Beyond Culture: Towards a Phenomenological Foundation of Anthropology

ongoing

The universality of the divide between nature and culture has been recently challenged by anthropology as researchers argued that this divide is specific to modernity and should not be generalized to capture the plurality of ways of conceiving humanity’s relation to the world. To account for the diversity of collective experience, the humanities and social sciences should decenter supposedly universal categories of Western modernity and reconceptualize the fundamental aspects of collective behavior beyond this ethnocentric bias. How does this pluralistic view of the world change our philosophical account of nature and culture? How can phenomenology explain the different modes of collective existence described by anthropology? The working hypothesis of COSMOS is that the interaction between phenomenological philosophy and anthropology can improve our conception of social experience and change the traditional view in which the distinction between nature and culture is assessed. While extensive literature has been devoted to the social world and the duality of nature and culture, phenomenological research on the anthropology of the lifeworld and the intersubjective aspects of nature and culture remains largely unexplored, especially when it comes to a discussion with concrete findings in anthropology. COSMOS aims to fill this gap and break new theoretical ground by providing a foundation for contemporary anthropology. It will draw upon the phenomenology of the social world of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schütz and recent research on social experience to provide a new view of the common world that integrates anthropology’s radical idea of diversity and plurality. By combining a phenomenological approach with anthropology’s findings and theoretical considerations, it aims to build on and impact recent research on sociality and contribute to changing sedimented views of nature and culture underpinning the division between natural and human sciences.