C. Jason Throop

Bourdieu and phenomenology A critical assessment

This article sets out to examine and critically evaluate Bourdieus critique of phenomenology as presented in his Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) and The Logic of Practice (1990). Since it is not possible to properly understand Bourdieus critique without situating it within the context of his broader theoretical orientation, the article begins with an exploration of some of the key concepts underpinning his version of practice theory. Of particular importance for this article are his notions of habitus, body hexis and doxa. Having reviewed these central constructs, the article turns to discuss Bourdieus critique of phenomenology. Following this, some of the problems with his critique are examined in light of the work of Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz. The article concludes with two points: a brief discussion of how Bourdieus project, while at times richly nuanced, can itself be criticized for being an overly deterministic rendering of human thought, feeling and behavior; and a call for anthropologists to rethink the potential benefits offered by phenomenology for anthropological research.

Imagination and Reality: On the Relations Between Myth, Consciousness, and the Quantum Sea

There often appears to be a striking correspondence between mythic stories and aspects of reality. We will examine the processes of creative imagination within a neurobiological frame and suggest a theory that may explain the functions of myth in relation to the hidden aspects of reality. Myth is peppered with archetypal entities and interactions that operate to reveal hidden processes in reality that are relative to the human condition. The imagery in myths in a sense “sustains the true.” That is, mythopoetic imagery keeps the interpretive process in experience closer to the actual nature of reality than the rational faculties operating alone are able to do. Indeed, whereas rationalizing can easily lead us awry, genuine myth rarely does. Explanations of events offered by cultures around the world are frequently couched in terms of mythic themes and events. An important function of myth is to provide a “field of tropes” that in-forms the lived experience of people. This paper focuses especially on those aspects of myth that represent facets of the quantum universe and give us clues as to the relationship between consciousness, symbolism, and reality.

Intermediary Varieties of Experience

This paper engages in a phenomenologically informed examination of the cultural and personal influences implicated in the constitution of experiences that may shift from subjective to objective, and to intermediate varieties. Drawing from extensive ethnographic research on the island of Yap, Federated States of Micronesia, the paper explores how a cultural phenomenological understanding of intermediary varieties of experience is resonant with aspects of Yapese ethno-epistemology in which material objects are understood as variously invested with subjective entailments, and vice versa. Two examples are used to illustrate the active inter-subjective constitution of such intermediate varieties of experience: the ambiguity of pain as an object of experience and the significance of food in everyday social life.

Continuity, Causation And Cyclicity: A Cultural Neurophenomenoloǵy Of Time-Consciousness

Abstract The neurophenomenology of time-consciousness is presented. This lays a foundation for exploring the ways that society and culture influence the experience and interpretation of time without losing sight of the embodied, neurophysiological and universal aspects of time-consciousness. The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) are summarized as they relate to temporal perception and cognition. Phenomenological approaches to time- consciousness (using Edmund Husserls work) are integrated with theorizing about subjectivity, experience, and social action, and the relationship between narrative and higher order forms of time-consciousness are discussed. The authors suggest that there are fundamental similarities between the ways that human societies in the past experienced and interpreted primordial aspects of time-consciousness and the way peoples do so today.

Cultural Neurophenomenology: Integrating Experience, Culture and Reality Through Fisher Information

Anthropologists and psychologists have long debated the relative importance of nature and nurture in human affairs. By and large anthropologists have opted for what might be called the ‘naïve culturological position’ that when our species developed culture, it left its biological roots behind. Psychologists, on the other hand, until relatively recently, have largely ignored the impact of culture upon the processes and functioning of the human mind. In their attempt to approximate the rigors of scientific methods practiced in the so-called ‘hard’ sciences, it is often a naïve scientism that drives theorizing and research in the discipline. The single most decisive impediment to the emergence of a mature anthropology and psychology is the mind–body schism. We will argue that bridging the mind–body schism requires a language by means of which we can refer to individual experience, culture and extramental reality simultaneously. Our approach is that of a cultural neurophenomenology that allows us to speak about the social and biological factors that produce, potentiate and limit human experience. We show that one key concept in unifying the languages of these different domains is ‘information’. We trace the history of the concept of information, and demonstrate that from the perspective of Fisher information one may more easily conceive of the interactions among experience, culture and reality in commensurable terms. Fisher information also allows us to model the relationship between knowledge and reality, and to suggest some of the mechanisms by which the individual psyche and a societys culture remain ‘trued-up’ relative to the reality of the world and the individuals own being.

Interpretation and the limits of interpretability: on rethinking Clifford Geertz's semiotics of religious experience

This paper critically interrogates Clifford Geertzs analysis of religious belief as it relates to both his broader semiotics of culture and his views on how such beliefs are implicated in the formation of particular dispositions, propensities, and habits informing social action. It is argued that Geertzs account of religion can be held to reveal some of the most central assumptions of his social theory, his hermeneutics of culture, and his philosophy of action.

Ambivalent happiness and virtuous suffering

This article advances an analysis of those affective, mooded, and worldly happenings that define the limits, contingencies, and possibilities of happiness. More specifically, drawing from sustained ethnographic research, ambivalent orientations to experiences of happiness are examined in Yapese communities in the Federated States of Micronesia. For many, happiness is experienced as an ambivalent object of concern inasmuch as it stands in tension with local ethical modalities of being that emphasize virtuous forms of suffering.

Aspects, affordances, breakdowns Some phenomenological anthropological reflections on Webb Keane's Ethical life: Its natural and social histories

Comment on Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical life: Its natural and social histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Being open to the world

As the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka poetically phrased it, human beings are “beings of the far reaches.” Our human condition is, in other words, conditioned by the existential fact that we are beings who are open, attuned, and responsive to the world. Building upon and extending some of my earlier reflections on the distinctive modes of openness, attunement, and responsivity that are revealed in the context of ethnographic practice, this essay will seek to clear some new pathways to potentiating generative dialogue between anthropological and philosophical phenomenology. In particular, the article will explore how a phenomenologically informed analysis of the specific form of bracketing that arises in ethnographic encounters—what I have termed the ethnographic epoché—can help anthropologists and philosophers alike to rethink possibilities for thinking, not only in the context of their respective modes of inquiry but also at points where the two fields mutually intersect.