that their number is so high that it forms a dialect or idiolect that is almost a language, if we are in a hypothetical situation in which two people only use slang words to communicate and we had someone who does not know them listening to them, this person would be faced with a new language that would have to learn it from the beginning because although slang does not imply replacement of articles and grammatical or syntactic forms, the lexicon as we know is very important in a language so that it would be another language that would have a grammar very similar to that of Spanish

   A bread is a very good person, so good that he is a bread.

   A download is a way of calling you to talk for a while about some topics in a relaxed way but where everyone improvises their ideas and talks, it is also used in music both in singing and with instruments, a download is playing for a while the musical instruments

   A niche is a person of African, black descent. It tends to be used for very black people, but not for light mulattoes or Creoles, but in general it designates a dark-skinned person.

   Muela, literally is the name of one of the pieces of the dentition that is used to grind food, but in Cuban slang it means that a person talks a lot, giving a molar to another person is talking a lot about something, usually it puts the accent in which one thing is explained a lot as if resorting to far-fetched arguments to convince another person, it is used negatively in the form of leave that tooth, as if telling the other, don't give me more tooth, don't try to explain more or convince me, or it is used in the positive, tremendous tooth that one person gave to another, I talk to him a lot explaining and convincing with his arguments, it is also used in recurrence or as a recurrence to resolve situations, if a situation turns out that there are not many handles seen, They tend to say, it can be resolved with a grind, you have to give a grind on that topic to convince someone by explaining and arguing, it means to speak but with the purpose of convincing or persuading, a grinder, is a person who talks a lot trying to justify or explain himself.

   In this case it is not a neologism but an existing word, but whose semantic meaning changes completely to mean other things.

   Matules, means suitcases, what one carries with one, backpack, things that weigh and is different from tareco, which is a type of things that are disused or half broken or old, but that one has at home or in a space. , which take up a lot of space and are kept well because one day they want to be repaired even though they are disused, or because they are used but they make a bulk, that is, they fill up space

   Doll is called to girls as a way of telling them that they are very beautiful

    Kimbado is a way of saying that another person is crazy but not in the sense that they are sick, but rather as saying half crazy, the word in English is also used, crazy, kimbado and crazy, it is a person who is half dazed or half crazy but It is not literally meant that this is crazy, although sometimes it is, however, it highlights the fact that the word kimbar comes from a popular Cuban game that is played on the ground with small glass balls where the balls must fall into a hole made on earth called guao, whoever manages to enter the guao has the turn to shoot his crystal ball over those of his opponent by holding it between his fingers and throwing it towards the opponent's ball by rubbing his thumb with the ring finger in which it is puts the ball, if the ball of the player in turn manages to trip over the opponent's ball it is called kimbo, this is called kimbar al opponent, and then the opponent is called kimbado

   It is possible that the use of the word came from that game and was then extended to a semantic way of speaking or saying a dazed or half-crazed person because the crystal ball that is kimbada shoots out without being able to foresee where it is going as if it were left dazed.

   The word crazy, by the way, in the feminine, that is, in the place of crazy, crazy, is used in the opposite way to the masculine gender to tell masculine people that they are homosexual and it is a slang expression, that crazy woman is a person male who is homosexual

   The word carving, which literally means to sculpt wood with a metal instrument and give it an artistic shape, is used in Cuban slang to mean everything that the boy says to the girl to conquer her, to try to get her to be his girlfriend, the size, but it is also called shooting, although it has a different meaning, carving is a long ritual of conquest that includes everything that is said to it and puts its semantic accent on the effort made to explain and convince, shooting is just declaring to a girl

   The word dead, which means dead, lifeless, is used in Cuban slang to say that a boy is very in love with a girl, dead means the most in love that a person can be where he only lives for his partner or for the girl in his life. who is in love, it is said that such person is dead with the other, the converse is also used dead, in reference to the girl who is dead with the boy, very much in love.

      For this same thing, the word match is also used, this match, or departure, is dead or dead with the person he loves, but dead is more in love than match and the word match, unlike dead, has other meanings in slang, it is also used. It is used to say that a person was discovered in something that he did or it is used to designate homosexuals, what happens to the homosexual is that he splits, he is split, so that split has all these semantic meanings in slang.

   Bolao means that something is very good, it can be balao for very well made or it can be balao for very good in general, it tends to be used as a tacho because of its sling although it is necessary to say that in general all the slang is related to the idea of ​​having honda or saying things with a honda, which means that the usual way of saying it has become boring, lacking freshness where the senses have been impoverished, behind the uses of slang the idea of ​​saying things and communicating them with more depth is implicit , a person with a sling is a person, for example, who dances very well, or who dresses in fashion, but in speech it designates ways of drawing words, ways of pronouncing, attitude towards the language, attitude towards the semantic meanings that are used. communicate by meaning the immediate or surrounding world or simply by meaning the world in general, a person has swin which is pronounced suin in Spanish, when he has honda, he does it in fashion or in a way that is refreshing or more attractive than in the Ordinarily, behind slang there is a sense of suin and sling, to use language with more guara, to use another slang word, but at the same time, because from the point of view of social stratification slang As a dialect and idiolect tends to be seen on the conservative side as a form of bad speech, as bad education, which in a certain way reflects social stratification, slang is torn between these two senses of the social, something that has depth but also something that is not very well seen or that is frowned upon by some

   Despite this, slang dominates in all areas of the uses of Cuban Spanish and is continuous and constant from one end of Cuban culture to the other, both in the United States and in Cuba, the opposite of honda and suin is cheo or chea

   Cheo or chea, its most literal meaning could be in bad taste, but in reality it is more subtle than that, cheo or chea is something that has no honda or no suin, but with the interest that has arisen towards popular culture and its values, just as towards kitsch, cheo or chea has also become a valued aesthetic and in that sense, a chea aesthetic or cheo way of conducting oneself is not always pejorative, it can also mean the culture that has been formed around certain popular tastes, ways of wearing a shirt, ways of arranging one's hair, ways of wearing bracelets or bracelets, of putting on necklaces, ways of decorating the house or car, the word has been becoming more subtle in its meanings so that it no longer means only as in its origins it does not have a sling or does not have a suin, but can be used to mean a certain attitude towards things, so for example, on one occasion a friend told me that ethnography is chea, at first I did not understand it, but Then I was able to understand his expression, it refers to the fact that he looks at a culture without paying attention to its fashions or its sling, but rather presupposes that to know a culture is to refer to things that in that culture have been overlooked or have ceased to be in use, so it tends to be used to designate aesthetics in general, forms of singing, for example, or dancing, but also to designate aesthetic conglomerates.

   To the extent that its semantic meaning has been refined and some use cheo intentionally as an aesthetic attitude, slang has resorted to another word to designate what was previously meant by chea, the word picúa, which is in itself the name of a type of fish or sea fish, it is then used as a sign of the opposite of the slingshot, like barludo and chimbo with respect to sifrino in Venezuela, it means something that can be seen close to ridiculous, but with stridency and attention. to the quirky and extravagant typical of kitsch and certain fashions, the limits between the picuo and the non-picuo have also become susceptible to semantic variations, so that there are, for example, in Cuban cinema films that have shown how the culture of the picuo It has redeemable aesthetic and cultural values, such as Patakin, all of this has been greatly relativized, but in any case there is an original meaning of the terms that continues to be a decisive component at an axiological level in its semantics.

  Guataca or guatacón is a word that uses an existing word to mean something else, in its initial meaning it refers to a certain instrument for working the land very typical of the Cuban peasantry, but in its uses in slang it means a person who highly praises to other people in order to obtain some benefit from them, to be a guataca or guatacón, is to pay a lot of worship and homage to someone who has some hierarchy that facilitates something or on whom one depends in some way to obtain something in return, at the same time At the same time, the guataca occupies a very prominent place in the Yoruba religion, which has appropriated all types of objects in Cuban material culture for its rituals.

   The face is the face, but in a way that accentuates the good part of the face, its emphasis is on showing the face, or on the image that others ultimately have of one.

   A pincho or el pincho is a word that, in other words, can be used to refer to people who have high institutional positions, military or not, a pincho is someone with a high institutional position.

     The list of slang words would become endless, we have seen with a moderate portion to what extent they are semantic conjugations related to intricate intramundane meanings through which common sense means the world, now I would like to expand from here to argue two things In terms of common sense sociology and cultural anthropology, the first of these extensions lies in reasoning that a very significant portion of the syncretic forms of religiosity in Cuba enter the culture in terms of its meanings via slang, that is, related to meanings. which, like those previously analyzed in their subtle semantic relationships, are related to common sense riddles, hunches and spells that have in their background ways of meaning things,

   First, they are meant as words that do not exist in the corpus of established Spanish, which is mostly spoken not only by those who do not use slang but also by those who use slang, by which I mean not only that the relationship between the institutional religions such as basic Christianity in orthodox Catholic Cuba, and those non-institutional are of the same type, nomenclatures that use the same structural principles of Spanish, grammatical and syntactic, but that make phonetic, morphemic and glossematic modes inclusive in whose lexicology Sounds and timbral modes are incorporated, largely coming from African ways of speaking, from Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Cuban and African body, gestural and synesthetic styles in general, beyond that, even the words that begin to have certain meanings or meanings in the area. religious are largely related to the same type of ritual logic to which these linguistic neologisms respond and also have, at a lexicological level, semantic meanings that are merely linguistic in their uses, that is, meanings that, in their mere expression, are still only semantic irradiations of the words. themselves.

