introduction 17
Having leaned on the term “phenomenology” at several points already,
I should explain that this term has multiple and ambiguous meanings, and I
should clarify how I am using it. Th ere is no succinct or consensus defi nition of
“phenomenology.” Th e term is associated with the philosophy of Husserl, Hegel,
Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, among other Western thinkers. Also, diverse
movements within Buddhist, Japanese, Indian and other cultures and philoso-
phies have been considered phenomenological. Phenomenology is concerned
with the nature of experience and knowledge and the relation between these. It
involves an attempt to understand the condition of being in and experiencing
the world while also addressing our awareness and interpretations of this
condi tion. Th e concept of phenomenology has been imported into anthropol-
ogy to refer to feeling and perceiving the world and to indicate a focus on
sensate experience and the existential condition of being in a body.^7 Some
use phenomenology to describe an eff ort to represent experience-in-itself in
ethnography, prioritizing direct, subjective (though not necessarily embodied)
experience over theory and interpretation.^8 I use the term here to refer to
how one experiences—at the levels of consciousness, mind, body and other
media—being in and living in the world, yet I also assert that there is not a
single, universal phenomenology but rather multiple phenomenologies, mul-
tiple culturally and historically shaped ways of assembling and prioritizing the
modes of experience through which people interact with the world.^9
My assertion about the diversity of phenomenological orientations resem-
bles Farquhar’s 2002 claim that there is no single a priori state of embodiment,
which she demonstrates by revealing how embodiment (embodied, aesthetic
engagement with the world) changed from Maoist to post-socialist China in
people’s relations to food, sexuality, medicine and other realms of consumption
and practice. Farquhar focuses on the body while her ethnographic analysis
hints at a wider realm of aspects of the person that might help us theorize
experience and how it changes historically. For example, she discusses those
who delight in the emergence of the individual and interiorized self while also
examining the development of an indulgence in the aesthetics of food and
the sexualization of popular culture and everyday life in post-Maoist China.
Similarly, I suggest that we need to consider the whole person as it is constructed
at diff erent times and in diff erent places. Also, just as Farquhar suggests there
are universal aspects of bodily desire, I assume that phenomenological orienta-
tions also contain within them truths of human experience that to some degree
transcend time and place, but I propose that these are diff erently parsed and
reconfi gured in diff erent localities. For example, all humans inhabit bodies—
that is, embodiment is a universal existential condition in some sense—but
many in India, including both lay thinkers and seasoned philosophers, feel