Anthropological Theory
Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications
(London,Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
Vol 3(2): 219–241
[1463-4996(200306)3:2;219–241;033163]
219
Articulating experience
C. Jason Throop
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Abstract
This article engages in critical dialogue with what appears to be an emerging fin de
siècle concern with the unexamined theoretical usage of the concept of ‘experience’ in
anthropology. The article begins with a brief review of the work of a number of
scholars who share a growing dissatisfaction with the problem of experience in
contemporary anthropological and social scientific writings. In order to evaluate and
situate these recent critical perspectives, the article then shifts to explore in greater
detail the writings of two anthropologists who have significantly contributed to
contemporary anthropological theorizing of experience: Victor Turner and Clifford
Geertz. Finally, in an attempt to lay the groundwork for a ‘return to experience’ in
anthropological theorizing and research, the article concludes by outlining a
‘complemental’ model of experience. Drawing from insights into the temporal
organization of experience found in the phenomenological writings of William James,
Edmund Husserl, and Alfred Schutz this model attempts to bridge what some scholars
believe to be a controversial gap between ‘granular’ and ‘coherence’ theories of
experience that permeate many of the anthropological (and philosophical) discussions
of the topic.
Key Words
anthropological theory • experience • phenomenology • temporality
‘Experience, I believe, has no . . . inner duplicity; and the separation of it into
consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way of addition.’
William James, 1904a
‘The word “experience” is the most deceitful in philosophy.’
Alfred North Whitehead, 1927
‘To reach reality one has first to reject experience.’
Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955
I. INTRODUCTION
There are certain concepts in anthropological theorizing that are foundational. Because
these concepts provide the ground upon which anthropologists are able to construct
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their theoretical edifices, they are often taken for granted and tend to remain largely
unquestioned. One such concept is that of ‘experience’. While experience has remained
a key concept throughout much of the history of the discipline, it has, until relatively
recently, remained largely unexamined in critical literature. And yet, its proliferation
throughout contemporary anthropological writings is truly remarkable.1 Indeed, experience
has become a central construct for a number of divergent perspectives in anthropology,
including feminist theory, phenomenological anthropology, psychological
anthropology, medical anthropology and critical ethnography. In all of these approaches,
while the importance and centrality of experience is evident, the definition and operational
properties of the construct remain largely elusive. This lack of conceptual clarity
seems rather surprising given that these theoretical perspectives often look to experience
not only as a central area of investigation, but also as the ground upon which all later
speculation, description, and explanation are erected.
This article engages in a critical dialogue with a number of key works representing
what appears to be an emerging fin de siècle concern with this unexamined theoretical
usage of the concept of experience in anthropology.2 The article begins with a brief
review of the work of four scholars, Joan Scott (1991), David Scott (1992), Robert
Desjarlais (1994, 1997), and Cheryl Mattingly (1998), who share a growing dissatisfaction
with the usage of the concept of experience in contemporary anthropological
and social scientific writings. In order to evaluate and situate these scholars’ concerns,
the article then shifts to explore in greater detail the writings of two anthropologists who
have significantly contributed to contemporary anthropological theorizing of experience:
Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz. Finally, in an attempt to lay the groundwork
for a ‘return to experience’ in anthropological theorizing, the article concludes by outlining
a preliminary model of experience that draws from the writings of William James,
Edmund Husserl, and Alfred Schutz. The hope is that this model will demonstrate how
a more phenomenologically grounded understanding of the temporal organization of
experience might serve to bridge what some believe to be a controversial gap between
‘granular’ and ‘coherence’ theories that permeate many of the anthropological (and
philosophical) discussions of the topic (see Schrag, 1969).
II. FIN DE SIÈCLE CULTURETHEORY ANDTHE PROBLEM OF
EXPERIENCE3
In the work of the historian Joan Scott (1991),4 and the anthropologists David Scott
(1992), Robert Desjarlais (1994, 1997), and Cheryl Mattingly (1998), we find what
appears to be a growing fin de siècle concern with the problem of experience in anthropological
and social scientific theorizing. In the writings of these scholars, experience has
been characterized as a common sense, taken-for-granted construct that permeates
theorizing in anthropology. Moreover, these authors argue that the unexamined centrality
of experience in anthropological theory requires that a careful exploration and
reformulation of the concept’s current usages be made in order to ensure that researchers
do not build their theoretical edifices upon putatively vacuous foundations.
Most pointedly, both Joan Scott (1991) and David Scott (1992) argue that it is time
for social scientists to reject the concept of experience. In grounding research in the
rhetoric of experience, which is intimately tied to notions of ‘visibility’, ‘transparency’,
‘individuality’, ‘immediacy’ and ‘authenticity’, Scott and Scott hold that social scientists
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have become increasingly blind to those processes and structures that give rise to the
historicity and possibility of experience, shared or otherwise.
Desjarlais (1997: 17) makes a similar argument when he asserts that ‘discourses of
depth, interiority, and authenticity, sensibilities of holism and transcendence, and practices
of reading, writing and storytelling have helped to craft a mode of being known in
the West as experience: that is, an inwardly reflexive, hermeneutically rich process that
coheres through time by way of narrative’. Unconvinced by the universality of these
dimensions of experience, Desjarlais (1997: 24) proposes a ‘critical phenomenology’ that
will place the concept of experience itself into brackets to examine why it is that phenomenology
‘after Hegel has been centered on the study of personal experience, individual
consciousness, and subjective perception’ and to recognize that ‘what we take as “experience”
and “agency” are born of a gamut of cultural, political, biological, linguistic, and
environmental factors’. In accord with this critical stance, Desjarlais goes on to suggest
a new ‘form of life’ that he believes better suits the individuals he studied in a homeless
shelter in Boston; a non-reflective, punctuating and sensorial form that he calls ‘struggling
along’.
In another recent work, Mattingly (1998) also devotes considerable attention to the
problem of experience in relation to narrative and the sense-making properties of the
human mind. In contrast to Desjarlais, Mattingly suggests that anthropologists often
define experience in opposition to narrative, which is understood to be a ‘distortion’ of
life-as-lived-through, that results from the functioning of a retrospective stance,
temporal remove and the condensation of complexity. Indeed, she (Mattingly, 1998: 32)
argues that the general picture of experience emerging in anthropology is as largely nonnarrated,
formless, structureless, fragmented and lacking in coherence and continuity.
Against this view of experience as an incoherent ‘prelinguistic bombardment of the
senses’, she (Mattingly, 1998: 45) asserts that ‘narrative imitates experience because
experience already has in it the seeds of narrative’. Ultimately, she sets out to challenge
the ‘anthropological dichotomy between experience as narrated and experience as lived’,
for she argues that lived experience is ordered by remembrance and anticipation and is
thus not merely the blind succession of events in a linear series. According to Mattingly,
there is an intrinsic ‘toward which we are heading’ quality of lived experience that is
situated in the context of anticipations partially predicated upon a recalled past.