   Thus, for example, elegua from the point of view of slang before and without yet being considered as a word that designates a certain African god whose meanings can be sought in the sense of these deities in Africa, has in terms of dialects and idiolects semantic meanings similar to ecobio, consorte, monina or ambia in the uses of the language in speech. If we, in the same way that ecobio or ambia have semantic vestiges of social relations but that have been disseminated and can only be evoked, we put our emphasis on the mere sound of the word elegua in phonetic terms, advocating the hypothesis, for the moment, when its religious semantic side disseminated, that is, it remained as if in extinction behind the phonetic sound, as happens with ambia, we would apprehend in that mere sound, that elegua, in its pronunciation, could be a social other, that ball elegua, what honda elegua, leave that elegua, or for example, elegua with that, or instead of directing it to another social, relating it to things and situations, for example, give elegua to that, as when it is said, give water to the domino, or for example, in the way of meaning to get rid of something but in a mundane sense, as if saying, get out of that, elegua with that, or conversely, so that you have elegua with that, or elegua be

    In fact, when a Cuban for some reason carries with him, mentions or says elegua, the first thing that other Cubans interpret from it is that that individual or person carries an elegua, I will try to be elucidative in this, before going to search for the most intricate meanings. from elegua on a religious level, elegua for common sense, means a type of social relationship, something that can be with respect to someone, an elegua thus devoid of its deepest religiosity, used in the semantics of ordinary worldly speech, like an ambia, an ecobio, a monina or a consort, it is a semantic relationship of meanings constrained in phonetics, an elegua seen in this way can be a helpful friend, someone who facilitates and makes viable, someone who opens doors, facilitates a path or it unravels entanglements at the crossroads of life or things, or it can be without person and without gender, the mere sense of luck or ache on the road

   But at the same time elegua, like a consort, designates a ritual relationship of relationality, it has, however, its semantic residuals relative to the less widespread African languages ​​because it preserves in those a more precise religious sense that has not become extinct, but rather which can be searched for in its religious meanings,

  Beyond the scope of common and mundane sense, it is a type of transfer that has in its origin more the meaning of a carrying than that of a being, ultimately, although common sense knows that one thing is the person and another The ritual symbol to which it is related is very different, it is something that can go hand in hand with the identity of the person, I try to make explicit and elucidate this relationship with identity, between carrying with and being, this kind of duplication that presupposes, just like the ambia or ecobio, elegua

   It happens here as it happens with the tarot and the astrological chart, where people presuppose that according to a certain order in the cosmos, people are either Libras or Sagittarians or Aries, or monkeys or tigers in the Chinese zodiac, a person is the person who is with his identity and his name but at the same time is a Libra or Sagittarius in the zodiac, in the same way, a person is the identity that he is, but simultaneously a certain word linked to the African liturgy corresponds to him, that is why which is something that can go hand in hand, it is up to some to choose - they carry it with them instead of being, carrying with one instead of being, highlights the duplication here, one is one, but also on another level, like libra or sagittarius, monkey or tiger, it corresponds to elegua, it carries elegua, it doubles in a pair that is its elegua or elegua, to others chango, to others yemaya, and so on with the different words

   Even people who do not believe in these religions from a religious or theological point of view tend to accept that it corresponds to them as well as being Libras or Sagittarians, monkeys or tigers, elegs or shangos.

  There is here, of course, a semantic difference with consort, ambia, monina or ecobio, a consort, a monina, an ecobio or an ambia are semantic meanings that designate ritualized modes of relations with social others, these modes of social relations are given in semantics and replace the effective identity of the person, that other can be Pedro, Roberto, Jacinto in his identity as a person, but at the same time he is an ambia of one, an ecobio, a consort, a monina, in a similar way the replacement or the figurative simultaneity through which the semantically socialized ritual identity that redoubles or repeats on another level, the identity of the one, the one on a par, is individual towards one or according to what it means to one in relationships of otherness and social alterity, when we say elegua, only that an ambia, an ecobio, a monina or a consort, do nothing more than signify a social relationship insofar as an elegua can become, as in the zodiac a libra, a sagittarius a aries, not only a word that semantically connotes that it facilitates, makes viable or unblocks, but it can be depersonified, abstracted as a cosmological immateriality while maintaining its ritual meaning,

   I explain and elucidate this more precisely given that the mode of social other of an elegua does not function exactly the same as neologisms such as ambia, ecobio, consort, although it is very similar from a phonetic and lexical point of view, in the sense of ritual vestiges. From the semantics of the word, an individual may be elegua as much as he or she is Libra, but Libra or Sagittarius designate a mere sense of cosmological identity whose relationship to the identity of the individual person or the self is archetypal but does not contain the meaning. of a you, a him, a she or a them,

   elegua, and other words in the African lexicon, always maintain, even when used in their immateriality such as libra or sagittarius, something of the reminiscences of the social other, in the sense that elegua is still cosmologized and treated outside the scope of social others, continues to have like a consort or an ecobio, the reminiscences, the remnants of a type abstracted from another social one, an elegua will always keep some sense of brother or social person, as I said, consort and ambia, or ecobio, are reminiscences of ritual relationships that They once had types of ties with them, such as those of the clan, currently they refer only to neighborhood relationships, but they evoke something of a type of social relationship that is linked to lineage.

   Indeed, when we read the text that explains Libra or Sagittarius as concepts that presuppose being abstractions of cosmology that correspond to one, that being, in carrying one on a par, reads descriptions of types of people, they are like abstracted types of person. .

   When we go to religion and then away from the intramundane uses of the semantic meaning of common sense about elegua, we searched more deeply for its religious meaning as we said before, we see that elegua, in the mythemes that collect the fables of its origin, was a good brother, a brother who cared for and protected his other brothers from the authority of his father, while also being a good son because he protected his mother from the mischief of one of his brothers, at the same time the one with the greatest ancestry I had in my father that it was the eldest to whom I listened, it was like saying the eldest brother although in reality he was not biologically the eldest but the youngest to whom Olofi, the main creator god in African religion, said that you being the smallest and my messenger , you will be the greatest on earth and in heaven, and without you it will never be possible to do anything

    This way of meaning things around African deities is given by the fact that at a non-religious pagan level, these words, from the point of view of slang, idiolects and dialects, have intramundane meanings that have been filled with axiological nuances. semantics where they are not yet meant according to their meanings in religion but only by those semantic irradiations that the words acquire, these semantic irradiations have in the center or core of their meanings, certain corpuses of main meanings, elegua is luck, viability, ease , and since it is at the same time a certain type of social other, it is at the same time something to be had

    Now, when we go to religion we see that this ritual meaning preserved by the phonetics and timbric of the pronunciation of the mere word, is in reality about deities that in their initial meanings in Africa had precise ritual and tribal meanings, elegua was a naughty boy, not because he was naughty in himself, but because he protected from mischief, a brother, son of abatala, who helped his brothers with respect to his father

   But it is necessary to understand that these allusions must be deliteralized because although they do keep the vestiges that Elegua was a brother in terms of kinship in the mythemes that collect the stories of African oral memory, these identities were not literal and were full of semantic ambiguities, For example, Elegua was the son of Abbatala, but when one investigates who Obbatala was, it turns out that Olofi, the main god of the origin of the African world, created Obbatala as a kind of intermediate deity between him and the more mundane deities or those attached to the earthly world. so as to help him complete the image of the human being in the creation of the world that Olofi had created, Obbatala, on the other hand, father of Elegua is the son of Olodumare, who together with Olofi and Olorun make the main trinitarian divinity of the african liturgy

   so that if elegua is the son of obbatala while on the one hand it becomes obvious, as otherwise occurs in the Christian religion, that the deities descend from ties of original kinship, on the other hand it becomes explicit that here the relations of godson or offspring do not come from clear and clear biological links, Obbatala in fact, could be the same man as woman and given that Elegua was the son of Obbatala and Yemu but given that Yemu was a woman it could turn out to be the case that if Obbatala was a woman then Elegua would be son of a homosexual relationship between two women, which would once deny the principle of biological reproduction and in that case Elegua could only be an adopted son, but at the same time the same would happen with his brothers, sons of Obbatala and Yemu, Ogun, Ochosi. , etc., they could all be legitimate children but they could also be adopted, although in this regard Shango is different, since he is Yemaya's son that she rejected and Obbatala raised for adoption

   This relationship of brother or brotherhood related to elegua is here literal and in the intramundane common sense disconnected from its religious meanings, it preserves that lightness, people in fact, in the common sense when listening elegua listens, the one who opens the doors, the one who clears the way, in religious terms, however, the meanings are much more complex, on the one hand it is the oricha of the house, of the home understood from within, one's own, where one is protected in what is one's own understood within. , away from the outside world, his image, generally a snail or stone with cowrie snails that act as eyes and nose, is generally placed behind the main door that divides the street from the interior of the home, his necklace, which many people even wear non-believers in religion, it is made of black and red beads

    When we delve into its religious meanings we then have a series of axiological nuances that move from the simple individual in everyday life who uses elegua as a mere word in semantic terms meaning with it luck, ease, viability, protection of parents or authority, etc., passing through non-religious but more ritual meanings such as wearing a certain type of necklace or bracelet of black and red beads that symbolizes an elegua on the body, or further, having an elegua at home behind the door, Up to this point we are in the still pagan realm of common sense. When we immerse ourselves in religious content that escapes or moves beyond intramundane logic, we enter the field of people who decide to embrace the African religion.

   Now back to slang, back to routine common sense.

   One of the reasons that I want to clarify here refers to the fact that a significant number of the slang words that make up idiolects and dialects, maintain, with respect to the ruling language, Castilian Spanish, the language that is mostly spoken all the time. the same people who resort to slang, as well as those who do not, an asymmetric relationship, this asymmetry is given in the fact that the previously formed and instituted corpus of language, which grammatically regulates both figurative and neological conjugations of slang, is the Spanish and not the other way around, therefore these jargons, dialects and idiolects are residual with respect to Spanish, read asymmetrical, residual because they are responsible for collecting semantic meanings that incorporate intramundane connotations of common sense related to cultural understandings that surround those meanings. intramundane, Spanish as a language does not supply or fill,

   But let us ask what are the constants of these new meanings in formation, of these new archipelagos or semantic islands, of these residual and asymmetrical alternative languages, astructural with respect to the structure of Spanish but regulated by it at the same time as ascending in it from the point From the point of view of speech, its constants are rituals, they designate meanings that presuppose an attitude towards the language that is brought to it intricacies that add to the lexicon variations that link the language with extralinguistic rituals, mostly extraverbal,

    In the same way, the words that begin to have a more acute meaning with respect to religion have a ritual background in semantic terms, they designate more ritual meanings around intramundane cultural understandings, on the other hand, they are words that begin to radiate contents. semantics that not only concern forms of otherness and social alterity but more explicitly designate attitudes, riddles, hunches and spells of routine meaning around the world and things,

   The reasoning here is that words coming from religion, or whose vestiges and reminiscences in religion are more precise, used at a pagan level in common sense, have persuasive content and their semantic ancestry is related to axiological mediations that translate semantic content. rituals that other words do not have, hence their strength and ascendancy.

