Abstract
Late in his career Schutz showed some interest in cultural anthropology, but did not begin to develop a theory of it. Nevertheless, such a theory can be begun through comparison with other social sciences and drawing on texts for ethnography and ethnology where disciplinary definition, basic concepts, and distinctive methods are concerned.
[A]n anthropologist who would describe the ceremony of a primitive tribe merely in terms of overt behavior without any reference to its subjective meaning could not decide whether this ceremony is a preparation for war or just a dance in order to honor a deity, for a barter trade or for the reception of a friendly ambassador. (PP 138)
Embedded citations refer to works of Schutz listed at the end of this chapter.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Boston: Pearson Education, 2006. Hereafter: M&W.
- 2.
At the end of Part III of this anthropology textbook there is also this listing of these “Key Concepts”: “authority, band, banditry, big-man or big-woman system, clan, confederacy, critical legal anthropology, critical military anthropology, faction, feuding, influence, in-kind taxation, law, legal pluralism, nation, norm, policing, political organization, power, segmentary model, social control, transnationalism, trial by order, tribe, and war.”
- 3.
Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2001.
- 4.
Schutz also refers to the fundamental hypothesis of naturalistic science according to Husserl: “In the world perceptible by our senses, changes in the spatio-temporal positions of solids, changes in their form and fullness, are not accidental and indifferent, but they are dependent on each other in sensuously typical ways. The basic style of our visible immediate world is empirical. This universal, and indeed causal, style makes possible hypotheses, inductions, and predictions, but in pre-scientific life they all have the character of the approximate and typical. Only when the ideal objectivities become substituted for the empirical things of the corporeal world, only when one abstracts or co-idealizes the intuitable fullness, which is not capable of <direct> mathematization, does the fundamental hypothesis of the entire realm of mathematical natural science result, namely, that a universal inductivity might prevail in the intuitable world, an inductivity which suggests itself in everyday experience but which remains concealed in its infinity” (I 129). Concerning the greater danger in how the idealizations, i.e., typologies, in the social sciences can similarly be substituted for real things, see I 138.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Works of Schutz
Works of Schutz
Note: Unless done otherwise, the following works will be cited with the embedded abbreviations as listed down the left margin below, plus the page number(s).
I = Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. I, The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962).
II = ––––, Collected Papers, Vol. II, Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Broedresen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964).
III = ––––, Collected Papers, Vol. III, Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, ed. Ilse Schutz (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966).
IV = ––––, Collected Papers, Vol. IV, ed. Helmut Wagner, George Psathas, and Fred Kersten, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996).
V = ––––, Collected Papers, Vol. V, Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, ed. Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011).
VI = ––––, Collected Papers, Vol. VI, Literary Reality and Relationships, ed. Michael Barber (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013).
PSW = ––, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967).
PP = –––––, “Positivistic Philosophy and the Actual Approach of Interpretive Social Science: An Ineditum from Spring 1953,” Husserl Studies, Vol. 14 (1998): 123–149. Reprinted in Dermot Moran and Lester Embree, eds., Phenomenology: Critical Concepts in Philosophy, 5 vols. London: Routledge, 2004, III, pp. 119–145. Also available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/t52u22v305u28g04/
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Embree, L. (2015). A Schutzian Theory of Cultural Anthropology. In: The Schutzian Theory of the Cultural Sciences. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 78. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13653-0_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13653-0_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-13652-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-13653-0
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)