Phenomenology by Michael Schnegg
Ethos, 2024
To explain cultural diversity, many theories refer to the social construction of reality. In this... more To explain cultural diversity, many theories refer to the social construction of reality. In this telling, we frame the world to make it meaningful. In my analysis of what people in Namibia and Germany know about "SARS-Cov-2" and "climate change," I propose an anti-constructivist alternative. Drawing on the work of the phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels, I argue that experience comes first and exceeds language and the conceptual and symbolic orders we use to describe it. Waldenfels refers to this excess as "the alien" (das Fremde). This alienness calls us and demands a response. Only by responding, do we make the world meaningful. Since the alien is the excess to a particular order it becomes important to explore how orders are applied in situations. To explain this, I draw on recent developments in "4E" cognition that describe the mind-world relation as fourfold intertwined: embedded, embodied, extended, and enacted. Combining Waldenfels' responsive phenomenology and "4E" cognition thus allows it to be shown how knowledge emerges as an enactive response to the demands situations create. I conclude by showing how this opens up new possibilities for addressing the plurality and situatedness of knowledge in anthropology.
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/ Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology , 2023
As a philosophical discipline, phenomenology is interested in how and as what things appear to a ... more As a philosophical discipline, phenomenology is interested in how and as what things appear to a subject from the first-person perspective. Phenomenological analyses can be applied to objects, others, the self, feelings and much more. Yet, how do they appear? Within experience! While this is also accepted in anthropology, I show how we can benefit from some of the theoretical concepts that phenomenology has developed, including intentionality, being-in-the-world, embodiment, empathy, responsivity and atmosphere, to explore specific experiences more thoroughly. To demonstrate this, I introduce the foundations of these concepts: of-ness (Husserl), in-ness (Heidegger), embodied-ness (Merleau-Ponty), with-ness (Stein), responsiveness (Waldenfels) and between-ness phenomenology (Schmitz). Then I discuss how these ideas have been mobilized in anthropology before applying them to a single ethnographic scene about the weather in Namibia. This allows a phenomenological anthropology to be developed positing that as what a thing appears for the subject depends on how it appears. This how encompasses transcendental structures of experience and the social contexts that shape what people live through, including the normative views they face when acting in the public sphere. By tracing entanglements between firstperson perspectives and social, material and normative structures, phenomenological anthropology can make visible what otherwise remains obscured. In concluding, I carve out the unique critical potential that emerges from such an analysis and show the potential it offers for imagining a possible otherwise, two salient components of my version of a future phenomenological anthropology.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2024
This article asks why Namibians complain that rural communities have become |owesa (boring) and w... more This article asks why Namibians complain that rural communities have become |owesa (boring) and why they describe a feeling of pointlessness. After Namibia gained independence in 1990, those who migrated to the towns often progressed economically, while those who remained in the rural hinterlands became the spectators of their success. At the same time, they experienced their efforts as having been 'blocked' (ǁkhaehe) not only by the economy, as the literature suggests, but also by the harsh arid environment, the state, others, and their own bodies. To theorize the shared affectivity these experiences create, I mobilize phenomenological theories that take emotions out of the 'box' of the psyche and consider them as atmospheres that hover in situations where they transcend people, things, and activities, creating rural boredom. |Oweb rides on your back, people say. Turning emotions inside out allows them to be politicized by demonstrating how boredom grows in the gap created by promising a different future while at the same time preventing it. While people strive, and sometimes manage, to get |oweb off their backs, theorizing boredom as an atmosphere makes it clear that it will return unless these conditions change.
Ethnoscripts, 2023
Many anthropological theories address food sharing as an intentional act, asking what motivates p... more Many anthropological theories address food sharing as an intentional act, asking what motivates people to give. They show how one gives for generosity, reciprocity, or becoming virtuous. In these views, the answer to the ethical question of whether to give is to be found inside the giving self. However, for Damara pastoralists and others, sharing is often initiated by the beneficiaries. To address this, I propose using Bernhard Waldenfels's responsive phenomenology that locates and theorises the mainsprings of ethical action beyond the subject. According to Waldenfels, Fremdheit (alienness) is a salient dimension of how the world appears to us. This alienness solicits us; it causes a demand to which we must respond. With sharing, the 'needs' of others are alien. They include the needs of those giving and demanding, and of others present in the situation. The pre-reflective response to these demands is almost always mās |guisa ra hî, one just gives. Only in select cases is a reflective choice made, where (1) multiple demands compete and (2), importantly, the alien largely withdraws from the attempt, sticking out and exceeding the ethical orders of the everyday. I conclude by showing how sharing and its ethics can be theorised as an interplay between the habitual and creative response to the demands that situations create.
