Epoché
摘要
This chapter traces my engagement with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology from my initial encounter with it while still working as a professional musician in Canada to my ongoing efforts to explore how phenomenological and anthropological insights can generatively speak to one another. More specifically, I argue that Husserl’s method of bracketing the “natural attitude” (epoché) provides us with important insight into what makes ethnographic practice generative as a form of knowledge production. In making explicit something that ethnographers are already doing, the concept helps provide theoretical and methodological clarity to otherwise unexamined processes that are generative of ethnographic modes of knowledge production. Important relations between philosophical and anthropological forms of thinking also disclose themselves through such an analysis. Just as Husserl’s phenomenological method of bracketing was meant to destabilize the taken-for-granted quality of our everyday world, thereby opening the possibility of generating new insights into the conditions that make possible human modes of worldly existence, the ethnographic epoché allows us to see the phenomenal world in ways that had not been previously available to us, in the process, disclosing aspects of our ongoing intersubjective, intercorporeal, and worldly situatedness.