Since childhood, Stephen Castillo Bernal has liked heavy metal. And although he has been passionate about the genre for many years, until he completed his doctoral thesis he was able to combine this taste with his career as a social anthropologist. This is how Música del Diablo was born, a book recently published by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). Under the subtitle of "Imaginary, social dramas and rituals of the metal scene of Mexico City", the work, writes Francisco de la Peña Martínez in the preface, "reveals the passion of an anthropologist, who e. In addition to historically placing the heavy metal movement, as well as its appearance and development in Mexico, the researcher, who is in charge of the Tolteca room of the National Museum of Anthropology, analyzes the different styles through which he has traveled. It also deals with the places where this music and its rites are played, clothing and accessories, the role of women and metal tattoos, the ways of distributing music and other topics. Castillo Bernal says in an interview that he began the investigation in 2008 with the purpose of "destigmatizing the metal scene. It is always associated with the dark, with the sordid and with dangerous people, when in reality it is just another way of facing a world that is musically homogeneous. Metal is something completely rebellious; if that condition is removed, it would cease to be what it is. It has to be peripheral, underground. " The anthropologist affirms that the metal movement "is a thermometer of a society. If there is something that sustains heavy metal, with its different subgenres, it is that it embraces subjects little approached by traditional music or by traditional society. It is a thermometer of certain elements that are not very well received by social actors in the nation state, in this case Mexico. "Http://www.milenio.com/cultura/pasion-de-antropologo-metaleros also a metalhead, to objectively study the world of metallic rock, making use of an intensive and rigorous ethnographic work ".
