Phenomenology, Place,
Environment, and Architecture:
A Review of the Literature
David Seamon
*A much-abbreviated version of this review appears as “A Way of Seeing People and Place: Phenomenology in Environment-Behavior Research,” published in S. Wapner, J. Demick, T. Yamamoto, and H Minami (Eds.), Theoretical Perspectives in Environment-Behavior Research (pp. 157-78). New York: Plenum, 2000.
This review
examines the phenomenological approach as it might be used to explore environmental
and architectural issues. After discussing the nature of phenomenology in broad
terms, the review presents two major assumptions of the phenomenological
approach--(1) that people and environment compose an indivisible whole; (2)
that phenomenological method can be described in terms of a "radical
empiricism."
The review then
considers three specific phenomenological methods: (1) first-person
phenomenological research; (2) existential-phenomenological research; and (3)
hermeneutical-phenomenological research. Next, the article discusses
trustworthiness and reliability as they can be understood phenomenologically.
Finally, the review considers the value of phenomenology for environmental
design.
Keywords: phenomenology, place, architecture, landscape, environmental experience, lifeworld, home, dwelling, being-in-world, hermeneutics, environmental ethics
OUTLINE
1. Introduction
2. History and Nature of Phenomenology
3. Some Core Assumptions of the Phenomenological Approach
4. Specific Phenomenological Methods
5. Reliability and Phenomenological Methods
6. Phenomenology and Environmental Design
7. Making Better Worlds
1. INTRODUCTION
In simplest terms,
phenomenology is the interpretive study of human experience. The aim is to
examine and clarify human situations, events, meanings, and experiences
"as they spontaneously occur in the course of daily life" (von
Eckartsberg, 1998, p. 3). The goal is "a rigorous description of human
life as it is lived and reflected upon in all of its first-person concreteness,
urgency, and ambiguity" (Pollio et al., 1997, p. 5).
This preliminary
definition, however, is oversimplified and does not capture the full manner or
range of phenomenological inquiry. Herbert Spiegelberg, the eminent phenomenological
philosopher and historian of the phenomenological movement, declared that
there are as many styles of phenomenology as there are phenomenologists
(Spiegelberg 1982, p. 2)‑-a situation that makes it difficult to
articulate a thorough and accurate picture of the tradition.
In this article, I
can only claim to present my understanding of phenomenology and its
significance for environment-behavior research. As a phenomenological
geographer in a department of architecture, my main teaching and research
emphases relate to the nature of environmental behavior and experience,
especially in terms of the built environment. I am particularly interested in
why places are important for people and how architecture and environmental
design can be a vehicle for place making.
I hope to demonstrate
in this article that the phenomenological approach offers an innovative way for
looking at the person-environment relationship and for identifying and
understanding its complex, multi-dimensioned structure.
In exploring the
value of phenomenology for environment-behavior research, I have come to
believe strongly that phenomenology provides a useful conceptual language for
bridging the environmental designer's more intuitive approach to understanding
with the academic researcher's more intellectual approach. In this sense,
phenomenology may be one useful way for the environment-behavior researcher to
reconcile the difficult tensions between feeling and thinking and between
firsthand lived experience and secondhand conceptual accounts of that experience.
In this article, I
consider the following themes:
Throughout my
discussion, I refer to specific phenomenological studies, the majority of which
involve environment-behavior topics.1 Most of these studies are
explicitly phenomenological, though occasionally I incorporate studies that
are implicitly phenomenological in that either the authors choose not to
involve the tradition directly (e.g., Brill, 1993; de Witt, 1992; Pocius, 1993;
Tuan, 1993) or are unaware that their approach, methods, and results parallel a
phenomenological perspective (e.g., Krapfel, 1990, Walkey, 1993, Whone, 1990).
I justify the inclusion of these studies because they present aspects of human life and experience in new ways by identifying generalizable qualities and patterns that arise from everyday human life and experience‑-for example, qualities of the built environment that contribute to a sense of place, order, and beauty (Alexander, 1987; 1993; Alexander et al., 1977; Brill, 1993; Rattner, 1993).
2. THE HISTORY AND
NATURE OF PHENOMENOLOGY
The history of
phenomenology is complex. Over time, as often happens with philosophical
traditions, there developed different phenomenological schools, styles, and
emphases (Spiegelberg, 1982). As the founding father of phenomenology,
philosopher Edmund Husserl believed that, beneath the changing flux of human
experience and awareness, there are certain invariant structures of
consciousness, which he claimed the phenomenological method could
identify. Because Husserl viewed consciousness and its essential
structures as a pure "region" separate from the flux of specific
experiences and thoughts, his style of phenomenology came to be known as
"transcendental."
Eventually,
however, other phenomenological thinkers such as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger
and the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty reacted against Husserl's
transcendental structures of consciousness (Heidegger, 1962; Merleau-Ponty,
1962). These "existential" phenomenologists, as they came to be
called, argued that such transcendental structures are questionable because
Husserl based their reality on speculative, cerebral reflection rather than on
actual human experience taking place within the world of everyday life
(Schmidt, 1985).
In his 1927 Being and Time, Heidegger (1962) argued
that consciousness was not separate from the world and human
existence. He called for an existential correction to Husserl that would
interpret essential structures as basic categories of human experience rather
than as pure, cerebral consciousness. In his 1945 Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau‑Ponty (1962)
broadened Heidegger's correction to include the active role of the body in
human experience. Merleau‑Ponty sought to reinterpret the division
between body and mind common to most conventional Western philosophy and
psychology. This "existential turn" of Heidegger and Merleau‑Ponty
moved Husserl's realm of pure intellectual consciousness "into the realm
of the contingencies of history and embodiment" (Polkinghorne, 1983, p.
