Page 144 - Contribution To Phenomenology

THE OTHER CULTURE 137

ego that it is mine, in which case to ascribe ego to an other would
involve a contradiction. From the transcendental egological stance which
Husserl adopts, it is indeed necessary to explain how I could at all speak
of the other ego. How am I able to transfer the predicate "ego" from
my own case, where it has its original home, to the other—more
specifically, to the appearing body over there? Whatever may be Husserl's
account in the Fifth Meditation, that is not my present concern. I
assume, he shows, in his own terms, starting from the reduced sphere
of my ownness, how I can step-by-step constitute the sense "other ego,"
and meaningfully (not necessarily truly, for the other body in my
perceptual space may be hallucination, an apparition, a mannequin or a
wax figure) ascribe ego to the other.
Can we pose a similar problem, at the level of philosophical
abstraction, with regard to the other culture, and ask how is the sense
"other culture" constituted for a member of the home culture? Most
social scientists, when they raise methodological questions regarding
knowing other cultures—thereby asking questions pertaining to the insider-
outsider situation or Kenneth Pike's etic-emic distinction^—are really
asking questions regarding the epistemological basis of their sciences. In
general, they are asking, how can the investigator, belonging as he does
to his own home culture, forge an access to the native's world—his
language, beUefs, thoughts and desires, in fine, to his "conceptual
framework." The concern is analogous, on an individual level, to the
skeptical worry, how can I know what is transpiring in his mind? Just as
the last worry presupposes that I already have available to me the sense
"other mind," so does the social scientist's epistemological concern
presuppose that he has aheady available to him the sense "other
culture." Just as in the former case, there is the transcendental question
"How is the sense *alter ego' constituted?," so in the latter case one may
want to press a transcendental question "How is the sense "other
culture" constituted?"

^ For these debates, see Hedland, Pike and Harris, Ernies and Etics. The In-
sider/Outsider Debate (Frontiers of Anthropology vol. 7). Newbury Park: Sage Publica-
tions, 1990.