Why social scientists still need phenomenology

Introduction

Phenomenology is first and foremost a philosophy, initiated in the work of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Yet its theoretical approach, subject matter, and methodology have proven continuously productive in nearly every discipline. ¹ What insights does phenomenology provide for the social sciences today?

At its simplest, a phenomenological social science privileges study of the ‘world’ – situations, events, living beings, places, objects, ideas, etc. – as it is experienced. Presented like this, three interrelated building blocks emerge: the world; an experience of it; and the experiencing self. Phenomenological social science, then, always involves investigation of these three themes and of relations between them.

More concise definitions add substance to these relationships. Desjarlais for example defines phenomenology as a ‘method of inquiry’ that seeks to describe and understand ‘phenomena as they appear to the consciousness of certain peoples’ (2003: 6). Here experience of the world is re-described as the perceiving of phenomena, and the ‘we’ or ‘us’ that experiences them while living can be delimited as an individual or expanded to incorporate a group or a class. Further, according to Desjarlais’s formulation, phenomena present themselves to us. In doing so they manifest themselves not merely to an experiencer per se but more particularly to their consciousness.

Nevertheless, although Desjarlais’s definition holds true for much of our experiencing of the world, is there not something overly passive in the language? Phenomenology also directs our attention to how consciousness interprets and actively shapes the sensefulness of things for us, in the process bringing meaning to being, and subjectively constituting the significance of phenomena for the self.

In this paper I inquire into how social science should approach this entwining of passive and active perception. One helpful cue comes from the poets Orhan Veli (2010) and Walt Whitman (1986): ‘Istanbul’u dinliyorum, gözlerim kapalı’ (I am listening to Istanbul, my eyes closed), says Veli. ‘I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen, / And accrue what I hear into myself…and let sounds contribute towards me’, writes Whitman. Each indicates how even a ‘passive’ apprehension of the sounds of places is also actively absorptive, here led by the decisive stilling of the body’s movement in perambulating between places. Each affirms that hearing is an event.

But analysis of the entangled relations between activist constitution of the world and the world’s revealing of itself to consciousness can be extended by being re-problematized in different terms. Perception involves a perceiving self. Thus, the phenomenology of perception takes an approach to ‘whatever appears’ that considers the various intentional acts and embodied experiential processes that constitute its significance by and for the self. As we see below, Husserl’s phenomenology rejects a naturalistic science that maintains things are objectively knowable in themselves in favour of one that accepts that entities are meaningful or known only in relation to the temporal purposes and consciousness of the perceiver. By contrast, in objectivism nature is taken to be an object of cognition even as the event of its cognizing is taken for granted.

In critiquing objectivistic philosophy, phenomenology also acknowledges that scientific disciplines teach students a particular way of interpreting the world. Science fosters in novices a collective naturalism, in which ‘nature’, simply out there, is taken for granted, waiting for its fixed routines to be objectively discovered. This being so, the ‘issue’ of perception for social science can be re-described again, this time as the process whereby any individual’s acts of consciousness that subjectively constitute the world unfurl in the midst of their participation in social life that educates them in shared modes of worldly perception.

Of course, the sociological limits of individual perception have always been a concern for social science. How best do we describe relations between the self and the collective? How can we assess the efficaciousness of social forces in partly in-forming our intentions? What does it mean to be a member of a class and thus to possess class consciousness? One influential account of the social fabrication of a constituting self is found in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who writes as a protagonist against phenomenology even while drawing upon its ideas. This paper makes a counter case against Bourdieu’s theorizing of a science of the social structures that govern perception, showing how phenomenology’s discovery of both the natural attitude and of the reduction (or epoche) inaugurates for social scientists a more fulsome understanding of the ways in which both their own perceptions of subjects and those of their interlocutors are personal but not wholly particular to themselves. In brief, this paper seeks to provide an account of perception responsive to its intertwined individual and collective aspects, aspects that reveal how perceivers are simultaneously constituting and constituted creatures. ²

To do so I have divided the paper into three parts. Part I reveals how phenomenology’s conceptual instrumentarium, gained through its exploration of the ‘intelligibility of lived experience’ (Burch, 1989), provides social science with a suggestive language and with useful explanatory ideas for apprehending human engagement with the world. In doing so it affirms that phenomenology has identified certain elementary features of consciousness through which humans constitute or perceive worldly entities, events, time, and situations, etc. (There may be others that it has not noticed.) Phenomenology’s claim is that these essential operations – for example, human consciousness as embodied subjectivity given to us all through ‘having a body as an organ of conscious activities’ (Luft, 2005: 152) – pertain to everyman and to everywoman, despite our differentiating social maleness or femaleness, our specific and inculcated national-ness, and our varying class-cultural subjectivities.

Building upon these themes, Part II concentrates on one of their more controversial elements, the positing of consciousness whose intentions and orientations constitute the significance of the world for the subject. I say controversial because in phenomenology, as in social science, the existence and workings of what Husserl called the ‘transcendental ego’ – and in his last work the ‘transcendental person’ (Luft, 2005: 145) – has been disputed. To clarify how the phenomenological reduction allows us awareness of our subjective perspective, Part II revisits the relationship between the natural attitude and the epoche, arguing that our inconstant moving between them is central to exploring the scope of a perceiving self that is also constituted by the world.

Part III more explicitly turns to social science, drawing out the second level methodological consequences of this phenomenologically informed conceptualization of society and self. Against Bourdieu, here I imagine alternative possibilities for and consequences of ethnographic research, contending that in the first instance fieldwork entails not the suspension of disbelief vis-à-vis the life-worlds of interlocutors but the suspension of belief vis-à-vis the researcher’s own natural attitudes. In this phenomenologically influenced conceptualization of social science, I conclude by arguing that in the relational endeavour of fieldwork, the researcher’s interlocutors themselves are potentially enabled to become ethnologists of their own social practices.

I Phenomenology’s conceptual instrumentarium

Phenomenology’s identification of consciousness’s constitution of the meaning of the ‘world’ through intentional acts and thoughts provides a first crucial insight for social science. Here ‘objectivity’ – the act of positing the sense, value, and significance of things for one’s self – is understood to be constituted out of subjectivity. ‘Phenomenology attempts to describe the origin of meaning as deriving precisely from consciousness, from its meaning-giving acts, from intentionality as a constitutive activity’, says Cohen (1995: xxvii).

Sartre describes the process differently, noting that ‘an emotion is a transformation of the world’, in which the ‘body directed by consciousness changes its relations to the world in order that the world may change its qualities’ (1976: 58, 61). ³ Merleau-Ponty gives the example of an unclimbable rock face: ‘a large or small, vertical or slanting rock, are things which have no meaning for anyone who is not intending to surmount them, [that is] for a subject whose projects do not carve out such determinate forms from the uniform mass of the in itself and cause an oriented world to arise – a significance in things’ (1962: 436; emphasis in original). We can peremptorily state that perceiving the world simultaneously involves constitution of its sense.

A second insight of phenomenology’s exploration of perception is its complementary analysis of inter-subjectivity and of its contribution to our constitution of that world. It is in the centrality of our knowing and perceiving in relation to others – with or against them – that our varying intentions and meanings emerge. In every encounter between individuals, or between individuals and entities, subjectivity generates inter-subjectivity – action, affect, and being oriented to the other. Similarly, in every encounter between individuals, inter-subjectivity generates subjectivity, through individuals’ part-calibration with, or dissent from, others’ posited interpretations of events, speech, and action.

I give one personal example. I am close to my father and see him regularly. His walking frame; his forgetting of conversations unfolding in intimate talk and their clarifying understandings about the world; the degradation of his bodily and perceptual capacities; my holding of his arm; his general ‘shrinkage’ and emotional ‘scaling-down’: all of these are occurring in front of my eyes and through my ears. Alongside his quiet distress and my own sadness, I am also made to confront how such a process concerns myself, his situation forcing upon me a new comprehension of my own temporality and embodied aging – of my own mortality. Finitude and decrepitude are less assertions about being and more truths that I now must cope with even as I am altered by them, truths constituted for me not mainly via my father’s words but inter-corporality, mediated through his body. In establishing the intricate correlation between acts of consciousness and their objects, phenomenology intuits how ‘the perceptual synthesis of the object [is] accomplished by the subject, which is the body as a field of perception and practice’ (Csordas, 1990: 35).

