between art and anthropology

    Between Art and Anthropology by George E. Marcus and Fernando Calzadilla

    Edited by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

from an initial 2001 paper

George Marcus

By the mid-1990's, I had just about given up hope that the aesthetic issues that were implicated in the so-called Writing Culture critique of anthropology during the 1980's (1) would be developed by anthropologists themselves. Beyond the critique of the authority of ethnographic texts and of the conditions for the production of knowledge in the traditional mise-en-scène of fieldwork, these issues might have defined the ground for rethinking the longstanding forms and practices of anthropological research (the emblematic and defining fieldwork/ethnography paradigm of the discipline) that are so much challenged at present as anthropologists involve themselves with more complicated conditions and objects of inquiry (2). For anthropologists to have explored the aesthetics of inquiry would have required styles of thinking, rhetoric, and practice--keyed to the notion of experimentation––that proved unacceptable to the boundary keeping institutional and professional rules of order in the academy. While anthropology during the 1980's was influenced more than ever (and vice versa) by theoretical developments in the academic humanities through interdisciplinary movements that were themselves caught up in self-images evoking historic avant-gardes (the "theory" tendency in literary studies, for example, had this imago), it was still obliged to be social scientific, and definitely not art. Thus, any efforts at experimentation with the ethnographic form, beyond textual maneuvers, were understandably limited, largely rhetorical, and when substantive, idiosyncratic and certainly marginal.

Perhaps, this is as it should have been. While there have been some remarkable experimental texts exploring the relation between culture, the anthropological task, and aesthetics, produced through and from the trend of 1980's critique (3), the urge to experiment in the sense of artists' practices within the restricted confines and norms of social scientific disciplinary practice was bound to generate many more works of unclear vision and uncertain address in terms of to whom and for whom they were directed. Still the most compelling aspects of the Writing Culture critique of the 1980's opened questions about breaking the authoritative frames, not only of traditional ethnographic writing, but by implication of the traditional practices and professional regulative ideals of fieldwork in the name of such notions as collaboration, polyphony, reflexive inquiry, and dialogue. These were indeed radical alternative suggestions or hints for practice, and they could hardly be served by mere modifications in the way ethnographies were written or even traditional projects of fieldwork were conducted. Attempts to do so––the body of "experiments" we have––were for the most part considered to be weak, rhetorical, and idiosyncratic. One might conclude then that more radical experiments, touching upon the aesthetics of fieldwork, were something that anthropologists, operating between the critiques of the 1980s and the changing conditions of research in the 1990s onward, could benefit from, but which, because of the weight of the professional apparatus of power, authority, tradition, and self-interest, they could not do for themselves in any coherent way. Only artists, who understood the task of ethnography more deeply than most other artists have in the heady era of disciplinary mixings that we have just gone through, might,

show anthropologists something important about methods that they could not see as clearly for themselves.

Abdel Hernández is a Cuban art critic, and cultural theorist. He belongs to the 1980s avant-garde art movement in Havana, being one of its main actors and conceivers. The 1980s was a time of renewed possibilities

The fall of the Soviet Union marked the end to this period of ferment and critical possibility in the arts. Many Cuban artists, including Hernandez, went into self-imposed exile at the end of the 1980s, living in such countries as Venezuela, Germany, and the United States.

In Caracas, Hernandez continued his anthropologically relevant work in conjunction with a diverse group of Venezuelan artists. During that time, Venezuelan-American artist-curator, Surpik Angelini, a resident of Houston met him in caracas. They formed a workshop, representing the work that Hernandez and his collaborators were doing in Venezuela. They proposed to present the results of this workshop as a group of exhibitions and performances within the context of the rice university campus, the transart foundation of Houston sponsored the curatorial serie of exhibits of abdel Hernandez san juan and surpic angelini cocurated shows –seven exhibits titled artists in trance, and the Department of Anthropology at Rice University sponsored letters of invitations of abdel Hernandez san juan and the artists and facilities to get spaces at rice campus . Abdel Hernandez san juan and surpic angelini after the spring edited a documentary catalogue titled threshold they presented within the context of department of anthropology. The association of our department, known for orienting its own teaching and research around the implications of the 1980s critique of anthropology, with this documentary catalogue presentation marked a serendipitous and unusual engagement between a practice of anthropology understanding the necessity of rethinking the paradigm of method at the heart of the discipline, and an initiative among artists strongly influenced by this same development in anthropology, but focussed on disciplinary norms and constraints of art criticism (see the appendix to gain a sense of how this event was anticipated by the anthropologists at Rice). The curatorial practice of seven exhibits artists in trance resulted from the workshop of producing the exhibits in caracas, called workshop of art and anthropology in caracas included and added a parallel multimedia course addressed to offer visual material and reflexions on another artists from latinoamerica, this parallel parallel multimedia course was known as

