Biography
Roger Bartra (Mexico City, 1942) is a Mexican anthropologist, sociologist and essayist. He studied Ethnology at the National School of Anthropology and History and obtained a doctorate in Sociology at the Sorbonne. He is an emeritus researcher at the Institute of Social Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a full member of the Mexican Academy of Language.
His research has addressed the relationships between culture, political power, identity and historical forms of social representation. In La jaula de la melancolía (1987), he critically examined myths of Mexican national identity. In El salvaje en el espejo (1992) and other essays, he studied the cultural construction of otherness and the persistence of certain imaginary figures in modernity.
Another central strand of his work concerns the relationship between brain, consciousness and culture. In Antropología del cerebro and Cerebro y libertad, he explored the exobrain hypothesis, conceived as an approach to the symbolic and cultural networks involved in conscious activity. He received the National Prize for Sciences and Arts in 2013 and an honorary doctorate from UNAM in 2015.
Published books