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Habit and habitualisation play an important role in Husserl's phenomenology, yet one aspect of habituality has been somewhat overlooked, namely the dimension of authenticity/inauthenticity. While authenticity in Heidegger has received a lot of attention, inauthenticity in Husserl is less well researched, although, as I will show, it is of equal importance to his overall theorising. The central aim of this paper is to explore the authenticity/inauthenticity-distinction in the various domains of habitualisation and to establish its fundamental importance for Husserl. In the first, introductory part of this paper I offer a few remarks on how to understand and categorise Husserl's transcendental take on habits; I also introduce the important distinction between authentic and inauthentic habits and authenticity and inauthenticity in general. In the second part I present the problem of mechanisation as a form of inauthentic habitualisation as it appears in Husserl's phenomenologies of ethics and, more importantly, science. The third part concludes the paper with a reflection on how phenomenology is programmatically aimed against any form of inauthenticity, and on how it might or might not achieve this goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disorientation is a versatile, multidisciplinary concept. Whether associated with its spatial meaning or its non-spatial, more metaphorical sense, various disciplines have used disorientation to describe a broad range of philosophical, cultural, and social phenomena in the last decades. However, the focus on the concept from an emotional perspective remains scarce. To expand the current investigation on the topic, the present paper attempts a first approach to conceptualize disorientation as an emotional experience from an interactionist perspective. The paper reviews the previous literature, provides theoretical background and a working definition for the concept, and examines prototypical situations that are potentially disorienting for individuals, emphasizing the social and situated nature of the disorienting experience. The paper also comments on the relationships between disorientation and culture and points out some implications of the concept in mental health and psychological distress. Altogether, the paper argues about the value of disorientation as a powerful construct to gain insight into what, why, and how traumatic and everyday situations as well as current cultural and social challenges impact people emotionally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper means to demonstrate the theoretical-and-methodological potential of a particular pattern of thought about culture. Employing an end-means and absolute value plus concept of reality approach, the continuous model of culture aims to embrace from one holistic standpoint various concepts and debates of the modern human, social, and political sciences. The paper revisits the fact versus value, nature versus culture, culture versus structure, agency versus structure, and economics versus politics debates and offers the concepts of the rule of law, state capitalism, a dialectical model of progress, and interpretative qualitative research, as well as of cultural diffusion, autonomy, alienation, and individuality. This model distinguishes between the ideal-symbolical and the instrumental functions of culture, sees culture as being sewn from universal binaries, and provides a certain understanding of the cognitive function of a value judgment, with positivism so far vague about the topic. It, too, suggests an extra method for investigating culture(s): the comparative literature study of culture(s) enables social science to view literature as its potential in-depth interviewee-a case for arguing for a certain conception of interdisciplinarity as well. In addition, it predicts that cultural particularism or individuality remains an essential factor of human existence. Analyzing the issue of Eurocentrism in social science, the model finds modernity's concept of reality to be involved in 'methodological' intellectualistic reductionism, characterizing it since the empiricism/rationalism origination. Systematically confusing the universal oppositions in a Eurocentric manner, intellectualism becomes a contributing factor in unfolding post-modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the 'cultural dope,' an ironic reference in Harold Garfinkel's Studies in Ethnomethodology to the rule-following actor in conventional sociological theories. In the nearly half-century since the publication of that book, the 'cultural dope' has been incorporated into numerous criticisms of 'models of man' in the human sciences. Garfinkel's account appeals to many writers because it seems to present an alternative picture of the actor: an individual who is self-aware, reflective, and skilled in the conduct of daily affairs. A problem with such a generalized picture of the actor is that it may seem to encourage uncritical acceptance of whatever 'the public' (or a broad segment of the public) happens to believe or support. This paper revisits Garfinkel's account of the cultural dope, and contrasts 'conservative' and 'radical' readings of what Garfinkel does with that figure. The 'conservative' reading leaves the edifice of a social-structural model largely intact, and provides an alternative, more complex, picture of individual action than that of a cultural dope. The 'radical' reading places relevant social structures in a dependent relation to the contingencies of action, and thus destabilizes the very theoretical edifice that sets up the problem of how to integrate individual actions with stable social structures. In line with the 'radical' reading, this paper suggests that Garfinkel creates serious difficulty for any generalized 'model of man,' regardless of whether it portrays the individual as active or passive, well-informed or ignorant, or reflexive or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can a phenomenology of culture be at the same time a philosophy of culture? In other words, can a descriptive exploration of acts and objects of culture serve at the same time as a critical reflection on those acts and objects? Or does cultural critique imply a separate and additional task, that of a normative examination of the explored cultural phenomena? What would be the founding values of such an examination? How would it be established? Furthermore, what would be the importance of recognizing