New Methodologies in the Work with the Other in Latin American Art), occurred at Rice in the spring of 1997, and was supported by the newly formed Transart Foundation.

The various performances and installations were meant to explore the concept of evocation (5) and its relation to ethical practice. In some cases artists developed ethnographies of themselves using installation as a spatialization of self-narratives and critique. In other cases, artists explored conceptually how cultural knowledge is constructed and how anthropologists represent cultures. Still other artists evoked the ethos of community mediating values in popular culture, questioning such traces of cultural domination as fetishism, colonialism, and textual authority in art history.

For me, the centerpiece of this workshop was The Market From Here (hereafter, TMFH) installation (6), presented both in Caracas and Houston. This installation was produced through a fascinating collaboration between Hernandez and Fernando Calzadilla, a well-known Venezuelan scenographer and artist of the theater. They became engaged with the challenge of producing an ethnographically influenced installation of a marketplace--so diffuse and fluid in the human action it encompasses, so complexly polyphonous in the voices that define it as a place.

This is in part a task which involves ethnographic-like research and investigation, but where the outcome is not a work of analysis or a representation, but a particular sort of chronotope, to use Bakhtin's expression, for a drama. Hernández and Calzadilla designed and built an installation that could easily be interpreted as an attempt to represent the market, not by an ethnographic study, but by a mise-en-scène. Actually, the construction of the TMFH installation, with the involvement of numerous people of the literal market-place they researched, is quite different than a mere representation as mise-en-scène. It was more the creation of a sort of imaginary of the people involved in the market-place working with Hernández and Calzadilla making intricate decisions about space, light, materials etc. This involved a much more complex and richer notion of collaboration than the ideal evoked in the 1980s critique, primarily by James Clifford, that limited itself to questions of authorship and writing texts. The heart of this paper is Calzadilla's account of the process which produced TMFH, which exemplifies for me the lost opportunity of the encounter between art and anthropology that did not quite occur in the opening created by the Writing Culture critique.

What I find personally most exciting particularly for the practice of anthropology in this evolution of Hernandez's work to the production of the TMFH installation is precisely the kind of possibility in the ethics of collaboration that it develops. Ethnography is much richer in possibility if it collaborates with the practices of other intellectual crafts that have a kinship and resemblance to it ––as in the case of scenography in the theater. The debates and discussions of collaboration in these cases promise outcomes more complex and interesting than just “the monograph” or “the essay” into which all experiments in anthropology seemingly must end, or merely the “mise-en-scène” of theater or the installation of performance art, which otherwise lack the intensity and theoretical depth of ethnography. And of course such “expert” collaborations in different genres are about a “third”––people in certain settings in their everyday lives who become the subjects of interest to anthropologists and dramatists. What is fascinating about these expert collaborations is that they incorporate the "others" of their mutual interest in a greater variety of ways and with different sorts of outcomes and products than would be possible if, say, anthropology refused to risk its authority by not entering into such partnerships with the scenographer, for instance. The result is messy, for certain, but I would easily trade the rather large anthropological literature on Latin American traditional market-places for Hernandez's, Calzadilla's, and unnamed others' The Market From Here.

