ae ee 40029310 Ew «s Things as 176 They Are NEW DIRECTIONS IN PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY edited by Michael Jackson Indiana© 1996 by Indiana Unversity Pres eights served fomorby took may be erode ted 27 Nope i er crane ncuig OOPNG Se cog a ma ee Seago he ui on lr rect Reaction Mon Permissions constitutes the only rt ‘exception to this prohibition. am eens sh prs tenon pes emi een saci i es oa a Library of Congress Catalosingin Publication Dot ropes! setey ne new dectonsinpemenoi aoe oe ‘edited by Michael Jackson. . nade pc ee ssn ss. 000K ae pp — HEN OTP TION alk. paper) « Phemmenlogts abrpsog Jackson Micha OE 988 a 95-4591 ee led CONTENTS Preface /micwace jackson vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Phenomenology, Radical Empiricism, and Anthropological Critique / micHaeL JACKSON 1. Honor and Shame / 11a asu-LuGHoD 51 Struggling Along /RoBeRr DESJaRLaIs 70 “The Cosmology of Life Transmission / René DEvisch 94 Reflections on a Cut Finger: boo in the Umeda Conception of the Self /aurrep cut 115 Space and Sociality in a Dayak Longhouse / cHristine HELLIWELL 128 fiance of Destiny: The Management of Time and Gender at a ‘Cretan Funeral /micnae. werzFeip 149 ng and Its Professional Transformation: Toward an ography of Interpersonal Experience / ARTHUR KLEINMAN AND JOAN KLEINMAN 169 ‘Hand Drumming: An Essay in Practical Knowledge / sawn tinvsay 196 g and Suffering in Iqwaye Existence /japran mimics 213 Fieldwork /xe1TH RIDLER 238 After the Field /jim warer 259 Contribuors 273tsoaiBe [erou38 ou “ojouauouayd jo unos 19840 5.21004 s380y 40 “payprar st snsuasue9 Ix> yainasax pu satfopy: YD smonSiquie pur py SdOVAINdwiih pnerace ‘on terms, nor could there ever be. Iisa subject in ee = ‘making of it what he (she) will for his [her] own work. The ins fruitful, the doctrine remains a challenge” (Poole 1972:81). ACKNOWLEDGMENTS REFERENCES the essays in this volume were previously published. or and Shame,” by Lila Abu-Lughod, is reprinted from Writing Worlds: Bedouin tories, chapter 5, inaslighty mended recon Edie, James M. 1987. William James and Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana Qn naks Tes 1086 Cnaticis of chimley: Albay Sel Dnterty ok mofthe author and the Regents of the University of California and the - sequen | : ; h York Press. Deep Subjectivity. London: Allen Lane. Along by Rober Desa, a res Michaod. 1975 Jones aad Hse The Founda of Mean The “ “Anthropological Assi iepeocuced by ee Stevens, Richard. 197+, James and Huser % es oe: Marina No. “ ste, are 195 il Jones and Prono: A of Th Principles of schol” Blomngin: Indiana Univers) Pres by The University of Chicago. all ‘on a Cut Finger: Taboo in the Umeda Conception of the Sel ited Gell is reprinted from Fantasy and Symbol: Studies in Anthropol i edited by RH. Hook, 1979-133-148, with permission of the and Acadlemic Press London and Ballere Tindall (© 1979 by Academie Inc. [London] Lid). Space and Sociality in a Dayak Longhouse,’ by Christine Helliwel, is « byrevised version of ‘Good Walls Make Bad Neighbours: The Dayak 82 Community of Voices,” fist published in Oceania 1992, vol 62 ea i isteprinted here with the permission of Oceania Publications Pp ance of Destiny: The Management of Time and Gender ata Cretan ichael Hercfeldis reprinted here from American Ethologst 1993, D(@):241-255, with permission of the author and the Amen Anthro- ation, and Its Profesional Transformation: Toward an Ethnography of sPerience,"by Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman is reprinted opie: Medicine and Psychiatry 1991 vol. 15 (3):275-301, by Of the authors and Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Theack things themseves, dese Hel Logical vations And they said then, “But play, you must Attune beyond us, yet ourselves, Avune upon the blue guitar (Of things exactly as they are.” alae Sevens, The Man wih he Blue Gala c uld be given a name every event which occurred could be gi there would be no need for stories. As things are here, life outstrips our vocabulary. = —John Berger, Once in Europa Introduction Phenomenology, Radical Empiricism, and Anthropological Critique MICHAEL JACKSON. How can we undestand someone else without Sscrficing hi to cur logic orto hin? Maurice Merless-Ponty (1964115) anthropology. But anthropology and ig ‘sumption of the phenomenology outlined here is that Sahn taeotes like politcal opinions, should be regarded xe part pete world in which we live rather than transcendent nox that social interests, cultural habits, and which the worth or truth of any view is fer one calls upon correspondence to the » contest, and experience our ated decisively, or regarded as of phenomenology is being-in-the be constrited strictly in terms of (Casey 1991 xix), What phenom M ofthe products of intellectual reflec self-enclosed features nenology stands against tion, Thus, objectivism,5 MICHAEL JACKSON and subjectivism are equally untenable if by these terms we imply that one domain of experience isto be privileged asthe way to truth, while others are isparaged and ignored. The phenomenological method is above all one of direct understanding and in-depth description—a way of according equal ‘weight to all modalities of human experience, however they are named, and deconstructing the ideological appings they take on when they are theorized (Goldstein 1961:225-226). Phenomenology isthe sciemific study of exper ence. Iris an attempt to describe human consciousness in its lived immediacy before itis subject to theoretical elaboration or conceptual systematizing. Int words of Paul Ricoeur, phenemenology is “an investigation into the structures of experience which precede connected expression in language” (1979:12 THE WORLD REGAINED Many contemporary anthropologists have expressed dissatisfaction with the arcane, abstract, and alienating character of much theoretical thought. Some times this is phrased asa criticism ofthe ways Wester intellectual traditions tend to be privileged over all others, as though no edifying account of human social life could be rendered by using African, Islamic, Indian, Chinese, or Polynesian traditions of thought. In addressing these issues, detailed descrip. tons of lived reality are seen as ways of resisting the estranging effects of conceptual models and systematic explanation which, when pushed too far, disqualify and efface the very life one wants to understand,* and isolate us from the very life we have to live The knowledge whereby one lives is not necessarily identical with the know!- edge whereby one explains life. Would one ever make a nest if one were mindful that some day one would have to dig a grave¥/The ways in which human beings reflect, analyze, and rationalize events in retrospect are seldom isomorphic with the atitudes they adopt in the face of life Ina moving essay entitled “Coping with Destiny,” Meyer Fortes shows how this paradoxical disjunction between doctrine and action, theory and practice, episteme and experience, applies 10 notions of fate in societies chere, the Tallensi of northern Ghana) which we allo often characterize as “fatalistc” Fate, which isin theory iresistible and irrevocable, isin practice taken 10 be controllable... 1s thus recognized that its notin the nature of man to submit blindly to what purports to be mystcaly inevitable, Our Western science and ‘medicine, our politics, cosmologies and moral or religious systemstestifyeven more ‘mperiously to this than do the atempts of Hindus, Buddhists or West Africans 10 control by ritual meane what they designate as Destiny. (1987:145-146) What is at issue here isthe intellectualist fallacy of speaking as if life were atthe service of ideas (Dewey 1980:291; Merleau-Ponty 1962:39). By “intellec- Introduction 3 es Dewey: the “assumption of intellectualisn primarily experienced/For things are ob and with, enjoyed and endured, even tn ea loeicy things cognized” (Dewey 1958.21), ariety of human experience cannot be solidified Miheodor Adomo calls “a body of enumerable theorems (Adorn changed philosophy, notes Adomo, would “cease persuad itself that it had the infinite at its disposal” 7 eS contrary tothe facts jets to be treated, used, more than things to be ganice would lei the diversity of. sty. of objects that impinge upon it and ofthe ks 4 aventy not wrought by any schemes he se pul uly ae eel rher tan ve them ses a aastaing som image for concrecon It would bemahng perience inthe medium of conceptual reflection, Gd 13) hhomely way of phrasing this point of view iach or cen obs poor orarger ore gmt by,"or seek success,” is as abstract ands who slices the all (because of bad habits o the ball'YConcepts that might have little practical efficacy inefficacious as instruct- body use) to “keep hs have some value in commenting y in working out routines and pull actully help a person accomplish his or her life goals? rae gstsue of *identitybinking” (in which a determi- exist between words and the les emigue of thea Se athropoloyel ate of the anhropolopts os oe boundaries.” oe des what is loosely called postmederis g akdown of herd and fast dsinetons tone Iture, a dispersal of authorial authority, an underey ng ch European intellect tien tual traditions have accorded them4 MICHAEL JACKSON selves vis-i-vis non-European societies, and a shift in emphasis from explana. tory causes to creative elfecs, Ata time when the gap between the havesand the have-nots is both widening and hardening, the theoretical question of how one right understand the world yields to the practical question of how the world right be changed. But in invoking Marx's second thesis on Feuer only to underscore the point that what compels our interest in any idea is its power to destabilize and unsetile received ways of seeing the world, replenish- Ingoour sense of ife's variety and possibility, and encouraging debate on the role ofthe inellecwal in.the world of practical ffi. Many ground-breaking ethnographies are providing us with timely and ironic reminders that for the most part human beings live their lives indepen- dently ofthe intellectual schemes dreamed up in academe, and that the domair of knowledge is inseparable from the world in which people actually live andi act. The essays inthis volume may be read asa corrective to the “natural failing of intellectuals to exaggerate the significance of their theoretical knowledge They bring home to us that what people recognize as imperative and real in most societies, most of the time, is not ratiocination, but commonsensical, taken-for-granted knowledge, and that this constitutes, to all intents and purposes, the effective and practical reality of life (Berger and Luckman 1966:26-27). In prioritizing the knowledge with which people live rather than, the knowledge with which Western intellectuals make sense of life, ethnogra- phy helps us place practical and social imperatives on a par with scholastic rules and abstract understanding, It helps us recover a sense of those critical contexts of existence where knowledge is not a matter of how to know but & ‘matter of life or death, when something is hazarded and risked in the process ‘of coming to know, when “something i at stake” (Kleinman A. 6. 1991-277). Fieldwork brings hom to us the oniological priority of social existence, and fieldwork-based writing affirms that truth must not be seen as an unmasking which eclipses the appearance ofthe thing unmasked, but form of disclosure which does it justice? This ‘anti-intellectualist”attiude, as William James called it, implies "a looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities and of looking towards things, ults, consequences, facts” James 1978:32). 