Page 252 - Contribution To Phenomenology

ETHNIC STUDIES AS MULTI-DISCIPLINE 245

Thanks. Another type of "phenomenology in" pertains to disciplinary
self- consciousness. I have previously reflected on particular disciplines,
say psychology,^^ but now I am fascinated by the cultural multi-discipline
of Ethnic Studies. I think a multi-discipline is different from an in-
ter-discipline by virtue of the continuous explicit recognition of differences
between the component disciplines with respect to how they approach
race and ethnicity. Thus economics, education, sociology, linguistics,
nursing, political science, hterary theory, psychology, anthropology, etc. can
be said to focus on different, but perhaps overlapping and hopefully
complementary, systems and processes of individuals and groups as ethnic.
Then again, psychology might differ from sociology and political science
in emphasizing the individual rather than the group.
Hence, the reflective-descriptive approach sketched that I have can be
taken to the central problem of Ethnic Studies you identified above as
like the problems of multi-cultural or multi-ethnic life. The cultural
scientist participating in a multi-discipline would have a self-understanding
not so much in terms of just how her own uni-discipline differed from
others but also how there can be interaction and, it would be hoped,
complementarity with other disciplines represented in a multi-discipline.
This would be more emphatic when hegemony by one or a few
disciplines was not permitted to subordinate and peripheralize the others.
How members of disciplines are aware of, beUeve in, value, and will
themselves and others individually and collectively and, now, uni-disciplin-
arily and multi-disciplinarily in their awareness, believing, valuing, and
willing lives in the habitual way characteristic of professionals trained in
disciplines can be reflectively observed and described in an arguably
phenomenological way in cultural science.
It sounds to me like phenomenology of that kind of science. Well,
actually, it is phenomenology "of it as done "in" it! What is basically
signified by the in/of distinction is the difference between the level of

^^ Cf. Lester Embree, "Aron Gurwitsch als phanomelologischer Wis-
senschaftstheoretiker," translated by Alexandre M6traux, Zeitschrift fiir aUgemeine
Wissenschaftstheorie 5 (1974), 1-8; "Gestalt Law in Phenomenological Perspective,"
Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 10 (1978), 112-27; "The History and
Phenomenology of Science is Possible," Phenomenology and the Understanding of
Human Destiny, edited by Stephen Skousgaard (Washington, D.C.: Center for
Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1981), 215-
228; "The Natural-Scientific Constitutive Phenomenological Psychology of Humans
in the Earliest Sartre," Research in Phenomenology 11 (1981), 41-60; "Teleology in
Human-Scientific and Natural-Scientific Psychology and Psychotechnics," in Current
Issues in Teleology, edited by Nicholas Rescher (University of Pittsburgh Center for
Philosophy of Science and University Press of America, 1986), 120-128.