For some anthropologists, such collaborations might seem to go too far in that the disciplinary pride and authority of anthropology itself––its ability to ask and answer its own questions––became too compromised in its associations with ethnographic-like inquiry in other spheres of practice (like scenography). With all of its problems for anthropologists, an installation such as TMFH is valuable precisely because it has things to teach them by going beyond the limits of the rather narrow conventions in which experiments have been done by anthropologists themselves to areas of provocation that are too risky for anthropologists to develop, but that nonetheless work through strains of ideals and longing deep within their disciplinary tradition.

Here, I refer to the idea of ethnography as performance, which has been one of the "key words" of possible alternative for anthropological practice in recent years. Also, there has been a more or less developed idea of ethnographic "competence" being performative. That is, the true standard of judgment of ethnographic interpretation and translation is whether the anthropologist "gets it right," not as judged by his professional peers but by the people he studies. Competence always begins with language, and anthropological folklore often focuses on who among the specialists in an area or region speaks the language “like a native.” To some extent, this very deep but underplayed and romantic ideal of very serious ethnography evokes the much disdained and naive "going native" syndrome. Still, anthropologists have often sustained in their judgment of ethnography the related notion of competence or performativity. This perhaps had its most elaborate and scientistic expression in the ethnoscience/cognitive anthropology/new ethnography movement of the 1960s and 1970s (7). Indeed, the ability to play back category systems in speech to the native, to "elicit" action from them was to become the highest scientific standard for anthropology. Of course, this movement eventually fell on hard times once it went beyond color and kinship categories. But something of the same ideal has always been present in the interpretive/symbolic movement as well. In the field, one is constantly testing one's interpretations and understandings by finding ways to play them back to informants.

Finally, there was the brief surge into "theater anthropology" in the late

70s and early 80s, based on the interesting partnership of Richard Schechner and Victor Turner, and the writings of Eugenio Barba, among others. The main inspiration for this in anthropology was the later work of Victor Turner, who early on had a strong sense of the value of understanding ethnographic settings in dramatistical terms. However, what Hernandez and Calzadilla are up to is quite different than this earlier effort at theater anthropology. Turner was really bringing anthropology into the framework of theater, and Hernández and Calzadilla have made the opposite sort of move (not so much theater as performance/installation art) with more radical and interesting results for effacing the boundaries of both art and anthropology as institutions. Also, Turner was less interested in matters of epistemology and method than in universalist

and transcendent questions about mind and emotion that could be explored by making theatrical the rituals that anthropologists studied in the field among peoples like the Ndembu and the Kwakiutl. There was never the more provocative bringing of the experiment and the performance to the field, as in Hernandez's work.

Thus, TMFH as well as the another exhibits is a fresh initiative in the exploration of the practice of anthropology as performance. Why his work should be of interest to anthropologists is that it makes explicit and experimentally explores tendencies deeply a part of the ethos of the discipline having to do with a combination of scholarly distance and a more active participation in a culture but still within the frame of professional fieldwork. The idea of collaboration, shared authorship, and "the dialogic" stood for these tendencies in the 1980s critique, but they could (dared) not go beyond the conventional notions of fieldwork, even though they upset them from within their boundaries. The idea of performance had this possibility of going further, but mainly it has remained a theoretical artifact––another inspiration with which to frame the longstanding practices. 

  Fernando Calzadilla

Sometimes, waking up in the early hours, around four in the morning, used to be a nightmare during my childhood in Caracas, Venezuela. There was this strange noise coming from the street that I could not identify. I asked Rosa, our old nanny, and she told me it was the devil going back to its quarters. Soon enough for my relief I found out the noise's origin when I started to accompany my mother on early outings to the nearby Mercado Libre. Boys, not much older than myself, used to make carruchas, a kind of put-together wooden box with roller skate metal wheels to carry and deliver people's staples. Their large number and the metal wheels produced the noise I couldn't identify. That is one of the earliest marketplace memories I have, not to mention that my father had a wholesale food store near one of the city's food distribution main centers, Quinta Crespo, but I did not enter in contact with that world until I was a little older. I remember spice and grain sacs accumulated in the storefront filling the air with the strong aroma of clove, cinnamon sticks in bundles, salted codfish, coffee, and cumin. The smell still fills my memories.