A third contribution of phenomenology to a social science of perception is its awareness that individual-subjective and inter-subjective constitution/modification of the sense of the world is a temporal process, unfolding and emerging in time in the course of experience. A sequence of acts that perceive an (identical) thing under new conditions may either increase one’s intuitive knowledge of that entity or contradict earlier intuitions so that the sense of what is acquired is modified or cancelled (Levinas, 1995: 126). Merleau-Ponty’s example of an unclimbable cliff-face draws attention to how the body’s historic engagement with things (through their use) in turn generates present perception. There is a tension in our perceptions between the influence of the past and the efficacy of the present, each of which are cast in the light of differing anticipations about the future. Thus, to some sure extent the consequences of past inter-subjective relations/events and collective histories continue in the present despite their completion as discrete acts, so that new events and inter-subjective relations are perceived in the light of such previous relations and happenings. ‘Not the intense moment / isolated, with no before and after, / but a lifetime burning in every moment’, says T.S. Eliot (1952).

Yet despite the power of precedence, the unprecedented, too, has force: sometimes a new event (and its inter-subjective content) overwhelms or ruptures the past. In that occasion people may also attempt to make themselves into singular subjects (temporarily or permanently) through participation in or commitment to events or acts that create, distil, simplify, or foreground certain realities for them (Humphrey, 2008). Here the sense of the past may be as ‘emergent’ as anticipations of the future. For Bachelard (1994: 67) ‘consciousness dominates memory’.

In phenomenology this insight into the temporality of perception is also expressed in its idea of perceptual horizons that inform both constitution (sense bestowal) of the world and inter-subjective relations. There are personal horizons of the past (that may also be simultaneously collective) that enter into one’s present perception both as sedimented history of one’s body and as recollections, habits and moods, fostered or unwanted (as when past experiences colour present perception of emotions, say in the dread felt by chronic sufferers of depression at the apparent onset of a new ‘episode’). There are also horizons of the future, present perceptions oriented by future anticipations, hopes, threats, and expectations.

Horizons may also be understood more literally, as in phenomenology’s distinction between the perceptual processes of foregrounding and backgrounding, or its analysis of our extracting a phenomenon from the background which usually accompanies it. Levinas also calls this a movement between focus and ‘fringe’, in which the existence of unperceived or ‘fringe’ properties of objects inheres in the possibility that they may become the central focus of attention. Here ‘to be is to be experienced’ (Levinas, 1995: 149). In brief, foregrounded and backgrounded perceptions of things involve phenomenological modifications in time whereby our intentions change entities’ aspects and meanings for us, so that what Wallace Stevens (1990) calls the ‘seemings’ of things are perceived differently. ⁴

Fourth, a phenomenological social science discerns that individual-subjective and inter-subjective constitution/modification of the sense of the world is also a spatial process, unfolding and emerging in place in the course of experience. As Steinmuller (2019) tells us (citing Luhmann), in losing your keys,

the world transforms into a map of potential key locations. Every place – the pocket of your jacket, the slot behind the sofa, the chest of drawers by the door – is somewhere where the keys could be now, where they have been in the past, or where you might place them in the future. Not only are the spatial coordinates of your world now re-adjusted to the key search, so too are the temporal coordinates: what you did in the moments before you lost your key, and what you will do in the future, only make sense in relation to the lost keys.

Fifth, phenomenology establishes for social science the importance of embodied sedimentations of educated knowledge and skills, given its interest in the training and modification of our conscious attention as contributing infrastructure to a person’s perception of things. For example, imagine musical enskillment in polytonality that trains performers to hear 2, 3, 4 (or more) melodic lines simultaneously. By contrast, think about how an ‘ignorant’ ear may perceive the call to prayer (ezan), aroused by it in some way without understanding Arabic or comprehending the mode (makam) in which it is recited. Or consider how listener expertise in the genre of death metal facilitates intelligibility of its vocalization lines (Olsen et al., 2018). In The Algerians (1962), Pierre Bourdieu names the embodied process of acquiring knowledge ‘cultural apprenticeship’, while Husserl traces it to immersion in a lifeworld. The university values it as a ‘disciplining’ of students’ perceptual knowledge, through which they skilfully learn to insert their discipline’s presuppositions into the world.

