Husserlian Neurophenomenology: Grounding the Anthropology of Experience in Reality

Summary

Anthropology has often avoided becoming a nomothetic science, leading to missed opportunities for empirical theoretical development. A new movement focusing on the anthropology of experience and senses could integrate Husserlian phenomenology with neuroscience to explore consciousness structures and their neurobiological processes. By combining sensory essences with neural correlates of consciousness, traditional ethnographic research could be enhanced, addressing biases in constructivism.

Study at a glance

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.