My fascination with the marketplace has been constant since early childhood. The relationship has been one of use and participation, observer and devotee. During my adult life, I have routinely visited the marketplace to satisfy my needs, to recover portions of my past, and to enjoy the gathering, the accumulation of people and the diversity. That is why, when Abdel Hernández first approached me with a proposition to develop work around the relation of the marketplace with the art museum, I was more than enthusiastic, I was ecstatic.

The case in particular was the Museo de Artes Visuales Alejandro Otero and El Mercado de Coche. The Mavao (by its acronym) and Coche sat in close geographical relationship, but ignored each other as neighbor. The Mavao's curatorial department proposed an exhibition to Hernández that focused on the market, and Hernández's ideas went far beyond collecting works on the subject. Hernández invited young artists to create specific work that dealt with the relation between the Mavao and Coche. Mavao is a contemporary art museum housed in a Travertine marble building with a resemblance to Washington's National Gallery; Coche is the main food distribution center for the city with trucks pouring in and out from all over the country. They are located in the outskirts, surrounded by low-income barrios in a densely populated area. The elitist museum is in the hippodrome grounds and its patrons are not exactly those of the community where it sits. With these premises, Hernández and I approached the artists and invited them to get in touch with Coche to develop works that would address issues of art market, community, the white cube neutral space of the gallery, and the re-writing of it, the desecration of the museum space, the separation between high and popular culture, how the market looked at the museum and vice versa, the ephemerality of the market against the permanence of the museum, etc.

My job was to create the dramaturgy of the space, to place the artists' works in the museum and design the space to make a coherent statement of the whole exhibit, something for which my skills as theater designer and market lover were appropriate. As our meetings with the artists grew so did ideas and proposals. (Not Money was the reason).

But Hernández and I had been enthralled by the market idea.

After Hernández's visit to the Department of Anthropology at Rice University during the spring of 1997, the idea of presenting a major work on the popular market rose from its ashes. This time Hernández and I were co-authoring the investigation/realization. Bound by a set of given circumstances such as a specific date and event with a pre-established theme, the project had a different process. We were not orchestrating the work of other artists; we were the artists realizing the work itself. The investigation was not centered on one specific locale but on the market's general relationship with the city, with the ephemeral, the transient, and the no-place that paradoxically constitutes 'market' because it only exists in the passing of hands.

Both Hernández and I, in different venues, had been involved in ethnographic research. Hernández during his Sierra Maestra projects in Cuba (see footnote 4), myself in the approach to scenic design and its later implementation as the ethnographic study of the people, their costumes, and places for the piece. Showing the structure that held together the scenic design served the purpose of emphasizing the ethnographic data that I collected in direct fieldwork or through others' accounts (8). We started with the ethnographic approach by roving the Venezuelan markets, talking to people, to vendors, establishing links until we narrowed our interest to two of the most visited and populous markets in Caracas, El Mercado de Catia, and El Mercado Quinta Crespo (9). This kind of market is under municipal control; they are administered by the city council and each vendor is allotted a stand according to the type of merchandise s/he sells. Nemesio, a plantain vendor at Catia, had been in the same spot for 43 years when we met him. The medicinal herb vendors prescribe and advise on matters of health, love, and happiness.

Mercados Libres are class bound; they are not modern supermarkets. They evoke the street fair, the bazaar, the historical place of encounter marked by exchange. Both Catia and Quinta Crespo are situated in low-income areas of the city, quite central, and on busy nodal intersections. They are nested in their own early 1900s buildings, open naves with high ceilings; a mixture of church and industrial construction surrounded by a myriad of buhoneros (illegal street vendors) who use the circulation space to display their merchandise.

The scene is one of sensual chaos: vendors hawking their wares, patrons, the aroma of cooked meals, peeled oranges, the colors of cloth, jewelry, the noise of children, the loud music, etc. Except for Quinta Crespo and Coche, Mercados Libres are not open everyday, which increases the number of people who might mingle during business hours, from dawn until noon. Catia's market days are Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Others throughout the city vary, but most of them work on Saturday as opposed to the traditional Sunday street fair. Within this context, Hernández and I, both longhaired people, looked out of place without shopping, instead taking photos, recording, and making notes of everything. What is the role of the artist as ethnographer?