1" rejecting metaphysical abstraction, William James wanted to debunk all n- tions that it is possible to have the last word on the meaning of human existence. The world is never something finished, something which thought n bring to a close; the world is always in the making, and our thoughts, tke our actions, have meaning only in relation to.the. practical and social life in which we are engaged. “The truth of an idea,” says James, “is not a stagnant propeny inherent init. Truth happens to an idea. It Becomes true, is made true by events ts verity is infact an event, a process (ibid :97). The same pragmatic spirit informs the work of the Frankfurt School, for whom the discovery of immutable truths yields toa concer for the possibilities of changing the world. gm to serve the particular inten Introduetion endeavor, doctrinaire notions of ahistorical and : anonymous truth ar ts of power elites, i Knowledge to function asa means of obscuring tie we the active, nt onstititive power of human subjectivity. Mex Michael ggasi power of uman subject. re enly,nie Hines that the idea of tra Seg sees snr tthe idea of transcendenc: ntext-free, rational | oe language, but ideologies 992:20-21), e power and bureaucratic authority (Herefld 1 a Pragmatist critique to bear on theoxetical thou gical pretensions in order to disclose its existe this means placing intellectual culture in 4 Horkheimer’s and Adorno's argument (19 ith its preoccupation with pattern and orde 8 fer controlling nature and dominating oth emphasis on inellectual rationality and ord, et eels that its power and privileges are always under a Salads from ts own asa word ol cha (Adore OV Fee ceubation with order and structure may be seen asa fom of king, # consoling Wlusion passing it En worknge of he Passi ite off aca priveged glimpse order which the ethno, ight is to undercut its tial meanings, ts historical context 72) that instrumental reflects the mentality leron one’s world, called “the fallacy of misplaced concepts easily become if they gave control overpe wonDeud pu DUDIEIND fos e> stsioyouowouayd wy uo pur. sete i ‘woy asinopstp amo Bu294 jo Ue 7 ee Pp onsanb © ow! pamemsuen et nt utdauy jo wonsanb aun tuonsanb ay 40) sy sapu8u; nije: . 1 ae esd 3H 10} Sy “Japua8ua cue saynes waned jousmouayd q patesard oud sty, on ancy pre wane p23 ya s Suva up 27180: iam we se dn punoil auf wos} SDHOM Toape anuauada 01 2ayj 2x6 24 TU! NOS peusduus pu yequojo> W03) ‘ojodk jaoue9 2up 29 pas rsid> isuneBe 198K YDIT A aps ane Kau 248 OF wseyiusa ang ‘sandanb2su 238 |P9 109 OF 48. OP PITON 2m ye a8 MOMENTS (Hee L061) SS pu or wuoyuoo ovat way 2M IU PHOM Treung Suootoud 4a seme Jo ssouaasuodsasu pioe ayuod ano cps 0p 298 THAN U8 pur ngfaotn angdzourodonypae yiog Hod receen) sstwrun at 7 Angeuokes teaay 2qt paw ssaio wosxove Taynoun+ MncMAEL JACKSON ‘ts habituality ts crises, its vemacular and idiomatic character. its biographical particularities, its decisive events and indecisive strategies, which theoretical knowledge addresses but does not determine, ftom which conceptual under. standing arises but on whieh it does not primarily depend. Sartre's notion of “situation” (1956.481-553), Wittgenstein's “environ. ‘ment of a way of acting’ (1979), Bateson's “ecology of mind™(1973)- ‘Haberinas's exploration of the lifeworld asa field of intersubjective commun, cation (1987), Tumer's use of Lewin's field theory in his analysis of Ndemiby initiation ritual (1970), and Kleinman's. work on. “local. moral. worlds (4992:172) are moments of reclamation when soctal theorists, alarmed 3t the alienating power of their professional discourse, have attempted to turn our attention back to what William James called/“the world experienced ? ‘After James, perhaps no American philosopher has made a better case for this reclamation than John Dewey, whose empirical naturalism refused to subject “things in their immediacy” to “cognitive certification’ or reduce “primary experience” to intellectual meanings which were not self-evident (1958:126). Knowing, for Dewey, was a factor in action and undergoing," an instrumental ity rather than a goal, a way of accomplishing things inthe world rather than a way of intellectually possessing it. For Dewey, empirical method begins and ‘ends in the ifeworld—the world of our everyday goals, social existence, and ‘practical activity, This is why an anthropology of the lifeworld is critical of “a spectator theory of knowledge" (Dewey 1980:23) in which intellectual goals are divorced from what Brace Wilshire calls “the gritty and obscure drama of everyday life” (1990:190) For anthropology, ethnography remains vital, not because ethnographic methods guarantee certain knowledge of others but because ethnographic fieldwork brings us into direct dialogue with others, affording us opportunities toexplore knowledge not as something that grasps inherent and hidden truths but as an intersubjective process of sharing experience, comparing notes, exchanging ideas, and finding common ground. In this process our social jgumption and social skills, as much as our scientific methodology, become measures ofthe limits and value of our understanding This calls upon the intellectual to resist the tendency to ontologize the results of his or her interpretative activity: the fallacy of thinking that what '& conjecturally possible must be actually the case, or falling into the belie that ‘what is conceived in the mind must perforce exist in the world, The feushized Products of intellectual activity all too often assume a life of their own. reinforcing the illusion that life can be possessed, controlled, captured, and pinned down. Ouraim is to do justice to the lived complexity of experience by avoiding those selective redescriptions, reductions, and generalizations which claim to capture the essence of the lived in underlying rules or overarching schemata yet, in effect, downplay and deaden it Introduction 9 of William James, the empirical naturalism of nenology of Merieau-Ponty insist that knowing must. {tis possible to absent ourselves from the constraints gencies of our situation, One may disengage from the (Merleau-Ponty 1964a:119). The implication is that ints central. outside or above tosituating oneself elsewhere within esa shit from an emphasis on explatiatory models to odels impose connections on experience, metaphors ions within experience (Jackson 1989:142). Erwin ofthis in his famous study of upright posture. tS out, characterizes our humanity—biogenetically, ly. Uprightness has both physical and metaphysical en we refer to a person's “standing” “substantality,” (1966-143). The “verticalty schema” i, however, ambigh- is with. fear of falling. Ludwig Binswanger des an example of what this means in practice, When -speak of the ground giving way beneath them, of being footing, and of falling, these are not, Binswanger argues, states. Body and mind are effectively one, and what of is the actual experience of disoriented Being, ment, “we {all from the clouds,” then we fall—we is nether purely of the body nor something metaphor cally falling, ur harmonious relationship withthe world 1s suddenly suffers a staggering blow, stemming from the ment and the shock tat goes with it. In such a moment ly suffers, is tom from its positon in the world and thrown €s, Until we can regain our equilibrium in the world, our within the meaning matrix of stumbling, sinking, and (general meaning matrix the “form,” and the bitter dsap- nt.” We can see that in this ease form and content ate one. 223) elsewhere (Jackson 1989-142) that sf body metaphors are tualistically, so that the idea or sensation and its bodily seen as an arbitrary or rhetorical synthesis of two terms— €l tenor and vehicle—which can be defined more realistically then the meaning of metaphor lies in its disclosure ofthe dy and mind, self and world, Metaphors thus reveal or ate not figurative means of denying dualites.10 MICHAEL JACKSON René Devisch's study of the khita healing cult among the Yaka of Zaire (1993) describes in depth how metaphors are the connective tissue of the lifeworld. For the Yaka, the life eycle of persons is metaphorically integrated with seasonal and lunar rhythms, This integration is likened toa fabricof firmly but delicately interwoven social, bodily, and cosmic threads. Infertility isa tear in this fabric of life and regenerative rituals are ways of reweaving the damaged strands, However, this metaphorical warp and woof of person and world isnot simply a semantic or conceptval artifice but a lived reality, a vital flow charged. ‘with bodily. and sensory-power,-in-which-self, group, and world are one (Devisch 1993:257), “I contend,” writes Devisch, “that ritual metaphors in Yaka culture are not the flickering touch of mind on mind but a blending and empowering of senses, bodies, and world” (ibid.:43). Elsewhere, observing, {that ritual syrabols are not abstract images, but corporeal devices, processes, ‘methods, or patterns that originate inthe lifeworld (bid, 280), Devisch points * out that such a view implies “a reversal of most of the linguistic and semiotic perspectives on metaphor and its logical processes known today" (ibid). And it implies a methodological shift as well, since understanding this lifeworld entails reaching beyond “dialogue and discursive reality” into participation and transference (ibid.:283). THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL EPOCHE Husserl’s phenomenological method was one of suspending inquiry into “objective” realty in order to explore the reality of human consciousness (1931:107-11). For anthropology, this implies a practical relativism: the suspension of inquiry into the divine or objective truth of particular customs, beliefs, or worldviews in order to explore them as modalities or moments of ‘experience, to trace out their implications and uses. Ideas are not so much, discounted as deconstructed; they ae seen as approximate expressions rather than exact explanations of experience. The phenomenological method involves, “placing in brackets’ or “setting aside” questions conceming the rational, “ontological, or objective status of ideas and beliefsin order to fully describe and do ustice to the ways n which people actually live, experience, and use them— the waysin which they appear fo consciousness. Dewey calls this “the postulate of immediate empiricism,” namely that “things are what chey are experienced -t0-be" (1905:228), This phenomenological epoché OF “bracketing plies a rigorously empirical attitude, without being empiricist. Empirie, nicht Enmpirismus, declared Dilthey, in order to emphasize that though phenomenol- ‘oy focuses onthe fac of consciousness it doesnot strive o explain these facts away by reducing them to antecedent conditions, biogenetic determinations, ‘unconscious principles, or invisible causes This is not to say that human experience is without preconditions; rather, itis to suggest that the experience of these preconditions is not entirely i tis fist manifested by the social or cultur brings about and in which i imprisons Objects would not be what the a aso have as is meaning 0. reject them an: Reimplicaion is that life cannot be under js Outward and given forms: symbolic images general, subject and object. One's thy Mhich the scemingly fixed forms of ssand activity. As Goethe obse femselves are the truth” Introduction. al structure, th € appearance of which self, But is use-abjets and is cataral eifthe actvty which rings about ther appearance ded sd 0 surpass them. (1963:176) stood simply through the systematic ‘witcheraft-(1989), itis 1m the people who make2 MICHAEL Jackson fo witchcraft during terminal llness—as desperate stratagems for reclaiming autonomy ina hopeless situation. The self-confessed witch does more than Passively submit to her misfortune. Nor does she blindly recapitulate the Stereotypes which men promulgate. Rather, she actively uses the imagery of ‘witchcraft to givevoice to