   I try to explain this in a more explicit and elucidative way, a Cuban may not be a believer in African or Afro-Caribbean religions in the sense of not explaining the world in the terms in which these religions explain it, he may or may not be a believer in Christianity. as a religion, but whether or not they believe in one religion or the other, many Cubans tend to consider that the words that designate Africanness are related to their cultural identity, in reality they are not more so or in any way in more decisive ways, which Spanish with its Iberian culture and, as I said before, Arabic and Moorish, since Spanish is the ruling language, what actually happens is that the Cuban cultural identity is, like its main language, mainly neo-Iberian or as they call it in Hispanic-American Cuba,

  It is necessary here to return to a distinction that does not neglect Hispanicity because the concept of Latinidad used to say Latin Americans ignores the immense ancestry and importance of the Arab in the Iberian content of Hispanicity, but at the same time, because Hispanicity with its Iberian and Arabic content, in the same way and above all as a result of the Spanish language being the governing and institutional one, the sense of cultural identity tends to be associated with what that more pre-given institutionality does not include, In this sense, the slang lexicons analyzed above and together with them, the way in which the words of religion enter that lexicon with their new semantic meanings, mediate more ritualized intramundane meaning relationships - hence their great persuasive force - and this is the reason why even Cubans who do not believe in those religions now react prejudicedly in the opposite direction to that previously discussed,

   We said at the beginning that there is a relationship between social stratification and slang, giving these lexicons as forms of bad speech, but at the same time the opposite also happens, an attitude that does not recognize the axiological value of these slang lexicons in Cuban culture would distance itself from the content. of mediation that they have because they mediate as reified corpuses in speech, intramundane ritual semantic meanings and common sense that refer to cultural understandings,

   It is important here to analyze the extraverbal ancestry of these semantic contents, so that the words of the Afro-Caribbean religion not only have ancestry in Cuba through speech, although in a timbral and phonetic sense, obbatala is a word that has a sound that In itself, like yemaya, it radiates semantic meanings like those we previously analyzed about elegua, that is, meanings that are not yet religious, such as ecobio, ambia, consort, meanings that timbrally refer to a certain rituality around which constricted semes can be obtained, that is, associated main senses, they also have a very important relationship, even in sonorous, rhythmic and timbral terms, with facial and body expressions, related to music and dance.

   Cuban dances very intricately related to idiosyncrasies or customs such as the guaguancó and the mambo, for example, which include both musical sounds and dances, are aesthetic, rhythmic and vocal, guttural, extraverbal recreations of oral expressions related to speech and popular phrasing, of In fact, unlike the religions of Asia in whose languages, as I have argued elsewhere, we observe graphics that are disconnected from speech, one of the main characteristics of Afro-Caribbean religions is that they are closely related to oral speech not only because they are traditions that have been preserved above all through oral memory but because they are inscriptural forms, that is, because their modes of writing are almost gestures of forms of speech, the genres to which I refer, in fact, are almost spoken, The guaguancó is a type of speech or spoken oral enunciation that repeats certain phrases, it is a type of speech in phrases or intertextual speech, the mambo is a sound and bodily repetition of a spoken slang,

   In this sense, the words that enter slang via the lexicon with semantic conjugations that preserve a more or less religious origin in a more or less clear sense, are words that, by incorporating into the meanings semantic meanings about ritualized intramundanities that Spanish does not have, They provide a mediating function, they mediate between the non-institutionalized oral culture, that is, the oral intramundane life worlds, and the instituted structures of the language corpus. The same occurs in terms of the way in which religions in Cuba relate to each other. The only difference is that these slang neologisms, although inventively made in the African way in their phonetics, rhythm and vocal sound, many of them, do have precise meanings in both words and elegua, although they do have a symbolism that can be simplified to their meanings. of meaning in the non-religious common sense, they are also words in the Yoruba language, a language that Cubans do not speak, which is why the merely sonorous due to its relationship to the extraverbal inside in a neological imagination already disconnected from that Yoruba language, in This point is somewhat similar to what happens with the way in which Amerindian sounds are assimilated in Venezuelan neological Spanish, with the difference that in Venezuela these languages ​​are spoken, although not by non-Amerindian Venezuelans, but by the latter. .

    I now return to religion.

   I am not interested here in making merely analogical transpositions, but it is true that just as Spanish and the dialects and idiolects of slang are related, the institutional Christian religion and Afro-Caribbean religions are related, which, however, is not seen or understood. It is understood the same if we analyze it from the axiological point of view of the studies of the Christian religion in Cuba as if we analyze it from the point of view of Afro-Caribbean religions, since syncretism does not have the same value and semantic content when we talk about how it is syncretized. the Christian religion than when we talk about how the African religion is syncretized, for example, in the rule of ocha or Santería.

    Here comes something that is unique to Cuban culture and I would say perhaps additionally to Brazilian culture, these African lexicons with their ritual semantic meanings presuppose the following, in their origin, they are closely related to speech, which is made explicit in the gestures. extraverbal in music and dance, as well as in the writings, but paradoxically at the same time they are full of vestiges and reminiscences that relate them directly almost as redoubled forms of oral speech, these languages ​​are not spoken in Cuba, nor in the Brazil.

   Only a very closed circle speaks the Yoruba, Candomble and Umbanda languages ​​in Cuba and Brazil. In Bahia, the largest number of African descendants in both cultures do not speak those African languages, unlike what happens with the Amerindian languages. from Mexico via the Andes to all of South America where hundreds, if not thousands, of Amerindian languages ​​are today spoken intact by their communities, as is the case, for example, with Arawak among the Wayues, and this fact is decisive in understanding the importance of the neologism. That is to say, their high inventive content, given that those languages ​​are not spoken, but given that at the same time they are very based cultures almost dependent on oral speech, such a high level of neologisms is produced in the culture that it goes beyond the usual semantic relationships between language and speech in culture.

   Having cleared up that slang lexicons, from a semantic point of view, enter Cuban culture through its asymmetric relationship with Spanish, that is, with respect to the ruling and generalized culture of the Iberian and Arabic language of Hispanicity, they go entering into the pure oral spoken without entering the corpus of the established language, which is why everyone speaks Spanish and uses slang only alternatively, in specific situations and or in more or less frequent ways, and understanding that from the point of view of non-religious pagan common sense, in the same way that slang lexicons, enter via ritualized intramundane semantic meanings, as cultural understandings, the words of religion connoting a measurable radius of attributed meanings, simple meanings of a symbolic nature, enter the common sense and its uses, meanings such as elegua that makes the path viable, at the point where non-religious people carry with them elegua, chango, and sometimes even orula or yemaya necklaces without often knowing the meanings that these words have in the religion,

   Things such as, in the way of the zodiac, accepting a certain carrying along with the identity, such as libra or monkey, zagittarius or tiger, whichever corresponds to elegua, chango, or any other oricha, and assuming that in the the same way in which the slang words that we have analyzed before work, which, although seen as forms of bad speech, mediate ritualized meanings of subtle semantic intramundanities that Spanish does not have, from the sound, timbral and rhythmic point of view, the words with African reminiscences and vestiges, more or less religious in their symbolism, are ascending and persuasive via essentially extraverbal ritualized content, facial expressions that accompany speech, body movements, music and dance, we can then analyze more complex aspects of religious symbolism.

Bibliography

Eco Umberto, Kinesics and Proxemics, The Semiotic Field, The Absent Structure

Eco Umberto, Sociolinguistica-ethnolinguistica, Pp 14-16, The Semiotic Field, Pp 9-22, the absent structure, lumen

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, El Correlato de mundo: interpretante y estructura en la teoría cultural posmoderne

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Christianity and structure, on the intramundane horizon

Shutz Alfred, The Knowledge in the Worlds of Everyday Life, edited by ilse and Luckmann

Tyler A Stephen, Lexical studies, semantic analysis, a point of order, rice university studies

Weber Max, Sociology of religion

Yoruba Imagery: Signs, Semas, sememas, semantemas and narrative correlates/a semiotic perspective in sociology of religion

   ©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

   This essay is focused on discussing anthropological and ethnographic issues that have become the center of my analysis from the United States about a film that I presented at the end of my conferences in the auditorium of the rice media center in Houston Texas, rice university on Afro-Cuban religions, not without first thanking my friend and colleague fran rodriguez for going to look for it in havana and bringing it to me for my course

    Presenting, discussing and analyzing a religion is a very complex effort in terms of anthropology and ethnography. On the one hand, there is a temptation, in which countless efforts are diluted to derive studies of religions, losing the understanding of them, the anthropological and ethnographic objectification, but on the other hand, the anthropological and ethnographic perspective tends to ignore everything that, as I have analyzed elsewhere, is only possible to abstract from sociology.

    In this sense, I establish clear differences between what we could consider a sociology of religion, in the sense developed by Max Weber, and uses of sociology within the anthropology of religion and ethnography, at the same time that I differentiate anthropological analysis from mere study of religions.

   My perspective, as I said before, is from the sociology of religions in the terms initiated by Max Weber.

    I will develop here objectifying sociological analyzes on African religions from a semiotic perspective that focuses on cutting and discussing the signs, the semes and the relationship of these to narrative correlates, we understand by sign an individualized unit cut out as a one in front of the multiple, which It has both form and content, and it is a cut-out form in itself in the place of an object or something that denotes or connotes. We understand by semes, since we have discussed the sign extensively in other books, a minimal unit. semantics, or what in semasiology we call semanthemes, these minimal semitic units bring together their material substrate which can be in most cases syntacsis, that is, pure form, logical surface, although also substance of the expression, thereby connoting the matter of the sign, as well as lexical, that is, matter of a word or vocabulary, a seme always has a vehicle in one of these three dimensions, at the same time, a seme or semantheme is, along with that material minimum, also a minimum of meaning. associated with that minimal material unit, and we call a narrative correlate a limited or constrained set of textual supplements, usually narrative, that is, that with respect to that sign and that seme or semantheme, they collect a certain story,

   We have discussed elsewhere, especially in my essay Epistemology and theory of performativity, a hermeneutical critique of the sign, but given that here we are dealing with symbolic phenomena in which figurative languages, that is, tropological translations of meaning, metaphors , allegories, etc., as in every religion they are in excess, we refer to my more limited --- less hermeneuticized analyzes of the sign, in my book the correlate of the world: interpretant and structure in postmodern cultural theory,

   I will avoid as much as possible the concept of mytheme, which I myself sometimes resort to to define a constrained or minimal narratological dimension of narratives based on oral memory, and I will discuss these issues specifically as they occur in Brazil, in the northern Caribbean area of Venezuela, and in Cuban culture on both sides Florida and the island of Cuba.

   It is not my objective, of course, to offer an exhaustive study that covers all aspects of these religions, specifically regarding the content of this essay I aim to clear up some methodological issues that I consider essential and necessary for research and comprehensive research. of these religions on the basis of the tradition that exists in this regard

    One of the issues that I want to highlight and focus on here is the difference that implies approaching religion from the perspective of how it is expressed in a certain visual material culture and how it is expressed instead from the point of view of the collection of oral narratives.

