Phenomenology in Anthropology

A Sense of Perspective

Kalpana Ram, Christopher Houston

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780253017802
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

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

PART I

THE BODY AS CONSTITUTIVE HORIZON OF EXPERIENCE

1 Moods and Method

Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty on Emotion and Understanding

Kalpana Ram

PHENOMENOLOGY CAN ASSIST anthropology in two specific ways. The first is in giving us a stronger way to frame objectivity as an aspiration for anthropological knowledge and for the social sciences more generally. The second is in allowing us to give emotions a methodologically central role in enhancing objectivity.

My claims for phenomenology in this essay are limited to the work of two key exponents of the philosophical method, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. There are specific reasons why these two philosophers recommend themselves out of the wide range of philosophers who can claim to represent phenomenological methods. Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty made innovations that are particularly compatible with the premises of the social sciences. They share with the social sciences a break with all variants of what one might describe as a methodological individualism, that is to say, methods which begin with the isolated individual. But unlike the social sciences, which tend to take this break for granted, both of these philosophers are engaged in an active debate with longstanding philosophical traditions. The fact that this was for them an active project itself affords us several advantages. Their language is vital, the models of sociality they propose are fresh, and in bearing witness to the difficulties of breaking with their intellectual predecessors, we gain insight into the sense in which Western philosophy forms a potent tradition. I have argued elsewhere at length that we in the social sciences continue to be shaped by such premises precisely to the extent that we remain either unaware of this tradition, or go along with current tendencies to treat the power of tradition itself far too lightly (Ram 2013).

In this chapter I concentrate on another aspect of their contribution, just as important for the social sciences. Both these philosophers develop a critique of dominant models of objectivity. Applied to the study of human experience, the scientific method performs what Heidegger would describe as a radically impoverishing reduction, which is then mistakenly taken to be an adequate starting point for representing the truth of human experience. The phenomenologist Ihde describes just such a reduction in a psychology experiment:

In some psychology many of the experiments are deliberately designed to first disrupt all previous “learning” by radically altering its context. To view a white sheet of paper under blue lighting through a darkened tube which cuts off the normal context and field significance of the experience is to radically alter ordinary experience. But the learning which is tacit in ordinary experience is then further cut off by allowing the experience to continue for only an atom of time, thus preventing any adjustment. In this way the experiment is set up so that it often cannot help but circularly re-enforce the “abstraction” of the “sensory atomist’s” view of perception which begins with the “abstraction” of “sense data” or similar “stimuli.” The experiment constructs the condition for the performed conclusion and interprets what it finds as a primitive of experience. (Ihde 1976: 62)

Both philosophers also reject a model of objectivity that requires the inquirer to somehow transcend their own subjectivity, history, and social location, or leave all this behind as so much baggage in the course of their inquiry. Instead, such inquiry, where both subject and object of study are human, must acknowledge and work with the embodied particularity of the inquirer.

So far, these arguments will seem familiar to us, thanks to the social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s which have given us decades of politicized doubt on reigning models of objectivity. Many of the key thinkers who influence the social sciences today, such as Foucault, Derrida, and Bourdieu, also transmitted the lessons of phenomenology which they received as part of their training. But some crucial aspects of phenomenology have also become lost to us in the transmission. It is these that this chapter seeks to retrieve. For Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, rejecting the dominant model of objectivity did not entail rejecting the possibility that accounts of the world can be more or less satisfactory as interpretations, depending on whether they are more or less adequate to their object. This vital dimension of their argument is a far cry today from various post-structuralist formulations of knowledge, and even communication, which carry weight today. Spivak has recently reaffirmed her influential thesis in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” which conveys, more fiercely than ever, her opinion of the hopeless idealism of assuming shared communication: “All speaking, even seemingly the most immediate, entails a distanced decipherment by another, which is, at best, an interception. That is what speaking is” (2010: 64).