long-suppressed grievances, coping with sulfering by declaring herself the author of it. She makes of her own body the site of the world’s injustice. Thus, she determines how she will play out the role which circumstance has thrust upon her. She dies deciding her own destiny, sealing her own fate (Jackson 1989-101). ‘The phenomenological tum prepares the ground fordetailed descriptions of how people immediately experience space, ime, and the world in which they live The “facts” of natural science, lke the notion of objective reality itself are treated as “phenomena” of human experience, to be placed on a par with beliefs" and elements of so-called subjective realty. But to suspend disbelief in such notions as objectivity, cause, essence, and authority is not ro banish them from our vocabulary. Denying such terms absolute explanatory power is simply a prelude to exploring their phenomenal power—the interes they serve and the transformations they effect. Consider for instance the terme “heredity” and “environment.” Any attempt to decide empirically how “natural and “eultural” elements interact in human behavior must be complemented by ‘am analysis of the ways in which “nature” and “nurture” are invoked in sociel iscourse to legitimate quite different worldviews Tourniet 1988201). People ‘who invoke biogenetic nature as determinative tend to be political conserva. tive; social inequalities, they argue, reflect the nature of things. By contrast, People who invoke nurture tend to be liberals for whom the world can be changed for the bette through concerted politcal action, Katsuyoshi Fuku's ethnographic research among the Bodi of Southwest Ethiopia providesan example of how “contradictory” models rellect,not logical confusion, but contrasted context of social use. The pastoral Bodi recognize rnumerous color patterns for cows, based on eight primary color terms, Mastery of this “color-pattern vernacular,” and of cattle genealogies and clan classifice, tion, is erucial ro decisions as to which cow it Is symbolically appropriate to sacrifice on such critical oceasions as sowing grain or summoning rain, What 'sstriking for our purposes, however, is thatthe Bodi apply Mendelian genetic Principles in selectively breeding cattle whose color patterns are useful for ‘cosmological and ritual purpeses, but do not apply this model ta human ife or human genealogies. The reason is that cows, not persons, occupy the crucsl mediatory position between social microcosm and natural mactocosta, crcl ritually cortect color combinations mus be realy available if elations berocon humanity and cosmos are to be managed effectively (Fuku 1979. 1987) ‘Use, not logic, conditions belie That the phenomenologis i loath to ‘Ssealize such terms as nature, femininity, or Aboriginal does nox pe, a Introduetion 1b Deena eittat 3 SePtatst, esenlizing thetorc is often an Breen sean not esesed groups snd chnic inorwesinlying Bree bekeh a sseenon. Silay, the force ofa Chistian ent to belie, say, inthe divint the Sperone epic eicane cea ese oT al and homeopathic criteria (Hughes 1978, 154). Finally, it should be Seeger rn ay, pol ny se Be aabontyndcbecine nowkg mstoaeneene ers oui erelore such belits are instrumentally necessay ctl ally esa senso Fea hereon resinccaveconscloneier earn Premrgtiledze from curing practices were frosinic ‘ Hep, saree ta Eh dona Mercedes, refused to relate what she did to; ted aha ae everything she sai Be my mye oe hat mar alk about i. You would just do (Donne. 1984-7), am e fe Phenomenologist uneasy is the assumption that beliefs ae a kind of ahistorical, Supraempirical v; alidity if they me aaa Pas can be meaningful ‘and have useful consequences, are epistemologically unwarranted, } antecedent events, and id. “Every time you ask Hangs 21 Etropcan Sciences and Transcendental Phenor Fmt if, between 1934 and 1957) Hane Nhat be calls the Lchensweleifeworld) ove menology (written in er! gives ontological the world of theoretical IE '”~ ll__ invisible, the tangible and the intangible. Dewey suggests that 4 MICHAEL JACKSON One response to the crisis was o critically question the classical empiricist assumption that the observer could distance himself from the object of “observation by using disinterested techniques and neutral methods, thereby sainingcertain and consistent knowledge ofthe other. Another response was to question the very idea that the world of theoretical ideas could im fact be dissociated from the pretheoretical lifeworld (Husserl 1970:123-14D. ‘in recent years, one of the most compelling anthropological explorations of the relation of abstract theoretical thought to the lifeworld has been Jadran ‘Mimica’s study of counting and mythopoeia among the Lawaye of Papua New ‘Guinea (1988). Mimica shows in great detail that the Iqwaye counting system answers practical needs in everyday life and depends upon specific techniques of the body. But though these practical, cosmological, and corporeal givens define the matrixin which the counting system operates, Iqwaye arithmetic is logically capable of extensions that carry us far beyond the immediate world of Iqwaye needs and usages. But, Mimica argues, these abstract mathematical possbilities—which in the West have been so comprehensively elaborated and formalized that we have los sight oftheir original sources in the lifeworld—are rot realized in Iqwaye practice because the Iqwaye have no use for them. Turning to the question of why Wester philosophy has so systematically sought transcendent conception of number in pure rationality, Mimica argues that itis a matter of reification and forgetting, An ethnographic description of Iqwaye numeration, cosmology, and practical life thus reminds us that histor cally and ontologically the very possibilty of “our” systems of mumber is ‘grounded in, albeit distantly, and pointsto albeit obliquely, the concrete world of things. Consider, too, the indeterminate and ambiguous character of experience Merleau-Ponty used a Gestalt fi us of the ways in which consciousness continually shifts between figure and ground. Whatever is ‘brought forth, embodied, and made visible beats with ita sense of other things ‘which are co-present but backgrounded, peripheral, and ephemeral. Every ‘modality or moment of experience entails its contrary. As John Dewey put it, a primary datum of all experience is a sense of contrast between that which is immediate and that which is non-immediate, between the visible and the wf distinction ‘between sensible experience and the ideas which make this experience inteli- ible is directly comparable to “primitive” distinctions between matural and Supernatural domains (1958-43-44). We can put this another way/ Experi- tences we tend to gloss as belonging to the unconscious—an abyssal region of the mind—are conventionally construed in many preliterate societies as be- vregingto te unkown penumbra, scruabl pe hs, in Polynes the world of light (fe ao)—of ordinary, quotidian, workday reality—Is con- ‘rasted with the world of darkness (te po) which both precedes it historically and lies about it (Levy 1973:249). For the Kuranko of northeast Sierra Leone, sialic aad Introduetion between dayne and darkness suggesive ofa mor fareaching ion between secular authority and “wid” power. The word of the ce cette lo Teac Baia et sey tna weg Gc Bs soya many fh wt ne worlds also conjures up a distinction between the ane id of quotidian existence and the latent world ofthe Dreaming from which ‘comes and into which all life whimat ae imately returns (Myers 1986:48-51; 1s one ofthese distinctions implies that the lomains of darkness Or Dreamingatetherwordy supernatant) ny hey are worlds Ut eter expenence a of which duet Beis had. They are, sot speak, dimensions of the heworl not iy bro into consciousness, ey rental par of epi Object the by conta. forcing its ditincton betwen the f 1 World of sensible expeien | terpeive models cancend the empirical word, POY ln what docs this going beyond realy consis” I thought as disssc life as it sometimes appears to be? id Scknowledging that “reason develops and transforms itself in the Strauss insists nevertheless that tho ught is pregiven “inthe form of Structure ofthe psyche and bran without whch hee oslo xs nor thought” (1966:263-264). How can one account for this ence on locating the foundations of thought outside the lifeworld? GENEALOGIES OF THE CONCEPTS OF LIFEWORLD AND CULTURE ie Bidney observed that “the concept of the lebenswelt is 3 hone n modern anthropology and Phenomenology” Soros nmnie oem a ee ithe concept of lifeworld and the Bly dep teste Coat wes Of feo is presagd in Wilhelm Dilley de awe mreinechaaancey cyte mae raat ag aoe eee ae Sg oo see ce aes mits aw sate” C19T6:178). Th a from and find consummation in yhe id not be for knowledge for its own sake . In his Introduction to the Human the natural sciences used abstract16 MicHAEL JACKSON degree which would be unacceptable in the human sciences{ His program for the human sciences involved placing conscious experience at its core, acknow!- ‘edging the reciprocal relation of self and world (the “life-nexus”), and empha- sizing the significance of purpose, will and agency in human life. ‘There are cleat echoes of Dilthey’s notion of lfe-nexus in Husserl' notion of lifeworld (Gadamer 1975:214-225; Makkreel 1982), and Dilthey antic. pates Husser!s insistence that we avoid reducing lived experiences (Erlebnise) to causal principles of which the subject is not conscious. Gadamer speaks of the concept of lifeworld as “the antithesis ofall objecivism” (1975:218). The ‘concept represents a resistance to metaphysical and etherealizing notions of culture For Husserl, the Lebenswelt was the world of immediate experience, of sociality, common sense, and shared experience that exists for us independent of and prior toany reflection upan it.The life-world isa realm of original sell- ~ evidences,” he writes, experienced as the thing itself” (1970b:127-128), In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger uses phenomenological methods to explore “Being-in-the-world” and “Being, with-others,” and in his account of “Being-in’ Heidegger tries to recapture the primordial sense of cultural life as mode of indwelling “in” is derived from “innan”—"to reside,” “habitare,” to dwell” sich auf halter). “An? signiies “Lam accustomed,” "Lam familiar with,” “Hook alter something" I thas the signification of “olo™ inthe senses of “habito” and “diigo.” The entity to ‘which Being-in in this signification belongs s one which we have characterized as that entity which in each case I myselfam (bin). The expression “bin” is connected ‘with “be“and so “ich in” Tam") meansin ts turn “I reside" or “dwell alongside ‘the world, as that which is familiar to me in such and such away. “Being” Sein), asthe infinitive of ich bin" (that sto say, when it isunderstood as an existential), ‘ignlies "to reside alongside .. "tobe familiar with...” “Being-in” is thus the {formal existential expression forthe Being of Dascin, which has Being-in-the-world as its essential state. (1962:80, italics in text) Heidegger reminds us that in its original usage, culture (from the Latin colo) did not imply any separation of conceptual or moral qualities from practical hfe and social activity. In this pragmatic view the gods were not looked upon to ‘make people morally better but to control the natural forces upon which the ‘material bases of prosperity and happiness directly depended. Practical ané Teligious life merged (Ogilvie 1969:10-21). Colo meant to inhabit a town or district, o cultivate, tend, or till the land, to keep and breed animals, and generally to look after one’s livelihood “especially in its material aspects'— clothing and adorning the body, caring for and attendingto friends and family. ‘minding the