Existential Anthropology

The Chapter considers what is implied in the being-there of the ethnographer in the field. in particular it focusses on the role of moods - notably the pathos of estrangement - and postures assumed in response to such moods in the processes of truly and emphatically "arriving" in the field. In other Words, the chapter attempts to disclose the existential conditions of possibility of the being-there in place in the field that is presupposed in participant observation.

As a result of focusing on other themes, anthropology hasn’t developed sophisticated theoretical tools to analyse individuals. The philosopher Ernst Tugendhat has proposed a theory of the individual. In this article, the author tries to fathom in how far Tugendhat provides a useful template for an anthropology of the individual. In view of this aim, the author tests Tugendhat’s theory with empirical anthropological studies, in which individuals play a major role, and with Albert Piette’s writings on the individual. By confronting Tugendhat with these anthropological writers, he shows that Tugendhat’s theory covers a significant part of how anthropologists perceive the individual, but he also identifies those points in Tugendhat’s theory that might need to be elaborated further. Finally, the author tries to show that explicit reflection on the nature of individuals enables anthropologists to give more differentiated accounts of individuals.

Au commencement, les Homo sapiens ne croyaient pas. Un jour, certains ont commencé à croire à des choses incroyables, en tout cas difficilement croyables, par exemple que des morts vivent. A partir de là, c'est l'hypothèse de ce livre, une manière humaine d'exister s'est progressivement façonnée. Celle que nous connaissons et qui est marquée par l'interférence permanente de la présence et de l'absence, de l'engagement et du dégagement, du majeur et du mineur, les uns et les autres si caractéristiques des humains. Comment l'Homme moderne va-t-il continuer à évoluer ? En augmentant ses facultés d'activité ou ses facultés de passivité ? Pour poser ces questions, pour tenter d'y répondre, ce livre met en résonnance les sépultures de la préhistoire, des autoportraits de l'auteur en train de croire, une réflexion anthropologique et une interrogation éthique.

Even better: the butinage metaphor might help us make real progress in thinking beyond binary notions of religion/secu larity and religion/nonreligion-sornething that scholars call for in principle but struggle to achieve in practice. To construct another example, butinage helps us grapple with the career of someone who sometimes attends a place of worship----who finds the spaces, smells, and ideas, ethics, or aesthetics found therein somehow salient-and who also harbors materialist notions ofexistence that maybe color their experiences. as well as shaping, for example, their bodily experience of ifiness and pain (cf. Asad 2003). We can imagine and describe, too, the cross-pollination of religious and nonreligious "flowers": a person might, for example, participate in activities of religious traditions that they perceive as "exotic" andbe influenced both by the contours of those traditions and by their sense of oth erness from them (Lee 2015). Or, on the other side ofthe coin, we can describe the way in which nonreligious identities are shaped by the individual's knowledge and experience of particular religious cultures (Davie 2013). Even though such cxperiences are commonplace-the norm, even-we often find ourselves trying to force them into single religious or nonre ligious categories, bitterly contesting the 'tme" identity of an actor as one or other. Thinking with butinage is potentially an effective way of extricating ourselves from these intellectual and scientific cul.-de-sacs.

What if war is not simply a destructive force? What if war might also
offer possibilities of regeneration? What if war harbours potential for
self-becoming, for realizing one’s dreams, and for fulfilling one’s
desires? The inquiry at hand suggests that Danish warriorhood has
been revived with Denmark’s military engagements in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Addressing this fundamental transformation of the
Danish soldier’s operational role and social identity, this article argues
that there are Danish troops who seek out war in Afghanistan as an
existential window of opportunity for following their desires to
become ‘truewarriors’ and thereby regenerate themselves as ‘authentic
individuals’. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with some of the
very last Danish combat soldiers deployed with the International
Security Assistance Force (ISAF), this study explores ethnographically
how these Danish ISAF troops give voice to and act upon their warrior
dreams over time – before, during, and after a tour of duty in the
Afghan Helmand Province. The article shows that there are Danish
soldiers who become disillusioned by war – not because of any
barbarity, but because of the virtual absence of any real acts of
combat. As such, the inquiry bears witness, on the one hand, to
how some Danish soldiers have their warrior dreams shattered by
what turned out in their case to be a relatively uneventful war and, on
the other hand, to how a few of these troops attempt to mend their
broken warrior dreams by returning to war for a second chance.

Existential Theology: An Introduction offers a formalized and comprehensive examination of the field of existential theology, in order to distinguish it as a unique field of study and view it as a measured synthesis of the concerns of Christian existentialism, Christian humanism, and Christian philosophy with the preoccupations of proper existentialism and a series of unfolding themes from Augustine to Kierkegaard. To do this, Existential Theology attends to the field through the exploration of genres: the European traditions in French, Russian, and German schools of thought, counter-traditions in liberation, feminist, and womanist approaches, and postmodern traditions located in anthropological, political, and ethical approaches. While the cultural contexts inform how each of the selected philosopher-theologians present genres of “existential theology,” other unique genres are examined in theoretical and philosophical contexts, particularly through a selected set of theologians, philosophers, thinkers, and theorists that are not generally categorized theologically. By assessing existential theology through how it manifests itself in “genres,” this book brings together lesser-known figures, well-known thinkers, and figures that are not generally viewed as “existential theologians” to form a focused understanding of the question of the meaning of “existential theology” and what “existential theology” looks like in its varying forms.

