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REFLECTION ON THE CULTURAL DISCIPLINES 35

empower individuals ("subjective spirit" in Hegelian terms) can be
maintained in the face of so-called Post-Modern thinking.
Then again, ethnic or cultural groups exist within and overlapping
political structures such as nation states. Cultural groups can be
approached in terms of how individuals relate to their own groups, how
they are rooted in or alienated from them, or in terms of the relations,
positive and negative, between cultural groups. Within societies there are
ideals such as ethnic purity and multi-culturalism and policies (and not
only in education) that support and undermine cultural groups and there
are also processes of integration and disintegration. And, finally, there is
the question of how current approaches—particular, specific, and
generic—to the cultural disciplines as well as to cultural practices and
phenomena can be related to phenomenological philosophy. It seems
difficult to doubt that a phenomenological philosophy of the cultural
disciplines, were it to exist, would be relevant in the contemporary
situation.
The essays in this volume are expUcitly or implicitly obUque in their
approach, i.e., informed by work in cultural disciplines of one or another
sort and sensitive to how the cultural world can present itself in
disciplinary perspectives. Thus David Carr's discussion of Schutz implies
Schutz's reflections on the interpretive sociology of Max Weber, Mano
Daniel discusses Biography explicitly as a cultural discipline in which the
stories of lives lived within cultures are told, Jim Hart uses "religious
studies" as a point of view in considering part of Husserl's thought, Don
Ihde's chapter reUes on the phenomenological analyses of how engineers
and others use equipment in cultural worlds that are more explicit in his
various books, Stanford Lymnan and Lester Embree explore how the
academic multidiscipline called Ethnic Studies might be approached
phenomenologically, the field of Woman's Studies as well as that of
Environmental Studies can be seen as presupposed in Don Marietta's
chapter on ecofeminism, Ullrich Melle's philosophical view of the
environment is also informed by ecological research, Algis Mickunas is
quite expUcit in discussing the work of a number of social scientists, Tom
Nenon explores Connectionism as a new line of scientific inquiry that
bears on cultural phenomena, Maxine Sheets-Johnson relies on paleoanth-
ropology in her attempt to establish the invariants across vast ranges of
time of the human body and behavior, Osborne Wiggins, like Nenon,
reflects on the research frontier of a type of special science concerned