the distinct nature of this task compared to the exploratory-descriptive one? How would the two tasks relate to one another? Finally, is a full-fledged philosophy of culture, i.e. a critical exploration of cultural phenomena, needed? And if yes, why? These are the questions addressed by this paper. Answers are sought in a close examination of the work of Ernst Cassirer which involved both a phenomenology of cultural forms as well as an attempt at their normative-critical evaluation. And yet his work was criticized by many for its lack of an ethical dimension, a critique endorsed by another phenomenologist of culture, Alfred Schutz, whose work itself was accused for being non-critical. Beginning with a presentation of these two phenomenologies of culture this paper examines closely the charges directed against Cassirer's comprehensive philosophy of culture, namely, its idealism and its a-moralism. Through this examination the paper aims to shed light on a number of issues pertaining to the questions formulated above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of my paper is twofold. First, I show how the notion of phenomenal field can be used to examine, describe and understand particular collective patterns pertaining to the everyday domain of our common social experience. Secondly, I outline the role of the notion of “phenomenal field” in ethnomethodology. I briefly discuss Gurwitsch’s notion of functional meaning. After presenting the argument, I show “the locally achieved ordinariness of a common task”, that is the lining up of the player of the two teams in the pitch, as an embodied coherence of figural contexture in its empirical perceptual details, as Garfinkel says. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a historical and biographical perspective, this paper examines the structural elements and cultural signs of contemporary social events and problems in Turkey in order to understand their basic features. Hermeneutics is used in order to understand contemporary Turkey by way of its historical background and prominent biographies. Two basic epic texts were interpreted using Gadamarian hermeneutics with the help of key concepts such as gaza1 and gaza cult. Semiotics is used to examine key concepts as binary opposites. Dialectics is used to understand these concepts as the unity of binary opposites coexisting at the same time and place. It is concluded that the contemporary cultural values and biographies explored are linked to their historical past and Islam seems to be more influential on hybrid identities than on ethnic status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnomethodologists (or at least many of them) have been reticent about their theoretical sources and methodological principles. It frequently falls to others to make such matters explicit. In this paper I discuss this silence about theory, but rather than entering the breach by specifying a set of implicit assumptions and principles, I suggest that the reticence is consistent with ethnomethodology‘s distinctive research ‘program‘. The main part of the paper describes the pedagogical exercises and forms of apprenticeship through which Garfinkel and Sacks aimed to develop ethnomethodology as a practice. These efforts were not entirely successful, partly because ethnomethodological ‘practice‘ required an engagement with other fully-fledged practices. Aside from the difficulties of mastering such practices, it was unclear what an ethnomethodological study would add to, or take from, them. Whether successful or not, ethnomethodological research points to the specificity of discourse and action in any given practice which a general theory is bound to misconstrue. Current disputes about cultural constructivist versions of natural science illustrate the problems that arise when the terms of a general theory are used to describe and evaluate specific domains of practice. The paper concludes by recommending ethnomethodology as a way to dissolve an unbridgeable gap between cultural theories and socially located practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnomethodological studies of work attempt to examine ordinary activities for the ways in which they exhibit observably and accountably competent work practice as viewed by practitioners. Because it is the analyst's task to describe activities as viewed by practitioners, qua practitioners, two methodical problems must be solved. The first problem is how the analyst can know and describe the members' point of view. Because members display their point of view to each other, the problem can be formulated as the question of how the analyst can identify members' displays. This is the problem of observability. The second problem is how the analyst can make a distinction between activities done by practitioners, qua practitioners, and other activities. How can the analyst for instance, distinguish `talk as work' from 'talk at work'? This is the problem of specificity. This paper's aim is to critically examine the ways in which ethnomethodology manages these two problems. First, the concept of the 'occasioned corpus of setting features' is discussed. Next, two examples of ethnomethodological studies of institutional work are examined. It is argued that these studies fail to provide an adequate description of the specificity of the work studied because both disregard practitioners' orientation to the requirements of institutional accounting and reporting. Finally, it is discussed how practitioners' orientations to institutional criteria can be made observable in the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this text, I discuss the concept of culture that ethnomethodology suggests. First, I will review the sources that Garfinkel refers to: While he draws heavily on Parsons' conception of culture, he also criticizes it with reference to Schütz. I start the second part with examining Garfinkel conception of ethnos—that suffixes 'ethnomethodology'—to then present six salient dimensions of the ethnomethodological conception of culture: (1) recognizability; (2) normatively interspersed knowledge and cooperative continuation; (3) familiarity and trust; (4) indexicality and vagueness; (5) practice; and (6) fractality and fragmentation. The text ends with some thoughts comparing the ethnomethodological notion of culture to other conceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of our article is to review the widespread anthropological figure, according to which we can achieve a better