205).
As a philosophical
tradition, therefore, phenomenology has changed considerably since its founding
by Husserl, moving from cerebral structures to lived experience. In this
article, I emphasize the viewpoint of existential phenomenology, since the
central focus of environment-behavior research is the everyday environmental
experiences and situations of real people in real places, environments,
landscapes, regions, spaces, buildings, and so forth.
I therefore define
phenomenology as the exploration and description of phenomena, where phenomena refers to things or
experiences as human beings experience them. Any object, event, situation or
experience that a person can see, hear, touch, smell, taste, feel, intuit,
know, understand, or live through is a legitimate topic for phenomenological
investigation. There can be a phenomenology of light, of color, of
architecture, of landscape, of place, of home, of travel, of seeing, of
learning, of blindness, of jealousy, of change, of relationship, of friendship,
of power, of economy, of sociability, and so forth. All of these things are
phenomena because human beings can experience, encounter, or live through them
in some way.
The ultimate aim of
phenomenological research, however, is not idiosyncratic descriptions of the phenomenon,
though such descriptions are often an important starting point for existential
phenomenology. Rather, the aim is to use these descriptions as a groundstone
from which to discover underlying commonalities that mark the essential core of
the phenomenon.
In other words, the
phenomenologist pays attention to
specific instances of the phenomenon with the hope that these instances, in
time, will point toward more general qualities and characteristics that
accurately describe the essential nature of the phenomenon as it has presence
and meaning in the concrete lives and experiences of human beings.
3. SOME CORE
ASSUMPTIONS OF A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH
In the last several
years, there has appeared a growing number of works that discuss the relation of
phenomenology to the scholarly and professional worlds in general terms (Burch,
1989, 1990, 1991; Embree, 1997; Stewart and Mukunis, 1990) and to specific
disciplines‑-e.g, anthropology (Jackson, 1996); art (Berleant, 1991;
Davis, 1989; Eisner, 1993; Jones, 1989); education (Fetterman, 1988; van Manen,
1990); environmental design (Berleant, 1992; Condon, 1991; Corner, 1990; Dovey,
1993; Mugerauer, 1994; Howett, 1993; Vesely, 1988); geography (Cloke et al.,
1991, chap. 3; Relph, 1989b, 1990; Seamon, 1997); gerontology (Reinharz and
Rowles, 1988); psychology (Pollio et al., 1997; Valle, 1998); philosophy
(Casey, 1993, 1996); social science (Rosenau, 1992); and natural science
(Bortoft, 1997; Heelan, 1983; Jones, 1989; Riegner, 1993; Seamon and Zajonc,
1998).
In much of this
work, commentators have placed phenomenology within the wider conceptual and
methodological rubric of qualitative
inquiry (Cloke et al., 1991; Fetterman, 1990; Lincoln and Guba, 1985; Low,
1987). For example, Patton (1990, pp. 66-91) associates phenomenology with
such other qualitatively-oriented theories and orientations as ethnography,
heuristic inquiry, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, and ecological
psychology.
Patton argues that,
in broadest terms, all these perspectives present variations on "grounded
theory" (e.g., Glaser and Strauss,1967)‑-in other words,
perspectives assuming "methods that take the researcher into and close to
the real world so that the results and findings are `grounded' in the empirical
world" (Patton, 1990, p. 67). This perspective approaches theory
inductively, in contrast to "theory generated by logical deduction from a
priori assumptions" (ibid., p. 66).
Patton's
identification of phenomenology with qualitative orientations is certainly
acceptable, though it is also important to realize that these various
qualitative perspectives involve as many differences as similarities, thus, for
example, ethnographic inquiry typically studies a particular person or group in a particular
place in time; in contrast, a phenomenological study might begin with a similar
real-world situation but would then use that specific instance as a foundation
for identifying deeper, more generalizable patterns, structures, and meanings.
Similarly, both
symbolic interactionism and phenomenology examine the kinds of symbols and
understandings that give meaning to a particular group or society's way of
living and experiencing. The perspective of the symbolic interactionalist,
however, most typically emphasizes the more explicit, cognitively-derived
layers of meaning whereas a phenomenological perspective defines meaning in a
broader way that includes bodily, visceral, intuitive, emotional, and
transpersonal dimensions.
Phenomenology,
therefore, can be identified as one style of qualitative inquiry but involving
a particular conceptual and methodological foundation. Here, I highlight two
broad assumptions that, at least for me, mark the essential core of a
phenomenological approach. These assumptions can be described as follows:
1. Person and world
as intimately part and parcel;
2. A radical
empiricism.
I emphasize these
two broad assumptions because the first relates to the particular subject
matter of phenomenology, while the second relates to the means by which that
subject matter is to be understood. I hope discussion of these two assumptions
gives the reader a better sense of what makes phenomenology distinctive and how
this distinctiveness can offer a valuable tool for environment-behavior
research.
3.1. Person and
World Intimately Part and Parcel
A central focus of
phenomenology is the way people exist in relation to their world. In Being and Time, Heidegger (1962) argued
that, in conventional philosophy and psychology, the relationship between
person and world has been reduced to either an idealist or realist perspective.
In an idealist
view, the world is a function of a person who acts on the world through
consciousness and, therefore, actively knows and shapes his or her world. In
contrast, a realist view sees the person as a function of the world in that the
world acts on the person and he or she reacts. Heidegger claimed that both
perspectives are out of touch with the nature of human life because they assume
a separation and directional relationship between person and world that does
not exist in the world of actual lived experience.