gods, upholding custom through the cultivation of correct moral ‘and intellectual disciplines (Oxford Latin Dictionary 1969). Thissense of culture as afield of dramatic, vital and corporeal reality, mediating past and present, ancl. Introduction aa land person, visible and invisible, subject Devic ose, ns SUR defies the throughout the late Middle idle Ages in Europe, “culture” psfection and intelectual or ars accomplchrene Presi uct century, when German weer began (9 apy the tem to a history. cltre almost invarabiy designated the refined spiritual faculies which members of the European beer set thse: pat fom manual woes, pass and cms Sitio ef ster one ears data ‘cho of sts rmeta- ris an ordered series from lower to hi g5 and actualzatons. As Dewey notes, this dociiee seve cy esa tne AS Dewey nates, his doce served to Purpose symbolic by the body assay ode cede ae B40 RS Cyto Te od cn aa soul proper, amenable t0 reason, emy gate 8 apts Secomes Teer ters and philosophers slone exemple pre reso epenn on for he sake fhe ter The cam of ths asf ees symbolized by nos, pate ininatenal mind. Demey 1956 ee eh and iene Ep, sch acl dances ee es vision whereby the spiritual was “lifted out of its mn oe pe a (false) collective noun” as in the ‘idea of a classical culture” (Marcuse 1968:94-95). Ac- : ee denote a realm of authentic spiritual values, realized aati. ha Anwardness" (ibid::129), radically opposed to the py a pee means. Roy Wagner (1975) calls this an Bee a esi Individual soul was set off from and against aw Ny ‘Was spiritualized in notions of romantic love and Hlralon, No ng picked by concencesbout the nyse eS led higher values depended upon the menial toil lof the Ss" the bourgrowie denied both theses by ath mace oe oe Peters rested. Exclusion of the body from eee ication, of the masses from political life ihc Engh uhropologst Edvard Tyr published Ns poe Gul berowing ie erm care onthe Garments sales Gustav Klemm, nan sparen new ey includes knowledge, belief, art, law, wee an apabllies and habs acquired by man ss atacaor oho ct and Kluckholn 1963581) although culture wg hedge8 MICHAEL JACKSON distinctive atbute ofall humankind, varying only in degree, the pejorative and historical connotations of the word culture remained in place, and Tylor, like Klemm and Herder before himn, applied himself to the task of tracing out progressive stages of social development in terms of the advance of scientific rationality and technological control over nature. Taken up by American anthropologists as early as the 1880s, the term culture gradually lost its nineteenth-century glosses, and between 1920 and 1950 a new demarcation function was assigned to it: culture defined the ‘emergent properties of mind and language which separated humans from animals/This view, already implied in Krocber's seminal 1917 paper “The SSuperorganic,” was reiterated in Kroeber and Kluckholn's 1952 review of the concept, where they define culture as “a set of attributes and products of human societies, nd therewith of mankind, which are extrasomatic and transmissible by mechanisms other than biological heredity, and areas essentially lacking in sub-human species as they are characteristic of the human species as itis ‘aggregated in its societies” (Kroeber and Kluckholn 1983:284), ‘Whether we consider the idealist traditions of the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries which “etherealized” the body or anthropological definitions of culture which play up conceptual and linguistic dimensions of human existence to the exclusion of somatic, sensory, and biological dimensions, one finds that science since the Enlightenment has been pervaded by a popular bourgeois conception of culture as something “superorganic” and sui generis— a selF-contained world of unique qualities and manners divorced from the ‘world of materiality. and biology. As Norman ©. Brown puts it, “Culture originates in the denial of life and the body” (1959-297). The term works to demarcate, separate, exclude, and deny. Although at different epochs the excluded “natural” category is variously focused on peasants, savages, women, children, animals, and material objects, a persistent theme isthe occlusion of the somatic, a scotomacizing of the physical aspects of Being, a denial ofthe sgounds of our natural humanity LIFEWORLD, HABITUS, AND LIFE STORY How then might European thought address a non-European world? And how can phenomenology outstrip its European origins and contribute to cross- cultural understanding? ‘No doubt Adorno is right in criticizing the intuitional, essentializing tenor ‘of much of the work of Husserl and Heidegger (Adorno 1982). There cannot be such a thing as pure intuition, or a transcendental, monadic ego, because all acts of so-called intuition are informed by social interests, cultural bias, and the claims of our panicular lifeworld upon us. A universalizing, eternalizing theory ‘of Being, grounded in the being of European bourgeois intellectuals, has litle value for anthropology. Feyerabend puts the matter bluntly when he takes _ Introduction 19 rh nctonares of human ‘writes, to imagine that any one individual all societies to be able to speak of lusser] know of the “true being” of th to task for proposing that philosophers are “i Muisa ‘phenomenal concei."he wrtes einage have sufficient knowledge of ing of humanity.” What does Hi rabend 1987.27 foward the end of his life Husserl read Le assume a universal ontology or enter ‘of people in other societies (Metleau: fot to have been an issue for man touching briefly on anthropol. ropology, concealed and less complicated” fo the true 1e Nuer? Bru and came tosee that one Imatter-of-factly into the experi. Ponty 1973:101-104), but this y Phenomenologisis who, like sggested that “primitive” Dasein i ofthe Dasein ative in “highly Meoped and difereinedcunee: oe What ethnography ae aa oak brings us from abstract quest existential questions con fons conceming objective Kerning how people actually nly influenced by Flusserl Fal the en ved, experienced, and ower, also area that maser by chen oa eo us howre se toma th ely hich—out action fils Especially orthecrenaa en of a reality that isi20 MICHAEL JACKSON holds good that we engage in itby acting and changeit by ou actions, Everyday Iie at province of elt in which we encounter diecly, a the condition of sar life- natural and socal givens as pregiven realities with which we must ry te cope. (Schutz 1989:1) Schutz presages Bourdieu in seeing the Mfeworld asa “province of human practice (1989:1), but Bourdieu dsparages Shuts focuscom lsedexpenenees Fehrs) and encounters (Erfabrungen)as.a kind of “Tabby humanism (Bourdiea 1990a'4)- While acknowledging his intellectual debs to Heideasey Hwerl, and Schut2, Bourdieu repudiates phenomenology because it fails est or the historical and cultural conditions under which forms of se accor ousness and socially emerge (1990b:25-26). In other words, he epudi stes the phenomenological epoche. Yet Bourdieu also repudiates objecivism gn the grounds that educes agency to automatism and practices io theore san Br 1900b.9¥ He rejects a spectator theory of knowledge in which the Sees stands apar from the action the better to grasp its objective signf- Seat (197.96), ut he also wants to avid the observer becoming too closely (Merleau- takes place, consciousness finds expression, determinations take effect, and habits are formed or broken. Any theory of culture, habitus or lifeworld must include some account of those moments in socal life when the customary. given, habitual, nd normals disrupted, flouted, suspended, and negated. At Such moments, crisis transforms the world from an apparently fixed and finished set of rules into a repertoire of possibilities. To borrow Marx’s vivid ‘mage, the frozen circumstances are forced to dance by us singing to them their own melody (Jackson 1989-20), Behind Bourdieu's and Foucault's refusal to admit the knowing subject to discourse isa refusal to give issues of existential power the same value as fst ‘of political power. Questions of coping with lif or finding meaning in the face of suffering are rated less imperative than questions of socal domination and Bemis ancl post-modem conceptions ofthe person define Bis ole subject, bu wo specs oftrperence whe a land co-present in evry period of history and every hone society.” Tobe bor is both to be bom ofthe world and to’ World is already constiwed, but also never enn, we are acted upon, inthe Second we are ilies. But this analysis 3 ono he wer. The ply conte ih ae Stl shes re ean ae recht Tam nee this imperative dat underes Lila Abu aphy ofthe lleworld through telling the aor ‘Sees this as a kin, ues ighod's approach to an : s of particular individu of “writing against culture” De Sten ndividals and sepals of thi ies, 10 perceive similarities in all our lives. Of aoa distinction. Yet, at times Foucault seemed to recognize the need to unveil the Bad, Parc isnot to sy that oc any ofthe ane a eal subject and author who had been so cunningly hidden in the oblique and Ber i looking atthe everyday we might we oe sae alegol world of is books. In 1962, rely admiting an intrest nthe sl Such a thos: between every earner amet he confessed that he had in his ely work “nied maybe too much so ere oof scr into, orc shane EP techniques of domination’—surveillance, the clinical gaze, the confessional_— and now felt the need to explore what he called “techniques of the sell” (Foucault and Sennett 1962). It was the existential force rather than the s8ciopolitical power of these techniques that intrigued Foucault. In shifting his Tocus from power tthe subject in hs later work, Foucault wanted to explore the way in which’techniques of the self such as meditation, sex, drug use, and aestheticism permitted individuals to experiment with and transform thet selves(Miller 1993:322) Aer structuralism and post-structuralism the subject will never again be ; foregrounded in the heroic manner of romanticism and modernism, but i's alleged that all forms of e equally te hat never aan wile abet be bese nee a Bythcorcs af ree os oF ei erased "lke a face drawn in sand at the edge ofthe sea” (Foucault 1970:387) Burospecion and ieeirng _Bry MICHAEL JACKSON social determinants of experience (Bourdieu 1990b:26; Lévi-Strauss 1973:58; 1981640), Structuralist and post-structuralist thought has tended to sustain, these misunderstandings. Let us take, as a starting point, Lévi-Strauss's scath- ing remarks in Tristes Tropiques. Phenomenology I found objectionable in that it postulated a kind of continuity between experience and reality. Lagreed that the latter encompasses and explains the former, but 1 ad learned from my three sources of inspiration (Geology, Marxism, and Freudian Psychoanalysis} thatthe transition between one order and ‘the other is discontinuous; that to reach reality one has fist to reject experience, and then subsequently to reintegrate it nto an objective synthesis devoid of any semtimentalty. As for the intellectual movement which was to reach a peak in ‘existentialism, it seemed to me tobe anything but a legitimate form of reflection, because of ts over-indulgentatitude tothe illusions of subjectivity. The raising ‘of personal preoccupations to the dignity of philosophical problems is far too likely to lead to a sort of shop-girl metaphysics, which may be pardonable as a dlidactic method but is extremely dangerous if allows people to play fast-and- loose with the mission incumbent on philosophy until scence becomes strong ‘enough to replace it: that i, to understand being in relationship to itself and not {in relationship to myself Instead of doing away with metaphysics, phenomenol- logy and existentialism introduced two methods of providing it with alibis, (1973:58) Lévi-Strauss is speaking here of his