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"existential anthropology"
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Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology
This review explores the most significant dimensions and findings of phenomenological approaches in anthropology. We spell out the motives and implications inherent in such approaches, chronicle their historical dimensions and precursors, and address the ways in which they have contributed to analytic perspectives employed in anthropology. This article canvasses phenomenologically oriented research in anthropology on a number of topics, including political relations and violence; language and discourse; neurophenomenology; emotion; embodiment and bodiliness; illness and healing; pain and suffering; aging, dying, and death; sensory perception and experience; subjectivity; intersubjectivity and sociality; empathy; morality; religious experience; art, aesthetics, and creativity; narrative and storytelling; time and temporality; and senses of place. We examine, and propose salient responses to, the main critiques of phenomenological approaches in anthropology, and we also take note of some of the most pressing and generative avenues of research and thought in phenomenologically oriented anthropology.
Journal Article
No Path Home
\"No Path Homeis an extremely interesting, engaging, and well-written book. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn's fluid and clear prose paints a very evocative picture of life for internally displaced persons as well as presenting a clear theoretical account.\"-Laura Hammond, SOAS University of London, author ofThis Place Will Become Home
For more than 60 million displaced people around the world, humanitarian aid has become a chronic condition.No Path Homedescribes its symptoms in detail. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn shows how war creates a deeply damaged world in which the structures that allow people to occupy social roles, constitute economic value, preserve bodily integrity, and engage in meaningful daily practice have been blown apart.After the Georgian war with Russia in 2008, Dunn spent sixteen months immersed in the everyday lives of the 28,000 people placed in thirty-six resettlement camps by official and nongovernmental organizations acting in concert with the Georgian government. She reached the conclusion that the humanitarian condition poses a survival problem that is not only biological but also existential. InNo Path Home, she paints a moving picture of the ways in which humanitarianism leaves displaced people in limbo, neither in a state of emergency nor able to act as normal citizens in the country where they reside.
eBook
Explicitation Interview: A Method for Collecting First Person Perspectives on Living Alone in Old Age
How can older adults (OAs) live at home alone when they have health problems? Growing numbers of OAs live with chronic health problems and yet are determined to remain in their homes as long as possible. The risks associated with living alone are a source of grave concern not only for OAs but also for those around them. Knowing how OAs cope with the risks they face is a central issue for home care and support services. The present article describes the advantages of coupling an existential anthropology approach with an explicitation interview (EI) methodology as a means of understanding the details of how OAs manage their lives at home alone. Using this introspective methodology, we encouraged 20 participants aged 80 years or older to share very detailed elements of their subjective daily life experiences of coping with the risks inherent to their solitary lifestyles. Different types of risk coexisted with one another; some risks were physical, while others were existential. Physical risks appeared to be subordinate to other major fears: loss of identity, disintegration of one’s internal coherence, lack of autonomy and control over one’s personal situation, and decline in self-esteem and self-image. These fears acted as incentives for developing various practical coping mechanisms for their daily lives, including measures that involved taking risks with regard to their physical safety. Using our existential anthropology approach, supported by the EI methodology, we closely examined the details of interviewees’ realities.
Journal Article
Maya Intimacy with the Mountains: Pilgrimage, Sacrifice and Existential Economy
In this paper, I present two very different and yet very similar ethnographic examples of mountain-related pilgrimage and sacrifice ritual performed by the present-day highland Maya. The question I ask is why the sense of sacredness, animation and power of the mountains endures among the traditionalist as well as Pentecostal Maya in spite of the extensive transformations of the world today. In so doing, I examine the native concept of the mountain not merely as a social or cultural representation, but as an expression of everyday lived experiences and existential relationships between people and the physical and spiritual world they inhabit. Finally, I argue that the experience of interaction, communication and intimacy between the Maya and their mountain deities can be best defined as a dynamic participation in the course of the world – an existential economy of ‘working the world’.
Journal Article
Extreme Poverty and Existential Obligations
The suggestion that the anthropological study of morality is theoretically undeveloped carries with it the risk of caricaturing ideas of moral obligation in mid-twentieth-century social anthropology. The need for recovering aspects of these ideas is demonstrated by the tendency of moral philosophers to reduce the issue of world poverty to a question of ethical choices and dilemmas. Examining the diplomatic tie that had existed for almost 42 years between Malawi and Taiwan and an ill-fated project of Taiwanese aid in rural Malawi, this article maintains that honoring obligations indicates neither a communitarian ethos nor rule-bound behavior. As the mid-twentieth-century anthropology of Africa theorized ethnographically, the moral and existential import of obligation lies in its contingent materiality rather than in social control. Such insights, the article concludes, can enrich debates on world poverty with alternative intellectual resources.
Journal Article
Psychoanalysis and Phenomenology
If psychoanalysis and phenomenology are thoroughgoing, comprehensive, and complementary accounts of subjectivity, anthropological analyses of subjectivity can benefit from them both as well as from the dialogue between them. In the first part of this article I present and elaborate a preliminary outline of conceptual correspondences between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. These are pairs of ideas that seem intuitively to \"go together\" on either a parallel level of analysis or in terms of the role they play within the broader intellectual movement. In the second part I call attention to a preexisting body of work that explores the relation between psychoanalysis and phenomenology. This is work in phenomenological or existential psychiatry that developed sometimes as a synthesis of the two fields, and sometimes as a critique of and alternative to psychoanalysis. I conclude by suggesting that anthropology is a field sufficiently fertile for such a cross-pollinated mode of thinking to take root.
Journal Article
Relations, Individuals and Presence: A Theoretical Essay
In this theoretical article, the author examines the rarely discussed but ubiquitous references to relations in anthropology. Research themes, explicatory concepts, work methods: everything seems to pass through relations. But is this not too much? And what about the existence of each human singularity, each individual? Does this not risk being absorbed by this excess of relationism? The author offers a critical evaluation of relationism and invites us to observe human existence, presented as a theme, concept and method associated with anthropological knowledge.
Journal Article
Between one and one another
Michael Jackson extends his path-breaking work in existential anthropology by focusing on the interplay between two modes of human existence: that of participating in other peoples' lives and that of turning inward to one's self. Grounding his discussion in the subtle shifts between being acted upon and taking action, Jackson shows how the historical complexities and particularities found in human interactions reveal the dilemmas, conflicts, cares, and concerns that shape all of our lives. Through portraits of individuals encountered in the course of his travels, including friends and family, and anthropological fieldwork pursued over many years in such places as Sierra Leone and Australia, Jackson explores variations on this theme. As he describes the ways we address and negotiate the vexed relationships between \"I\" and \"we\"—the one and the many—he is also led to consider the place of thought in human life.
eBook