In the context of the work of these four scholars we are thus confronted with a general
dissatisfaction with the usage and definition of experience in anthropological theorizing
that is based on differing perspectives on how the term should be conceived of and used
in anthropology and the social sciences more generally. For instance, where Joan Scott
and David Scott are happy to reject the term on the basis of its highly subjectivist and
totalizing tendencies that supposedly efface ‘difference’ while obscuring those constitutive
processes that provide the conditions that support its usage, Desjarlais would like
to advocate a position where the ‘traditional’ anthropological (and philosophical) view
of experience in terms of its interiority, coherence, hermeneutical depth, immediacy and
authenticity is tempered by the recognition that there are other ways of being-in-theworld
that are not consonant with these definitional criteria. In contrast, Mattingly
makes the case that it is not so much the coherence and hermeneutical depth of experience
that is problematic, but the prevalent and strict distinction between experience and
narrative which postulates the former as an unorganized field of sensory impressions that
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is only retrospectively organized into a coherent form through the structuring properties
of the latter.
Here, I think that it is safe to say that while there is some consensus that the usage of
the concept of experience in anthropological theory is certainly somehow problematic,
there is no consensus with regard to how these various thinkers characterize the use and
definition of experience in anthropological theorizing, nor is there consensus with regard
to how anthropologists should go about rectifying the putative problems with its usage.
For these reasons, I would like to now turn to a brief review of two thinkers who have
done much to inform our present understanding of the concept in anthropology, Victor
Turner and Clifford Geertz.Through this review, I hope to demonstrate a breadth, depth
and variety to their definitions and usages of experience that defies any simplistic rendering
of their work into either what I would like to call, following Schrag (1969), the
‘coherence’ or ‘granular’ views of experience that are variously construed to be characteristic
of anthropological theorizing and practice.
III. ANTHROPOLOGIES OF EXPERIENCE
Turner’s anthropology of experience
Influenced early in his career by the likes of Emile Durkheim, Arnold Van Gennep, A.R.
Radcliffe-Brown, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Max Gluckman and Kurt Lewin, Victor
Turner is perhaps best remembered for his detailed theoretical and ethnographic analysis
of Ndembu symbolism and ritual life. While it is certainly true that some of his most
celebrated work deals with the problems of social drama, the ritual process and the antistructural
properties of ‘liminality’, in the context of his mature work Turner can be
viewed as one of anthropology’s foremost theoreticians of experience.
In his earlier writings (see Turner 1967, 1969), Turner’s understanding of experience
is most often tied to the physiological, bodily, sensory and emotional dimensions of
human existence. While in these writings Turner seems to have been only marginally
interested in the problem of experience and did not devote much time to explicitly
outlining the concept’s definition or theoretical import, inspired by the writings of the
German philosopher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Turner’s mature work demonstrates a clear shift
to an explicit and detailed theoretical discussion of the concept. In the context of his
dialogue with Dilthey, Turner’s early ‘physiological’ understanding of experience is transformed
to encompass a trichotomy of cognitive, affective and volitional dimensions.
Indeed, throughout his later works we find Turner repeatedly following Dilthey in his
attempt to outline a model of experience that is predicated upon the integration of
cognitive, affective and volitional elements as they are directly ‘lived through’ by social
actors.
In the book From Ritual to Theater (1982), we find one of Turner’s first published
discussions of experience from the perspective of a Diltheyan framework. In this work,
Turner points out that in contrast to Kant’s belief that it is only with the conceptual
patterning of sensation that the ‘raw data’ of experience are given definite form, Dilthey
holds that every distinct ‘unit of experience’ is given to an individual’s awareness with a
certain structure, which is not merely the result of the categorical impositions of the
human mind (Turner, 1982: 13). In addition, Turner outlines various ‘moments of
experience’ that Dilthey understands to be integral components to the eventual
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organization of any distinctive ‘structure of experience’. After outlining five such
moments – the perceptual core, the evocation of past images, the revival of associated
feelings, the emergence of meaning and value and finally the expression of experience –
Turner (1982: 15) argues that it is only really in the fifth moment of ‘expression’ that
the ‘structured unit of experience’ can be said to reveal itself. It is in this context that
Turner first recognizes Dilthey’s distinction between the immediate ‘living through of
experience’ as a sequence of events (erleben) and the retrospective attribution of meaning
tied to the structuring of ‘experience’ as a particular coherent unit or form (erlebnis).
Building upon these insights, Turner (1982) explores the multilayered structuring of
experience in terms of the temporal organization of ‘meaning’, ‘value’ and ‘ends’ (see also
Turner, 1985: 214–15). According to Turner’s reading of Dilthey, where ‘meaning’ is
essentially a cognitive structure oriented to the past, ‘value’ is an affective structure tied
to the vicissitudes of the present moment, while ‘ends’ are volitional structures tied to
goal-directed behavior oriented toward an emerging future. As Turner argues, while
‘ends’ do play a role in structuring experience, it is primarily the cognitive category of
‘meaning’ as mediated through memory that provides the reflexive articulation of what
would otherwise be the affectively infused experience of mere temporal succession
through value. Where meaning is tied to memory, cognition and coherence, the category
of ‘value’ is tied to those affective structures of experience that are immersed in the
present arising moment. For this reason, Turner, again following Dilthey, asserts that
there is little to no cognitive coherence in the ‘unarticulated quality of value’. Indeed, it
is only with the interconnection of what are otherwise latent ‘tonal-affinities’ that
disparate ‘values’ are able to be organized into a coherent structure through the ‘ligatures’
provided by personal and cultural forms of ‘meaning’ (Turner, 1982: 76). In
contrast to the transient sequentiality that is characteristic of value as it manifests itself
in its immediate immersion in the ‘conscious present’, ‘[m]eaning is apprehended by
looking back over a temporal process’ [emphasis in original] (Turner, 1982: 76). It is
interesting to note that for Turner the relationship between meaning and value can also
be tied to questions of determinacy and indeterminacy. Where the cognitive and
mnemonic organization of meaning most often brings a historically patterned determinacy
and ‘indicativity’ to the ‘structure of experience’, the prehension of value in the
conscious present is suffused with a generative indeterminacy that operates primarily in
a ‘subjunctive mood’ of fluidity, creativity and potentiality (Turner, 1982: 76–7).
In his posthumously published collection of essays entitled On the Edge of the Bush:
Anthropology as Experience (1985), Turner further elaborates upon the relationship he
sees between the fluidity and indeterminancy of experience in its sequential unfolding
in the present moment and the ‘fixing’, ‘ordering’, ‘framing’ and ‘regularization’ of ‘structures
of experience’ with the retrospective imposition of meaning. In a much neglected
essay that actually pre-dates his in-depth exploration of Dilthey’s philosophy of experience,
entitled ‘Process, System and Symbol’, Turner (1985 [1977]) briefly draws upon
Husserl, Schutz and Garfinkel in an attempt to outline those processes underlying the
‘typification’ of experience. Directly quoting Schutz, Turner (1985: 154) explains that
the meaning assigned to an ‘experienced object’ stems from a process of ‘relating by its
typicality to pre-experienced things of similar typical structures and we accept its open
horizon referring to future experiences of the same type’. Turning to the work of Sally
Moore (1976), he goes on to argue, however, that by examining more closely these
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‘processes of meaning assignment’ we can come to see more clearly how ‘social reality is
“fluid and indeterminate,” although regularizing processes continually transform it into
organized or systemic forms’ (Turner, 1985: 155). Here, then, we find Turner attempting
to outline a model of experience that rests on the assumption that its temporal structure
creates an ever-present tension between its coherence, order and fixity and its
fluidity, flux and indeterminancy.