Last, and bringing all these insights together, is phenomenology’s discovery of both the natural attitude or natural stance and of the phenomenological epoche or phenomenological reduction. The natural attitude concerns our ‘certitude about being’ (Husserl, 1931: 3) in our ‘effective involvement in the world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: xiv), involving what Husserl describes as our ‘naïveté with which one presupposes that the world is self-evidently in being – given to us by experience as self-evidently already out there’ (1931: 5). The natural attitude assumes the existence of a subject-independent world. It originates in our existential dwelling in the world – pursuing our activities, projects, and relationships – in the living of which we direct our attention to various elements of those activities, entities and relations, even as these modifications in our consciousness lead to the ‘disappearance’ of other of their dimensions. Duranti (2010: 3) redefines the natural stance for social science as ‘the cultural attitude’.

For Husserl, one equivalent of the natural attitude in science is what he calls theoretical naturalism, the conviction that ‘every phenomenon is encompassed within and explained by the laws of nature’ (Moran, 2000: 142). For example, for some forms of cognitive science ‘consciousness’ may be posited to be a natural phenomenon, disregarding the fact that experiential knowledge of its nature relies on the scientist’s consciousness to disclose it. Similarly, disciplines such as anthropology or sociology may also be characterized by a theoretical naturalism, in naively believing in the existence of collective cultural meanings or of cultural representations as ‘things’ in themselves without acknowledging the theorist’s part in constituting them or in making them the factual object of investigation. In each case, phenomenology criticizes forms of objectivism that attend ‘only to what appears and not to the relation of the appearing to the subject’ (Moran, 2002: 2).

Further, different spheres of being or what Husserl called ‘regions’ of the world (i.e. material objects, places, people, ideas, etc.) possess their own ‘specific mode of being an object of consciousness’ (Levinas, 1995: 127). For example, in the natural attitude the constituting acts of consciousness judging the meanings of the actions of other persons presume others’ utterances derive from their intentions, or perhaps from their origins in naturalized psychological categories (i.e. character type; personality disorder). Each presumption naively overlooks one’s own synthesizing achievement in part-constituting the particular significance of their acts. Somewhat differently, our perception and use of place involves the practical utilization of its affordances according to one’s wishes, which involves a certain obliviousness to the constructed nature of places, to the efficacy of their builders’ intentions embedded in them in terms of their attempted conditioning of our actions and relationships. The natural attitude is composed then of a variety of other attitudes, e.g. the spatial attitude, or the psychological attitude.

By contrast, the phenomenological reduction or the phenomenological epoche involves various methods by which we ‘neutralize’ such naivety, first so as to encounter and describe our actual experience of the ‘world’ – the first-person perspective – and second so as to gain a sense of perspective on our [consciousness’s] contribution to its constitution. Thus, phenomenological analysis is two-sided. As Jackson puts it, the phenomenological epoche ‘prepares the ground for detailed descriptions of how people immediately experience space, time, and the world in which they live’ (1996: 12). Yet secondly, it also seeks to thematize the conditions of the possibility of subjectivity and experience (see Luft, 2005: 150ff.).

Merleau-Ponty argues that the question of the reduction was of crucial significance for Husserl, a procedure at the core of his [mature] phenomenology. For Husserl, the epoche puts in question the ‘certitude about being that operates in my experience of the world’ (1931: 5). In doing so, the reduction enables us both to attend to and to part explicate the presentation of the world for our conscious experience – say of my perception of x. If we consider the sounds of the world, for example, the epoche encourages us to ‘step back’ from what is heard and ‘step into’ the hearing of what is heard. Different ‘regions’ of being (e.g. places, people, politics) require their own specific reductions. Yet in each the reduction involves a re-focusing of our attention away from the external entity that we perceive – its existence or objectiveness – to our ‘act of giving [it] meaning, and [to] the meaning and object intended’ (Moran, 2000: 156).

Attending to our perception of x helps us to reflect upon or to part account for the manner in which the perceived entity appears. Thus, the reduction obstructs our taking things (x) for granted. ‘Phenomenology has no other goal than to place again the world of objects – objects of perception, science, or logic – in the concrete web of our life and to understand them on that basis’ (Levinas, 1995: 149). The phenomenological reduction affirms the possibility that humans are at least partially able to discern the horizons – related to intentional achievements, interests, position, desires, knowledge, anticipations, and historical experiences – that insinuate themselves as mediators of our perceptual acts and judgements.