student years, but he reiterates this scornful view of existentialism in the closing pages of L’Homme Nu—the last volume of Mythologiques (1971)—deseribing it as a ‘self-admiring activity which allows contemporary man, rather gullibly, to commune with himself in ecstatic contemplation of his own being,” a philosophy which cuts itself off from scientific knowledge “which it despises’ (1981:640), The notions of subjectivity and experience which Lévi-Strauss singles out for derision are manifestly those that belong to nineteenth-century introspective psychology and German romanticism, though, as Arjun Appadurai has recently observed, there isa longstanding tendency in Wester discourse to assume a "normative break” between “inner states” and “outer forms” and so interiorize and cessentialize affect (1990:92-93). In these traditions, experience is a matter of “deep interiority,” of inward sensibilities based on soulfulness, love, passion, genius, inspiration, suffering, and authenticity. As Dewey observed, this concept of experience as something privileged, personal, and sealed off from the world—'as the equivalent of subjective private consciousness set over against nature, which consists wholly of physical objects, has wrought havoc in philosophy" (1958:11). But just as limiting is the conception of experience associated with traditional empiricism, which isolates, selects, and decontext ualizes immediate, sensible experience, treating it as raw material or crude ore from which pure metal—essence, truth, order, totality, reality—may be ex- tracted (ibid :133). In this view, the subject, far from bringing knowledge into fadical empiricism avoids both ingthe notion of experience toi Ye a Introduction 25 ispiration, is relegated to the passive and ions and discerning rules already written h insight, intuition, or in ested role of receiving impress Being of the world ideas and empiri extremes. By ex include ave and passive made ons. he reariousasyellastheceai, the oye Elo oes fom tying eaabsh ioundaons er meeeaee jon of the circumstances under which different m les of exy course Of life. Contrary to the Fae bythe aparemeae wh which Lene which LewStmss duced lol undrying indigenous taxonomies and arenes a of any totalizing system, but b tem, but by the exigencies lospitalty. People who settled together in the ngied to sink thei dlferences and place the past we abeyance, Contemporary interests. These found objective ex totems, references to a unifying Godhead, intermar.26 MICHAEL JACKSON into itself” or “promote an idea something like that of a humanity without fromtiers the rudiments of an international society" (Lévi-Strauss 1966:166,167). Rather, immediate imperatives of mutual support and amity informed the ongoing restructuring of totemic identifications, Kuranko totemism was a repertoire of instrumental possibilities whose operation could ‘only be understood by reference to the Kuranko lifeworld at its most local level (Jackson 1974; 19825) Its important to stress that phenomenology and radical empiricism are not merely philosophies ofthe subject. Although, as James points out, “the fons et orig ofall reality... is... subjective is ourselves (1950 vol. 2:296-297), he insists that experience encompasses the empirically singular “me” as well as all ‘my "social selves” which emerge in various contexts of interaction, recognition, and relationship (1950 vol. 1:292-296). Subjectivity entailsa reaching beyond the self Insofar as experience includes substantive and transitive, disjunctive «and conjunctive modalities, it coversa sense of ourselves as singular individuals as well as belonging to a collectivity. William James compared the way consciousness continually slips from one modality to another with the cease- less movement ofa bird between flights and perchings. The flights stand for the transitive parts of experience; the perchings suggest the substantive parts (1950 vol. 1:243), Lévi-Strauss structuralism stands as a critique of the atomistic tendencies of structural-functionalism and the subjectivist ontology of Sartre's carly work, But itis important to remember that meaning lis in relationships as they ae lived and not simply in the structural and systematic properties that analysis may reveal them to have. For social phenomenology, praxis is seldom a matter of individuals acting alone. tis a mode of shared endeavor aswell as conflict, of mutual adjustment a8 well as violence, Subjectivity is in effect a matter of intersubjectivity, and experience is inte-experience (Merleau-Ponty 1973:56). A person becomes a stibject for herself by fist becoming an object lor others—by incorporating the View that others have of her. The self arises in. social experience (Mead 1934), which is why one's sense of sells unstable and varies from context to context ‘The task for anthropology is to recover the sense in which experience is situated. sithin-relationships.and.beoween. persons if the lifeworld is to be explored asa field of intersubjectivity and not reduced to objective structures ‘or subjective intentions. Recent studies of the anthropology of the emotions have made this point with great force, showing that affects neither an intrinsic Property of human nature nor ofthe individual subject, but culturally embed ded in forms of interpersonal and intersubjective relationship (Lutz and Abu- Tughod 1990) 5 In this view, reality is not to be sought beneath the empirieal—in uncon: scious forms, instinctual drives, or antecedent cause—but in the constructive and deconstructive dialectic of the lived interpersonal world. From the outset iain, OT Introduction a7 lives we are in intersubjectivity. ASR. D. Lai : s ing notes, “The task of social ology isto relate my experience of the other’ behaviows tev rs experience of my behaviour f lity and intersubjective understanding are in Hie nine months of age, well before the aqui tute what Daniel Stern calls the “existential bedrock of of interpersonal (1905125) and aher28 MICHAEL JACKSON James called the “double-barrelled” character of experience—the way the abjects of experience tend to fuse with the ways those objects are experienced, ie. the lived processes of experiencing. Only such a concept of experience, Dewey notes, does justice to the “inclusive integrity of experience” by admit- ting no division “between act and materia, subject and object” but, rather, containing them both in “an unanalyzed totality" (1958:9,8).° Let us briefly consider this proposition that the field of intersubjectivity includes relations between-people-as. well as.relations between people and ings. Marx’s account of human labor in The German Ideology shows how these hhorizons come together in the metaphor of begetting or reproduction. The metaphor discloses the phenomenal unity of laboring to give birth and laboring toensure the continuity of one's socal group (Marx and Engels 1976:43). Marx argues that in expending time.and energy on making an abject, the object becomes ‘a prolongation” of the workers body (1964:89). The body is, in ~ elect, repfoduced through the making ofthe objec, im the same way that itis reproduced through begetting a child (ibid.:91),’ Just as individuals speak of ‘dentfying with, giving themselves to, or losing themselves in others, so in building houses, making tools, tilling the soil, or writing a book, people will ‘speak of putting their heart and soul into the work, investing their time and ‘energy in i, giving it thei all. Ici thus understandable that people should anthropomorphize and talk to the things they work on, blaming their tools ‘when things go wrong, feeling that apart of them has been violated ifthe object oftheir labor is stolen, and, as Mauss observed in his famous essay, feling that something of their own vitality is passed on to others in the form of a material gilt (Mauss 1954:8-10). In many cultures this intersubjective relationship between people and the earth, people and masks, the living and the dead, is accepted as a natural attitude. Thus, writing of Turkish traditional art, Henry Glassie notes: “In things they donotsce things, but people” (Glassie 1993;103). “The aris’ gift sifluses an object with spirit... Artis the object that contains love" (Glassie 1994-5, 6). In the West such attitudes are often writen off as supernatural belief, as “fetishism” or mere superstition, even though these experiences are universal and commonplace. ‘An emphasis on the transitive and intersubjective does not mean denying the substantive and subjective; rather it implies that these terms denote not onirasied entities, but moments ofa dialectic. Such a dialectical view of experience evokes the metaphor of journeying, But it is not only way-stations and termini that figure in our itinerary, but critical deviations, digressions. and delays. I is inthis sense that we begin to recover something ofthe original meaning of experience as empeiria whose root peris the same as the Germanic fahr to travel’). Experience, like experimen- tation and empirical work, suggests a passage into the wntld_a going fort, & venture, atrial, a sel-proving peregrination—a “thinking with one's feet,” as Introduction 29 pts it (Marias 197:40). This was the task Victor Turner set later work—moving beyond a structural-functional concem with d forms and manifest functions of ritual activity to “idiosyncratic g5" “individual symbolic objects and actions," and inward transfor- ‘experience that “cannot be explained as epiphenomena of social 5° (1978:572). For Turner, an anthropology of experience from the domain of anthropological theot Blifeword (Tumer 1985,1986) 8) ‘be Stamatic dy insisted on locating knowledge, experience, and the person in ‘This implies that consciousness cannot be tnderstood in isola- cognition or disinterested observation. Consciousness is engaged eworld. It is “from the very beginning a social product” (Marx and ). In this sense, consciousness is active and outgoing: it points ell Belie is always about something. Feelings and thoughts are “or phenomenology, the ego works with or against world on th basis ofthat which seady given, Roraback hen alls sad and done, the world so constituted through milvidual_ praxis i objectively identical to the world which the significant fact for phenomenology stat the passage from Bustin t another is always mediated by subjective lle—by Sr pal aati, and projective and state imagination ciple of intentionality is central to a 5 any phenomenological analysis. fa tobe the discovery of Huse (ling om the work of Sots known that Hussetspoion of intentionality was strongly by William James for whom the purposes or intentions of thinking, feeling must be taken into account if one is to undersiand any ‘r sensation (Wilshire 1968; Edie 1987; wild 1966). lew, society or culture cannot be conceptualized in terms of tions that directly determine the possibilty of thought or actions it. Society is equally a domain of instrumentality in which human ee —30 MICHAEL JACKSON beings make their lives and confer meanings whose existential import cannot in the final analysis, be reduced to the meanings sedimented in preexisting, cultural forms. As Merleau-Ponty notes, the very activity that brings about the appearance of social structures and cultural forms also has “as ts meaning 10 ‘eject them and to surpass them” (1963:176). Analyticaly, our understanding, ‘of human intentionality demands what Sartre called a progressive-regressive _ methiod—a disclosure ofthe dialectical tension between whatisgiven and what wwe make of the given in the light_of emergent. projecs, imperatives and contingencies, This is to say, what is possible for a person is always precondl- “trond by the world into which he or she is born and raised, bu a person's life ‘does more than conserve and perpetuate these pre-existing