Existence in the Details: Theory and Methodology in Existential Anthropology. Translated by Matthew Cunningham [1 ed.] 9783428546770, 9783428146772

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Anthropology, Existence and Individuals Volume 1

Existence in the Details Theory and Methodology in Existential Anthropology

By

Albert Piette

Duncker & Humblot · Berlin

ALBERT PIETTE

Existence in the Details

Anthropology, Existence and Individuals Edited by Dr. Jan Patrick Heiss, Zürich Prof. Dr. Albert Piette, Paris

Volume 1

Existence in the Details Theory and Methodology in Existential Anthropology

By

Albert Piette Translated by Matthew Cunningham

Duncker & Humblot · Berlin

This book is published with the subsidy of the University Paris West Nanterre

Bibliographic information of the German national library The German national library registers this publication in the German national bibliography; specified bibliographic data are retrievable on the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

All rights reserved.

© 2015 Duncker & Humblot GmbH, Berlin Typesetting: Klaus-Dieter Voigt, Berlin Printing: buchbücher.de gmbh, Birkach Printed in Germany

ISSN 2364-8791 ISBN 978-3-428-14677-2 (Print) ISBN 978-3-428-54677-0 (E-Book) ISBN 978-3-428-84677-1 (Print & E-Book) Printed on no aging resistant (non-acid) paper according to ISO 9706

Internet: http://www.duncker-humblot.de

To Charlotte “I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it.” (Albert Einstein)

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

11

Part One Wholes and Particularities

16

A critique of the operation of the social sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. The “good” sociological object . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Cultural ethnography and interactional ethnography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

16 16 21

II. Leftovers of details: a photographic experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

33

III. What is the minor mode of reality? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

39

I.

Part Two Existence and Days

45

Displacement and continuity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

45

II. Plurality, laterality, singularity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

55

III. Existential anthropology: from sociology to non-sociology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

63

I.

Part Three Presences and Intensities

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“Entering into” presence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

68

II. Reposity chart and intensitometry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

72

III. Mitigated humans: what can be concluded? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

86

IV. Phenomenographic paths for analyzing presence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

90

I.

8

Contents Conclusion

I.

99

An ontology of the individual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

II. Minima . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 III. Where is “society”? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 IV. A narrative of origin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

Figures, Tables and Charts 1: Gilles’ figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

37

2: Two types of observation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

45

3: Reposity Chart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

77

4: Reposity chart (driving a car) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

79

5: Table of intensitometries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

83

6: Reposity chart (with intensitometries) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

85

7: Pie chart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

86

Introduction This book invites readers to circulate among leftovers, sometimes among leftovers of leftovers abandoned by the social sciences after their process of data filtering and selection, those remainders that did not resist the observation, conceptualization or writings of sociology or social anthropology. This book is an anthropology book. This seems to me to be beyond doubt. But it is not a social or cultural anthropology book on a group, on an activity, actions or interactions. Let’s say it is a work of existential anthropology. When readers reach the end, I would like them to be convinced, if they are not already, that existential anthropology has confirmed that it exists and that it can exist with methods and concepts1. Historians of philosophy could explain that for a long time, this discipline was a debate about essences and categories. Anthropologists could themselves also think that their discipline has its own “essences”, that is to say themes and perspectives that allow them to side-step existence: societies, cultures, social issues, representations, structures, but also, more recently, activities, actions, modes of expression and even non-humans. What is anthropology? It is doubtful that the answer consists of a strictly sociocultural definition. When Merleau-Ponty evoked the crisis of philosophy in the 1930s, he noted that one of the lost causes was that of existence (Merleau-Ponty 1997: 39). In anthropology, especially in France, the impact of Lévi-Strauss’ thought has made this an impossible task, so virulent was his contempt for the individual and empiricism, the situation and the “me”, which he deemed only suitable for a “shopgirl’s philosophy” (Lévi-Strauss 1961: 62). Is not the genius of anthropology, in all its still current expressions, to have ignored, dissolved or forgotten human beings in their most unique possession: the fact of existing? Is this the price that had to be paid to create science, whether social or biological? Anthropology is certainly one of the rare fields that has let its “subject” drift away to the point that the discipline is no longer the equivalent of the etymological meaning of its name. This being the case, it is not tautological to speak of an anthropology of human beings, as it would be if one spoke of the zoology of animals or the “botany of plants”, to borrow Heidegger’s expression (1996: 46). Observing the human, considering the human! The hu1 I thank the Research Commission of the University of Paris West and the Centre for Ethnology and Comparative Sociology (CNRS – University of Paris West) for their subsidy.

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Introduction

man, a human, several humans: the social sciences have chosen their “articles”. Always humans clarified in their social and cultural specificity: assembled, grouped humans in their social synthesis (classes, social groups, etc.) and/or cultural synthesis (cultures, systems of representations, thoughts, etc.). This is the work of the social sciences: sociology, social and cultural anthropology. Though they use different theories and methodologies, they ultimately constitute one, single social science maintaining the illusion that there are differences between them by means of their lack of contact, their bibliographical independence, or through the geographic compartmentalization of their subjects or work themes. This perspective implies that it is humans (in varying numbers) who are observed together, grouped in the analysis according to assimilated, “same-ized” characteristics presented as shared by all. It is also humans studied in their links, relationships, connections, interactions and activities. Observation, description and analysis therefore focus on the inter-human, since the entity to understand is the action, the relationship, or the interaction. And when the focus of the observation is placed on humans, this is done with a view to quickly grouping them into an appropriate set. When I decided to go into anthropology, it was in order to observe and consider the human being, not “togethered” humans, cultural differences, or social relations but “separated” humans and the human in general. This is of course another set2. And it is certainly possible to meet these initial objectives through work that involves grouping and then comparing humans. But this is only done very rarely. Few social anthropologists think in terms of universals. One cause of this scarcity is that comparative and theoretical acts that can say something about humans are performed on the basis of human sets, quickly losing sight of the humans themselves for the benefit of a sociocultural synthesis. This book tries to stick to the line: one human, different humans, the human. It presupposes bringing the focus back onto humans, one at a time, in a situation, to compare humans as part of an attempt to consider the human, ideally presuming that the final comparison must be made as late as possible, so that at the moment of observation, the resulting collective perspective does not absorb individual singularity. This would be the ideal of an anthropology of existences. This individual right here, the one who exists, is he not more that the sum of various psychological, biological, social and cultural characteristics? He is existence, he exists. I will relate this book to a few quotations. “It is a very great fault in a painter,” Leonardo da Vinci writes, “to repeat the same motions in figures, and the same folds in draperies in the same composition, as also to make all the faces alike” (Leonardo da Vinci 2004: 48). This takes us straight to the heart of 2 This does not imply giving more meanings than necessary to the term “species”, which Darwin viewed “as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other” (Darwin 2006: 34).

Introduction

13

observation methods. What does the eye capture when it observes? What does it see? And how? Close up or far away? In general or in detail? How are details incorporated into the work of constructing the object? On a photographic image of any scene, all of the different faces would necessarily appear, but what do specialists in the social sciences make of them? They probably would not see them. And even if they were to base their work on photographs and filmed images, as their research progressed they would risk very quickly losing sight of each person’s small differences. Recording everything that happens, getting through all the data: this concerns gestures just as much as mental states. Photo or film images are of course decisive because they enable gestures and movements to be spotted, but also from these images interviews about states of mind to be realized. In existential anthropology, it is a matter of spotting, writing and representing the detailed richness of instants of presence. This is discernible not just horizontally, in gestures peripheral to the situation’s central activity, but also vertically in the always fluid, nuanced and changing experience of human beings. “I do not portray being, I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another, or, as the people say, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute”, Montaigne writes (2003: 740). In a footnote to his Essays, he explains that he does not create a portrait, a static analysis of himself, but he gives his observations from day to day – and observations on his variations. Passing, continuity, here-and-now existence that continues, coming from various situations and continuing towards other situations: these set themselves up as themes that seem impossible for a traditional ethnography of specific situations and activities. “I was thinking appurtenances,” writes Sartre, “I was saying to myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that green formed part of the sea’s qualities. Even when I looked at things, I was miles from thinking that they existed: they looked like stage scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance. But all that happened on the surface. If anybody had asked me what existence was, I should have replied in good faith, that it was nothing, just an empty form which added itself to external things, without changing anything in their nature. And then, all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself.” Existence is as if “in excess”, according to Sartre’s expression. In any case, it is more than an effect of expression or an effect of categorization, as can be read in various recent writings in the social sciences that nevertheless highlight the ideas of existence and the existent. Existence is an extra; it, too, seems to be a leftover, one that is not reducible to the “pooling” of the social sciences, not reducible to the logic of belonging or the effects of relations. The details of the faces remind us of this. Existence is unique; it is that of this man, of that woman. In this book, I set out three different exercises I undertook during my fieldwork in Belgium and France: the observation of a single individual in his day-by-

14

Introduction

day continuity, the observation of gestural details that have no relevance to any situation, and the observation of modes of presence in an activity. For each of these, I will present an empirical work, not really for its own sake, but in light of the theoretical reflections it entails, as well as the epistemological critiques and conceptual propositions it enabled to construct. Making a shift is not easy. This is what I want to show in this book, which is presented as the construction of an existential anthropology, an anthropology of existences. Existential anthropology, as an empirical and theoretical branch of anthropology, is in its beginnings3. It presupposes a radically critical approach of the social sciences, as well as a methodological and conceptual inventiveness that it must take care to maintain. These are the objectives of this book. But why existential anthropology? Is there any subject more important than suicide, when it is question of the human condition? “There is but one truly philosophical problem,” Albert Camus writes, adding: “Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest – whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories – comes afterwards” (Camus 1955: 4). We could say that there is only one really serious anthropological problem: suicide. And it matters little whether the world can be reduced to one, four or six elementary structures that, though refuted as soon as they are proposed, are tenacious in their scientific existence. And yet there are only some fifty references to suicide in anthropology! While searching “anthropologie du suicide” in French on Google, the top results linked to an argument between two anthropologists4! At least they seemed to agree on one thing: the goal, or at least one of the goals, of anthropology is to find sociocultural principles that explain or shed light on the particularly high suicide rates in one part of the world. This very closely resembles what Durkheim asked of sociology: find the social causes of suicide. But what a dark fate anthropology has met, if it is really doing nothing more than sociology, and conceding: “Anthropology, like sociology, is unable to, and is in any case little concerned about, finding the ultimate ‘cause’ or ‘causes’ of suicide. It will never say why, out of two individuals subjected to identical conditions (a situation of anomie for example), only one chooses to take his own life” (Rozenberg 2009: 251). If anthropology can say nothing about the fact that suicide is committed by one individual and not another, if anthropology can only be social, and therefore only be sociology, it no longer has any reason to exist. It becomes a mere vestige of time, an exercise in reinforcing cultural differences, a “satellite” of the social sciences!

3 I am thinking of the works of Michael Jackson (2005 and 2013) in the US. In France, from another perspective: Piette (2009 and 2011). 4 About Charles MacDonald’s book (2007), see G. Rozenberg’s criticism (2009) and MacDonald’s reply (2009).

Introduction

15

This argument over what anthropology can do risks illustrating its epistemological “failure”: that it says nothing about the act, the moment, the succession of instants. To present suicide as a social and cultural phenomenon is to overlook what triggers it – a chance meeting, a word, circumstances, consciousness, states of mind, the details of life. It is up to existential anthropology to ensure a level of specificity that is all too rare: an empirical and theoretical analysis of consciousness and feelings – in short, an analysis of existence. An anthropology of human beings who exist. Would circumventing the existing conscious and unconscious person not amount to the suicide of anthropology? It would mean surrendering to an inability to say something essential about the human condition. Between, on the one hand, naturalism and cognitivism and, on the other hand, the theory of multiple ontologies, existential anthropology has a role to play. It examines the singularity of individuals as they move through different situations and spheres, and considers what in a situation really exists, according to which modalities. In this way, existential anthropology would establish a unique place for itself in the intellectual world of the sciences, with meticulous (and I stress this term) observation methods that are no more impossible or difficult than in other fields of research, as long as they keep their limits in sight, like Sisyphus rolling his boulder. How powerful, how intellectually liberating it would be to observe and compare people in the process of living and existing, either alone or with others, whether children, the elderly, the sick, the dying, or whoever. Without leaving them to philosophy, which is often speculative, or literature, which invents, or to the social sciences, which bury them under their frameworks and sidestep the fact of existing. This is called an anthropology of human beings, an anthropology of existences. There will be bright days ahead for anthropology if it observes, knows, and keeps a clear perspective. We must imagine Sisyphus as an anthropologist.

Part One

Wholes and Particularities I. A critique of the operation of the social sciences It is possible to reinterpret the history of the social sciences as a perpetual challenge to the idea of socialized man. But like Sisyphus pushing the boulder that immediately rolls back down, the social sciences constitute a perfect illustration that it is impossible to avoid constructing a sociological object as something shared and typical, no matter which theoretical option it is founded on. Even if the researcher thinks he is getting rid of Durkheim’s homo sociologicus model by injecting methodological individualism, he encounters, through the emphasis on the significance of actions and through ideal-type mediation, another overinterpretation of social facts, as if it were already trapped by what is typical and shared. Through the ample use of quotations, I have chosen to look as closely as possible at the thought of four theorists: Durkheim and Weber at the two ends of the spectrum of sociological tradition, and Malinowski and Goffman for their ethnographic work. 1. The “good” sociological object Choosing a “good” sociological object starts with a basic principle, that of selection. Classic texts mention at least three ways of separating what is sociologically essential from what is not. First there is Durkheim’s choice, which can be read in The Rules of Sociological Method. “Every individual is an infinity, and infinity cannot be exhausted” (Durkheim 1982: 110); what is therefore needed is a “principle” to make “a selection” and pinpoint “the most essential properties”. Formulating “laws” is only possible, he continues, “after having reviewed all the facts” (ibid.: 110). One must therefore seek “decisive or crucial facts”, which are not necessarily the same as “common facts” but, he adds, “it is not difficult to surmise in what area to look for the characteristic properties of social types” (ibid.: 111). Durkheim then explains that “the general facts of social life” are “of a morphological order” and concern “the elements that go to make up [the society]” and “the way in which these are combined” (ibid.: 115). For this purpose, “the method of concomitant variations” (ibid.: 151) constitutes “the supreme instrument for sociological research” when it comes to penetrating social facts in their typical characteristics, since by proving that “two phenomenon vary with each other” it becomes possible to establish a “law” (ibid.: 153) and also keep to

I. A critique of the operation of the social sciences

17

a limited number of facts, thus comparing a “series of variations, systematically constituted” (ibid.: 155). In Weber’s texts, it is also a matter of choice and selection, but using different criteria. The goal of “social science”, Weber points out, is to understand “the characteristic uniqueness of the reality in which we move”. That is to say “the relationships and the cultural significance of individual events” (Weber 1949: 72). But this exploration of “cultural significance” immediately runs up against the diversity of reality, which rules out reproducing life experience and exhausting all possible points of view. No system of ideas “can exhaust its infinite richness” (ibid.: 105): “a description of even the smallest slice of reality can never be exhaustive” (ibid.: 78). This leads to the elementary process of distinguishing “the important from the trivial” (ibid.: 81) and therefore determining, among the elements, “which of these components should be regarded as essential” (1949: 93). In Weber’s view, rather than seeking causal connections, one should aim to find “those segments of reality which have become significant to us” (ibid.: 76) and “only a small portion of existing concrete reality” is significant (ibid.: 76). To which facts to we attribute significance? “The significance of cultural events presupposes a value-orientation towards these events” (ibid.:76). And Weber explains: “Empirical reality becomes ‘culture’ to us because and insofar as we relate it to value ideas” (ibid.: 76). Distinguishing the essential from the secondary consists in relating elements of reality “to universal ‘cultural values’” (ibid.: 82). The second principle of sociological work, and also of social anthropology, consists in looking at the object as it is shared by members of a social class, group, culture, or some other collectivity. This shared dimension of the sociological object very often goes without saying. It is as if the collective approach implied focusing directly on the general similarity of behavior, drawing a decisive, exclusive line around particular marks. In a book that sharply criticizes this sociological obsession, Stephen Turner (1994) uses the term “sameness” to designate the sociological object constructed as something collectively shared. Durkheim took a strong stance in the matter: “in order for a social fact to exist, several individuals at the very least must have given rise to some new production” (Durkheim 1982: 45). According to Durkheim, social facts are made up of “the beliefs, tendencies and practices of the group taken collectively” (ibid.: 54). Consequently, “these ways of acting or thinking acquire, by dint of repetition, a sort of consistency which, so to speak, separates them out, isolating them from the particular events which reflect them” (ibid.: 54). They possess, Durkheim asserts, “a reality existing outside individuals, who, at every moment, conform to them” (ibid.: 45) and are “vastly distinct from the individual facts which manifest that reality” (ibid.: 54). Social facts are even “endowed with a compelling and coercitive power by virtue of which, whether he wishes or not, they impose themselves upon [the individual]” (ibid.: 51). Durkheim’s work contains a few variations on this point, sometimes stressing the coercitive, external dimension of social facts,

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Part One: Wholes and Particularities

sometimes stressing the internalization of the collective dimension that is identified with a psychological identity. Thus defined, the social fact does not easily lend itself to immediate observation, because this one does not distinguish “its pure state” (ibid.: 55) from concrete performances by individuals. To find this pure state again, Durkheim suggests at least three methods. There is of course the classic theoretical consideration of treating social facts “as external things”, that is to say as things that are “detached from the conscious beings who form their own mental representations of them” (ibid.: 70). From that perspective, it is difficult to legitimize an observation of the fluidity of social life, of “fleeting reality” and of “concrete data” (ibid.: 83). What is needed first is a “solid foundation” and not “shifting sand”, Durkheim advises (ibid.: 83). Another modality consists in the specific methodological artifice that statistical analysis constitutes. Given that “certain currents of opinion, whose intensity varies according to the time and country” certainly do constitute “social facts”, according to Durkheim statistics provide “a means of isolating them” from “individual cases” and “individual circumstances” (ibid.: 55). As Durkheim stresses: the phenomena must be “stripped of all extraneous elements” (ibid.: 55). It is therefore important “to refine out the social fact from any amalgam and so observe it in its pure state” (ibid.: 55). The third method used by Durkheim to attain pure social facts independent of individual interference consists in finding “a constant, fixed vantage point” in social reality that “allows all that is variable, hence subjective, to be eliminated” (ibid.: 82). Durkheim’s methodological rule is to consider social facts “from a viewpoint where they present themselves in isolation from their individual manifestations” (ibid.: 82–83). Are there no “privileged moments” (Turner 1994: 63– 67) when “generality” becomes “normality”? What actually happens to individuals when they aggregate, interpenetrate or fuse themselves with others, to use Durkheim’s vocabulary (ibid.: 129)? Durkheim himself characterizes major ritual events as special moments of collective effervescence, of influence by the collective consciousness and, at the same time, of social norm internalization. According to him, all individual interpretation is either eliminated or corrected in these events. Reception is pure in them, and reproduction is faithful and without remains. One can never read enough of this text by Durkheim, a true symbol of sociology as a science of shared collective objects: “Commencing at nightfall, all sorts of processions, dances and songs had taken place by torchlight; the general effervescence was constantly increasing [. . .]. One can readily conceive how, when arrived at this state of exaltation, a man does not recognize himself any longer. Feeling himself dominated and carried away by some sort of an external power which makes him think and act differently than in normal times, he naturally has the impression of being himself no longer. [. . .]. And as at the same time all his companions feel themselves transformed in the same way and express this sentiment by their cries, their gestures and their general attitude, everything is

I. A critique of the operation of the social sciences

19

just as though he really were transported into a special world, entirely different from the one where he ordinarily lives, and into an environment filled with exceptionally intense forces that take hold of him and metamorphose him” (Durkheim 1915: 218). It is therefore possible to re-read the history of thought in the social sciences as a succession of “attacks” or challenges against Durkheim’s idea of the socialized individual. I will content myself with understanding Weber’s very symptomatic critique and his impossible avoidance of the sociological object. It can certainly be said that Durkheim’s collective fortress was weakened by Weber’s social vision. To Durkheim’s negation of the theoretical relevance of individual singularities, Weber opposes a reversal that appears radical at first glance, by proposing to consider the isolated individual and his activity as the basic unit. Sociology is “a science concerning itself with the interpretative understanding of social action [. . .]. Action is ‘social’ insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course” (Weber 1978: 4). Denying collective structures have any factual existence, he treats them as representations that “have a meaning in the minds of individual persons” and according to which “actors orient their action” (ibid.: 14). Furthermore, based on his own definition of social activity, Weber explains that “not every type of contact of human beings has a social character” (ibid.: 23). He therefore does not accept the qualification of social activity for influenced or purely reactive action, as for example “when it is merely a result of the effect on the individual of the existence of a crowd as such and the action is not oriented to that fact on the level of meaning” (ibid.: 23). We are far from the hypnotic paradigm out of which Durkheim constructed his analytical model of the social fact. Having established the premises of the program, how will Weber negotiate the construction of his relevant sociological object? It is significant that Weber stresses rationality as if, at first sight, our homo sociologicus lost in shared elements what he gained in reason. In Weber’s view, reasonable human activity falls under categories of “ends” and “means”: setting a goal, figuring out the right means, determining the consequences. We are dealing with a human being who “weighs and chooses from among the values involved according to his own conscience and his personal view of the world” (Weber 1949: 53). This is the key phrase that constitutes another vision of sociology: that of the rational individual. From this perspective, the ideal social activity becomes that which is ultimately rationally determined. When man “tries to achieve certain ends by choosing appropriate means on the basis of the facts of the situation”, the sociological interpretation of this activity possesses the “highest degree of verifiable certainty” (Weber 1978: 5). Against this, Weber himself raises at least two counter-arguments. The first directly refers to the existence of activities other than whose which are “instrumentally rational”. Here we are of course dealing with Weber’s famous four-cate-

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Part One: Wholes and Particularities

gory social activity classification. In addition to instrumentally rational action, there are traditional and affectual behaviors: these are situated “very close to the borderline” or “on the borderline of what can be considered ‘meaningfully’ oriented, and often it, too, goes over the line” (ibid.: 25). I could continue: at the very limits of the relevant sociological object. Weber also adds value-rational action, which is characterized by a “clearly self-conscious formulation of the ultimate values governing the action and the consistently planned orientation of its detailed course to these values” (ibid.: 25), but “the meaning of the action does not lie in the achievement of a result ulterior to it, but in carrying out the specific type of action for its own sake” (ibid.: 25). His second self-objection concerns the state of consciousness in which an activity concretely unfolds, not in full consciousness and clarity, but “in a state of inarticulate half-consciousness or actual unconsciousness” (ibid.: 21). Weber responds by proposing a construct of concepts or types, by which we reach another crucial aspect of the modalities of sociological vision. Weber explains that a construct based on types makes it possible to proceed “as if action actually proceeded on the basis of clearly self-conscious meaning”(ibid.: 22). He adds: “The construction of a purely rational course of action in such cases serves the sociologist as a type which has the merit of clear understandability and lack of ambiguity. By comparison with this it is possible to understand the ways in which actual action is influenced by irrational factors of all sorts, such as affects and errors, in that they account for the deviation from the line of conduct which would be expected on the hypothesis that the action were purely rational” (ibid: 6). Weber denies his procedure involves a “rationalistic bias” and claims it is only a “methodological device” (ibid.: 7). It is a matter of “making as if . . .”. Weber also explains that achieving understanding based on the activity of individuals does not imply resorting to psychology, and that it is wrong “to regard any kind of psychology as the ultimate foundation of the sociological interpretation of action” (ibid.: 19). Sociology is not interested in the psychological characteristics of behavior, whose differences are, on their own, not sociologically relevant. The sociological perspective remains “the scientific investigation of the general cultural significance of the socio-economic structure of the human community” (Weber 1949: 67). To attain this objective, the study of individuals becomes that of typical meaningful relations, and involves determining typical motives, typical meanings, etc., and elaborates “type concepts and generalized uniformities of empirical process” (Weber 1978: 19). Unlike historical science, sociology positions itself as a generalizing science that aims to provide an understanding of the sequences and “regularities” of human behavior. In fact, the need to maintain the reference of individuals to a social context is found in the idealtype procedure, mediation making it possible to look at individuals who are grouped and identical and view them like abstract types, or broad categories according to a necessarily simplified representation of their reasons for acting and

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their common characteristics. The ideal-type construct constitutes a decisive reality-filtering instrument. On the subject of the ideal-type construct mechanism, Weber explains that it looks like a “utopia which has been arrived at by the analytical accentuation of certain elements of reality” (Weber 1949: 90). He further explains: “An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, [. . .] concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct” (ibid.: 90). We therefore do not escape the collectivization process of the individuals thus grouped and characterized by caricatural traits. And Weber adds: “In its conceptual purity, this mental construct cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality” (ibid.: 90). The author and reader make as if . . . In the late 19th century, the legitimacy of the social sciences – sociology no less than social anthropology – came quickly to be associated with the principle of, if not the autonomy, then at least the consistency of a social logic that has its own laws and a symbolic significance. It was up to the social sciences to understand, analyze or explain this logic’s diverse expressions, selected at various scales, from simple interaction to the broadest collective entities. Today, university courses, books, theses, student dissertations, as well as conferences on sociology and social/cultural anthropology generate a wide range of objects but offer no surprises: big debates about current events, social classes, social groups, cultural identities, “typical” themes such as changes in the world of labor religion, activities that are important for the functioning of society, social problems, etc.. And it is in the process of constructing their objects that researchers inject a methodological protocol and show their theoretical affinity for one or another of sociology’s favorite intelligibility framework. And what about the existences in all of this, the individuals with their unique existence and their particular presence in a situation, the very people who called out to me in the first place, as I explained at the beginning of this book? What becomes of them? They obviously do not resist the operation of the social sciences as I have described it. The reader will have understood as much. They are like Sisyphus’s boulder, the one he pushes up but rolls back down every time. And yet he keeps on pushing it! But one could object that those are theories, the theoretical vision of the social sciences. And quite rightly. Then let us take a look at how ethnographers work. Because they claim precisely that they are getting closer to individuals, even sharing their life situations through fieldwork investigations. 2. Cultural ethnography and interactional ethnography Ethnography and fieldwork investigations are often essentially a matter of understanding and representing the real lives of human beings though observation,

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especially participatory observation. When ethnographers join these people, immerse themselves in their day-to-day existence and attempt to capture their point of view, the aim is to observe, understand and then describe real behavior in all its fine detail, even including the unspoken, the insignificant and the trivial. Ethnographers reject the truncated image of human beings that results from overly vague concepts, hypothetico-deductive methods and quantitative techniques. They choose instead to study the fluidity and indeterminacy of social life. Thus, ethnographers find themselves faced with a contradictory injunction: how are they to remain within the framework of the social sciences, whose object construction and collectivization modalities we know, and describe the behavior of human beings observed close-up? They find themselves forced into something of a compromise between these two requirements. Selecting details considered relevant for analysis, choosing specific concepts and using a particular form of writing makes it possible to move the ethnographic slider between two poles: the individual human being and the sociocultural logic. What are the specific characteristics of the ethnological exploration of human life? Even if there are many ways of practicing ethnography, I will cite two examples that will give us an idea of the logic underlying the choice of details: Malinowski and Goffman, the ethnography of culture and the ethnography of interaction. I will use “the detail” as my critical analyzer in order to highlight and clarify the objectives of both researchers. This critique of ethnographic work is crucial. I will linger on it somewhat, because examining ethnography will allow us to form a notion of how, by contrast, an observation of existences could be constructed. Malinowski or cultural ethnography Looking at culture. The introductory pages of Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), often cited as the foundation of ethnographic methodology, recommends giving attention to the details of real behavior. The author uses several expressions evoking the “flesh” and “blood” enveloping the skeleton of tribal life or describing the daily grind and the noise and excitement generated by a celebration, ceremony or unexpected event (ibid.: 18–19). The details which social anthropologists set out to describe, and which “should be noted” (ibid.: 20) relate to two criteria. First there is the concrete way in which a behavior is manifested beyond the prescribed rule. Social anthropologists therefore observe “human beings who behave seriously or jocularly, with earnest concentration or with bored frivolity, who are either in the same mood as he finds them every day, or else are screwed up to a high pitch of excitement, and so on and so on” (ibid.: 21). Observing these attitudes in people allows the anthropologist to note – alongside the “normal” and “typical” – “the slight or the more pronounced deviations”. Malinowski explains that “the normal moves” are located between two extremes (ibid.: 21).

