to Part II of A Geography of the Lifeworld
[from David Seamon, A Geography of the Lifeworld, copyright
1979, 2003 David Seamon]
PART I
SEEING ANEW
What is the hardest thing of all?
That which seems easiest: to use
your eyes to see what lies in
front of them—Goethe (cited
in Roszak, 1973, p.310).
CHAPTER 1
A GEOGRAPHY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
I love to sit in the sun. We have the sun so often here, a regular visitor, a friend one can expect to see often and trust. I like to make tea for my husband and me. At midday we take our tea outside and sit on our bench, our backs against the wall of the house. Neither of us wants pillows, I tell my daughters and sons that they are soft‑-those beach chairs of theirs. Imagine beach chairs here in New Mexico, so far from any ocean! The bench feels strong to us, not uncomfortable. The tea warms us inside, the sun on the outside. I joke with my husband; I say we are part of the house: the adobe gets baked and we do too. For the most part we say nothing, though. It is enough to sit and be part of God’s world. We hear the birds talking to each other, and are grateful they come as close to us as they do, all the more reason to keep our tongues still and hold ourselves in one place‑-Robert Coles (1973, p.6).
Why might a geographer be interested in a frail elderly woman describing her daily life in a small isolated village in the mountains north of Santa Fe? Geography is the study of the earth as the dwelling place of human beings. It seeks to understand a person’s life in relation to the places, spaces and environments that in sum comprise his or her geographical world. The friendly sun, the supportive bench, the warm clay bricks, the singing birds‑- each is an aspect of the geographical world in which the woman finds herself. Wherever we are, be it small as an apartment or expansive as a desert, strange as a distant country or taken-for-granted as a small adobe home, we are always housed in a geographical world whose specifics we can change but whose surrounds in some form we can in no way avoid.
This book explores the human being’s inescapable immersion in the geographical world. The focus is people’s day-to-day experiences and behaviors associated with places, spaces and environments in which they live and move. The search is for certain basic patterns that epitomize human behavioral and experiential relationships with the every day geographical world. Why, for example, do people like the old woman express profound attachment for their home place? What is the nature of every day movement in space? In what ways do people notice and encounter their geographical world?
The topic of concern is everyday environmental experience--the sum total of a person’s first-hand involvements with the geographical world in which he or she typically lives. What is the underlying experiential structure of everyday environmental experience: Does it encompass certain basic characteristics that extend beyond particular person, place and time? Clearly, the geographical world is intimately joined with other dimensions of living‑-the person’s socio-economic world, his interpersonal and spiritual worlds, the temporal context that places him in a personal and societal history. As a geographer, I recognize these many linkages but limit discussion to the world of geographical experience and behavior. What is the nature of human existence as it happens in a geographical world? What in most essential form is man as a geographical being?
The geographer’s interest in environmental behavior and experience is not new. Along with psychologists, sociologists, planners and other researchers, geographers in the last few decades have helped establish an interdisciplinary field which has variously been called environmental psychology, psychogeography, human ethology, environmental sociology, research in environmental perception, or behavioral geography, as I call it here.1 Behavioral geography has explored such themes as spatial behavior, territoriality, place preferences, attitudes towards nature and the physical environment. Its development reflects a strong need felt in both the social sciences and design professions to understand the inner psychological structures and processes that underlie a person and group’s environmental behaviors. Behavioral geography attempts to clarify how human behavior affects and is affected by the physical environment. This work may provide help in improving existing environments and designing future ones, be they bathrooms, homes, streets, parks, shopping malls -- even entire towns and cities.2 Also, behavioral geography may help the student become more sensitive to the roles that place, space and environment have in his or her own daily life.
This book is different from most work in behavioral geography because it makes use of phenomenology, a way of study which works to uncover and describe things and experiences -- i.e. phenomena -- as they are in their own terms. “Phenomenology”, writes Giorgi (1971, p.9), “is the study of phenomena as experienced by human beings.3 The primary emphasis is on the phenomenon itself exactly as it reveals itself to the experiencing subject in all its concreteness and particularity.”