Instead, Heidegger
argued that people do not exist apart from the world but, rather, are
intimately caught up in and immersed. There is, in other words, an
"undissolvable unity" between people and world (Stewart and Mickunas,
1990, p. 9). This situation‑-always given, never escapable‑-is what
Heidegger called Dasein, or being-in-the-world. It is impossible to
ask whether person makes world or world makes person because both exist always
together and can only be correctly interpreted in terms of the holistic
relationship, being-in-world (Pocock, 1989; Relph, 1989a; Seamon, 1990a).
In this sense,
phenomenology supplants the idealist and realist divisions between person and world
with a conception in which the two are indivisible--a
person-world whole that is one rather than two. A major phenomenological
challenge is to describe this person-world intimacy in a way that legitimately
escapes any subject-object dichotomy.
One broad theme
that phenomenologists have developed to overcome this dichotomy is intentionality—the argument that human
experience and consciousness necessarily involve some aspect of the world as
their object, which, reciprocally, provides the context for the meaning of
experience and consciousness.
As Pollio (1997, p.
7) explains, intentionality "is meant to emphasize that human experience
is continuously directed toward a world that it never possesses in its entirety
but toward which it is always directed." Intentionality, therefore,
"is a basic structure of human existence that captures the fact that human
beings are fundamentally related to the contexts in which they live or, more
philosophically, that all being is to be understood as `being-in-the-world'"
(ibid.).2
In examining
peoples' intentional relationships with their worlds, environment-behavior
researchers using phenomenology have typically drawn on three central notions
that I review here‑--lifeworld,
place and home. These notions are significant for a phenomenological approach
to environment-behavior research because each refers to a phenomenon that, in
its very constitution, holds people and world always together and also says
much about the physical, spatial, and environmental aspects of human life and
events.
3.1.1. Lifeworld
The lifeworld
refers to the tacit context, tenor and pace of daily life to which normally
people give no reflective attention. The lifeworld includes both the routine
and the unusual, the mundane and the surprising.
Whether an
experience is ordinary or extraordinary, however, the lifeworld in which the
experience happens is normally out of sight. Typically, human beings do not
make their experiences in the lifeworld an object of conscious awareness.
Rather, these experiences just happen,
and people do not consider how they happen, whether they could happen
differently, or of what larger experiential structures they might be a part.
The natural attitude is the term by which
the phenomenologist identifies the corresponding inner situation whereby the
person takes the everyday world for granted and assumes it to be only what it
is. In this mode of attention and awareness, people accept the lifeworld
unquestioningly and rarely consider that it might be otherwise. The natural
attitude and lifeworld reflect, respectively, the inner and outer dimensions of
the essential phenomenological fact emphasized above: that people are immersed in a world that normally unfolds automatically.
One major research
focus relating to the lifeworld is its perceptual taken-for-grantedness
(Abrams, 1996; Pocock 1993), thus, for example, Heelan (1983) argued that
Western people tacitly perceive the world in terms of a Euclidean-Cartesian
perspective that organizes space in terms of rules of mathematical
perspectives. By examining the artistic presentations of space portrayed by
post-impressionist artists Cezanne and van Gogh, Heelan also considered ways by
which we as Westerners might become familiar with non-Euclidean modes of
perceiving whereby concepts like near/far, large/small, inside/outside are
brought into question and shift in their experiential sense (also see Jones,
1989).
Partly influenced
by the seminal works on the acoustic dimensions of the lifeworld by Schafer
(1977) and Berendt (1985), there have also been phenomenological studies of the
multimodal ways in which the senses contribute to human awareness and
understanding (Jarvilouma, 1994; Pocock, 1993; Porteous, 1990; Tuan, 1993; von
Maltzuhn, 1994). One of the most unusual studies in this regard is
Schonhammer's efforts to understand the experience of regular users of Walkman
headsets, both in terms of the impression that these users have on people
nearby as well as the way the sense of the surrounding world is changed for the
users themselves (Schonhammer, 1988, 1989).
Other
phenomenological researchers have considered how particular circumstances
relating to the environment or to the person lead to particular lifeworld
experiences, thus Behnke (1990) and Rehorick (1986) examined the experience of
earthquakes phenomenologically, while Hill (1985) explores the lifeworld of the
blind person and Toombs (1992a, 1995a, 1995b) drew upon her own experience of
chronic progressive multiple sclerosis to provide a phenomenological
explication of the human experience of disability.
One insightful
study relating to material aspects of the lifeworld is Palaasma's architectural
examination of how the design aesthetic of Modernist-style buildings largely
emphasized intellect and vision and how a more comprehensive architecture would
accommodate an environmental experience of all the senses as well as the
feelings (Pallasmaa, 1996). Another study linking lifeworld with environment is
Nogué i Font's efforts at a phenomenology of landscape (Nogué i Font, 1985,
1993). He attempted to describe the essential landscape character of Garroxta, a Catalonian region in the
Pyrenees foothills north of Barcelona. In developing a phenomenology of this
region, Nogué i Font conducted in-depth interviews with five groups of people
familiar with Garroxta in various ways‑-farmers, landscape painters,
tourists, hikers, and recently-arrived residents who were formerly urbanites.
In this study,
Nogué is Font addressed a central phenomenological question: Can there be a phenomenology
of landscape in its own right, or does there exist only a phenomenology of that
landscape as particular individuals and groups experience and know it? He
concluded that both phenomenologies exist, and one does not exclude the other.
In describing the
meanings of Garroxta for the farmers and painters, for example, Nogué i Font
(1993) found that, in some ways, the landscape has significantly contrasting
meanings for the two groups. In spite of these differences, however, both
farmers and painters spoke of certain physical elements and experienced
qualities that mark the uniqueness of Garroxta as a "thing in
itself." For example, both groups saw the region as a wild, tangled
landscape of gorges, precipices, and forests that invoke a sense of respect and
endurance.
