Human Studies

Don Juan said that my body was disappearing and only my head was going to remain, and in such a condition the only way to stay awake and move around was by becoming a crow ... He ordered me to straighten up my head and put it on my chin. He said that in the chin were the crow's legs. He commanded me to feel the legs and observe that they were coming out slowly. He then said ... that the tail would come out of my neck. He ordered me to extend the tail like a fan, and to feel how it swept the floor ... I had no difficulty whatsoever eliciting the corresponding sensations to each one of his commands. I had the perception of growing bird's legs, which were weak and wobbly at first. I felt the tail coming out of the back of my neck and wings out of my cheekbones. ... When don Juan directed me to grow a beak, I had an annoying sensation of lack of air. The something bulged out and created a block in front of me. But it was not until don Juan directed me to see laterally that my eyes actually were capable of having a full view to the side... (Castaneda, 1968, pp. 172–174)

This is an existential-phenomenological reading of Max Weber’s “Class, Status, Party” that seeks a fuller understanding of meaning accomplishment in a stratified World. I appropriate stratification as a single meaning structure ontically defined by domination, intersubjectivity, and life-chances and ontologically determined by the power-to-be (Seinkönnen), There-being-with-others (Mitdasein), and potentiality (Möglichkeit). I then discuss the significance of these structures in finite transcendence (There-being, Dasein) and describe ways they factually unfold in World achievement. I conclude with logotherapeutic reflections concerning meaning accomplishment in a stratified World and a summary of key questions facing existential-phenomenology in light of the likelihood that There-being must embrace, indeed, live, the inherent equality of Being (Gleichheit des Seins) among Daseins to accomplish its authenticity.

This paper examines the intersection of technical law and common sense reasoning in small claims arbitration, a distinctive and increasingly prevalent kind of legal work. Following (Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology’s program: Working out Durkheim’s aphorism, 2002), the study explores the “reform of technical reason” and what a “just outcome” means by focusing on the arbitration of actual small claims cases and how technical-legal and non-technical/informal resources are brought into alignment to produce dispute resolution. The arbitrator elicits discussions that establish consensual and commonplace formulations of “the case,” formulations that foreshadow its disposition as technical matters of law. The research demonstrates how formal structures of equity, evenhandedness, and decisions without bias have their production in vivo, and how a just and fair course becomes a “just outcome.”

This paper employs ethnographic research methods to study a Buddhist meditation practice that takes the walking body as its object. The mundane act of walking is transformed into a meditative object for the purpose of refining states of embodied consciousness. This meditation practice offers a glimpse of the relationship of body to mind, a fundamental concern within the philosophy of mind. The analytic focus of this paper is the practical nature of meditation work. Aspects of Buddhist Philosophy are explored and compared to analytic themes within Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology.