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ETHNIC STUDIES AS MULTI-DISCIPLINE 235

11. Phenomenology in and of Ethnic Studies

Lester, how do you see Phenomenology as relating to Ethnic Studies? The
way in which the special sciences, which include the cultural sciences, are
related to in Phenomenology can be extended to such a multi-discipline.
We can speak of Phenomenology "in and of a discipline or, now, multi-
discipline, including how phenomenological philosophy can benefit fi*om
reflecting on Ethnic Studies. There is some work in this vein prior to the
rise of Ethnic Studies program. Firstly, there are the immediately relevant
ideas in Hannah Arendt (1906-1975),2i Aron Gurwitsch's (1901-1973),
Human Encounters in the Social World,^ Alfred Schutz's (1899-1959),
"Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World,"^ and Jean-

subordinated (but, of course, I know of a certainty that Phenomenology is the oldest
and best, and that the others should be understood as merely branching from its
stem!). Such a dynamic of orientational tendencies is what one might predict in the
histories of other disciplines, something which is of no small interest for an
historically oriented philosophy of the natural or formal sciences as well as of the
cultural disciplines. Does this work for sociology?
Lyman: Sociology for some years has been in a "crisis," i.e., it suffers from the
unmistakable decline of the dominent paradigms—structural functionalism and
quantitative positivism—and from the enormous retrenchment in govenment funding.
A number of other subordinated approaches—^Marxism, feminism, ethnomethodology,
symbolic interactionism, deconstruction, postmoderism, etc.—are vying for recognition
and desciplinary domination. None seems likely to win out over the others. Sociology
is likely to remain pluralistic.
^ Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1958) and The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modem Age, edited
by Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove, 1978).
^ Aron Gurwitsch, Human Encounters in the Social World, (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1979), originally written in Berlin during 1928-31..
^ Alfred Schutz, "Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World,"
in Lyman Bryson, Clarence H. Faust, Louis Finkelstein, and R. M. Maclver, eds.,
Aspects of Human Equality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957) and reprinted in
Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. II, ed. Arvid Brodersen, (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1964). Probably the first phenomenological move towards the issues of
Ethnic Studies as a multi-discipline is a related manuscript, "A Search of the Middle
Ground" (1955), Chapter 18 in Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol IV, edited by
Helmut Wagner and Fred Kertsen, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
forthcoming).