   I consider that a religion is present in culture effectively primarily and primarily as a material culture with its visual expression and its physical correlates such as visual icons, sound and bodily expression, sometimes including forms of language, speech and writing, and that material culture is the only support to find the congruent and understandable set of it, while I think that although many religions, and specifically this one, have survived and have been reproduced thanks to oral memory and depend , is above all, of speech, the collection of mythemes, that is, of mythological oral narratives, is always random and fragmentary so that trying to read a form of religion through them we end up scattered in ramifications that lead to other ramifications and that branch into contradictions.

    Regarding this religion, additionally, as I said before, there is the disjunctive addition that we cannot turn to the Yoruba language to infer conclusions in its analysis since it is a language that is not spoken in the same regions in which it has proliferated as a religion. or that ultimately so few people speak it that the path through it is not viable.

   Where to start, however, is the question.

   Anthropology and ethnography, faced with this question, are always faced with the dilemma of lists of contiguities or the creation of catalogs of aggregated elements between which, however, it is not known what the relationships are, thus, for example, with respect to this religion. , or there is a tendency to make a contiguous collection, that is, a list of orichas one after the other trying to explain it to the same extent as each oricha or deity is talked about, something that would be like explaining the Greek religion by placing one behind from another to the gods pyche, eros, venus, etc., or in the Christian one making a contiguous list Adam, Eve, Abraham, James, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, and so on, arriving at the saints and the angels

     At the same time there is generally no form or criterion to order the collected mythemes, Levi Strauss's comparative analyzes between the musical staff and the myth that compares melody as diachronic and harmony as synchrony serve only to further complicate the things, then, if the relationships between the mythemes or mythical fragments of collected oral narratives are fragmentary, how can we unite the fragments with respect to an overall idea?

  Levi Strauss's approach was, of course, to renounce an overall idea, to instead proceed by comparisons between fragments, trying to find invariants through comparisons, for example between myths of tribes in North America, myths in South America and myths of Greek antiquity,

   My comprehensive and sociological perspective, based on a criterion of axiological neutrality, cannot, without a doubt, take either the most usual path of the catalog of juxtaposed contiguities, one oricha after the other, nor the Pentagramal path suggested by Levi Strauss, but neither the path of Malinowski, who gives so much functional importance to oral narratives and their relationship with myths that he produces the image that culture is a mechanism of functions perfectly fitted into each other where each oral history or ancient narrative explains the steps of magical rituals and at the same time the latter are like micro effects that bring with them almost like a recipe for a meal, or a script for a film, the oral narration or the myth collected as their instructions for use, like the user manual. regarding household appliances

  What then should be the criterion to bring religions together?

   How to proceed between the fragments and the whole, in what way to relate split fragments, parts or elements, with a general idea of ​​congruence and above all, where to start?

   Only in sociology do we understand that religions, regardless of how they represent and explain the world, are symbolic formations that take shape within a certain social and cultural reality synchronous in the social present of a culture within which they reach the status of a specific form of visual and material culture with a certain imagery that is cut out from the rest of visual culture in its specificities, we define by imagery a visual set of material culture with its own characteristics that differs notably from other visual sets, and only in Sociology understands that this material culture of course has a correlation of immateriality in a certain imaginary, the imagery lives in the forms, it is the visual expression of the forms of that material culture that is religion, the imaginary, it lives in the senses. and the meanings that people give them and therefore it is immaterial, it lives in the imagination, it is, however, at the same time the dematerialized drumbeat of what imagery is, that is, a repetition of the latter on another level as It occurs, for example, between the object that we see and the image of the object that remains later in our memory when we turn our attention to another place and the object is behind us or outside the visual area or the reach of our area of ​​effective sensory manipulation.

   We always remember that object but it already lives in an incorporeal ethereal dimension, in a spectral dimension typical of memory. The first is the imagery, the second is its imagery.

   It is this immaterialization that explains in what ways the evaluative universe of people, their moral values, their moral imagination, their premises and the orientation of their actions towards values, expresses the symbolic contents of that religion.

   The above requires, before entering into the specific contents of the images of religion, deities, narratives, images, etc., to understand how this is inscribed and cut out with respect to the rest of the culture of which it is a part or in which it is part. expresses,

   We have analyzed slang in Florida and Cuba, something similar would be missing with respect to African culture in Brazil and on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, but empirically it has been enlightening to analyze certain idiolects and dialects of slang within Cuban culture in the analysis of which we have understood how the religion that interests us here is spatialized and inscribed in general from the semantic and lexical point of view with respect to the whole of a culture, but this is not enough, it is necessary, before entering into the analysis of the symbolism and religious images, objectify how that religion is expressed in terms of material culture, that is, as specific imagery in terms of visual culture, including objects, artifacts, images and icons as well as music and dance.

    Now, at the same time, the universe of images, icons, objects and elements that make up imagery as cultural visual material can also be susceptible to being reduced to a catalog of contiguities where, like in a list, things are located one after the other without it being made explicit what the relationship is between them, what links of sense and meaning explain their relationships, in this sense from the methodological point of view the very problem of how to relate in the analysis of the images, the non-iconographic aspects related to them, something that returns us to our essay on material and immaterial culture when we analyzed how generally the analyzes on forms of symbolic production are based on ways of relating the visual with narratives external to the visual. which ultimately have to also be searched for in that narrative material from which we moved away before, and what difference does the concept of material culture entail in this specific sense with respect to that of symbolic production?

   I will undertake these analyzes by positioning myself epistemologically from the perspective of common sense sociology.

   Common sense has been a concept and category in the sciences since the early discussions about the relationship between scientific language and common sense language at the beginning of the 20th century.

   This reflexivity, which also occurred in the field of art, when it was analyzed that it differentiated a properly artistic language from one that was not, placing the latter as a language of common sense, had its first expressions in the discussion on scientificity that governed the times. of positivism, logical neopositivism and later empiricism, and acquires a somewhat more elaborate development, although still not enough, in some texts by Alfred Shutz, such as those compiled by Ilse and Luckmann, knowledge in the worlds of everyday life, and in the semantics of greimas when I talk about the possibility of a sociology of common sense

  In Cuban culture, syncretism is frequently spoken of, both in Florida and on the island, and it is generalized with this expression that, just as Cuban culture has been the result of a transculturation between Spanish culture and those other pre-colonial Caribbean and brought from Africa, the assumption or assumption that the Christian and African religions have been syncretized, giving this as undisputed, it is unknown, however, as I said before, that this is actually relative and debatable.

   We can speak of a syncretism in general culture precisely when through analysis such as those previously developed around slang and its relationship with folklore certain abstract semantic meanings, that is, abstracted from its literal religious contents through its aesthetics, its formal appearances, their timbres, their extraverbality and their rhythmicity, are accepted as syncretized at the level of a general synesthesia and a general kinesics which precisely expresses the extraverbal ancestry of the semantic contents of which we are talking, however , moving to the more narrowly religious level of these semantic contents, the question of syncretism is not as clear and precise as has generally been believed.

   On the one hand, it is not the same to talk about syncretism if we are perceiving the matter from the perspective of the Catholic and Christian religion, how it is expressed in terms of material culture within the latter, than if we see them from the African perspective, since it is It is essential to clarify that, just as ambia, ecobio, consorte and monina have never entered the institutional corpus of the Spanish language, not even in a dictionary of Cuban Spanish, and with them all the others mentioned above, the Catholic and Christian religion has an imagery and a material culture that cuts it out as something in itself differentiated from any other imagery, differentiated both from what we have analyzed in another essay, such as the visual cutout typical of colonial imagery, despite being related, as well as any other visual imagery in the culture including the one at hand here, no deity, no oricha, no mytheme, and no aspect of African religions has ever been institutionally and formally beatified or sanctified by the Christian church either as visual imagery or as religion .

   There are some isolated phenomena, such as the Virgin of Charity of Copper, and it can be said that there are some very alternative synagogues and convents in the societal sense, that is, closely related to the urban emergencies of certain communities, which have accepted a certain type of approach or inclusion, but this is in no way something institutionally recognized by Christian institutions.

    At the same time, conversely, in no way when we study the rule of ocha and Santería do we find a true fusion or integration of both religions, Santeria, the rule of ocha is undoubtedly, yes, without a doubt, a neologism, that is, an inventive recreation very disconnected from the meanings that the symbols had in Africa and therefore so inventive and recreational with respect to the African past, a Cuban invention, no less than a dish in Cuban cuisine such as For example, okra or ajiaco, malanga friturita or other food inventions can be related to Spanish cuisine and African cuisine,

   but regardless of that high inventiveness that makes the rule of ocha a neologism as inventive as it can be to say tacho to the hair, or to say jeba to the girlfriend, or to say jamar to eat, or to say ambia or ecobio to the friend, this neologism conforms in itself a religion that is in no way Christian and that has in no way really been syncretized with the Christian religion

    Saying that elegua is a saint like saying that orula, yemaya, babalu aye or chango are saints in the Christian sense is as unreal or as much a fiction as it is, even more so than saying that tacho is the Spanish word for hair, as much or more What to say, güiro is the Spanish word for a festival, African deities have never been and probably never will be, accepted by the Christian parameters of beatification, as much or more asymmetrical with respect to the Christian religion, that is, elegua is a saint. as asymmetrical is to say that someday ecobio will be the Spanish word for friend.

   Neither more nor less, the rule of ocha and Santería, are with respect to the Christian religion, religions that appropriate it without its institutional consent, and this is not coincidental, like speech with respect to language, which can take its own path without being included in that, these are religions essentially based on oral memories that depend completely on speech, that could not exist without speech and that speech is the territory in which they have been generated,

   In this sense and from this same linguistic perspective, not to say, exact sciences, we can say that in the same way that the dialects and idiolects of slang would not be possible without using Spanish grammar, using its articles, its syntacsis and its conjugations, but without ever being accepted by that language as an established corpus, Santeria appropriates the Christian religion, specifically the orthodox Catholic religion, which is the one that governs Cuba.

   We have already analyzed before in our book the intramundane horizon that the Christian religion is structural in culture and this comparison between slang and corpus of the language, on the one hand, and between the rule of ocha - Christianity and catalogicism on the other, is a demonstration More than that, the rule of ocha is therefore, like the Amerindian cultures in Venezuela multi and plurilingual, with respect to Venezuelan Spanish or like Spanish with respect to English in the United States, or like the Indian languages ​​in the United States with respect to English, asymmetric with respect to English. to Catholicism, which would be something like saying that the Santeros speak the Catholic language, but the Catholics do not speak the Santero language, for which there is, by the way, a word aleyo in its Guine Gongori variation which means the language of a Santero.