Later in the same volume, Turner reiterates the ambiguity inherent in ‘experience’ by
explaining that while erlebnis as a ‘structure of experience’ is ‘inherently structural, not
a flow of ephemeral moments’ (Turner, 1985: 212), it may also have the connotation of
‘presence’, which is much closer to the concept of ‘life’ as a sequential, somewhat indeterminate,
flow of succession (Turner, 1985: 212). This ambiguity aside, Turner argues
that a ‘structure of experience’ has a tendency toward expression and in its expression it
has the possibility of being crystallized in an intersubjectively accessible form – what
Dilthey called ‘objectified mind’ (Turner, 1985: 217; see also Throop, 2002). According
to Turner, the assorted collection of expressions of experience in the form of ‘objectified
mind’ is nothing other than ‘culture’.
Turner’s last published discussion of the problem of experience is found in his short
contribution to the collection of essays compiled in his co-edited volume The Anthropology
of Experience (1986). In this essay we find what is now a much-cited passage where
Turner draws again from Dilthey (1976: 210) to distinguish between ‘mere experience’
and ‘an experience’. As Turner explains,
Mere experience is simply the passive endurance and acceptance of events. An experience,
like a rock in a Zen sand garden, stands out from the evenness of passing hours
and years and forms what Dilthey called a ‘structure of experience.’ In other words,
it does not have an arbitrary beginning and ending, cut out of the stream of chronological
temporality, but has what Dewey called ‘an initiation and a consummation’.
(Turner, 1986: 35, emphasis in original)
Ultimately, it is important to recognize that even with a somewhat simplified version
of Dilthey’s rendering of the various moments of experience (see Throop, 2002), Turner
still presents us with an account of experience which can by no means be reduced to an
understanding based solely upon Desjarlais’ criteria of hermeneutical depth, interiority,
integration, wholeness, authenticity and coherence. Indeed with his reformulation of
Dilthey’s understanding of the expression of experience and its crystallization in ‘objectified
mind’, Turner clearly moves beyond the subjectivity and interiority of the individual
experiencer to the world of intersubjectively mediated cultural and social forms.
Moreover, with his distinction between ‘mere experience’ and ‘an experience’ and with
his detailed discussion of the difference between the unarticulated unfolding of value
apart from its organization through the cognitive ‘ligatures’ provided in a restrospective
imposition of meaning upon the unfolding temporal steam, Turner by no means reduces
experience to either hermeneutical depth or strict and rigid coherence.
Geertz’s significant symbols and the organization of ‘experience’
Influenced by the likes of Max Weber, Ernst Cassirer, George Herbert Mead, Talcott
Parsons, Suzanne Langer, Walker Percy and Gilbert Ryle, Clifford Geertz’s approach to
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experience can perhaps most simply be characterized as ‘semiotic’. In his now famous
appropriation of Ryle’s (1949) ‘thick description’, Geertz clearly establishes his position
that ‘an I-am-a-camera, “phenomenalistic”’ approach to anthropology is necessarily
insufficient for any attempts to uncover the ‘structures of signification’ that serve to give
meaning to all observed phenomena (Geertz, 1973: 6). Following Weber, Geertz asserts
that his vision of an ‘interpretive science’, whose purpose is to explore the ‘webs of significance’
that serve to constitute culture, is predicated on the idea that culture is a public,
ideational and yet non-mentalistic system of ‘construable signs’.
Attempting to move beyond the ‘cognitivist/subjectivist’ fallacy, Geertz argues that it
is time for anthropologists to recognize that ‘culture’, ‘mind’ and ‘experience’ are, in the
end, symbolically mediated public interpretations and actions. For this reason, Geertz
makes a point of distinguishing his position clearly from phenomenologists like Husserl,
who tend to advocate ‘strong subjectivist tendencies’ that ‘place stress upon a supposed
inner state of an actor rather than on a certain sort of relation – a symbolically mediated
one – between actor and situation’ (Geertz, 1973: 110, footnote 34).
Building on Ryle and G.H. Mead, Geertz argues that the assumption that culture is
both public and social leads inevitably to the insight that cultural processes do not
‘happen in the head’ but consist, in contrast, of a traffic of significant symbols that serve
to ‘impose meaning upon experience’ [emphasis mine] (Geertz, 1973: 45). Geertz holds,
in fact, that ‘[u]ndirected by culture patterns – organized systems of significant symbols
– man’s behavior would be virtually ungovernable, a mere chaos of pointless acts and
exploding emotions, his experience virtually shapeless’ [emphasis mine] (Geertz, 1973:
46). In other words, without the medium of culturally infused significant symbols
Geertz asserts that experience would be relegated to incoherent and impenetrable
behaviors and sensations. For Geertz then, the imposition of meaning on an otherwise
chaotic stream of stimuli and responses is one of the key defining aspects of our existence
as cultural beings. Drawing from the work of Walker Percy, Geertz maintains that,
‘[e]very conscious perception is . . . an act of recognition, a pairing in which an object (or
an event, an act, an emotion) is identified by placing it against the background of an
appropriate symbol’ (Geertz, 1973: 215, emphasis added).5 Ultimately, he argues that
everything in experience ‘is tinged with imposed significance, . . . [is] apprehended only
through a screen of significant symbols which are the vehicles of their objectification’
(Geertz, 1973: 367).
Geertz can thus be read as emphasizing a conceptually grounded understanding of
experience, for it is not the putatively private world of subjective experience that interests
him but ‘the conceptual world in which our subjects live’ (Geertz, 1973: 24). Indeed,
the degree to which Geertz understands experience to be infused with conceptual and
symbolic determinants is clear in his belief that ‘interpretation . . . goes all the way down
to the most immediate observational level’ [emphasis mine] (Geertz, 1973: 28). In his
view then, culture is construed to be the very ‘fabric of meaning in terms of which
human beings interpret their experience and guide their action’ (Geertz, 1973: 145). In
one of his most clearly articulated passages on the concept of experience Geertz explains
that:
. . . human experience – the actual living through of events – is not mere sentience, but,
from the most immediate perception to the most mediated judgment, significant
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sentience – sentience interpreted, sentience grasped. For human beings, with the
possible exception of neonates, who except for their physical structure are human
only in possee anyway, all experience is construed experience, and the symbolic forms in
terms of which it is construed thus determine . . . its intrinsic nature [emphasis mine].