What is existential anthropology, and how would you define it? What has been gained by using existential perspectives in your fieldwork and writing? Editors Michael Jackson and Albert Piette each invited anthropologists on both sides of the Atlantic to address these questions and explore how various approaches to the human condition might be brought together on the levels of method and of theory. Both editors also bring their own perspective: while Jackson has drawn on phenomenology, deploying the concepts of intersubjectivity, lifeworld, experience, existential mobility, and event, Piette has drawn on Heidegger’s Dasein-analysis, and developed a phenomenographical method for the observation and description of human beings in their singularity and ever-changing situations.

La mort d'un proche provoque un sentiment d'abandon que le temps, seul, permet parfois d'atténuer. Mais est-il possible de définir ce temps lié au deuil, d'en distinguer les étapes ? Albert Piette nous y invite dans ce très beau livre où le récit intime croise l'analyse scientifique. Confronté à la mort de son père, l'auteur, anthropologue, va mettre en place tout ce qui constitue ses croyances pour remédier à l'absence et maintenir le lien avec la personne disparue. Tour à tour ses convictions religieuses, son goût pour l'écriture, pour l'anthropologie, pour la recherche dans différents domaines liés à la mort, à la résurrection, sont explorés pour ne pas laisser le néant et l'oubli recouvrir le souvenir. Albert Piette livre ici un récit étonnant où la réflexion anthropologique et l'expérience personnelle tentent de comprendre les réactions de l'être humain face à la mort et d'analyser des espaces aussi privés que le deuil et la croyance.

Gestalt Therapy techniques are considered to be powerful tools for the remobilization of human growth and change. I will attempt to show that the power of these techniques lies in the fact that they are effective ways of dealing with our "internalizations". I will first briefly review object relation theory and then discuss gestalt techniques as they pertain to internal objects.

Drammaticamente l’essere umano si è avviato verso una mentalità “cosificatrice” dell’uomo, costruendo una società che nega valori e tradizioni. È in questo contesto che hanno avuto luogo i grandi drammi della storia: i totalitarismi, l’annichilimento della persona e il nichilismo. Di fronte ad una “nevrosi collettiva” in cui l’uomo vive angosciato e disilluso a causa della mancanza di un significato, la logoterapia di Viktor Frankl guida alla (ri)scoperta del significato ultimo dell’esistenza e del senso presente in ogni situazione della vita. Fondatore della Scuola di Analisi Esistenziale riconosciuta come “Terza Scuola Viennese di Psicoterapia” dopo la psicoanalisi di Freud e la psicologia individuale di Adler, Viktor Emil Frankl ha vissuto personalmente la deportazione nazista ed attraverso la sua esperienza ha potuto testimoniare contro la concezione deterministica che vede l’uomo come prodotto delle condizioni biologico-sociali: l’uomo invece può essere condizionato dagli eventi esterni ma non determinato. Il lavoro svolto è incentrato sul concetto di libertà di atteggiamento che ha l’uomo di fronte ad una situazione di dolore, e sull’incondizionata necessità di un significato perché sia possibile sopportare la sofferenza; così facendo si propone un’immagine di uomo come essere-in-cerca-di-significato in quanto essere spirituale che mira al trascendente.

La dissertazione ruota attorno al quesito principale: Che cos’è l’uomo?

Da qui scaturiscono le domande che rivestiranno l’intero discorso antropologico: può l’uomo vivere dignitosamente in ogni circostanza? Può sopportare la sofferenza? Che atteggiamento deve assumere l’uomo di fronte al dolore?

Ma soprattutto, esiste un significato nella sofferenza?

In this paper, I present a Maya legend of travelling saints and people searching for their home. The story shows the ways in which a sense of belonging is contested, recreated and sustained within the context of place and pilgrimage. I argue that to understand such a narrative, a phenomenal and existential experience associated to particular collective memories and performances must be taken into consideration in addition to historical, political and cultural backgrounds.

