Page 147 - Contribution To Phenomenology

140 /. N, MOHANTY

These remarks are meant only to make the point that the transcen-
dental constitution problem as it was formulated by Husserl with regard
to the "other ego" cannot simply be stated with regard to the "other
culture." But one may nevertheless have a problem somewhat like it.
Without being able to reduce to the sphere of one's ownness, i.e., to
one's own culture in its purity, one may still ask, how does one come to
apprehend a foreign culture as such? Let us try to go back again to the
beginnings.

Ill

In course of our travels in foreign lands we come across a group of
natives engaged in ritualistic behavior. Since the transcendental constitu-
tive problem with regard to other egos has been, ex hypothesis, solved,
we perceive them as other egos, i.e., as having mental experiences like
ours, intentional acts for which their world is presented, as in our case,
with their meanings. The question that we ask ourselves is what do they
mean by their actions and speeches. If, in our own case, behaving in a
certain manner is a sign for having a certain intentional experience, does
the same observed behavior in their case too, carry the same sig-
nificance? Or, as Turnbull observed in the case of the Ilk in Uganda
just the reverse may be the case. What do we take them to be
experiencing, when we observe the man watch a child *Svith eager
anticipation as it crawled towards the fire, then burst into gay and happy
laughter as it plunged a skinny hand into the coals . . . .[Then] a mother
would glow with pleasure to hear such joy occasioned by her offspring,
and pull it tenderly out of fire."^ Eraser's The Golden Bough abounds in
such examples.
With this, we are back in the epistemological problem—indeed the
first of the three questions I listed at the beginning. I did not plan to
answer that question, which is of so vital interest to the social scientists.
I would therefore return to the constitutive question, despite the failure
to take a transcendental stance with regard to the other culture. How
is the idea of ''foreign culture" constituted?
One meaning of "constitution" can be explained thus: to exhibit the
constitution of a concept 0 is to show what are the sorts of intentional
experiences in which objects instantiating 0 are originarily presented.

• Colin Turnbull, The Mountain People. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.