(Geertz, 1973: 405)
Turning to the ‘problem of meaning’, Geertz argues that without the coherence
provided by culturally elaborated systems of significant symbols, humans would find
themselves on the brink of chaotic dissolution, since the lack of ‘interpretability’ of
experience ultimately leads, in his estimation, to anxiety, angst and disquiet (Geertz,
1973: 100). The quest for meaning is thus understood as a response to the ‘opacity’ of
certain events, such as the ‘dumb senselessness of intense or inexorable pain’ (Geertz,
1973: 108). To this end, Geertz (1973: 128) argues that the efficacy and significance of
symbolic forms lie in their ability to organize experience. He suggests, therefore, that
symbols are perpetually serving to fuse what would otherwise be ‘wholly disparate’,
‘incomprehensible’ and discrete ‘elements of experience’ (Geertz, 1973: 128).
Finally, in an epilogue to Victor Turner and Edward Bruner’s collection, The Anthropology
of Experience, Geertz (1986: 374) asserts that while the concept of ‘experience’ is
unsatisfactory for many, ‘it is equally true that without it, cultural analyses seem to float
several feet above the ground’. That said, Geertz (1986: 380) still holds that experience
is never simply ‘mere experience’ but is always ‘an experience’, that is, an ‘interpretive
replay [of an event] as we recollect it to ourselves and recount it to others’.
Again, while Geertz’s emphasis on coherence, meaning and hermeneutical depth
clearly aligns him with Desjarlais’ and the Scotts’ assessment of anthropological and
philosophical views of experience, his emphasis on the external, public, intersubjective
and material nature of the significant systems of symbols that serve to mediate experience
seems to go against the idea that anthropologists should be faulted for stressing
primarily the interiority and subjectivity of experience. In Geertz’s case this could not
be farther from the truth. Indeed, Geertz consistently emphasizes the notion that experience
is not something to be found ‘between the ears’ or in ‘the head’ but in the publicly
accessible world of social action and cultural symbols.
IV. A RETROSPECTIVE GLANCE: ASSESSINGTHE GROUND UPON
WHICH WE STAND
From this brief review of the work of Turner and Geertz, we are confronted with a
number of positions that do not simply or clearly map onto either Joan Scott’s, David
Scott’s, Desjarlais’ and/or Mattingly’s formulations. While it is the case that these two
thinkers have, at times, characterized experience as aligned with ‘subjectivity’, ‘internality’
and ‘privacy’, we see that this is clearly not always so. Indeed, both Turner and Geertz
have sought at different times to stress the suprapersonal, external, collective, shared and
public nature of ‘experience’ as mediated through culturally shaped systems of linguistic,
symbolic and representational forms. Moreover, the hermeneutical depth, narrative
structuring and coherence of experience is similarly absent from a number of the definitions
explored in the writings of these two scholars. With the allusions made by these
theorists to what is often characterized as the indeterminate, fluid, discontinuous,
disjunctive, chaotic and/or fragmentary structure of experience – especially in its sensory
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or immediate variants which are only thought to be given form, organization and coherence
through the patterning proclivities of a culturally shaped mind’s conceptual and
interpretive overlays – it seems that in many instances Mattingly is most accurate in her
characterization of the ‘traditional view of experience in anthropology’ as predicated
upon an incoherent flux of sensory impressions that is in its immediate apprehension
without narrative structure or coherence.
Significantly, the writings ofTurner at times demonstrate a clear attempt to leave room
for a definition of experience that is in no simplistic way organized exclusively by linguistically
mediated interpretive frameworks that serve to pattern experience into coherent
structures. Moreover, for Turner there also seems to be some recognition of the fact that
there may often be a pre-given coherence to experience that is not merely the result of
the impress of hermeneutical, semiotic and/or linguistic forms. All that being said, the
most important point to take away from this review, however, lies in the fact that these
thinkers seldom present us with any one clear definition of experience, but, in contrast,
rely upon relatively complex, and at times contradictory, understandings of experience
that seem to largely defy any simplistic categorization according to ‘coherence’ or
‘granulated’ theories (Schrag, 1969).
That there is a complex integration of such seemingly contradictory understandings
of experience in the work of these two anthropologists, who have arguably been
most influential in shaping many current theories of experience in the field, is not
that surprising when we turn to look at the various ways that experience has been
discussed in the context of western philosophy. For instance, whether it is in terms
of Locke’s (1979 [1689]) definition of experience as a synthesis of active reflection
and passive sensation, Kant’s (1990 [1781]) a priorist rendering of experience as
arising out of the categorical structuring of what is otherwise an undifferentiated
sensory flux, or Gadamer’s (1975: 61–6) historically grounded discussion of experience
(erlebnis) in terms of a fluctuating ‘immediacy that precedes all interpretation’
and as a mediated coherence that ‘makes a special impression that gives . . . lasting
importance’, we are confronted with views of experience that seldom simply conform
to either ‘coherence’ or ‘granulated’ poles. Indeed, it seems that each of these perspectives
seem to resonate, at least to some degree, with both ‘coherence’ and ‘granulated’
varieties of experience.
That so many minds have set out to define experience along what seems to be such
contradictory lines points, in my estimation, to the fact that experience should be understood
as encompassing the entirety of this definitional range. The antimonies, contradictions
and conflicts embedded in these various models of experience must, in other
words, point to something fundamental about the structure of experience itself. A structure
that encompasses the indeterminate, the fluid, the incoherent, the internal, the
disjunctive, the fragmentary, the coherent, the intersubjective, the determinate, the rigid,
the external, the cohesive, the conjunctive and the unitary. At this juncture then, I would
like to conclude the article by turning to outline a model of experience that is drawn
from the phenomenological writings of William James, Edmund Husserl and Alfred
Schutz. A model that I believe will help us to bridge these seemingly divergent poles of
understanding.
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V. OPEN HORIZONS: JAMES, HUSSERL AND SCHUTZ ONTHE
TEMPORAL ORGANIZATION OF EXPERIENCE
Before turning to outline the model, it is important to note that I am certainly not the
only anthropologist to have explored links between pragmatist and phenomenological
perspectives in an attempt to demonstrate their significance for anthropological theory;
such connections have already been made by the likes of Berger (1997, 1999), Csordas
(1994a), Jackson (1989, 1996), Laughlin and McManus (1995), among others (see
Throop and Murphy, 2002). Neither am I the first scholar to highlight the explicit
connection between James’, Husserl’s and Schutz’s perspectives on the temporal structure
of consciousness; such linkages have been long noted by a number of philosophers
including Casey (2000 [1987]), Edie (1970), Gurwitsch (1964), Schrag (1969), Schutz
(1966) and Wilshire (1968). That said, I do believe that the model outlined in the pages
that follow is unique in emphasizing how the phenomenology of time consciousness
serves as an important window to understanding the variable structures of experience
and in arguing for the significance of this perspective for recent debates over the articulation
of experience in anthropological theorizing.
