PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Phenomenological anthropology refers to a way of doing ethnography and ethnology which emphasizes the study of consciousness. The term “phenomenology” needs some clarification because it is bantered about a good deal these days and is frequently used in the most general way to mean any sort of experientially-based methodology. Even within the western philosophical tradition the word labels a very broad movement and not a precise school or unitary method. Speaking generally, a phenomenological study is one that is grounded in the direct experience of aspects of ones own consciousness.
But in the more strict philosophical sense, phenomenology refers to any method for the study of consciousness that (1) grounds knowledge about consciousness in intuition as the prime source of insight and as the final arbiter of truth about consciousness, and (2) recognizes the possibility of, and seeks knowledge about the essential structures of consciousness (Spiegelberg, 1982: 5-6). Most phenomenologists today would track at least some of their ideas and methods to the works of the greatest of all phenomenologists, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), who wrote such books as Cartesian Meditations, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology and The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. In these works, Husserl espoused a method for exploring and intuitively realizing the universal structures of experience that required dropping ones culturally conditioned views of self and consciousness (see Spiegelberg, 1982: 69-165).
Phenomenological Anthropology
In keeping with Husserl’s project, phenomenological anthropology is concerned with methods that may be utilized in fieldwork to “get into the native’s head” and understand what the native is experiencing. In addition, phenomenological anthropology recognizes the fact that other non-Euroamerican cultures have produced their own phenomenologies and techniques. For example, the Buddhist Satipatthana (“Foundations of Mindfulness”) practice may be considered a phenomenology under the above definition. Both western phenomenology and Buddhist meditation systems advocate direct intuition as the best access to knowledge about consciousness, and both recognize the existence of structures that are interpreted as essential to consciousness and universal to humanity.
Hermeneutical Phenomenology
One of the most influential phenomenologies for ethnographic fieldwork is that of Paul Ricoeur (see Rasmussen, 1971, Ihde, 1971), a French student of Edmund Husserl’s methods. Although not trained as an anthropologist, Ricoeur’s work has been concerned with retrieving the meaning of religious texts. Ricoeur has effectively argued against the structuralist methods of Claude Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss claimed that texts can be interpreted independently from the actual experiences of the people who tell the myths. Ricoeur countered by saying that an accurate interpretation of a native text requires accessing the experiences of living people who are influenced by the text. In other words, true hermeneutics involves a dialogue between a text (e.g., myth, drama, fairy story, dream report, oral history, etc.) and the experiences evoked in people participating in the text. The meaning of the text is developed within the consciousness of living people, so that there is a movement from an initial hearing of the text which then may lead to experiences that illuminate the meaning of the text. Then later people may reflect conceptually upon both the text and the memory of experiences related to the text.
By implication, the ethnographer must approach religious texts from an experiential stand point. Ethnographers cannot merely apply formulaic, “exegetical” methods to a myth, or other text, and hope to understand it in the same rich way the native does. Rather, the analysis must relate to direct human experience in order to reconstruct the real meaning of texts as they exist and operate in their native cultural contexts.
Transpersonal Phenomenology
A number of anthropologists have begun to realize that the experiences associated with some religious texts and ritual practices are of an exceptional nature and not easily be accessed by routine ethnographic field methods (see Laughlin, 1988). “Transpersonalism” is a movement in science toward the recognition of extraordinary experiences as legitimate and useful data. What makes these experiences extraordinary is that they in some sense go beyond the boundaries of ordinary ego-consciousness. Transpersonal experiences include such phenomena as out of body experiences, visions, possession states, near death experiences, and meditative, ecstatic, unitive, and mystical experiences.
To give one example of the application of transpersonal phenomenology to ethnographic fieldwork, Carol Lederman (1988:805-806) has reported that during her fieldwork among Malay healers, Lederman ran across the concept of angin (“Inner Winds”), a native concept which labels an experience that sometimes occurs during healing rituals. She mentions that her informants declined to define the concept for her, insisting instead that she would have to experience angin herself in order to know what it means. When she finally undertook the healing ritual herself, she experienced the angin “like a hurricane” inside her chest. Thereafter, Lederman was able to evaluate the meaning of the “wind” metaphor from direct experience. Angin ceased to be merely a belief and was appreciated as a metaphorical description of a real and profound experience.
William James’ Radical Empiricism
As anthropologists become more interested in the full range of human experience, the relevance of the works of William James become increasingly important. James, a famous 19th century psychologist, is best known for his views on pragmatism. But James also developed a very broad approach to the study of experiential reality, an approach James (1976:22 [1912]; see also Taylor 1994) called a “radical empiricism:”
To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as “real” as anything else in the system.
James was in effect writing a manifesto for phenomenological and transpersonal anthropologists, for there is no scientific discipline better positioned to ascertain the full range of human experiences encountered among the world’s cultures.
Social Phenomenology
The social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz should also be mentioned, for it has had in increasing influence upon anthropological thinking about the social dimensions of experience (see Berger and Luckmann, 1966). Schutz advocated the study of society from a special stance that he called the “phenomenology of intersubjectivity.” The object of scrutiny is ones relationship to another person, rather than some non-human object in the world. The other person (known as the capital-O “Other”) is a very special object, and requires its own distinct approach in order to intuit the essential qualities of the social relationship.
In order to phenomenologically study this intersubjective relationship with the Other, I must first suspend my uncritical belief in the “taken-for-granted” aspects of the culturally conditioned, social experience. This natural social attitude depends upon my face-to-face encounter with the Other in direct experience. This face-to-face encounter requires that the Other be in the same space and time as I am — that our respective streams of consciousness be flowing in synchrony. It also requires my recognition of the Other as the same as me in all essential respects, including the Other being conscious and symbolically expressing that consciousness to me. These qualities are automatically present in any actual social experience.
Neurophenomenology
As we argued in our book, Brain, Symbol and Experience (Laughlin, McManus and d’Aquili, 1990), the best and most direct route to uncovering the essential structures of consciousness available to us today is to steep ourselves in the cross-cultural evidence pertaining to human experience, and then explore the universal structures of experience via an amalgamation of phenomenology and the neurosciences; that is, via the application of a neurophenomenology. More specifically, anthropology gives us a sense of the full range of human experiences, while at the same time it suggests some of the universal similarities in those experiences. Phenomenological anthropology provides a kind of cross-cultural laboratory for exploring these universal structures, as it were, from the inside. And the neurosciences allows us an independent source of observations about the structures of experience by looking directly at the architecture of the organ of experience, the human brain.
Conclusions
Phenomenology has a history in philosophy dating back at least to the “phenomenology of mind” of Georg Hegel (1770-1831) in the early 19th century, and has left a rich legacy of writings, especially those of Edmund Husserl during the early 20th century. But the influence of phenomenology on anthropology has been felt only quite recently. Whether it applies to recovering the meaning of texts, ascertaining the effects of ritual practices in producing altered states of consciousness, discovering the universal structures underlying social interactions, or uncovering the universal neuropsychological structures producing experience, the impact of phenomenology on anthropology is as telling as it is increasing. Probably the most important reason for the current attractiveness of phenomenology is that the issue of consciousness, long excluded from much of scientific discourse, has been re-introduced into the domains of ethnographic fieldwork and ethnological theory. We may fairly expect in the future for the role of phenomenological methods to develop to the extent that anthropology becomes more focused upon meaning and experience in any transpersonal or social encounter.
Bibliography
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