3.1.2. Place
One significant
dimension of the lifeworld is the human experience of place, which, in spite of
criticism from non-phenomenologists (e.g., Rapoport, 1994), continues to be a major
focus of phenomenological work in environment-behavior research (Barnes, 1992;
Boschetti, 1993; Bolton, 1992; Chaffin, 1989; de Witt, 1991; Hester, 1993;
Hufford, 1988; Million, 1992; Oldenburg, 1989; Pocius, 1991; Porteous, 1989;
Relph, 1992, 1993; Seamon, 1992, 1993; Sherry, 1990, 1998; Smith, 1989;
Tammeron, 1995; Weimer, 1991).
In philosophy,
Casey (1994, 1996) has written two book-length accounts that argue for place as
a central ontological structure founding human experience: "place, by
virtue of its unencompassability by anything other than itself, is at once the
limit and the condition of all that exists...[P]lace serves as the condition of all existing things...To be
is to be in place" (1994, pp. 15-16).
Drawing on
Merleau-Ponty (1962), Casey emphasizes that place is a central ontological
structure of being-in-the world partly because of our existence as embodied beings. We are "bound by
body to be in place" (1994, p. 104), thus, for example, the very physical
form of the human body immediately regularizes our world in terms of
here-there, near-far, up-down, above-below, and right-left. Similarly, the
pre-cognitive intelligence of the body expressed through action--what
Merleau-Ponty (1962) called "body subject"‑-embodies the person
in a prereflective stratum of taken-for-granted bodily gestures, movements, and
routines (Ediger, 1994; Hill, 1985; Seamon, 1979; Toombs, 1992a, 1995a, 1995b).
The broad
philosophical discussions of Relph (1976, 1990, 1993, 1994, 1996) continue to
be a significant conceptual guide for empirical phenomenologies of place
(Boschetti, 1991, 1993, 1996; Chaffin, 1989; Masucci, 1992; Million, 1993,
1996; Paterson, 1996; Seamon, 1993, 1996).
Perhaps the most
comprehensive example is provided by Million (1993), who examined
phenomenologically the experience of five rural Canadian families forced to
leave their ranches because of the construction of a reservoir dam in southern
Alberta. Drawing on Relph's notions of insideness and outsideness (Relph,
1976), Million sought to identify the central lived-qualities of what she
called involuntary displacement‑-the
families' experience of forced relocation and resettlement. Using in-depth
interviews with the families as her descriptive base, she demonstrated how
place is prior to involuntary displacement with the result that this experience
can be understood metaphorically as a forced journey marked by stages.
Becoming uneasy (1), struggling
to stay (2), and having to accept
(3) emerge in Million's study as the first three stages of involuntary
displacement whereby the families realize that they must leave their home
place. The process then moves into securing
a settlement (4) and searching for
the new (5)‑-two stages that mark a "living in between"‑-i.e.,
a middle phase of a forced journey and a time when the families feel farthest
away from place. Finally, with starting
over (6), unsettling reminders
(7), and wanting to settle (8), the
families move into a phase belonging to the rebuilding phase.
Million conducted
her study at a time when the families were involved in the third year of
rebuilding, thus the end of a forced journey at that point remained to be seen.
Her last chapter therefore explored the hopeful possibility of rebuilding
place. Million's study is significant because it examined the foundations of
place experience for one group of people and delineates the lived stages in the
process of losing place and attempting to resettle.3
3.1.3. Home
Another important
aspect of the lifeworld, home and at-homeness are another way in which the
situation of people immersed in world is often expressed existentially. Since
the early work of Bachelard (1963) and Bollnow (1961), the theme of home has
received major attention from phenomenologists (Barbey, 1989; Boschetti, 1990,
1993, 1995; Cooper Marcus, 1995; Day, 1995; Dovey, 1985; Graumann, 1989; Koop,
1993; LeStrange, 1998; McHigh et. al., 1996; Norris, 1990; Pallasmaa, 1995;
Rouner, 1996; Seamon, 1993; Shaw, 1990; Sinclaire, 1994; Vittoria, 1992, Wu,
1991).
Shaw (1990), for
example, conducted a firsthand description and phenomenological explication of
a return to a home place and family that he had not seen for some twenty years.
In another phenomenological study, Winning (1991) explored the relation between
language and home by drawing on experiences from teaching English as a second
language to Canadian immigrants.
Using students'
written descriptions as an interpretive base, Winning developed five
"axioms" in regard to language and home‑-e.g., "at home
people always speak to each other in a particular way"; "an accent
comes from somewhere else"; "when away from home we hear the sound of
words." Winning then asked what educational value these axioms might have
in teaching immigrants as a second language: Given that there is a homelike
quality to language, "what can be attended to in the...classroom to foster
a more homelike feeling in the second language?" (p. 180)
There is also a
growing phenomenological literature on what home can mean in today's postmodern
times of continual change, spatial fragmentation, and instantaneous
communications (Casey, 1993; Chawla, 1994, 1995; Mugerauer, 1994; Romanyshyn,
1989; Seamon, 1993; Silverstein, 1994). Day (1995), for example, suggested
that, in the last two centuries, the idea of home has become the core of
Western traditions and a mainstay of popular culture. In our ever-increasingly
technological and mobile society, however, home takes on new, ambiguous
meanings, and Day argued that its uniqueness experientially is in danger of
being lost.
To identify the
particular nature of at-homeness, Day asked a group of individuals to
"describe a time in which they felt at home" (p. 14). He identified
five themes that appear to present "a general structure of the experience
of at-homeness" (ibid.): (1) home often invokes a timeless quality; (2)
home involves a positive attunement to the present moment; (3) home relates to
a lived interplay between safety and familiarity, on one hand, and strangeness
and the uncanny, on the other; (4) home offers an attunement to one's self in
relation to special others; and (5) home relates to healing and personal
well-being.