understanding of humans by contrasting them with animals. This originally Herderian approach was elaborated by Arnold Gehlen, who characterized humans as “deficient beings” who become complete through culture. According to Gehlen, humans, who are insufficiently equipped by instincts, indirectly stabilize their existence by creating institutions, i.e., complexes of habitual actions. On the other hand, Maurice Merleau-Ponty shows that corporeal relationship to the world is already indirect because it is based on preestablished and readjusted “standards” or “norms” of interaction with the environment. Merleau-Ponty then calls these norms “institutions” and views culture as readjustment of institutions which operate already on the level of corporeal existence. The anthropological figure of confronting humans and animals thus cannot produce, as in Gehlen, a contrast between an allegedly “direct” relationship to the world in animals and a supposedly “indirect” relationship to the world in humans. The Herderian approach can be meaningfully retained only if interpreted as an invitation to confront the norms of indirect interaction with the world in animals and in people, that is, if viewed as a comparison of their respective institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article culture is understood as the ensemble of systems of classification, assessment, and interaction that establishes a basic community of values in a given social field. We will argue that this is made possible through the institution of fundamental prohibitions understood as mythical points of closure that set the last frontiers of that community by designating what crime is. Exploring these theses, we will see that criminal transgression may be thought of as the actualization of a rigorous otherness. This otherness, however, is nothing but the culture itself in its extreme vectors, its contradictions, and residues. From there we will differentiate three types of crimes: paroxysmal, archaic, and impossible. And we will conclude that the criminal question it is not a 'social problem' among others. Rather, it is a fundamental crossroad where the very constitution of any culture is at stake. It is the question of the beginning and end of the societal order and its subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple disciplines have contributed to acculturation research with aims to measure, conceptualize, and theorize this complex phenomenon. Few studies, however, have attempted to find meaning in how acculturation is lived and, this lack may have contributed to acculturation being understood as a construct removed from human experience. The purpose of this article is to show how a research methodology based on phenomenological epistemology can humanize the understanding of the acculturation experience. This contribution is demonstrated in a study that used a phenomenological approach to describe and elucidate acculturation as a lived experience in the context of Latina adolescents who emigrated from Mexico to the US. Thus, this article illustrates how the phenomenological approach used in this study allows new meanings of acculturation to be experientially revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is concerned with the central issue of philosophical anthropology: the relation between nature and culture. Although Rousseau was the first thinker to introduce this topic within the modern discourse of philosophy and the cultural sciences, it has its origin in Diogenes the Cynic, who was a disciple of Socrates. In my essay I (1) historically introduce a few aspects of philosophical anthropology, (2) deal with the nature-culture exchange, as introduced in Kant, then I (3) relate this topic to the Ancient Cynic Diogenes. Surprisingly, although we usually identify Critical Theory and Freudian psychoanalysis as theories that have shown that cultural progress should not be comprehended as a development from nature to culture, and that instead it should be conceived as a development from culture against (external as well as internal) nature, I show that Cynicism can be conceived as a vivid example within the history of our culture that reveals a double sense of repression and alienation, which is part of human civilization and mankind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first part of this essay it is contended that Schutz's project is best called the philosophical theory of the cultural sciences; in the last parts it is shown that he offers satisfactory rudiments of a theory of the historical sciences except where the differentia specifica of those sciences is concerned. The central part is devoted to women's liberation as a case of “contemporary history” in relation to which Schutz's thought about the historical sciences needs correction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural activity is characterized as the cultivation of the self in the course of diverse acts and plannings for action. Philosopher Alfred Schutz's way of understanding human being as situated by engagement in the social world of work provides a more plausible basis for affirming the self as morally, politically, and epistemically responsible which determines what whether self determines language or vice versa thinking. The evidence provided by the conduct would be that people determine what they want to say. More generally, the self uses language to carry out its purposes. In sum, the self is cited in language and owes its being to its being said. The difficulty with this understanding of human being is paradoxically similar to that which troubles an understanding based in sight. If the self lives in and by means of what it sees or says, there is no way of understanding how it can perceive and speak the novel. In other words, the sensory world does indeed delineate the self by providing the things, events, and deeds that are the visual content of our lives. Likewise, language does indeed delineate the self by providing a grammar, syntax, and vocabulary that permits and limits ability to speak about anything including and especially, the ability to speak about the self. One sees in terms of sameness and difference, for each item in the environment is somewhat similar, and somewhat different, may be frustrated by the linguistic tools available to carry out their wishes for expression, they muddle through creating and changing words and modes of speech to suit their needs. Schutz's concept enable to theorize the self as pre-eminently practical rather than theoretical.

