This article has two objectives. In the first part, I present a critical overview of the extensive anthropological literature that may be deemed “phenomenological.” Following this critique, which is built up around a classification into four different varieties of phenomenological anthropology, I discuss the relationship between phenomenological anthropology and the ontological turn (OT). Contrary to received wisdom within the anthropological discipline, I suggest that OT has several things in common with the phenomenological project. For the same reason, I argue, it (...) is not accurate to posit OT and phenomenology as opposing or antagonistic projects, as they are often depicted among critics and advocates of OT alike. On the contrary, I go as far as suggesting, OT may be understood as one of the most concerted attempts anthropology has produced to realize a distinctly anthropological version of Husserl’s method of phenomenological bracketing, namely what could be called the ontological epoché. (shrink)

Building on a phenomenological analysis of the Tunisian Revolution, this article puts forward the concept of critical experience as a type of experience in which the very experiential structures prove subversive of otherwise established orders (e.g. political, ethical, technological, epistemological etc.). In order to trace the anarchic, but generative impulses of such critical experience, the article develops a variation of the phenomenological reduction called an anarcheological reduction. In the anarcheological reduction, registers of critical experience are accessed in which the aforementioned (...) anarchic impulses elicit a constitutive quasi-transcendental structuring of fields of possible experience. In order to describe the always singular, contingent trajectories along which such quasi-transcendental structuring takes place, the term generative vector is introduced. The article concludes by specifying how the quasi-transcendental registers accessed in the anarcheological reduction are different from other quasi-transcendental registers and accordingly suggesting this type of reduction as a valuable methodological supplement in critical phenomenology. (shrink)