بر اساس دیدگاه وجودی، ما انسان ها از کسانی که دنیا را با آن ها سهیم هستیم، جدا نمی باشیم. تربیت عقاید شخصی ما تا حد زیادی از والدین ما سرچشمه گرفته اند. بنابراین، ما باید از کسانیکه در طی سالیان سال بر طرز فکرمان تأثیر گذاشته اند قدردانی فراوانی به عمل آوریم. کتاب حاضر مجموعه ای از آثار مربوط به روابط وجودی می باشد. این کتاب نتیجه کار گروهی با چندین نویسنده می باشد، کسانیکه به طور محسوس و مستقیم الهام بخش ما در گردآوری مجموعه حاضر بوده اند. ما (امی ون دورزن و یاکوو) به طور مشترک در مورد تألیف این کتاب برنیامدیم زیرا به دنبال مجموعه ای با خصوصیات متفاوت بودیم. از همین رو بر آن شدیم این کار را با مشارکت چندین مولف و در نظر گرفتن تجارب و دیدگاه های متفاوت انجام دهیم. مشارکت در این کار فرآیندی آزاد بوده و در مقایسه با کار انفرادی، نتیجه بدست آمده راضی کننده تر بوده است. ما از درمانگران وجودی مجربی که فصول این کتاب را نوشته اند بسیار سپاسگزار هستیم، به خصوص به خاطر تعهدشان در ارائه زمینه های جدید کار در درمان وجودی و همچنین به خاطر صبر و حوصله فراوانی که از همان ابتدای کار که ایده های گرد آوری این کتاب پرورش داده می شد تا مرحله چاپ از خود نشان دادند. به هرحال، افتخار واقعی این کتاب به گذشتگان تعلق دارد: از سقراط گرفته تا بودا، از ارسطو تا یاسپر، از کی یرکگارد تا سارتر و از کامو گرفته تا نیچه. اینان افراد بزرگی هستند که ما بر گفتار خردمندانه آن ها تکیه کرده ایم و دِینی بی حد و حصر به آن ها داریم. امیدواریم در این کتاب مطالب گذشتگان به نحو مطلوب ارائه شده باشند و در همین حال برای آیندگان نیز مطالب ارزشمندی به جا گذاشته باشیم.

Our lack of awareness of Being results in bewildering experience. The intrinsic inner radiance, the inner light of Being arises out of primordial luminous spaciousness, the unbound openness of unbound pure potentiality. When this primordial ground of Being is veiled and obscured by the lack of experiential awareness, we can be locked into dualistic experiences, and consequently the non-dual nature of the field of Being is experientially foreclosed. The sense of indivisibility of all phenomena and awareness is experientially foreclosed. The capacity to see into, feel into and see through the lucidity of phenomena as the very field of Being becomes foreclosed and densified. We then live contained in mind alone. There is no experience of the field of Being. Without the field of Being we easily become things and objects both to our self and to others.

Este trabajo presenta elementos conceptuales para elaborar una aproximacion existencial a a etnografia. Las principales influencias de esta propuesta se relacionan con el pensamiento filosófico de Heidegger y Sartre, asi como de las ideas desarrolladas
por la antropologia critica y reflexiva, la antropologia de la experiencia de Victor Turner, y el posmodernismo antropologico. Se discuten las vinculaciones existentes entre el Ser, la Existencia y el lenguaje para la descripcion y analisis de la practica etnografica en el mundo contemporaneo. Se pasa revista a la constitucion ontologica del sujeto-etnografo desde los inicios de la disciplina hasta el presents. Asimismo, se brinda una definición existencial de la antropologia y de su momento experiencia.1, la etrnograiia, como un desplazamiento ontologico por el espacio del Mundo. Esta practica supone la posibilidad  de concretar una praxis no alienada, donde la estructura dual del sujeto-etnografo (un
individuo historico y un 'espacio metodologico'), se unifique en lo que Bob Scholte denomina ‘reconciIiaci6n existencial’. Finalmente, se postula la necesidad de un nuevo espacio intersubjetivo que supere al individuo autonomo y cerrado de la etnografía tradicional.

In this article, the philosophical-anthropology of St. Thomas Aquinas is examined. In particular, the non-dualistic aspects of his anthropology are explicated and shown to have the potential to provide an underpinning for a holistic approach to psychology. In the course of this examination, parallels are drawn between Thomism and existential-phenomenology. The article concludes with an exploration of the ways in which a dialogue between existential-phenomenology and Thomism might benefit both traditions of thought, particularly as regards their relevance to metapsychology.

We have two ways of knowing. Our mind knows forms, things, both subtle and gross. Faces, hands, buildings, trees, math formulas, mind knows subject and the mind knows otherness. The mind knows dualities, the mind knows me and you, us and them, and this and that. Mind knows time, mind knows the past, the present and the sense of the future. The mind knows things and entities, the mind knows beings, infinite numbers of beings and things. The mind knows difference. The mind thinks conceptually, feels affectively, imagines through imagery, the mind has sense and the mind has memory. The mind knows dualistically.

In the Gudyargarbha tantra there is this most wonderful verse. Appearances, sounds, and thoughts are the diety, mantra and the state of dharmakaya. What this wonderful language brings forward into our awareness is the amazing understanding that self liberation is the direct experiencing of the appearing of appearances.

A person's own inner most awareness and the movements within their awareness field bring forth their direct personal experience of their cosmological archetypal field of awareness. This spontaneous event is given to us within the archetypal realm of awareness. The archetypal dimension manifests itself as us, and reveals itself to us through our experience of its self-manifestation.

