Roger Bartra

Roger Bartra Murià (born November 7, 1942, in Mexico City) is a Mexican sociologist and anthropologist, son of the exiled Catalan writers Agustí Bartra and Anna Murià, who settled in Mexico after the defeat of the democratic forces in the Spanish Civil War. Roger Bartra is recognized as one of the most important contemporary social scientists in Latin America.Bartra is well known for his work on Mexican identity in The Cage of Melancholy. Identity and Metamorphosis in the Mexican Character, his social theory on The Imaginary Networks of Political Power and, recently, for his anthropo-clinical theory of the “exocerebro” (exocerebrum), that argues that the brain is partly constructed by its “cultural prostheses”, external socio-cultural elements that complete it.

Trained as an anthropologist in Mexico, Bartra earned his doctorate in sociology at La Sorbonne and he is an Emeritus Researcher at Mexico´s National Autonomous University, where he has worked since 1971; in 1985 he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship. He was also Honorary Research Fellow at the Birkbeck College of the University of London.