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One must describe, he continues, these real behaviors in concrete terms and make sure not to overlook “certain subtle peculiarities” (ibid.: 21) due to excessive familiarity or lack of knowledge. “Functionalist therapy” is the best remedy for mastering details. Everything adheres to everything else, and one can wander without becoming disconnected. (Payne 1981: 438). In this case, a good detail is one that has the possibility of being reincorporated by the anthropologist into the description of a concrete norm that is of course not that of the prescribed rule, but that which corresponds to a behavioral model shared by the members of the group. How far can a discrepancy go and still remain relevant and typical? Although this question is of the utmost relevance to what anthropologists will watch, see and note, Malinowski never answers it precisely. When observing what is happening, out of the details that constitute a discrepancy from what is prescribed, attention is only captured by those that impose themselves in the common and therefore typical form of social facts. The detail criterion that “should be noted” is that of its significative relevance within the social structure as a whole. This is where we find the demands of functionalist totality, which is even more important in the other category of details mentioned by Malinowski, those he calls the “imponderabilia of actual life” (Malinowski 1922: 18–19). This designates the behaviors of everyday life: grooming, cooking, meals, quarrels, arguments, “unimportant” incidents of family life, styles of conversation, personal vanities and ambitions, affectionate gestures and attentions, work routines, etc. In this second case, the details that make up the day-to-day routine and can seem secondary to the central issues of the social structure, clearly indicate the typical characteristics of a culture. This is the monographic detail. The functionalist conception of social life certainly influences this anthropological detail theory. Malinowski writes that “these imponderable yet all-important facts of actual life are part of the real substance of the social fabric,” and that “in them are spun the innumerable threads which keep together the family, the clan, the village community, the tribe” (ibid.: 19). Alongside these details that are only retained if they relate to the totality of a culture, Malinowski mentions a second element of ethnographic methodology that contains an implicit rejection of the detail: paying attention to the speech of indigenous people who are expressing their subjective dispositions. They are sometimes quoted verbatim in ethnological reports. Listening to the “native language” (ibid.: 23), understanding “the native’s point of view”, and “his vision of his world” (ibid.: 25) – his vision of the world as the observer lets him express it – is not without consequences for an ethnography of action. The anthropologist knows that many traits stemming from ordinary day-to-day life are often not attentively perceived by people, or are in any case verbally untranslatable. But in fact, focusing on speech is an easy way to avoid the detail. This model certainly makes it anthropologically possible to take a step forward in understanding ac-

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tion; but it then immediately takes two steps backward in the search for the action’s details. Anthropological discourse can go very far in its collective-cultural reduction: “First of all, it has to be laid down that we have to study here stereotyped manners of thinking and feeling. As sociologists, we are not interested in what A or B may feel qua individuals, in the accidental course of their own personal experiences – we are interested only in what they feel and think qua members of a given community” (ibid.: 23). Malinowski does not hide his culturalist opinion: what is communicated to the anthropologist are mental states that have received “a certain stamp”, having been “stereotyped by the institutions in which they live, by the influence of tradition and folklore, by the very vehicle of thought, that is by language” (ibid.: 23). In anthropological observation, the detail can therefore only be represented if it is integrated into a typical dimension of the society or culture. This is the aim of this type of observation, which is directly attracted by the “strangeness” of an exotic object (one that is relevant because it is distant) and is focused on decrypting this cultural singularity based on the minimum amount of information needed to identify the object. “What is then this mental ethnographer’s magic, by which he is able to evoke the real spirit of the natives, the true picture of tribal life?” (ibid.: 6). It is up to social anthropologists to pinpoint “the native’s cultural and mental peculiarities” (ibid.: 6). To this end, Malinowski evokes “a clear and firm outline of the social constitution” and “the firm skeleton of the tribal life” (ibid.: 11). “The soul of a population”, “attitude towards life”, “behavioral tone”, “basic personality”, “cultural area”, “cultural traits”, “system of meaning”: the anthropological tradition, in various theoretical tones, has employed a diverse lexicon to designate what constitutes the fundamental quest to identify a sociocultural singularity as it contrasts with others. Making a description. The aim is to present the tone of a culture. What mediates between the singularity of a ritual or some other activity and the tone of the culture is the idea of “homogeneity” or “shared identity” within one community of people who respect each other, anchored to a circumscribed location. Underlying this perspective are, on the one hand, the idea of the “community” as a unit of anthropological research and, on the other hand, the idea of a structure capable of integrating the facts into a coherent whole. Therefore, what an anthropologist looks for in a specific action is not its own singularity but the singularity that necessarily informs the social structure or culture as a whole by virtue of the principle of homogeneity. In the anthropological model, the chosen event is of intellectual interest only insofar as it relates to that famous “mental chart” shared by the set of individuals, and insofar as it allows the conscious and unconscious models regulating social life to be isolated. The action of an individual is anthropologically relevant only because it represents a sociocultural, ethnic or national category. In fact, it appears in a quite dwarfed form in the final description. At bottom, social anthropology does not really describe actions.

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Observations are placed in cultural perspective in the anthropological text itself, as part of a process of “descriptive simplification”. Marie-Jeanne Borel writes: “A description outlines events in the field by equipping them with structural traits. As they function within the economy of discourse, these outlines possess some of the characteristics of a model, since their cognitive function, like that of every model, is to interpret the complexity of fieldwork events based on a symbolic reconstruction of their supposed form (their picture)” (Borel 1990: 67). Thus constructed, the described object is distinguished by three characteristics that are key to my point. It is general, reflecting not the nature of the described entities, but rather the variables and similarities that enable them to be grouped and compared; it is abstract, represented by a set of specific properties selected according to the aims of the description; it is configured within different representations that possess their own principles and organizing “grids” (Borel 1989). The goal is to reveal a culture by highlighting the properties that distinguish it from others. This outlining process necessarily effects the rhetorical strategies of standard anthropological texts (Marcus and Cushman 1982): not only is the author absent, remaining in the background as if the neutrality of the text went without saying, but there is also the tendency to resort to types in descriptions that, outside of any specific space and time, refer to the actors by a generic appellation or even by reference to a central activity, as if this common denominator synthesized their behaviors as a whole and allowed us to forget the particular qualities of individuals; the development of normative models for behaviors that seem automatic and pre-coded, as if they were unswervingly contributing to a narrative structure whose well-organized sequences guaranteed that the event would be completely fenced off. The occasionally dry and serious style of anthropological writing recalls some of the descriptive modalities of realist texts: – limiting the described actions to one principal role of the character – the tendency to write transparently, seriously and in a de-modalized way, which means avoiding quotation marks, italics, adverbs or phrases like “maybe”, “a kind of” indicating hesitation, irony, etc. – the tendency to completely eliminate, between the being and appearance of objects or characters, any imbalance that expresses ambiguity, ambivalence, equivocality, paradox, etc. – the rejection of voids, gaps, delays, waiting, hesitations, with the risk of possibly flattening the text. Simplification, generalization, exaggeration: such are the constraints of a descriptive economy that directly serves the objective of the anthropological mode of observation, which is to identify the cultural singularity of an action integrated perfectly into a totality. The anthropological model’s theoretical demand for a synthesizing totality permeates descriptive texts, particularly monographs, which

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create the effect of a whole or of totality. The detail, which was presented as an asset in descriptions of human beings, ultimately appears to have been trounced. It loses any chance of being representable if it has no impact in terms of identity and differentiation. Not really observation or participation. In the fieldwork, how does the social anthropologist behave? In his introduction to Argonauts, Malinowski invites the ethnographer “to join in himself in what is going on. He can take part in the native’s games, he can follow them on their visits and walks, sit down and listen and share in their conversations” (Malinowski 1922: 21). But Malinowski’s point of view contains a few reservations. He recommends “cutting oneself off from the company of other white men and remaining in as close contact with the natives as possible” (ibid.: 6), but he is quick to add that the native “is not the natural companion for a white man, and after you have been working with him for several hours, seeing how he does his gardens, or letting him tell you items of folklore, or discussing his customs, you will naturally hanker after the company of your own kind” (ibid.: 7). Malinowski remains a “lord” living in the middle of the village, who has not married a Trobriand woman, who has not taken part in the obligations and reciprocities of the kinship system, and who has not worked on the land (Wax 1972: 10). Can the interaction between Malinowski and the villagers really be likened to ordinary communication, even if he describes his day as more or less similar to that of a native (Malinowski 1989)? Although the anthropologist must certainly conform to the rules of the group and get a sense of what constitutes good and bad manners, the presented anthropological model does not presuppose that the researcher becomes a native, nor even an “ordinary” interactant. In anthropological conventional wisdom, the researcher remains a marginal, unassimilated figure, moving freely through the social system, while still able to access and take part in various situations. According to Wax’s comment on Malinowski’s work (Wax 1972: 12), within the anthropological model, the fieldwork technique known as participatory observation consists in first questioning and listening, then observing, and finally, to a minimal extent, participating. Participatory observation reflects an anthropological approach that assumes a unsystematic method of observation and a very minimal participatory presence. Let us take a look at another way of practicing ethnography. Goffman or interactional ethnography In his books, Goffman says very little about his own fieldwork practices, leaving the reader without methodological notes on the collection of data concerning “the presentation of self in everyday life”. And yet, on at least two occasions, Goffman presented his own conception of fieldwork. The first came in the form of a paper delivered at the 1974 conference of the Pacific Sociological Associa-

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tion, of which no trace would remain had it not been recorded (without Goffman’s knowledge) and transcribed with the consent of his widow. The other appears in his PhD thesis, submitted to the University of Chicago in 1953. He dedicates a brief introduction to explain how he had conducted his twelve-month study on “conversational interaction” on the Shetland Islands, a study that was to inform all of his future work. Interacting, participating and observing. In the 1974 text, Goffman characterizes participant observation as “subjecting yourself, your own body and your own personality, and your own social situation, to the set of contingencies that play upon a set of individuals, so that you can physically and ecologically penetrate their circle of response to their social situation” (Goffman 1989: 125). Gestural, visual and bodily details are obtained by getting your body “tuned-up” to those of others in a situation. It is therefore an interactional observation that consists in observing by participating and playing a normal, active role in the situation. This is the full sense of the term “participant observation”, and for me the only valid one. It is up to the researcher to cut himself off from his usual life, to arrive with a clean slate, to be “strategic” in negotiating social relations (ibid.: 129), and to build a new network of relationships even if it means having to “open yourself up to being snubbed” (ibid.: 128). It is a sign that fieldwork is being well-conducted when what the researcher sees and hears around him becomes normal, when he forgets he is working as a sociologist, or when the representatives of the opposite sex become attractive . . . “You should be able to engage in the same body rhythms, rate of movement, tapping of the feet, that sort of thing, as the people around you” (ibid.: 129). It appears that his fieldwork practices twenty years earlier do not belie this brief methodological description. What Goffman wrote in the introduction to his thesis represents the very challenge of interactional observation (Goffman 1953). On the subject of interactive conversation (the subject of his work), he says that it is not a question of using traditional formal tools like questionnaires or even interviews, because: people have very few ideas about what an interaction is; people would take it badly if you asked them questions about this; and, Goffman continues, good knowledge of – or experience with – what is “taken for granted” in the group is needed before one can ask good questions about it. One’s participation in everyday interactions must be earned, and Goffman says that success is reflected by the number of “informal sanctions” received when mistakes are made. Participating in a set of situations is what, in his view, enables the researcher to observe deeply and intimately, and the trust he receives from the people can confirm or disconfirm his interpretations (ibid.: 6). Goffman also explains that he proceeds without any distracting recording system since this would necessarily be distracting, and he lets himself be guided by events before devising a conceptual framework to identify regularities (ibid.: 9). He gives himself a set role: not that of an investigator of interactions, but that of a researcher interested in the island’s agriculture. Goffman

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initially lives in a hotel, then buys a small cottage nearby and continues to frequent the hotel. He takes part in more and more interactive situations, particularly evening activities like billiards and other pastimes, as if he had a preference for situations in which people talk more, and talk later than usual. The kind of fieldwork practiced by Goffman clearly does not stem from the culturalist model of observation. He does not aim for broad coverage in his observations, and does not need special informants who dictate what is significant and point out macrosociological connections. His so-called objective is to analyze the island’s agricultural economy and but he focuses his attention on interactions. Goffman did not want to let himself get tempted by bizarre facts (ibid.: 4) in a classic curiosity mode. He explains that he was not setting out to produce a classic monograph of a community but a study in a community (ibid.: 8). Goffman was not looking for the sociocultural peculiarities and distinctive facts of a community based on a representative sample. On the first page of his doctorate, he explains that he is not “recounting the history of any interactive practice, the frequency and place of its occurrence, the social function which it performed, or even the range of persons among whom it occurred” (ibid.: 1). What Goffman sought was, to use Schudson’s words (1984: 640), the “pure interactional man”, revealed outside of any sociocultural context, based on the “anti-anthropological” model as it appears in subsequent books that examine diverse, non-contextualized situations. “At an outdoor political rally,” Goffman writes, “a dog barking at random can often be disattented more or less effectively; but if the dog happens to chime in so that his bark can be taken as a comment upon something being said, the chime occurring precisely at a response juncture in the saying, it will be hard indeed to manage the difficulty. Laughter or its suppression can become general” (Goffman 1974: 215). All or almost all of Goffman is there! Let us retain the detail as the critical analyzer of Goffman’s ethnography. Based on everyday experiences, Goffman observed the regularity of minor, day-to-day behaviors. They constituted his own vision of interaction, which he presented according to various lines of interpretation throughout his work. It is no longer identity and community that conceptually structure the data. But rather: interaction and strategy. The interaction is first regarded as a set of relevant, meaningful signs, acceptable to other participants, providing a starting point for the next message. Second, the interaction is based on mutual acceptance. Against the backdrop of existing information that enables the participants to predict other people’s behavior and behave in such a way as to prompt a desired behavior, and also learn what is expected of them, the action’s guiding lines determine the important points of “working consensus”. By virtue of a shared definition of the situation, the interaction brings out common knowledge and values surrounding events: “the maintenance of this surface of agreement, this veneer of consensus, is facilitated by

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each participant concealing his own wants behind statements which assert values to which everyone present is likely to give lip-service” (Goffman 1956: 4). The interaction is also constructed according to a precarious balance. This reflects the risk of either disorganization, a moment of confusion or a false note that causes embarrassment. In the same analysis in which Goffman contrasts ideal definitional relevance and mutual acceptance conditions in an interaction with the constant risk that incongruous events could arise, he provides several descriptions of interactional difficulties caused by linguistic inabilities, physical appearance, the problems of unspontaneous situations, different types of territorial violations and offences, or even the various accidents or gaffes that can shatter a coherent representation. With this theoretical focus, gradually mastered by the researcher, fieldwork consists in getting a “feeling” for the meaning attributed to events, people and objects, and also for categorizing them, not by means of an intellectual process but through personal experience developed and sustained by an activity shared with other people. To be interactionally effective, the understanding that underlies every process of participatory observation must therefore be based on the “socially recognized categories” and “shared meanings” that organize the social world. In short, it is based on what is relevant. No matter what role the researcher plays in the interaction (in any case, this can evolve in the course of his work), participatory observation is the process of gradually accessing relevant, shared knowledge. It is a limitation for the sake of efficiency. The details that are seen and taken into account must be evaluated in light of this need for efficiency, and it appears quite natural from this observational perspective that details, which are not relevant to share, and socially non-relevant meanings should be quickly forgotten. But Goffman saw other things, other details, smaller ones that looked more insignificant at first glance. Much of my argument hinges on this: these new details meticulously pinpointed by Goffman. How will he incorporate them into the interactionist framework, into the sociological operation? Will he incorporate them? I would say this merits a bit of a detour. New details. The reader would be quite right to raise the objection that, alongside lines of interpretation that exclude incongruous details, many examples of these are mentioned throughout Goffman’s work. Indeed, here and there, he emphasizes attention lapses during conversation (Goffman 1953: 142) and points out that a “euphoric” interaction does not presuppose all actors being completely immersed in their role (ibid.: 248). Qualifying the application of rules of tact that generate “boredom” if they are followed precisely, and “embarrassment” if they are not, Goffman believes that engagement also consists in a slight infringement of the rules of tact (ibid.: 257). The particularity of Goffman’s eye is increasingly precise: between, on the one hand, relevance and mutual acceptance and, on the

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other hand, the incongruity of an embarrassing occurrence, there is a range of tolerated infractions. But it is here that Goffman’s subtle eye, which allows him to see the smallest details of everyday life – unimportant things – starts getting plagued by interactionist theories that link these things to the meaningful relevance of shared obligations, strategic ruses, or inappropriate disruptions – in short, the interactionist stranglehold on slight infractions. Let us take a look at a few examples from Goffman’s work. On this subject, the concept of “role distance” is central. It is explained by Goffman in a remarkable chapter of Encounters, with a view to describing individuals in a way other than according to “a Hollywood ideal” (Goffman 2013: 116). “Role distance directs attention to the fact that situated roles allow for nonrelevant expressions”, Goffman informs us (ibid.: 133). But soon enough, as we will see, the meaningful and strategic relevance reclaims the upper hand. Adhering to a situation does not exclude parallel gestural activity. Not interfering with the situation, this activity only indicates that the individual does not accept being defined solely by his official role (ibid.: 134). Goffman characterizes the heterogeneity in the performance of a role more as a simultaneous (we could say stratified) presence than as the sequential presence of distance to the expected role. He describes three different ways of mounting a wooden horse on a merry-goround. A child of three or four is very serious in his role. At the age of five, the young boy wants to show that he is more than a merry-go-round horseman, refusing to put his foot in the strap. At seven or eight, the dissociation from the role increases even more: the child climbs on without using his hands. Between the ages of nine and twelve, it is important to play the role with some creative distance, treating the horse with humor. And adults on the carrousel make fun of it by tightening the safety belt or crossing their arms, or make it clear that they do not consider the ride an event in itself, but are there only for the sake of their child (ibid.: beginning p. 105). For Goffman, the distance one takes from roles in these situations expresses the separation between the role played and the individual himself. The individual is in the process of “denying not the role but the virtual self that is implied in the role” (ibid.: 108). In the stratified performance of a role, accompanied by simultaneous gestures, the distance taken becomes doubly relevant “to assessing the actor’s attachment to his particular role” and suggests “that the actor possibly has some measure of disaffection from, and resistance against, the role” (ibid.: 108). The behavior that enables him to enter into a situation while showing that he does not belong in it conveys dual information to the audience in question. The sociological analysis of different ways of distancing oneself from a role allowed Goffman to show that “distance is not introduced on an individual basis but can be predicted on the grounds of the performers’ gross age-sex characteristics” (ibid.: 115). Even with some distance from the role, the individual continues to act against a backdrop of predictable and relevant generality. In Goffman’s analysis, this distance is never more than a

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matter of a shift in relevance: not the relevance which is obligatory for a role, but the one which is typical in that it is expected in this or that situation. In Frame Analysis, Goffman uses a new set of concepts to synthesize and analyze the ethnographic observations made in the course of his previous research. The ethnographic complexity of a situation, not reduced to the ideal narrative model, constitutes the foundation of a theory of social experience and of its stratification into various layers. Without failing to mention – as a reminder of the “relevance” pole – “expectations of a normative kind” (Goffman 1974: 345) in a given context, particularly those related to engagement and attention, Goffman also explains that “some deviation from the norm is tolerated”, immediately adding: “and if effective cover is maintained, a great deal of deviation can be got away with” (ibid.: 346–347). In an intriguing way, Goffman stresses the “particular contingencies” that facial expressions constitute, and that these are always “a labile, unstable thing” (ibid.: 349). He is searching for the trouble that makes the situation “capsize”: laughter, tears, anger, panic, absorption into his own person. The chapter in question then turns to incongruous elements and all of the inappropriate reactions in a situation. The catalogue of “out of frame” actions fully expresses the subtle observation of unimportant ethnographic details as well as the author’s interactionist temptation. “Participants pursue a line of activity – a story line – across a range of events that are treated as out of frame, subordinated in this particular way to what has come to be defined as the main action. Of course, individuals can give the appearance of respectful involvement in their declared concern when, in fact, their central attention is elsewhere” (ibid.: 201). Here Goffman proposes the notion of the “disattend track” (ibid.: 222–223). First mentioning the distraction of participants caused by events that are taking place nearby, elsewhere and in another setting, Goffman could hardly have chosen a more “extreme” example: a speaker who acts like nothing is happening when interrupted by noisy criticism (ibid.: 202–203). What interests Goffman is not the lightness of the distraction, but the management of its inappropriateness: “a mechanism will be required”, he writes, “for removing failures, and in such a fashion that the removal process itself can be assimilated to the pattern” (ibid.: 204). From inappropriateness to relevance . . . How can a parading soldier manage his desire to shift or yawn? Goffman replies: suppress it, or do it and act as if nothing happened or (even if this does not apply to soldiers, it could apply to other cases) ask to step out of ranks, prevent others from perceiving the “lapse”, give oneself the liberty of doing it or asking to be excused in order to do it (ibid.: 204–205). In short, in “extreme” cases (ibid.: 206), the distraction is always already incongruous and therefore in need of management. This is what preoccupies Goffman: the modalities used to neutralize or excuse these gestures. Goffman’s inability to consider distraction outside of its relevant or incongruous impact is obvious, not only in his choice of examples, but in the form of analysis on which these depend, and which inevitably consider the strategic-relevant sig-

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nificance of the lateral act. Goffman continues his chapter on the “out of frame” by analyzing signals that reinforce the relevance of messages and by stressing the human ability to dissimulate embarrassment through backstage maneuvers or artificial facial expressions. Goffman concludes that dealing with everyday life interference, with minimal attention, is an essential feature of interactional skill, but at the same time he asserts the importance of the strategic scheme that he develops throughout the chapter, stressing the repeated use and manipulation of the disattend track. Goffman delights in reconstructing these reframing and activity-sequence transformation modes. The most “strategic” manipulation of the disattention track certainly consists in exploiting it for the purpose of conveying secret information: to cheat at cards by scratching your nose or moving your hands (ibid.: 222–223). All of the details Goffman observed are in fact reincorporated into issues of relevance, incongruity or strategy. Goffman places less emphasis on signs that are particular and contingent than on the management and manipulation of these, and this gives them a clearly disruptive dimension or integrates them into the rules of relevance and mutual acceptance. Goffman’s attention was of course focused on details that are new in anthropological observation. But the analysis incorporates them into a perspective that is inherent to sociological operation. In the depths of small details in interactions, we find the presence and power of the sociology’s theoretical vision. With Goffman, we have a model of what constitutes the principle of the ethnographies of sociologists or social anthropologists studying actions, interactions or relationships, no matter what their scales of observation or analytical concepts are. Sisyphus has been defeated once again. Malinowski and Goffman: of course, I could have chosen other authors. They would most certainly have brought us to the same diagnostic. Details as they are considered in ethnographic work – that of social anthropology or that of the interactionists – constitute a kind of a fortiori argument: even when sociologists and social anthropologists take an interest in the details of everyday life, they do not escape the social sciences’ classic intelligibility operations: sharing and making relevant. This is what I needed to show. What, then, is a detail? Is it a part extracted from the whole, within which it plays some role and can be studied minutely? Or is it an insignificant element, of no importance in this whole? There would thus be some details that are “good” to think about and “good” to work with in a scientific operation; and there would be others which would be necessarily thrown out. But what can we make with these last ones? In contrast to sociology, ethnography, and social and cultural anthropology, the specificity of existential anthropology is looming on the horizon. The existences that live in groups, that perform actions: what are they like amid the succession of instants and activities?

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II. Leftovers of details: a photographic experiment The social sciences give details the chance to survive only if they fit into the characterization of the culture, group, activity or social phenomenon researchers are trying to understand. Intelligibility at the expense of the real: this is the principle of science, even if there can be wide variation in the proportion between intelligibility and attention to the concrete. This objective generates a desire for details, as well as a fear of them. A gain in knowledge can only be achieved with its opposite: a loss of knowledge in the course of its construction. There are details that, scientifically, have a hard life. They are “bad” details. They shatter the illusion that the product delivered in the final text is pure. They show that it is nothing but a construct, a bit like what happens when a gallery visitor closely examines a painting and sees traces of the physical action of painting, its “production script”. These details interfere with a theoretical or descriptive consistency, halting the movement of a text as if it immediately became necessary to find another meaning for it. They especially reveal the sharp contrast between the generality of a text and the particularity of the trait it denotes. It appears to be the first sign of a long series of other details that went unnoted and unobserved. These details are semi-tragic traces of many other details left unwritten. They frighten and disturb, because they provide a direct reminder of the arbitrariness of scientific texts. It is within this configuration that the idea of the minor mode and really unimportant details take their critical place. Some years ago, when my objective was to observe and compare rituals and behaviors in various festivals of francophone Belgium (carnivals, popular festivals, political celebrations), the comparative perspective – even if supported by photographic observation – necessarily directed my attention to what seemed naturally important, guided by information from the actors themselves. I went through the usual stages of a fieldwork study: observation, taking and organizing notes, conceptualizing and writing. And many of the details ended up in the wastebasket! I did not escape the fact that no scientific study can exhaust the smallest fragments of reality, and that the investigation process involves both keeping and eliminating. There are elements that almost naturally, through the habit of observation, are not even seen, not even noticed by the observer in the fieldwork. There are other elements that, though they are noticed, will not get recorded in a fieldwork diary. And if they happen to get recorded, there is a high risk that they will not make it through the note-organizing step. Other more resistant details then confront the theoretical and conceptual stage, which consists in emphasizing trends in accordance with the principle of abstraction, so as to bring out diffuse elements and eliminate others. And during the other stage, that of writing, one is also forced to reduce and dismiss anything that interferes with the objective of maximum readability. In short, one makes things disappear!