Timeless awareness is the essence of Dzogchen. Time experienced within timeless awareness is also an expression of the essence of Dzogchen. Dzogchen is an ancient form of Tibetan mystic humanism. Dzogchen makes the essential distinction between mind and awareness. A person can be located in mind alone and locked in time. As a person shifts from being located in mind alone (mindfulness) and goes beyond mind alone (mindfulness), one becomes aware of their own awareness. As we focus our awareness on our own innermost awareness, vast dimensions of awareness begin to open and self-reveal its nature to us. Awareness is a multidimensional experience and this awareness is infinite in its horizons. The innate qualities of awareness are spaciousness or openness or emptiness. Another quality of our awareness is luminous radiance and still another is awareness as energy. Awareness is alive and is both vast stillness and unceasing movement. The Union of Mind and Awareness When a person is able to experience the union of their mind and their awareness, then the person has a simultaneous experience of being in time and in timeless awareness. The mind is the place of thinking, feeling, sensation, memory and imagination and the mind is the mode of knowing singularity and difference in the world. This is the realm of ordinary knowingness and this is the realm of duality. Our mind is the realm of time. This time bound knowing is the knowing of you and I, us and them, this or that in time and place.

Issue of The Humanistic Psychologist (Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 1988, 278 pp.) "Existential analysis" was introduced to the English reader in 1958 with the publication of Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri Ellenberger's Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology. While Erwin Straus, Viktor von Gebsattel, and Eugene Minkowski were cited as pioneers in "Psychiatric phenomenology," Ludwig Binswanger alone was named founder and representative of "existential analysis," a new school of psychoanalysis built upon the edifice of Martin Heidegger's (1927/1962) early ontology. Subsequent texts (Spiegelberg, 1972; van den Berg, 1972) have followed suit, discussing Heidegger's influence on psychiatry with primary reference to Binswanger, either ignoring the distinctive contribution of Medard Boss altogether or giving him curiously short shrift in comparison to his colleagues.

In the summer of 2013 at the Tibetan Center in Poolesville, Maryland the great Lama YangThang Rinpoche gave instruction on the practice of the great compassion, or as he described the practice, as being the practice of Absolute Compassion. The instruction was to extend the light of awareness into the world and into the cosmos. Extending the light of awareness into the present moment of a person, extending the light of awareness into the past time of the person and extending the light of awareness into the future time of the person. This truly is the great practice of the great compassion and everyone can practice this extension of the light of awareness. This very proactive praxis brings forth the light within us and fills us with the light of the field of awareness. It is great to practice this vast practice. Of course it takes a boldness of intention and passion of heart. Extending the light of our innermost awareness into the present of those we love, and into the past of those we love, and then extending the light into their future of those we love is self-liberating. The light of awareness illuminates experience, metabolizes experience, opens us into un-bound awareness, undoes fixated-ness, and brings forth luminous intensity. The light of awareness is pure potentiality. The same practice can be used with those whom we hate or dislike or whom disgust us. This practice of extending the light of awareness deepens our own experience of becoming aware of awareness. As we practice extending the light of awareness, awareness itself completely opens up for us and deepens our experience in depth and breath. In time we begin to experience the true secret of this praxis. Timeless awareness begins to be experienced by us and sustained by us. Timeless awareness is the

English: This book addresses, from an anthropological and historical perspective, nurtured by  postcolonial perspectives, the main principles and features of the Western Argentine Qom (or Toba) ontology. This chronicle integrates as a subtle and aesthetically oriented whole, both narrative and conceptual genres of writing, which show how Qom being-in-the-world was constituted historically. In so doing, it stresses the main events that shaped their collective memory, the role of the State in the construction of the “Indian”, and the centrality of dreaming as a key experience-place in which social reality is interwoven in its deepest meaningfulness. Simultaneously, it is a critical assessment of the current practice of ethnographic fieldwork, not only in the Chaco region but also elsewhere, wherein its proper becoming shows a collection of ideas, plans, failures and contradictions in applying  pure scientific and Western categories of knowledge and reality. Qom religious horizons are explored which are integrated by shamanism, Catholicism and Pentecostalism, plus creole traditions of curanderismo. Also, through the help of pictures of powerful beings of the Qom pantheon made by Angel PitaGat, a dear Qom friend from the Tacaaglé indigenous colony, in Eastern Formosa province, some of the main principles of Qom world view and cosmology are iconically presented and discussed.


Spanish: Este libro es una aproximación, desde la antropología y la historia, a las principales características y elementos de la ontología de los qom o tobas del oriente de la provincia de Formosa. A través de un estilo de crónica, en donde la narración y el análisis conceptual profundo se integran con sutileza y sentido estético, se entra en el mundo toba explorando como se constituyó históricamente su ser-en-el-mundo, qué eventos impactaron en su memoria, cuál fue el papel del estado en la construcción del “indio”, y qué importancia tiene el sueño como experiencia-lugar clave, en donde la realidad social se teje en su significación más compleja. Simultáneamente, se reflexiona sobre la práctica del trabajo de campo etnográfico, en donde su mismo devenir ilustra las consistencias y contradicciones que una investigación concreta va planteando.
A través de una estructura formal novedosa, la obra integra material visual del mundo qom, experiencias shamánicas y de las iglesias autóctonas o Evangelio, junto con documentos históricos de distintos tipos, los cuales abren espacios para la dialéctica de la pregunta y la respuesta, que se orienta a sentar las posibilidades de una filosofía intercultural. Esta implica crear puentes para entender, en definitiva, cómo la historia, en sus detalles y contingencias, se pliega en las existencias de los qom.