The article discusses the linguistic and phenomenological contributions to theory of culture. The status of the concept of the culture in the social sciences is far from clear. In discussions of the concept there is general agreement on its symbolic character and cognitive function. With regard to the contribution of culture to the organization of social life, especially in comparison to non-symbolic factors, there are many different accounts, ranging from those which stress that symbolic functions directly and significantly affect the structure of society, to those which attribute a minor, even derivative, influence to symbolic functions. The article argues that the major theories of culture and symbols too narrowly construe symbols by considering them only as conceptual phenomena, in so doing they disregard the evidence for the perceptual locus of symbols, as phenomena of experience. The article also discusses the crisis of modern culture. According to the article in societies where crises of modern culture have reached an advanced stage individuals often seek to retrieve symbolic experience of moral values and social virtues by intensifying their participation in personal relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents views of the author with respect to the opinion expressed by structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss on the requirement of having a separate place for anthropology. His structural anthropology presupposes the unity of reason and the permanence of human nature. His method approaches the understanding and explication of the formation, maintenance and transformation of human societies and cultures in terms of "deep" structures operative in all human intellectual activity. Social behavior, cultural beliefs, traits or customs are not formative of human thought as sociologist Emile Durkheim's work suggests but the reverse. Strauss would like to distinguish structural anthropology from philosophy and science. According to the author anthropology is not bound by any cultural prejudices. According to Levi-Strauss, the anthropologist must transcend the value norms and standards of judgment of his own society and become completely objective in his analyses so that he may take a levelheaded and unbiased view of other cultures. Strauss is willing to grant that there are many worlds and many levels of reality, i.e. many possible myths and he seems to have made up his mind about which myth is correct. But this is inconsistent with the allegedly unbiased and unprejudiced approach that his structural anthropology espouses.

In this article, the author explores the foundational meaning of culture. By "foundational," the author means that which is constitutive of particular ways of experiencing the world that comprises the human conditions of everyday life. To suppose that attitudes, values, etc. are either logically constructed by a recurring kind of evaluation of conditions, or that they are somehow magically "internalized" beforehand in the same forms in which they find expression, is on both accounts to miss that human beings are rooted to the world in ways deeper than the appearances and expressions of situated experience. It is precisely the original substrates of experience in which human beings figure into the world, within which it is originally accessible in all modes of perception and conception, are what the social sciences must refer back to for qualitative apprehension of the dialectic between man and world. The pregiven sense of the objective world is a sedimentation of the dialectic, and, as such, forms the dynamic foundations for the continuing interaction between self and world.

This article attempts to assess "the reality strategies" of modern Western culture. The features selected for analysis are not necessarily the most accessible or distinctive. The author approached culture as a repository of ideas and sentiments rather than as a storehouse of events, and intended to examine particularly those precepts, which most directly refer to the notion "metatheory." "Metatheory" precedes both fact and theory, and is best understood as belief, sentiment, or intuition. Metatheory appears in a variety of forms, such as one's presystemic notions concerning the moral nature of the species, the species' historical fate and its psychic evolution. Indeed, the agglutination of a number of metatheories gives us an immediate and unreflected understanding of the viewpoint of a certain culture. A classical metatheory is the notion of purposive history, which has become essential to the social, philosophical and religious thinking in the West. The metaphor of imminent growth, of inescapable universal progress, has become one of the cornerstones of modern intellectual endeavors.