Phenomenology explores the things and events of daily experience. Keen explains:
Its task is less to give us new ideas than to make explicit those ideas, assumptions, and implicit presuppositions upon which we already behave and experience life. Its task is to reveal to us exactly what we already know and that we know it, so that we can be less puzzled about ourselves (1975, p.18).
Phenomenology has recently been heralded as a significantly new perspective in behavioral geography, which conventionally begins with a particular theoretical perspective (e.g. territoriality, spatial cognition) and set of definitions and assumptions (e.g. home ground, territory as function of aggression, cognitive map. spatial behavior as a function of cognitive image).4 Phenomenology, in contrast, strives to categorize and structure its theme of study as little as possible. It seeks to understand and describe the phenomenon as it is in itself before any prejudices or a priori theories have identified, labeled or explained it. Phenomenology, says Spiegelberg (1971, p.658), “bids us to turn toward phenomena which had been blocked from sight by the theoretical pattern in front of them”.
In addition, phenomenology strives for a holistic view of the phenomenon it studies. "Always a relatively full analysis of any phenomenon must include its relation to neighboring phenomena,” writes Fischer (1971, p.158), succinctly expressing the need for phenomenology to place its topic of study in a wider context of meaning. Most conventional work in behavioral geography brings its attention to one limited aspect of environmental behavior and experience‑-getting around in a new city, residents’ definitions of neighborhood, wilderness users’ images of wilderness. Phenomenology, in contrast, seeks to understand the interrelatedness among the various portions of environmental experience and behavior. It works to uncover the parts of everyday environmental experience as at the same time it insists that these parts must reveal a larger whole. In good phenomenology, parts reciprocate parts, and parts reciprocate whole: each gives insight into all the others.5
Movement, rest and encounter are the three primary themes used to reveal the whole here. Chapters on movement explore the role of body, habit, and routine in our day-to-day environmental dealings, while chapters on rest examine human attachment to place. Chapters on encounter consider the ways in which people observe and notice the world in which they live. I argue that these three themes portray in one possible fashion the essential core of people’s behavioral and experiential involvement with their everyday geographical world. In addition, I suggest that these three themes give valuable insight into environmental education and design.
The empirical data for this inquiry are a collection of descriptive reports very much in nature like the elderly woman’s account above. These reports were gathered in the context of four groups of people who were interested enough in their personal relationship with the geographical world to meet weekly for several months and probe different aspects of their own everyday environmental experience. These participants were asked to explore, for example, their day-to-day movements in space, the meanings that various places in their lives had for them, the ways in which they made attentive contact with the everyday environment in which they lived. Each of these groups, including myself as leader, is called an environmental experience group. Participants in the groups are called group members.6
This book works to demonstrate that many of the theories and concepts that have found favor in contemporary behavioral research may not be in accurate contact with the phenomena for which they claim to speak. This does not mean that phenomenology seeks to negate or destroy research in behavioral geography but rather asks its practitioners to re-examine the theoretical groundings on which they make their claims. Is spatial behavior really a function of cognition? Is attachment to place really bound up in territoriality? Do people really prefer the places and environments they say they prefer? By asking questions like these, phenomenology helps the behavioral geographer, environmental psychologist and other such researchers to clarify the starting-points from which their work arises and thereby to establish a more perfect correspondence between behavioral theories and the actual fabric of human environmental experience and behavior.
1. For overviews of this interdisciplinary field‑-by a psychologist, anthropologist and two geographers respectively‑-see Craik, 1970; Rapoport, 1977; Saarinen, 1976; Porteous, 1977. Also see Moore and Golledge (eds.), 1976; Wapner, Cohen and Kaplan (eds.), 1976; Leff,, 1977; Kaplan and Kaplan (eds.), 1978.