Donald Winnicott's radical existential psychoanalytic understanding of transitional awareness and transitional relatedness is an amazing and little used doorway for today's psychotherapist and psychoanalyst. In today's cognitive clinical culture we have become cognitions tampering with cognitions. Life as cognition. Existential Ontology Winnicott's creative understanding of our capacity for transitional awareness and transitional relatedness intertwines both our personal psychology and our innermost experience of our own existential ontology. Transitional knowingness intertwines both our mind and our primordial awareness field. Our field of awareness knows the field of Being since awareness is the field of Being. Transitional awareness intertwines both our mind and our psyche. Donald Winnicott's phenomenological understanding of the self radicalizes our sense of self from being a representational picture or cognitive affective schema or synthesis of disparate psychological part's to a fluid sense of self as a direct experiential felt sense of ongoing continuity of Being. Our knowingness though the medium of awareness, opens for us the direct knowing of the experience of Being. The experience of Being is for us our sense of natural spirituality. Our liminal transitional awareness field opens us into the immediate ongoing intimate experience of Being. This experience of Being is of Being within our very own self and of Being within our very own relational life-world. Ordinary Personhood We, as a most ordinary person, can experience the unfolding movement of the experiencing of Being within our own self as our self, and simultaneously, the unfolding experiencing of our own being as the being-ness of Being which is the Being of the world. As we experience the Being .

is obscured because of the compelling actuality of our dualistic experience within the dualistic forms of phenomena. Phenomena is compelling! Our indivisibleness within each other and our indivisibleness with Being is obscured and made invisible by the dramatic compelling experience of the different range and forms of our experience such as pleasure and pain, happiness and horror, anxiety and relational yearning, sex and death, starvation and torture, to name a few.

Based on an interpretation of the work of martin Heidegger, this article offers a shift away from social and cultural anthropology, which explores sociocultural aspects, and also from general anthropology, which aims to summarise all dimensions of human being. the author defines the specificity of existential anthropology: observing and conceiving human beings as they exist and continue to exist towards death. With a few twists in relation to Heidegger's thought, the author discusses what is theoretically and methodologically at stake in this perspective, opening existential anthropology to a large empirical field.

The focus of Dzogchen practice is to experientially understand the nature of our awareness through awareness itself. To be nonconceptually aware of the nature of our awareness is rig pa or open presence.The root or the source of all phenomena is Presence. This word presence is often used by 14th century Longechenpa as well the contemporary Namkai Norbu and many dzogchen masters as the signifier of ground of being, the ground as presence. Contemporary Christian philosophers influenced by existential phenomenology, such as Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner, describe the ground of being and ground of presence as Divinity. In Dzogchen philosophy descriptors are added such as the divine presence, luminous presence, radiant presence, pure presence, immaculate presence.

Ce livre est le fruit d’une expérience unique : l’auteur a été filmé par Catherine Beaugrand et Samuel Dématraz, sans interruption, pendant 12 heures. Il présente la description aussi précise que possible de tous les instants privés et publics, sans aucune coupure, du petit déjeuner au dîner, en passant par les trajets en RER, les conversations avec des collègues, les heures d’enseignements et les moments vides. Ces descriptions sont suivies par des commentaires sur le volume humain, ses modes de présence, ses actes, son style, ses détails, ses changements et sa continuité au fil de la journée. L’auteur propose des concepts et des réflexions sur ce qui pourrait constituer l’anthropologie comme science de l’homme. C’est comme s’il y avait deux disponibilités, constate Albert Piette, l’unité humaine sans discipline, et l’anthropologie, sans objet qui lui soit propre, une sorte de mot fourre-tout ou synonyme de sociologie. En postambule du livre, l’auteur s’interroge sur ce que serait les fondements de l’anthropologie. Il convoque alors, non plus Hérodote, mais Aristote et, au fondement métaphysique, il ajoute un fondement artistique, en commentant Rilke sous forme de conseils à un jeune anthropologue. Ainsi au fil des pages se précisent les principes d’une telle science de l’homme que l’auteur ne veut pas séparer d’une éthique, une « éthique du volume » selon ses mots, dans laquelle il s’interroge sur ce qui existe et sur ce qui n’existe pas : ce qui lui permet d’attribuer une valeur centrale à l’être humain et à chaque singulier.
Le livre commence par une préface de Catherine Beaugrand.

Clinical psychology is an area that, since its historical genesis, as heir to the medical model, has been permeated by theoretical, epistemological, methodological and ideological impasses that impose certain difficulties in defining its scientific status and in fulfilling its social function. The theoretical and methodological contributions of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), an existentialist philosopher, put into question many of these dilemmas, pointing out innovative solutions. Sartre began his theoretical forays by formulating propositions in the field of psychology, insofar as he understood, since the beginning of his studies, the importance of this knowledge in defining the anthropological basis of modern society. However, he turned to philosophy for the technical need to better base his propositions for that science. In this way, Sartre problematized psychological discipline to its core, reformulating it in ways totally different from those hitherto existing. Hence the importance of Sartre's contributions to the area, since, by enabling a new clinical perspective based on his psychology, he places himself as a fundamental instrument for research and intervention in the existential and psychological problems of the contemporary subject.

