Anthropology as an existential enquiry

Why should pre-fixing ‘existential’ to ‘anthropology’ make any difference? Here we trace a pathway from Kant’s programme for a cosmopolitan anthropology centred on ‘what humans, as free-acting beings, make of themselves’, through the Malinowskian epoché of fieldwork, arriving at a version of anthropology, as described by Gell, where ‘the spaces of anthropology are those which are traversed by agents in the course of their biographies’ and the anthropological task is to ‘articulate … the agent’s biographical “life project”’. In this process, anthropology has needed to liberate itself from an objectivism by which its ‘human subjects of study’ are regarded as ‘the bearers of an impersonal “culture”, or wax to be imprinted with “cultural patterns”’ (Turner). One approach is to re-envision ‘structure’, not only as that which gives ‘objectivity’ to a cultural field, but rather as an emergent property of any human individual’s autobiographical ‘handwriting’—their way of writing themselves into the world. Thus, the ‘existential’ prefix re-orients anthropological conversation towards contingent yet actually observable gestures of personal worldmaking, and away from the hypothetical power of culture or discourse to determine this same individual’s life-path.