Phenomenology in Anthropology

Description

This volume explores what phenomenology adds to the enterprise of anthropology, drawing on and contributing to a burgeoning field of social science research inspired by the phenomenological tradition in philosophy. Essays by leading scholars ground their discussions of theory and method in richly detailed ethnographic case studies. The contributors broaden the application of phenomenology in anthropology beyond the areas in which it has been most influential—studies of sensory perception, emotion, bodiliness, and intersubjectivity—into new areas of inquiry such as martial arts, sports, dance, music, and political discourse.

Introduction: Phenomenology's Methodological Invitation Kalpana Ram and Christopher Houston
1. Moods and Method: Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty on Emotion and Understanding Kalpana Ram
2. Toward a Cultural Phenomenology of Body-World Relations Thomas J. Csordas
3. Sacred Suffering: A Phenomenological Anthropological Perspective C. Jason Throop
4. Being 'Sita': Physical Affects in the North Indian Dance of kathak Monica Dalidowicz
5. Beneath the Horizon: The Organic Body's Role in Athletic Experience Greg Downey
6. Unmeasured Music and Silence Ian Bedford
7. Experiencing Self-Abstraction: Studio Production and Vocal Consciousness Daniel Fisher
8. Being-in-the-Covenant: Reflections on the Crisis of Historicism in North Malaita, Solomon Islands Jaap Timmer
9. Seared with Reality: Phenomenology through Photography, in Nepal Robert Desjarlais
10. Writing Affect, Love and Desire into Ethnography L.L. Wynn
11. Senses of Magic: Anthropology, Art, and Christianity in the Vula'a Lifeworld Deborah Van Heekeren
12. Neither Things in Themselves nor Only for Someone: Anthropology, Phenomenology and Poetry Christopher Houston
Afterword Michael Jackson

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Movements
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Phenomenology
• Anthropology

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 19 octobre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253017802
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