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I have noticed that many of the losses concern particularities of individuals’ concrete modes of presence. Once my comparative research was finished, I felt a kind of dissatisfaction that made it seem obvious to dig through dustbins, to recuperate a set of details discarded during the various stages of scientific analysis. Fortunately, the leftovers thrown into the dustbins were in my photographs! In the world of festive rituals, my most heuristic encounter with this viewpoint was with the Gilles of Binche, Belgium. The folk character known as “the Gille” is part of a symbolic order, involving a large affective mobilization of the Binche population. In fact, these symbolic orientations can be presented with the following three pairs, one pole of each having a positive or negative valence: (past +/ future –); (inside +/outside –); (constraint +/liberty –). According to the axis of the first pair, the Binche festival is viewed as a “traditional festival” and the Gille is compared to numerous dancers in other age-old European festivals. “The carnival should remain a tradition,” the Gilles say. Some practices associated with the Gille costume suggest a desire to make some elements permanent in accordance with the oldest possible historical model. According to the axis of the second pair, emphasis is placed on the festival’s authenticity, which is purely local and opposed to any mercenary “folkloric” displacement of Gilles outside the town. This emphasis on the local nature of the Gille implies a certain “osmosis” between the Binche population and its Gille, which excludes “outside” spectators. According to the axis of the third pair, the Gille is presented as a very serious character whose gravity and solemnity make him similar to “a great priest”, as people say locally. It is therefore logical that this character would be subject to various rules during the performance of his ritual, enforcing the most dignified behavior possible: avoiding excessive drinking, not having hair hanging down over the neck, not dancing with women in cafés, avoiding putting one’s hands in one’s pockets, not leaving one’s group without a tambourine player. Thus at the beginning of my study, compelling local discourse, my own observations, the re-reading of my fieldwork notes, and analysis of the photographs made me see a convergence of attitudes about the Gilles, as though they were identical. For example, I noted without further clarification: “As the public begins flooding onto the sidewalk, the different groups of Gilles descend from the Station Square to the Central Square, constantly dancing to the rhythm of tambourines but not without relaxing in two or three cafés.”

I will call this Description I. After searching for the details that had been put in the wastebasket, I wrote a new description (which I will call Description II) of the same action sequence, which was presented in another book, Le mode mineur de la réalité (Piette 1992: 67): “The Gilles dance their traditional steps not without a shiver of emotion, often with an air of seriousness. It is not forbidden to exchange a few words, to tell jokes to each other, all along this choreographic path. Dawn breaks. Spectators are already turning up; no doubt they are Binche people watching, instead of doing the Gille.

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The groups, though they keep together, let a few gaps appear: children in the foreground, a bit lost, or behind the group, chatting amongst themselves. In front of the group, relatives and friends of Gilles hurry along as if they had to protect the dancers.”

This description was not only accompanied by photos, but at the end of the text I also juxtaposed a set of terms suggesting an “extra” to the narrative model: “various salutations – exchange of words – joking – overlooking the children’s behavior”. The ethnographic approach may entail the risk of becoming pathological (discarding nothing and describing everything), but I would like to turn this into a heuristic advantage. Is it not the height of the pathological obsession to dig through dustbins? This is my own methodological choice, leading to an approach that is the opposite of how social sciences operate (Piette 1996). It is a matter of returning to the event after the text has been written, going back through the various stages of the research process, recovering all of the abandoned material from wastebaskets. To return to my description of the Gilles: what happened between Description I and Description II? Some photographs of this ritual sequence played a decisive role in the data recovery process. After looking at them several times, I started to notice details from one to the next that, though unimportant, were nonetheless present in each one. I will elaborate the photograph interpretation process, and then I will explain the kind of details they allowed me to recover. By virtue of the principles of focus and depth of field, photographs offer a more or less stratified and modulated presentation of the photographed scene (Piette 1993). The image nevertheless constitutes a flat, uniform medium, taking three-dimensional objects situated at various distances and transposing them onto a two-dimensional surface. To compensate for a photograph’s tendency to impose uniformity on the data it supplies, it is necessary to apply three cumulative and interwoven levels of image interpretation, highlighting the relevant and non-relevant elements of a situation. As far as the action sequence described above is concerned, an initial interpretation [Figure 1a] is based on a principle of schematization: creating a hierarchy, discerning, eliminating the non-essential in favor of the essential. This can be done by placing tracing paper over a photo and drawing a silhouette, reproducing the traits considered most important, highlighting chosen contours. This takes us into the realm of the concept-photograph, characterized by the emphasis of one or several aspects of the photographed data (clothing, gestures, etc.). This operation consists in making behaviorally non-convergent actors disappear, leading to Description I. At the second level of interpretation, the application of a particular grid – specifically that of the “somatotactical” and/or “proxemic” codes (Spiegel and Machotka 1974) – brings out the various modalities of presence [Figure 1b]:

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– interpersonal positions (face to face, one behind the other, one beside another, back to back, and at variable angles); – interpersonal movements (approaching, contacting, intersecting by occupying the same space, manipulation of personal space through action, withdrawal through detachment, separation with lack of contact, etc.); – variable engagement intensities (avoidance, lack of contact, grazing, touching, intensive engagement); – different body positions (standing, leaning, sitting, crouching, bending over); – gestural movements (of the head, arms, legs, feet, or the whole body); – ways of looking (averted eyes, sidelong glances, looking generally, looking straight in the eyes); – “beam” areas from the body, to execute a definite movement (front, frontlateral-left, etc.). Finally, the photographic analysis-frame attempts to reuse the data from the first two interpretations. Far from embracing the abundance of reality, the concept-photograph and the adopted interpretation code risked structuring it too much, drying it up, or in any case reducing and excluding. It is for this reason that the aim of the photographic analysis-frame is not just to “frame” the studied scene, but also to make it possible to perceive the behavioral laterality it involves. By first bringing out the silhouettes using the tracing paper, and then making good use of the naked eye on the basis of that first task, this behavioral movement can be captured. By enabling reality to exist in its uniqueness, this type of photographic interpretation allows a scene to be framed on the basis of the focal event; but in so doing, it shows the modalizations of this frame, which is subject to a permanent vulnerability. In the process that leads to Figure 1c, it was necessary to recover a set of discarded details contained in the photographs. Today I would be lying if I associated these extra pieces of information with this or that specific wastebasket, that is to say with this or that specific stage of the research process: writing, conceptualization, note-taking and note organization, or direct observation in the fieldwork. But there is no doubt that the detachment of some children while dancing (on the left-hand side of the drawing) resisted until the final step, and that the lateral movements of the Gilles were not even noted at the time of the observation. It is quite possible that they were not even been noticed! Here is how the gradual waste-recovery (or data-recovery) operation could be reconstructed, in accordance with an operation that is the opposite of the traditional fieldwork study: – On the left-hand side of the image, the movement of children drawn to an external element is generating a marked lateral displacement and risks leading

II. Leftovers of details: a photographic experiment 1: Gilles’ figures

a) Concept-photograph

b) Grid for interpreting standpoints

c) Photographic analysis-frame

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to an action that could trigger a call to order (like “Be careful! Where are you going?”). This is a borderline distraction. Another possible case would be a highly compartmentalized incident, for example straightening out clothing that is out of adjustment. – The greeting that the Gilles offer to people they recognize on the sidewalk. In the dominant compromise mode, the Gilles are also Mr. X and Y, who, while they are performing the ritual action in question, also actualize other roles (familial, professional, etc.) through discreet, controlled signs. This is the split that enables the actor to actualize traces of other roles in a more or less controlled way. Whereas the principle of shifting concerns a succession of actions, here it is a matter of showing the simultaneous presence of different registers within one action sequence. There are various examples: a more precise nod of the head or a look of recognition towards one person or another person, an occasional conversation between two members of a group of Gilles. – The small movements of the Gilles: the interpretation codes used make it possible to see movements of the head, eyes and body to the right or left, as well as the variable gaps between everyone’s positions. These variations do not seem intentional. Being purely individual, these constant gestural traits are differential and are not shared among the members of the group. These unnoticed gestures have no consequences and are absorbed as soon as they arise in the action. – The Gilles’ distraction by an insignificant external element; this does not seem to correspond to a specific greeting to anyone. – The backdrop, particularly the trees, houses, streets and sidewalks. This meticulous observation of details reveals five forms of distance that infiltrate into modes of human presence1: Docility: This concerns a sort of “withdrawal” of attention during the immediate and automatic performance of an action under the effect of habit, and the implicit use of various rules and reference points. Interstitiality: This designates the leeway introduced into the here-and-now act of presence, through a modalizing posture in the form of hesitation, detachment (absence), as well as small gestural and postural disparities. Laterality: Within a space-time unit, this designates elements that are already present and peripheral to the relevant situation. These can be people, animals, objects or landscapes. They constitute a backdrop; the observed person can perceive some of its elements as unimportant details in a minimal, at most distracted way.

1

See also Part III of this book about modes of presence.

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Exteriority: In the act of presence, this concerns the appearance of elements external to the spatiotemporal unity in question, in the form of wandering thoughts, particularly memories of past situations or anticipation of future situations. Fluidity: This expresses the immediate, continuous flow between situations, moments, and action sequences (even opposite or contradictory ones), whether punctuated or not by blank moments, marked by (fluid) variations of intensity and attention swings. But fluidity is also the human ability not to close off actions or conversations, but rather to postpone them, forget them or set them aside. At the end of this return trip from the event to the text and from the text to the event, sociocultural ethnography shifts away from its observational habits to analyze the presence of individuals. Rather than comparing and collecting attitudes, gestures and postures in synthetic descriptions with a view to understanding groups, cultures, or societies, I attempt to capture human presence in its various expressions of engagement in a situation in which an individual harmonizes with others under collective circumstances, and at the same time manifests a set of unexpected gestures and behaviors. This is the minor mode of reality. Here it becomes apparent that I am working on data with characteristics that are different from what is usually sought and analyzed by the social sciences, which focus on details that are typical and shared by the members of a collectivity. Indeed, everyone who is shown my “waste material” confirms the nature of the detail: “That isn’t important”. This is why they interest me, and why I focus on gestures and attitudes that the social sciences and the individuals themselves do not consider principally important. Many of these gestures often go unnoticed and unobserved by the interaction participants themselves. These details do not introduce a new system of signs that are directly relevant and interpretable by humans. Moreover the minor mode is not shared since these expressions are fragmented and always diverse. Though the minor mode is inherent to human existence, it seems to the social sciences like an impossible object. These details are a simple indication of humanity. However they are not counted as part of the significative relevance of an interaction or the typicality of a cultural model They are important because they are not relevant. Details such as these lie at the heart of human existence.

III. What is the minor mode of reality? The minor mode of reality merits a few theoretical clarifications. A moment of human presence is usually made up of a large number of details, that is to say things that are as unimportant to the people who carry them as they are to their fellow participants in a situation or outside observers. The reality of action is, on

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the one hand, a body in the process of moving, accompanied by sideways glances and peripheral gestures, and on the other hand a state of mind that often has nothing to do with the action in progress. All of these details make up what I have called the minor mode, which is neither a general action, nor a particular type of activity. It constitutes a specific modality by which an individual is necessarily present in a place with other people. The minor mode widens the field of details to be described and considered. It is useful for describing the real, concrete person, getting the clearest possible view of his or her constant variations of intensity. From a theoretical perspective, it is also just as useful for considering the anthropological difference, as we will see. Details are constant leitmotifs in the social sciences, as well as in ethnographic activity. But with the minor mode, what interests me is the possibility of making it into an object of thought, exploring the status of details, which almost become scientific anti-objects. It is a matter of considering the detail as a detail, as something unimportant, whereas the usual semantic reading of the social sciences masks, overlooks, loses the detail status of various small things, by linking them to attributes that are different from those of a detail. Let us consider that the minor mode constitutes a “lesser” way of performing actions, without the introduction of this “less” constituting a new attribute or having supplementary effects on the situation, and also without changing the act in question, which unfolds with its socially expected meanings. The minor mode is a way of being present in one’s action that releases the human from the action without disengaging him. It neither adds nor removes a layer of meaning from the performed action. In the performance of human actions, the minor mode is constant in varying doses, whatever these actions may be. It is a reality, one that does not attract attention. It even counts among its characteristics, manifesting itself in forms that are lesser than those of the expected action, forms that are involuntary and unnoticed, singular and particular, and do not lead the situation’s other participants to share in them. Therefore, as the photographic exercise showed, one form of minor mode resides in gestures and thoughts that: are different and simultaneous from those that are expected in the action; are not relevant; are not noticed or barely noticed; are thus tolerated; do not imply an active, intentional, strategic dimension for the person executing them. In any situation in the life of society, people do what is appropriate but they also look left and right, seem to become detached, come back and then once again release themselves from the scene. They are a bit distracted, absent, thinking about other things. From this I can conclude that people are skilled at doing two things at once: managing the collective aspect necessarily implied by the interaction in which they are participating, and managing their own singularity through gestures, movements and thoughts that are specific to each of them. They introduce the individual detail against a backdrop of coordination. Thus these details present a few characteristics that are important to my

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position: they are inherent in a human being’s participation in an action, they cannot be shared by others without a lapse into irrelevance, they are contained within limits beyond which they cannot pass without the risk of engendering an inopportune situation. They have no relevant effect on the interaction in progress or on a subsequent description, but are tolerated by the interactants, who implicitly dissociate them from any fault. The presence of these minor gestures does not invite one to think about the succession of different actions, but rather about the simultaneity of the various strata: the part that is appropriate to the situation and the residues of other actions. In a situation, human presence would seem inconceivable and impossible without this variable dose of small details that have a lesser intensity, are in the background, are toned down. The situation’s agreeableness depends on them2. In human presence, certain action and gesture choices are actualized, while others that are neither actualized nor abandoned are seen as potential: as such, they can leave traces and appear in the form of unimportant details. In a situation, there is thus an extra-social reserve or “negative reservation”, to use Simmel’s wording: human beings seem to be equipped to continue to live, to survive. Surely though, a situation without any emergent meaning would be chaotic. It would lack order, lack reference points. But a situation without any leftovers is unlivable. Minor details enable people to live together. They add a new stratum to those that contribute to the action’s construction. This is “the” human stratum that lightens, defuses and frees human presence from the imperatives of meaning and rationality, and allows people not to see others as “exhibitionists” or “strategists” of meaning. Thus my reading is different from Goffman’s interactionism. While the inappropriate use of this leeway risks threatening the flow of the interaction, not using it at all entails an interactional danger such that the interaction participants could bring the normality of a human being into question. Would a scene of total and collective absorption not provoke a feeling of fright or be interpreted as a sign of madness? Interactional skill implies not only an ability to identify with the situation and achieve leeway in a controlled manner, but also a capacity for tolerance that makes it possible to minorize this flexibility in the situation. The same judgment of madness would also apply to someone who, brought to a standstill by particular details in others’ behavior, would implicitly be unable to practice this cognitive minorization operation. On the basis of a methodological observation of the life of details, the observer can note small gestures, some of which will become “majorizing”. There are sequences of action in which two shared principles do not manifest themselves with equal intensity, where the second, unexpected stratum manifests itself as a “sur2 On the proportion and regulation of these details, see for example the research of Catherine Rémy (2003). See also Piette (1996).

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plus”, a “more” experienced as such by the situation partners. Accompanying the unfolding of the action, these small majorized or majorizing gestures arise, in this case voluntarily and noticeably: surpluses like the kindly smile of the employee behind the ticket window, an inopportune utterance, or a Freudian slip. At the same time, there is the risk of too much minimum, too much docility, passivity or unawareness in social life – this being not without ethical considerations. Minimums that are non-relevant to the scene can also hamper or even disrupt what is taken for granted in presence. And they may darken moods, invade and overload consciousness. Minimums live and change, sometimes accumulating, sometimes seeming incompatible, losing their minor status, or regaining it. It is certainly more difficult and daring to focus on the minors which are minor than on the minors which become major, these immediately seeming more “interesting” in the social sciences. Other forms of minor detail majorization are possible. Intentional sleepiness, the deliberate air of detachment of a person listening to someone else’s speech (during a conference or seminar) constitute a specific tactic designed to offend the speaker. Not to mention the overwhelming ruminations that an individual sometimes can’t get out of his mind. This action is not a case of the minor mode, even if the gesture in no way compromises the stability of the situation, assuming the other listeners are paying attention. Particular details therefore do not constitute parameters that in themselves generate the minor mode. For the transmitter, this implies the presence of a not really deliberate behavior, which does not offer any sharable model to others. And on the part of the receiver(s), it implies a cognitive discrimination operation that distinguishes the pertinent from details that are assumed to be minor and are therefore tolerated. At the least discord in the interplay of communication (a strategic intention or paranoid focus on a particular detail), the minor mode disappears. Discriminating poorly, majorizing something that is minor for the transmitter, or not tolerating a particular detail: these all erase the minor mode from an action. Knowledge of the conventions related to the interaction, of its framework, of its socially distinguishing traits is crucial for the exercise of this interactional skill. Instead of interactional skill, I should speak of semi-interactional skill since it reflects presence without any conscious strategy on the part of the transmitter, without any explicit decoding on the part of the receiver, and without the creation of a shared line of action. The introduction of alternative action and attention strata into a presence can have consequences and various continuities, can lead it to all sorts of oddities, can imply obsessions that hinder the unfolding of the action that was in progress. Leftovers, residues and intervals make up the heterogeneity of the action. Among these, there are very active ones that quietly “work away” in the background of relations, able to rise to the surface in the next situation, as Cyril Lemieux has explained (2009: Chap. 6). We are seriously lacking close-up observations of ongoing actions and modes of presence. It is almost “absurd” to see this when it

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concerns such an essential point, especially considering the abundance of action theories. It seems to me that the split between relevant actions and non-relevant actions needs a new complementary analysis in terms of existence and presence. This ability to perform simultaneous, heterogeneous actions gives human beings a distinct way of being present in the world and in situations. Let us return to this “less” in the action, which partly consists of the presence of other layers of action and attention in the present volume of being. But why “less”? One reason is that, as we have seen, these layers are lesser than the expected meaning of the principal action. In this case, direct observation of the action consists in separating the expected – what is relevant in this action – from physical, gestural and cognitive signs that attest to the presence of what is nonrelevant in the action. Another reason is that the action, that which is appropriate, as it is encompassed within a set of heterogeneous details, has a characteristic dampening effect on the ways of being that are present in the situation. Focusing on the minor mode enables attention to be drawn to one way (the human way) of looking, perceiving, being attentive, let’s say “being in the world”. The minor mode then takes an extended meaning. It resides in the following few traits. First there is the human mode of perception, which is most often parsimonious and light in everyday situations, not involving an active, nervous or alert exploration of an object’s characteristics and thus enabling its trigger effect to be blunted. In various situations, people are usually surrounded by many things that are “there”, things that they might see but not really observe – the minimal perception of which is not followed by an action. Moreover, while humans can understand an object with various meanings or purposes, they associate it, in a specific situation, with one meaning, which may have been central before and which in the present situation becomes secondary without being absent. Individuals perceive with a system of open blinders that enable them to see a prominent object without eliminating what is all around them, maintaining a kind of backdrop from which emerge things they perceive as unimportant details. They are able to be distracted without losing sight of the main object of their attention, continuing their main activity, without becoming detached, without losing their concentration on this. Finally, they live in the world, from which things they perceive appear with a certain continuity from situation to situation, without involving the abrupt replacement of one perception by another, against a backdrop of relative stability, without the need to control and far from a state of readiness. Wandering thoughts are possible, straying far from the activity underway, thoughts concerning the past, the future or other things. These thoughts may also become critical towards the present act, as if it made one sense one’s restriction, a problem, tiredness, a habit, and may give rise to a doubt, an inner conflict. They then cause one to leave the minor mode. This minor modality constitutes a way of being in the world, it is even specific to the Sapiens species through our ability to not see and do directly, head-on,

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exclusively, totally, to introduce a layer, a loosening stratum, to different degrees of course. From this perspective, observation consists in pinpointing the elements that characterize lightened presence and make it possible. It is into this distance, this suspension, this withdrawal that the minor mode inserts itself, while also being something more: a new distance from the distance, withdrawal and suspension. These details attest that humans are not exclusively focused on the imperatives of communication, on social networks and social strategies, as animals would be. Is it not precisely this principle of an animal life without leftovers that is illustrated by Darwin’s description on dogs which “when feeling affectionate, lower their ears in order to exclude all sounds, so that their whole attention may be concentrated on the caresses of their master” (Darwin 1965: 118)? It seems to me that the minor mode is more than just a research subject. Is it a thema, to use Holton’s expression (1978: 3–24), like a new representation in a discipline, capable of creating new intelligibilities? Intellectual clarification by means of minimality implies a representation of human beings that is different from the one that presents them as active, rational, as vulnerable, fragile and anxious, as passive or determined, as multifaceted and multi-active. The minor modes injects “a little something” different into these various representations. As a stratum among other presence strata, the minor mode is profoundly real: it is there simultaneously with people’s presence, and we do not want to see it. The minor mode offers a powerful descriptive heuristicity and constitutes thus a critical lever that helps characterize the operation of the social sciences, while at the same time also providing a glimpse of the specificity of an existential anthropology. This critique of the operation of the social sciences seemed indispensable for pinpointing what existential anthropology is not.

Part Two

Existence and Days I. Displacement and continuity More often than not, ethnographic work is based on a series of situations through which the observer passes, each situation necessitating choices about perspective, note-taking, note organization, interpretation, conceptualization and writing. The culturalist and interactionist models are opposite in terms of their selection modalities. In the table below, the operations listed are not necessarily linear in the context of a real investigation. Sometimes they require a step backward. These two models designate not only ethnographies conducted in social and cultural anthropology, but also those linked to sociology. And most importantly, though they are presented here with opposite characteristics, in the fieldwork they can interpenetrate in varying proportions. I am far from thinking that social anthropologists do only cultural ethnography and interactionist sociologists practice only interactional ethnography. Social anthropologists also use interactionist concepts. Moreover, there are not many interactional ethnographies in which researchers have become fully-fledged “members”. On the contrary, they are constantly playing with variations in their level of active participation in certain situations, and with their distance in others. 2: Two types of observation Culturalist model – Understanding a culture – Observation from a distance (the researcher has no role beyond that of observer) – Extended territory: the observer circulates according to a program of observed situations – Listening to people’s points of view (interviews) – Taking notes “on live”, with the possibility of photographing and filming – Focus on details that are meaningful for the culture being identified – Conceptual field: community, culture, identity, totality, homogeneity, structure . . . – Possible occasional restriction of the culturalist focus to interactions and gestures

Interactionist model – Understanding interactions – Participant observation (the researcher plays a role other than that of observer) – Limited space in which the researcher plays his “day-to-day” role – Normal interaction and conversation – Note-taking impossible on the spot (efficiency constraint) – Focus on details that are meaningful in the interaction – Conceptual field: interaction, meaning, role, strategy, presentation, role distance ... – Interactionist information is placed in perspective to understand a broader entity (a “world”), and it is also possible to occasionally restrict the interactionist focus to gestures

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From all of this it follows that ethnography is too quickly tempted to give accounts of the collective effects of local interactions, rather than describe the circumstantial situations out of which they arise. Why eliminate the circumstances and hesitations of human beings when these generate and structure practices whose effects serve as the basis for macrosociological interpretations and theories? Within fieldwork investigations, the observation process is too often limited to one event, to one activity or one specific level of activity, and when “life” becomes the object of study, people’s stories often constitute the basic methodological tool (Denzin 1989). In this spirit, I prefer to suspend the word ethnography in favor of phenomenography1, which could be existential anthropology’s observation method. This would consist in giving detailed attention (through observation and note-taking) to all that appears in a situation. It constitutes the basic principle, the initial pinpointing of all that can exist in a situation, accompanied by a polyfocal observation that establishes a hierarchy between the concerns of meaning. This step, similar to ethnography, would only be exploratory (if it is necessary), to get an understanding of the “field”. The observation process then continues with a focus on human beings, their actions, gestures and states of mind, taken separately and tracked from situation to situation. This observation also aims not to immediately eliminate secondary, peripheral or non-relevant elements. Thus it endeavors to identify as many details as possible in human presences, particularly links between an element and its opposite. Depending on the anthropologist’s objectives, the observation may combine the continuity of existence and modes of presence with closer perspectives and a more detailed focus on particular moments, to understand the continuity of the situations. What is sought is a balance between closer or more distant perspectives, in order to observe and write a description of existence, and not just of one activity, situation or event. The final text favors a referential presentation that incorporates situational indications through images or transcriptions of conversations. An expression that conveys all of these points of view is: continuous, polyfocal, auto-hetero-mono-liminal observation. “Liminality” means observation upclose, alongside, at the threshold of the person, with the naked eye, while taking notes, or through film, photographs, or even using a webcam. “Mono” designates one existent person at a time, with the possibility of repeating the exercise with several people selected according to various criteria. “Continuous” means the tracking of the existence, without stopping on one activity. “Polyfocal” designates the change of scale that is needed to capture the action and the leftovers, the continuity and the moments. “Auto” indicates an autographic process on the 1 With a very different meaning and methodology, phenomenography is sometimes presented in educational sciences as research (through interviews) on forms of learning categorization. See Gloria Dall’Alba and Biörn Hasselgren (1996).

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part of the researcher, or carried out by the person observed. “Hetero” specifies the fact of asking to individuals introspective explicitations. Phenomenographic attention orients the observer towards a perspective whose heuristic impact I believe is very important: following one person throughout his days, in various situations and activities, and preserving this continuity of moments in the writing. This type of methodology exists, and it is called “shadowing”: “The researcher follows a person as his or her shadow, walking in his or her footsteps over a relatively long period of time, throughout his or her different activities, to collect detailed-grained data” (Meunier and Vasquez 2008: 168). This method is for example currently practiced in organizational studies, as indicated in the summary book by Barbara Czarniawska (2007), a management studies specialist2, but it remains marginalized in the social sciences, all the more if the shadowing takes place outside of professional or public spaces, entering into individuals’ private, domestic spheres, or if the shadowing is done with a camera. This method is of course intrusive and uncomfortable to say the least, but anyone who practices it comes away with a rich understanding of the person and a richness of data3. It is a question of shadowing, observing and taking notes, conversing with the shadowed person now and then, when he is less preoccupied by his activities. The researcher can also conduct very introspective exchanges. Shadowing with recorded video is possible, of course more difficult, but this is very heuristic. But in any case, phenomenographic shadowing also involves taking very meticulous notes, which the final text should restitute as faithfully as possible. There are various ways of completing this information: particularly the use of diaries, which the researcher could ask to be kept, or which might already exist in all of its possible forms, and be made available to the anthropologist, who is then able to track variations in states of mind. These notes may or may not concern very circumscribed situations revolving around a specified theme. In those cases, immediately after self-observation, people would note their states of mind, modes of consciousness and emotions. It is also possible for the subjects to record themselves in various formats, if the observer has asked them to record each other. When it is a question of existence, it is not so much the action that is at play, but rather the existence modalities involved in its execution. This increases the necessity and the appropriateness of not shadowing only one single 2 See also Büscher, Urry, Witchger (2011). The authors mention the “mobilities paradigm”, which aims to analyze the processes that follow people’s presences, corporeal displacements (continuities, presences-distances, intermittences). See M. Büscher (2009) and Kusenbach (2003) who uses a mobile ethnography, which she prefers to interviews and participatory observation divorced from temporal perspectives carried by individuals. 3 In the tradition of social anthropology, it often happens that the individual is placed in the center of the chosen problem but is still approached with the usual ethnographic methods, without being completely considered in his detailed modes of presence. See Miller (2009) or Biehl and Locke (2010).