William James: From the ‘fringe’ to ‘pure experience’
One of the most memorable metaphors used by James (1950 [1890]) in his attempt to
detail the nature of human consciousness and the contours of lived experience is found
in his comparison of the structure of consciousness to a stream: a stream that ebbs and
flows continually forward while retaining the undercurrents and residues of past experience.
Another central metaphor used by James in his various discussions of consciousness
and lived experience, however, lies in his distinction between the focal and fringe
elements of awareness, which he holds to permeate all cross-sections of the stream as it
comes into being and passes away moment by moment.
For James, who wanted to create a position that mediated between synthetic Kantian
models of experience and disjunctive Humean models, the key to understanding that the
stream of consciousness is neither a completely unified and coherent field nor a disjointed,
fragmented conglomeration of mental contents lies in better understanding those processes
and constituents that arise at the fringe of our stream of awareness. In this respect, James
notes that every content of consciousness is surrounded by a ‘fringe’ or ‘halo’ of anticipatory
and residual movements which serve to frame and give definition to the focus of our
present moment of awareness as it arises in the context of the ‘here and now’ (James, 1950
[1890]: 254, 255, 258, 259, 606). With regard to the residual contents of the fringe, James
argues that each moment of conscious awareness is permeated by two basic forms of
mnemonic structure. These he calls ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ memory.
According to James, ‘primary’ memory can be understood as the lingering traces of
an immediate past that are still retained in the present moment of awareness. These
echoes of the past reflect the immediate mnemonic residues of an individual’s previous
concerns, motivations, feelings, perceptions and beliefs, which are often attuned to the
context of personal and situational determinants. In contrast, ‘secondary’ memory
reflects those more enduring mnemonic structures that also serve to organize the present
moment of awareness but which are not necessarily tied to the immediately fading traces
of past moments of experience that unfold in the context of ongoing interaction, feeling
and thought.
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In addition to these residual mnemonic aspects of the fringe of awareness, James (1950
[1890]: 613) also importantly notes those anticipatory elements of awareness that are
encapsulated in the ‘forward fringe’. That is, James not only details the effects of the past
upon the structuring of the present moment, but is also able to demonstrate how it is
that a future orientation – that is at least partially informed by those lingering traces of
past experience – is also part and parcel of each moment of the stream of consciousness
as it feeds forward to anticipate the horizon of future perceptions, feelings, sensations,
motivations and actions. It is precisely the nexus of primary memory and anticipation
that James terms the ‘specious present’. As he explains, ‘the practically cognized present
is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit
perched and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition
of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were – a rearwardand
a forward-looking end’ [emphasis in original] (James, 1950 [1890]: 609).6
There are a number of important affinities between this earlier rendering of the
temporal structure of experience as it unfolds in the context of the stream of consciousness
and James’s later writings on ‘radical empiricism’. First elaborated in two essays
published in the same journal in the same year (see James, 1904a, 1904b), James’s ‘radical
empiricism’ can similarly be read as a response to what he understood to be the all too
polemical renderings of conjunctive and disjunctive varieties of experience in a priorist
and empiricist philosophies respectively. In this light, James provides a perspective that
attempts to bridge what he views to be the problematic gap that arises between Kant’s
synthetic understanding of all varieties of experience as conjunctive and Hume’s atomistic
stance which characterizes experience only in terms of continuously unfolding
conglomerations of disjunctive sensory impressions without definite form or coherence.
Of particular import in this regard is James’ postulate of ‘pure experience’, which he
understood to be a non-reflexive, non-verbal, preconceptual ‘feeling’ that grasps the
‘immediate flux of life’ in terms of its undifferentiated unfolding in the field of sensory
immediacy, prior to its organization into distinctive contents, forms and structures
(James, 1996b [1912]: 13, 37, 46–48; see also Laughlin and McManus, 1995; McDermott,
1976; Myers, 1986). According to James (1996b[1912]: 7), in its most ‘pure’
state, ‘experience’ is prior to distinction between subject and object and is thus without
‘inner duplicity’. In ‘pure experience’ there is no split between consciousness and what
consciousness is ‘of’, there is no differentiation between thing and thought, self and
world, since the identical ‘bit’ of pure experience once reflected upon functions as both
the qualities of objects in experience and the various states of consciousness in which
those qualities inhere (James, 1996b [1912]: 7, 13, 37).
James not only understands ‘pure experience’ as the pre-reflective ground for all later
forms of conceptualization, verbalization, narration and understanding, but further
argues that this postulate suggests that it is possible to equate experience with reality.
The implications of effectively equating experience and reality for James lie in the fact
that no element or phenomena that is directly experienced can be excluded from reality
and therefore, even the experience of transition between experiences should be understood
as part and parcel of reality. Just as he pointed out in the continuity arising between
the backward and forward fringe in the stream of consciousness, James believes that the
experience of transitions, what he calls the ‘conjunctive relations’, are necessarily as much
a part of experience and reality as discontinuous and disjunctive elements.
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Arguing against ‘rationalistic’ (e.g. Kantian) and ‘conventional empirical’ (e.g.
Humean) views of experience, which either explain continuity in terms of an abstracted
‘Absolute’, or leave experience ‘permanently disjointed’, James (1996b [1912]: 26) asserts
that ‘conjunctive relations’ as felt in experience are equally as ‘real’ as those ‘disjunctive
relations’ that involve discrete, atomistic and discontinuous ideas, images, feelings
and/or impressions. In other words, for James ‘experience’ must always be construed as
organized according to both ‘conjunctive’ and ‘disjunctive’ relations and elements such
that it is never simply a matter of ‘coherence’ and ‘fragmentation’ or ‘differentiation’ and
‘nondifferentiation’ that characterizes its structure as lived. As he argues in A Pluralistic
Universe (James, 1996a [1909]: 279–80), ‘[e]very examiner of the sensible life in concreto
must see that relations of every sort, of time, space, difference, likeness, change, rate,
cause, or what not, are just as integral members of the sensational flux as terms are and
that conjunctive relations are just as true members of the flux as disjunctive relations are’
[emphasis in original].
Edmund Husserl: On internal time consciousness, protention and retention
Influenced by James’ writings on the ‘stream of consciousness’ and its residual and
anticipatory ‘fringe’, Husserl also presents us with a view of experience that is grounded
in a careful phenomenological description of the forward and backward facing ‘horizons’
of awareness (Husserl, 1962 [1931], 1964 [1905/10], 1993 [1931]).7 According to
Husserl, every intentional object is surrounded by a ‘horizon’ that contains multiple
arrays of ‘retention’ and ‘protention’ which serve to partially structure what is given
focally to our awareness at any given moment, while also serving to connect the existing
moment of awareness to both its antecedent and subsequent arisings. In Husserl’s
opinion (1964), the horizon is therefore organized according to a quasi-spatial/temporal
frame that extends forward in anticipatory ‘halos’ of protention toward the next arising
moment of awareness, while simultaneously ‘sinking back’ from the nucleus of the
present moment in the form of a ‘comet’s tail’ of retentional residues from past moments
of awareness.8
In addition to the moment-to-moment organization of experience in terms of retentional
and protentional extensions, Husserl further discusses ‘recollections’/’secondary
remembrances’ (Husserl, 1964: 57–9, 68–70, 74–8) and ‘expectations’/‘hopes’ (Husserl,
1964: 79–81; Dostal, 1993: 146–7), which he characterizes as intentional structures that
have a far more heightened durative form when compared to the more rudimentary
temporal, mnemonic and anticipatory processes that make up retention and protention.