circumstances; it interprets them, negotiates and nuances them, re-imagines them, protests against them, and endures them in such complex and subile ways tha, in the ‘end, human freedom appears as “the small movement which makes ofa totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him” (Sartre 1969:45; see also Jackson 19894 Kleinman 1992:173-174) EMBODIMENT In The Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl observed that physical bodies and living bodies are “essentially different.” Unlike physical bodies, such as rocks and buildings, the human body “holds sway in consciousness” (1970:107). The landmark work in developing this insight was Merleau-Ponty’s Phe nomenology of Perception. Like Husserl, Merieau-Ponty repudiated the idea that the ‘phenomena’ of human consciousness, alletivity, and compartment could be equated with the “facts” on which mathematics and physics were based Descartes distinguished between an I or ego which is essentially a thinking entity, an active mind (res cogitans), and a body or res extensa—a supposedly different kind of entity whose defining characteristic was that it had extension im pace. The world was thus divided into an unworldly, transcendent domain ofmind and a worldly domain of body. As Drew Leder puts, —n Cartesianism. the human mind is viewed as an island of awareness afloat in a vast sea of insensate matter" (1990:8). Since the Baroque logic of Descartes led people to see mind and matter as essentially differen, it became of great scientific and philosophical interest to understand how mind could act upon matte, Some thinkers resolved this dilemma by saying that mind does not act upon matte. If appear to move my hand itis not a physical action caused by a mental decision but a coincidence of two separate actions, each caused by the will o God. God alone is the primary cause of all movement and my will san illusion. ‘The early seventeenth century philosopher Geulinx used an analogy of two clocks, both keeping perfect time. The clock of mind points to the bour, the clock of mater strikes, and tothe inattentive observer there seems to bea causal Introduction ay n the two. But this is an illusion. It is God who 4s God who set the two clocks ing and synchronized them (Coe 196429). Samuel Beckett, eae fexireme Cartesian scenarios, made many of his principal characters a CGesianism, ike Murphy who, powers to at, les abed ding himself to desire and need nothing, since nothing can be actually dor needed unless God decides it. (Unhappily, in Murphy's universe Beso xs.) Or eh who contemplates his hands and feet with a bin iment as though they did not strictly belong to him, Her of how Beckeus character, Watt, walks. eS say of advancing du es, for example hi . le wast tr his busta ar as Be towards the north, anda the same time to fing his ight leg et leva tes, andtien tun sb aa pose arse hand the sae neo igh gas tara pie owen soon, overand over again, many ties uni head he id sit down. (1958:32) ana account ofthe hapless Watt there is no natural or habitual dd. etre ha Re care) analysed, which, by an imperfect coincidence, add up to the fo of walang in Wat's mind Gsuateinan tik a a y of Wat and ofthe philosophical positions into whic Philosophy talked icelf are not simply aac of owe che end ‘hese descriptions of minds alienated from their bodies reflect. a not mode of human experience. Indeed, Drew Leder argues, i fuch phenomena as absentmindedness, bodily disappearance, and ‘experiences are fairly common that we lend support to Cartesian. Sphical error begins when we Teify such experiences, ot make ional to our understanding of what the world is realy like. Put Phenomenology does not claim that human beings never experi- cts dembodied, or never experience thei es nen or Biysical encumbrances (see Gadow 1982): rather, argues aginst ua experine toh Ponty, the Cartesian division between subject and object le view that the human mind is the soe focus of subjectvy, the being. physical object that the mind has to move, manipulate. or rian For Merry, hangin ner bal Ms Sutcome of conceiving or willing something in the mi case eat Ponty explains, “is not, a it were a handmaid of conscious the body to that point in space of which we have formed a Sean Gao ni on i amatert dik ar raat through the intermediary ofthe body” (bid, 137).ey tHe wopmssuc pm a9 [penne ase 2 Bun =b- mumue> 21 pu poottans aan onde 24 nssuup 40 Buugon yo oto Dad) ssad0ad Azo) a154fit Ouse puv A S®10U papearsi id © na (2/2/66 ofne,g) SuIpuNIs 2>uapyoose yas outs Pe yeaa “ae diysup a 420} “PoUIES UL, £aI00s, IMIEOUE Jo suonesoqeya AtepuOseS a1 wormnpesur payuats pur rayrufis u2ossioq tone|2221p SON '25-Apoq wo $340, ‘Sumpundsars09 2x9 a y>qisa zepAasAuL 10 248 ween paueasp aq Kew wostadsuEy 8 70 sounuo} ax) ‘papal ‘FuMKpoquis jo Taneur eng “ForuNeN yo JaneW 1 fjaiaut ou ‘aioyoroyn ‘s| uorUasardey “(Eg6T UOPUAy) APoq 2x7 Jo sue 4q 50 yam se sui upy Aq pareuisop are suoneyar uy “exensny [euruoqy jo sued Ate “yp yo ajdtexa Suyfaduuoa e sapiaoud diysury eursuoqy @Bpaysouy jeonsead) nisousonypad un Jo apow STL “CLFI-OFL-7IGT) ..vOURIRY Jo aan ayeu oF Survey amon 4 sqre> Aawog-meapoy Supa Suxgmealgo, 10 SUOE|AUIO} peqI2A Iq rey am yy pur “uoned nue uy ‘aw a4 yonyys eau >ypods Sufi up se nq “paruasasda a 109 st algo me spresor pas ‘esi one ayn ust mq wu puran aeTOs 5 dqpog eyo Buroeaue 2if,. pura 24 UH Poo} 11y suruaarBardqn>2/q0 20 8ussa1dk3 0 Kem wus aap wo suits 10 sjoquiés se paquasut 21e sBurueats 2524p. NOY HOYS, SIDS, uh 4 puna 2yp ur Buyueau jo 2amnos 2x9 pareoy Suey ppyAes|spoui 1U2080], reno sagas Spoq 2 40g Jo jo wadse pespiourad v yam se snrp st eunpoquig prelusa 10 Asruey yo: ppou fqn Ed4 Mrcmann JACKSON PRAXIS AND PRACTICE If, as phenomenologiss argue, knowledge of the mind is neither ontologically prior nor superior to knowledge of the body, then we have to accept that _activily may be meaningful even when itis not couched in words, explicated in concepts, or subject to reflection. In other Words, our gestures, acts and modes “BT comportment do not invariably depend on a priori cognitive understanding Practical skills, know-how, a sense of what to do, are irreducible, The meaning of practical knowledge lies in what is accomplished through it, not in what conceptual order may be said to underlie or precede it* ‘In most human societies, knowledge is a matter of practical competence and sensory grasp rather than declaration (Devisch 1993:50; Desjarlais 1992:26-27). Among the Cashinahua of eastern Peru, for example, the knowl- edge a person acquires through skillful work is sad tobe “in the hands,” while emotional saoir-fir is “in the liver” and social knowledge is “in the ears” (an index of how sociality demands effective oral communication). The Cashinalua reject the idea that the brain is some sort of central controlling agency, arated from the body. “They insisted,” writes Kenneth Kensinger, “that different kinds of knowledge are gained through and reside in different pars of the body. The whole body thinks and knows” (1991:44). Moreover, the validation of knowledge is how a person actually behaves, “It is in action, not \.in contemplation, that knowledge is both gained and given expression” (ibid. 45). This may be taken as a critique of our intellectual tendency to observe ‘practical and social activities which are highly effective and complex, only to reduce them to hidden principles, cognitive patternings and unspoken as- ‘sumptions which we ourselves bring tothe field. We thereby subtly prioritize theoretical knowledge, giving the impression that the meanings we make of an activity are somehow determinative of i, albeit in an underground way which the participants are ignorant of. The theoretician’s emphasis on saying over doing, on intellectual grasp over practical accomplishment, can thus imply an “invidious distinction between native intuition and anthropological reason, ‘Compelling examples of this can be drawn readily from cross-cultural studies of cognition where non-literate peoples are asked to respond to experimental protocols aimed at testing theit abilities for abstract theoretical reasoning, Consider, for example, this excerpt ftom an interview between # Russian psychologist and an illiterate peasant called Rushtar, reported in A. R Luria's essays on cognitive development (1976:109-110), It begins with the psychologist presenting the subject with a syllogism: “In the Far North, where there is snow, all bears are white, Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North and there is always snow there. What color are the bears there?” -iP there was someone who had a great deal of experience and ad een everywhere, he would do well to answer the question.” i intact sel tit : n could ret he would know what color the bears were.” i. Besa that thre were white beater, bute id’ ny wt ed oes that hs subjects refused to dss any opis that went Beyond onal experience, insisting that one could speak only of arte Russa psycologes the coete stoned eee eet sponses is seen a “failing 1 accepted the premises presented te ofa lack of abstract cognitive skills, such as conceptual generalization fate and taxonomic reasoning, rather than as a positive preference Ing more compatible with immediate social concems. One cannot heh from these transcribed interviews the impression that the psycholo- ded the peasants as ignorant, fnot stupid. Worse, tei lack of logic and abstract reasoning capacity is alleged to indicate a kind of arrested fod ontop developmen. But not the case that, given the c these exercises in deduction and inference, the who seems alienated and obsess i PPClogs el Oakeshott helps us put theoretical knowledge in its plac hat we ike othinkofas theoreti knowledge tach ape on of what's std and done than an explanation of t. What an enim 0 wring and syabesis oases of theoretical ons about social organization, symbolism, or belie, should bof asruls which gover thes varluslds of cal activity, Inctoe at we make of social word when we rect upon fom aa ino. worlds workings. Speaking doesnot spring from a knowledge Any more than good research is an outcome of methodological 800d workmanship is guranteed by reading how to-doit books So easily into the habit of elucidating general principles from obser. in the course of research, then hypostazing these principles as gletedly detemine human acy fom within cure alo Junconscious mind. Oakeshott compares this misconce en sror ofthikingoeepebekasaki of Indepneny rom which cookery can spring” Infact f ofactivity, abstracts of somebody's practical knowledge of how se they “nist in advance ofthe activity, they cant propery be Ti” or “provide the impetus ofthe activity.” A rule, ke x recipe hot, “isthe stepchild, not the parent ofthe activity" (1962.90.91), offers a basis for a entique of Wester metaphysics by36 MICHAEL JACKSON showing that theoretical knowledge hasits origins in practical, worldly activit and by reminding us that in mest human communities the measure of the worth of any knowledge sits social value. Knowledge isa vita activa, a form of savoir-faire, of knowing how to generate the wherewithal for life, and to ‘comport oneself socially with gumption, propriety, and common sense. What isexpected of the ethnographer is that he or she act ina socially adroit manner, evincing an understanding of how to greet people, sit with them, give and receive, work alongside, and express compassion in times of adversity. These social expectations tend to be couched in terms ofthe practical obligations of fictive kinship and hospitality, and all the abstract, theorized work of anthro- pology counts for litle i these socal imperatives are not met. Dialectic must, 50 to speak, be realized as dialogue (Strasmer 1963:257). In this spirit, many contemporary ethnographers emphasize that ethnographic