While describing the relationship between aesthetic quality and ideological tendency, Walter Benjamin in his 1934 essay, “Author as Producer,” (10). In my case, one thing was going to the market to buy my food (as I had done most of my life) and another was going to the market as an observer. Is there a critical distance?.

As we walked the markets, greeting people we were seeing repeatedly, talking to Nemesio, whom we had recently met, or Francisco, my orange marchand for some years now, there is no pure outside from where to observe nor did we want to be in that place (if it ever existed).

Joseph Kosuth asserts that “[b]ecause the anthropologist is outside of the culture which he studies he is not a part of the community…whereas, the artist, as anthropologist, is operating within the same socio-cultural context from which he evolved.” (11) Nevertheless, our role as observers of the market as phenomenon immediately placed us outside of its social matrix despite my personal and biographical past involvement with markets. In our approach, the only difference with anthropology was that while the anthropologist is trying to acquire cultural fluency in another culture, we were acquiring cultural fluency in our own culture. Yet, the objectification created by the practice of observation negated the intention of the inquiry.

This subject is the subject of the threshold, the boundary, the liminal subject that can journey between subjects and objects, between sameness and difference; is the subject capable of inhabiting the betweenness of images and contexts. The subject that can explore the dialogue between the reflection on the wet asphalt and the shadows on the plastic covering the buhonero stand.

The ethnographic fieldwork then, was not about the market, or its people, but about us in relation to the market.

James Clifford's The Predicament of Culture (13) addresses the issue of ethnographic self-fashioning and ethnographic surrealism as we have seen it in Leiris and Bataille.

After a daylong planning session at my studio, Hernández and I brainstormed scrutinizing the folds of the afternoon light on the windows. We began to draw on big pieces of paper cut from a roll of newspaper print. While the light faded outside, we drew and talked about the form of our investigation, the shape of what we were doing, looking for an analogy. We were looking at it from above, or we were on it; we were it. It had extended wings and a long tail. We still didn't know what form the result of our inquiry was going to take.

Being both trained in the visual arts, our first instinct was to draw.

Our outings to the market started to accumulate data about the materials used by the vendors and buyers. A closed system of ties, knots, bags, plastic sheet, wraps, sacs, etc., that dealt with issues of ephemerality, temporary display arrangements, mobility, precarious establishments that appeared and disappeared because the market closed, or because the police stormed the streets. Walking between art and anthropology had not given clear signals yet. Ethnographic accounts have been traditionally written, suffocated by the tyranny of language. Still worse were ethnographic displays, curiosity cabinet collections exhibiting ‘native art’ or ‘cultural artifacts.’ How to translate what we saw, what we had learned? How to evoke what we were experiencing without representing it? How to enact the shadows behind the plastic sheet when at night the street was illuminated by the buhonero stands, like paper lanterns illuminate a local fairground? All we were doing was gazing.

Sight has been the privileged sense in Western culture. A continuous “preoccupation with visual and spatial root-metaphors of knowledge” (14) has been the backbone of Western metaphysics. According to Simon Goldhill (15), classical Greek society was a sight related performance culture.

The pervasive values of performance in Greek culture together with the special context of democracy and its institutions meant that to be in an audience was above all to play the role of democratic citizen. Theoria, the word from which 'theory' comes, implies, as has often been noted in contemporary criticism, a form of visual regard; what is less often noted is that Theoria is the normal Greek for official participatory attendance as spectator.

Goldhill succinctly synthesizes two of our major concerns to translate or enact what we were experiencing: visual regard and participatory attendance, Theoria in its full ascription. With this idea in mind, we then thought about a place, about the topoi of our work and how it was going to be presented. Participatory attendance could be performative in the sense that it could be an action carried through space, which would in turn give us “the spatialization of time.” A space that could be walked, transited, read like a text without being literal to what it attempted to describe took shape as the stronghold of our work. It did not contain the exhibit, because there was no exhibit, the structure itself, inside and out, was the result of our interaction with the material and the experiences gathered in the markets. A movement between places.