We have here in Husserl, therefore, a duality of mnemonic and anticipatory structures
(see also Casey, 2000 [1987]: 49–52; Berger, 1997: 470), for in conjunction with the
microgenetic structure of past and future orientations accounted for in the concepts of
retention and protention, we also have the more fully elaborated and enduring structures
found in fully articulated ‘recollections’ and ‘expectations’ that arise in the confluence
of noesis (acts of consciousness) and noema (distinct contents of consciousness). In
this model, the coherence, form and structure of experience are predicated for Husserl
on the ‘thematic unity’ that arises with retrospective apprehension. From this perspective,
polythetic acts of consciousness are held to establish a ‘thematic object’ through the
‘retrospective apprehension by which the [pre-predicative] set [of constitutive acts] is
given to the ego as an object, something that is identifiable’ (Husserl, 1997: 246).
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In his book Experience and Judgment, Husserl (1997 [1948]) further argues that all
the mental operations which underpin the formation of the ‘natural attitude’ – that
attitude in which individuals take the world as given to everyday experience for granted
including operations of interpretation and judgment – are based upon a substrate of prepredicative
experience. For Husserl, this substrate is itself founded upon a passive synthesis
of polythetically constituted percepts (noema) which derive their form and coherence
through acts of consciousness that are patterned according to the sedimentation of past
experiences.
While fully predicative and reflexive, experience is intentionally ‘given’ to awareness
in the definite form of a meaningful coherence. When understood in the context of its
temporal organization in the stream of ‘internal-time consciousness’, however Husserl
agues that there is a fluidity and flux to experience that is never completely obfuscated
in the organizational synthesis provided through the monothetic glance back over the
temporal stream; an idea that is also noted elsewhere by Husserl (1964: 157–60) in his
discussion of the ‘double intentionality of the stream of consciousness’. As he puts it:
Every lived experience, every consciousness, is subject to the original law of flow. It
undergoes a continuity of alterations which cannot be indifferent to its intentionality
and which must, therefore, come to light in its intentional correlate. Every concrete
lived experience is a unity of becoming and is constituted as an object in internal time
consciousness in the form of temporality. This is already true of all immanent data of
sensation, but, further, it is also true of the apperceptions which encompass them and
likewise of all other intentional lived experiences [emphasis in original]. (Husserl,
1997 [1948]: 254)
By characterizing lived experience as a ‘unity of becoming’, Husserl is struggling to
articulate a position where experience is understood to integrate both coherence and
granular perspectives. Indeed, Husserl argues that in any perceptual synthesis there is a
co-perception of the given along with appresentative entailments, that result in what he refers
to as a ‘presentative/appresentative structure’. According to Husserl:
appresentation as such presupposes a core of presentation. It is a making present
combined by association with presentation, with perception proper, but a making
present that is fused with the latter in the particular function of ‘co-perception’. In
other words, the two are so fused that they stand within the functional community of
one perception, which simultaneously presents and appresents [emphasis in original].
(1993 [1931]: 122)
Here Husserl wants to delimit active and passive, predicative and pre-predicative, monothetic
and polythetic modes of experience.9 He is, in other words, attempting to account
for the vicissitudes of the ‘flowing subjective process’ while still recognizing those aspects
of the stream that are organized into both pre-reflective and reflective varieties of
synthetic unity (Husserl, 1993: 42). As Levinas explains, from Husserl’s standpoint,
experience is simultaneously understood as an intentionally structured ‘presence’ and a
‘temporal flux of a sensuous matter’ (Levinas, 1998: 143).10 Husserl’s understanding of
experience (erlebnis) is therefore, much like James’, carefully delineated to include both
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synthetic and disjunctive varieties as it effectively encompasses ‘a kind of passivity in
activity’ [emphasis in original] (Husserl, 1997: 108; cited in Casey, 1996: 18). As Edward
Casey phrases it, Husserl thus understood perception and experience ‘to be absorptive
yet constitutive, both at once’ (Casey, 1996: 18).
Alfred Schutz: On duration, reflection and action
Building on Husserl and Bergson, Schutz (1982 [1924–28], 1967 [1932]) also recognizes
that time plays a crucial role in coming to understand the interplay of creativity
and constraint, event and structure, in any given theory of experience, meaning and
social action. Using Husserl’s concepts of protention and retention, Schutz argues that
experience is temporally organized and that there is always the presence and persistence
of the past in the present moment of awareness, which is also simultaneously oriented
toward a future that is partially scaffolded upon these preceding mnemonic structures.
Schutz explains that the relative objectivity of experience is predicated upon the extent
to which individuals are able to immerse themselves in either the undifferentiated flow
of pure duration or in the ‘typifying’ imperative of reflective awareness (Schutz, 1967;
Schutz and Luckmann, 1989).
According to Schutz, the key to understanding the variegated structure of experience
lies in comprehending the relationship between a reflective monothetic glance and time.
In Schutz’s model, it is the reflective glance that serves to ‘single out an elapsed lived
experience and constitutes it as meaningful’ (Schutz, 1967: 71).11 Prior to reflection
upon an elapsed lived experience, Schutz (1967: 51) holds that consciousness is
immersed in the felt flow of duration and as such reflects a series of ‘undifferentiated
experiences that melt into one another in a flowing continuum’. Schutz (1967: 70) thus
conceives an ever-present tension between ‘living experience within the flow of duration
and reflection on the experience thus lived through’. In other words, Schutz argues that
it is only through a glance of attention that experience can be fixed into a definite ‘structure’
or ‘coherence’, otherwise it remains without formal definition.12
Significantly, Schutz (1967: 65) argues that ‘the meaning of an action is different
depending on the point in time from which it is observed’.13 According to Schutz,
behavior as it is occurs in pure duration, is ‘pre-phenomenal’, without explicitly formed
goals, motives, projects or recollections. In the immediacy of the ‘deed in the doing’
there is no reflection upon the act in progress or upon the goals to which that act may
be directed. In this pre-phenomenal stage, behavior is still directed, however, by ‘halos
of retention and protention’ that serve to pattern the unfolding of awareness and action
at least partially according to the dictates of the individual’s past experiences. That being
said, Schutz is also careful to distinguish between pre-phenomenal behavior and
phenomenal action – the latter is behavior carried out in service of an explicit recollection
or projected act. In this respect, the conscious project ‘anticipates not the action
itself but the [completed] act’ (Schutz, 1967: 67). As Schutz (1967: 64) makes clear,
depending on whether or not a theorist is focusing upon the pure project stage, the
action in progress, or the act as it has been already executed, there will be very different
ways for us to interpret an agent’s conscious attention to their motivations, intentions,
plans and goals.