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activity. It seems to me that shadowing, when it is practiced only occasionally, is not sufficiently recognized for its heuristic power or for its usefulness as a crucial tool for understanding the act of existing. From this perspective, Jack Katz’s words seem highly relevant: “In the study of behavior in public places, the advances begun by Georg Simmel and continued by Erving Goffman and John Lofland have not seen new leaps for 30 years. It is time to move beyond the atemporal, fly-on-the-wall perspective of the situationally specific participant observer to see the meaning of the current situation within the longer-term framework of a participant’s biography as he or she moves from one arena of situated interaction to another, always aware of what in situ co-respondents cannot fully know, that what is currently happening has retroactive and prospective meanings based on the overarching trajectories of his or her own social life. Getting access to the biographical meanings of the situated public interactions requires negotiating relations with subjects of a sort that a clear-eyed but always cool observer like Goffman would resist. You have to expose yourself, if only as a researcher, when you ‘go along’. But unless the ethnographer of public behavior is willing to work out observations over a series of sequential, situated involvements of the same subjects, he or she will be unable to compete in data quality and analytic precision with the increasingly powerful stationary audiovisual recorder” (Katz 2010: 26). The observation of existence is rather more delicate. On the one hand, it implies a focus on individuals, as I have noted. On the other hand, since an existence is first and foremost a continuing person, an anthropology of existence must keep Aristotle’s words in mind, at least as a horizon of thought: “And so one might even raise the question whether the words ‘to walk’, ‘to be healthy’, ‘to sit’ imply that each of these things is existent, and similarly in any other case of this sort; for none of them is either self-subsistent or capable of being separated from substance, but rather, if anything, it is that which walks or sits or is healthy that is an existent thing. Now these are seen to be more real because there is something definite which underlies them (i. e. the substance or individual), which is implied in such a predicate; for we never use the word ‘good’ or ‘sitting’ without implying this” (Aristotle: Book 7, part 1, 1028a). When anthropologists see human beings, they must be thoroughly amazed by their presence. In a situation, it is almost impossible to indulge in this wonder: “Oh, you human, I’m looking at you because soon you will be no more . . .”. Substance and individual: these are not words easy to introduce in anthropology. But is it not precisely up to the anthropological perspective to make sure, throughout its research, not to forget singularity, by means of various methods? The phenomenographer would make this observation-description of a human being, by following him for different periods of hours or days, while taking notes on modes of presence, that is to say on the actions, gestures, and states of mind that make up existence. Hence existential anthropology specifies its aim: to analyze the act of existing, insofar as it goes beyond the individual’s social dimension.

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In 1995 I practiced shadowing alongside a Catholic priest in a French diocese. I tracked him for a week, every day, from morning until evening, as he went about all of his activities, both public and private, whether specifically religious or not. It was an exercise in direct, close-up observation. It was direct because it directly focused on action sequences in progress. It was close-up because it consisted in very closely following the priest, his presence, but without participating in his interactions with parishioners. Closely following the priest meant circulating with him, just behind him, through his various spaces, while making notes in a diary on his actions and verbal exchanges. And this was always with the objective (which is almost impossible to achieve but has value as a stimulating aim) of not immediately selecting one sequence of actions over another because of its relevance to the concrete situation. The advantage of this method is that it allows us to be amazed (and continue to be amazed) by circumstances, anecdotes, details, and by the heterogeneity of the actions that a human being performs. Furthermore, the observation of actions was often supplemented by the priest’s retrospective commentary, particularly during moments of transition such as meals or car journeys. When working on the final product, the guiding principle is that all of the notes taken during the observation should be transcribed, and that as little as possible should be lost in the process of reorganizing them. This is an essential objective: not to lose sight – during the research process, from the observation stage to the production of the final text – of the individual. It was with Max Weber’s ideal type that I tackled the fieldwork data. This constitutes the guiding line of my exercise. “This conceptual pattern,” Weber writes, “brings together certain relationships and events of historical life into a complex, which is conceived as an internally consistent system. Substantively, this construct in itself is like a utopia which has been arrived at by the analytical accentuation of certain elements of reality” (Weber 1949: 90). This is how Weber characterizes the ideal type, as we have seen before, which he steadfastly refuses to consider a copy of reality, since reality is composed of an infinite number of diffuse actions that no concept can exhaust. I will now present two extracts from my fieldwork diary4. The results obtained from the observation of the priest will enable to understand the idea of “displacement”, which it is possible to extend to human beings in general and to their mode of existence. From notes taken in the situation, let us detect what, in this first exercise, can help us understand the act of existing. Tuesday December 12th, 8:45am, in the church sacristy. Bernard [this is the name I gave to the priest] takes a set of objects, which he places on a stand attached to a cupboard. Once they have been prepared, he carries them with his two hands to a table behind the altar. Thus Bernard prepares his “work space” for the mass that will follow. In any case, these objects constitute essential reference points for coordinating and completing liturgical sequences. Bernard knows where he can place this set 4

For more details, see Piette (1999).

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Part Two: Existence and Days of objects so that they will be directly accessible at the desired moment. Next, he puts on his white alb and places the mauve stole over it. From the sideboard, he takes the Roman Missal, a small booklet, Prions en Église (Let us Pray in the Church), which he places on the altar. The Missal is opened. To the right page. On the pulpit, he opens the lectionary to the Gospel of the day. He lights two large candles near the altar. Bernard seems to be immersed in his booklet, which he has just picked up again. Two minutes of silence. The bells ring. Bernard gets up and, standing behind the alter, says: “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit . . .”, making the sign of the cross. For about half an hour, Bernard activates a set of gestures and words by which he addresses God to praise him, to ask him to cleanse sins or bless offerings. He wishes for God’s presence close to the parishioners, or even objectivizes it through the Host and the wine to be shared. Bernard also uses the objects he placed on the table behind the altar. He does this according to a set of meticulously performed actions with corresponding words. The wine and water in the chalice, the Host in the paten, the breaking of the Host and the distribution: “Happy are we to be invited to the Lord’s supper”.

There are several steps in my exercise. The first consists in taking those of Weber’s ideal types that relate to religious activity and comparing them to the findings in the fieldwork. In his “priest” ideal type, Weber likens the priest to a functionary in a cult institution, with defined rules and norms. What I have just noted on Bernard’s liturgical actions does indeed seem to conform to the “ritual institutional model” ideal type that Jean-Paul Willaime has proposed in the sociology of religion, to make Weber’s categories more specific. In this model, importance is primarily placed on the legitimization of the function validated by the institution, and not on the officiant’s personality (Willaime 1992: 17). Hence the rigid objectivity of the Catholic ritual, conforming to a gesture and language system that is organized hierarchically, and is in any case less vulnerable to various fluctuations than Protestantism with its sole emphasis on preaching. But on that morning, Bernard also delivered a homily. After having raised and lowered the lectionary, standing at the pulpit, he launched into a less “ritual” style that was more directly communicative and educational, even if the “instruction” was authoritative and delivered flawlessly. It was about faith: the extreme desire to live according to faith and at the same time the clarity of mind not to close oneself off. “We must go,” he says, “towards those who are outside the flock. But what does faith mean today in France at a time of crisis, of widespread strikes5? The challenge is to take the Lord with you throughout life and the world”. Then, after these phrases had been hammered out, silence. As if the change of tone indicated the personalization of the message, the desire to make the institution’s ritual apparatus part of the events of everyday life. It was as if Bernard were saying to his parishioners: “I’m not simply a Host distributor. There is also the Gospel, and I present myself as a witness of the meaning it 5 The observation exercise was conducted in France in 1995, during an extended rail strike.

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contains in our lives today”, as he expressed it to me. Having become a sermon professional, the priest has his own way of showing the authority of the Scriptures and their ability to guide. The liturgy is not given only through an apparatus of institutional objectivity. It is also a reminder of the importance of being faithful to the evangelical message, and of its contemporary interpretation – even though, delivered in an authoritative way, it does not open a discussion on the truth of the message, and even though the discourse stays within the rules of the ritual, which must be conducted according to specific conditions of delivery for the sake of the existence of the institution, which is always ultimately conferring legitimacy. The priest’s discourse is also heard as a personalized speech that expresses specific theological orientations that various people can relate to. It is the evangelical message that moves the priest to interpret and go beyond his own institutional and ritual anchoring. In keeping with Weber’s typology, he plays the role of “prophet”, by creating meaning, based on the Gospels, and by giving importance to his personal charisma. Let us look at a second situation: Wednesday December 13th, around 8:40am. Around a few adults, a group of children is moving restlessly in front of the presbytery. They are from a 4th grade catechism class (12 years old) that a coach is taking, on this one occasion, to the neighboring abbey a few kilometers away, to prepare the Christmas service. The children sit in a room, under the supervision of two catechists, Madame Patix who is in charge and Pierre, a rather little man with a loud voice. It is he who leads and presents. Bernard is staying in the background. The theme of this meeting is “After Mary’s example, accepting Jesus”. Madame Patix begins speaking about Mary. Later Bernard told me he did not quite agree with the title: “It’s as if one were taking Jesus for oneself”. He would have preferred: “Accepting Jesus’s gift”, and to have added an ethical element. And when Madame Patix mentions Mary, she stresses how she is drawn towards God: “Very soon, she wanted to belong to God alone . . .; she fully submitted to God . . . a young girl who should have married, letting herself be guided by God”. Pierre then reads two extracts from the Gospel of Luke. One on the birth of Jesus, in which the angel Gabriel tells Mary she will give birth to a boy, Jesus, who is also the son of God. Then another extract recounting what the angel said to the shepherds. “Fear not: for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born [. . .] a Savior, which is Christ the Lord”. And the shepherds go see “Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger”. The children ask questions about vocabulary: sterile, rejoicing, humble, . . . and Bernard answers very kindly . . . Then suddenly: “It’s ten o’clock,” he says. “I have to go.” As the meeting at the abbey continues, Bernard dashes to the Vernac church. A service is taking place there for the “grade 3” Sunday school class, led by two women. In the car, Bernard did not hesitate to pick away at Madame Patix’s presentation: “It’s the stuff of legends. It’s a Mary completely outside humanity, always already subject to God, even though Mary is a model believer and it’s possible, by following her example, to strive for perfection through a political attitude.”

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Part Two: Existence and Days It’s clear: the “right” religion is not about legends. But it’s an ethical attitude that engages with life, based on the meaning of the Gospels. Having arrived at the Vernac church thirteen minutes late, Bernard puts on his alb. A woman is in the middle of reading a text to the sitting children. Then it’s the priest who speaks. He evokes the notion of “conversion”: turning towards or returning to the right path is better than coming to get forgiven for one’s sins, as a little girls says. Bernard stresses that forgiveness does not mean coming and saying you’re nasty. We are all nice and we always have the desire to change our lives. Converting therefore means reconciling with a friend. Changing direction. This does not prevent everyone from proclaiming, in accordance with the program prepared by the two women of the “Sunday school” (not very young): “I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done . . .” It’s a full-fledged discrepancy: saying one thing, and being forced to do the opposite, immediately after. And Bernard “receives” each child individually in the Choir. And to assert the importance of others, a woman reminds them that “the Abbé asked you to pray for each other.” Bernard told me that he tried to tell each child that God values him, so the child knows that God is counting on him to experience this friendship. “In fact,” he says to me, “this kind of service is important for the Sunday school ladies. It is always formalism. I told the children: ‘When you’re ready, come.’ And it’s done in an ordered way, one at a time. There was a boy who had nothing to say. I didn’t go rummaging through his conscience.”

Even if he is not opposed to the Mary worship that some parishioners organize in the form of rosaries, Bernard favors the ideas that he considers those of the Second Vatican Council. The catechist women belong to the other “camp”, with their supernatural representation of Mary, their ritualist fixation, and their emphasis on clerical authority. They consider their priest Bernard a responsible authority, a spiritual father, and a mediator between God and human beings. It is to these “three” that they speak when they timidly apologize for having missed a meeting. Whereas they complain that the clerical role they once knew is being abandoned, Bernard presents himself as a “socio-psychological” counselor or contemporary witness of the evangelical message. He keeps repeating: “No, I’m not the one who . . .”, while stressing the importance of other roles: “But I am . . .”. This does not stop him from performing Eucharistic services several times a week, without being uncomfortable “wearing” his alb and repeating liturgical phrases. In short, the clergy’s role presents a set of contradictions, as well as some incongruity in relation to the parishioners’ expectations. I do not wish to relate this well-established diagnosis to the identity crisis of a destabilized, challenged clergy that is becoming scarce and constantly adjusting by means of a host of statuses and functions in the context of so-called unstable modernity. Even if this interpretation can be enlightening, here I am considering all of these elements as magnifications of what a priest does as he moves from situation to situation. So let us keep in mind for these situations and others that follow during the day: mass is not only a priest’s objectivized ritual, it is also the anchoring of the

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interpretation of the Gospels in everyday life; parish meetings do not mean just the ritual of mass, they mean thinking about taking concrete action for the benefit of disadvantaged people; the marriage ritual is not primarily about the ceremonial, festive element; the priest is not just the manager of the institution’s shop, he is someone who takes an interest in sociopolitical current events; the priest is not just someone who performs sacraments, he is also someone who helps parishioners form a “community”. These elements do not match with the “priest” and “ritual institutional model” ideal types; but these elements are of interest for how they are repeated in the course of situations and seem to form a series. Bernard is a priest: sometimes he confirms the institutional and ritual model expected of him, sometimes he confirms it while adding complementary meaning (homily), sometimes he opposes it with another orientation. Even if Weber does explain that the work essentially consists in measuring things against the concept, the ideal-type method implies at least two dangers (that come with some ways of using it): that of exclusively focusing on ideal types and their relations, fully disconnected from the facts; or the danger of reducing the status of facts to that of examples or illustrations – mere “servants” of concepts. To preserve the complexity of reality under ideal types, one first solution would be to connect several existing ideal types and to create a new frame of reference to better describe the facts. It is thus possible to offer a complete idealtype series that incorporates the heterogeneity of the actions observed. In addition to the priest, prophet and magician ideal types proposed by Weber, new ones (theologian, teacher, preacher) can be added, each connected with one of the religious personage’s action modalities (Willaime 1997). It is up to the researcher to define the modalities of these connections. What do we observe? Bernard most often rejects the roles of ritual functionary and institutional administrator, even if he also carries out their functions. The prophet relies on emotions and the person: we see this when Bernard draws attention to his own personal qualities in a homely, or we find it in his friendly relationship with children at a meeting. The magician is condemned by Bernard who considers him an automatic distributor of efficient sacraments. The teacher is linked to an ideology and a text: it is Bernard presenting Mary while refusing to be a priest or magician. There is also the ancestor, which is linked to memory and filiation; the appeal to these is constant, particularly through the apostolic lineage in which Bernard is a link, or through the repetition of “original” words, or through legitimization via the use of different forms of ecclesiastical “tradition”. There is also the preacher, who depends on a group and a certain engagement: it is Bernard placing importance on interpreting political current events in light of the Scriptures and encouraging people to take action. Priest, prophet, theologian, preacher, magician . . .: Bernard is constantly moving through these figures. But there is another solution. It consists in systematically recovering the leftovers eliminated by all of these added-up ideal types, as they were constructed by

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the researcher in his analytical construct. This perspective is all the more essential if the details eliminated by each of the ideal-type concepts form a series over the course of a set of observed situations in relation to which this ideal type has been precisely measured. This is indeed the case here, faced with the set of negations Bernard effected among the various actions. The ethnographer often hesitates to take these cumulative details and nuances, these disparities outside ideal types, and form them into a factuality that is constitutive of the object of study. But if the important thing were precisely this set of details, that is to say the negations that are lined up by Bernard but do not appear as the relevant trait of each situation, then, as Paul Veyne writes: “Instead of taking no notice of that residue, as if it were just a clumsy expression, an approximation, a dead passage in the text, we should make an extra effort to make explicit what it appeared to imply. And suppose we were successful” (Veyne 2010: 7). This is indeed the phenomenographic hypothesis. The various remainders of each ideal type (no, I am not a priest, magician, prophet, preacher, etc.), from which Bernard distinguishes himself each time, then become the recurring stamp of his point of view. This one makes him say and show in different tones: “No, it’s not that”. Refusing to keep a position closed, he places it in an endless state of flux, in a process of perpetual transfer. Instead of the stopping points, which are always precarious, the important thing seems to be what happens between these. The act of carrying over is more important than the stop at one established position of priest, preacher, etc. Bernard appears to be a particularly heuristic symbol of the modes of displacement of humans and of existence in general. Through the interplay of these negations, there are different connections or superimposition of various activities that Bernard exercises as priest, prophet, theologian, preacher, teacher. When he delivers an evangelical speech during a service, he attempts to extract an original meaning from it, while also inserting himself into the framework of the institutional ritual. At a parish meeting, he recalls the operating principles of a parish entity, but rejects the obsession with liturgical details that he himself needs in order to perform the ritual. He denies his status as a ritual functionary when he is asked to officiate at a wedding or burial, while he is busy entering the most recently performed ritual operations in the parish register, or while he edits the parish information sheet, which lists the week’s services. And so on. In short, from situation to situation, everyday life sketches a set of displacements, stops, repetitions and differences. The phenomenographer can certainly be struck by the discontinuity or continuity of actions, their duration, their linking modalities – some slower, some faster – between these situations (car time during a journey, domestic activities), their regularity and their degree of reciprocal overflow. Let us be more precise. Comparing the priest’s day to a set of ideal types enables to think that the adding-up or juxtaposition of these ideal types, or of these different actions in a situation, is more appropriate than linking everything to one single concept. But above all that, even after having tested this add-

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ing-up or juxtaposition, there are always leftovers – the negations –, which could provide coherence from one situation to the next. When examining the flow of action, one of the points of phenomenographic focus would be the continuous displacement from one situation to another, with in each of them a form of negation. It is as if each situation contained the implicit challenge of not stopping, and as if in every situation, leftovers from the previous one and parts of the following one facilitated the movement. Is this not every individual’s mode of being, appearing in an enlarged form in religious activity? Is this modality of being in displacement not that of all individuals? This is crucial. To sum up, Weberian sociology of religion provides the observer with a set of ideal types: priest, prophet, magician. On the one hand, the week-long shadowing observation of a Catholic priest confronts us with the difference between the “priest” ideal type and his concrete activities. These are leftovers I: for example, for the “real” priest, mass is not only the objectivized ritual of the functionary priest, it is also about rooting the interpretation of the Gospels in day-to-day life, for example by helping the poor. In this case, it is possible to consider the day as a juxtaposition of different ideal types. On the other hand, this observation highlights another, narrower set of leftovers: what still remains after the addition of data that can be integrated into the ideal-types of priest, prophet, magician and other religious types. What most struck me was the interplay of negations, compromises, oscillations and supplements, which created constantly varying entanglements and connections between situations. These are leftovers II. This enables us to see the importance of the negations that the priest introduced into each situation, and at the same time shows the displacements that they set in motion between different situations. I think it says something about the movement of existence in general. At the heart of human presence, in all activities, there is repetition, difference and continuity between situations and actions. I am convinced that the social sciences have not grasped the extraordinary anthropological fruitfulness of the phenomenographic study of variations and differences between the singular days of human beings6.

II. Plurality, laterality, singularity Let us carry on the reasoning. At every stage of research, a phenomenography retains the maximum number of details, as well as various elements that fall out6 Shadowing exercises are therefore rare in the social sciences. They are a radical challenge to the principle of studies focused on wholes, seeking to retain, on one way or another, what is shared in these. It is therefore all the more important to mention Bernard Lahire’s (2010) call for a “sociology at the individual level”, calling for a focus on the individual with a view to understanding the variations of each of them based on common socializing experiences. The fact remains that the finely detailed description of an individual presence in an action cannot be contained in the idea that each person is the sum and sequence of various episodes of socialization.

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side of ideal types or overly exclusive concepts. It should be able to place them in a logical series and establish connections between them so that, at every moment, these leftovers avoid the researcher’s famous dustbin. Sociology’s specific history is marked by theories of human action in which the presence of individuals is suspended, considered non-relevant. Most of these, each constituting a different expression of the understanding of action, are expressed in terms of constraint, determination, rationality, communication, strategy, practical accomplishment or creative fulfillment. Existential anthropology highlights the pitfalls of these points of view, basing its critique on what human beings are, how they exist, and the nature of their presence in a situation when an action is underway7. So how should one go about finding out more about individuals, their presence and their existence in process, their consciousness and their thoughts? According to the phenomenographic perspective, when clarifying one single situation, it is certainly preferable to add up and juxtapose different sociological paradigms, rather than apply one paradigm that excludes others. But beyond this adding-up and juxtaposition, there are still leftovers that are essential . . . In a situation, an individual recognizes what is at play, adjusts to it and then shifts perfectly from one sphere to another, finding it relatively easy to forget the principle that governed the previous situation: from the workplace to the post office, then to the sports ground, to public transport and to one’s living room at home . . . This point of view invites “to explore the temporal flow of actions, the continuous work of interpretation by agents as they link specific circumstances to general categories, and the way in which they discuss, negotiate, and question their earlier conclusions as they seek new agreements that will allow the interaction to continue” (Dodier 1993: 563). Likewise, reading Hannah Arendt’s (1954) reflections on the philosophies of existence can convince one that what these have taught us is to focus on existence (and therefore on the individual), and to adapt the anthropologies underlying the work of each philosopher (Jaspers or Heidegger, Kierkegaard or Levinas) as combinable tools that can be used to describe various modes of individual presence. Existence is therefore that of an individual as an empirical unit, whose successive moments will justify sometimes emphasizing self-becoming, the resolute consciousness, sometimes emphasizing communication with others and strength in extreme situations, and sometimes emphasizing theories on solitary, desperate individuals with no ties to anything, or on those who have become strangers in the world, or on individuals as they develop in a community, or on individuals in the process of feeling conscious, of either understanding or not understanding themselves, and of either becoming or not becoming “free”. In these different descriptions, we find successive situations and moments from the existences of people who are experiencing and recognizing themselves. This does not necessarily imply focusing attention on existential 7

For example: Rapport (2003: from 59) and Jackson (2013: 3–28).

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questions concerning death, suffering or birth. In this spirit, I believe it is important for existential anthropology not to base itself on restrictive definitions of existence, such as those advanced by philosophies that link existence to freedom, commitment, subjectivity or anxiety. This is a criticism I would direct at anthropologies presenting individuals in only Nietzschean, only Sartrean, or only Levinassian terms, at a level that is less micrological than the one I wish to emphasize. When indeed are individuals really Levinassian, Sartrian or Nietzschean in the course of their activities? A few minutes a day, I might say? Let us go further, because all of this fundamentally says nothing about the possible simultaneity of logics of action or various strata, about the nuanced presence of individuals. Sometimes action is understood in an overly broad sense, designating principles and values in one single situation that calls on a variety of motives: civic, commercial or industrial, in the form of consensus or conflict8. This point of view really says little or nothing about an individual’s complex presence at moment t. Another suggestion would be to examine the simultaneous mixture of logics of action associated with sociology’s traditional paradigms, for example. For an action sequence, given that one single logic of action would be insufficient to account for the complexity that it manifests, leftovers (at least some leftovers) could most certainly be explained by another logic of action: as in the case of an administrative strategist who is so accustomed to this kind of manipulation that it has become an automatic process, one to which he was already exposed in his childhood. The various enumerated action modalities are not incompatible, such as, in this case, constraint and rationality. Similarly, the subordination of the child as studied by Durkheim is not so mechanical, as he recognizes, since he who obeys can also conform – with full knowledge of the facts – to clear ideas and motivations that enable him to perform actions in an “enlightened way”. Putting simultaneous action principles together in this way does not rule out distinguishing, in a particular sequence, one dominant relevance and secondary relevance. So the “leftovers”, in the form of other types of action in the background, which have been forgotten or set aside in the theoretical construct, would not be insignificant for understanding the human being in a situation. Strategy, expressiveness, automatism and social determination could therefore be examined together to understand the actions and presence of a head clerk in a large administration. But this does not satisfy me: because what is this man like when he is at his office, in complex and subtle modes for presence, at the coffee machine, pressing its buttons, talking to a colleague, or at home, eating, talking and thinking about his day? Indeed, the argument that there is a multiplicity of simultaneous action modes does not suffice. Because there are . . . the leftovers of the leftovers. 8 This point has been studied in pragmatic sociology in France: Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) and Thévenot (2006).

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The difficulties are very real when it comes to considering the simultaneous, variably shaped presence of different logics of action, and incorporating the “leftovers” of the leftovers – in the form of unimportant details – into a characterization of the laterality of presence modes. At this stage of the critique of logics of action, empirical questions start coming from every direction. In reality, when are human beings really strategic in the performance of actions? When do they make full use of their expressive capabilities? Is immediate, total engagement really possible? And is the tension inherent in new actions not rare? And do actions under constraint exist concretely under this kind of submission? And how does automatism work? What is one like when one is “automatic”? When closely observed situations are connected in a series, there are always leftovers, and leftovers of leftovers, and their recurrence inevitably attracts my direct attention. It is these very diverse details that infiltrate the relevant concerns that cause human beings to act according to reference points – motivated by morality or self-interest – and perform appropriate actions. Can we observe a person in the process of being a strategist, making the decision to manipulate? Certainly, but not very often, even in administrative contexts. It is only (especially) retrospectively, on the basis of effects, that the strategy can be deduced. When does one observe a morally responsible human being? Morality is certainly often observable in actions, but what are individuals themselves like? What is the distance, what are the leftovers between an action – interpreted as such by an observer – and the person who performed it? Interactionism enjoyed and still enjoys great success in ethnography. It is effective at revealing “actionist” risk. Because can actions only be considered interactions in Goffman’s sense of the term? Considering and examining actions as interactions imply retaining all of the signs that are relevant, those that others consider meaningful and acceptable enough to serve as a point of departure for their response. How restrictive it is to describe looks, gestures, postures and verbal utterances only insofar as they are “external signs of orientation and involvement” (Goffman 1967: 1). The notion of presence seems heuristic to me, because it more easily incorporates everything that modulates and softens the interaction – this having little to do with the distance from roles that was so dear to Goffman, since this is still a role, as we have seen. The forms of laterality are diverse: evasive eyes, isolated distractions, wandering thoughts, anticipating moments to come, remembering moments past. Therefore, understanding presence implies taking account of a simultaneous multiplicity of logics of actions and of the share of laterality they contain. There is another element that I believe is very important: singularity. Individuals are not solely related or composed of relations; an understanding of them must go beyond the relationist entrance to maintain a tight focus on individual singularity. Allow me to stress this singularity. This is crucial for considering, observing and describing presences. What, in fact, is an existence? This word designates an individual in the process of existing, coming away from other situa-

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tions and moving towards other ones. Individuals that exist have at least two characteristics: their current presence and continuity. The questions that existential anthropology asks are: how are individuals present here and now? How do they continue? These individuals are not like closed monads. On the contrary, they are open to others, equipped with social abilities and skills. But what are they like when they are alone or with others – these existences, these single numerical units, these distinctive, singular forms, always in the process of changing according to circumstances, this individual right here, in the process of continuing, constantly changing through traits that are often imperceptible from moment to moment? It appears that this empirical unit, which exists, which goes out (according to the Latin etymology of the word existere), thus defined, constitutes an irreducible singularity that disappears when it dies, never to be replaced. Every individual is different from the other individuals, that sociologists designate as belonging to the same shared social group, that social anthropologists attribute to the same shared cultural group, that biologists classify as one species. This singularity is not what is grouped and designated as shared, relevant and solicited by members of the group, activity or interaction, nor is it what is isolated at moment t in the individual’s life. It is rather constituted of leftovers, I would say. Iris Murdoch’s question cannot but speak to me: “Why should attention to detail, or belief in its inexhaustibility, necessarily bring paralysis, rather than, say, inducing humility and being an expression of love?” (Murdoch 1997: 88). An individual, who can be defined by a proper name and a demonstrative reference (that person, this person) possesses his own singularity, which is made up of infinite characteristics (which would be impossible to add up), and of course also contains permanent elements such as genes, relatively stable elements like physiological characteristics, social inclinations or psychological tendencies that are gradually formed over years of life. But this singularity is also made up of circumstantial details, unimportant gestures like words spoken here and now. Within this concrete reality, I will therefore not just focus on what is shared with others, or relevant to an activity, or stable in a continuity; I must not exclude the always abundant “accidents”. A volume of being is unique, a complex presence of actions and feelings, of more or less visible traces of trajectories, of various minor thoughts and gestures, all mixed together, changing and qualifying each other. Existence is a living reality. It is also a lived reality. What effect does it have to exist, to be in the middle of existing, in contingency and time? The human being, who is going to manifest himself as various figures, has existed, felt, experienced, has performed this or that gesture here and there. He has really experienced and performed. It is this that must be described, contrary to the deeply anchored habit of describing simply by acting as if he were this, had done that, for one reason or