research is, in Karen McCarthy Brown's words, ‘a form of human relationship... social an” (1991-12), But because our understanding comes from “talking to people” (Shostak 1981:7) we find ourselves caught between the “force field” of these” vernacular dialogues and the “disciplinary field” of anthropology (Scheper-. Hughes 1992.24-25), But the tension is also between cultural fields. Twenty years ago, Paul Riesman wrote that his “introspective ethnography” of the Fulani was a result of “the encounter of a man belonging to Western civiliza- tion, and haunted by questions which life there raises for him, witha radically different civilization which he investigates with those questions constantly in rind” (1977:1-2). How to reconcile these fields isa question which many of the essays in this anthology address, SUBALTERNITY Our tasks clear to evalidate the everyday feof ordinary people, to tell their | stories in their own words, to recover their names. For anthrapology, there can ‘he no doubt as to the identity of this ordinary person, this common man Hes the murmur of societies. Aways he precedes texts, He doesn't even wat for them. He pays no attention to them. But in written representations he gets along. Lite by ltl he occupies the center of our scientific scenarios, The cameras have deserted the actors who dominated proper names and social emblems in order to fix themselves on the crowd of the public. The sociologization and nthropologization of research privilege the anonymous and the everyday where close-ups isolate metonymic detale—parts taken for the whole. Slowly the representatives who previously symbolized families, groups, and orders are effaced from the scene where they reigned during the time ofthe name. Number ‘has arrived, the time of democracy, ofthe big city, of buteaicrcies of eybernet ies leis supple and continuous crowd, woven tightly ike a fabric without tear ‘or seam, # multitude of quantified heroes who lose their names and faces while becoming, the mobile language of calculations and rationales which belong to no one, Ciphered currents inthe street. (de Certeau 1980°3) a Introduction 37 hilt our focus from the privileged world of detached intellectual activity to foften underprivileged domains ofthe if ins ofthe lfeworld isto reconstitute our movledae as something urgently of and forthe world atherthansometion world Nowhere are the political implications of sucky shu eflly spelled out than in the ongoing work othe oe arated! By Ranajit Guiha in the late 1970s, The ology is only now being realized Our concern here isto ex subalemstuies projec, porto this we a 41-42). ena Das observes thatthe published work of the der to anthropologists that much of their “ om that “render othe ue father (1 sublem ates poup srcaleenl gee cscs Hwa tcmas cn '89:310). But such a preoccupation with order faction through: themselves as the suppression and? consciousness is) bodily, soctal, and practical life which wel a par with {experiences we have hitheno ice and for all the invidious id ofthe European intellectual to recover and place on ional. If we are to dissolve on Cal divisions that mark off the wor fein ff the worl38 MicHArt Jackson Consider, for example, the question of history. Phenomenology. is.less concerned with establishing what actually happened.in.the.past-than. in exploring the past as a mode of present experience, Michael Oakeshot sets the A fixed and finished past a past divorced from and uninfluenced by the present, {s a past divorced from evidence (for evidence is always present) and is conse- {quently nothing and unknowable. Ifthe historical past be knowable, st must ‘Belong tothe present world of experience; ifit be unknowable, history is worse ‘than futile, ivis impossible, (1935:107) “This view urges us not to oppose oral tradition and writen history, but rather disclose the different social realities they authorize. For a long time, a positivist view of history, emphasizing exact chronology, objective events, and Tinear chains of cause and effect, served to bolster the authority of Eurocentric @titeria of truth. We are now seeing a shift of emphasis toward indigenous truths, in which oral history is seen as sustaining the life of the living rather than ~"Keepitig a record of the past. In het work on Maori oral narratives, Judith Binney speaks of the importance ofthis shift i making colonizers aware of ‘what is imperative for the colonized—a necessary step ifthe dominant culture isto change “ts attitudes about its possession of truth” (1987:17). ‘Maori oral narrative histories convey what is seen to be the essence of human ‘experience to the people who are living. As the Samoan historian Malama Maleisea has commented, if there were a truth, there would be no histories, Or equally, asthe Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe pt it in his evocative novel about the colonization of his country, Things Fall Apart, "There is no story that is not tue. .. . The World has no end, and what is good among one people is an abotnination with others.” (Binney 1987.28) NARRATIVE {As Jurgen Habermas has shown, the everyday lifeworld is aworld of discourse, langage games, and communicative activity (1987:135-140). In Habermas ‘cénception of the lifeworld, narrative plays a singularly important role, for narrative makes it possible for people to create coherent scenarios which Jrtculate shared meanings (Habermas 1987:136).As Lyotard puts it, a collec~ “Gy “finds the raw material for its social bond not only in the meaning ofthe arratves it recounts, but also ithe act of reciting thet” (1984:22), Sociaity i, therelore, both mediated by siytlling and objectfed in stories told and passed on If we are not to Tapse into solitude or solipsism, we need seenarios nd syimbols—irue or otherwise—with which we can identify, stories which Speak tothe things we have in common (Jackson 1982s). John Berger's stories {af French Alpine peasant life illuminate this. Writing of gossip as a form of Introduetion 39 ” Berger observes that it allows the whole village to of il, din fom is physical and geographic hes of altho an perl laronshipcneing ns and economic relationships—usually oppressive—wt link fe othe est of ie wo Bt one ould sy something rae te ne tow. What dsinglshes the ie of lag that ile if communal poral, nthe eveybody is ponryed sd eee ap... Every villages pot of isellsconscted however nono but out of words, spoken and remembered: out of opinions stories, reports legends, comments and hearsay. And itis a continuous portray ‘it never stops. (1979:9) ie theoretical explanation, narrative red arTaive. tedescriptionjs.a.crucial_ and othe ongoing activity ofthe fewarid, whichis why narative a.cenval olin phenomenological description. Moreover, nanaive e ¢ link between discourse and practice, since the very structure ures of everyday life. As Alisdair Macintyre : before they. are told’ (1984:212). Consider stories ts not just that journeys provide the content ofthe tal; the ‘ofthe story replicates the structure of journeying, Ina mundane te sense, stories grow out of patterns of our everyday movements evar going forth 1 work o forage, returning at evening oa home to share food and drink and tell each other about our day's But there is also the more epic journey which encompasses a the movement Irom birth to death which passes through the af some: sl asain ening nd taising children, ve, We might say is.a form of Being as much as a way of ‘tories, myths, and histories all reflect the temporality ee 80; 165). tisaview echoed in Alasdair MacIntyr's notion that) any person sie “resides in the unity ofa narative which inks birth as narrative beginning to middle to end” (1981:205). As Hanna erves: “That every individual life between birth and death can By be told as a story with beginning and end isthe prepoliteal and ondition of history, che great story without beginning and end’ tive then, is one mode of description or discourse which may satisfy upon expertence-without a tadicl spit from i 2 el de ere pts ita theory of taaion i ? a ‘of practices, as its condition as well as its Produc- > $78) Thus, pedestan movements toand fo along vlge paths, or id of city trets, already impose a precognitive disposition which, Pression in stories where moral or conceptual transformations take40 MICHAEL JACKSON place from one mode of being to another. As de Certeau suggests, the mundane ‘metaphors of walking, traveling, digressing, and to and froing,swhich pervade narrative, disclose the intimate connection between non-discursive and discur- sive fields of activity (bid :100-101). Theoretical knowledge pretends that this connection can be disrupted, that discourse can escape the preconceptual conditions of being-in-the-world. But theoretical discourse_is profoundly shaped and haunted by mythical and narrative forms—something which is broiight home in Misia Landau’s study of narratives of human evolution, where she shows how paleoanthropological research repors ae {requently couched in terms of classic folktale scenarios (1991). What is implied here is thatthe very comprehensibility of theory depends on pretheoretical narrative-forms that_are common. knowledge. In other words, the argument that scientific Theory and traditional storytelling gain legitimacy or assert authority im radi- cal iferen ways questionable /As Lyotard obser the rey ay discourse in the postmodern age is not decided by the facts speaking for themselves or by the data per se, Butby the way factsand data ae organized into anarrative/As readers we decide whether or not to accept an account rendered, not merely on the bass of evidence and arguments, but onthe strength of how _ agreeable the story is. t0.us. This bestowal of consensus implies, therefore, « social evaluation of the work, and reflects class interests, shared. aesthetic values, and a politcal sense of community, rather than some neutral, dispas- sionate, objective method of verification. A such, every piece of scientific knowledge, every innovation in medical technology, every paradigm in anthro- ppology wins acceptance and gains currency in part because itis informed by a ‘metanarrative—a hidden story which s, in effect he stony. which the group ‘who bestows this acceptance wants to hear about itsel. ‘A focus on the lifeworld is thus connected with a revived interest in narrative description in anthropology. This is not necessarily a reflection ofthe fashionable view that ethnography isa form of writing (Marcus and Cushman 1982), but the expression of a concer for writing about lived experience in sera aibs ae bgt Thess «political edge to this. As Lila Abu-Lughod. observes, storytelling works against the “culture concept” by subverting as- sumptions of homogeneity, coherence and timeless, and by revealing the struggle, negotiation, and strategizing that lie at the heart of social life (1993:13). John Berger makes a similar point. Insolar as stories preempt and forestall abstraction, they bear witness 1o realities which the well-heeled often prefer to ignore In poor societies abstraction and tyranny go together; in rich societies tt 18 indifference which usually goes with abstraction. Abstraction's capacity to ignore ‘what i real (and the heart can abstract as well as the mind: unjustified jealousy, for example, s an abstraction) is undoubtedly where most evil begins. (1985: 266-267) troduction a THE RED WHEELBARROW (Carlos Williams's famous poem may serve to preface our exploration plications of radical empiricism and phenomenology for ethnographic ty should figure so prominently in phenomenology is attested in fof Heidegger and Bachelard. The origins of the poetic image, lobserved, cannot be determined. The resonances of the image carry nd that which can be contained and encompassed by conceptual aré manifested in