For Schutz, then, it is never simply the case that either a practical, pre-phenomenal
sense or a reflective, phenomenal project serve to direct an individual’s action, since at
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different stages of action there will be differing contributions from pre-reflective and
reflective experience. Moreover, it is clear that practical experience itself must be understood
to interpenetrate with representational and intentional processes such that any
attempt to argue for the priority of either sphere must certainly do a disservice to the
actual lived experience of agents in their day-to-day interactions within their social and
physical environments.
VI.TOWARD A COMPLEMENTAL MODEL OF EXPERIENCE
In the writings of James, Husserl and Schutz, I believe that we find a basis for outlining
a model of experience that works to integrate the immediacy of temporal flux and the
mediacy of reflective assessment. We find that for all three thinkers it is never simply an
‘either/or’, but a ‘both/and’ perspective that best characterizes the structure of experience.14
From the perspective of this model we can see that Mattingly is correct in her
position that there is an important structural homology between narrative and experience.
However, this model also incorporates those varieties of experience, significantly
highlighted by Desjarlais, that even in their temporal structure, do not simply conform
to the ordered coherence that is often implied in emplotted narrativity,15 a point that
Mattingly (1998: 154) also recognizes in her assertion that it is perhaps not coherence
but drama that serves as the pivotal link between narrative and experience.
As James might have put it, there is both conjunction and disjunction in the stream
of experience and, as such, neither should be given exclusive priority if an accurate definition
of experience is to emerge. Indeed, it seems that even moments of active reflection
cannot simply be equated with the coherence of experience. As Schutz notes (1967:
52–3), there are experiences that, even when reflected upon, defy our abilities to secure
typification and thus remain fundamentally discontinuous and indeterminate in structure.
Moreover, disjunction cannot simply be equated with pre-reflective experience. As
Husserl argues, it is also possible for coherence to emerge in the pre-reflective field of
immediate duration. For even in the unfolding stream of fluctuating and pre-predicative
internal time consciousness there are often emergent and coherent elements of
experience that arise in the midst of a stream that is characterized as a ‘passivity in
activity’ and a ‘unity of becoming’. In other words, conjunction and disjunction may
arise in both reflective and pre-reflective varieties of experience.
While James, Husserl and Schutz recognize that the ligatures that bind experience into
coherent, conjunctive forms are intimately tied to the very temporal structure of experience
itself in its forward and backward fringes that are mutually integrated through
multiple acts of protension and retention, all of these thinkers are also careful to leave
room for the ‘gaps’, ‘disjunctions’ and ‘fragments’ that might break up an otherwise
coherent temporal stream. As Schutz points out, both pre-phenomenal behavior and
phenomenal action intertwine in the field of experience and are often co-equal contributors
to the structure of social action. Correspondingly, what Mattingly (2000) has characterized
as the ‘three fold’ structure of the present does not thus necessarily entail that all
experience is relegated to coherence. In addition to Mattingly’s (1994: 812) important
insight that in the ‘midst of action’ humans are always seeking to give order to simple
succession, she also makes clear that our ability to map meaning upon experience may
often fail. ‘Mere’ temporal succession, fragmentary disjunction and meaningful coherence
are thus each important potential constituents of the structure of experience.
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Here I believe it is possible – and important – to distinguish between the retrospective
‘ends’ that serve to partially structure the field of past lived experience and the projected
‘ends’ that arise in the immediacy of the present moment of duration that do not necessarily
ensure experiential coherence. It is indeed in instances where our protentional
horizon remains open, unfulfilled and/or discordant with an arising moment in the
temporal flux that we fail to find our footing in the coherence of experience. During
these moments there may be perceived breaks and disjunctions in our experience of lived
temporality. To this end, I think that in addition to what Heidegger (1996 [1953]),
following Husserl, characterizes as the ‘deep temporality’ of ever-recurring patterns of
retention and protention, we can discern at least four different temporal orientations
that may each differentially structure the experience of self and world. These include:
(1) an orientation to the present moment that consists of unfulfilled protentions as open
anticipations toward an indeterminate future; (2) an explicit future orientation that
consists of imaginal anticipations of a determinate future that are predicated upon
residues of past experience that emerge, as Mattingly points out (1998: 155), ‘even in
the midst of action’; (3) a retrospective glance that entails the plotting of beginnings,
middles and ends over the already elapsed span of a delimited field of experience; and
(4) the subjunctive casting of possible futures and even possible pasts, across the ‘fluid
space between a past and a future’ (Mattingly, 1998: 96; see also J. Bruner, 1986, 1990;
Good, 1994; Ricoeur, 1981).
While it is true that we often maintain an attitude toward the world that is structured
according to a future orientation of goals and desires (see Mattingly, 1994, 1998;
Heidegger, 1996), it is also the case that there are moments where it is not merely attention
to the future, but attention to the past or the contingencies of the present that
directs our action. Indeed, in the context of extreme forms of suffering, it is often the
case that individuals have little other choice than to deal with their immediate immersion
in the present moment (see Good, 1994; Leder, 1990; Scarry, 1985). In these
moments, protentions remain unfulfilled as what were previously taken-for-granted
properties of self, body and world are recurrently challenged in the face of pain, illness
and/or disability.16
Finally, I think it is useful to follow Drew Leder (1990) in his appropriation of Freud’s
(1962: 106; 1966: 347) concept of a ‘complemental series’ in order to better highlight
the relationship between these seemingly divergent varieties of experience. According to
Leder, a ‘complemental series’ is any series that ‘exhibits a full range of intermediate
examples as well as those of the polar extremes’ that are structured such that the two
poles maintain a relationship of mutual inhibition, where the rise of one pole affects the
necessary decline of the other. That is, the polar ‘etiological factors’ in any given complemental
series interact such that ‘the arising of one is necessarily correlative with the
other’s decline’ (Leder, 1990: 28). While Leder utilizes this concept to account for differing
forms of bodily ‘disappearance’ where the modification of attention works to ensure
that ‘as a part of my body is taken up focally, it can no longer play a background role
relative to that activity and vice versa’ (Leder, 1990: 28), I believe that this same concept
can serve to outline the general relationship between conjunctive and disjunctive
varieties of experience.
A ‘complemental model of experience’ that is grounded in the organization of attention
according to the dynamic structuring of what is foregrounded and backgrounded
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in awareness (Leder, 1990; see also Berger, 1997, 1999; Csordas, 1993, 1994a), would
thus leave ample room for a range of intermediate experiences which do not display
either full coherence or full disjunction, while also serving to help explain why it is that
absolute coherence and disjunction are in the moment of their immediate occurrence
mutually exclusive categories.17 This is not to say that what was once a disjunctive experience
cannot be fashioned into a coherent experience through the meaningful structuring
entailed in a retrospective glance, nor that coherence and disjunction cannot follow
one another in close temporal succession.18 What this model implies, however, is that
while there is indeed a spectrum of possible articulations of experience in terms of
coherent and disjunctive forms, it is not the case that experience will emerge as coherent
and disjunctive simultaneously in either the foreground or background of awareness.