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another. Theoretical positions and ideal types do not conceal the fact that they do “as if”, that they offer fictions that caricature reality. Such cannot be existential anthropology. There are individuals all over the world. Among all others, each individual is a unit, an identity, connected with an identifiable corporeal continuity, but is also a mental continuity, each able to experience it, and to do so over time. And what is this really like? If the individual experiences joy, it is he who feels his joy, that specific joy. Someone else could not feel it for him. A central element of this singularity is the individual’s death, which no one can undertake for him. At most, one can give support to someone else as they die. We are each “numerically one” from birth to death. This is what is called the principle of “separateness” (Nussbaum 1990: 223). Martha Nussbaum stresses that each person’s consciousness is distinct from others. What X eats will not nourish Y. The hunger or pain felt by a given person reminds him that it is he who is suffering and not someone else. Even in symbiotic relationships, the separation of individuals is not overcome. What effect does it have to be this entity capable of recognizing himself, feeling his own existence? Experiencing the feeling that he is engaged in a given activity, that he is sad or happy? That it is indeed I who am in the process of writing, sitting in front of a computer, aware to varying degrees of my fragility in time? In this exercise of focusing on one individual, it is not primarily the fear, happiness or attention of person X that interests me, but rather X himself, in his fearfulness, happiness or attentiveness, with his states of mind, mixing them together, qualifying and mitigating them, and continuing towards other heres and nows. As far as existence is concerned, it is not only actions or emotions that are at play, but also ways of being present while performing or experiencing them, and of subsequently carrying on. Is not there indeed a difference between existence and experience? The “experience of” refers to a moment, an activity, a relation to. It implies to look for relevant elements of this “experience of” (sickness, power, music, etc.). Existence modifies the focus on the existent being who lives this experience, and on his entire volume of being. This point of view allows to observe that the human being is more than just this experience at the moment he experiences it, and goes on through other activities after this experience. Are a human being’s moments not encompassed and permeated by an existential solitude to varying degrees? What Donald Winnicot (1984: 29) has written, from another perspective, on “the capacity to be alone” or “not communicating” seems to me to be very accurate. It emphasizes the young child’s ability to withdraw, to be alone . . . in the presence of his mother, and supports the idea of a kind of essential solitude, “the permanent isolation of the individual”. “At the centre of each person is an incommunicado element”, he writes. And even this: “Each individual is an isolate, permanently non-communicating” (Winnicott 1984: 187). Moreover, I have always thought that each person’s minor gestures, without having anything to do with the concerns of the relation in progress, are

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the expression – sometimes minute – of this partial but permanent withdrawal from others, from their concerns. Such is the individual to be observed and introspected by the anthropologist. Too many anthropologies that paradoxically promote notions of existent beings and modes of existence do without flesh-and-blood individuals, who are reduced to connecting lines, or to the effects of words, gestures or social positions, or are distilled into action abilities, rationality and consciousness. The dialogue between Graham Harman and Bruno Latour is central to this discourse (Harman 2009; Latour, Harman and Erdelyi 2011). What bothers Harman is the relationism in Latour’s propositions. Indeed, Bruno Latour pays more attention to relations and connecting networks than to the individuals in these relationships and networks. This is very clear in his actor-network theory, and in my view it is even clearer in his most recent book, even if he offers “an inquiry into modes of existence” (Latour 2013). Latour places the focus on what is between, whereas an anthropology of presence starts with individuals and attempts to describe them as more than relative to a group. The individuals are more than their relations; they constitute volumes of being with various intrastrata, some of which result from past, present or future relations. The Latourian entity is only defined by its connections, and by actions whereby one thing changes another. It is described as it existed at every moment in its full deployment as a field of dynamic interconnections with other entities. The slightest change in an object will transform it in a new actor. According to Latour, an entity is defined by its relations and if the relations change, the definition changes accordingly. But in Harman’s view, the use that is made of an object at a given moment cannot reveal the object in all its singularity. Sitting down in a chair does not exhaust the chair. Thus the object (especially if this is a human being, I would add) is more profound and complex than the relations in which it manifests itself. Harman presents the object, physical or otherwise, real or not, as “unified” and autonomous, and argues that its qualities always exceed its functions in a network. Harman is critical of the demolition and burial of objects. The first implies that the object is only a superficial effect and that it is necessary to look for basic elements or deeper realities. The second supposes that the object is less important than the relations it implies. Harman wants neither to think of the object as exhausted in a presence for another object, nor to reduce it to a web of relations. Objects, which are “deeper” than their relations, cannot be dissolved into them. Is it absurd to uproot the social sciences from their relationist anchoring? This does not mean not acknowledging the uncertainty and incompleteness of the knowledge obtained, the impossibility of delineating the relata and the terms of the relation. The idea that I am developing is to focus analysis not on the relation but on the singular being. It is certainly a mistake not to consider individuals in their relations, but it is a shame that the relationist focus regards them as relative to a system or a set of connections.

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It seems to me that Harman’s argument even more urgently concerns human beings whose presence cannot be separated from their potentialities and reserves, including states of mind, which are lacking in the actor-network theory. Latour asks: “But what about me, the ego? Am I not in the depth of my heart, in the circumvolutions of my brain, in the inner sanctum of my soul, in the vivacity of my spirit, an ‘individual’? Of course I am, but only as long as I have been individualized, spiritualized, interiorized.” (Latour 2007: 212). This is also an important question for existential anthropology. What am I like when I am individualized and internalized? Latour does not really provide an answer and continues: “In doing away both with ungraspable subjectivity and with intractable structure, it might be possible to finally place at the forefront the flood of other more subtle conduits that allow us to become an individual and to gain some interiority.” (ibid.: 214). He also adds: “What I am trying to do here is simply show how the boundaries between sociology and psychology may be reshuffled for good. For this, there is only one solution: make every single entity populating the former inside come from the outside not as a negative constraint ‘limiting subjectivity’, but as a positive offer of subjectivation. As soon as we do this, the former actor, member, agent, person, individual – whatever its name – takes the same starshaped aspect we have observed earlier when flattening the global and re-dispatching the local. It is made to be an individual/subject or it is made to be a generic non-entity by a swarm of other agencies. Every competence, deep down in the silence of your interiority, has first to come from the outside, to be slowly sunk in and deposited into some well-constructed cellar whose doors have then to be carefully sealed” (ibid.: 212). Readers circulate within a structural-relationist lexicon. It inclines more towards structuralism when Latour favors the passive voice and sets the individual aside, something that recalls Lévi-Strauss’s “I am acted upon, I am thought”. Latour proposes to track the creations of interiority, the “psychotropic beings” that change beings, that produce subjectivities and skills. Individuals are secondary. The text inclines more towards relationism when it emphasizes “having things done”, focuses on the activity, the “between”, translations, trajectories, transfers, attachments, networks. What is important, according to Latour, is that which precedes and that which follows (Latour 2013: 285). “Instead of striving to find the proportion of Individual and of Society in each course of action, it is better to follow the organizing act that leaves these distorted, transitory figures behind in its wake” (ibid.: 402). What could be more Latourian than this proposition: “We shall simply say that Peter and Paul, along with their friends and enemies, find themselves linked, attached, bound, interested”? (ibid.: 428). Even if contemporary anthropology seems to be in full “ontological turn”, with beings and modes of existence, where are the empirical units? They do not exist! We do not see them situated and described. They are treated as the effects of utterances and relations. The individuals to be described, wherever they might

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be, are more than what they do and get done; their stratified presence is more than these actions. It would be enough to lose them, to regret their absence, for the memory to fill with the details of their singular presence, which obviously cannot be reduced to the relationist point of view. The anthropologist, who wishes to describe with precision a person’s gestures and thoughts, has understood his/her irreducible singularity to relations and trajectories. Existential anthropology’s perspective is gradually being defined over time.

III. Existential anthropology: from sociology to non-sociology In 1570, John Dee, a Euclidean geometry specialist, mathematician, astronomer, geographer and a bit of a mystic, associated anthropology with the description of the number, size, shape, location and color of every element in the human body. During the Renaissance, anthropography was a cross-disciplinary project that was viewed as a kind of “cartography” intended to enable an increasingly complex understanding of human beings9. The term “anthropography” was primarily restricted to the study of people’s physical and anatomical characteristics. But what would an anthropographer do today? He would first observe a human being, an individual, a volume of being. The methodological point of departure would be the numerical unit constituted by the individual, who should be followed in the course of his actions with a view to defining how he is present in the performance of these, and observing him in the details of his presence at moment t and beyond. This constitutes a shift away from the study of relations and interactions, towards the observation of singular individuals. When taking this approach, it is not enough for observers to place themselves in the middle of the situation, as they often do to get an overall view of what is happening, taking a sweeping survey of the scene and, based on what they happen to consider important, focusing their attention on one individual and then another. Refining the observation process involves looking at individuals both in their presence and in the interlinking of their situations. And one point is crucial: the requirements of this observation are inseparable from that of keeping all of one’s notes close to hand as much as possible, and even making sure not to sort them at all, right up until the final writing10. 9 See Del Sapio Garbero, M. (2010). In 1618, physician Jean Riolan published an “Anthropographie”, which he defined as an anatomical description of man: see Tilkin (2008). 10 See Massard-Vincent, Camelin and Jungen (2011). The “anthropography” intuition comes from Christine Jungen. In the introduction, the authors write that it is a matter of emphasizing the “living self”, “a person’s singularity”, the way in which “X exists at a given moment”, understanding moments of action and withdrawal, disconnecting individual idiosyncrasies from collective models, getting a “humanity” to emerge from each portrait. In my view, propositions of this kind are far from insignificant; they are way out of line with the program of social and cultural anthropology.

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In the 18th century, the word “anthropology” already had poorly defined contours: a grouping of sciences, the observation of others and of oneself, the observation of physiological or sociocultural facts, the consideration of questions of human existence. Two centuries later, social science theorists (I am not referring to philosophers, prehistorians or palaeontologists) continue to attribute various meanings to the word “anthropology”: anthropology as the third step in research, according to Lévi-Strauss, associated with the comparison of sociological or anthropological work, to find universals; anthropology as a total science, a kind of federation or confederation that is vague but above all has no autonomous methodological and theoretical existence; anthropology that is explicitly referred to as social or cultural – or social and cultural – and that immediately proclaims its association with the science of social phenomena, believing that it is differentiated from sociology by the geocultural specificity of the fieldwork study, by its methods or by its deliberate lack of theorization, as is typical of the anthropological traditions of some countries; an anthropology by default, as if its authors did not want it to be included in the various recognized forms of sociology and social anthropology. Many of us are convinced of anthropology’s intellectual importance. But which anthropology? “I am an anthropologist; not a social or cultural anthropologist; not a biological or archaeological anthropologist; just an anthropologist”, Tim Ingold wrote (2011: XI). What does this mean? A certain radicalism is needed to concretize this assertion. Maurice Bloch is right to ask: “Where did anthropology go?”, noticing the lack of general theories in anthropology, driven into a corner by the choice between unacceptable theories and non-theories (Bloch 2005). Unfortunately, the perceived difficulty of conceiving a unity between the biological and the sociocultural has alienated anthropologists from theorization. Maurice Bloch has called on anthropology to collaborate with other disciplines (since it cannot get there alone) to construct theories on Homo sapiens: “What are human beings like?” and stresses this theoretical aim for anthropology, based on fieldwork studies. For ethnography only is not specific to anthropology. It is also practiced by sociologists and specialists in political science. And most importantly, why are there so few theorists doing general anthropology? In my view, this is because there is no empirical anthropology that has a specific object and method that are different from the social sciences. This empirical anthropology, neither social nor cultural, would be an anthropology of human beings, an anthropology of existences. I think that anthropology’s theoretical weakness, thus diagnosed, is due to the near-absence of any direct focus on singular individuals, and also stems from the gradual loss of singularities over the course of the research process. What do human beings look like, and how do they differ from other living species, and also from inanimate non-humans? With the objective of new theoretical propositions, the data must not only be made up of ethnographies of social and cultural activ-

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ity, it should also emanate from other methodological focal points, centered on individuals themselves, whether human or not. The ideal methodology (impossible for various reasons) would be: the continuous film of the whole life of every person on earth, with their own explanations of the viewed sequences. All other methodologies would be second-best, with some falling below minimum requirements. A few beneficial compromises: one human being for a few consecutive hours, a week, a whole day, or several selected human beings observed from a few hours to several weeks, repeated at regular intervals. Did Montaigne not write: “If you have lived one day, you have seen everything. One day equals all days” (Montaigne 2003: 104)? He thus posits the phenomenographic principle of describing concrete human beings, confronting the task completely, not reluctantly. It is not for nothing that Montaigne is sometimes considered the founder of anthropology. In line with the operating principles of their fields, the sciences of society – that is, sociology and social anthropology, I emphasize this point – are interested in collective things: societies, cultures, relations, interactions, activities and actions, even when they set their sights on the small details of interactions. This is how the social sciences operate, by suspending (more or less quickly, more or less tardily, depending on methodological choices and theoretical filiations) the individuals who belong to these groups, those who are participating in the situations and performing the actions in question. Even though the social sciences (sociology, social and cultural anthropology) cannot help watching and questioning individuals, they create their “object” by covering them up, by sidestepping and overlooking them. As we have seen, this is how these disciplines construct cultures, societies, spheres and actions: by getting their actors to share common characteristics that are judged relevant and meaningful for the purpose of understanding a sociocultural originality, an interactional principle, a collective specificity. I have attempted to show that the Weberian tradition of sociology, ethnomethodology and ethnography does not escape the sociologism of these fields: understanding a collective phenomenon, “togethering” individuals with common characteristics, who are in the process of either living in one culture, engaging in relations or performing an action. This is not an objection to the practices of the social sciences, it is an obvious description of it. The principle asserting that no individual exists without another individual constitutes the foundation of a series of theoretical and methodological consequences at the basis of social sciences: at least two individuals are observed (usually more), to the point of surveying groups and cultures. Hence the observer being placed in the middle of situations and not alongside one single individual. It seems to me that sociologists and social anthropologists choose to divert attention from the inadequacy of their observation methods by constructing a narrative that has become outdated by dint of repetition, about the relational challenges and difficulties surrounding the researcher’s presence. As if the two tasks of shat-

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tering the “myth” of participant observation and carrying out the necessary intrusion in an individual translated into methodological paralysis. Ethnography deserves criticism more than any other method, even though it asserts the importance of getting close to the experience and aiming for exhaustiveness. First of all, contrary to its principles of proximity and exhaustiveness, it constitutes a process of uncontrolled data loss, from the observation phase to the writing phase, with a selection of many of its notes. Next, it does not sufficiently question this situation, which has been rooted in the social sciences for a few decades. It is also too inward-looking, bogged down in relational problems concerning the observer and the observed, and overly satisfied with its methodological singularity. Finally, by being true to its principles of proximity and exhaustivity, it could advantageously turn itself into radical exercises in direct, filmed or photographed observation of existence in the strictest sense: as the continuous experience of moments and situations. I should add that, without necessarily being forgotten or rejected, the methodological and epistemological issue of the researcher’s relational engagement – so widely discussed in ethnography – does not seem to me to be a high-priority debate. Has this emphasis (still very current) on relational issues in the fieldwork not become redundant over the past few years? And what if this were anthropology: a phenomenography of individuals, compared according to various characteristics, whether sociocultural (though not exclusively and not necessarily), psychological, generational or of a different nature. Thus phenomenography consists in either taking what has been eliminated by various forms of sociology and social anthropology (whether actionist, relationist or cultural), or shifting everything that these disciplines have placed under a culturalist or interactionist perspective for example. One must not act as if the gap between, on the one hand, the paradigms or theories of the social sciences (sociology or social anthropology) and, on the other hand, volumes of being were not important, or as if this were simply an epistemological necessity. Existential anthropology works within this gap. This is exactly what Anne Rawls means about the ethnomethodological perspective: “From Garfinkel’s perspective, even phenomenology and traditional ethnographic studies did not go into enough detail. And what they meant by detail was more conceptual and cognitive than empirical. A transformation was required. The task was to construct a sociology that would reveal the “more” detail there was to social order and meaning – not a sociology that would obscure that detail by burying it under conceptual reduction as Parsons did, or behind conceptual types as Schütz had” (Rawls 2006: 13). But the critique that Anne Rawls directs at phenomenology and ethnography must be completed. It should be carried on all the way, by always going further in criticizing how details are observed and interpreted. Because in its “activist” conception of natural attitudes, ethnomethodology does not escape the same filtering of details in the name of their appropriateness for producing, ordering, creating and mastering social orders. Of course, the social sciences are certainly not incapable

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of producing enlightenment, but they say little or nothing about the successive presences of individuals and their interlinking moments. Thus the principle of existential anthropology is twofold. On the one hand, it is about shifting a set of gestural and mental elements away from socio-perspectivism (those elements that sociologists or social anthropologists have interpreted in sociocultural or interactionist terms). On the other hand, it is about taking still other elements out of the researcher’s dustbin, with a view to reincorporating them into an anthropo-perspectivism that seeks to describe human existence, its continuity in time, outside of the traditional sociological models of constraint, rationality, strategy or communication, which are anthropologically inexact in most situations in the lives of human beings.

Part Three

Presences and Intensities I. “Entering into” presence What is this human being really like, what does he really think about, what does he really feel, what does he really perceive, how does he really interact? Now and a few moments later? What would the social sciences become if they possessed a complete film of the life of all of these “flows” over a period of a week? What would become of the paradigmatic choices of action theory? It is the venture of describing existence (whether ordinary or less ordinary, not focused on any single place or activity), of tracking acts, gestures and thoughts (that are often not the causes of the action, from which their contents are therefore dissociated), of understanding moments and presences that are, that come into being, that continue. The various philosophical and sociological theories all contain their share of truth, but they are not true for all people, or more precisely they are all true for the same individual but at different moments. What is a human being really like? There are probably several ways of explaining it, but there is only one way of being, sensing, feeling at moment t, and this is of course complex, ambiguous, ambivalent. Would the task of existential anthropology not be to get the closest possible view of real, concrete presences – moments of presence and successions of moments – to understand individuals, “singulars”, in their variations and differences right down to the unimportant details of perceptions, gestures, thoughts, objects and various present beings? What is this human being like when he enters into contact with someone else, or distances himself from him, or when he performs this or that action? When I look at people in their successive moments, I often perceive trivial presences that will perhaps become catalysts for decisions, generators of various consequences. These presences sometimes have no consequences, and they often allow themselves to be infiltrated by empty moments, secondary gestures or wandering thoughts. What does this individual have in mind at moment t, in a given situation, in an action involving several people? What does it mean to live, as a human way of being? What does existing as a human imply? How do human acts unfold? Thus amid reality’s inexhaustibility, existential anthropology’s task is to undertake observations characterised by an intensive methodological detailism centred on individuals, and a theoretical perspective that sets its sights on humankind as a species.

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Phenomenography therefore also concerns moments of presence, inserted into an action sequence, itself encompassed within the never interrupted pace of situations. Moments of presence: what can be said about them? Which discipline is taking care of describing human beings in situations? Psychology favors laboratory experimentation or explains cerebral (dys)function, and the social sciences – when they choose to observe – seek to understand a group, society, interaction or social activity. On the other hand, philosophical works present many avenues of phenomenographic observation, but often have no methods of course. Phenomenography pinpoints gestures but also the mental and the emotional, employing as much methodological rigor as possible. This is not phenomenology which, on the contrary, lacks methodological supports, tends to decontextualize the experience and search for pure forms (sometimes extreme ones), rather than seeking out the hubbub of everyday life. In phenomenology, experiences are instead described as “pure”, not situated in precise spaces. And the “me” is also too actively positioned as “giver”, too quickly treated as intersubjective and relational. The individual-centered, dual fidelity to real time and to fieldwork notes allows the researcher to give attention to other elements, to peripherals and leftovers, giving them a central theoretical place, and rediscovering the presence of human beings in the process of performing actions – in the process of existing, I would say. It would be a mistake if this examination of quotidian human beings (who cannot help being quotidian), in the moments and situations of their existence, were to be treated as secondary. On the contrary, I think it is appropriate to take this perspective all the way. Watching human beings and keeping hold of them right to the end of the writing process; as has already been said, this is the work of anthropologists and phenomenography. Have explicatory macro-principles not acquired their intelligibility through the observation faults of the social sciences, whose investigation techniques are very loose, remote, selective, and focused on what was not sent to the dustbin? Phenomenography’s empiricism aims to capture furtive moments, the flow of life, gestures, perceptions and thoughts, which ethnographers do not easily observe, since they situate themselves at the central moment of a given social relation. This flow of experiences proceeds according to a variety of conscious fields and intensities, usually below human beings themselves. But is this not the goal of anthropology, as opposed to social anthropology and sociology: the profoundly concrete human being? Because, I repeat, who observes, in natural situations, those moments that philosophers speak of, but with too much dependence on examples removed from any context: effort, will, decision, choice, intention, belief, the beginning of an action, the continuity of an action sequence, passivity, oblivion . . .? And who describes these existences, as I have shown? In terms of the phenomenographic perspective, it would therefore represent a methodological deficiency to content oneself with merely observing – even

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close-up – sequences of action and the flow of interlinking moments. How can the attempt to understand mental states and ways of being be taken further? The anthropologist should arrive at an account of the effect of being this or that, in the process of doing one thing or another. He can then ask certain people to describe their presence modes and action sequences in various situations, in a form similar to a diary (Rodriguez and Ryave 2002). He can also ask different people to describe their ways of being present (in one place or another, at this or that moment), their states of mind, their underlying mood, the desires that predispose them to certain actions, an isolated emotion, and also their peripheral mental images (Varela 1999). In this way, the external observation is supplemented by the individuals’ own detailed description of their action. The researcher has to teach them to explain and describe these ways of being and of perceiving, to develop awareness of differences so that they themselves can “explicitate” action and presence. This has nothing to do with traditional “interviews”. Verbalization assumes that the person can access a “concrete memory”, not as a result of a conscious, considered effort, but almost involuntarily so that they can then describe actions, gestures and perceptions – those directly relevant to the situation as well as other subsidiary perceptions. It is up to the phenomenographer to solicit this description, to ask questions and trigger memories, for example through photo or film images, which constitute an exceptional resource that helps make people aware that they were not aware. He must also ask them how they were, while keeping track of the flow of situations and transitions between important phases, noting the individuals’ gestures and where they were looking. Of course no account is complete, but the aim is to learn “things” about how individuals are present and absent when they are with others. “This is one of things I find most fascinating,” writes Pierre Vermersch, “in the explicitation interview process: questioning people who begin by asserting that that they do not know what they did or what happened (therefore subjectively not conscious) and to gradually hear them precisely describe their actions as the interview progresses, as they and I simultaneously discover the detail in their experience. Because this is indeed what will be achieved with the explicitation interview: the verbalization of the experience of the action will be achieved through an induced development of awareness of details that the subjects do not yet know they do not know!” (Vermersch 1994: 74–75)1. No doubt it is advisable to find, invent and cobble together methods of closeup observation, so that anthropology can better see and describe the inner swarming of feelings, and variations over time, always according to various modes of presence-absence. When the objective is to acquire knowledge, this certainly does not rule out first-person writing, even by researchers, even if an account of their lives outside the field of investigation may not seem necessarily relevant to 1

See also Petitmengin and Bitbol (2009) and Vermersch (1999).

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the knowledge production process. I myself have practiced autography to understand love and the act of believing. The researcher can then compare his subject’s writing with other accounts, searching for differences and similarities. Another reader may perceive connections to his or her own experience. This leads to knowledge about existence and presence. Writing about one’s personal experiences is sometimes the only way to capture not only private, emotional experiences like love, suffering, secrets or lies, but also the various layers of consciousness involved in these experiences, through what it brings into being, around itself and among its manifestations. In short, the fluidity and movement of life. Autographic accounts that aim to explain specific sequences of an experience have nothing to do with the life stories traditionally told to social anthropologists seeking special access to a culture. I prefer to speak of “autography”, to distance this process from sociocultural methods of placing data in perspective. It is used to gain an understanding of the human essence in an action, not necessarily its sociocultural characteristics. Its only objective is to advance knowledge, on the basis of private information, whose accuracy and precision must be guaranteed by an autographic pact between the researcher and his readers. This goes to the heart of existential anthropology, which cannot forget that the anthropologist is also an existent being. Of course, this type of exercise can meet with reservations, relating to the possibility of subjectivism, narcissism, journalism, a lack of a scientifically reproducible protocol, unreliable data, lack of consistency . . . Yet a few examples have fascinated me. Carolyn Ellis’s book (1995), Final Negotiations. A Story of Love, Loss and Chronic Illness, constitutes a perfect example. Through what she characterizes as an introspective ethnography, without any conceptual filter, she tells the story of something as private as her encounter with a man, and then of his illness and death. But she also writes of jealously, attachment, loss and reconstructing the self – “real life”, as she says – and without the particular details disappearing into the overall writing. I should also mention the auto-ethnographic work of Carol Rambo Ronai (1995) in an article – published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography – that won her the Herbert Blumer Award of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. The sociologist based this work on her own experience as a victim of sexual abuse, presenting a stratified account with different layers of writing: stories of her childhood with incestuous parents and her experience today as a “sexual abuse survivor”, as well as statistical data and sociological reflections. She claims each of these situations as an integral part of her personality, and her multilayered account allows both author and reader to circulate among different points of view on the same phenomenon. From another perspective, David Sudnow’s book Ways of the Hand (1978), is a beautiful example of an autographic work, in which he studies his own hands’ intimate knowledge of piano keyboards, and their ways of improvising. He focuses his attention on the human body, particularly on the development of “jazz hands”. He does not try to explain, but instead provides a

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very detailed description, from his own point of view, of the concrete problems that arise when attempting to improvise. It was the self-observation exercises I conducted in my own day-to-day life that persuaded me of the importance of the ever-changing presence and absence of supports, and of the mixed proportions of activity and passivity in each moment of presence. Let us take a look at this.

II. Reposity chart and intensitometry Reading Durkheim (2003) and Garfinkel (1967) means confronting a contrary lexical field. On the one hand, when Durkheim specifically analyses the educational process, it is a question of rules, constraints, authority, commands and obedience. On the other hand, when Garfinkel describes the situation of Agnes – who was raised as a boy until the age of 20 and then underwent a sex change operation – the action is presented in terms of tension, effort, will, vigilance, foresight, justification, invention, and a strategy enabling her to secure and display her femininity in front of the people she knows. But between the description of the schoolboy and that of the man or woman who wishes to switch genders, where is the presence of the human being? This question has never stopped haunting me since my observations first of carnivals and then of Catholic religious celebrations. These made me recognize a human manner of being present in the minor mode. The notion of reposity is central to my analysis. This consists in the ability of human beings to sit and repose upon supports. Some of these belong to them (their skills, experiences and reasons for acting), others come from the situation, and may be present before their arrival. Reposity directly implies an economical way of being present in perception and thought. The situations people encounter in the course of the day take place against a “backdrop” of reference points, rhythms, constraints and norms that implicitly or explicitly generate their expectations, commitments for themselves and others2. All of these supports are often easier to leave unchecked than to change. Let me be more precise. I would say that there are four types of support and four types of repose. On the one hand, the supports primarily make it possible to define the action. On the other hand, the modes of repose make it possible to define the corresponding modes of presence. At the various points below, certain social science theories and conceptual relations can be recognized. A situation is initially organized on the basis of a framework of interweaving norms, values and rules. These elements are often obvious and go without saying. The individuals do not set the rules of the round to be played in each situation. 2 Without necessarily being linked to the idea of reposity and cognitive economy, the idea of a backdrop is well known in the social sciences: see for example Giddens (1986) and Searle (1995).