PHENOMENOLOGY IN ANTHROPOLOGY

PHENOMENOLOGY IN ANTHROPOLOGY
A SENSE OF PERSPECTIVE
EDITED BY
KALPANA RAM
AND
CHRISTOPHER HOUSTON
AFTERWORD BY
MICHAEL JACKSON
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-01754-3 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-253-01775-8 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-01780-2 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
WE DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO IAN BEDFORD, WHO PASSED AWAY DURING ITS PREPARATION.
Contents
Introduction: Phenomenology s Methodological Invitation Kalpana Ram and Christopher Houston
Part I. The Body as Constitutive Horizon of Experience
1 Moods and Method: Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty on Emotion and Understanding Kalpana Ram
2 Toward a Cultural Phenomenology of Body-World Relations Thomas J. Csordas
3 Sacred Suffering: A Phenomenological Anthropological Perspective C. Jason Throop
4 Being Sita : Physical Affects in the North Indian Dance of Kathak Monica Dalidowicz
5 Beneath the Horizon: The Organic Body s Role in Athletic Experience Greg Downey
6 Unmeasured Music and Silence Ian Bedford
Part II. History and Temporality
7 Experiencing Self-Abstraction: Studio Production and Vocal Consciousness Daniel Fisher
8 Being-in-the-Covenant: Reflections on the Crisis of Historicism in North Malaita, Solomon Islands Jaap Timmer
Part III. The Poetics and Politics of Phenomenological Ethnography
9 Seared with Reality: Phenomenology through Photography, in Nepal Robert Desjarlais
10 Writing Affect, Love, and Desire into Ethnography L. L. Wynn
11 Senses of Magic: Anthropology, Art, and Christianity in the Vula a Lifeworld Deborah Van Heekeren
12 Neither Things in Themselves nor Things for Us Only: Anthropology, Phenomenology, and Poetry Christopher Houston
Afterword Michael Jackson
Contributors
Index
Preface
P HENOMENOLOGY IN ANTHROPOLOGY: A Sense of Perspective continues a dialogue with previous debates in phenomenological anthropology by incorporating invited and original contributions from earlier participants in that debate, including Robert Desjarlais, Thomas Csordas, and Jason Throop. The volume has been further enriched by Michael Jackson s generous contribution of an afterword, in which he reflects on his earlier insights into phenomenological anthropology as well as on continuities or changes in his present engagement with it.
This book has its practical origins in a shared intellectual endeavor. Many of the essays found here were written first for presentation at the staff seminar of the Anthropology Department at Macquarie University, when contributors were asked to explore the phenomenological dimensions of social life in their respective fieldwork locations. Invited contributors read each other s work, building upon ideas developed in this dialogue to fill out various dimensions of the broad convergence of anthropology and phenomenology. Contributors then engaged as a group with these central methodological issues, each breathing diversity and fresh life into these broad questions by bringing their own area of empirical enquiry and thematic preoccupations to bear on them. Through this joint collaboration, we hope to have shown that phenomenology speaks to a broader range of methodological questions and empirical fields of enquiry than is often recognized.
The editors wish to thank the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University for its generous support toward the publication of this volume. Most importantly, we acknowledge the collegiality and enthusiasm of our colleagues in the Department of Anthropology, who have helped make the organizing and writing of this work an absolute pleasure.
We dedicate this book to Ian Bedford, cherished husband of Kalpara Ram who passed away while it was in production. As founding member of the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, novelist, and translator of eighteenth-century Urdu Sufi poetry from South Asia, he helped shape generations of students and colleagues and touched many more with his erudition, humanity, and sheer enthusiasm for ideas. Those who had the great fortune to be supervised by him came to know first-hand the importance he placed on good writing. For, to quote from his contribution to this volume, Many a good utterance on the page is heard, is listened for. Part of the task of comprehension lies in this listening. Part of the force of language lies in a superfluity at the heart of language. How many essay-writing students have had to be taught that it is not only the facts to be reported, the bare bones of the argument on the page, but the cadence that matters!
PHENOMENOLOGY IN ANTHROPOLOGY
Introduction
Phenomenology s Methodological Invitation
Kalpana Ram and Christopher Houston
W HAT IS PHENOMENOLOGY? And why should anthropologists, as well as students of history, psychology, education, or political economy be interested in it? Within philosophy, phenomenology is as diverse as its practitioners. Indeed, Moran (2000: 3) in an introduction to philosophical traditions of phenomenology finds it important to warn readers not to overstate the degree to which phenomenology coheres into an agreed method, or accepts one theoretical outlook, or one set of philosophical theses about consciousness, knowledge, and the world. Some of this diversity continues to be a feature of anthropological uses of phenomenology, as we show here. Yet we also argue for a heuristic narrowing of the range of its meanings. We do so in order to widen its potential applicability, making it more instructive to anthropology as well as to aligned disciplines. What might appear to be a paradox-restricting meaning in order to expand its use-is in fact in keeping with phenomenology s own teachings, and we argue for this in some detail in this introduction. For preliminary purposes, we offer a serviceable definition of phenomenology: phenomenology is an investigation of how humans perceive, experience, and comprehend the sociable, materially assembled world that they inherit at infancy and in which they dwell.
Framed in this way, phenomenology in anthropology is a theory of perception and experience that pertains to every man, woman, and child in every society. As such, it is relevant not just to locals in the fieldwork sites that anthropologists step into and out of, but also to anthropologists and philosophers in their own regional lives, surrounded like everyone everywhere by significant others, human and non-human. Phenomenology therefore has a decidedly universalistic dimension. But it is also determinedly particularistic. The phenomenology we privilege sets out to show how experience and perception are constituted through social and practical engagements. There is a temporal, cumulative dimension to phenomenological descriptions of people s activities and concerns, which comes through most profoundly in phenomenology s subtle vocabulary of the orientations that inhabit our bodies and guide people s actions and perspectives.
Such a developmental account is necessarily also particular to both time and place. In this combination of the universal and the particular, phenomenology contains elements of anthropology s original charter that sought to maintain a sense of human generalities while pursuing empirical investigation of the particular and the concrete. We suggest that phenomenology can renew this older project, infusing it with freshness, while avoiding many of the pitfalls that have been located in overlapping and diverse critiques of universalism as a cloak for particular and powerful subject positions-European, imperialist, masculinist, white, and so on-there being no necessary limit to such forms of positionality. Instead, the universalism of phenomenology seeks to locate itself at ever more basic levels, actively aiming to expose and shed presuppositions. Its method is in fact predicated on this quest to reveal and discard whatever is revealed to be an unwarranted presupposition smuggled into one s work.
The account we provide in this introduction tries to elucidate and clarify a version of phenomenology that makes it important not simply to contemporary anthropology with its breadth of concerns, but to other disciplines as well. Many definitions of phenomenology locate its focus at the level of individual experience. But perception and experience contains many dimensions-sensorial, corporeal, cultivated, interactional, distributed, collective, political, ethical, and individual. Such dimensions immediately invoke processes of education, socialization, and political power. As people s situations, concerns, or orientations alter, often materialized in a transformation in embodied experience or in educated capacities, so are their perceptions modified. The phenomenology we seek to foreground invites considerations of politics and political economy, macro- as well as microprocesses. In the many corners of the world now where war, compulsory migration, or violence have wrought perceptual and experiential modifications upon people, phenomenological anthropology will be necessarily involved in describing the passive apprehension of that wh