    But certainly, the rule of ocha and Santería, not only appropriate, as slang with its idiolects and dialectics of Spanish, its grammar and syntacsis, without respecting its lexicon, its semantics and its meanings, of religion Christian way of using with respect to its devotees or faithful the ancestry that Christian holiness has in them, treating their deities as saints but without the slightest consent of Christian religious institutions and it is necessary in this sense to be clear that beyond persuasiveness that we have analyzed before, it is important to distinguish what differentiates an oricha from a Christian saint,

   The rule of ocha or Santería, moreover, not only appropriates, as the dialects and idiolects of slang appropriate from Spanish, the Christian religion, it also appropriates other contents of Cuban popular culture that are not religious in the first place. In the end, for example, the entire so-called monte ewe of Santería is nothing more than an appropriation of the so-called culture of Cuban popular medicine, a whole series of herbs, ointments, decoctions and preparations with plants that supplement through common sense wisdom, corporal or spiritual solutions that come from knowledge that, for example, peasants and grandparents have in Cuban popular culture, has been progressively appropriated by Santería, which then begins to name those plants with beneficial effects after their deities and gods, Santería, like slang, and structurally, in a semantically and lexicologically way we could say that it is almost identical to slang, it is an alternative practice that has been gaining authority in Cuban culture through the mediation of the extraverbal contents of African culture within Cuban culture— synesthetically and synesthetically--, music, dance and visual material culture, but not in its specific religious contents.

   In this sense, I consider that the now evaluative analysis and understanding of these African religions must be discerned or distinguished as the study of something that is as much or more material culture than religion. I do not deny with this argument that it is a religion, it is undoubtedly a religion, but It is a type of religion that, structurally speaking, does not have its ancestry in Cuban culture through its strictly religious contents but rather has its ancestry through what we must define and understand as imagery and a material and visual culture. Also musical and dance, this material and visual culture, without excluding its music and dances as very important, enters Cuban culture through semantic means without undermining the fact that a semantic sense always brings with it, as we said, its vehicle and its material way of being a syntacsis and a lexicon, that is, a morphology, a material base, without yet entering through its strictly religious contents

   And starting from this understanding, I consider that these African religions must be studied from a formalist point of view, initially objectifying them through the concepts of imagery and material culture, aesthetics, form, with the correlate of visual culture that this implies, including music and dance to progressively approach the analysis of the religious aspects themselves.

   For this, I focus on a comparison of visual anthropology between, for example, in the case of the Yoruba religion, the differences between deities and orichas, understood according to oral narratives or understood as mere visual artifacts of material and visual culture.

   In this last sense, they are only very rarely symbolic productions and are rather mostly forms of material and visual culture whose artisanal logic is based on principles of bricollage and palimpsests, imitations and refunctionalizations, textual material formations legible in their aesthetics and their forms, that is, that is, susceptible to exegesis and interpretation which move between the notions of altar and reliquary, and more extensive notions that encompass places in architecture, inside or outside the house, such as inside behind the door, in landfills, inside shop windows or closets, display cases and floor furniture, through shelves, in the form of installation areas in the corners or in rooms that are reserved for them, as well as including sculptures without disdaining the importance that the things that are carried have in this religion. on the body such as bracelets, necklaces and clothing, then as a continuation of the body as a vehicle there are dances and music

  It is required, to isolate the signs in their singularity from individuals cut between a form and an object or referent in whose place that form is and which it denotes or connotes, as well as to isolate the semes, to resort to a relatively synthetic and summarized table. of the main forms that this visual imagery adopts as material culture, resorting in order to make this tight constraint to the notion of pattern whose literal translation is as a noun fabric, print, fabric fabric, in masculine design, model, and in terms of facts pattern

  Understood as mere objects of visual and material culture, we have in this religion a relationship between signs, symbols and spatial arrangement, for example:

Sign: güira or clay fryer, ota: stone, couri snails as eyes, nose or ears---object denoted: elegua (deity, oricha)/

Sema: Entrance of the house-behind the door/direction: elegua/inside/home/protection from the outside, open-close

Minimal narrative theme: open and close the passage, way, viability, ease, enter, exit

Spatialization: installation

Symbols/objects: necklace of red and black beads, kites, whistles, balls, little soldiers, doodle, guano, cook's or yarey's hat, knee-length pants,

Symbols/dance: children's jumps, kite raising, spinning top dancing, brushing aside weeds, grimaces, cuteness, whirlpool

Sema: clearing or opening the way, chance, good or bad luck, twists of fate

Spatialization: corporal and installation expression

     With the above, it is a meaningful, semic and pre-narrative patters about elegua, one of the orichas of the Yoruba religion.

     We could do the same thing that we have just done with respect to elegua with the rest of the Yoruba deities one by one, each one admits a pattern as constrained as this one in its minimal expression although different due to the denotative and semantic peculiarities of each one, something that which we will see later

   Let us say in general that the peculiarity of elegua, as in another sense different from that of orula, another deity, is that, unlike other African deities, such as obbatala, father of elegua, oggun, and eightsi, is that the latter are also represented with the full-length sculpture of a human being, obatala sculpturally is a black man dressed in white with a cap and arms extended to both sides of the body or if she is a woman, with an African hairstyle as a sculpture of a black woman with a sophisticated fabric In its motifs, oggun as a sculpture is a black man brandishing the machete, eightsi a black man with his uniform and his bow for hunting, yemaya a black sculpture with his striped dress, chango a black sculpture with his jacket and royal attributes and his crown also sculptural or as a god of thunder and lightning with the bippene ax and his oche in his hand and head,

   elegua and orula, however unlike the others, although also osun are not represented with full-body humanoid sculptures, the stone or snail with which elegua is represented is given eyes and noses of couris small snails that suggest the human face but as a whole it is an ota, that is, a stone, the cowrie snail used for the eyes and nose is a mollusk whose shell was currency in several African towns and is the snail used in the diloggun –minor oracle-- depending on how it falls face down or face up, the letter or oddun is read and the officiant communicates the consulate the pataki from which he draws the teachings or morals that he communicates.

    orula is represented with the set of elements of ifa - major oracle -, a divination system that consists of a tureen that contains the ikines or ekines, attributes of the babalawo-priest of ifa, who attends to the consultants and reads the oracle, an iruke to scare and to clean the officiant, the ate, which is the board used for divination, --which symbolizes the world, the creation of everything--the brush to clean the board and the ekuele or chain that is used in the divination system, that material and visual set that makes the oracle, is distributed on a mat, and is the material and visual representation of orula, this is therefore installation, distributional and dispositional in space with elements that are mostly independent objects one of other non-sculptural

   Both elegua and orula are therefore only installational, they never acquire, like other orichas, a sculptural form of the entire human body, which denotes many of their semantic meanings, of what differentiates them, likewise, Osun is among all the orichas the most signico, is immediately represented by the sign of a metal rooster, more specifically a silhouette of a rooster, although we should say that eightsi is as signico as osun by being immediately denoted by a bow and arrow, but unlike elegua and orula that never have full-length sculptural representations, although pictorial orula does appear sitting in a lotus-like position with his hands on his knees like Buddha, oggun, on the other hand it can be relatively denoted by the sign of iron, machetes, shovels , pickaxes, hammers, mandarris, firearms, guatacas, sickle, scythe, these things and the mountain denote as signs to oggun but not, however, its receptacle, which in the case of elegua is a sign, in that of oggun is not a sign to Unless it is an iron container, the colors at the same time do work in all cases as symbols, elegua red and black, orula green and yellow, oggun green and black

  We then have even more constraint:

elegua-path-viability-luck-destiny,

oggun: mount-iron, blacksmith, farmer

ochosi: farmhouse,

orula: divination, future, counselor

   Now, let's try the same but not in reference to the visual imagery of material culture but rather extending beyond the minimal narratheme towards the broader narrative correlate.

    Seen in this sense and resorting again to the concept of patterns, we would have the following synthetic order starting from the general to the particular according to a logical order of common sense congruence

Space and cosmological logic/common sense

Spatial

On: oddua

North: obbatala

This: monkey

West: echu

Cosmological-celestial

Principal Trinitarian Divinity

Olofi-olodumare-olorun (almighty god, creator of the world from heaven)

Intermediaries between the cosmological-celestial and the earthly

Obbatala-creator of the earth and man /

Oddua: creator of the head

Iba-ibo, oddua corrector

Earthly Creation Elements

The hen. Creation of the earth

The Sea and Life: yemaya

Okay: the mountain

Sub-terrestrial

Elegua: luck, destiny, opening or closing paths

Ochun: feminine beauty, river

Chango: male virility: fire, lightning, thunder,

Oggun: mount

Orula: divination. Future

Oracles

Chango: diloggun, minor oracle

Orula: Ifa-major oracle

     In my analyzes resulting from the study of sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics and ethnography of speech on slang, I did my best to from a perspective that objectifies how common sense assigns meanings to certain contents not yet immersed in religiosity around words understood as mere lexicon. of this religion that enter the uses through its extraverbal semantic ancestors, dance, music, visuality, etc., as well as intramundane cultural understandings, abstract minimum principles that, relative to what is called the drumbeat of identity, explain how and in In what ways are the identity of the person related to the sense of an implicit parity with the relationships that exist between the identity of the person and the cosmological archetypes in the zodiac, accepting, for example, Libra, Zagittarius, Aries at the same time as person with a name and social identity, we saw in this sense that certain very simplified meanings from the semantic point of view of the lexicon give rise to semes such as, for example

elegua: home, inside, door, viability, luck, path, playful, etc.,

zodiac: balanced, seeking balance, or sanguine, impulsive, etc., etc. What defines those signs?

   This is at a level similar to that principle that makes the signs of the zodiac species of characterizations of possible abstracted types of person.