2. See, for example, Ittelson et al., 1974; Rapoport, 1977; Porteous, 1977.
3. One of the best introductions to the history and methods of phenomenology is Spiegelberg, 1971, especially vol.II, pp.659-99. Also good are Giorgi, 1970; Ihde, 1973; Keen, 1975. Some of the best examples of empirical phenomenology are found in Giorgi et al, (eds.), 1971, 1975. For discussions of the relationship between phenomenology and social science see MacLeod, 1969; Zeitlin, 1973.
4. Statements emphasizing the value of phenomenology to behavioral geography include Relph, 1970; Wisner, 1970; Tuan, 1971a; Buttimer, 1974, 1976. Practical application of phenomenology to geographic themes include Dardel, 1952; Eliade, 1957; Bachelard, 1958; Lowenthal, 1961; Heidegger, 1962, 1971; Buckley, 1971; Fischer, 1971; Tuan, 1974a, 1974b, 1975a, 1975b, 1977; Jager, 1975; Moncrief, 1975; Graber, 1976; Relph, 1976a, 1976b; Seamon, 1976a, 1976b; Rowles, 1978. Note that except for Dardel (1952) and Lowenthal (1961), all work until 1970 was written by non-geographers. Critiques of the relevance of phenomenology to geography include Entrikin, 1976, 1977; Ley, 1976; Cosgrove, 1978; Gregory, 1978.
5. Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness (1976b) is so far the best pehnomenological presentation of a geographical whole -- in this case, the experience of place (and its experiential opposite, placelessness). Especially valuable is Relph’s inside-outsideness continuum on which can be located different modes of place experience.
6. Observations from these groups, arranged by topic, are included in Appendix A.
CHAPTER 2
PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL EXPERIENCE GROUPS
Phenomenology begins in silence. Only he who has experienced genuine genuine perplexity and frustration in the face of the phenomena when trying to find the proper description for them knows what phenomenological seeing really means--Herbert Spiegelbert (1971, p.672).
In normal daily existence people are caught up in a state of affairs that the phenomenologist calls the natural attitude‑-the unquestioned acceptance of the things and experiences of daily living (Giorgi, 1970, pp.146-52; Natanson, 1962). The world of the natural attitude is generally called by the phenomenologist lifeworld‑-the taken-for-granted pattern and context of everyday life through which the person routinely conducts his day-to-day existence without having to make it an object of conscious attention (Buttimer, 1976, pp.277,281). Immersed in the natural attitude, people do not normally examine the lifeworld; it is concealed as a phenomenon:
In the natural attitude we are too much absorbed by our mundane pursuits, both practical and theoretical; we are too much absorbed by our goals, purposes, and designs, to pay attention to the way the world presents itself to us. The acts of consciousness through which the world and whatever it contains become accessible to us are lived, but they remain undisclosed, unthematized, and in this sense concealed (Giorgi, 1970, p.148, italics in original).
Through a change in attitude‑the phenomenological reduction as it is usually called‑the phenomenologist seeks to make the lifeworld a focus of attention: “the acts which in the natural attitude are simply lived are now thematized and made topics of reflective analysis’ (Giorgi, 1970, p.148). An important tool in this reductive process is epoche‑the suspension of belief in the experience or experienced thing. The phenomenologist attempts to disengage himself from the lifeworld and re-examine its nature afresh in epoche‑“to bring...precognitive "givens’ into consciousness...and enable one to empathize with the worlds of other people” (Buttimer, 1976, p.281)
Epoche does not mean that the phenomenologist rejects the world or his experience of it. Rather, he begins to question these things, as well as all concepts, theories and models designed to describe and explain them. If he conducts epoche properly, he may discover that many events and patterns which he previously “knew” become questionable, while facts that he had previously ignored or deemed insignificant emerge clearly and demand examination and description (Zeitlin, 1973, p.147).