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Embodiment or embodied awareness is a way of understanding the body. The body is not simply the external body, the body is the lived body. Both the 10 th century Kashmir philosopher Abhinavagupta and the contemporary French phenomenologist Merleau Ponty have a similar view of the lived body, or better 'lived' embodiment. A person may have a most beautiful external objective body but minimally lived in. Embodiment allows us to understand and conceive of the body as a way of living, experiencing and of perceiving through the medium of our embodiment. The body is the medium of the field. A person perceives not simply through eyes and ears alone, but through the whole body. Our body is an instrument of perception. Our body is an instrument of knowingness. The embodiment of awareness is the lived embodying of primordial awareness that liberates our being in the world. The embodiment of awakened awareness pulsates in resonance with and within Being itself.

The word Emptiness has many various meanings. The experience of awareness becoming aware of its own self opens the experience of emptiness in a most direct manner. Experientially emptiness has many faces. Sometimes the face of emptiness is a void or abyss like experience. This abyss can open the unhappy experience of falling and falling and falling. This void experience can at times open the experience of disappearing and dissolving into a terrifying nothingness. And sometimes emptiness is experienced as no thingness. Sometimes emptiness is experience like endless and infinite space. Sometimes emptiness is experienced as unbound openness. Sometimes emptiness is experienced as deep unmoving stillness, stillness of movement and stillness of sound. Sometimes emptiness is experienced as bliss, vast bliss. All these variations of experience unfold over time as one becomes aware of their own awareness. Sometimes emptiness is experienced as freedom of pure potentiality. Often the word sunyata implies the experience and nature of emptiness. The personal experience of emptiness is a vast range experience often beyond words and language. The human range of experiencing emptiness is vast and ineffable. The experience of emptiness can range from nihilistic experience that can not be thought to the positive experience that is unbound bliss as gnosis. This wide range of meaning of emptiness is not only personally experiential but there is vast range of the historical cultural unfolding of the appearance of emptiness and articulation of emptiness by the various spiritual traditions. Over time the phenomena of emptiness has been articulated in various ways, and at times in ways that are in opposition to each other.

What is amazing is that the unfolding of our felt sense of ongoing continuity of Being and the felt sense of the continuity of our sense of self is a convergent experience. Our very sense of self and our very sense of Being are intimately and ultimately the same experience.

How is it possible to approach the philosophical question of existence in an anthropological manner - that is by observing and describing moments of being and modes of human experience among lines suggested by existential anthropology? Pursuing this question requires a certain distance from traditional sociocultural paradigms. In discussing Michael Jackson's and Albert Piette's bodies of work, I offer an understanding of existential anthropology as a literary though nonfictional description of life as lived. I argue that existential anthropology is based less on theoretical foundations than on an epistemological project and posture. Its project is to describe moments of being. Its epistemological posture may be characterized by a withdrawal from the level of cultural representation in anthropological understanding and an engagement with the relation of a human being to the world, which is fundamentally equivocal.

How Non-being Haunts Being reveals how the human world is not reducible to “what is.” Human life is an open expanse of “what was” and “what will be,” “what might be” and “what should be.” It is a world of desires, dreams, fictions, historical figures, planned events, spatial and temporal distances, in a word, absent presences and present absences.

Corey Anton draws upon and integrates thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Bergson, Kenneth Burke, Terrence Deacon, Lynn Margulis, R. D. Laing, Gregory Bateson, Douglas Harding, and E. M. Cioran. He discloses the moral possibilities liberated through death acceptance by showing how living beings, who are of space not merely in it, are fundamentally on loan to themselves.

A heady multidisciplinary work, How Non-being Haunts Being explores how absence, incompleteness, and negation saturate life, language, thought, and culture. It details how meaning and moral agency depend upon forms of non-being, and it argues that death acceptance in no way inevitably slides into nihilism. Thoroughgoing death acceptance, in fact, opens opportunities for deeper levels of self-understanding and for greater compassion regarding our common fate. Sure to provoke thought and to stimulate much conversation, it offers countless insights into the human condition.

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781683932840/How-Non-being-Haunts-Being-On-Possibilities-Morality-and-Death-Acceptance

Phenomenology is the study of different kinds of giveness, the giveness of experience.There are various ways of being open to experiencing the world and the phenomena of the world. The phenomena and the objects of the world and the world itself can be experienced and perceived more or less directly and more or less in the present. The phenomena, the objects of the world and within the world as the world, can be experienced more or less in breadth and depth, and more or less in obviousness and more or less in subtlety. The world can be experienced more or less in translucidity and more or less in darkness, and more or less in openness and more or less in hiddenness, and more or less concealed and more or less unconcealed. There are many ways of experiencing the world and objects of and in the world which are the appearances of the world.

