Abstract

This chapter theorizes the phenomenological potential of anthropology through an examination of what we will call the “eventive ground” of ethnographic knowledge. Though anthropologists and phenomenologists have reacted to one another’s work, including the now famous early correspondence between Husserl and Levy Bruhl (see Sato, 2014; Throop, 2018), it has only been over the past few decades that some anthropologists began to distinguish a genre of a distinctively ‘phenomenological anthropology’ (Desjarlais & Throop, 2011; Katz & Csordas, 2003; Ram & Houston, 2015). Anthropologists have applied and extended phenomenological theory in several respects. By attending to the cultural and social contexts—the conditions of possibility—within which phenomena variously disclose themselves, anthropologists have significantly contributed to research in intersubjectivity and genetic phenomenology. Likewise, anthropologists have frequently drawn from and contributed to the phenomenology of perception, the senses, self-experience, embodiment, emotion, affect, mood, politics, and ethics.