Fernando Estévez González (La Orotava, 1953- 2016) was always an atypical anthropologist. His research focused mainly on debunking colonial and ideological prejudices of his own discipline, or criticising the role the social sciences had in the construction of the narrative of Canarian identity. His book Indigenismo, raza y evolución. El pensamiento antropológico canario (1750-1900) [Indigenism, race and evolution: anthropological thought in the Canary Islands (1750-1900)] published in 1987, still stands today as a point of reference for de-activating any attempt at appropriating the phantom of the primitive: in this case the guanche. Estévez was not comfortable within the limits of his field, in fact he liked to present himself as ’a part-time farmer, clandestine cook, and accidental anthropologist’. We might add ’provoker of theoretical accidents’ —his passion for testing the boundaries of theory that inspired him to write conceptually and methodologically impeccable texts was the same passion that prompted him to break with the standard boundaries of his discipline to embark on a clearly uncomfortable theme for anthropology: tourism; or to engage early on (as director of the Museum of Anthropology and History of Tenerife) with the emerging field of ethnographic museography along the lines of Neuchâtel; or to open up a new dialogue with contemporary art (as we can see from his various exhibition projects); and even to abandon his scientific neutrality as ethnographer and commit himself to lost causes. There are brilliant examples of all these facets in this book, which brings together the different ways in which Fernando Estévez González confronted the subject of tourism: as an essayist and academic lecturer, speaker, museum curator and activist.
Dean MacCannell has said of him:
I was fortunate to have been one of the first English language readers of Fernando’s essays collected in this volume… He provides us with wise answers to so many of the contradictions, paradoxes, and antinomies facing not merely anthropology but every informed global citizen.
ARTE Y TURISMO SERIES
In partnership with Turicom. Project PGC2018-093422-B-I00
