Robert Desjarlais
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Robert Desjarlais is Professor of Anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and currently the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He has conducted ethnographic research in several distinct settings, ranging from a homeless shelter in Boston, Massachusetts, to the city of Paris, France. He has also conducted extensive ethnographic research in the Nepal Himalayas with Hyolmo people, an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people.
Research Interests
Sociocultural anthropology, phenomenological anthropology; colonial and postcolonial histories; life and death; the anthropology of images; film and photography
A critical phenomenology of “experience”
This research project examines the concept of “experience” from the perspective of critical phenomenology and phenomenological anthropology. The concept of experience is one of the most foundational concepts in the humanities and the social sciences. And yet the intricate complexities of the concept are often underplayed or passed over by those who write about the experience of persons in diverse sociocultural and historical settings. In reflecting on the concept of experience and the way it is used and invoked in anthropological and philosophical thought, Robert Desjarlais strives to develop a more comprehensive and critically engaged analysis of the many dimensions and complex histories and genealogies at hand in uses of the concept and discursive invocations of experience. Through this research and writing effort, he seeks to examine the complex genealogies of the word “experience,” the ways in which the concept of experience or something like it takes form in distinct cultural and historical contexts, and the many intricate dimensions of the concept of experience. Drawing in particular from Walter Benjamin’s innovative writings on experience, in which experience is theorized as involving distinct formations of life, perception, and consciousness in particular cultural-historical settings, Desjarlais explores the ways in which forms of experience tie into perceptual, discursive, and technological features of human existence in ever-shifting ways.
Key publications
Robert Desjarlais. 1994. “Struggling Along: The Possibilities for Experience Among the Homeless Mentally Ill.” American Anthropologist 96:886-901.
Robert Desjarlais and C. Jason Throop. 2011. “Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology. 40:87-102.
Robert Desjarlais and Khalil Habrih. 2022. Traces of Violence: Writings on the Disaster in Paris, France. Berkeley: University of California Press.
 New session of the "Paris IAS Ideas" online talk series, with the participation of Robert Desjarlais (Sarah Lawrence College, USA / Paris IAS Fellow) |
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