As with lifeworld
and place, home as experience presupposes and sustains a taken-for-granted
involvement between person and world. This bond is largely unself-conscious,
and the phenomenological aim it to make that tacitness explicit and thereby
understand it.
3.2. A Radical
Empiricism
If one key
phenomenological assumption is the intimate connectedness between person and world,
a second assumption relates to what I call "radical empiricism"‑-the
particular manner in which this person-world connectedness is to be studied.
In using this
descriptive phrase, I attempt to encapsulize the heart of phenomenological
method by indicating a way of study whereby the researcher seeks to be open to
the phenomenon and to allow it to show itself in its fullness and complexity through her own direct involvement and
understanding. In that this style of study arises through firsthand, grounded
contact with the phenomenon as it is experienced by the researcher, the
approach can be called empirical,
though the term is used much differently than by positivist scientists who
refer to data that are materially identifiable and mathematically recordable.
If, in other words,
phenomenological method can be called empirical, it must be identified as radically so, since understanding arises
directly from the researcher's personal sensibility and awareness rather than
from the usual secondhand constructions of positivist science‑-e.g., a priori theory and concepts,
hypotheses, predetermined methodological procedures, statistical measures of
correlation, and the like. In this section, I first delineate in broad terms
the particular attitude and approach that phenomenology, as a radical
empiricism, uses to examine the phenomenon as thoroughly and as deeply as
possible. Then, I present some specific phenomenological research methods.
3.2.1. The
Phenomenological Reduction, Intuiting, and Disclosure
Through a change in
perspective--the phenomenological
reduction as it is sometimes called--the phenomenologist works to
circumvent the taken-for-grantedness of the natural attitude and bring to the
lifeworld a directed, sympathetic attention (Spiegelberg, 1982, pp. 118-123).
The heart of the
phenomenological reduction is what Spiegelberg (1982, pp. 682-687) called phenomenological intuiting‑-an
effort through which the phenomenologist works for an openness in regard to the
phenomenon under study. He or she attempts to meet the phenomenon in as free
and as unprejudiced way as possible so that it can present itself and be
accurately described and understood. The hopeful result is moments of deeper
clarity in which the phenomenologist sees the phenomenon in a fresh and fuller
way.
Phenomenological
intuiting requires discipline, patience, effort and care. It requires
considerable practice and training, and students can find their way to
intuiting only by themselves, often in hit-and-miss fashion. Intuiting is:
one of the most demanding operations, which requires utter concentration on the object intuited without being absorbed in it to the point of no longer looking critically. Nevertheless, there is little that the beginning phenomenologist can be given by way of precise instructions beyond such metaphoric phrases as "opening his eyes," "keeping them open," "not getting blinded," looking and listening (Spiegelberg, 1982, p. 682).
Through intuiting,
the phenomenologist hopes to experience a moment of insight in which she sees
the phenomenon in a clearer light. I call this moment of greater clarity the phenomenological disclosure, though it
might also be described by such phrases as "the aha! experience,"
"revelatory seeing," or "pristine encounter." Through
phenomenological disclosure, the student hopes to see the thing in its own
terms and to feel confident that his or her seeing is reasonably correct.
In phenomenological
intuiting, therefore, the researcher's personal efforts, experiences, and
insights are the central means for examining the phenomenon under study and
arriving at moments of disclosure whereby the phenomenon reveals something
about itself in a new or fuller way.
Generally,
phenomenological intuiting involves a series of smaller and larger disclosures that
slowly coalesce into a fuller sighting of the phenomenon. In this sense,
intuiting is rarely a single moment of revelation in which understanding is had
in one full swoop. Instead, intuiting is gradual and unpredictable. Through
the researcher's wish, effort, and practice, the phenomenon is seen in smaller
and larger ways. Patterns, relationships, and subtleties gradually arise of
which the student was not aware before. In her depiction of phenomenological
intuiting as a flow and spiral, Tesch (1987, pp. 231-232) described the
unpredictability and serendipity of the process well:
Obviously, the [phenomenological] researcher must begin somewhere and intends to end somewhere. Thus there is a movement, a progression, and eventually, an arrival. It would be wrong, however, to picture this movement as a straight, sequential process. It is even a bit misleading to think of it as a process. To conjure up an image of what this movement is like, it helps to see it more in terms of a flow, or of a cycling and spiraling motion that have no clearly distinguishable steps or phases. Typically, the researcher would be hard pressed to say where this flow begins. She knows only that her first data collection session already contained the seeds of what is usually termed the "analysis." The first ideas of how to make sense of the data are born then, and other ideas may come to her at any time during any research activity, even up to the eventual writing of her results (pp. 231-232).
3.2.2. Key
Characteristics of Phenomenological Method
There is more to
the phenomenological enterprise than phenomenological reduction and
phenomenological intuiting, but these two processes mark the core of
phenomenological method.4 Having discussed this core, I can now make
the following claims about phenomenological method as a radical empiricism:
1. The study must
involve the researcher's direct contact with the phenomenon. If the
phenomenologist studies a person or group's experience, then she must encounter
that experience as directly as possible. Methodological possibilities include
the researcher's participating in the experience, her conducting in-depth
interviews with the person or group having the experience, or her carefully
watching and describing the situation supporting or related to the experience.
If the phenomenon
being studied is some artifactual text--for example, photographs, a novel, or
music‑-the researcher must find ways to immerse herself in the text so that
she becomes as familiar as possible with it. Thus, she might carefully study
the text and thoroughly record her experience and understanding. She might ask
other parties to respond to the text and provide their insights and awareness.