II The constituting self

III Phenomenology, Bourdieu, and social science

The first two sections of this paper have demonstrated how phenomenology’s identification of the natural attitude allows people the possibility of temporal reflection upon it, as well as of more fulsome knowledge of their situation.

In the remainder of this paper I turn more explicitly to social science, to draw out certain consequences of the phenomenological ideas presented above for its methodology and theory. To do so I discuss the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who criticizes phenomenology even while drawing upon many of its themes. Below I engage mainly with Bourdieu’s 1977 book Outline of a Theory of Practice, as my concern is not with the genealogy of his ideas but with what his critique of phenomenology obfuscates. ⁵ Bourdieu’s relationship with and use of phenomenology has been of great interest to theorists, and although here I focus on the issue of description, my analysis builds upon the work of others (e.g. Csordas, 1990; Alexander, 1995; Jackson, 1996; Dosse, 1997; Throop and Murphy, 2002).

In Outline Bourdieu describes the process of Algerian cultural apprenticeship (the becoming of a self) as an inculcating of embodied dispositions via schemes of perception deposited in subjects as members of a class/group, which enable a masterful practical relationship to the social world encapsulated in Husserl’s notions of the natural attitude and life-world. To that extent, Bourdieu’s theory of habitus has phenomenological roots. Yet phenomenology also takes us far beyond it, by incorporating the centrality of the reduction into its account of perception. By contrast, for Bourdieu’s Algerian ‘subjects’ there is no epoche, as Bourdieu re-presents them as unable to reflect upon or recognize the causes or even the operation of their schemes of thought, cognition and mis-recognition. Csordas accuses Bourdieu of making ‘inadequate provision for self-motivated change within the habitus’ (1990: 42).

Similarly, in Masculine Domination Bourdieu doubts the efficacy of subordinated women’s own consciousness-raising efforts as a mode of resistance to masculine domination, because the only effective opposition to the hierarchical order of things is political practice that overturns the structural and material conditions that produce women’s abject consciousness. But how could that overthrow ever occur without some self-modifying of agents’ perceptions about their subordination? The implication for political strategy, as Deranty (2020) notes, is that an enlightened avant-garde has to lead the mobilization of the dominated, a political elite knowledgeable by dint of an epoche concerning the cultivated dispositions embodied in subordinated women agents.

These critical remarks are made as prelude to defence of a particular view of the social science project as informed by phenomenology, understood not as a process that constructs knowledge about other people/peoples either to explain or to save them, but in the first instance as a methodical experience of reduction for the researcher herself. Through fieldwork the researcher gains insight into his or her own natural attitudes via the reduction. To put it another way, fieldwork incites a reduction in the anthropologist’s social attitude. This ‘ethnographic reduction’ (Throop, 2018: 204) occurs in relationships with interlocutors. It is the result, then, of inter-subjective encounter and relationship. Throop describes it lucidly, noting how fieldwork forces ‘shifts or modifications in awareness triggered by intersubjective and intercorporeal entanglements with concrete worldly situations that brings into relief what was formerly merely the unnoticed background of dispositions, propensities, and preunderstandings informing habitual engagements with the surrounding world’ (2018: 207). ⁶

Yet equally importantly for social scientists, because these changes in self-awareness occur in the doing of activities with others, it may also be that over time these particular reductions become available to those others too. Indeed, research as inter-subjective knowledge made through relationships performs its most valuable service for the people researchers work with when, via one’s own sponsored modifications of perception, it also facilitates (in turn) minor alteration of others’ perspectives on a situation. For example, in my learning about spatial politics in Istanbul from ex-militants, specific elements of the research process (interviews, site visitations, attendance at commemorations, ongoing conversations, and the publishing of work in English and Turkish medium journals) facilitate for militants in turn a new perspective on memories and experiences of urban activism, enabling them to perform their own phenomenological epoche in which they gain a modified perspective on earlier constitutions of the city and on their acts of giving it meaning. One learns from one’s collaborators through a mutual and dialogical process of reduction (see Houston, 2020). Through such exchange a more knowledgeable yet still subjective account of the situation might be made. Phenomenology inflected social science thus encourages collaborative visual, poetic, performative or exhibitive ‘outputs’ as products of these processes of inter-subjective exchange. In the process collaborative fieldwork turns interlocutors into fellow researchers while, potentially, turning researchers into fellow activists.