VII. CONCLUSION
Aside from serving to mediate disparate perspectives on ‘experience’ in anthropological
theorizing, this model also has direct significance for anthropological research. As
Jackson (1996: 42) notes in his own discussion of James’s and Husserl’s writings, a key
insight stemming from this tradition lies in noting the fact that there are ‘significant
differences between the way the world appears to our consciousness when we are fully
engaged in activity and the way it appears to us when we subject it to reflection and
retrospective analysis’. Moreover, there are not only important differences that are
attributable to retrospection and immersion in ongoing action, but also potential differences
in the structure of experience as mediated through a number of differing temporal
orientations. As mentioned earlier, by paying careful attention to the temporal orientation
of our informants when engaged in, recollecting, or anticipating social action, it
may be possible to gain some insight into how these different orientations engender
differing varieties of experience that are to a greater or lesser extent aligned with such
descriptors as ‘fragmented’, ‘coherent’, ‘disjunctive’ and ‘conjunctive’.
On a more practical level, an acknowledgement of the effect of temporal orientation
on the structuring of experience leads to important questions concerning the effects of
different types of methodologies used to elicit data on the varieties of experience that
are attributed to the informants we observe and interact with in the field. Indeed, it
appears that there are a number of methodologies used by anthropologists that tend to
privilege one or another temporal orientation, and as such, tend to privilege one or
another variety of experience in our ethnographic accounts. It seems that there might
very well be an important connection between the fact that Desjarlais, for instance, relied
primarily upon observation and little upon interviewing when collecting the data for his
work in Shelter Blues and his conclusion that his informants did not ‘experience’.
In conclusion, what this model thus highlights is the importance of employing
methodological strategies that complement the collection of explicitly retrospective
assessments – in the form of the recollective meaning seeking that often emerges in the
context of interviews, questionnaires and other forms of elicitation that depend upon
those explicit reflective processes that tend to give coherence and definite form to experience
– with strategies such as the video taping and/or systematic observation of everyday
interaction that focuses upon capturing the often pre-reflective, real-time unfolding of
social action. The necessity of using methodologies that differentially access both prereflective
and reflective varieties of experience and the significance of exploring more
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carefully how differing methodologies may privilege accounts that draw from one or
another form of temporal orientation seem to be essential to ensuring that experience is
explored ethnographically throughout the entire range of its various articulations.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Robert Desjarlais, Jennifer Dornan, Linda Garro, Kevin Groark,
Douglas Hollan, Michael Jackson, Allen Johnson, Charles Laughlin, Cheryl Mattingly,
Keith Murphy, Elinor Ochs, Mariko Tamanoi, Warren Throop, Richard Wilson and two
anonymous reviewers for carefully reading and commenting on earlier versions of this
article. I am especially indebted to Allen Johnson for allowing me to pursue many of the
ideas found in this article in the context of a doctoral qualifying exam written during
the summer and fall of 2001.
Notes
1 See for instance: Csordas (1994a, 1994b); Ewing, (1990); Good (1994); Hastrup
(1995); Howes (1991); Jackson (1989, 1996); Kleinman and Kleinman (1991,
1997); Marcus and Fischer (1999); Wikan (1991).
2 It is interesting to note that arguably the most prolific era of writing on experience
in philosophy also began at the end of a century: see Bergson (1910 [1889]); Dewey
(1958 [1929], 1980 [1934]); Dilthey (1985 [1887], 1989 [1883]); James (1950
[1890], 1996a [1909], 1996b [1912]); Husserl (1970 [1900/01], 1962 [1913],
1964 [1905/10], 1993 [1931]); Oakeshott (1933) and Whitehead (1978 [1929]),
among others.
3 This is a play on the title of Jeffery Alexander’s book, Fin de Siècle Social Theory:
Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason (1995).
4 I would like to thank Mariko Tamanoi for bringing this article to my attention.
5 Walker Percy was a physician turned philosopher and author who drew from Peirce
and Mead to argue that human consciousness is symbolic and intersubjective to its
core (see Percy, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1961).
6 See also Whitehead (2001 [1920]: 343–4).
7 See Casey (2000 [1987]); Gurwitsch (1964); Schrag (1969); Schutz (1966) and
Wilshire (1968).
8 As Levinas (1998: 143) points out, for Husserl ‘[c]onsciousness of time is not a
reflection upon time, but temporalization itself’.
9 Husserl (1997: 108).
10 In Husserl’s terminology ‘streaming hyletic data’.
11 See Schutz (1967 [1932]: 51).
12 Schutz (1967 [1932]: 81) calls these ‘structures’, ‘coherences’, or ‘patterns’ that arise
in the reflexive arc of monothetic attention ‘schemes of experience.’
13 The following section is based on a reworking of a paragraph from Throop and
Murphy (2002).
14 A comparable perspective is advanced by Peirce who argues that
we hear only what is present at the instant, and an orderliness of succession cannot
exist in an instant. These two sorts of objects, what we are immediately conscious
of and what we are mediately conscious of, are found in all consciousness. Some
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elements (the sensations) are completely present at every instant so long as they
last, while others (like thought) are actions having beginning, middle, and end,
and consist in a congruence in the succession of sensations which flow through the
mind. They cannot be immediately present to us, but must cover some portion of
past or future. Thought is a thread of melody running through the succession of
our sensations’ [emphasis in original] (Peirce, 1992 [1878]: 129; see also Ricoeur,
1991: 212).
15 See Ochs and Capps (2001) for an insightful discussion of narratives of personal
experience that do not conform to standards of emplotted coherence.
16 For instance, in the anthropological and phenomenological study of pain, there is a
growing consensus that pain is often experienced as ‘disjunctive’ and ‘world-destroying’
(see Daniel, 1994; Good, 1994; Leder, 1985, 1990; Scarry, 1985; Throop,
2002).
17 See also Ochs and Capps’ discussion of the tension between poles of ‘coherence’ and
‘authenticity’ in the context of everyday narratives (Ochs and Capps, 2001: 2–6,
17–18, 24, 156, 278–9, see also 1997).
18 See Berger (1997: 481); see also Berger (1999: 124); Berger and Del Negro (2002:
71–72).
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C. JASON THROOP is a doctoral candidate in the program for psychocultural studies and medical anthropology
in the Department of Anthropology, UCLA. He is currently conducting his dissertation field work
investigating the experience of chronic pain sufferers on the island of Yap (Wa’ab), Federated States of Micronesia.
Address: Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, 341 Haines Hall, P.O. Box
951553, Los Angeles, CA 90095–1553, USA. [email: jthroop@ucla.edu]
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