Phenomenology Paper
This is a paper that interrogates your own direct experience with your way of living. I want you to become a kind of ethnographer, like Lee or Sahlin, of your own life.
You will ask three primary questions about your own experience as you live your normal life on a given day and try to dig beneath the surface to richer answers to these questions:
– What do you spend your time doing? Like Lee, make a record of the amount of time you spend on particular activities. Record the actual time spent. You can ignore unusual activity. Try to focus on the predominant activity of your day. Don’t prejudge the relative importance of the activity. Let the time spent indicate importance. As you are watching yourself, try to organize your activity into broad categories, but avoid letting the conceptual categories distort a clear picture of the activity.
– As you are observing your activity, pay particular attention to how that activity connects you to the world and to others. What does that activity “make important”? Are those things actually important? What objects do you use? What are you connected to and in what ways? It might help you to think of the !Kung San as a contrast to help you more clearly see your own situation. How are they connected to the world and each other in their activities?
– Finally, and this is the hardest part, what is at stake in your activities and the connections they establish or fail to establish? What differences in your life or the world does doing or not doing those activities make? Again, comparing your own practices to those we are investigating that are very different may help you see what is at stake for you more clearly.
In this paper, report the breakdown of your primary activity, and then write about the activity you spend most of your time on. What kind of world and person does that activity create? How does that activity locate or anchor you in the world and in relation to others? How does it connect you and to what and with what specific consequences?
This analysis will be a kind of “ethnology.” You’ll be thinking and talking about what kind of things and activities are central to your life, and what those reveal about yourself and what is important in your world; what the point of those things and activities are; what value do they have.
Treat yourself as if you were an unfamiliar culture or kind of person. What conclusions can you draw about yourself and way of life from your observations?
Paper should be 4-5 pages in length.