Or she might study other commentator's understandings of the text--for example,
reading reviews of the novel or studying all critical commentaries on the
author or artist in question.
In short, the
researcher must facilitate for herself an intimacy with the phenomenon through
prolonged, firsthand exposure.
2. The
phenomenologist must assume that she does not know the phenomenon but wishes
to. Ideally, the phenomenologist approaches the phenomenon as a beginner‑-in
fact, phenomenology is often defined as a "science of beginnings"
(Stewart and Mukunas, 1990, p. 5). Whereas in positivist research, the student
typically begins her inquiry knowing
what she does not know, the phenomenologist, does not know what she doesn't know. The phenomenon is an uncharted
territory that the student attempts to explore.
The phenomenologist
must therefore always adapt her methods to the nature and circumstances of the
phenomenon. A set of procedures that work for one phenomenological problem may
be unsuitable elsewhere. In this sense, the central instrument of deciphering
the phenomenon is the phenomenological
researcher herself. She must be directed yet flexible in the face of the
phenomenon.
In short, the
phenomenologist has no clear sense of what she will find or how discoveries
will proceed. The skill, perceptiveness, and dedication of the researcher is
the engine for phenomenological research and presupposes any specific
methodological procedures.
3. Since the
researcher as human instrument is the heart of phenomenological method, the specific
research methods she uses should readily portray human experience in
experiential terms. The best phenomenological methods, therefore, are those
that allow human experience to arise in a rich, unstructured, multidimensional
way.
If the interview format
seems the best way to gather an account of the phenomenon, then the researcher
must be open to respondents and adapt her questions, tone, and interest to both
respondents' commentaries and to her own shifting understanding as she learns
more about the phenomenon. If the researcher uses a novel, photograph or some
other artifactual text to examine the phenomenon, then she must be willing to
return to its parts again and again, especially if an exploration of one new
part offers insights on other parts already considered.
In short,
phenomenological method incorporates a certain uncertainty and spontaneity that
must be accepted and transformed into possibility and pattern. The
phenomenological approach to a particular phenomenon must be developed creatively
and allow for a fluidity of methods and research process.
4. SPECIFIC
PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHODS
Having considered,
broadly, some central components of phenomenological method, I next wish to review
attempts to identify specific methodological forms of phenomenological
research.
For the most part,
it has been psychologists‑-especially
psychologists associated with what has come to be called the "Duquesne
School of Phenomenological Psychology"‑-who have sought to
establish reliable procedural methods for conducting empirical phenomenological
research (Giorgi et al., 1983; Valle, 1998; also see Moustakas, 1994).5
Drawing on the
designations of Duquesne phenomenological psychologist von Eckartsberg (1998a,
1998b), I discuss two methodological approaches‑-what von Eckartsberg
calls the existential and the hermeneutic. I also add a third approach
that I call first-person. I describe
this approach first, since it draws on the realm of experience closest to the
researcher‑-her own lived situation.
4.1. First-Person
Phenomenological Research
In first-person
phenomenological inquiry, the researcher uses her own firsthand experience of
the phenomenon as a basis for examining its specific characteristics and
qualities (Chaffin, 1989; Lane, 1988; Seamon, 1992; Shaw, 1992; Toombs, 1992a,
1992b, 1995a, 1995b, Wu, 1991). One example is the work of Violich (1985,
1998), who examined the contrasting qualities of place for several Dalmatian
towns with varying spatial layouts. Using such techniques as sketching,
mapping, and journal entries, he immersed himself in each place for several
days and sought to "`read' each as a whole" (1985, p. 113).
One of the most
sensitive and exhaustive uses of first-person phenomenological research is the
work of Toombs (1992a, 1992b, 1995a, 1995b), who lives with multiple sclerosis,
an incurable illness that affects her ability to see, to hear, to sit, and to
stand. In her work, which most broadly can be described as a phenomenology of
illness (especially 1995a), she demonstrates how phenomenological notions like
the lived body provide "important insights into the profound disruptions
of space and time that are an integral element of changed physical capacities
such as loss of mobility" (Toombs, 1995b, p. 9).
Toombs' method
involved a continual dialectic between phenomenological notions as conceptually
understood versus their concreteness as known directly in her own lived experience.
For instance, to provide an understanding of how the disabled person's loss of
mobility leads to a changed interaction with the surrounding world, Toombs
recounted in detail a typical experience‑-her journey by airplane to a
professional conference. At one point in her narrative she described airport
check-in:
Once in the terminus I go to the airline check-in counter. In my battery-operated scooter I am approximately three and a half feet tall and the counter is on a level with my head. All my transactions with the person behind the counter take place at the level of my ear. The person behind the counter must stretch over it to take my tickets, and I must crane y neck and shout to be heard (ibid., p. 14).
From such lived
examples, Toombs drew phenomenological generalizations‑-for example, she
described how her loss of upright posture relates to Merleau-Ponty's broader
notions of bodily intentionality and the transformation of corporeal style
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 76). Thus the loss of uprightness is not confined to
problems of locomotion but also involves deeper experienced dimensions like the
diminishment of one's own autonomy and the tendency of able persons to treat
the disabled as dependent or even subnormal.6
Another way in
which the first-person approach can be used is phenomenology is as a starting
place from which the phenomenologist can bring to awareness "her
preconceived notions and biases regarding the experience being investigated so
that the researcher is less likely to impose these biases when interpreting
[the phenomenon]" (Shertock, 1998, p. 162; also see Colaizzi, 1973).
In this sense, if
the phenomenologist has access in her own experience to the phenomenon she
plans to study, first-person research can offer clarity and insight grounded in
one's own lifeworld.7 This understanding is derived from a world of
one, however, and the researcher must find ways to involve the worlds of
others. This need leads to the method of existential-phenomenological research.