poems,” he writes, “that do not pass through etFnowedge (1968) row exemplifies William Carlos Williams's poetic dictum: fn things." It bears a family resemblance to Husserl's dictum, themselves" (curick zu den Sachen selbst), and implies the same eal task which Heidegger defined as letting “that which shows, Seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from its” Williams's commitment was to the specific, the local, the vernacu- ed particular. He wanted to make writing faithful to immediate direct, presuppositionless, open-ended. In his longest poem, Williams gives presence to this bodily and sensory immediacy—of the “jumps, swiftnesses, colors, movements of the day"—by ‘mage of walking through a landscape. Elaborate reworking, definition, and rhetorical embellishment are eschewed in favor of sense of being-n-the-world (Tomlinson 1985:vii-xvi) ‘Carlos Williams's poetry and ideas about poetry are deeply in “the Oe eal Ralph Waldo Emerson's dum: "Askbe at or id Thoreau’s famous phrase, “The roots of letters are things.” And ly cer thse holy Sg thc pag a joes the New World impulse to break with the meta ‘the metaphysical and cal traditions of Europe by renewing a concer for practical “what works,” with primary experience rather than rationally “eategorical systems of ideasa wiewant incon : haan = ‘The link between the radical empiricism of William James and Husserl's pject—the notion that the object can be captured, held, and possessed, phenomenology is well established (Edie 1987; Ihde 1986; Gavin 1992)" surprising, therefor, that so much inventiveness characterises eto Both philosophers insisted on the comprehensive description of experience as swing in the phenomenological vein. Nori it strange that women it is actually had prior to intellectual reflection. at the forefront of this phenomenological tum, Observes Adrienne ‘At first sight this may seem naive. But, as Alfred Gell observes in his P’Men in. general think badly: in disjuncture from their personal lives, phenomenological analysis of human time, logical perspicacity, methodologi- jobjectivity where the most irrational passions seethe, losing... their cal rigor, and rational inguiry must be inchided, not expunged, if such an the pursuit of professionalism.” analysisis tobe complete (1992:328). What Husser! and James wanted to stress ‘Gixous also sees definition, categorizing, rationalizing, and enclo- ‘was thaffthere are significant differences between the way the world appears to line traits. She celebrates instead a passive and open attitude ‘our consciousness when we ae fully engaged in activity and the way it appears [life in which language is entered into rather than exploited to.us when we subject it to reflection and retrospective analysis. It is not that Pe, ee reflection, explanation, and analysis are to be extirpated from phenomenologi- de of passivity is our way—really an active way—of getting to know ‘al accounts of human life; rather that these modes of experience are to be Jetting ourselves be known by them. You don't seek to master. To denied epistemological privileges and prevented from occluding or down- = explain, grasp. And then to lock away in a strongbox, To pocket part es ofthe world. But rather to transmit to mal s playing those non-reflective, atheoretical, and practical domains of experience 1991:57) ‘rather to transmit ike things loved by making which are not necessarily encompassed by fixed or definitive ideas, ‘When the World Trade Center in New York City was bombed on February es this naturalistic style exemplified in such recent ethnographies as 26, 1993, reporters were quickly on the scene, interviewing people fleeing the ay Brown's Mama Lola (1991), im Wafer's The Taste of Blood smoke-filled towers. ‘Scheper-Hughes’ Death without Weeping (1992), Lila Abu- fing Women’s Worlds (1993), Brian Mocran's Okubo Diary (1985), We crawied under pipes when we arrived and everything was on fie," sad 's Body and Emotion (1992), René Devisch’s Weaving the ‘Edward Bergen, a 38-year-old firefighter who was one ofthe st wo reach the ISOS). Tiy Gun AT Home iothe World VODey Me oe seene of the bast. “Suddenly guy came walking ow ofthe fame, like one of Petey cf cnil nti ig fatto cere those zombies in the movie “The Night of the Living Dead.” His flesh was hanging, 18:131) and “paratactic style” (Rose 1978:13), They provide abun- fff He was a middle-aged man (Nev York Tines Feb. 27, 1993:10) iv never enough (0 say that ethnography is a form of th various genre com coming and going like interpretive The mano wie vl experienc etpoe ef ne ee nt sine le ee sensory experience with pregiven cultural knowledge (in this instance, wel oo ; ld not a theory of culture. Realist in character, yes, but not ‘known horror movie) was, for me, reminiscent ae oe Sas Seat iccarcin wae are eee ee ee Urgent sense to place on record and testify to human experiences inherited cultural knowledge and personal experience (Jackson 1995). But BN ees shee tpi oar meee both these examples, thei the cultural are.co-present. Indeed it isthe shared symbol that enables everyone to find consensus and tion Liia-story: The phenomenological method aims for verisimilitude, placing primary experience and secondary elaboration on the same footing. Both arc seen as integral to how people manage the exigencies of life. This is brilliant!y aa ‘elucidated in Michael Young's study of lived myth in Kalauna (1983), where he ’ pia somes from the Greek phaenesthai (to flare up, show shows how the horizons of myth and biography are effectively fused, so that an hhas explored this paradox in depth, noting that Niels Bohr’s individual projects himself *as a synecdoche of his ancestors and lineage Clife-iling principle) applies equally to the way that experimental (bi 19), blurring the line between fact and fiction, life story and exemplary mi un an eapertenc so undead wll the sine models an blterateall ce ofthe phenomenon on scl. agp Phenomenology’s skeptical atutude toward systematic understanding a Te Ee ee toe aes ee eee ‘which resist the idea that knowledge may be won by a progressive Merregation aMICHAEL JACKSON ‘4 Paul Feyerabend traces this division back to Parmenides who distinguished Deivcen a way of inquiry “far from the footsteps of humans’ that leads to what is "ipproprate and necessaty,” and a way of inquiry based on “habit, bom of experience Introduction : nd th Pls of the Emotion, eC. A. Lute an aod =. Cambridge University Press. emer 938. The Human Canton. Chicago: Univer of Chicago Pres ee erate ors oe Om procedure, he believed, could ee nes Con Choa etre tt establish truths capable of superseing ll traditions (1987:120). pod ja 1940" In laminations, by 5, Crucial to Schutz’s phenomenology of the lifeworld are his distinctions between soe Sone sceccien Books. several horizons or existential modalities of social experience, based on whether rigins of Pragmatism, San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper and Co. wiSinstans ae dhrely or indieely experienced. Thu, the world ofa person's gl Gaston. 1964. The Pots of Space, tas. Mara Jolas. Boston: Beacon a (ence mh he wn ofa pesos omen aa er cans (orl an sucrsore (Few) Which nt ee a et ces el oe ret ic Ob femove Gchut: 1989. & set esi ees x“ = 1979. Pig Earth. London: Writers and Readers 1, For anthropology, thi means that there is no rel distinction to be made bet Feet Leer: Were nd Renters Pubihing Coop theca we adj othe proces of studying Our understanding inter of another, nor of onesel, but ofthe interplay and interaction between othe ‘and sell. ‘ ape seh ia leet rar or emanating account of Row the Aboripsial people of Belyven (Cox fer Land Lckman, Thomas. 1966, The Sec Consictn Fda athens Tertoy, Ausuala), conceptualize labor and work, Elzabeth Benth Sako of Krone. Harmondowort: Penguin Books” * : 1973, "Phe Peminllnote that all matter including the human body, “the congealed labor of momenologcal Method and the Anthropologial Science of oe Life World” Tn Phenomenology an the Scial Seenes ed, Maurice tiythic action’ which penetrates the earth or human body as speech and as sweat (1993:137-160). 109-140. Evanston: Norhwester Unive Pres ‘8. Consider, for example, small boat-building—where the “conception” ofthe craft teas Usher eeraer este pir Texts: Two Forms of is incorporated in the builder's experence and body memory, requiring no blueprint 5 te New Zealand Journal of History 21(1):16-28. me of I a ae Er 1063, Being inthe World: Selected Papers, trans, Jacob Needleman, ‘Souvenir Press. ; 1971. “Intellectual Field and Creative Project.” In Knowledge and Directions forthe Scale of Education ed ai te ee eT Outline ofa acs Bain fa Tar of Prac, tans R Nice, Cambridge: Cambridge plan or objective measurements. ®. Ikis worth noting thatthe air of scientific neutrality m this research masked poliical assumptions and cultural prejudices that were anything but neutral. Lurias Pecarches were cared out in emote villages of Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in 1931-32 ‘during the Soviet Union's drive to eliminate ileracy, collectivize the eonomy. Suppress slam, and generally create a socials “revolution sn cognitive activity" (Luria 197639. ° TO. Alfred Schutz was also a ‘careful and sympathetic reader of William James” Bn Othe Words Eas iowards a Reflexive Silly, trans. M. Adamson (atanson 198618), and in The Origins of Pragmatism, A.J. Ayer referred to Jamesas se dae rong penomenologis (Ayer 1968224-242, 291-193) Beene ia tan. Nice, Sunfrd: Senora University Pres Se McCarthy 191, Mana Ll: A Vodou Pes ron, Bele 0.1939 Life Again Death: The shane Baca yehowal Meaning of His rin of Neate Dict: Thar W. Ado fan Franfurt site sec, Susce: Hacer ree 1901. Spnt and Sa Eye n Plea Pohl Dalles: Spring REFERENCES “Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1991. “Writing against Culture” In Recapturing Anthropology: Work ing in the Present, ed, Richard G, Fox, 137-162. Sante Fe: School of American Research Pres ns Ai atlas ear win Pres sles, ed Deborah Jenson Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ‘Adomo, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialects, tans. EB. Ashton. 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Associating honor with men and shame with women, of this cultural complex have generally treated women's role as, Fat best passive. Yet Kamla, a young woman who has been to school sserts the honor (through modesty) of girls like herself and struggles this modesty as part of her cultural identity. Moreover, although erms ofthese seemingly timeless values, she rejects some of theit s, using arguments derived paradoxically from both her religious the romantic mass-media soap operas that enthrall her. Honor ‘in Egypt in the 1980s for a young Bedouin woman with some fluenced by the ideas of urban Egyptians and sensitive to the es of increasingly persuasive Islamic groups, take on specific ed, the very possibility of an abstract moral code like “honor Js thrown into question by the relentless specificity of Kamla’s othe U.S, from Egypt and dated July 30, 1989, Kamla wrote to ‘God the All-Mercful and Compassionate, I gives me pleasure 0 tle to my dear sister, Dr Lila, hoping from God on high, the All- ‘treaches you carrying love and greetings to you and your family all inthe best of health and in perfect happiness he mentioned my brother and sisters (none of whom she has met) foconvey her greetings and those of her family to them and tomy vellas to the one American friend of mine they had met ten years to everyone they knew about in my lfe in America, | had my last vist that | would be getting married soon, She asked ‘wrote, she sent a thousand congratulations and hoped, God good man who would understand me. She hoped also that was a noble man, the best in all of America, and that they