Husserlian Neurophenomenology: Grounding the Anthropology of Experience in Reality

Anthropology has historically avoided becoming a nomothetic science, missing chances to build empirical theoretical constructs and instead retreating into a natural history of sociocultural differences. This paper argues for methods that focus the ethnographic gaze on essential structures of perception alongside cultural variation. The anthropology of experience and the senses can incorporate a partnership between Husserlian phenomenology and neuroscience to evidence essential structures of consciousness and the neurobiological processes that present the world as adaptively real. Combining essences—sensory objects, relations, horizons, and intuitions—with the search for neural correlates of consciousness can augment traditional ethnography and counter the constructivist bias that reduces everything to culture.

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Abstract

Anthropology has long resisted becoming a nomothetic science, thus repeatedly missing opportunities to build upon empirical theoretical constructs, choosing instead to back away into a kind of natural history of sociocultural differences. What is required are methods that focus the ethnographic gaze upon the essential structures of perception as well as sociocultural differences. The anthropology of experience and the senses is a recent movement that may be amenable to including a partnership between Husserlian phenomenology and neuroscience to build a framework for evidencing the existence of essential structures of consciousness, and the neurobiological processes that have evolved to present the world to consciousness as adaptively real. The author shows how the amalgamation of essences (sensory objects, relations, horizons, and associated intuitions) and the quest for neural correlates of consciousness can be combined to augment traditional ethnographic research, and thereby nullify the “it’s culture all the way down” bias of constructivism.