   We said that from this point of view of lay individuals and pagans of common sense, they accept as measurable the constrained sema that an individual in his identity as an individual and social person can carry instead of being, or can correspond to, like a Libra or a Zagittarius, an elegua or elegua

Correspondence—versus being

It corresponds to one, carry with you, go hand in hand

constricted weeks

Zodiac/Yoruba

Real person identity/idealized prototype abstract person traits

Peter/Pound/elegua

Jacinto/Zagitario/osun

Alberto/aries/yemaya

    At the same time he explained that, however, these African deities do not bring with them, even minimalized at the level of semes, only synthesizable and archetypal humanoid principles in terms of cosmology, also at the same time they are never separated from other senses that presuppose other social and alterities. of various types that presuppose vestiges and reminiscences of forms of social relations, those that we analyzed in ambia or ecobio, as presupposed neighborhood relations, acquire in these deities of religion more complex meanings typical of the rituality and tribality to which they are related. , clan, caste, ordinate relationships of lineage, thus underlining the passage from the subjective to the objective of culture

    At this point, the perspective of sociology of religion, axiological neutrality and the cognitive-semantic-lexical perspective that Stephen discusses with Tyler in a point of order are combined when Stephen discusses how the cosmological order of the Sanskrit scriptures is transferred to the understanding of a social order given in varnas and jatiz

Sociology of religion/Weber/attachment and detachment to the world

Cognitive anthropology/Stephen A Tyler/subjective-objective order

Sociology of common sense/Shutz (typifications) and greimas (isotopies-explicitations)

   As we saw, we found that indeed the sign - Libra, Zagittarius, Aries, Cancer, etc. - is an abstraction of a possible person with certain traits: balanced, impulsive, sanguine, etc., and we compared how it is possible through restricted semes that the signs Yoruba function in the same way, however, we analyzed how aspects in the latter escape the same logic due to their reminiscences of ritualized social alterities, in this sense, and from the perspective that we have just discussed we will take as reference another parameter for the analyzes of homology, not just the zodiac but rather systems more related to forms that are oracular, which is typical of this religion in its social expression, such as the tarot where semantic units are used that are closer to those of this religion, such as, for example, saying that cards speak, as well as saying that snails speak or literally that the first to speak at the origin of the world was a snail, or that the oddun of letters speaks, etc.

   But even before resorting to these homologies, if we isolate the signs and semes of the tarot as a cut in itself, we find the following: we have a black mat that is placed on the floor, with a single person in front of it. who is going to be consulted, other people are only listeners or spectators, we see that the black mat has a predetermined number with the place where the cards should be placed according to the random order in which they come out,

  This principle, in its random relationship, is similar to that of the snails in the dilogun and that of the odunnes or letters in Ifa, then the cards are placed in the corresponding numbers, the same ones, from the point of view of their visuality. and imagery are allegorical figures, highly metaphorical, in iconographic terms their differences lie in figurative elements, the hunchback, for example, represents a hunchbacked man in the Middle Ages, it can be a letter that comes out to the consultant, the prince coming out of the castle, for example, then the consultant goes to a book where he has brief narratives or narrative correlates of the image, these narratives are themselves semantic constraints of possible anticipated meanings, a sign of unforeseen turns, unexpected obstacles, new changing situations, spells to face , another indicates a clear path, favorable situations are approaching, acquaintances with new people, unforeseen good fortunes, etc., semantic constraints inferable from allegorical narrative sets, tarot books, when this is designed so that the consultant can play it alone without the intervention of a cartomancer or tarot reader, bring at once those narrative correlates of the image and also bring those semantic constraints, based on a set of several cards whose positions on the mat are symbolically predetermined, the inverted card from the south means the past, the top card on the right the future, the center card the current situation, etc. Tarot reading works based on a semantic relationality that includes chance as a determining element then controlled by a sense of predestination given in the symbolism assigned by anticipating the location of the card that semantically indicates the situation of the consultant and his possible inclinations, here, now, then, before, etc., combined with the allegorical contents suggested by the narratives and their symbolic constrictions or semes,

   Seen from this oracular logic, we could based on basic signic and semic constrictions and starting from the importance of the oracle in the Yoruba religion as well as above all the high allegorical, tropological and metaphorical content of both the signs and semes as well as the constrictions narratives around this religion, make hypothetical cards for each oricha, thus the elegua card would be red and black, it would have a stone with couries, a door and a child's doodle. This on the visual signifying level while in terms of sema, we would have luck, clearing the path, home, door, internal protection, unforeseen changes, etc.

    Chango's would be white and red, he would have a bat and a virile masculine body at the signic level and at the semimatic level of his semanthemes we would have fire, thunder, etc., Ochun's would be yellow and he would have hair combed with a mirror and a beautiful girl in a river at a signic level and at a semi-level, beauty, femininity, seduction, the one from Yemaya would be blue and transparent or crystalline, and would have a sea at a signic level while at the semi-level, life, water, and so on, the of green and yellow orula and would have visual elements of ifa, that of osun a rooster, that of oggun elements of iron, dispensing according to this logic of the babalawo or the santero as readers of the ifa and dilogun,

   We would have a self-consultation book that would bring for each card, a narrative correlate or pataqui that would offer, like the tarot, a certain story around the relatively constrictive image in the mode of constrained semes, narrathemes and narrative extensions, the narratives would have to be Taken to its concise expression, elegua would have the house, the home, the door, and would always include a positive inclination alone or a moderate or transformed inclination as an inclination or tendency that could be positive or negative, which would be the echu and depending on the relationship between This card and other cards would lean more towards himself or towards his relationship with the echu, successively we would have this around each oricha with his card, in this way the oracular system as opposed to remaining as an exclusive knowledge of the babalawo or the santero, It would become a socially externalized and self-consultable oracle for the layman equally full of advice on luck or dalliances, good fortune or prevention in the face of questions such as the immediate past, current situation, main question, future tendency, variables of change, surrounding environment, money and prosperity, work or opportunities, travel, among other areas predefined by the positions of the cards in the distribution of chance

   Here we have dispensed with orula or, in any case, replaced the sema of orula with a semic oracle that would be like an ifa or a digolum to be played alone or with the presence of a partner, friends or biological relatives.

   It is obvious that, constrained to signs and semes, the Yoruba religion would be completely reducible to an oracular principle such as the tarot based on the relationship between chance and predestination; likewise, a similar semimic comparison could be risked with the ichin, the Chinese oracle whose logic It is similar to that of the tarot, the coins are thrown and as they fall by chance the hexagram is drawn between continuous and broken lines, then the symbolism of that hexagram is searched in the ichin book where if it falls elevation, mountain, this symbol is accompanied by a proverb or narrative of oriental wisdom the same as a pataki in the Yoruba religion, a pataki of course, which would have to be constrained to its signs and semes in the same way that the tarot with respect to religion or the ichin with respect to religion they are minimalized semantic constraints

  Only then, from a semantic perspective constricting to semanthemes and signs, do we understand why Levi Strauss could compare the European Renaissance, reflected by the way in the tarot, with the Ife culture in Nigeria.

  We have therefore resorted here to a semiotization of Yoruba, but this semiotization must move us well beyond mere analogies that explain the semantic constraints of the oracle, to go on to objectively discuss other relevant aspects in the exegesis and sociological understanding of this religion as a cultural phenomenon. and in its relationship with subjective and objective culture

   We have also abstracted principles from the point of view of the meaning that religion makes to common sense within its typifying congruences.

     Returning to the semes, semanthemes and sememes where the meaning is subordinated to a corpus of syntactic meaning, surface logic, capturing the meanings through allegories and tropes that constrict the field of evocations of meaning, let's see the dances these are sometimes accompanied of the songs that are always in the Yoruba language which means that the lay listener does not understand their content but does listen to the African rhythmic of its phonetic force and its timbral color, the musical instruments are percussive with an African timbral based on the rhythm, but The dances often go alone, with the music subordinated to them, and on a semiotic level they are the best example of the allegorical semiosis that we have analyzed,

   highly tropological and metaphorical are, however, as occurs with medieval painting with respect to theological passages, highly allegorical, however, due to their eminently symbolic and metaphorical tropological character, at the same time that they capture the seme, the main sememes of the deities, on the other hand, as bodily expressions, are very seductive and attractive, unique we could say in terms of dance, something that in itself has generated an entire school of ballet and folk dance with different tendencies in bodily expression, some more attached to the allegorical content, where the dancers dance as if they were illustrators of the deity, others more recreational exploring the possibilities of form and aesthetics around the allegory,

    Thus in the dances to and from Obbatala: the dancers make the gestures of an old man, also a rider with his sword shakes the tail of the white Iruke horse to clean the paths, in the dances from and to Yemaya: the dancers rotate in the mode of waves, or eddies of the ocean, they laugh. They make the gesture of swimming, they make the gesture of submerging, they suggest the undulations of the waves, the breeze moving the sea, then like a wave until it becomes angry.

   In the eight-and-a-half dances, the dancers shout and make the gesture of shooting the bow and arrow. In the y a oggun dances, the dancers dance in a bellicose manner with machete, they make gestures of rural or agricultural work, they dance as if cutting the herbs with the machete or in the style of the blacksmith crouching, one foot forward, the other behind as if dragged

   In the dances of and to Ochun, the dancers express themselves with sensuality, they move their arms so that the handles sound, their hands go down and run over the body as if underlining their forms, like the springs and streams descending from the hills, they also make the sign of the rower, the body movements of grinding coffee or other products in the pestle, make sexy contortions with the pelvis, and emphasize the love in life

   In the dances of and a chango, the dancers do ram's turns towards the drums, open their eyes and stick out their tongues, shake the sacred axe, grab their testicles, warrior dances and erotic body expressions with the bipenne axe and sexual evocations.

  In the dances of and to Elegua, the dancers run to stand behind the door, they jump like unruly or naughty children, they make faces and gestures of children's games such as lifting a kite and dancing a top, they make jokes with the spectators, they make jokes, they move away the weeds. As a symbol of opening the paths, on a single foot they symbolize the mocking and childish swirl, evoking the unpredictability of chance.

     Returning to the narrathemes and continuing the analysis that goes from the minimal narrateme constrained to the narratological extension as a correlate of the visual, we would like to analyze certain differences that concern the passage from the subjective dimension of cosmology towards the objective order of culture.

Oracles

Tarot/diggolum e ifa 

   As in the tarot in the Yoruba religion we continually have tropological relationships and figurative languages, we would say that in this sense it is a very metaphorical, highly allegorical religion, indistinguishable between the symbolic and the natural order, the vegetal, the animal, the human and the supernatural. They dilute one in the other, they mix, passing through allegorical ellipses, tropes and metaphors, from one to the other, as also happens in ancient Greek religion.

   in the place of phenomena that from the point of view of common sense respond to logic that is irreplaceable by metaphors and that therefore alter the principles of explanation and elucidation of common sense, such as, for example, relations of descent that for the purposes of common sense can only function through biological reproduction and formation of the biological family, in Yoruba they are altered

    In the Yoruba religion, descent through godchildren, understood as something allegorical, plays a significant place, almost all the deities descend from others: chango son of yemaya and agayu, agayu son of oriyana, obbatala son of olofi and olodumare, elegua, osun, Ochosi, Oggun, son of Obbatala and Yemu

     But let's analyze it according to the cosmological order, the deities of this religion, without reference even to its form of objective culture.

