CFP: Producing the Anthropological: An Onto-Phenomenological Approach to Anthropology and Its Worlds

[Alexander Thomson]

**Producing the Anthropological: An Onto-Phenomenological Approach to Anthropology and Its Worlds**

*Organizers: Alexander M. Thomson (UCLA) and Matthew McCoy (UCLA)*

As the discipline of anthropology continues to encounter, influence and (re)present an ever-growing number of phenomenological lifeworlds, anthropologists occasionally find themselves removed from the peaceful process of anthropological production (i.e. pre-reflexive anthropological practice) and cast into a disquieting meditation on the overall importance of their work. Confronted by an incalculable number of inexhaustible – and inexhaustibly variegated – lifeworlds, the anthropologist cannot help but wonder if her research is capable of speaking to something larger than itself or if it is merely the result of an institutional compulsion toward archivization. In this panel, we intend to critically engage the discipline of anthropology and its production par excellence (viz. ethnography) by way of an anthropological performance that seeks the very limit of the structures in which it moves. Conceptualizing anthropology as a textual academic community with unique practices of documentation, textualization and circulation, i.e. an intersubjective method of opening-up (and ex necessitate foreclosing) worlds, we believe that the discipline of anthropology is capable of going beyond – and indeed, to some extent, already does go beyond – the documentation of those existentiell actualities and potentialities for being that exist in concrete human communities prior to the anthropologist’s arrival. Through a sustained engagement with the phenomenological tradition (esp. the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Arendt, Levinas, Derrida and Sloterdijk), we hope to illustrate the manifold ways in which the techniques of anthropology work to disclose temporal, existential and ontological aspects of the human Dasein, which might otherwise have remained hidden. At the same time, we also hope to suggest a program of theoretically-driven anthropological inquiry capable of revealing more of these aspects in the future. Among the topics to be addressed during this panel are: a return to and close reading of foundational texts in phenomenology, the interplay of ethnographic and phenomenological methods, the phenomenological experience of time and temporality in concrete communities, the phenomenological installation of worlds through language and narrative, and various conceptions of intersubjectivity.

Building our research in the Shetland Isles (Scotland) and Northern Ireland, the panel organizers (viz. Alexander Thomson and Matthew McCoy) will focus on the community-typic and person-specific ways in which our subjects orient toward past, present and future imaginaries. In the case of the Shetland Isles, the focus will be on the bifurcation of temporal consciousness whereby the past facilitates and constrains certain future-oriented actions in the present. Special attention will be lent to the role that mytho-historical narratives, e.g. narratives of ethnic distinction and Scottish Oppression (esp. during the 17th and 18th centuries), play in Shetlanders’ contemporary political engagements (e.g. Scottish Independence). In the case of Northern Ireland, the psychosomatic symptoms resulting from “The Troubles” and subsequent ethno-nationalist struggles will be examined through a dual attention to 1) how the traumatic events from the past are experienced in the present and 2) how waiting for reparations and for “truth” circumscribes one’s future-oriented possibilities. Further, this research examines the on-going process of everyday coping through vocation, religion, and politics.

We are seeking theoretically-rigorous papers that engage in and with anthropological project, showing-forth both its revelatory (presencing) potential and its dissimulatory (absencing) potential with respect to the temporal, existential and ontological nature of the human Dasein. Interested parties are invited to submit an abstract to alexander.thomson at ucla.edu no later than Saturday, April 5th.