In the garage of Fuenteovejuna (16) we built the structure out of scaffolding pipes, clamps, and use-mangled floorboards, a cross-like shape consisting of two naves, each one measuring 27 by 9 feet, about 7 feet high walls, and 13 feet high on the apex (the roof was cross-gabled). The floorboards were raised 18" above the ground. As soon as the structure was up, the relationship with the work changed. There was a physicality now that stopped all speculations about form. The space was readable and the fieldwork had accumulated plenty of knowledge and experience to start filling it up. We began to bring materials and objects into it. The image of the lit buhonero stand with plastic sheet coverings became our metaphor for skin, for surface, for shelter. Diluted asphalt was applied to the plastic sheets before fixing them to the structure to gain opacity, to gain color; skin-like texture as it wrapped around the pipes following the structure's contours. The asphalt on the plastic became the medium were light refracted, tinted, and deformed the shadows that filtered through folds and stains.

Asphalt was also a reference to the oil industry that has ruled the Venezuelan economy for the last 70 years. We covered the whole structure, giving walls to all of its sides and leaving only one open end to enter and exit. This solution, of course, was not reached without many hours, days of discussion and trials. Having the four ends open made it more accessible but also we would have had less control on how the work was going to be read, taken in, interpreted. Already the idea of text conditioned the way we wanted to spread on the structure. Hence, we decided to have a circuit, one way of entering and ‘reading’ the installation. We didn't want to leave anything open to the audience because of the many layers the work was piling up. Ordering the space and how the materials entered and were perceived followed the strict dramaturgy of the space; how proxemics (17) worked in the placement of each object, its relation to each other, followed a strict relationship to the spectator, to Theoria.

Cardboard boxes, onion sacs (red open weave), jute bags, rope, twine, thrift clothes, guacales, plastic bags, plus innumerable household and personal effects donated by friends and family became our medium. Even market vendors donated part of what made it into the installation. Again, each new phase of the work raised conceptual issues that had to be solved as we worked. By bringing the ready-made objects into the space, were we making a Duchampean allusion(18).

An answer to these questions was in the combination of a textualist model with aesthetic values, a ‘readable’ sequence yet an atmospheric environment that allowed the TMFH to develop a polyphonic language placing the work in another betweenness, the betweenness of orchestrated voices. The cachicamo shells used by former peasants to carry seeds in the field looked like incantation charms when placed next to the carpenter's bench I recovered from a construction site, which after a ‘treatment’ became “the table where I cut your image.” The hangings on the string-wall that separated the yerbatero space were scrap pieces of iron from a smith shop that resembled bells to keep the bad spirits away. Bullhorns from the municipal slaughterhouse in Clarines, a small town in the east, completed the grammar in order for the ‘text’ to be read correctly, as belonging to a yerbatero in a popular market.

Something more theatrical had to be devised in order to alienate the spectator, to produce a distance from where to gaze, a parallax that would frame the observer as well as frame the framer. Out of this need was born the ‘ethnographer.’ A frame Hernández devised, the ‘ethnographer’ was a fictitious character whose ‘office’ was at the head of the installation. There, was an old desk with notes, anthropology books, photos enveloped in plastic bags. The separation between his office and the rest was an open structure of shelve units from where looking devices pointed toward different parts of the installation. Toy telescopes, reading glasses, magnifying lenses focused on a particular subject on a photograph, cardboard tubes tied to the structure at different angles signaled to an overlooked detail, a knot, a point in the structure. From there the spectator could see the others seeing, the framing devise that frame the framer, making it one step removed, since now it was not our ethnography but ‘his’ though he was our creation. The invention of the ‘ethnographer’ opened the possibility for a critique of the ethnographic presence, the mapping and his impossibility to grasp it. The ethnographer's office was also the place where the work reflected upon itself, an impossible inside/outside signaling a fiction. Which one? That is for the spectator to reflect on. This movement, the shifting point of view created the necessary distance for the work to reflect upon itself and for the spectator to reflect on her participation: “If this is not the representation of a market, if this is not an ethnography of the kind belonging to natural museums, then where am I?” For many of the Rice University workers who visited the exhibit, the immediate reaction was to say “just like the market of my hometown” whether they were from México, Ecuador, Perú, or Nicaragua. There was an instant connection with a memory, something familiar, recognizable. The paradox is that what people saw in the TMFH was the trace of a performed evocation for everything in the installation had been altered, manipulated through our subjectivity and distanced through the fictionalized layer of the ‘ethnographer.