    This principle of descent is even susceptible to tropologisms and figurative languages ​​of very different types. Offspring involves relationships between father and mother and children, but children sometimes have several parents or it happens that the deities that are born from the father and mother can be each a male or female, sometimes producing offspring from parents of the same sex, which is impossible and therefore relates the tropological and metaphorical figurative with the natural, as well as semantically having an ambivalence between legitimate and adopted child, or being subject to supernatural principles that cannot be explained. due to multiple parents

Offspring relationships/

obbatala

hijo de olomo y olofi

elegua, oggun, ochosi

children of obatala and yemu

Chango, son of Yemaya and Agayu Sola, raised by Obatala

Elegua: son of Echu Acu Boro and of evil

   We see that new parents appear for elegua.

   This then begins to happen with all the orichas according to the paths, each one appears at different times with different parents, which however does not alter the order of the religious hierarchies, the main parents are those who have the most hierarchy in the understood religious system. As an explanation of the origin of the world, the secondary parents come to relate with their own symbols to avatars in the symbolic path of each oricha or deity.

   We see immediately that the elegua has other parents at the same time and simultaneously without explanation of congruence, this happens continuously in this religion from time to time we find that each singular entity endowed with a name in a nominal sense and with certain semantic properties of meaning, as well as certain humanoid traits in their attributes, happy, enterprising, unruly, flirtatious, erotic, protective, good, kind, angry, etc., appear again and again referred to as the son of other parents or conversely as parents of other children who In turn, they are also children of multiple parents, something that is made explicit especially in the so-called paths that are like species of avatars of the oricha or deity, like stories or small stories about their lives which tend to cover different regions of Africa, and when we go out in search of a common sense logic for these relations of descent we only have them as tropological allegories, in this sense, the tropological allegorical as an analogical principle of relational logic is similar to the tarot

Allegorical Tropes

Tarot/yoruba

  and so on, through sponsons, there are also the relationships between the abstract religion as a cosmovisib system and its social expression in the culture with respect to the believers who embrace them, thus each babalawo has his children within the religion and they call birth in the religion to the type of relationship that its believers maintain with it once they accept it, this reception is carried out through godmothers and godfathers, mothers and fathers of saints, who support them, the babawo (ifa priest), awo (another ifa priest), the babalocha, the iyalocha, (priestess of the orichas) the iyawo, with respect to whom the believer becomes a godson, each believer becomes the child of the oricha that corresponds to him, in some cases wife or husband, as occurs for example when she is a woman (ico.fa)

Passage from the objective earthly dimension to the religious dimension

Objective/subjective

Male: Abo-faca

/the way in which the ordinary becomes babalawo

Femenino: Ico.fa/apetebi (hija de ochun)

     This also occurs on the signifying level, which in itself is very similar to the religion of India. I think, for example, of Kali, the Hindu goddess with eight arms. In the Yoruba religion, there are figures of two bodies with a head or of two heads with one body, of two caracas, of a female body and another male body with a single head, even of two bodies joined at the back into one, for example in some paths of elegua and obbatala we find the figure of two heads with one body and two bodies with one head, as well as the sacred image of certain animals such as the snake, the chicken, which participates in the creation of the world, among others, on the other hand the sacrifice of animals in offerings is very similar to that of early Christianity in the times of the exodus when Israel leaves Egypt and enters the desert, the times in which the first tabernacle or temple to Jehovah arises

   There is another aspect that would have to be analyzed in a subsequent study whether or not there are and to what extent homologies with Eastern religions, such as, for example, the principle of the indivisibility of the one or the monad, by which I mean that a deity or God does not have a single form that coincides with itself but many, there are, for example, around 16 obbatalas, I have not yet counted how many eleguas but on the elegua-echu paths there are no less than five or six eleguas different from each other

   continuing with the same narratological parameter

  The word son is very often used metaphorically as a synonym for under his tuleta, protected by, indivisible from on a merely symbolic level, this has, of course, as we have analyzed in other essays, tribal implications that are reflected in objective culture and that in terms of kinship, it alters existing theories,

   Despite this, the prohibition of incest undoubtedly has a very important dramaturgical place in the theatricality of Yoruba culture, so much so that we can say that the oracle of Ifa was born precisely as a consequence of an entire dramaturgy that develops around to the prohibition of incest, for example, the oracle system from the point of view of its material form and its main deity, is born from the forgiveness of the intermediary god between the celestial and the earthly obbatala to one of his orula children, through mediation of elegua as something dramaturgically triggered by a conflict of incense of the brother, oggun-yema, oggun in love with his mother wanted to make love with her, elegua prevented him, but oggun sought the help of his brother osun to make love with the mother, elegua protecting the mother, told abbatala this annoying man wanted to kill all the male children, but then elegua, again comes to the aid of the brothers, and protects them from obbatala, at one point obbatala gets sick and elegua He asks Chango, adopted son of Obbatala, direct son of Yemaya, to cure Obbatala. When Obbatala cures him, Elegua asks Abbatala to forgive his brother Orula. This is how Orula becomes the deity of the oracle, Chango, with the ceiba wood, delivers the material form of the major oracle Ifa to Orula who since then is the deity of Ifa and keeps the minor oracle, digolum

Minor Oracle/santeros

Greater Oracle/Babalawos

    But at the same time, the religious system as a whole is concerned with continually relativizing relations of descent, replacing the authority of the biological family with the formation of other tribal forms of authority and godsons, the individual who embraces the religion remains godson in another family, on the one hand he remains the son of his oricha, the deity that corresponds to him, on the other, to a family different from the biological family, godmothers and godfathers, fathers and mothers of saints

Biological family: Mother, father, siblings, cousins, etc.

Religious Family: Godmother, godfather, mother and father of saint, son or daughter of the oricha or deity

   The above in the Yoruba religion presupposes the passage of the person from the earthly dimension to the extraterrestrial, symbolic, extracorporeal dimension, in life, but it has, in terms of objective culture, expressions in which the tribal authority that within the objective life of the person who adheres to the religion, as well as indirectly, in that which inscribes that religion within the whole of an objective culture and society, that is, on non-believers who do not subscribe to that religion, these are consequences on this culture and non-religious objective society from the moment its symbolic forms as religion are inscribed within that objective culture, these incidents occur in a way similar to the influence or ascendancy of slang as a form of speech on the corpus of the instituted language, Spanish. ,

  in a similar way, by persuasive means—not very different in their procedures from the gospel, but adding a dimension that intervenes through tribal authority in the objective person, that is, in his socially differentiated life, such as descent of tribal authority over the objective destiny of people, interference of tribal authority in the authority of the social and family ties of the person, irreconcilable with Christian morality, among other phenomena incompatible with highly differentiated societies

  I refer comparatively to this phenomenon in order to explain how a subjective symbolism can have effects on an objective reality of the same type,

Tribal Authority/Highly Differentiated Society

(inscribed in the same objective social space of a culture)

    Returning to the narratological level relative to oral narratives collected beyond the iconic visual, let us now analyze what we could understand how, for lack of other words, the logic of dramaturgical congruence in religion, something that, later on, we will analyze whether or not it has and to what extent an expression in what in cultural studies is called theatricality in culture today

     This also occurs on the signifying level, which in itself is very similar to the religion of India. I think, for example, of Kali, the Hindu goddess with eight arms. In the Yoruba religion, there are figures of two bodies with a head or of two heads with one body, of two caracas, of a female body and another male body with a single head, even of two bodies joined at the back into one, for example in some paths of elegua and obbatala we find the figure of two heads with one body and two bodies with one head, as well as the sacred image of certain animals such as the snake, the chicken, which participates in the creation of the world, among others.

   There is another aspect that would have to be analyzed in a subsequent study whether or not there are and to what extent homologies with Eastern religions, such as, for example, the principle of the indivisibility of the one or the monad, by which I mean that a deity or God does not have a single form that coincides with itself but many, there are, for example, around 16 obbatalas, I have not yet counted how many eleguas but on the elegua-echu paths there are no less than five or six eleguas different from each other

   continuing with the same narratological parameter

  The word son is very often used metaphorically as a synonym for under his tuleta, protected by, indivisible from on a merely symbolic level, this has, of course, as we have analyzed in other essays, tribal implications that are reflected in objective culture and that in terms of kinship, it alters existing theories,

   Despite this, the prohibition of incest undoubtedly has a very important dramaturgical place in the theatricality of Yoruba culture, so much so that we can say that the oracle of Ifa was born precisely as a consequence of an entire dramaturgy that develops around to the prohibition of incest, for example, the oracle system from the point of view of its material form and its main deity, is born from the forgiveness of the intermediary god between the celestial and the earthly obbatala to one of his orula children, through mediation of elegua as something dramaturgically triggered by a conflict of incense of the brother, oggun-yema, oggun in love with his mother wanted to make love with her, elegua prevented him, but oggun sought the help of his brother osun to make love with the mother, elegua protecting the mother, told abbatala this annoying man wanted to kill all the male children, but then elegua, again comes to the aid of the brothers, and protects them from obbatala, at one point obbatala gets sick and elegua He asks Chango, adopted son of Obbatala, direct son of Yemaya, to cure Obbatala. When Obbatala cures him, Elegua asks Abbatala to forgive his brother Orula. This is how Orula becomes the deity of the oracle, Chango, with the ceiba wood, delivers the material form of the major oracle Ifa to Orula who since then is the deity of Ifa and keeps the minor oracle, digolum

Minor Oracle/santeros

Greater Oracle/Babalawos

    But at the same time, the religious system as a whole is concerned with continually relativizing relations of descent, replacing the authority of the biological family with the formation of other tribal forms of authority and godsons, the individual who embraces the religion remains godson in another family, on the one hand he remains the son of his oricha, the deity that corresponds to him, on the other, to a family different from the biological family, godmothers and godfathers, fathers and mothers of saints

Biological family: Mother, father, siblings, cousins, etc.