4. 2. Existential-Phenomenological
Research
The basis for
generalization in existential-phenomenological research is the specific
experiences of specific individuals and groups involved in actual situations
and places (von Eckartsberg, 199a, p. 4). In the discussion of lifeworld and
place research above, Million's phenomenology of involuntary displacement
(Million, 1998) and Nogué i Font's phenomenology of landscape (Nogué i Font,
1993) are good examples in that the basis for generalization is the real-world
experiences of the ranchers forced to relocate or the farmers and landscape
painters of Garroxta.
Phenomenological
psychologists, particularly those associated with the Duquesne School, have
devoted considerable effort to establishing a clear set of procedures and
techniques for this style of phenomenology (see Valle, 1998). For van
Eckartsberg (1998b, p. 21), the heart of this approach is "the analysis of
protocol data provided by research [respondents] in response to a question
posed by the researcher that pinpoints and guides their recall and
reflection."
Specifically, he
speaks of four steps in the process: (1) identifying the phenomenon in which
the phenomenologist is interested; (2) gathering descriptive accounts from
respondents regarding their experience of the phenomenon; (3) carefully
studying the respondents' accounts with the aim of identifying any underlying
commonalities and patterns; and (4) presentation of findings, both to the study
respondents (in the form of a "debriefing" about the study in ordinary
language) and to fellow researchers (in the form of scholarly presentation).
Other
phenomenologists have discussed the steps in existential-phenomenological work
in ways that more or less echo von Eckartsburg's four stages (e.g., Giorgi,
1985; Churchill et al., 1998; Wertz, 1984). Whatever the particular phrasing,
the common assumption is that the individual descriptive accounts, when
carefully studied and considered collectively, "reveal their own thematic
meaning-organization if we, as researchers, remain open to their guidance and
speaking, their disclosure, when we attend to them" (von Eckartsberg,
1998b, p. 29). In short, we return to the openness and spontaneity of the
phenomenological disclosure discussed above.
The
existential-phenomenological approach makes one important assumption in its
claim for generating generalization. The approach assumes a certain equivalence
of meaning for the respondents whose experience the researcher probes. In other
words, the claim is that "people in
a shared cultural and linguistic community name and identify their experience
in a consistence and shared manner" (von Eckartsberg, 1998a, p. 15).
Procedurally, this
claim means that respondents (1) must have had the experience under
investigation and (2) be able to express themselves clearly and coherently in
spoken, written, or graphic fashion, depending on the particular tools used for
eliciting experiential accounts. Ideally, the respondents will also feel a
spontaneous interest in the research topic, since personal concern can motivate
the respondent to provide the most thorough and accurate lived descriptions
(Shertock, 1998, p. 162).
These requirements
mean that inquiry is not carried out, as in positivist science, on a random
sample of subjects representative of the population to which findings will be
generalizable. Rather, some respondents will be more appropriate than others
because of their particular situation in relation to the phenomenon studied or
because they seem more perceptive, thus better able to articulate their
experience.
Usually, in
phenomenological research, "subjects" are instead called
"respondents" or "co-researchers," since any generalizable
understanding is a function of the sensibilities of both respondent and
researcher. As Shertock (ibid.) explains: "The emergent meaning is
co-constituted by the description of the experiences [from the respondents] and
the interpretive process of the one seeking the prereflective structure of the
experience."
In practice, there
is exact step-by-step procedure for conducting existential-phenomenological
research beyond the general stages identified above. As explained earlier, the
individual style of the researcher and the specific nature of the phenomenon
are much more important for establishing the specific research procedure and
tools of description.
In her study of
involuntary displacement, for example, Million (1993) spent much time locating
participants who wished to share their experience and who appeared to be able to
offer that sharing in a thoughtful, articulate way. She involved these
participants in several in-depth interviews, the formats of which shaped and
reshaped themselves as she learned more about each family's experience and the
broader events of the dam construction. In addition, she lived with some of the
ranch families and asked them to accompany her on "field trips" to
the flooded areas that used to be their ranches. In short, Million's specific
methods and procedures were auxiliary to the nature and needs of her own
individual research style, her research participants, and her phenomenon of
involuntary displacement.
4. 3.
Hermeneutic-phenomenological research
Most broadly,
hermeneutics is the theory and practice of interpretation (Mugerauer, 1994, p. 4),
particularly the interpretation of texts,
which may be any material object or tangible expression imbued in some way with
human meaning‑-for example, a public document, a personal journal, a
poem, a song, a painting, a dance, a sculpture, a garden, and so forth.
The key point
hermeneutically is that the creator of the text is not typically available to
comment on its making or significance, thus the hermeneutic researcher must
find ways to discover meanings through the text itself. As von Eckartsberg (1998b,
p. 50) describes the hermeneutical process:
One embeds oneself in the process of getting involved in the text, one begins to discern configurations of meaning, of parts and wholes and their interrelationships, one receives certain messages and glimpses of an unfolding development that beckons to be articulated and related to the total fabric of meaning. The hermeneutic approach seems to palpate its object and to make room for that object to reveal itself to our gaze and ears, to speak its own story into our understanding.
