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| Title: | An essay toward a phenomenology of presence |
| Author: | Armstrong, Robert Plant |
| Year: | 1981 |
| Periodical: | The Conch: A Biafran Journal of Literary and Cultural Analysis |
| Volume: | 13 |
| Issue: | 1-2 |
| Pages: | 103-112 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Ghana |
| Subjects: | culture Ashanti gold |
| Abstract: | Culture is a plexus of 'had' experiences. Such experiences are given inelectably had only in the cultural and autobiographical experience thereof. The author calls these patterns which reduce unpredictability in culturally specific ways 'cultural myths' or 'mythoforms', for they are the primary principles of our being whatever it is, both culturally and (therefore) autobiographically, that we might be said to be. The disclosure and description of these lived and living patterns which structure the culture - in time, space, process, and quality - constitute the kind of antropology toward which the phenomenological anthropologist might wish to aim. Man lives in certain ways which happen, at base, to be 'structurally' very much like the way in which other peoples live. But he does so in his culture-centered, individual fashion. The objective in the study of the cultural phenomenon is not so much to identify universal solely, but to do so in terms of its cultural particularity. After establishing an universal context for gold, the author gives brief considerations to the domain of power defined for gold among the Ashanti of Ghana, in order to ascertain something of gold's complex and subtle differentiations in a culture less secularized than our own. Bibliogr. |