Religious Family: Godmother, godfather, mother and father of saint, son or daughter of the oricha or deity

   The above in the Yoruba religion presupposes the passage of the person from the earthly dimension to the extraterrestrial, symbolic, extracorporeal dimension, in life, but it has, in terms of objective culture, expressions in which the tribal authority that within the objective life of the person who adheres to the religion, as well as indirectly, in that which inscribes that religion within the whole of an objective culture and society, that is, on non-believers who do not subscribe to that religion, these are consequences on this culture and non-religious objective society from the moment its symbolic forms as religion are inscribed within that objective culture, these incidents occur in a way similar to the influence or ascendancy of slang as a form of speech on the corpus of the instituted language, Spanish. ,

  in a similar way, by persuasive means—not very different in their procedures from the gospel, but adding a dimension that intervenes through tribal authority in the objective person, that is, in his socially differentiated life, such as ancestry of tribal authority over the objective destiny of people, interference of tribal authority in the authority of the social and family ties of the person, irreconcilable with Christian morality, among other phenomena incompatible with highly differentiated societies

  I refer comparatively to this phenomenon in order to explain how a subjective symbolism can have effects on an objective reality of the same type,

Tribal Authority/Highly Differentiated Contemporary Society

(inscribed in the same objective social space of a culture)

       Returning to the narratological level relative to oral narratives collected beyond the iconic visual, let us now analyze what we could understand how, for lack of other words, the logic of dramaturgical congruence in religion, something that, later on, we will analyze whether or not it has and to what extent an expression in what in cultural studies is called theatricality in culture today

Semantic analysis of dramaturgy between narratives

constrained and extensive narrathemes/example elegua

      In a general way, elegua let's say additionally that as the deity of the home and the interior of the house, it has as its opposite or contrary echu, which is the exterior, the external, the street, but given precisely that they are opposites, they are closely related, reaching the point. point that elegua, in addition to its own symbolic corpus, also has paths that are called the elegua-echu paths, these paths each trace specific symbolisms that help to understand other nuances of elegua as oricha, such as, for example, its relationship with the image of the naughty child, as well as some visual aspects that are related in many ways to the gods of archaic India that had several bodies, several heads or arms, I think, as I said before, of Kali, the eight-armed Hindu goddess, among other Hindu gods. , in these paths elegua sometimes appears with a doll with one head and two bodies, or with two heads and one body.

  Thus, in these paths of the opposites related elegua-echu, we have various added or additional symbolisms such as, for example, that it serves in the ebbos, ceremonies of offering and sacrifice of purification that range from a bath of herbs and flowers to putting sweets on the deities, other senses in which the divination system works with Ifa, who lives in the holes and tunnels at crossroads underground, who descended into the world with Obatala, who is Ifa's best ally protecting the babalawo in his safety, sometimes he appears as feminine or with two bodies, male and female, who lives with Ochun, who takes care of Orula's house, owner of the roads, who helps babalu aye, an elegua who has two maja faces as in the gods of ancient India , who plays with spinning tops and smokes cigarettes, who is the messenger of God, owner and lord of everything that is going to be done, with the olodumare ache to save or put things Alreves, the first to be entertained in the ceremonies, messenger divine of the dance, his iya has a mask, he grants the firmness and victory of ifa, goalkeeper of orula, staff of olofi, protector of ochun, messenger of olodumare, he is a maja, among an infinite number of other senses that can correspond to forms of the echu or of the elegua on that path elegua-echu

Grades

It would not be amiss to clarify, especially for those conservatives and especially stale representatives of the official culture who react alarmed to any study that escapes institutionality, as countless sociolinguists and speech researchers in ethnolinguistics have had to do, I have nothing against institutionalist research in social sciences, in 1994 I myself taught a seminar on contemporary theoretical sociology applied to the study of institutions, specifically a financial institution in its human resources characteristics, on which I focused. in institutional sociology including Melton, but there are phenomena and processes in culture that in their specificities inevitably escape the constraints of instituted authority, which Stephen Tyler confirmed for me in Evocation about the relationship between this and the critique of linear authoritarianism. instituted.

The studies from Stephen to Tyler focus on the analysis of non-oral written textual forms, in which the lexicon can also be analyzed semantically, but not in expressions of a lexicon in terms of speech, they are also about ancient Hindu Sanskrit, not on current forms of religions in contemporary culture, but they emphasize the possibilities of semantic and lexical analyzes in the analysis of cognitive anthropology as well as the relationship between the subjectivity of the cosmology inscribed in the Sanskrit text and objective forms of culture, studying kinship, and notions like varnas and jatiz

I must clarify, and it is very very important to be clear, that my anthropological work the market from Here has nothing to do with the Cuban issue in any of its areas, it is a work entirely dedicated to the Venezuelan urban popular markets and Venezuelan culture. which does not include anything regarding Cuba, I must at the same time say that unlike the United States, Brazil and Cuba where Afro-American culture is very strong, in Venezuela Afro-Americanism is weak, meager and not very relevant in the main composition of the culture as a whole is mainly formed by Canarian emigrations from Spain and by pre-colonial, colonial and current Amerindian culture, currently existing Amerindian communities that speak their own languages, forming a phenomenon of multilingualism, but despite this in the northern coast of Venezuela, there is an Afro-Caribbean and among this Afro-Caribbean culture – to which my friend and colleague Luis Alberto Hernandez has dedicated himself – we find offerings and rites related to elegua and obatala, for that reason, in a work that included more than five hundred images of the Christian religion, and approximately ten references to Amerindian culture, only two references to Afro-Caribbean culture were included, an elegua necklace with a guira, and an abatala necklace around a metal hoya which alludes to ogun , to go beyond those two references in a work dedicated to the Venezuelan urban popular markets would have been to lie and create a false and fictitious image of what those markets are at a cultural level, the references to Africa have within the work the same proportion as They have, in reality, something isolated, specific and unusual, but ultimately mentioned. This essay, in no way referring to that work, is part of a much later work that I began to consider its possibility in the year two thousand during my trip from Houston to Miami, it was the encounter with the Cuban culture of Miami, which motivated me to develop it and it is the first in a series that I want to dedicate to the subject.

Bibliography

Bolivar Natalia Arostegui, elegua, Pp 35-63, the orichas in Cuba

Bolivar Natalia Arostegui, The Olofi divinity, oloddumare-olorun, Pp 81-85, the orichas in Cuba

Bolivar Natalia Arostegui, Obbatala, Pp 97-116, the orichas in Cuba

Bolivar Natalia Arostegui, Oggun, Pp 66-71, the orichas in Cuba

Bolivar Natalia Arostegui, Yemaya, the Orichas in Cuba

Bolivar Natalia Arostegui, ochun, the orichas in Cuba

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Eco Umberto, Kinesics and Proxemics, The Semiotic Field, The Absent Structure

Eco Umberto, Sociolinguistica-ethnolinguistica, Pp 14-16, The Semiotic Field, Pp 9-22, the absent structure, lumen

Eco Umberto, the function and the sign, Architecture and communication, Pp, 279-339, The absent structure, lumen

Eco Umberto, Semantic Explicitation, Lector in fabula, lumen

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, El Correlato de mundo: interpretante y estructura en la teoría cultural posmoderne

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Christianity and structure, on the intramundane horizon

Shutz Alfred, The Knowledge in the Worlds of Everyday Life, edited by ilse and Luckmann

Strauss Levis, the structure of myths, in structural anthropology, Barcelona 

Tyler A Stephen, A Point of Order, rice university studies

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Weber Max, Sociology of religion

Grades

I have discussed in this book from the sociology of culture different ways of theorizing and studying processes of culture and culture itself, taking as a parameter ways in which certain diverse and complex acquis are integrated or participate more or less fused, within our own Western society, thus establishing that the contents or elements related to anthropology considered from the sociology of culture refer us to what we could define as impure anthropology, if we consider the meanings of Levi Strauss when he defined pure anthropology as that which is It deals with cultures or peoples that we consider primitive, unlike our Western culture and civilization, thus dealing with elements of impure anthropology, that is, the cultural study of our own Western society or the ways in which other cultures are expressed within it. that have been transculturated, syncretized or that occur within multiculturalism,

   At the same time, throughout the book we have also developed different analyzes on issues to be considered when it comes to the fact that even in certain cases certain isolated cultural groups can be searched for in the circumstances in which they live, as has been the example. of certain Amerindian communities in Venezuela, in such cases, from the sociology of culture, I maintain that no research methodology on such cases in this book, not examined in this book, can be developed without a theory of inscriptions where knowledge must start not from its possibilities. but of its limitations, beginning with the study of the inscriptions that these cultures have of what it means to be studied, of the images that have been made of anthropology, continuing with the study of the inscriptions that the researcher brings with him, understood as limitations. and the understanding of how these cultures are invented for the purposes of the outside observer.

  In this sense, excluded in this book, my individual point of view eludes both the authority of the observer endowed with objectivity according to pre-established methods, and the assumption that there exists in the opposite direction some way of dealing with differences that allows an objective or realistic immersion in such cultures, and in the opposite direction to both assumptions, my position establishes that in such cases anthropology must be about its own limitations, about its own limits, those of anthropology itself, focusing and focusing on the critique of representation and observation

  Finally we should point out how it is notable, that in this book several essays take the modern and contemporary city as a setting, for those who have read many of my books, will know that this is usual in me, both in my books on mass media and in those about everyday life and about my field work in popular urban markets, they take the urban spaces of the city as a parameter and setting, something also explicit in the catalog and introductory essay of my work the market from here: mise in scene and experimental Ethnography as well as the urban nature of its scenes and photographs, but it is something that goes back in the distant past to my first sociology and cultural theory projects in the late eighties in which I focused not only on the city but also on urban groups within her, but it is necessary at the same time to clarify that although I am interested in the relationship between city and anthropology, not from a historical or historicist point of view. It is true that we have the exception of the introductory catalog text of the market that goes back to the markets as they were in the colony, in the classical world to the modern one, but even in that, the only one that moves beyond the city considered as a space of experiential and empirical multisensory and as such in a synchronic and structural sense more of sociology than anthropology, my interest is not historicist. From this perspective, although it is something that I have been doing for several decades before them, a recent work byZeiderman Austin and Andrés Salcedo Fidalgo, Anthropology and the City, unlike me, the interest in it is historical, but the questions that are raised in the first part of their text until the first half about ways of assuming the city do coincide with the range of epistemological questions that are implicit in discussion and analysis, about the relationships between in the city, about the city or from the city, in reference to Geertz, anthropology, the city

It would not be amiss to clarify, especially for those conservatives and especially stale representatives of the official culture who react alarmed to any study that escapes institutionality, as countless sociolinguists and speech researchers in ethnolinguistics have had to do, I have nothing against institutionalist research in social sciences, in 1994 I myself taught a seminar on contemporary theoretical sociology applied to the study of institutions, specifically a financial institution in its human resources characteristics, on which I focused. in institutional sociology including Melton, but there are phenomena and processes in culture that in their specificities inevitably escape the constraints of instituted authority, which Stephen Tyler confirmed for me in Evocation about the relationship between this and the critique of linear authoritarianism. instituted.

The studies from Stephen to Tyler focus on the analysis of non-oral written textual forms, in which the lexicon can also be analyzed semantically, but not in expressions of a lexicon in terms of speech, they are also about ancient Hindu Sanskrit, not on current forms of religions in contemporary culture, but they emphasize the possibilities of semantic and lexical analyzes in the analysis of cognitive anthropology as well as the relationship between the subjectivity of the cosmology inscribed in the Sanskrit text and objective forms of culture, studying kinship, and notions like varnas and jatiz

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