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The situation is connected to organizational principles that are external to it, immediately arranging and structuring actions that quickly become habitual and regular. These lead to reciprocal expectations between individuals, enabling each of them to predict the behavior of the others and to behave in such a way that they do not depart from what others are expecting3. These supports do not necessarily impose a constraining or determining link upon the action. Between rules and actions there is a kind of immediate co-presence. In the succession of moments and situations, norms and rules are always there. But some can disappear while others are created or transformed. In this case, reposity can also mean the ability to install supports, and to install them again4. A second type of support is made up of elements that are immanent in the situation. They are objects or beings that constitute direct resources for action, or information that quite naturally entails various action consequences. These elements are found in distributed cognition theories, particularly in reference works such as those of Lucy Suchman (1987) or Edwin Hutchins (1995). In a situation, objects are supposed to organize space, informing its configuration as well as the immediate action to be performed; they are supposed to be directly manipulated and provoke a specific gesture. Even for seemingly complex activities, the flow of the action is thus simplified, reduced to well-coordinated manipulations and opportune glances. In a situation, people constitute not just a material resource but also an affective one, providing a combination of information, assistance, control or simply presence. In this way, they too are able to reduce the effort required for engagement, thought and deliberation. Conversely, for someone who is discovering the unfamiliarity of a new situation, automatic gestures are replaced by the interpretation of instructions and guidance, followed by a set of trials and errors, until the actions eventually become routinized. In this way, the supports can disappear, reappear and be modified. Networking or interconnection is the third support. Independently of the pace of sequential linking, a situation is also part of a network that connects it with other situations, according to more or less closely woven links contributing to its stability. In each configuration, traces and signs make this interconnection of situations visible and constitute an additional support without which the unfolding of the sequences of action would remain an impossible conquest. In this networking, there is the network of situations and at the same time the continuity of the elements, signs, objects and people that are present in it, incorporated into a past, practices, and decisions that have given them expression and stability. This point has been developed in the actor-network theory (Latour 1987). In this case, breaks in the network can impact on what is going on in a situation. 3

On this point, see Goffman (1974). In French, the word “reposity” fits well to designate the double act of “se (re)poser”, of “poser” and of “poser à nouveau (re-poser)”. 4

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Finally, there is sequential linking. It is the organization of everyday time, of the day punctuated by the hourly conventions and reference points that link one situation to the next without hesitation over the choice of subsequent actions. The paced navigation from one spatial configuration to another selects this or that action, in such a way that the individual already knows not only the order of most the situations making up his day, but also, within any given situation, the action sequences to complete. It is on, with, and next to these various supports that a human being is present in a situation with four economical modes and their opposite. The first is cognitive economy. This presupposes routines and the automatic performance of sequences of actions without the need for deliberation and without reference to an instruction. Bourdieu’s “habitus” theory strongly emphasizes this element of automaticity (Bourdieu 1990). It results from a harmony – regulated by experience – between a gesture, a perception, an object and an environment. Cognitive economy is also connected with the presence of mental patterns that enable the particular state of a situation to be assessed, thus generating appropriate actions almost automatically. This facility reflects the central role of material supports in the form of various signs (including writing and language) lightening the work involved in social negotiation, suspending – or in any case minimizing – the need to negotiate or create a new link. This economical mode of presence puts to the background a potential ordeal that a breach would cause to resurface quite quickly; in this way it de-intensifies the stakes and power contained in some of the situation’s supports. Moreover, the variety of potential and real information in a situation makes it impossible for a person to apply ideal norms of rationality (Cherniak 1986). Before making a decision, it is difficult for the person to make a rational calculation based on the information at his disposal. He cannot verify all of the surrounding sources of information and can only count on alreadyknown clues, as well as habits and previous experiences that enable him to assess the expertise and trustworthiness of a given interlocutor or datum and then make a quick decision. In addition to habit and the ability to set certain matters aside, trust is an expression of this economy. The opposites of cognitive economy would therefore be evaluation and decryption “work”, thought and emotion in their various forms. Cognitive economy is lacking precisely when a novice is discovering a new situation, activity or object (Searle 1983: 151). But it is also lacking in anyone who brings into play, in a maximal, sometimes determined form, their ability to evaluate, judge, scheme and draw meaning. Docility, the second form, corresponds to the possibility of reposing upon existing supports rather than changing them. It implies a kind of tranquility while the desire, will or need to change, to question (rules, human or material reference points) risks generating cognitive, emotional or moral tension. The act of changing a situation can bring about if not punishment, at least a reproach, in any case the serious need for a justification and the risk of disagreement or conflict. The

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enactor of the change will maybe answer to questions that could be asked by evaluators or various experts, by invoking a set of reasons and motivations that will make his action understandable from a semantic or moral perspective. Fluidity is the third form. It generates a kind of loosening and a certain tolerance of compromises, contradictions and inconsistencies5. Fluidity also translates into various forms of making light of a situation, such as humor or irony. This looseness is not the game to be played with its rules, but the “slackening” of roles, creating another kind of play, like a machine with loose screws. Fluidity also corresponds to the possibility of easily shifting from one situation to another and effortlessly traversing activities that are sometimes very different, connected as they are with regulatory principles that would be incompatible in a situation of simultaneity. This shifting is made all the more possible insofar as within an activity, elements not relevant to it can arise in the form of details that enable it to be interwoven with previous or subsequent situations, and insofar as the person’s aptitude for fluidity is supplemented by a particular ability to stay just below the level of consciousness, and also to forget his previous presences from one activity to another. Fluidity is directly connected to skills already acquired – the accumulated know-how that the person uses or effortlessly adapts to the situation. Cognitive fluidity is also manifested in the person’s body movement, which is not that of rigid mechanics with discontinuous, fragmented gestures, but rather that of good coordination: a kind of rhythmic choreography that harmonizes body positions, gestural movements and speech. Whether moving or at rest, the human form exhibits the opposite of the rectitude that was encouraged in bourgeois or aristocratic environments, incorporated into military speeches, and also used in gymnastics schools. These contexts demanded a vertical, corseted posture, stiff and upright, in contrast to protruding bellies, slouching profiles and even slightly softened bodies (Vigarello 2001). At all of these levels, it is rigidity and inflexibility that are the opposite of fluidity. It is this fluidity that will make it possible to assume attitudes of relaxation and distracted attention: not really listening, looking without seeing, talking without speaking, forgetting, turning a blind eye, deferring . . . Distraction, the fourth form, corresponds to this cognitive specificity to connect a distracting being, object or event with the status of a detail and thus avoid compromising the minimal attention the situation requires. It is only possible on a foundation of both reposity and lightened presence through various supports. There are certainly different forms of distraction, such as detachment accompanied by an air of absence, or distraction provoked by external noise (sunshine or a stain on the wall), but distracting elements are only such because they do not constitute a sharable engagement model, as we have seen before. Since they are 5 Archaeologist Steven Mithen (1996) posits cognitive fluidity as a specificity of Homo sapiens.

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only tolerated, they cannot become behavior to imitate6. The opposite of this light form of distraction is just as much concentration as the loss of concentration. This provides me – not just in terms of supports but also in terms of forms of repose – with four elements and their respective opposites. On the “supports” axis: norms (rules, conventions, etc.) versus rupture or change of norms (conflicts); reference points (clues) versus the loss or change of reference points; the networking of situations versus the rupture of links; pace of time (temporal rhythm) versus the rupture or change of rhythm (anxiety, worry . . .). On the “repose” axis: cognitive economy versus decryption (evaluation, judgment); docility versus the desire for change; fluidity versus rigidity; distraction versus concentration. Supports and repose combine to generate various modes of presence. I will isolate four of them. Tranquility often develops from infra-perception of reference points and spatiotemporal signs, against a quite stable backdrop, sometimes experienced as such, with the possibility that unimportant details could emerge. In familiarity, some points of reference and signs are new, or at least different, and others are found to be lacking relative to previous situations, though the difference is still absorbed in the economical mode, against a backdrop that is still well-anchored. It is when the at least partial disintegration of this backdrop is sensed – with the imposed or created absence of certain supports – that strangeness arises and reduces the possibility of distractions. There follows an attentive or emotional tension of (re)construction, judgment and evaluation. Then it is as if the backdrop were withdrawn, giving way to the nearly exclusive focus on an element. It appears to me that it is essential to perceive the constant, tangled play of these modes of presence in relation to the mobility of supports that either remain, go away or are recreated. These different forms of support and repose, as well as their respective opposites, constitute a descriptive framework for understanding and representing the movement of the sequences of a human presence in successive situations, between repose and work, between strangeness and tranquility, between tension and familiarity. Let us try to progress empirically, keeping in mind the apt warning issued by Gumbrecht, who said that “presence” is one of those terms often regarded as “a symptom of despicably bad intellectual taste in the humanities” (Gumbrecht 2004: 53). One is certainly “ getting our hands dirty” (ibid.: 93), but one is also persevering with a way of referring to human beings, that is more complex, that it so say more realistic, than other analytical schemata. The forms of repose and work are placed on the following chart – the reposity chart: 6 I have often stressed this point: see Piette (1996 and 2011). See also Part I of this book.

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3: Reposity Chart

It is important to emphasize that this chart can be used in various ways, particularly at different scales. For example, it can be used to show different modes of presence in a single situation or, at a more precise scale, to pinpoint a few sequences of action. The direction of movement or displacement between the chart’s squares is variable as well. The assessment of presence intensities is most

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often made on the basis of previous situations or analogous situations. I wish to stress one point: the two exercises I present here are only valuable as exploratory tests that attempt to precisely describe the presence modalities of human beings. Driving a car. I have written various autographies, including one that described the experience of mourning my father, and another that described my daily routine with my two daughters when they were children. In the first case I wrote on loose sheets of A4 paper, and in the second case I used A4 notebooks. When writing about day-to-day life with my daughters, the notes were not like an autobiographical narrative, which tends to be written in the past tense, with the author as the main character. Even if I did not rule out including myself in the scene, it was my two daughters who were the main characters in my notebooks. Unlike an autobiographical narrative that addresses readers with a literary construction, my notebooks were not addressed to readers. The authenticity pact was with myself more than with them. My notebooks were especially not intended as “literature”. They were a kind of more or less thorough review of everyday actions. This did not mean I was spared the doubts that assail autobiographical literature. The history of literature has generally shown contempt for writings about the “me”, while seeming to legitimize it for the “great” authors, or with a recognized literary structure. My notebooks did not record striking moments in which I searched for an identity, nor historical events, as in “memoirs”, where the history of a society is often at play. In my notebooks, what is recorded is the life of a few living beings together in a house. In this sense, the notes are more like a diary that describes day-to-day life, whereas an autobiography becomes a literary narrative of a relatively distant past. As with a diary, I wanted to use my notebooks to prevent the situations I experienced from being erased and forgotten. But in a private journal, one may find reflections, or beautiful writing that describes how a day unfolded. In my notebooks there is none of that: only facts, actions, sequences of actions, especially those of my children, and there is nothing about my professional or emotional life. These notebooks, which have a calming effect on me, are made up of notes taken immediately on fragments of life – often unimportant situations in which I later search for no meaning, no synthetic vision. I have re-read these notebooks, then I have chosen a situation of which I have reconstructed a readable description. Afterwards, I have attempted an initial application of the notions on the reposity chart: a drive in the car as I take my daughters to school. One morning, after a seamless breakfast, at 7:45am, I drove my daughters to school by car, listening to the radio while chatting with my two passengers. My usual route takes hardly ten minutes. The simultaneous performance of these activities presupposes that I repose upon the car’s technical supports, the firm support of the road traffic regulations, as well as the support of an itinerary and timeframe that I already know docilely, without having to think about them (Tr 1–12). The music of the radio sounds like a background noise (Tr 13–16). External interference is possible like im-

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portant news on the radio which cause little distraction and which I am listening to without much attention (Fl 13–16). For an isolated moment, I recognize an old friend on the pavement (Fl 14). Following an uncalled-for remark by one of my passengers bringing many things into question (why go to school?) (St 1–8), I feel that I have been challenged and I begin making a somewhat tense corrective statement (Te 1–4, 13–16). On top of this, to my brief annoyance, I notice that there are unexpected road works (St 2), but I have no trouble turning onto an unfamiliar route (Fl 1–12) for two minutes, a maneuver that does not prevent me from continuing my reprimand (Te 1–4, 13–16) and taking in the news on the radio (Fl 13–16) – still against the background of my supports (the car is moving and I do not encounter any reckless drivers Tr 1–12). All this is performed rather fluidly (Fl 9–12). Then I get back onto the usual route (Tr 1–16), feeling somewhat tense after that conversation (Te 9–12). Later, in another situation, I carry on straight to my office (Tr 1–12), several times thinking of the isolated annoyance (Fl 13–16). 4: Reposity chart (driving a car)

Let us attempt to comment on this situation and broaden the remarks so that they can be applied to other situations, keeping in mind the theoretical discussion presented above. What can the reposity chart confirm or teach about modes of presence? First, it highlights the presence (in different doses that will need to be specified) of tranquility (Tr), tension (Te), strangeness (St) and familiarity (Fl). The exclusively active mode of being (which presupposes bustling activity, attention, concentration, will, intention, meaning . . .) aiming to create new supports is

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rare, if not impossible, just as the exclusively passive mode of being, resting entirely upon things that already exist in the situation. Interactionist labor and social lethargy – one of which can be found for example in the work of Goffman or in ethnomethodology, and the other in the work of Bourdieu – are not realistic; this is an obvious fact that, despite everything, raises doubts about the extent of the sociologist’s or social anthropologist’s belief in his own narratives. During that drive in the car, I mixed the automatism of a driver’s gestures, a certain relaxation stemming from being conscious that I was experiencing a moment that was less difficult that what I was expecting to face in my office, annoyance over the conversation with my daughters, slight worry caused by the detour, faint vexation about having to resolve various problems on that morning. Weariness of an overly routinized activity was sometimes added to this, but so was the weakness of taking pleasure in this moment that I knew would not last. There was a constant, tangled play between these various modes of presence according to supports that stayed, went away or were recreated. Secondly, the four squares could also show the possible circulation of an object or thought, for example a distraction. The distraction may be slight and hardly developed, such as when a worker spends a brief moment thinking of his family after glancing at a photo on his desk (Tr 14). It can become more insistent without disturbing his work, such as when he gives himself over to a few memories of recent holidays (Fl 14). The cause of the distraction, whether it originates from a reference point within the situation (an e-mail on his computer) or external to it, can become more present and lead to resistance (St 2, 6, 10, 14; Te 2, 6, 10, 14), for example a resistance to the temptation to look at the e-mail. The temptation can then lead to new curiosities and other documents that become new reference points in the situation (Te 2, 6, 10, 14). It is all about tracking the life of details that could be objects, animals or people: whether reference points or signs, they become fragments of attention and obsession, before disappearing into the backdrop and re-emerging as unimportant details. The distraction, which could be left there, quickly absorbed, can thus become an opening, a curiosity leading to new meaningful acts, or may also become a weight, a temptation that can either be resisted or yielded to, as in the case of e-mail (Datchary and Licoppe 2007: 18– 19). It would appear that the reference point in question circulates clockwise. But the other direction is also possible: tension may arise out of an existing support, for example one that has become annoying. Then what ensues is concentration, inflexibility, the desire for change and the effort to create new supports in order to find some familiarity again. Thirdly, situations in which these modes of presence unfold are more or less decisive between other situations that are in the process of succeeding, replacing, recalling and entailing each other. The “nows”, that is to say the moments of being that make up individuals’ moments of presence in a situation, are always characterized by absences of reason or consciousness – implicit presences, in

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fact – even though the situations that precede and follow them indicate effects, enhancements of and references to what existed before and what will exist. But all of this happens without each person’s “nows” escaping incursions of “inconsistencies”: I see it without seeing it, I do it without thinking about it, I’m slightly distracted, I’m thinking of other things. To modulation (as the sequential movement of gestures, postures and states of mind), is thus added modalization (as the simultaneous presence of various strata in one single presence). An observer would notice the fluid compatibility between very different thoughts, gestures and objects – some of them opposite and contradictory – within one single situation (what I call external modalization). I think for instance of the mixing of the news about the Iraq war, the wave to my friend, the dialogue with my daughters, and so on. The observer would perceive the different internal strata of individuals’ always-nuanced behavior (internal modalization). He would also notice the continuous movement of the person, who is always in the process of modalizing and modulating strangeness and tension through familiarity and tranquility, according to their varying intensities. Searching for an object. Let us undertake a second exercise based on the same reposity chart, with the objective of measuring presence intensities. I will abandon the autographic format. This time it is an observation, with requests for explicitations from the observed person. The responses of this person contribute to a quantification, a sort of “intensitometry” of presence – maybe the word “anthropometry” could be reintroduced –, which consists in measuring the proportions of the four modes of presence (tranquility, familiarity, strangeness and tension). The exercise was realized by Nina Schmidt7 at the home of a 70-yearold woman named Edith, who was preparing lunch. The situation was filmed and Edith was able to give a few evaluations of her modes of presence. The exercise is particularly about the moment when Edith is searching a placemat and does not find it. Let us specify how to measure the different modes of presence. The principle is to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 the different intensities, the different weights not only of rules, reference points and clues that are always there, but also of absences and novelties that arise. The person evaluates the intensity of the docility (and the desire to change), the distraction (and the concentration), the fluidity (and the inflexibility), as well as the cognitive economy (and the active assessment work). At points of intersection of the reposity chart, if we divide the degree of intensity of each cognitive task (forms of repose and work) by the degree of intensity of each of the supports and each of the voids, then we obtain the intensity of the form of cognitive repose or effort for each support or void 7 N. Schmidt, “Moments et volumes”, a paper delivered at a conference of the French Association of Ethnology and Anthropology, Paris, EHESS, September 2011 (unpublished document). I wish to thank her for allowing me to use part of her work here.

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encountered by the person. This will determine the size of the points on the reposity chart. All the intersection points are not necessarily concerned by the description of a situation. Here is the situation of the exercise: At home, Edith places the grill pan on the gas cooker and goes into the sitting room. She opens the central part of the bottom of her sideboard in her sitting room. She sits in the armchair and spends a minute and a half searching for placemats, one with a photo of Mirmande and another showing Cliousclat, two towns in Drôme, where she lived until last April. She does not find Cliousclat. In the background, the radio station France Culture is presenting the headlines.

What comes to light? The description below should be read at the same time of Edith’s own evaluations in figures and the calculations of the proportions, summarized in the Table of intensitometries on the right page. Tranquility. Edith has her own reference points: she is at home, in the sitting room with her sideboard, armchair, dishes, etc. It is noon. Edith has started preparing lunch. She sets the table and then continues cooking. These different supports make it possible for her not to make any particular cognitive effort (R1/S2–3–4). Edith does not change them (R2/S2–3–4) even though she proposes this time to set placemats (R3/S2). Despite this, the presence of temporal supports continues to ensure the continuity and fluidity of Edith’s actions (R3/S4) until she notices the loss of one of her placemats. This moment is anchored in past situations (S3), more particularly the choice of placemats, which fits into the network of situations (in Edith’s recent life) and the pace of the moment (S4). Finally, she attributes the status of detail to a certain number of elements in her environment: her pets, the radio, as well as the linking of the situations and their pace, which do not require an intense effort of concentrations (R4/S2–3–4). It is worth noting that distraction (the ability to assign the status of “detail” to one or several situation elements) is not equivalent for the three supports singled out. Edith is more inattentive to the pace or the linking of the situations than she is to the situation’s immanent reference points like objects which are useful for cooking (compare R4/S4 with R4/S3 and R4/S2). Against a backdrop of tranquility, the action of searching the placement and not finding it constitutes a loss of reference points. Familiarity and strangeness are mixed up. The loss gives rise to a moment of decryption and concentration (W1–4/V2). It also disturbs her cognitive economy (R1/V2), leads to a small degree of docility (she does not accept it straightaway R2/V2) and interferes with her fluidity of the present moment (R3/V2). Nevertheless, it does not prevent Edith from maintaining a certain cognitive economy, docility and fluidity (R1–2–3/V2–3–4): the discovery of the loss of the placemat induces a slight break in the rhythm of actions (V4) and a possible rupture of links between the situations, especially when related to Edith’s past; but these two voids disturb less the modes of repose than the loss of a reference point does – here the placemat from Cliousclat (compare her gradings R/V2 and R/V3–4). More precisely, Edith accepts less these various inconveniences (R2/V3–4) than she is disturbed in the continuity of her actions (R3/V3–4). The square “strangeness” shows Edith’s cognitive attention effort facing the surprise of the loss of her placemat (W1/V2) and when she is asking herself: “I was saying to

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myself: come on, where is it?” (W4/V2). But this effort concerns even less the slowdown of the rhythm (W1–4/V4) than the anchoring in past situations (W1–4/V3). Edith seems more troubled with the fact that she does not find anymore the picture on her placemat of the town where she used to live than with the short delay in her cooking her surprise implies. Tension. A tension arises following this incident. It consists in finding a solution: she searches in her sideboard with attention and concentration to find her reference point (the placemat) again, with in the backdrop the other supports of her kitchen, which continue to back her and will let her carry on her activity (W1–4/S2). At this moment, she is but slightly worried about the stake of the link to the other situations. It remains strong for most of the situations, for there is no other problem (W1–4/S3). However, Edith feels more constrained/concerned by the temporal rhythm, that is the need to continue the cooking of her meal (W1–4/S4). All this remains very nuanced. 5: Table of intensitometries Here is the intensitometry of Edith’s presence in the situation. These evaluations are of course subjective, they are only Edith’s. Moreover, all the supports and cognitive modes are not taken into account by Edith. She estimates the degree of presence of three types of supports to be: 8 for the reference points, 8 for the network of situations, 9 for the pace of time. As for the degree of presence of the “voids”, the loss of a reference point is estimated to be 4, the rupture of the networks is 2 and the rupture of the pace is 3. Edith also estimates the degrees of intensity of each of her cognitive modes according to the supports, their presence or their absence. Reference Network points of situa(S2 = 8) tions (S3 = 8)

Pace of Loss of Rupture Rupture time reference of links of rhythm (S4 = 9) points (V3 = 2) (V4 = 3) (V2 = 4)

Tranquility

Familiarity

Intensity of cognitive 8 economy (R1)

8/8 9

9/8 8

8/9 3

3/4 6

6/2 6

6/3

Intensity of docility (R2)

9

9/8 9

9/8 8

8/9 2

2/4 6

6/2 6

6/3

Intensity of fluidity (R3)

7

7/8 9

9/8 8

8/9 3

3/4 8

8/2 8

8/3

Intensity of distraction (R4)

7

7/8 7

7/8 9

9/9

Tension

Strangeness

Intensity of decryption effort (W1)

7

7/8 3

3/8 5

5/9 6

6/4 3

3/2 1

1/3

Intensity of concentration (W4)

7

7/8 3

3/8 5

5/9 7

7/4 3

3/2 1

1/3

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The divisions of the degree of cognitive intensity by the degree of intensity of each of the three supports and each of the three voids are made square by square in order to specify Edith’s state at that moment. First in the tranquility square. – Cognitive economy is 8 for the points of reference, 9 for the network of situations and 8 for the pace of time. At each of these intersections this gives us: R1/S2 = 8/8; R1/S3 = 9/8; R1/S4 = 8/9. – Docility was estimated to be 9 for the points of reference, 9 for the networks and 8 for the pace of time. At each intersection this gives us: R2/S2 = 9/8; R2/S3 = 9/8; R2/S4 = 8/9. – Fluidity is 7 for the points of reference, 9 for the network and also 8 for the pace. At each of these intersections this gives us: R3/S2 = 7/8; R3/S3 = 9/8; R3/S4 = 8/9. – Slight distraction is estimated to be 7 for the points of reference, 7 for the network and 9 for the pace of time. At each intersection this gives us: R4/S2 = 7/8; R4/S3 = 7/8; R4/S4 = 9/9. In the familiarity square. – Cognitive economy is 3 for the points of reference, 6 for the network of situations and 6 for the pace of time. At each of these intersections this gives us: R1/V2 = 3/4; R1/V3; 6/2; R1/V4 = 6/3. – Docility is estimated to be 2 for the points of reference, 6 for the networks and 6 for the pace of time. At each intersection this gives us: R2/V2 = 2/4; R2/V3 = 6/2; R2/ V4 = 6/3. – Fluidity is 3 for the points of reference, 8 for the networks and also 8 for the pace. At each of these intersections this gives us: R3/V2 = 3/4; R3/V3; = 8/2; R3/V4 = 8/3. In the strangeness square. – The intensity of decryption is 6 for the points of reference, 3 for the network and 3 for the pace of time. At the intersections this gives us: W1/V2 = 6/4; W1/V3 = 3/2; W1/V4 = 1/3. – For concentration, the estimate is 7 for the points of reference, 3 for the network and 1 for the pace. At the intersections this gives us: W4/V2 = 7/4; W4/V3 = 3/2; W4/V4 = 1/3. Finally, in the tension square. – The intensity of decryption is 7 for the points of reference, 3 for the network and 5 for the pace of time. At the intersections this gives us: W1/S2 = 7/8; W1/S3 = 3/8; W1/S4 = 5/9. – For concentration, the estimate is 7 for the reference points, 3 for the network and 5 for the pace. At the intersections this gives us: W4/S2 = 7/8; W4/S3 = 3/8, W4/S4 = 5/9.

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The fractions are represented with circles of various diameters below. 6: Reposity chart (with intensitometries)

In each square, it is possible to add up the results of the various intersection points. In tranquility: cognitive economy is 3.01 (8/8 + 9/8 + 8/9); docility is 3.13 (9/8 + 9/8 + 8/9); fluidity is 2.88 (7/8 + 9/8 + 8/9); slight distraction is 2.75 (7/8 + 7/8 + 9/9) and the total is 11.77. In familiarity: cognitive economy is 5.75 (3/4 + 6/2 + 6/3); docility is 5.5 (2/4 + 6/2 + 6/3); fluidity is 7.41 (3/4 + 8/2 + 8/3) and the total is 18.66. For strangeness: decryption is 3.33 (6/4 + 3/2 + 1/3); concentration is 3.58 (7/4 + 3/2 + 1/3) and the total is 6.91. In tension: decryption is 1.8 (7/8 + 3/8 + 5/9); concentration is 1.8 (7/8 + 3/8 + 5/9) and the total is 3.6.