Ethnos, 2022
In Namibia, Damara pastoralists share the environment with many beings including elephants, trick... more In Namibia, Damara pastoralists share the environment with many beings including elephants, tricksters, and winds. While the importance of other-than-human subjectivity is well established, its methodological, epistemological, and ontological challenges are less settled. To address them, we combine expertise from anthropology and philosophy to ask how this world becomes what it is, using Edith Steins's notion of empathy (Einfühlung) as a theoretical guide. This allows us to show how Damara people use empathy to understand how different 'others' experience the world. We identify the basis for this in a 'pre-reflective otherawareness', which amounts to the implicit bodily awareness of the other's presence, and its influence on the situation and on oneself. At the same time, empathy differs, and only those other-than-humans with whom people fully empathise add perspectives that build an intersubjective reality that is different from any world in which those other-perspectives would not exist.
HAU
To explain how Namibian pastoralists envision the future of the climate and the environment, I de... more To explain how Namibian pastoralists envision the future of the climate and the environment, I develop a phenomenological framework that uses objects and events (e.g., their livestock, people, drought) as entry points. When pastoralism structured most of people's lives, things approached as rhythmic reiterations of the past. Therefore, some pastoralists say, there was no future in the past. By contrast, in the increasingly important capitalist domain, the subject experiences itself as moving in time towards objects, albeit different objects, such as money and success. With climatic change and increasing involvement in the market economy, pastoralism and the environment become more unclear. This changes the perception of time in the environmental domain. I describe the emerging temporality as an ascending spiral in which rhythms lose importance while a linearity towards a more open future gains saliency. Whereas the new future-making awakens potentialities, it also implies insecurities and stress.
Anthropological Theory, 2021
The Damara pastoralists (ǂnū khoen) in Namibia distinguish a diverse range of rains. Some rains k... more The Damara pastoralists (ǂnū khoen) in Namibia distinguish a diverse range of rains. Some rains kill livestock, others care for insects and still others wash away the footprints of the deceased, allowing the person to exist in the spirit realm. While anthropologists have documented cultural classifications like the Namibian rains for decades, we still lack a convincing theory to explain how they come to exist. To address this, I develop a phenomenological perspective and theorise how experience contributes to what rain becomes. I argue with Husserl that the present in which we experience the rain is not a discrete moment, but a unity across a succession of 'nows'. In the process, perceptions, images, memories and expectations about past and future events blend. In other words, a web of meaningful relationships connects the rain we experience 'now' with multiple past and future entities, including people, plants, spirits and animals. I refer to this as network formation. Combining the analyses of the people's pastoral beingin-the-world and their historical-political context, including post-colonialism, allows an explanation as to why some of those combinations are singled out and become distinct ontological entities. I refer to this as node selection. Combining the two processes network formation and node selectionallows for an explanation as to why precipitation becomes discernible and meaningful as eleven different Namibian rains.