In
environment-behavior research, much of the phenomenological work has been
hermeneutic because the aim is often an understanding of material environments, whether furnishings, buildings, cultural
landscapes, settlement patterns, and the like (Alexander, 1987, 1993; Alexander
et al., 1977; Anella, 1990; Brenneman, 1995; Chaffin, 1989; Chawla, 1994;
Chidester and Linenthal, 1995; Condon, 1991; Francis, 1995; Harries, 1988,
1993, 1997; Hieb, 1990; Holan, 1990; Lin, 1991a; Lin, 1991b; Lipton, 1990;
Mugerauer, 1993, 1994, 1995; Norberg-Schulz, 1980, 1988, 1996; Paterson, 1991,
1993a, 1993b; Relph, 1976, 1990, 1992; Riegner, 1993; Seamon, 1991, 1993, 1994;
Silverstein, 1993b; Stefanovic, 1994; Sturm, 1990; Swentzell, 1990; Thiis-Evensen,
1987; Walkey, 1993; Wu, 1994).
One useful example
of the value of a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach in environment-behavior
research is the work of Norwegian architect Thiis-Evensen (1987), who proposes
a universal language of architecture by focusing on the experienced qualities
of floor, wall, and roof, which he
says are "the most basic elements in architecture" (ibid., p. 8).
Through a
hermeneutic reading of many different buildings in different cultures and
historical periods, Thiis-Evensen suggests that these three architectural
elements are not arbitrary but, rather, common to all architectural styles and
traditions. The essential existential ground of floor, wall, and roof, he
argues, is the relationship between
inside and outside: Just by being what they are, the floor, wall, and roof
automatically create an inside in the midst of an outside, though in
different ways: the floor, through above
and beneath; the wall, through within and around; and the roof, through under
and over.
Thiis-Evensen
demonstrates that a building's relative degree of insideness or outsideness in
regard to floor, wall, and roof can be clarified through motion, weight, and substance‑-what he calls the three
"existential expressions of architecture" (ibid., p. 21). Motion relates to the sense of dynamism
or inertia evoked by the architectural element--i.e., whether it seems to
expand, contract, or rest in balance. Weight
involves the sense of heaviness or lightness of the element and its relation to
gravity. Substance refers to the
material sense of the element--whether it is soft or hard, coarse or fine, warm
or cold, and so forth. The result, claims Thiis-Evensen, is an intricate set of
tensions between architectural elements and experience.
In his work, Thiis-Evensen
assumes that architectural form and space both presuppose and contribute to
various shared existential qualities‑-insideness-outsideness,
gravity-levity, coldness-warmth, and so forth‑-that mark the foundation
of architecture as human beings experience it (Seamon, 1991).
For example, if one
studies the lived qualities of stairs, one realizes that narrow stairs
typically relate to privacy and make the user move up them more quickly than up
wide stairs, which better express publicness and ceremonial significance.
Similarly, steep stairs express struggle and strength, isolation and
survival--experienced qualities that sometimes lead to the use of steep stairs
as a sacred symbol, as in Mayan temples or Rome's Scala Santa. On the other hand, shallow stairs encourage a
calm, comfortable pace and typically involve secular use, as, for example,
Michelangelo's steps leading up to the Campidoglio of Rome's Capitoline Hill
(Thiis-Evensen, 1987, pp. 89-103).
I discuss
Thiis-Evensen's work at length here because it is an exceptional example of one
researcher's effort to look at a text‑-buildings in many different times
and places‑-and to identify a series of experiential themes that do
justice to "the integrity, complexity, and essential being of the
phenomenon" (von Eckartsberg, 1998b, p. 50).
One test of the
value of Thiis-Evensen's experiential theory is that other researchers have
found his interpretation to be a useful language for examining in detail the
work of specific architects and specific architectural styles (e.g., Kushwah,
1993; Lin, 1991b; Lin and Seamon, 1993; Ramaswami, 1991).
At the same time,
it is important to emphasize that Thiis-Evensen does not claim that his way of
architectural interpretation is the only way, and clearly there could be other
hermeneutics of architecture that would provide other ways of presenting and
understanding architectural meaning (e.g., Harries, 1988, 1993, 1997;
Mugerauer, 1993; Alexander, 1987, 1993). This is a key aspect of all
hermeneutical work: there are many ways to interpret the text, thus
interpretation is never complete but always underway.
4.4. Commingling
Methods
Very often the
phenomenological researcher uses the first-person, existential, and hermeneutic
approaches in combination, thus, for example, Nogué i Font (1993), in his
phenomenology of the Garroxta landscape, made use of interviews but also did
hermeneutic readings of nineteenth-century Garroxtan photographs and the
pictures of artists associated with the nineteenth-century Garroxta school of
landscape painting.
One of the most
sensitive examples of a phenomenological study drawing on multiple methods is
Chaffin's study of one Louisiana river landscape as it evokes a sense of place
and community (Chaffin, 1989). Chaffin's focus is Isle Brevelle, a 200-year-old
river community on the Cane River of Lousiana's Natchitoches Parish.
His conceptual
vehicle to explore this place is simple but effective: to move from outside to
inside, first, by presenting the region's history and geography, then by
interviewing residents, and, finally, by canoeing the Cane River, which he
comes to realize is the "focus of the community-at-home-and-at-large"
(ibid., p. 41). As he glides by the river banks, he become aware of a rhythm of
water, topography, vegetation, and human settlement. He writes:
Once on the water,
the earlier feelings of alienation and intrusion were gone. I came directly in
contact with a spatial rhythm. As the valley's horizon is formed by the surrounding
sand hills, so the river's horizon is formed by the batture [the land that
slopes up from a waterway to the top of a natural or artificial levee],
silhouetted against the sky when viewed from a canoe. I had the paradoxical
sensation of being both high and low at the same time; held down between the
banks, yet as high as the surrounding fields.
The meanders of the once-wild current organized this experience. As I paddled around the bends, the rhythm unfolded. On the outside of the curve, I was contained by a steep bank, emphasized by red cedar sentinels. Only rooftops and cars passing along the river road hinted at a world beyond. On the inside, I was released into a riverside world of inlets, peninsulas, and undulating ban