""In recent decades, human experience has become focus or frame for a wide variety of projects in psychological anthropology and beyond. Like 'culture,' which it arguably seeks to either qualify or displace, the concept of 'experience' has generated its own interpretive literature, competing schools of analysis, and internal resistances. We propose that the anthropology of experience has achieved a degree of recognition and maturity that renders genealogical reflection, stocktaking, and agenda setting both possible and necessary.
Although the anthropology of experience, like experience itself, does not (and perhaps should not) lend itself to easy definition as a singular or unified theoretical paradigm, it does involve a fluid constellation of themes shared by what are traditionally regarded as parallel or divergent lines of inquiry: what might be glossed imperfectly as the phenomenological and psychoanalytic schools within sociocultural anthropology. Here we aim neither for naıve synthesis nor a mathematical sum of parts, but for more adequate ways of depicting and making sense of what Dewey calls 'the inclusive integrity of "experience."’ This will require more concerted attention to the sources of ethnographic inquiétude—the gaps, silences, limits, and opacities—that either preoccupy or remain overlooked within both traditions." [experience, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, phenomenological anthropology, psychoanalytic anthropology, inquiétude]""

"A seminal ethnographic account of northern Uganda and the LRA war; an excellent analysis of the complex dynamics at play." —Amy C. FInnegan, Contexts

[An] insightful, compelling ethnography. . . . Finnström has important things to say about ethnographic intimacy, the phenomenology of fieldwork, and the universality of culture as human existence. The book offers a fine example of the merits of local, detailed ethnographic knowledge for understanding civilian life in a warzone, as well as glimpses of the emotional connections an anthropologist forms with informants and collaborators.”—Catherine Besteman, American Ethnologist

“[Living with Bad Surroundings] combines rich ethnographic detail with sharp theoretical acumen. . . . [A]n important text.:—Alicia C. Decker, International Journal of African Historical Studies

“I recommend it to anyone wanting to understand the problematic side of Africa. It reads more like the writing of a good and thoughtful war correspondent rather than a traditional social scientist. It what is useful and appropriate for understanding the world of contemporary northern Ugandans whom the author clearly liked and cared about.”—T.O. Beidelman, Anthropos

“Finnström’s analysis of the factors involved in the devastating conflict in Northern Uganda between the Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is a valuable contribution to the literature on contemporary armed conflicts. . . . Finnström’s careful examination is essential for students, scholars, and practitioners who want to understand the political, economic, historical, cultural, and religious complexities involved in ay armed conflict.”—Joanne Corbin, African Studies Review

“As well as being a valuable text for anyone interested in contemporary Africa and issues such as ethnicity, property rights, post-colonialism, and the relevance and continuation of tribalism, Living with Bad Surroundings is a powerful analysis of relations between stakeholders within the modern nation-state.”—Justin L. C. Hancock, Australian Journal of Anthropology

“This is a moving, politically engaged and penetrating study. It has . . . page-turning qualities. . . . If you are going to read just one book on northern Uganda, this is the one to go for.”—Tim Allen, Africa

“Through a more explicit engagement with the ambiguities and unfinishedness of lived experience, ethnographies like Finnström’s Bad Surroundings may thus offer more than philosophy alone in making sense of governmentalization and subjectification as they unfold through individual, collective, and political life.”—João Biehl and Ramah McKay, Anthropological Quarterly

“This is a highly accessible anthropological study of Northern Uganda and the LRA. It is useful in part because it establishes the colonial legacies though which the Acholi came to be marginalized in Uganda and stereotyped by the international community. Rather than basing his account on simplistic explanations like ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ between the Acholi and other Ugandans, Finnström provides a rich array of interviews with Northern Ugandans that touch on cultural, historical, and political aspects of the war. In particular, he highlights the voices of young people, whom he says ‘did not passively wait for outside solutions; rather, in everyday life they built for a future despite displacement and social unrest.’”—Kristin Rawls, Christian Science Monitor

“[A]n important contribution to the corpus of literature on structural violence and the lived experiences of war. This book will be a useful read for courses focusing on armed conflict, displacement, ethnographic methods and/or African studies.”—Julia R. Hanebrink, African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review

“Living with Bad Surroundings is written with sensitivity for the historical background of the Acholi people and their day-to-day realities. It highlights the impact of colonialism, independent Ugandan government regimes established after independence from Britain in 1962, and the local peoples’ expectations and realities. . . . The author writes with an ethnographer’s perspective, providing a fresh viewpoint on the war.”—Habiba Chirchir, Anthropological Quarterly

“This book is rich in detail and nuance, and challenges dominant discourses on the war in northern Uganda. It links the historical, international dimension to the lived experiences of the Acholi people. . . . [A] major book on everyday lived experiences in wartime. It adds to scholarship that interrogates colonial orthodoxies as well as academic writings that have produced stereotypes inimical to nation building. Finnstrom’s book is necessary reading for students of the Acholi, African wars, and Uganda.”—Steven Arojjo Obbo Ofumbi, Journal of Contemporary African Studies

“This complex and empirically rich account clearly and very tactfully analyses the harsh realities of the war. . . . [Finnström] vividly challenges the reductionist view that focuses on consequences of war rather than causes.”—Sarah Khasalamwa, Journal of Refugee Studies

“[T]he book is still impressive in its historical and analytical scope, and is not only very readable, but also moving. The narrative voice vividly evokes the inter-subjectivity of the ethnographic experience. Living with Bad Surroundings is an essential reference for studies on northern Uganda, and is also accessible to a wider, non-specialist readership. The work also provides a valuable contribution to the ethnography of conflict as well to literature challenging the ‘breakdown’ paradigm of displacement.”—Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon, African Affairs

