Narratividad, testimonios etnográficos y hermenéutica en la obra de Carmelo Lisón

Abstract

In an express and repeated way, Carmelo Lisón emphasizes the centrality of the word and the hearing in anthropological research. In this area, his attention spans the hermeneutic indagation of the semantic fields of «words-perch» to local accounts around the existential aporia. However, the discourse of his Galician monographs shows that in his ethnographic work the visual pathway is also decisive for the recording of the episodes and, in them, for the careful creation of his textual narrative. This technical clamp that articulates the heard and the observed is in accordance with the socio-hermeneutic method characteristic of Lisonian anthropology, oriented to the understanding and tentative interpretation of the symbolic universes of cultural meanings and values, including its most remote and ineffable aspects –all of them vehiculated through the local narrative–, but always anchoring exegesis in a dense contextualization, on the solid rock of socio-structural and ecological analysis of the real existential conditions of human groups – which also involves developing a methodical observer perspective. In the elaboration of his monographs, Lisón convenes an ethnographic plettive of testimonial fragments in direct style that acts as an initial hypotext, whose polyphony remarkably enriches the hypertext; his narrative written as an anthropologist-author. This is one of the research’s resources that more strong veracity confers on monographic fiction by informing it with local verbalized experience. In this way, an unequaled anthropological genre is thus consolidated.