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Presentation of the Book "El mito de al-Ándalus"
From April 08, 2014 until April 23, 2014
Cordoba, April 22. Madrid, April 23, as part of the city’s Book Night.
Jose Antonio González Alcantud, a Social Anthropology professor from the University of Granada and a scholar belonging to the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, is presenting his most recent work in Cordoba and Madrid: “El mito de al Ándalus: Orígenes y actualidad de un ideal cultural” (“The Myth of Al-Andalus: Origins and Current Status of a Cultural Ideal”).
The event, organized along with the Almuzara publishing firm, is taking place on Tuesday, April 22 at 7:30 p.m. at the Casa Árabe auditorium in Cordoba, and one day later, on Wednesday, April 23 at the Madrid headquarters auditorium, at 7:00 p.m., as part of the city’s Book Night event. Accompanying Alcantud will be the General Director of Casa Árabe, Eduardo López Busquets.
The result of extensive work by the author (conferences, prior publications, debates, etc.), this book highlights the legitimacy and currentness of the Al-Andalus myth, as well as its necessary validity for understanding the present and future of Mediterranean historical narratives. In his analysis, Professor Alcantud starts out with the origins of this myth in the ancient Mediterranean world, from the arrival of the Arabs and Berbers in the year of 711, to more recent events such as the “Arab rebellions.” The author, who possesses in-depth knowledge of the debates produced over these topics, comments on the need to consider Al-Andalus to be a “good myth.” In other words, it should be viewed as a construct of historical and mythological cultural essentials which serve a purpose in favor of “good,” and therefore it merits being thought of separately from the enormous historical and political debates which it evokes. From this perspective, the image of cultural destruction that has shrouded the idea of Al-Andalus in Eastern cultural media is combatted, on the one hand, while on the other, values such as co-existence and acknowledgment are given appreciation, compared with the biased interpretations which deny their value, reinvent history and bring old-fashioned, nationalistic, preconceived notions into the public forum.
José Antonio González Alcantud
Granada, 1956. A tenured professor of Social Anthropology from the University of Granada and correspondent scholar of the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. He was the President of the Ethnology Commission of the Autonomous Regional Government of Andalusia, and the founder and director of the Ángel Ganivet Research Center in Granada. Amongst his lines of research are those of exoticism, to which he has dedicated several books, the most notable of which are “Lo moro. Las lógicas de la derrota y la formación del estereotipo islámico” (“The Moorish. The Logics of Defeat and Formation of the Islamic Stereotype,” 2002), and “La fábrica de los estereotipos. Francia, nosotros y la europeidad” (“The Factory of Stereotypes. France, Us and Europeanness,” 2006); political anthropology, in which his best known works are “Sísifo y la ciencia social. Variaciones críticas de la antropología” (“Sisyphus and Social Science. Critical Variations of Anthropology,” 2006) and “Racismo elegante. De la teoría de las razas culturales a la invisibilidad del racismo cotidiano” (“Elegant Racism. From the Theory of Cultural Races to the Invisibility of Everyday Racism,” 2011); cultural heritage, in which his most notable work is “El malestar en la cultural patrimonial” (“Malaise in Cultural Heritage,” 2012); art anthropology with “El exotismo en las vanguardias artístico-literarias (“Exoticism in the Art and Literature Avant-garde Movements,” 1989) and “El rapto del arte” (“The Abduction of Art,” 2002) and last of all, games, with his work “Tractatus ludorum. Una antropológica del juego” (“Tractatus ludorum. An Anthropology of Games,” 1992). He is the director of the anthropological avant-garde journal “Imago Crítica” and has been a visiting professor at many universities, most notably at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. At present, he is carrying out field work in Morocco, and he continues to uphold Anthropology’s role in de-construction and criticism, as a theoretical amalgam of cultural creativity.
