Keith M. Murphy

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.

Collaborative imagining: The interactive use of gestures, talk, and graphic representation in architectural practice

Abstract This article examines the use of imagination as a communicative resource in interaction. Using actual examples of imagination in action collected during anthropological fieldwork at an architecture firm in California, I develop the concept of ‘collaborative imagining’ as a social, jointly-produced activity in which the objects of thought are created and manipulated in the shared space of face-to-face interaction. Such an activity relies upon a number of semiotic resources, and the paper examines three in particular: talk, gestures, and material objects, taking into consideration the talk and gestures of all participants in an interaction as well as the material surround available to the interactants. This view suggests two new ways to think about imagination. First, imagining is not a purely individual act but is also a product of and resource for group interaction; second, the objects of imaginative thought are not necessarily mental images, but can potentially be constructed in the material world with real, material components.

On problem-setting the cosmopolitical: a response to Tironi and Hermansen

In what follows I offer a brief reinterpretation of the design case presented in ‘Cosmopolitical Encounters: Prototyping at the National Zoo in Santiago, Chile.’ My goal in doing so is to present an alternative vision for understanding design cases such as these, one that is less based on a theoretical ‘taking seriously’ of different ontologies than on seriously considering designing from an ethnographic point of view. Within the broad range of design disciplines – but in particular architecture, industrial design, and interface design, among others that are also directly user-centered – there is a long-standing dilemma that characterizes the relationship between designers and the rest of us: in creating things and spaces for others, are designers granted too much power to impact how we experience the world? One way to address this issue has been the development of various kinds of design practices – participatory design, human-centered design, social design, and so on – that reposition the user as a critical aspect of the design process, one in which designers design with the people who will use what is made. While this shift has certainly been welcomed in many design disciplines as a corrective to elite designerly fiat, it is still nonetheless the case that designers, and not the rest of us, are the ones who drive most design action, everything from problem-setting, in Donald Schön’s (1983) terms, to form-giving, to decisions about materials and costs, even in instances of explicitly human-centered design. With the notable exception that the case analyzed by Tironi and Hermansen involves two chimpanzees, Judy and Gombe, it also falls quite squarely within this mode of designing. In other words, despite the insistence that there is something especially cosmopolitical going on here, it looks to me like a design intervention significantly steered by the desires, perceptions, and needs of interested humans. Before proceeding, I want to say something about Schön’s idea of ‘problem-setting.’ Designers often believe they have identified some issue or problem in the world, and that design – itself a pretty large black box – can be used to fix the problem, which is treated as existing and mattering independent of the designers who have ‘discovered’ it. From this point of view, the possibility that design can exacerbate or transform a problem rather than solve it, or that design can create new problems, is rarely considered. Schön’s concept of problem-setting, as opposed to problem-solving, is meant to highlight that designers have remarkable power to set the parameters of what counts as ‘worth designing for,’ and that much of what designers do involves creating solutions to problems they themselves have constructed. This is not to say that all design works this way, or that problems set by designers never correspond with things that need fixing. But contrary to what the authors have argued, my reading of their case is that the design scenario they present is a human-governed and human-concerned process of both problem-setting and problem-solving. Let me explain. Right from the start, we have the statement from Chimpáticos: ‘When we compared the eating habits of chimpanzees in wild environments with those observed in the zoo enclosure, it became evident that there was a need to stimulate the cognitive and physical work of the chimpanzees... .’Note that the phrase ‘it became evident’ obscures a lot of other things that were going on. The humans in