During the time of the exhibit, anthropologist Quetzil Castañeda (Texas University at Houston) and Linda Seligman (George Mason University, Virginia) came to visit and we had a dialogue in the installation. One of the students, originally from Guatemala, expressed (22)

When I walked in here it provoked memories from my childhood, memories which I had not transited in a long time: when I was eight years old and I went back to visit my grandmother she took me to the market. I had not remembered that until I came here, and heard the voices, and it was as if I was there in the market. Although I cannot remember the market in Guatemala, I felt as if I was there, I felt I was in a place that I can't remember. And that place over there…[yerbatero] I felt as if I had been there because there were many in my barrio but I never went there.

It goes without saying that neither Hernández nor I had been in Guatemala to research markets, and of course, there are similarities, both countries speak Spanish and are Catholic, but as I said before, TMFH is not a representation of a market, is an evocation, is the trace of a performance in the space. Evocation enacts the past while representation re-presents the past. Evocation does not resort to mimesis while representation does. I was evoking a situation, enacting a memory through my own subjectivity, therefore the outcome is different than the representation of a market, that which would be more akin to the curiosity cabinet, the natural science museum, the ethnographic exhibit.

What happened in the other spaces, for example in the buhonero space, the first one after the ‘ethnographer's’ vestibule, was along the same lines of the yerbatero's. We bought the catre from a vendor at the San Juan market in Barquisimeto and later place it in the installation along with the altar, the razorblade, the knife, but not in the manner the vendor we bought it from would have had it in 'real' life but in relation to the space we were proposing him, a spatial consciousness where fiction and reality mingled in the surface, in the skin of the plastic covering that wrapped around. The bags hanging from the chicken wire that served as ceiling and deposit, spoke of the transitory placement of their life.

The last space, the space through which one exited the installation, was dedicated the Fiesta, the celebration of the event and the gift, the vendors' presents to their foreign audiences: carved figures, rice bags with saints inside them, decorated false women nails, and a parrot that spoke English. Since the parrot could not travel, (there is a prohibition to take them out) we substituted the parrot with a cock when we got to The United States.

The Market From Here explored the language of the mise-en-scène as ethnography and as Installation Art (23). In doing so, it proposed a discourse that intercepts with its parental disciplines: anthropology, art, scenography, and ethnography. The hybrid that resulted, although some art critics preferred to categorize it as artifact, as ready-made, spoke of the new crossroads opened for those artists and ethnographers who transit between art and anthropology. In our case, we chose to use some of anthropology's methodology and content and make them complementary to the creative process, to the subjectivity of the artist. What the discourse of the TMFH proposed was the dismantling of anthropological authority, leaving the trace of the performance, the scenography of a play that created its own script as it played itself on space. Most interesting is the fact that this trace, the act of installing, the performance of an evocation corresponds to ethnographic knowledge exercised in the fieldwork. It is not about the objects themselves transcending essentialist categorizations but about a method of inquiry that opens conditions of possibility for the existence of experimental spaces within ossified disciplines.

Although anthropology made an in-depth critique of the discipline in the early 1980s, the shock treatment has not produced the results that would expand the field of the discipline. Retrenchment quickly took place after acknowledgement of the crisis and old forms of ethnographic narrative readapted to the new paradigms. Art on the other hand has been moving steadily toward the commodification of the art object. The axiomatic characteristic of the system makes it almost impossible to break through the wall as this one moves further as we move forward.