Many anthropologists will be dissatisfied with such pronouncements. For all our disciplinary insistence on the contested nature of meaning, for which I have myself argued (Ram 1991), it is timely to recall that the very possibility of ethnographic practice depends on assuming the capacity to enlarge our own experience by incorporating the perspective of others. The experience of achieving better understandings over a period of long-term participation in the lives of others is not an uncommon one. Yet Borneman and Hammoudi (2009: 14) convey a lively sense of taking a risk even in making the modest claim that “the more one shares time and speaks with people, the better acquainted one becomes with the texture of other life, making it more probable there will be a closer fit between the order of words and the order of things.” The risk of such a statement, as they spell out clearly, is that the ethnographer’s claim to “being there” seems to run contrary to a dominant critique originating in Derrida, of a philosophical legacy he describes as the metaphysics of presence. But one can argue against a metaphysics of presence—as I do in this chapter in arguing against certain understandings of fieldwork experience as direct and unmediated contact—without doing away with concepts such as presence and experience altogether. As I have argued elsewhere, the many ready-made critiques in which the category of “experience” is first routinely reduced to a naively empiricist, idealist, or individualist affair and then dismissed ultimately leave the disciplines that claim to study human existence in a state of incoherence (Ram 2013). At this point in my argument, the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty has a crucial role to play. Their sophisticated arguments anticipate many of the critiques that post-structuralism was later to level at empiricist and idealist versions of experience (see below), yet provide a supportive and sophisticated framework for reinterpreting both experience in general (see Ram 2013) and the specific experience I concentrate on here, that of achieving progressively better understandings.

I begin the next section with an exposition of their key concept of intentionality in order to bring out the specific sense in which we have access to the world around us. The exposition of intentionality is simultaneously also an exposition of the place of emotions in their phenomenology, for it is the emotions that provide a vital opening between self and world. My argument thus makes an indirect contribution to recent discussions in anthropology on empathy (Hollan and Throop 2008), and even more directly to the argument that “the concealed and neglected aspects of the researcher’s emotional experience can actually present opportunities for understanding” (Davies 2010a: 3). The final part of this essay explores one specific mood—that of anxiety—to see what “opportunities for understanding” it presents to anthropologists.

The “Human World” as the “Homeland of Our Thoughts”: Intentionality as the Primordial Movement Out into the World

Once more seeking a definition of what we perceive through the physical and chemical properties of the stimuli which may act upon our sensory apparatus, empiricism excludes from perception the anger or the pain which I nevertheless read in a face, the religion whose essence I seize in some hesitation or reticence, the city whose temper I recognise in the attitude of a policeman or the style of a public building. There can no longer be any objective spirit: mental life withdraws into isolated consciousness devoted solely to introspection, instead of extending, as it apparently does, in fact, over human space which is made up by those with whom I argue or live, filling my place of work or the abode of my happiness. Joy and sadness, vivacity and obtuseness are data of introspection. . . . Perception thus impoverished becomes purely a matter of knowledge, a progressive noting down of qualities. . . . If on the other hand we admit that all these “projections,” all these “associations,” all these “transferences” are based on some intrinsic characteristic of the object, the “human world” ceases to be a metaphor and becomes once more what it really is, the seat and as it were the homeland of our thoughts. (Merleau-Ponty 1986: 24)

In what follows I explain the quotation above in various stages. I begin with Merleau-Ponty’s invocation of two traditions of philosophy—both of which, he argues, “impoverish” ordinary experience. The first concerns empiricist theories of perception which, by allowing only for an interaction between the physical properties of the object (“stimulus”) and our sensory apparatus, exclude other sources of understanding. The second is the idealist, consciousness-based version of perception that denies our ready access to the world around us. In doing so, it loosens its grip on the world’s objective presence. Assuming that we are located primarily inside the individual cogito, this tradition makes introspection the central form of mental life. As Heidegger argues at the very beginning of Being and Time (1962), starting from such a position has produced a long tradition of Western epistemology which wonders how it is possible to know the world at all. Driven on by the same uncertainty, it seeks, by various permutations, to secure foundations for knowledge.

Today, we may seem distant from both these traditions. But while the widespread formulation of knowledge as a “construction” breaks definitively with the empiricist tradition, it retains many elements of the idealist tradition. We may have rejected the search for foundations, but when it comes to intellectual confidence in knowing the world around us, we find ourselves in an even more corrosive situation of doubt (I have referred to this as “politicized doubt”) than did Descartes, who at least was able to come to rest in one famous certainty, that he was thinking. It therefore comes as something of a novelty to find Merleau-Ponty, following Heidegger, confidently claiming that the human world is actually the “seat,” the “homeland’ ” of our thoughts. So what does their striking confidence stem from?

