Husserlian Neurophenomenology: Grounding the Anthropology of Experience in Reality

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...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inHumans Vol. 4; no. 1; pp. 91 - 107
Main Author Laughlin, Charles D.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published MDPI AG 17.02.2024
Subjects
anthropology of the senses
Edmund Husserl
ethnographic fieldwork
intuition
neurophenomenology
scientific anthropology
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary: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.
ISSN:2673-9461
2673-9461
DOI:10.3390/humans4010006