Climate Change by Michael Schnegg
American Ethnologist, 2021
American Anthropologist, 2019
This article brings the two questions, how and what we know, into a productive dialog to explain ... more This article brings the two questions, how and what we know, into a productive dialog to explain the difference between indigenous and scientific environmental knowledge. In the case I explore, scientists and Damara pastoralists (ǂn ¯ ukhoen) both relate the arrival of the rains in arid Namibia to the interplay between two winds. However, when it comes to explaining those observations, their accounts could hardly be more different. While Indigenous people understand the arrival of the rains as a play between loving and caring winds, scientists recognize them as a consequence of a shift of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Building on Heidegger's phenomenology, I explore the relationship between the knower and the known. My main theoretical intervention is to show that Damara people and scientists have distinct ways of encountering the world: from someplace and from noplace. In those encounters, the weather is either enmeshed in forms of use in everyday skilled activity for rural pastoralists, or enframed by technology for scientists. By encountering the weather from someplace and from noplace, the world turns into a different place for each. The engagement with these weather worlds shows how ways of knowing the environment can be multiple, but they are not mutually exclusive. [Indigenous knowledge, weather, phenomenology, ontology, Heidegger]
Ethos, 2021
Our ways of knowing the weather are transforming. Climate change modifies weather patterns, and t... more Our ways of knowing the weather are transforming. Climate change modifies weather patterns, and the globalization of scientific knowledge promotes new ways of making the weather intelligible. Following both transformations, I explore how Damara pastoralists (ǂNūkhoen) in Namibia entertain various Indigenous, religious, political, and scientific explanations for the most distressing weather-related phenomenon they experience-the lack of rain. Integrating qualitative and quantitative data, my ethnography reveals how people combine knowledge from multiple, even contradictory, registers to explain one situation, and use a different combination of sources to explain another. To understand this, I develop a phenomenological framework that shows how being-in-the-world creates a phenomenon situationally. If phenomena differ depending on how we enact the world, it is unsurprising that these phenomena would then entail different explanations. With this, I theorize why people make sense of climate change in multiple ways, and why they move between them. [climate change, knowledge, phenomenology, Namibia]
Human Ecology, 2021
International surveys suggest people increasingly agree the climate is changing and humans are th... more International surveys suggest people increasingly agree the climate is changing and humans are the cause. One reading of this is that people have adopted the scientific point of view. Based on a sample of 28 ethnographic cases we argue that this conclusion might be premature. Communities merge scientific explanations with local knowledge in hybrid ways. This is possible because both discourses blame humans as the cause of the changes they observe. However, the specific factors or agents blamed differ in each case. Whereas scientists identify carbon dioxide producers in particular world regions, indigenous communities often blame themselves, since, in many lay ontologies, the weather is typically perceived as a local phenomenon, which rewards and punishes people for their actions. Thus, while survey results show approval of the scientific view, this agreement is often understood differently and leads to diverging ways of allocating meaning about humans and the weather.
Environmental governance by Michael Schnegg
Geoforum, 2018
A B S T R A C T After independence, and in accordance with global environmental policies, the gov... more A B S T R A C T After independence, and in accordance with global environmental policies, the government of Namibia partly transferred the responsibility for managing wildlife and water to local communities. In this article, we use the concept of environmental justice as a theoretical guide to explore the combined effects that these new policies have had for pastoralists in arid, rural Namibia. We find, firstly, that partly due to conservation efforts, the elephant population has increased significantly. While a healthy elephant population supports exclusive, international tourism, the elephants are causing ever-increasing destruction at communal water points thus leading to increasing local financial costs. Only a small fraction of the revenues from community-based tourism, however, remains in the communities, and relatively few people profit from these revenues directly. Secondly, as new community-level sharing institutions for water emerge, pastoralists who are economically marginalized are subsidizing the financial costs of water for both their wealthy neighbours and the tourism industry. Looking at the combined effects of CBNRM policies for water and wildlife management, these policies are likely to lead to better resource management but greater economic inequality. To interpret these findings, we consider how CBNRM transforms landscapes and wildlife into global commodities. This process pulls communities into new common property regimes as well as towards privatization at the same time and helps to explain the social-ecological changes we observe.
Journal of Arid Environments , 2016
In Namibia, rural water governance has changed profoundly during the last two decades. Today, in ... more In Namibia, rural water governance has changed profoundly during the last two decades. Today, in many rural communities, user associations administer water and set the rules for management practices. Their rules typically define boundaries and specify contributions that vary for members and outsiders. When the rains failed in 2012e14, the mobility of people and herds increased and put the newly formed institutional regimes to a critical test. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in seven communities, we examine whether and how management regimes were either altered or applied. The results indicate that cultural models of kinship and reciprocity took priority over formal agreements during the drought. Non-adherence to formalized practices and to rules of excluding outsiders also expresses a certain resistance to the interpretation of water as an economic good.
World Development, 2015
— Sanctions are often considered an important component of successful resource management. To gov... more — Sanctions are often considered an important component of successful resource management. To govern water usage, pastoral communities in Namibia have specific sanctions at their disposal and yet these are almost never applied. Interestingly, this does not lead to a breakdown in water supply. To understand collective action in small communities it is important to take into account that people share multiple resources. Combining ethnography and network analysis we reveal that people cannot separate the sharing of water from the sharing of ancestries, food, and work. This discourages the application of formal sanctions while opening other means of maintaining institutional regimes.