“At times poetic, often philosophical, Finnström brings the reader to a new level of insight into war and its effects on the lived realities of affected persons—and how and why it is possible for people to survive the impossible day by day. Equally important, he vividly connects these personal stories to the political domain, unveiling, as each chapter evolves, the politics that divide people.”—Erin K. Baines, African Studies Review

“Living with Bad Surroundings . . . [is] a very good book, perhaps the best written on northern Uganda since the 1970s. It will be an ideal text for courses dealing with Africa and the local realities of modern armed conflicts.”—Tim Allen, Times Literary Supplement

“This subtle, sensitive, and sophisticated ethnography adds enormously to our understanding of contemporary northern Ugandan society and, more broadly, of everyday life during ‘low-intensity’ warfare. . . . This book is very good indeed and should find a wide readership among social anthropologists, Africanists, and students of conflict and violence.”—Mark Leopold, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

The dissertation consists of an introductory essay and six chapters, that together form an integrated narrative arc that begins with a critical phase (“Introductory Essay”, chapter one), that is succeeded by a programmatic phase (chapters two, three, four) and ends with a case-oriented phase (chapters five and six).
The introduction sets the stage for the rest of the work by giving a brief account of the relationship of the general project to, on the one hand, the anthropology of ethics and morality and, on the other hand, philosophical anthropology and existential phenomenology. After this, the introduction undertakes a preparatory, yet thorough critique of the anti-Durkheimian discourse that played a major role in the inauguration of anthropology of ethics. Through a close reading of Durkheim and Kant coupled with a discussion of notably Laidlaw’s arguments for going beyond anthropology as a Durkheimesque “science of unfreedom”, it is pointed out that the problematics of freedom that anthropology of ethics struggle with are grounded in an existential problem of transcendence, that is not explicated in the theoretical debates—this lack in conceptual clarity leads to several conceptual impasses in anthropology of ethics that must be overcome.
The first chapter: “Value, Virtue, Dwelling: Critique of the Guiding Concepts in Anthropology of Ethics” takes off where the exposition of the problem of transcendence ended. Guided by this problem, the task in this article is to submit to critical scrutiny three concepts—value, virtue and dwelling—that each in their distinct ways mark the investigations of the ethical in anthropology of ethics. First, the critique of the concept of cultural values explores the existential undercurrents that sustain our posturing toward values and that make us susceptible to the demands they put to us. Secondly, the anthropological variations of virtue ethics are critiqued with respect to their focus on the role of reflectivity in ethics. While reflectivity is granted some importance, it is concluded that taking reflectivity as the conditio sine qua non of ethics leaves in the shadows those existential dynamics of transcendence by which ethical actors come to find themselves emplaced in certain places calling for action. Thirdly, the critique turns explicitly toward the question of how ethical processes are themselves engaged in providing place for human existence. Here notions of dwelling are subjected to scrutiny. These critical procedures finally indicate a tentative definition of ethics as an existential quest-for-place that unfolds in processes by which human beings take place qua singular human beings in places of communitary dwelling. Concluding on the findings in the three critical vignettes, the article expands on the three problematic perspectives that respectively calls for the dissolution of the dichotomous schemata of ordinary/extraordinary, individual/collective, passivity/activity by foregrounding (i) the liminal character of ethics and the places of the ethical, (ii) that ethics always takes place under singular circumstances because ethical actors are singular, finite beings, and (iii) that the definition of what counts as ethical phenomena must be expanded from the merely active and reflective to count also such phenomena as pathos and postures.
The second chapter: “The Ēthos of Responsive Existence: Outline of a Philosophical Anthropology of Ethics” endeavors to put forward a programmatic, philosophical anthropological framework for the investigation of the ethical that pursues the notion of ethics as quest-for-place under the guidance of the existential characteristics (liminality, singularity, the emplacing registers of transcendence; pathos/postures) identified through the critical procedures in the first article. The second article assumes the philosophico-anthropological hypothesis that the human being is a responsive being and that the processes of human responsiveness come to the fore especially saliently in ethics and ethical experience. In order to appreciate the richness and depths of these existential registers of ethics a reevaluation of the notion of ethics is called for. After a short discussion of the analytical resources of traditional moral philosophy in light of the notion of responsiveness, the archaic topological meaning of the word ēthos is reintegrated in the notion of ethics. Now ēthos is no longer taken to mean psychological “character”, but rather existential abode, and the meaning of ethics shifts accordingly from having to do primarily with the formation of settled psychological dispositions on the basis of cultural contexts, to denoting instead communitary practices pertaining to the re-settlement of ontologically enabling human abodes. Ethics in this sense of quest-for-place qua repetitious re-settlement can be spelled out further in terms of grounding processes of ēthical delimitation that originarily draw the limits which bring forth the fundamental differences (wise/imprudent, good/evil etc.) within which alone ordinary ethical practices and deliberation can navigate.
The following chapters spell out this program in more detail as regards its ontological and methodological implications and work through several concrete case studies.