In his last work Joel Kahn (2016) criticizes the normal approach of the social sciences to other people’s experiences of, and religious knowledge about, the divine. For Kahn the orthodox practice of suspending disbelief, via one’s ‘bracketing out’ the question of the truth of the religious contentions of the other – say of their experience that a spirit is speaking through them – is problematic unless one also simultaneously suspends the construals of one’s own social or psychological science that presumes why a spirit is not doing so. This is another dimension of the epoche enabled by fieldwork, its identifying and neutralizing of the anthropologist’s presuppositions that constitute the meaning of phenomena. Indeed, Husserl’s critique of the natural attitude (naturalism) in science and psychology targets scholars’ naivety in presuming that ‘entities’ self-evidently [don’t] exist, while ignoring their lack of attentiveness towards, and apprehension of, them. For Kahn, an openness to the reduction caused by inter-subjective relationships with religious subjects allows researchers to resist their own trained social constructivism that explains away believers’ practices, leading, perhaps, to the possibility of some other encounter or passage across a threshold (see also Baldacchino, 2019). ⁷

By contrast, in the first pages of Outline Bourdieu identifies and criticizes phenomenology for stopping at description of individuals’ natural attitude – for making an ‘account of [their] accounts’ as he puts it – even as he applies certain of its other features (temporality, inter-subjectivity, practicality, the idea of the natural attitude itself) to analyse aspects of Kabyle agents’ social practices. Attacking phenomenology for its mere recounting of natives’ own telling of experience, Bourdieu’s intellectual project is to provide a science of the structures that govern practice, locating the social causes that enable and generate agents’ stories, experiences, and acts. In Bourdieu’s work the perceptions, discourses, and theories of individuals are insignificant, because their ‘everyday practices and preconscious patterns of thought’, as Bourgois and Schonberg (2008: 14) put it, are historically predetermined. ⁸ Rather than the ‘infinite variety of experience’ (Jackson, 1998: 189), or the limitlessness of practices, Bourdieu is more interested in pinpointing the generative schemes and inculcated dispositions that give rise to them. For Bourdieu, ‘objective events [i.e. an insult, or a gift] exert their action of conditional stimulation only on those who are disposed to constitute it as such because they are endowed with a determinate type of dispositions’ (1977: 83, my emphasis).

For phenomenology, however, description of anything is not best or even usefully understood as ‘mere’ accounting of the presence of things or of ‘things as they are’, either by interlocutors or by researcher-witnesses in their accounting of their accounts. Indeed, on the contrary, according to Bachelard, ‘when we describe we merely imagine’ (1994: 120, my emphasis). Description as imagination may equally well be phrased as description as interpretation. ⁹ On principle, then, rather than claiming that a qualitative distinction exists between the phenomenologist’s unquestioning reproduction of the discourse of the Kabyle peasant and the explanations of the Bourdieuian social analyst that accounts for each of their accounts, there is a core compositional similarity between all three respective account-makings. ¹⁰ Each describes, imagines or interprets – as we have seen, the preferred word for phenomenology is ‘constitutes’ – the world for themselves, in intersubjective relationships with others.

Where may we find alternative insights into the work and generative capacity of description or account-making? In his poem Description without Place, Wallace Stevens writes that:

Description is revelation. / It is not the thing described, nor false facsimile. / It is an artificial thing that exists / In its own seeming, plainly visible, / Yet not too closely the double of our lives, / Intenser than any actual life could be/…[Description] is the theory of the word for those / For whom the word is the making of the world.

In brief, description as constitution – by both agents and ethnographers, including Bourdieu – is intenser than the thing itself because the word-worlds or sound-worlds constituted by the imagination are all ‘foreground’. More deliberately intended than the mass of the world in itself, they sing phenomena into new being. Husserl affords social science another language to imagine the world, its effects on us subjectively, and our constitution of it through description. For him acts of consciousness (of the constituting self) create in turn their objective correlates of perception, the world as it ‘comes to appearance in and through humans’ (Moran, 2000: 15; emphasis in original). These correlates are what Husserl calls noema – for example, Jesus according to John, whose account in being read by countless others may inter-subjectively become significant for them also. In their correlation with the actual world, too, noema or descriptions appear not as something solely fabricated by consciousness, but as places revealed in relation to the world.