Just as the anxieties of epistemology flow from its fundamentally flawed starting point in the isolated cogito, so also the confidence of these phenomenologists in the objective presence of the world around us originates from their taking up a very different starting point. They propose that we attend to the everyday modalities of practical action and engagement. Both philosophers argue that the models built by intellectuals can mislead if we forget the characteristic ways in which we live in the world. This invocation of lived experience has repeatedly led phenomenology to be equated with a naive version of experience. But in attending to experience, both these philosophers point out dimensions that normally escape our attention, eluding all versions of experience that rest on conscious awareness.

At this pre-reflective level, for Heidegger, we are always already in the world, immersed in activities and in being-with others. I refer us back briefly to the model of communication proposed by Spivak, where subjects emit speech, in the faint hope that these sounds will be “intercepted” or perhaps “deciphered” by someone who is located at some “distance.” For Heidegger, this would be precisely the kind of awkward formulation that ensues from a starting point in which we are presumed to be creatures sealed off each into our own state of interiority, out of which we must clamber in order to gain any access to one another. Instead, he maintains that there is no time in which we are not already “outside of ourselves,” finding ourselves with others, as well as with all manner of things in the world: “When Dasein directs itself towards something and grasps it, it does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which it has been proximally encapsulated, but its primary kind of Being is such that it is always ‘outside’ alongside entities which it encounters and which belong to a world already discovered” (Heidegger 1962: 89).

This is a world which fascinates us, impresses itself on us, but which we also inherit from others. The world of entities is also a world already “discovered,” pre-interpreted—generations before us have already lived in it, fashioned it, and bequeathed it to us even as it has to be actively rediscovered by each individual.

This outward-directed quality of our existence is termed intentionality. As used by these phenomenologists, intentionality has little to do with intentions but has everything to do with their new conception of objectivity. The original formulation of intentionality—“consciousness is always consciousness of something”—is one that could readily be reabsorbed into more conventional philosophies of subjectivity. But Merleau-Ponty traces back to his predecessor, Husserl, a reworked understanding of intentionality, in which “the unity of the world, before being posited by knowledge in a specific act of identification, is ‘lived’ as ready-made and already there” (Merleau-Ponty 1986: xvii).

With the work of Merleau-Ponty, this “ready-made unity” is able to find its fuller location, in the body as the primary site of our engagement with the world. Already implicit in Heidegger’s language, the notion of the body as the medium for being in the world becomes explicit and fully elaborated in Merleau-Ponty’s systematic exploration. The confidence, which I have already noted as the most striking feature of these phenomenological reformulations of subject-world relations, is now expressed as the confidence of a body in motion. Descartes’ retreat into “I think, therefore I am” as the only source of certainty now emerges transformed: “Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think that’ but of ‘I can’ ” (Merleau-Ponty 1986: 137).

Moods as the Sustaining Background to All Intentionality

Emotional cues play a special role in developing this sense of “I can,” this primordial intentionality of moving in the world. To “grasp” the world around us entails more than motor skills and motility. We need also to “grasp” the significance of phenomena around us. The human world—a term which should not be taken to mean a world confined to human beings, but rather to a world in which all kinds of entities come to each of us pre-synthesized by previous generations of human existence—is constantly sending us emotional cues that we use to expand our understanding.

Even when a phenomenon is unfamiliar—the case that will most interest anthropologists—it is only when we take in its emotional significance to those around us that we develop understanding of that phenomenon. I take an initial example from my experience as an Indian who moved to Australia in her mid-teens. It was not until I had access to more intimate emotional cues that I understood the significance of Western opera and then began to appreciate it. My musical training in India meant I inherited an opinion of opera as a somewhat artificial style of voice production and music. The door opened for me only when I watched an opera sequence in a film—Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez singing an aria from Catalani’s La Wally in Diva (1981). The affective close-ups of the faces of spectators made possible by cinema and the composed, still, but dynamic bodily presence of the singer in performance mode were a revelation. Further consolidation came in watching a full-length cinematic version of Verdi’s La Traviata (1982). This was not unlike the Indian cinema I was used to—I could connect the familiar with the unfamiliar by comprehending in one swoop the mus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Phenomenology’s Methodological Invitation
• Part I. The Body as Constitutive Horizon of Experience
• Part II. History and Temporality
• Part III. The Poetics and Politics of Phenomenological Ethnography
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index