Sustainability Science, 2018
Natural resource management has changed profoundly in recent decades emphasizing new legislation ... more Natural resource management has changed profoundly in recent decades emphasizing new legislation that transfers responsibilities to local user groups. In this article, I follow changing water policies to Namibia and show that the enactment of policy in local institutions deviates from community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) blueprints and design. To understand why, I examine the theoretical premises of CBNRM. CBNRM is informed by rational choice theory which isolates economic transactions (e.g., sharing water) and assumes that people design institutions for a specific good. However, in the communities I study ethnographically, people depend on sharing multiple resources. To better understand how the degree of sharing and institutional overlaps matter, I explore empirically the concept of institutional multiplexity. Institutional multiplexity describes the number of transactions between two households in a social network. The results reveal that almost all social networks are institutionally multiplex. Institutional multiplexity implies that people cannot separate the sharing of water from sharing in other domains. Institutional multiplexity hinders the implementation of design principles such as fixing boundaries, sharing costs proportional to use, and formal sanctioning. However, it also opens other means for governing nature through social control.
Human Ecology, 2016
Water governance in rural Namibia has profoundly changed since the early 1990s. After independenc... more Water governance in rural Namibia has profoundly changed since the early 1990s. After independence and in accordance with global environmental policies , it became a central theme of Namibia's environmental legislation to transfer the responsibility for managing natural resources to local user associations. In this article, I explore the emergence of new social forms at the intersection of existing cultural models and new ra-tionalities for governance. Doing so combines an analysis of state legislation with the micro-politics of water governance in 60 pastoral communities. The ethno-graphic analysis reveals that different actors, including state bureaucrats as well as rich and poorer herd owners, have different understandings of how to share water. While the poorer often agree with the state policy that water is an economic good and should be paid for accordingly, only in about half of the communities do corresponding institutional regimes emerge. Using critical institutionalism as a theoretical guide, I offer a contribution to understanding how more than 20 years after Rio local institutions of resource governance emerge at the intersection of different, and often heterogeneous and intertwined, social fields.
Ambio, 2016
In the course of decentralization, pastoral communities in Namibia have had to find new ways to s... more In the course of decentralization, pastoral communities in Namibia have had to find new ways to share their most salient resource, water, and the costs involved in providing it. Using data from sixty communities, we examine (1) whether and to what extent different sharing rules emerge, (2) how variations can be explained, (3) how rules are perceived and influence success, and (4) what economic consequences they have. Our results reveal that either all members pay the same (numerical equality) or payment is according to usage (proportional equality). We find that although proportional equality provides more success, the rule can only pertain where the state maintains an active role. Simulations show that where it does not prevail, wealth inequality is likely to grow. These findings have political implications and suggest that, in the context of the widespread decentralization policies, the state should not withdraw if it aims to ensure the success of common-pool resource management and to fight poverty.
In recent decades, water management in Namibia has profoundly changed. Beginning in the 1990s the... more In recent decades, water management in Namibia has profoundly changed. Beginning in the 1990s the Namibian state has incrementally turned ownership of and the responsibility for its rural water supply to local user groups. While the state withdrew from managing resources directly, it continued to cir-cumscribe the ways in which local communities should govern them. In so doing, a " new commons " was created. Inclusive participation became the leitmotif of the new management scheme and in particular the participation of women was a major political and societal goal. In this article, we use the notion of travelling models as a theoretical guide to explore how the idea of participation emerged in international development discourses and how it was then translated through national legislation into the local context. The results of the analysis show that more than 20 years after the formulation of international conventions the average participation of women in local water committees remains low. However, older women do manage the funds associated with water and thus occupy one of the most important functions. Our explanation takes the wider social and cultural field into account and shows that gender and generational roles provide elder women with autonomy and authority which prepare their ways into these new official roles. We conclude by considering whether and how the travelling model of participation has been changing local social structures in general and the role of elder women in particular. Menestrey worked on the project and collected part of the ethnographic data. They all provided valuable ideas, partly incorporated in this paper. Julia Pauli, Lena Borlinghaus, and Edward Lowe have offered critical and constructive comments to an earlier draft of this manuscript. The DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) has funded the research since 2010. We are indebted to all of them.
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Phenomenology by Michael Schnegg
Climate Change by Michael Schnegg
Environmental governance by Michael Schnegg
social practices in rural Namibia. In so doing, I develop a model
that situates food on the continuum between private and com-
munal property regimes. I argue that the place it takes is largely
shaped by the social costs involved in excluding someone from
having a share. Those costs are situational, and as they rise,
basic food, once privately owned, becomes quasi communal
and is shared. The model is explored with qualitative and quan-
titative data about food transactions, which also facilitate an
investigation of when, where, and why demands are articu-
lated and typically met.