Conclusion

According to Bourdieu, phenomenology in social science comprises a mode of theoretical knowledge that seeks to ‘make explicit the truth of primary experience of the social world’ (1977: 3). In doing so, however, it becomes complicit in reciting the very language that conceals from a given group the truth about their own social life (1977: 21). Fortunately, Bourdieu is ready to step into the breach: to construct the objective structures that generate both practices and representations.

Nevertheless, despite this claim, in Outline Bourdieu puts certain insights of phenomenology to work. His use of it allows us to bring this paper to a close by suggesting in comparison an alternative, richer appropriation of phenomenology by social scientists. First, we see that in Outline there is no personal point of view, no subjective constitution of the world that grants significance and sense to things, nor any investigation of institutions, events, or cultural practices in relation to their subject-particular or personal-relative way of being given. Instead for Bourdieu’s Kabyles, the sensefulness of the world is bestowed on agents by the group via the depositing in them of the sense of honour. Individual Kabyle act in the world but they are not the source or principle of action. (Accordingly, Bourdieu never personalizes anyone by mentioning their name.) Bourdieu claims that the habitus gives on to infinite practices but his discussion shows the opposite – the generative schemes constrain action more than they enable it, because all exchange relations (women/men, words, gifts) between agents are oriented by a political calculus of domination.

Second, we find in Outline an unsatisfactory social theory of social science. Bourdieu diagnoses how the fieldworker’s ‘relation to the object of his study contains the making of a theoretical distortion’, because he has no place in the system observed. ‘This inclines him to a hermeneutic representation of practices, to reduce all social relations to communicative relations and, more precisely, to decoding operations’ (1977: 1). Bourdieu’s solution is to uncover the generative ‘principles’ of practice, thereby situating analysis ‘within the very movement of their accomplishment’ (1977: 3). Nevertheless, this turn to action does not overcome the identified source of the distortion, the disinterested, outsider status of the scientist. Hoist on his own petard, the fact that Bourdieu, despite being a spectator, knows more about the cause, reasons, and motives of agents’ practices than they do themselves suggests a theoretical distortion of another kind occurs in his work. Some other solution to the predicament of the researcher is required, argued above to involve an inter-subjective methodological reduction that enables insight into the researcher’s own constituting of the world, thereafter potentially leading to modified relations with others.

Fieldwork relationships possess a power to effect in both scholar and interlocutor a new consciousness of the ‘natural attitude’. For Bourdieu only a change in the objective conditions that produce the natural attitude (habitus) allows agents any knowledge of its constituting causes. And yet as our whole discussion has shown, we should not conflate lived experience with the phenomenological method of its analysis. Indeed, to wonder about the way anything that we reckon with is given to us and to others involves a phenomenological reduction. In its careful description of the way the familiar environment appears when we or others are engrossed in it, and in its reflective attentiveness to the very process of perceiving, phenomenology takes practical absorption in the lived-in world as its conscious and perceptible object of study. It discerns how relationships with others provides the researcher with a phenomenological reduction that enables new self-insight, which is fed back to interlocutors through that relationship. In doing so it reveals that the asserted necessity of a ‘break’ from the natural attitude – seen by Bourdieu as an act of science – is too strong a metaphor to describe the more gradual moving in and out of perspectives that a phenomenology of the natural attitude observes.

Positing the inseparability of the ‘natural attitude’, and of the ‘epoche’ that reflects upon it, helps to identify and explore the efficaciousness of social forces that mediate our intentions amidst our accomplishment in bringing significance to people and things. In its identification of a suite of processes that are involved in our perceptual synthesis of the world, I conclude that phenomenology shows that the constituting self and its operationalization of practices should not be conceived too uni-causally, too deterministically, or too collectively. Phenomenological social science affirms that even as subjects are constituted by the world – social scientists too – they also constitute new worlds: descriptions without place; practices beyond context; the inauguration of new understandings or positions; and personal existential truths gained in the crucible of inter-subjective life.