From there, percentages can be assigned to the different strata of the volume of being, each in relation to the others. For instance, the percentage of tranquility is 11.77x100/(11.77+18.66+6.91+3.6) = 28.7%. The proportions can be visualized in the pie chart below. This sheds new light on how Edith is present in her action. Is it possible to consider a present or future representation of this nuanced pre-

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sence with cerebral imaging, which would visualize the degrees of activation of this or that brain zone? Tranquility (28.7%): This defines the state of Edith’s presence in the kitchen, in the process of preparing a meal, against the background of her reference points. Surrounded by her usual equipment, which is in good working order, she is working in a routine, with confidence and at an easy pace, with no desire to change anything. Familiarity (45.4%): A problem arises. Edith notices the absence of the placemat she wants to use. This represents the loss of a reference point. Confidence is not shaken very much and the pace is hardly disrupted. She does not accept this absence, hence docility is weak. Strangeness (16.8%): Edith is surprised of its absence. She likes her placemat, the drawing of which represents part of her experience. Tension (8.7%): Edith is searching in her sideboard with attention. But this is nuanced because she remains surrounded by the supports of her kitchen. 7: Pie chart

III. Mitigated humans: what can be concluded? This methodology no doubt needs to be refined. But I believe that it is clearly not an ethno-graphy, and that existential anthropology can also work with precise methods. What conclusions can be drawn from the reposity charts? Human presence initially unfolds in a perceptional and/or cognitive act, in the process of which each individual does and/or says what needs to be done and/or said in co-presence

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with beings and objects. Since this act often goes without saying in the situation, it is carried out below the level of conscious, intentional movement. This presence does not require the full and unconditional adherence of the body and mind. There is, simultaneously with the engaging act, a dimension that lightens it. Why? First, because the interactional act is interwoven into a series of actions and situations that happen immediately or have themselves resulted from a specific life trajectory; secondly, because this act rests upon objects and beings that are themselves inserted into networks that bring them onto contact with other beings and other objects; thirdly, because the here-and-now act of presence is connected with a past reason for being; fourthly, because the act fits into a more or less tightly woven network of roles and situations. It is these four reasons that, according to various modalities and proportions, simultaneously engage and lighten the presence of the person in the situation. And this way of being can also be diverted or reinforced, according to a variety of psychological modes, while injecting an extra dimension into presence, occasionally experienced as constraints, strategies, morality, freedom, etc. – each term making reference to traditional theories in sociology. Such is the paradoxical specificity of human presence: interactionally relevant presence is necessarily coupled with an unfettered, relaxed and fluid dimension, through the adjacent presence of beings and objects that serve as reference points and signs, through the presence (in the form of traces) of previous reasons for acting and previously developed routines, and through the presence of other roles and situations woven into the immanent presence. In this way, the minor mode of presence is like the inseparable opposite of the major mode on which the social sciences focus almost exclusively. But it is a deformed or deforming “reverse” in relation to the “obverse”, one or another having – depending on the moment and the situation – different visibilities, forms, proportions and effects. “Philosophy,” wrote Merleau-Ponty, “has never spoken – I do not say of passivity: we are not effects – but I would say of the passivity of our activity” (Merleau-Ponty 1969: 221). Successive presence in instants is also what makes it possible to go on living when confronted with a dreadful situation, when a tragic event (nearly) fills a person’s whole situation and presence. This is what is shown by Primo Levi’s time in a concentration camp: his acceptance of orders, laws and more generally the imposed event; his development of an understanding of new points of reference that furnished a new routine; a numbness that provided a certain insensibility, a form of detachment; self-maintenance (which becomes “work”) by completing simple gestures (like washing); the inner language of wandering thoughts, even jokes; the deferral of a possible tragedy, that of being “in a concentration camp”, by focusing attention on little momentary worries or occasional, variable sufferings. Continuity, from instant to instant, from situation to situation, is achieved through the extraordinary conjunction between the tragic – dominant, anchored and almost fixed – and these more or less “secondarily” present re-

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mains, which are able to throw links between moments and situations and keep the person advancing. Primo Levi said himself that the state of misfortune was poorly studied (Levi 1987: 62). “It is lucky that it is not windy today,” he wrote about his concentration camp experience. “Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know that this evening it is your turn for the supplement of soup, so that even today you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium – as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom – well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining” (Levi 1987: 137). Schopenhauer also had something to say on the matter; he in turn convinced me of the relevance of phenomenographic investigation, writing that it is well-known that “great suffering makes all lesser ills cease to be felt, and that conversely freedom from great suffering makes even the most trifling inconveniences torment us and put us out of humor; but experience also teaches that if a great misfortune, at the mere thought of which we shuddered, actually befalls us, as soon as we have overcome the first pain of it, our disposition remains for the most part unchanged; and, conversely, that after the attainment of some happiness we have long desired, we do not feel ourselves on the whole and permanently very much better off and agreeably situated than before. Only the moment at which these changes occur affects us with unusual strength, as deep sorrow or exulting joy, but both soon pass away, for they are based upon illusion. [. . .] Only by borrowing from the future could pain or pleasure be heightened so abnormally, and consequently not enduringly” (Schopenhauer 1909: 406). The action of continuity is thus directly linked to the availability, alongside human presence, of practically inexhaustible revivifying supports. As I have pointed out, they consist of reference points, clues and rules. They are people or objects, spatiotemporal indicators in a situation’s foreground and background. But most importantly they have the ability to reappear (and be perceived) in other forms after they disappear, to mitigate a tragic dominant characteristic, to qualify a cognitive, emotional tension, to lighten the work of grasping meaning. It is another minimum, a few support leftovers that people find to keep themselves going. At the height of conflict, strangeness, anxiety or ruptures, people find forms of repose. Even though one or two supports are lacking, others remain. When cognitive economy gives way to the relentless search for meaning, and docility gives way to instability, and fluidity to inflexibility, and distraction to intransigence, strangeness can only be either very temporary, in which case it is quickly absorbed, or diffuse in which case it is still permeated in different

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doses by various rules, points of reference or clues supporting the situation. But all of these difficult events can have various impacts: from simple rumination to more or less serious consequences. Moreover, the reposity chart is not without any relation to theories of social sciences. Indeed, on the chart, the strong points of various theoretical interpretations can be identified. On the vertical line, at the cognitive economy and docility dots, it would be Bourdieu’s theory for example. It makes it possible to visualize the reduction (frequent in the social sciences) of the upper segment of the vertical line since fluidity and distraction are elements that are often eliminated from sociological analyses. Presence in a situation presupposes not so much a “total and unconditional” adherence (according to Bourdieu’s vocabulary centered on Tr 1–3 and 5–7), but also a way of being fluid, distracted and distant (Tr 9–16). Moreover these analyses risk confusing modes of presence with their supports, which are presented as internalized. According to this type of interpretation, there would no longer be any objects or supports, and there would therefore no longer be any horizontal line. My longstanding knowledge of traffic laws and my old habit of driving a car certainly produce a few tranquilities and familiarities as shown by my thoroughly assimilated automatisms, but the laws remain present like a very effective backdrop. They are there. This raises the need to rethink various presences, to determine where and how social trajectories and reasons for acting are present (either within or alongside the individual). During the drive, I could have questioned its reason, its “why”. Then the reason for acting would have ceased being a backdrop and turned into a subject for discussion. This encourages practicing “ontographies” of various beings (rules, reasons, “social”, but also gods and animals) according to their various modes of presence in situations8. On the vertical line, there are also action theories: Weber, interactionism and ethnomethodology, as well as pragmatic sociology. The thematic and analytical focus of the two lower squares (tension and strangeness), which can particularly be perceived in the researches of various sociologies of action, favor themes explicitly connected with challenges or interpretations related to work and tension in situations that do not necessarily require these. In a situation, individuals are much less productive of meaning, consciousness, rationality, strategies and justifications than is willing to be acknowledged by the whole range of sociologies of the subject and sociologies of action. It shows the mistake of deducing skills from various effects appearing in subsequent situations. On the horizontal line representing supports, there would be the actor-network theory and the distributed cognition theory. We would see then another asymmetry: it consists in presenting supports as the only working entities and attributing 8 On these points, see the work of François Cooren, who emphasizes these presences, and particularly: Cooren (2010). See also my recent books: Piette (2011 and 2012).

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cognitive information-storage and information-processing operations to objects and the environment, but at the risk of not considering human modes of presence. In such a case, the vertical line would no longer exist! It seems to me that interpretations of this kind miss the situational relationship between supports and modes, that is to say the co-presence of the person, the reference points and the rules. This is the risk that the distributed cognition theory might focus on cognition as it is actually shared in a situation by objects and various other resources and omit the presence of people, or in any case that they might go too far in treating it as the only attention and coordination activity9. Because I too am there with my feelings, moods, emotions, etc. I even sometimes experience the tranquility of driving at a given moment, to a certain place. And furthermore, I carry direct, indirect, diffuse or limited traces of a previous situation, of several situations that happened ten minutes ago, two days ago, or have accumulated over a week, over twenty or thirty years. I have my own way of driving, talking and getting angry. They obviously result from my social trajectories. They are maybe not relevant in this situation: they are not perceived by my passengers. But it might no longer be the case the following day when I address my students and conduct a seminar. In a situation, these traces are noticed, assessed, judged to be more or less relevant, non-relevant, are perceived as details by the carrier himself and/or by other participants. Of course, when a person feels a tragic or at least difficult moment, this has nothing to do with the effect of an ordinary previous situation, over the short or long term. We obviously have much to learn about how people continue, exist, from situation to situation, instant to instant, how they multiply and combine modes of presence. The comparison variables can be diverse and can also be combined: culture, social classes, age, mental health. Such would be an anthropology of existences, which describes and explains how people exist, with their own anthropological difference: knowing they exist, perceiving their own existence, not being unaware that they will lose it sooner or later. Such would be the vast, nearly unexplored field of existential anthropology, equipped with concepts and methodological rigor: describing the microcontinuity of man experiencing instants and situations, the apparitions and disappearances of people and objects, according to various modalities of absence-presence and passivity-activity.

IV. Phenomenographic paths for analyzing presence Watching, observing, photographing, filming, questioning, describing. The challenge is to find words to disconnect natural attitudes from an interpretation that focuses on action, in order to describe and understand the obviousness and 9 On this point, see Christophe Heintz’s (2011) very enlightening critique of the work of Hutchins.

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facility in human presence, which enables individuals to navigate moments and situations, and continue navigating them in spite of occasional obstacles and tragic atrocities. Because there is no denying that this natural attitude, which is a classic philosophical theme, was transferred to sociology at the cost of shifting observation away from everyday obviousness towards the analysis of human beings’ social conditions, or of their intelligibility in terms of action and the production of meaning. Sociology and social anthropology are therefore social sciences of the loss of human singularities. It is important for existential anthropology to work on the whole volume of human beings – the extreme singularity of each of them with their thoughts, gestures, imitations, acts and objects, many of which have no effect or relevance beyond a few moments, even at moment t of their execution. Resistance to the whole is therefore an incentive to observe the existences and presences of individuals in their actions or relations. Presence, defined by the The Oxford Dictionary of English as “the state or fact of existing, occurring, or being present”, designates a volume of being that is in the process of performing an action or a sequence of actions in a situation. From this point of view, ontology has a meaning different from that which is sometimes implied by anthropology’s ontological turn. “Ontos” or “onta” are forms of the present participle of the verb “to be” in classical Greek. Etymologically, “ontology” encourages a focus on beings in situation, rather than on speech, narratives, representations and conceptual systems. My point of view of course opposes the idea of treating alterity and cultural differences as pivotal, and conceiving anthropology as a science of otherness, of other ontologies and metaphysics. “Ontology” instead indicates a theoretical and empirical orientation that consists in observing, describing and comparing beings, presences, individuals, and existences in and through their constantly changing, diverse situations. I therefore interpret ontology not as an anthropological object, but as a mode of anthropological observation. I will now present various phenomenographic tracks that intersect and attempt to define a kind of general framework to guide observations of volumes of being with their different strata. Several observation themes emerge. Continuity and variations. Observing and shadowing an individual over one or several days means watching a rhythm of actions following one another and being repeated. In fact there is a dual repetition, of actions and of their interconnections. It is a rhythm that is both paradigmatic – as structuralism would say, referring to the repetition of the same situations day after day – and syntagmatic, made up of the same interconnections of situations in the course of a day. Differences appear in the succession of situations and in the situations themselves, which repeat with their own particularities. Thus in this repeated rhythm, no two corresponding situations are ever identical. Against a homogeneous backdrop,

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particular details emerge that are different every time. There are also specific objects, often different, that attract attention. The proper syntagmatic rhythm is also created in the repetition of differences: for example, the action of working in an office is not always preceded and followed by the same situations. These elements before and after the situation generate different moods and feelings, different ways of being present: the individual will be more or less anxious, more or less distracted, more or less attentive to one thing or another. Thus differences appear within the same repeated sequences, and also within the same interconnections that occur. In this rhythm, situations are sometimes or often punctuated by unplanned action sequences, though these do not cause surprise. There are also new situations that are added, inserted, or that replace others (such as going to the supermarket instead of going to the office). Acting, exercising an activity, gesturing: every time, these seem to unfold in an interval (which is more or less limited, more or less extensive) in which sets of actions are already proposed, pre-placed, placed in front of the individual, before beginning a new series of actions constituting another interval. Hence the importance of observing and comparing presences in analogous and contrasted situations. Displacement, putting aside, and effects to be tracked. Every situation is therefore like an interval in the day that makes it possible to (re-)place the flow of action into one frame or another. Some transitional moments lend themselves to this more than others, but each situation, each space, each time creates a displacement towards another. The rhythm of the day is not so much determined by juxtaposed situations or actions as by an interwoven displacement by which each situation recalls the previous one and announces the next one. A situation of course puts aside certain elements that were made current in the previous situation, and does the same to other elements that will be made current in the following situation, but this rejection process is not entirely successful, because these potentiated elements can appear in the background, creating an interweaving of situations and facilitating the passage from one to the next. Human beings are specialists in putting aside things that do not concern the current situation, while nuancing their continuous presences by introducing elements from previous and/ or subsequent situations. The sequences of actions that human beings perform are more or less consequential. There are of course isolated conversations that, though they have no real consequential effect can nevertheless create short, medium or long-term reverberation effects. An exchange on the subway can make a person seem nice, inclining one to greet and smile at him or her later. Other moments that seem to be swiftly set aside can still be the subject of occasional ruminations. There are also very specific situations that cause new propositions to emerge, for example new laws and rules that will be voted on and will trigger new situations, new actions, and gradually lead to new habits. These are normative or regulatory situations. Without changing the course of subsequent actions and moments, other situations

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bring “something” more, which will in turn become a reference point, a subtle object of attention or even an unimportant detail that much later recalls this singular moment. The phenomenographer also tracks consequences or the lack thereof. For example, on the basis of a decisive statement or gesture, how do actions, consequences and their rebounding effects come into being and follow one another? What forms do the consequences assume? How do the effects follow one another and how are they generated? What types of actions have consequences? Statements, performative utterances, gestures, decisions, situations . . .? And what kinds of consequences do they have? An echo, a mental reverberation, a memory, a rumination, an action, an occasional preoccupation, a deviation, an accident? A change of direction, a planned continuity? How do consequences and corollaries persist, and which of them do? Which type of relevant gesture or action in combination with which type of leftover carries over into another situation which gesture or action with which type of leftover? The consequences of effects are also generated alongside and within backdrops, through expressions of the minor mode. And what has no consequences? This is why any explanation of activities as they have consequences, of life as a challenge and of actions as problems, is inadequate. Hooking and weaving. In another way, human presence is first of all in a situation that is itself anchored in other situations according to various links. One situation is the outcome of a set of others. Being in a house, in a car, in this house, that car: these are specific moments, each of which requiring different series of previous actions. It is as if these situations were linked by more or less tight hooks. By keeping a journal that records action sequences, it would be possible to retain traces of this interlinking of situations. A foundational situation in which, for example, a decision is made, implies a new course of actions but rarely constitutes an immediate rupture that redirects all of the varied courses of action. Human beings, who already have the ability to put aside and temper situations, are also founders, normalizers, entailers. When a researcher describes a scene, he usually provides “preliminary” information that offers context and facilitates understanding. This information concerns a “background” of geographical and temporal data, about various habits and practices. But each of these elements was once a stake – maybe its main stake – of a previous or remote situation and might still engender various effects today. Human beings are of course capable of putting this or that element aside from a situation. But they are also weavers who “trace” from situation to situation. Each situation reflects a gigantic network that intersects many others that stem from the individual’s trajectory and from the trajectories of each of those who are co-present with him in a situation. And it is on the basis of these links – established by the human being and regularly altered – that elements from var-

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ious situations appear and intersect in the present situation. Human beings are also intersectors (see Latour 1996). Elements from elsewhere and intrastrata. Hence every current situation is more or less permeated by the presence of elements from other situations, with or without a direct relevance impact. These, which arise from an individual’s own situations woven into a network, or from those of others who are co-present, come from one’s past, from one’s future, or even from others’ past or future. Whether they belong to a near or distant past or future, they can all arise in a situation as attention fragments, unimportant details, reference points or active clues. Of course actions from the immediate past or future have a greater chance of triggering, in the current situation, the appearance of elements that are supposed to be relevant (or irrelevant) to it. Thus the past and the future, that of the observed individual or that of others, appear in a situation in the form of memories, worries, thoughts, ruminations or conversations. But the past can also be present in the form of a skill acquired over time and essentially routinized today, or even in the form of a “character”, a way or several ways of being. These are a reflection not so much of a foundational situation, but of a trait or set of traits that has developed over time. The same goes for social characteristics, ways of speaking and behaving, those which can be traced back through a “trajectory” to “origins”, to social “affiliations”, and which materialize here and now, whether or not they are noticed, whether or not they are evaluated by situation partners. In a situation, the ephemerality of the action (talking, touching, seeing, etc.) is often “simpler” than the whole volume of each being. In the immanence of the situation, past relations no doubt carry more weight than the relevance of the present interaction. And the same goes for each of the past moments. A presence’s prior and external links in a situation are therefore more important, or at least they take up more space in the volume of being than this present’s direct relevances. Human beings, carriers of networks of other situations, are thus made up of intrastrata. It seems to me that what happens in the situation gains descriptive and interpretive clarity from an examination of the various stratified layers of a volume of being, which are more or less potential, actualized, visible, perceptible or perceived. The phenomenographer therefore asks: among the intrastrata, which are current, visible or virtual here and now? What is voluntarily or involuntarily explicit or concealed? What is identified in the various actualized, potentiated, virtualized strata of the individual’s volume of being? As we have seen above, the interweaving of situations is also linked to the human ability to bring into existence norms, texts, books, automobiles, etc. They will be moved into different situations, either for personalized use or as a general law. While using them and reappropriating them as reference points, objects of attention, backdrops or even unimportant details, the user, owner or the citizen

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often ignores or forgets the objects’ origins. At most, he can occasionally remember the organization that produced it and the last link in the production chain. He often cares little about knowing that the giver of existence was also present in a specific situation, in a routine mode with reference points, in front of a backdrop, distracted by unimportant details, occasionally giving attention to fragments that have become important. This whole set of elements and networks, provided that the individual puts them aside, enables him to circulate within the flow of the action. Non-thought and wandering thoughts. It is within this interweaving of moments, places, people and situations that each person is present, along with states of mind, with his or her own singularity. Observation of the body in the process of moving cannot be separated from a consideration of forms of perception and more broadly of mental states. And new questions arise. For example: when an individual has an aim, when he desires or decides, what is he like? One of the regular characteristics of human presence is the dissociation between the action and the mental state which would correspond to the contents of this action. Philosophers from different intellectual traditions have often stressed this point: “Rarely do our actions coincide with an event occurring in our mental field, an event that we experience palpably, and that produces this action as a cause triggers an effect. The proof is that in order to have examples, one must turn to the emotional circumstances of existence: the prick of desire, a sharp pain, a fit of rage, the bite of jealousy, etc.” (Petit 1991: 160–161). Few mental calculations and deliberate decisions drive the action in progress. The thematic body-thought correspondence is rare and unnecessary. It is non-correspondence that is a necessity. As Searle has suggested, this is the difference, for example, between a skier who is learning, making jerky movements while concentrating on the right gesture, and a skier who knows, who moves fluidly and cannot think about it (Searle 1983: beginning p. 151). Imagine someone driving a car for the first time on an unfamiliar road, even one that is icy. In this extreme case, all gestures would respond to a strong intention, a conscious tension, an effort: changing speed, braking, slowing down, finding the shortest route, etc. This novel situation shows what usual acts set aside – the attention and tension of driving a car, uncertainty about the route, the traffic dangers – while for the experienced car driver, habit, routine and confidence take over, making it possible to stop questioning all of the presuppositions of the driving. In a way, the regularity of the performance of this action suspends not just the attention to the fragmented gestures of driving but also the reactivation of the intention and the motives to drive. A specific action sequence can of course be linked to a previous decision, but it would be impossible if it were accompanied by an explicit reference to this decision every time. The obvious nature of the action implies an ability to take for granted satisfactory conditions for its performance (trust in the safety of the vehicle, in the uprightness of other drivers, etc.), as well as an ability to use refer-

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ence points (for example those of the car’s dashboard) and conform to various rules (such as traffic laws), but also an ability to perform this action without any direct mental reference to a previously decided choice. The performance of an action is thus connected with the ability to not explicitly refer to an initial intention as well as all of the necessary acts and gestures. This enables human beings to take part in a collective action without an active intention, without deliberation or explanation, as if these possibilities had been neutralized. This “implicitation” could be called the virtualization of decisions, intentions and reasons for acting, which constitutes an essential element of human presence, element that is, in the descriptions and analyses of the social sciences, certainly too often neglected and suppressed by a theoretical explanation that deprives it of specificity. It is a kind of theoretical engagement that is different from mine, on the one hand proceeding as if human beings were always conscious and rational, as Weber suggests, while knowing that they are not, and on the other hand analyzing the grammars used to elucidate situations and establishing the rules of the agreement even though it is obvious that these principles are only very rarely elucidated in everyday life. In addition to meaning and order, the action needs economy, a characteristic that is just as crucial: placing elements at a distance, putting them aside, and trusting without verifying. But the non-thought of the action should not justify a lack of anthropological interest in presence. If acknowledging the non-thought in the action is not a reason to forget the modes of being present, what would our individual have in his head in the ultimately very lightened action of driving (for example)? When attention abandons the situation – as soon as it is no longer necessary – it can be replaced by other non-corrupting thoughts to the extent that these are able to settle into the mental presence of the individual. Thus it is necessary to properly distinguish non-thought, which is often a condition of the accomplishment of the action, from “other” thoughts or states of mind. An action is not firstly felt, experienced as an obligation, constraint, routine, or as strategic or rational. These elements constitute a back-knowledge that is virtually present. They can also be actualized and experienced as such in some circumstances. The individual can softly accompany his action with the idea that it could be revised. When he begins performing it, he can also occasionally become aware that it responds to a promise, desire or expectation, these being the immediate relays of a prior, sometimes distant intention. They update and reinforce the implicit reasons for performing this action, without being direct causes. In a situation, the individual has at his disposal various supports, rules, norms, spatiotemporal reference points, perceptional signs, and his own prior experiences. As we have seen above, he is also confronted with the possibility of their absences, changes, rejections. It generates a range of presence modes. The dose of work and repose, both inseparable, is different for each participant in a same situation. According to “the degree of our attention to life”, “now nearer to action, now further removed from it”, this

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interweaving of modes of presence gives “divers tones of mental life” (Bergson 2004: XIV). And while passing through a set of successive activities, one individual will undergo changes of proportion between work and repose. When human beings are “active”, they continue to be “carried along” by the linking of moments and the presence of reference points and other clues. There is no active dimension (evaluating, changing, losing, scheming . . .) that is not accompanied by at least one of the other dimensions constitutive of “repose”, and the reverse. In this perspective, a theoretical and empirical challenge is therefore to connect actions and presences. “Negative reservation” is the expression of Simmel (1910: 383) that we have already encountered. In his presence, every individual introduces – I strongly stress this point – a profoundly modalizing layer that, to varying degrees, blunts his ability to confront objects or other humans, whether he is saying hello, getting married, stopping at a red light, suffering in a hospital or weeping over someone he misses. This minor mode is a universal form of existing, consisting of a kind of “negative reservation” that is visible, sometimes invisible, gestural, mental, material. It is that stratum which modalizes, inside or outside of what is at play, simultaneously or successively. The minor mode is analogous to the water in the human body: “And if you analyze the human body, all you’re left with is water and a few dozen little heaps of matter floating round in it” (Musil 1965: 72). I would wager that in 60% of situations, this minor mode represents 80% of behavioral and cognitive density, that 20% of situations contain 50% of minor mode, and 20% of situations contain 20% or less. And this reservation could be deconstructed as follows: a backdrop with beings and objects peripheral to the principal action, distraction objects and beings that are perceived in their status as details, the non-conscious part of the individual performing the action, peripheral gestures (let us not forget Part I of this book), wandering thoughts that infiltrate the mind thus available, the floating attitude, as well as hypolucidity in face of what is and what will happen. And all of this without hindering things – even quite the contrary: happy and unhappy events occur, from one to the next and with their consequences. I am thus describing the fundamental passivity of presence as a stratum that necessarily complements the activity as it is relevant, with its challenges and consequences. Life and sleep, work and repose, activity and passivity, major and minor are like two sides of the same coin. And distraction, as mentioned above, infiltrates all the more easily insofar as we are in the presence of a consciousness that “implicitates”, does not reflect, does not choose, blunting the presence, the act, the action. What I wish to show is the importance of this stratum, which absorbs and diminishes the confrontation, the challenge of the activity, without hindering its execution. As near as possible to human presence, consciousness, decision and choice are less heuristic than docility, fluidity or distraction. This

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phenomenographic observation must of course be adapted to the individuals and situations, including the most terrible among them. Phenomenography tracks human beings’ discrepancies with themselves and attempts to infiltrate the details of presence. This necessitates precise descriptions depicting an individual’s singularity, which is not only his/her psychology. In the interval in which the leftovers of the social sciences are found, there is indeed human presence – the presence of the human being who was suspended or set aside by the operations of the social sciences. This is the interval that existential anthropology should zoom in on. A field of anthropological explorations seems to me to be possible and desirable.

Conclusion In this conclusion, I wish to recapitulate and clarify certain points. The first concerns the shift these chapters effect from the tradition of the social sciences, particularly from social anthropology. It basically reveals an ontology of the individual, far removed from the relationist models that anthropology has always favored. The second point redefines human beings’ characteristic way of being present in situations. The notion of minimality, which has been explicitly or implicitly present throughout these pages, is central. This will link to a third point: where is society in all of this? It did not receive much attention in this book. Continuity and virtuality, in their association with minimality, are notions that become necessary for explaining social life. I will end the book with a narrative of origin, a kind of scenario that puts forward a hypothesis on the beginnings of this minimal way of existing.

I. An ontology of the individual It seems to me that this book effects a shift from the epistemology of the social sciences. Not only have I abandoned the “shared” register to work on the “singular”, but I have also attempted to circumvent another point: the relationist model that has a strong presence in the history of anthropological ideas. As Alfred Gell noted: “Anthropological theories are distinctive in that they are typically about social relationships”. And he continued: “The aim of anthropological theory is to make sense of behavior in the context of social relations” (Gell 1998: 11). Marilyn Strathern has suggested that we understand “persons as simultaneously containing the potential for relationships and always embedded in a matrix of relations with others” (Strathern 1996: 66). And according to another perspective, Lévi-Strauss pointed out that anthropology’s aim was to link social life to “a system of which all the aspects are organically connected” (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 365). System, structure, interaction, activity and even person as we have just seen: these terms all speak of relations in their own way. “The provocation”, Matei Candea writes, “comes in part from the fact that anthropology’s commitment to relationality operates on at least three different levels: ethnographically, relations are our subject matter; analytically, the making of connections is our method, and engagement has come to be the ubiquitous key-word for thinking about anthropological ethics” (Candea 2009). A relationist perspective is for example one which considers that there are only relations and that everything can be explained by relations. This is Latour’s position. A theory is also relationist if, though it is based on individuals, it focuses on the “between” individuals, on the

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relevant “between” and a method is relationist if in the production of knowledge it emphasizes relational interplay. This is the interactionist position. In this book, my position is not relationist. I consider that there are only individuals in situations, who are of course able to react and address other individuals. It clearly places the emphasis on the singularity of individuals, beyond their relational positioning and the sum of their trajectories in a situation. This is not to say that the relations of individuals are not described and observed; this should be done very meticulously in the complexity of their heterogeneous simultaneity at moment t, and on the basis of the individual existence continuing in the flow of time. But the relations, connections and interactions that one individual weaves with another is only one part of his way of being present at a given moment. When the focus is placed on the individual, on one individual at a time, what does an anthropology of existence observe? Elements linked to what is relevant in the situation, to what is directly visible, and also to what is not relevant, strata that concern traces of past relations, such as social trajectories, as well as strata that provide a glimpse of elements that are not relationally relevant – leftovers and the leftovers of leftovers, the details I should say. Furthermore, what is important is not so much relational complicity, the researcher’s interactional interplay (much emphasized in ethnographic work), but rather the observation of the individual: what this human being is really like at moment t and afterwards. It asserts the existence of a reality to describe, independent of the observer, and does not emphasize a relationist method, as is the case with ethnography. I do not reject this, but I would only make it a point of departure, a way of exploring the context before any focus on individuals in particular. As we have seen, the observation of an individual is based on the shadowing of this same individual for varying periods of time, identifying modalities, modulations and modalizations of intensity, of presence and absence. Such would be the requirements of existential anthropology. The point of departure in observation, the “basic particular” as Strawson would say, is a given individual present in a situation, one who is visible and tangible, observable and introspectable.

