tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post6620062583765471994..comments2023-11-03T08:02:25.369-04:00Comments on AmericanScience: A Team Blog: JAS-BIO 2012David Roth Singermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12841041983824755867noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1030220433025894048.post-89919372024450293522012-04-26T13:07:06.049-04:002012-04-26T13:07:06.049-04:00This is really interesting, Joanna. One of the thi...This is really interesting, Joanna. One of the things that fascinates me is that structuralism and post-structuralism both tried to overcome phenomenology (represented by the likes of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in France). They did this by attacking the notions of consciousness and the "subject" and embracing antihumanism. Thus, in philosophy, history, and all of the "studies" fields of the 1980s and 90s individuals get swamped out by discourses, language, constructions of identity, etc. <br /><br />It seems to me that we have something very interesting happening in the present. First, some people are really interested in a materialist account that treats humans and non-humans as having causality. We've seen this a lot on American Science recently. Latourianism and other forms of recent materialism could be seen as a continuation of the antihumanist line. But second, we hear people referring to phenomenology, which is in some sense--for a historians--a return to the reconstruction of the historical subject's experience and consciousness (I would think). Can these two things--materialism and phenomenology--be brought together? Or will the two never meet (except through some form of neuroscience that would be unlikely to help historians)? <br /><br />I wonder how anthropologists, who are so extremely self reflective about the relationship between change, self-presentation, and the role of the observer, would deal with this seeming divide.Leehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14164091550633430973noreply@blogger.com