II. Minima Another central element that has run through the descriptions and analyses in this book is that very particular way in which human beings are present in a situation. Different concepts helped me characterizing it: the minor mode, minimality and reposity. What does an individual do when he is with others in a so-called collective action? He is there, doing what is necessary, without much mental or physical effort, very often out of habit, with economical perception, varying according to the situation of course. Most human actions develop in a situation without requiring more than this from the people who are there: only

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the minimal integration behavior, I would say. It consists of expected actions that often reflect not so much their ongoing performance but rather the earlier intention or decision to perform them. At the same time, this intention or decision is self-evident, reflecting prior situations, as we have just seen. Very visible externally, the stratum of minimal integration behavior often intrudes little upon the immediate presence experienced by the person. These minimal behaviors are executed all the more lightly insofar as they are routines, linked to known rules or co-present objects and resource-persons. But precisely in addition to this stratum, as I have pointed out, human presence also includes remains, the volume of remains. In fact, a close look at minimal integration behavior in a single situation reveals that no two behaviors are really alike. There are of course different styles and social tendencies surrounding one same gesture, but more importantly, in parallel with the execution of the gesture there are remains that are thus characterized because they do not jeopardize the minimum integration behavior. These are gestures peripheral to the expected action, thoughts heterogeneous to it and the absence of an inner state related to the ongoing performance. But they are also personalized, sometimes emotional evocations, stemming from what is being done or said, the occasional feeling that an experience is unfulfilling, or even an impression of constraint, or a brief critical doubt about what is happening. The minimal integration behavior is highly visible to everyone, whereas remains are often invisible to other individuals; in any case they are not interpreted as a sign of anything. Expected behaviors can be (though they are not always) less present in inner experiences than remains, which are sometimes strongly self-perceived and felt (at least some of them) in the course of the action, though not enough to jeopardize the successful development of the situation. As we know, the presence of individuals in a collective action, meeting or demonstration arises from various motivations, reasons, thoughts and sequences of actions. “With a widening scope of the circle”, Simmel writes, “the commonalities that bind every one in the social unity to every one else always become less extensive”. An individual’s mental and gestural presence contains only a social minimum, that is to say a minimum shared with others. And this minimum is precisely very minimal. According to Simmel, sometimes what unites individuals in a situation is made up of nothing but prohibitions and limitations: “the patterns of behavior that a group must demand of its members in order to be able to exist as a group tend to be all the more purely prohibitive and restrictive in nature, the more extensive it is” (Simmel 2009: 426). What manifests as respect or obedience to a rule or norm is all the less meaningful and indicative of a specific inner attitude insofar as this rule or that norm is more general. In that case, it is only disrespect and violations that have very strong consequences (ibid.: 474). This minimality principle is also one of the action interpretation perspectives that Pierre Livet proposes based on the idea of “communication limitations”. In par-

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ticular, they concern the impossibility of knowing what others are thinking, of positively determining either their intention in an action or the sense in which they are understanding and respecting the rule (Livet 1987). Life in common in a situation is therefore also the suspension of the search for these requirements, the acceptance of the undecidability of what other people think. And in each case there is a shared minimum along with that variable volume of remains. The situation’s participants achieve minimal integration behavior through the reciprocal establishment of visibility. The presence of remains is also shared but in an invisible way, at least without being recognized or hardly being recognized, and their contents are different for each person, the difference between them receiving no explicit expression. Thus, integration behavior is minimal but the remains are minimal as well, since they do not produce any change and are not experienced as different by everyone. Minimality is very much a crucial sociological operation principle. It enables a large volume of remains to exist alongside the gestural and mental minimum of social presence. And it is also very Simmelian since it creates the gap between this presence and the cultural content of rules, for example religious and political rules capable of uniting individuals in one shared situation, a gap that can sometimes be felt as an absence and a cause for worry. It is quite clear that the object of sociology and social anthropology most often concerns minimal integration behavior, at the very most certain remains that are precursors of change, relevant in the course of events, such as doing something under the effect of a restriction, with a critical doubt, with a present strategic aim. A phenomenography of the remains stratum implies not isolating the shared minimum of modes of presence and treating it as if it were the sole, maximal volume of presence, but also analyzing the portion of mental and gestural remains that exists alongside the shared social minimum. An instance of successful coordination requires the suspension of all requirements beyond the completion of a minimal substratum that is itself performed minimally, with perceptional and cognitive economy through habits and routines, in lightened co-presence with objects and resource-persons, against a backdrop of rules and norms that are both general and nonetheless virtually present, also against the backdrop of a still possible “ordeal” and of the existence of intense engagements that are more or less remote in time and space. There is another minimum, encountered in Primo Levi’s story, the minimum of the few remaining: that which, through successive presence in instants, makes it possible to keep living when confronted with a dreadful situation, when the tragic event (nearly) fills a person’s whole situation and presence (Levi 1987). There are therefore three types of minima: – the social minimum, that is to say the execution of what is expected in a situation with several people against a backdrop of rules, laws and habits,

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– the minimum of human presence, in which cognitive engagement can be very economical and inner engagement can be unnecessary, – the minimum of remains, those that stay in the sidelines and do not get overwhelmed by more or less total situations (dreadful ones in particular), those very remains that link together the continuity of existence. The social sciences are broadly permeated by an intensified anthropology, that of the actor, subject or worrier. But human beings are not capable of doing this “work”, as it is understood through the ideas of interaction, ordeal or rationality. The specificity of human presence resides in a sum of relevance, distraction, docility and minimality. As I have attempted to show it, when the phenomenographer lets himself be amazed by human beings, he is constantly preoccupied by: a constantly nuanced and modalized presence; the ongoing continuity, shifting and rhythm of situations and the play of differences and repetitions, with interconnections, interwoven displacements, memories, anticipations, ruminations, the implicatory dimension of actions and situations, the presence within one situation of other situations; the ability to put aside, blunt, nuance and modalize, to inject a reservation or restriction, to weave, trace, mix and mitigate, to repose in the familiarity mode, sometimes also in the tranquility mode; also the ability to fluidly absorb novelties or the loss of rules or reference points, to be docile and to reject, to be distracted or to concentrate, according to a variety of modalities and doses. In other words, what does minimality designate? A diffuse tolerance that consists in forgetting; not thinking about something; accepting without thinking; lacking the will to thwart; putting things off or postponing them; accepting not knowing what others think, particularly their degree of sincerity; and accepting contradictions, dissonances, little disparities from initial aims. Minimality has also other characteristics: choosing from among all of a situation’s data without preference, without evaluation or examination; performing an action without fully realizing the initial idea; the fluid rhythm of situations and actions; minimal and economical perception; thinking about things other than the action in progress, detachment gestures, with a more or less relaxed posture. These details of minimality are present in all the moments of human existences. A mine of new observations seems to be opening up for anthropology. From this perspective, it is obviously advisable to observe and retain elements to the end of the investigation, not just signs that are indicative of what is at stake in a situation, but also leftovers of the principal action, endless leftovers to which one must constantly return, even when they are in the dustbin. The phenomenographer must not forget to choose the right means of placing data in perspective: describing existences instead of systems of sociocultural communication, interactional coordination or communication channel utilization. This implies being

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truly “micrological” in one’s observations. And what will the observer also notice? Society! But present in a situation, like an individual.

III. Where is “society”? Observation leads the anthropologist – in the course of an individual’s various action sequences during a day, based on the subject’s words and gestures – to the presence of “collectives”, to the situated existence of collective beings, of society, as we know. The phenomenographic observer refuses, contrary to the practices of most of his ethnographical colleagues, to place himself in the middle of the “situation” and observe people from this position, to selectively sort his notes with a view to understanding logics of interaction or sociocultural singularities. Imagine him instead deciding to “stick” to one chosen human being, shadowing and observing him. Then, this anthropologist observes human beings in the process of perceiving society. He could also be called an ontographer, an observer of “beings”. In a situation, humans are often surrounded by collective beings: the USA, France, University, other collective beings, traffic laws, etc. They are also surrounded by gods, animals and objects that all have specific existence and presence modalities. In this case, I am not just interested in the attribution of various properties, of intentions and agency, forms of perception, enunciation or relation, as has become traditional in social anthropology; I am also interested in the singular ways of being present and existing that are found in these non-humans, or para-humans as I have called them since they are beside human beings1. Were Durkeim’s propositions not all that far from this? What can be said about them from a phenomenographic perspective? Not much if we stick to his definition of the sociological object as a shared reality of actions, representations and beliefs that are independent of individual consciousnesses, to be studied “in its pure state”, that is to say released from its “amalgam” with its individuals (Durkheim 1982: 55). But as soon as we forget this principle, a more generous interpretation can be called to mind through the idea of the presence of a social force that is precisely external to individuals. It is a heuristically far-reaching point that Laurence Kaufmann and Fabrice Clément (2007: 252) consider a “fascinating suggestion”. As Durkheim writes in the final lines of Elementary Forms of Religious Life, “we experience society”. “To conserve his distinctive traits,” he adds, “it is no longer necessary to put them outside experience” (Durkheim 1915: 447). To empirically extend this idea, I think it is important to set aside some explicit or implicit elements in Durkheim’s theory that are particularly loaded with meaning such as symbol, communion, internalization and emotion (which, it must be said, are emphasized in Durkheim’s work), with a 1 From this perspective, I cite the research of Marion Vicart (2014) about dog presence.

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view to analyzing the relationship between these two beings: humans and society. It is truly important to give a heuristic scope to Durkheim’s proposition, but making two changes: first, placing this “force” in the situation, describing and analyzing it as a specific presence that is beside individuals and not – or at least not only – within them (as the internalization process implies); second, not thinking of this presence of “society” as a force, command or constraint that implies obedience, but defining its presence and that of the individual as a familiar copresence that can – but only occasionally – be experienced as a constraint. Thus society therefore is a presence in a situation, with specific modes that are certainly not those of humans or divinities. Curiously, Durkheim’s idea of the situated presence of society has been little exploited empirically. Let’s say that society as something present is also an “individual”. Through interposed supports in the form of people, objects or rules, collective beings are effectively present in the course of a day’s activities alongside human beings, and these collective beings are perceived as a detail, experienced as an object of attention, used as a reference point or value. Thus re-presented, a collective being is linked with other collective beings and is thus endowed with some stability. How to understand the co-presence of human beings and society? What are the characteristics of society alongside the actions of individuals? Let’s take the example of a red light, always-already there before any driver arrives. The red light is not itself a collective being. It is nothing but a sign serving as a reminder of the traffic laws and representing the police. It is worth noting that the social sciences prefer to focus on drivers who pass through the light when it is amber and especially when it is red. But when it is red and the driver stops, this is done with an attitude of letting go, suspending sight, will and consciousness, and also adopting an economy of perception (did he even perceive the red?). Before leaving home, did he say he would be stopping at the red light, that he was going out in order to stop at the red light? Not likely! The red light and the driver constitute a co-presence: that of a metal post that supports alternating lights and that of the driver himself, but above all it is a co-presence of two continuities, that of the post which has been there a long time, serviced by various employees from the police station, city planning office or Ministry of the Interior, and the continuity of the human being. This human continuity has at least two components. On the one hand it is linked to longstanding knowledge, habit, and socialization that has made him capable of recognizing this element of the traffic laws, to subconsciously know its implications; on the other hand it is linked to the succession of moments and actions he performs, usually without any explicit will or intention. In that case, repose is not the leftover. On the contrary, it is will, consciousness, reflection, justification and strategy that are in excess, as a leftover. They only become central when a problem, an “ordeal” arise. One might say that the red light usually does not attract focused attention. It is there, always there, with-

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out soliciting the will or consciousness, which are in fact slightly blurred by other things that have nothing to do with it. It is only sometimes that it injects a constraint, that of stopping when one is in a hurry, or thwarts a strategy, that of driving quickly for various reasons. Through the obviousness of this co-presence, minimality mixes with continuity and virtuality. Let me clarify this. According to Jean-Luc Marion’s analysis (2002), the smooth operation of this co-presence implies setting three things aside: the self that is always ready to be activated, always able to think, to will, to madly accelerate the car, etc.; the origins of this light, which can be traced back to legislators and a set of civil servants and laborers from different administrative departments; and that metal pole, as a raw object. It is as if the light could not be seen by the ordinary driver. Looking, staring, obsessing: this is resisting the flow of moments. And when staring or obsession exist particularly in a state of constraint and suffering, they become fluid more or less quickly in the continuity of moments, to different degrees of course. Usually the other beings are not so much objects of thoughts and consciousness, but are rather there as a prospect, already existing; the individual finds himself beside them in an immediate co-presence. Sometimes of course he can also perceive and feel more or less marked, diffuse or direct differences of presence and weight among the collective beings that surround him. What appears to him, the individual hardly perceives it. He is not subject to a constraint, he is not staring at it, and is instead in the flow of moments, the continuity of actions. The element of laterality that develops in the co-presence between the individual and the unobserved, hardly perceived red light is a part of every act of presence and co-presence in a varied and proportioned way, as I am attempting to show. Co-presence does not primarily imply an expressive confrontation, an exchange, a reciprocity. From this perspective, the notion of “given” is maybe not so inappropriate when the aim is to describe and understand the modalities of donation (the light is always there, held securely in place by tight networks) and reception (the driver who passes without really seeing it). These are “givens” without any exchange, without debt and without reciprocity, or in any case they are long deferred. This co-presence made up of the implicit and the non-thought is a key element of social life in which interest, motivation, exchanges and calculation have been restricted. In my view, the donation is not a sequence in a relational cycle but rather a necessarily and specifically human stratum in every form of presence. This leftover becomes crucial, characterized by presence-absence, peripheral thoughts and gestures, surroundings of things, objects and other people. And the individual is also not capable of keeping up the confrontation with collective beings . . . And the other being – society – is not in front of him, it is more or less beside him, more or less near or far. More than once, I have put forward the idea of co-presence. It is better than the notion of interaction, and I believe it is more appropriate for considering that

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element of the lateralizing leftover, and even for giving it a principal dimension. This appears as something negligible in action theories and not worth theorizing about. Indeed, the notion of interaction is much more anchored and explored in the social sciences. On the one hand, according to the paradigm developed by the Chicago School, it encourages a focus on interactional elements insofar as they are meaningful and relevant in verbal and non-verbal expression, and insofar as they thus constitute the foundation of the necessary mutual acceptance. Interactionism is much more interested in shared and exchanged signs than present beings, as I have often pointed out in this book. On the other hand, interaction underpins a specific anthropology, that of a human being coming face-to-face with others, actively mobilizing mental and gestural resources to maintain the order of the interaction, according to principles of management, strategy and rationality, in short the constituent “labor” – to use Goffman’s word – of the agreement and the interactional order. The notion of co-presence in fact connotes the obviousness and presence of beings – their present continuity – rather than the moment of the rupture. Co-presence also makes it possible to designate the presence of beings, as they are, together in a situation, whether or not they are participating in the interaction’s central exchange, and encourages observation not only of these beings on the basis on their perceptional or cognitive characteristics (if they have them), but also of collective beings, as well as divinities or animals, that is to say all of the “companions” of human beings, who are now within the reach of a comparative phenomenography – again regardless of whether or not they are active participants in the interaction. In my current example, co-presence implies not only a minimality of presence and perception, that of the individual, but also a “beyond” the presence of the other being – that post which became a red light! “When we read a signboard ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’,” Bergson writes, “we begin by perceiving the prohibition; it stands out clearly; it is only behind it, in the shadow, that we have a vision of the constable lying in wait to report us” (Bergson 1935: 104). It is as if, in addition to setting things aside, human beings also retained, as a more or less distant prospect, the possibility of “intensification” of the situation, in the form of an ordeal like an accident or a police check2. It is precisely in the minimality of presence that something extra is attributed to the other presence. When one is not really looking at the red light – something that is essential – and one stops, this is implicitly because one knows that this post is not simply a post, and therefore that it has its leftover, an extra, a beyond that is outside its visibility. Perception is economical and is also unlimited. This is the dual ability of human beings to not think but at the same time to inject something more, an extra. Theologians would say that it is in the availability of blunted presence that the extra meaning appears. Withdrawal enables – goes hand-in-hand with – the object’s 2

According to the very accurate analysis of Linhardt (2009).

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extra, unlike obsessive thinking which limits, fixes and has no leftover. That post is not simply a post, it is a specific being, re-presenting, and giving presence to a collective being, specifically the Ministry of the Interior, or why not France or the USA! And society, the collective being, how is it present? This being is not visible directly, but only through interposed figures. Its presence is as if virtual, as Philip Pettit uses in the example of egocentrism of human actions: “Self-regard will normally have no actual presence in dictating what people do, it will not be present in deliberation and will make no impact on decision. But it will always be virtually in deliberation, for there are alarms which are ready to ring at any point where the agent’s interests get to be possibly compromised and those alarms will call up self-regard and give it a more or less controlling deliberative presence. The agent will run under cultural pilot, provided that pilot does not carry them into terrain that is too dangerous from a self-interested point of view. Let such terrain come into view, and the agent will quickly return to manual, they will quickly begin to count the more personal losses and benefits that are at stake in the decision at hand” (Pettit 1995: 320). In a way, virtuality is always there, through the mediations that represent the collective being and through the engagement modes of the human being who is referring to it as to a reference point, a backdrop, an object of attention or even a detail. In the case of the driver at the red light, the violation and punishment ordeal is not absent. Its presence is as if diffuse and postponed. It is as if the intensity of the ordeal were always there, but implicitly, in a de-intensified, minored form, as I have just said. According to Dominique Lindhardt’s analysis (2009), there is something of a “memory of the ordeal. It is this effect of memory that makes the state-related character in these things obvious and transparent”. As something virtual, the collective being cannot express and explain itself directly. In a situation, it shows itself through codified stylistic devices, such as allegory when a concrete element (a color, an object) represents the collective being, or personification when this being is placed in the role of a person (such as when a child offers a gift to “the” family and not to its particular members), or metonymy with the presence of elements that refer to the collective being through various links (as in the case of the red light in relation to the state), or metaphor when the collective being is ramified and made more complex in connection with other collectives (like France with its Parliament, regions, departments, municipalities), or even synecdoche when the presence of the collective being is indicated through the humans (all of them or a few) who constitute it, as in the case of a peloton of cyclists. Thus, the collective being is a virtual, stylistic, fragmented, diffuse or dispersed individual in a situation. According to Dominique Linhardt, it is “the tension between one’s presence and one’s absence, between one’s strength and one’s obliteration, between one’s ascendancy and one’s fragility” that characterizes the presence of the collective being outside of an ordeal. Gaining an understanding

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of the driver at the red light implies considering: the continuity of his daily pattern of actions; the virtuality of the state, reflected through a variety of interposed figures; the docility of the individual facing the prospect of the ordeal of an accident or fine; the potential intensity of this ordeal, which can become a reality; the minimality of the presence of the driver, who is not thinking about any of this, hardly even perceiving the color of the light. The collective being, which is stylized by the objects, people or signs that are its indications, encourages some loosening when the individual is busy creating a new being. But especially, this repose becomes a necessity so that the individual plays the collective being’s game. Life in common is, on the one hand, the minimality of human presence always tinged with various forms of absence (particularly the absence of thought) and, on the other hand, the virtuality and potentiality of collective beings whose real absence reflects the prospect of a form of presence. A dual absence-presence and a dual negative reserve constitute social life. It is therefore important that the observer should not overinterpret the individual’s presence or de-virtualize the presence of the collective being. Is it of course not easy to observe someone who hardly notices, who “infraperceives” a virtual being . . . That’s the life of human beings! Here again, a range of phenomenographic explorations opens up with a view to describing this diversity of reservations, restrictions, virtualities, absences and minimalities in presences.

IV. A narrative of origin This will be my final point. When examining human specificity, social and cultural anthropology broadly focus on the sociocultural dimension. In the scenarios of origin occasionally presented by anthropology, the originality of human beings is linked to rules, norms and prohibitions, to mechanisms of exchange and transmission. The existence of the first human beings, as evoked by Morgan, Malinowski or Lévi-Strauss, is presented either as a rupture for the sake of survival, made possible by an increase in cerebral powers, or as a continuation transformed by human complexity and a capacity for openness that has replaced inflexible animal behaviors. In any case, from the outset, human beings were well and truly sociocultural human beings, sometimes conquerers of order and creators of traditions, sometimes always-already part of a system of constraints that impose themselves upon people. This has provided the social sciences, sociology or anthropology, with the foundations of their research: life in a sociocultural order, constructed by human beings but at the same time determining them. It is up to social science to understand, analyze and explain the logic of each of its highly diverse expressions, chosen at different scales, from the level of an interaction to that of the broadest collective entities. Today, sociology or social anthropology conferences, university courses and theses testify that the social

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sciences focus practically only on the understanding of contemporary world. Have we not gone too far in this “topicalist” direction? But who are these Sapiens that existential anthropology considers it so important to understand, not just as individuals but also as a species? I think one of the key elements of the human mode of living is the rarity of lively thoughts and of consciousness about what the individual is doing, will do, or will no longer do, about what is happening around him, including atrocities and death. These words of Pascal ring very true: “That something so obvious as the vanity of the world should be so little recognized that people find it odd and surprising to be told that it is foolish to seek greatness; that is most remarkable” (Pascal 1995: 5). What can surprise an anthropologist? Social life; but this exists among most animals! Cultural differences? Why not? The origin of intelligence and reflexive consciousness? No doubt! What most fascinates me is precisely the everyday suspension of lucidity that can occasionally be effected by intelligence and consciousness. Not really thinking, thinking but not too much, suppressing thought, but without effort, without really being aware of it. Lethargy, restriction, detachment, reserve or hesitation, hypoconsciousness, hypolucidity. Hypo: not only through the effect of the automaticity of habits, through the effect of natural continuity, but also through the effect of a new cognitive ability that leads to living as a human being. This is my hypothesis. Modes of being present are what are characteristic of human beings. For 100,000 years, probably more, human beings, Homo sapiens, have been living with the risks of intelligence, consciousness (especially reflexive consciousness), the ability to know what they are doing, and the ability to conceive of passing time and death – the deaths of others as well as their own death, which they know they cannot escape. Perhaps it is this risk and its consequences that Neanderthals succumbed to, but Homo sapiens avoided. What happened? It can be said that animals live in a world in which perception and action are carried out without much gestural and cognitive laterality, without surrounding details. The species of the Homo genus have for their part gradually developed forms of distance to the immediacy of the situation that are more perceptional and behavioral than existential, thanks to their habitat, to the presence of objects, and to the use of material signs, of identity and recognition marks. And here arises the particular and fascinating case of Neanderthals, which can teach us a lot about the specificity of Sapiens. Their lives testify to the presence of sepultures indicating consciousness of time and death. Were Neanderthals unable to defuse their consciousness of death, something that might explain their long evolutionary stagnation? In short, they were excessively and insufficiently intelligent! Could the failure of Neanderthals have been to know they were mortal, to be “too” conscious of their mortality? The Neanderthal Man, who knows he is going to die, thus takes care of corpses. This would be my scenario of origin: many prehistorians – not all of

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them – agree that, contrary to preconceived ideas, Neanderthal sepultures are not accompanied by offerings3. However, a survey of Homo sapiens sepultures contemporaneous with those of Neanderthals does not rule out the possibility of offerings. On this basis, my hypothesis is to associate Homo sapiens with a specific ability that did not develop in the Neanderthals: to imagine a dead person as still alive, not just as a former living being, but as someone living a new life. Offerings are a sign – an uncertain one of course – of belief in this new life after death, or at least of belief in unbelievable statements, those that require the cognitive ability to associate two contradictory qualities, for example death and life. Thus Homo sapiens were or became capable of producing statements that combine contradictory categories (the dead person is alive, or the stone is a spirit), to which they started to give a kind of consent. So let’s say that they believe in it: “And what if he were still alive! And what if it were true!”. The act of believing has just appeared, but also at the same time – and above all – the need not to carry one’s understanding of this statement all the way to its conclusion. To accept its uncertainty. Thus the life of Homo would have changed. It is at that point that everything would have shifted. Human beings accept uncertainty, not fully understanding those contradictory statements, not looking any further. From that moment, they learn semi-consciousness and cognitive loosening. Imagine day-to-day life in a space-time in which reserve and distance are learned and gradually become new cognitive skills for human beings, who also develop them in other areas of activity or thought. The ability to accept indecision, to not take things literally, but also – and no doubt unfortunately – not wanting to be conscious, not facing up to things spread out. Another world starts to develop. The act of believing would therefore have encouraged a new cognitive aptitude: a mental loosening that was able to spread into all of human activities. It corresponds to a hypolucid mode of being, connected with the mental and discursive association of implausible things. Human beings would have just learned to use consciousness minimally: from then on, the individual would have known to what extent he could be conscious, and what he could be conscious of. Without a sufficient support for facing up to the cognitive tension, the Neanderthal Man lacked not so much reassuring divinities but rather hypolucidity. Unlike what we so often read, I cannot say that human beings, the Modern Humans, has effected a triumphant departure from animality. If there has been a departure, it is relative to other species of Homo, and there is nothing triumphant about this departure since the success of humans (or at least their survival up until now) has been achieved through a cognitive loosening. But while religious statements generated this new mode of life, they inspired a kind of solace and raised the need for 3 See the work of Steven Mithen (1996). And also Ian Tattersall (1998); Wynn and Coolidge (2004). See also Piette (2015).

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humans to stabilize, secure and transmit them. This generated the risk of entrenching, therefore of absolutizing, forgetting that it is only a belief in an implausible statement . . . because human beings have just learned to suspend, to delay, therefore to forget, to avoid thinking too much. Without this minimality, would human beings have been able to invent collective beings and everything else? Such is the minor mode of human life, an original way of being present in the world. It all remains to be explored by the anthropology of existences. The human being, as he exists, “thrown” in time and towards death, is at the root of existential anthropology.

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This book is an anthropology book, not a social and cultural anthropology book, but an existential anthropology book. It presents a critique of the theories and methods of the social sciences, which Albert Piette reproaches for side-stepping human beings, their modes of being and more generally the fact of existing. The book also offers an original combination of methods for exploring the details of existence: the particularities of each person in a group, the succession of situations in a day, and the subtlety of moments of presence. It gives rise to new theoretical propositions on what constitutes the specificity of human existence and social life. *** Albert Piette is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Paris-Nanterre and Researcher at the Centre for Ethnology and Comparative Sociology (CNRS). He is the author of books in French about anthropological theory, methodology of details, religious phenomena, and especially existential anthropology. With Michael Jackson he has coedited What Is Existential Anthropology ? (Berghahn Books, 2015).