Phenomenology is therefore a descriptive discipline. It attempts to question radically the taken-for-grantedness of lifeworld and theories developed to depict it. Through epoche, the phenomenologist looks at human experience anew and records resulting discoveries as accurately as possible.
Group Inquiry as a Phenomenological Method
In traditional epistemologies, modes of knowing have been labelled as either subjective or objective. The focus of subjective knowledge is generally said to be private individual experience. In contrast, objective knowledge is usually associated with generalizations and hypotheses which can be tested and replicated publicly (Bittimer, 1976, p.282; Rogers, 1969). Phenomenology is a way of knowing that accepts the validity of both traditional modes but is identical to neither (Buttimer, 1976, p.282). Through intersubjective verification‑- the corroboration of one person”s subjective accounts with other persons’‑-phenomenology attempts to establish generalizations about human experience. Unlike objective modes of study, which seek explanations and causes, phenomenology attempts only descriptive clarification of phenomena and events. It endeavors to “elicit a dialogue between individual persons and the "subjectivity" of their world” (Bittimer, 1976, p.282).
Group inquiry is one means of fostering this dialogue. Several people interested in better understanding a particular phenomenon meet together regularly for a longer or shorter period of time. They share relevant experiences. They assume that over time this interpersonal sharing and corroboration will lead them as a group to a deeper, more thorough understanding of the phenomenon.
In actual practice, group inquiry has had limited use in phenomenology. One of the few phenomenologists to use it is Fischer (1971), who included it as one technique among several in a phenomenological study of privacy. Though he preceded the formal development of phenomenology by almost a century, the poet and dramatist Goethe (1749-1832) was keenly aware of the value of interpersonal exploration of phenomena and made some use of the technique in his experiential studies of light and color (Seamon, 1978a, 1978b). Different people are sensitive to different aspects of a thing, Goethe argued, and thus one can discover more about that thing more quickly if his investigatory efforts incorporate the observations of others:
As soon as one directs the attention of alert, astute individuals to certain phenomena, one finds that they have both predilection for and skill in observation. I have often noticed the fact in my zealous study of the science of light and color, since I frequently discuss the subject of my current interest with persons ordinarily not accustomed to such observations. As soon as their interest is stimulated, they notice phenomena with which I in part was unacquainted and in part had overlooked. In that way they rectify my prematurely formulated ideas, thus giving me the opportunity to advance more rapidly and to emerge from the limitations beleaguering one during a laborious investigation (Goethe, 1952, pp.221-2).
The process of group inquiry works to establish a supportive context in which people can build on each other”s insights and come to moments of discovery in which unrelated bits of information suddenly fuse together in larger significance, revealing a pattern which was unseen before (Bortoft, 1971; Seamon, 1979). Participants’ attention is trained on a thing which is poorly known or only know in a priori terms. The aim is to clarify the nature of the thing, attempting to set aside all former conceptions and seeing afresh by the help of each others’ observations and insights.
Group inquiry fosters complementary results: descriptive accounts of the phenomenon for the researcher organizing the study, and deepened understanding for the participants learn to separate from the natural attitude and explore aspects of the lifeworld as objects of attention. They probe aspects of daily living that were taken for granted and less noticed before. Ideally, they become more sensitive to the lifeworld.
The double value of group inquiry and similar phenomenological methods has been described by von Eckartsberg, who depicts the process as a researcher-participant dialogue:
The dialogue between researcher and researched involves both a change and a learning process although the intentions and foci are different on the part of the researcher, and the researched. On the part of the researcher it is a deeper understanding of the phenomenon under study as lived in action and experience by concrete and hence unique human beings which is of concern, and for the researched the change is in terms of a reflective deepening of understanding of his own living in one of its aspects (1971, p.78).
Group inquiry involves potential problems. First is the question of generalization: can broad claims about experience be made on the basis of reports from small numbers of people whose socio-economic and cultural backgrounds are bound to be limited in range? How can such groups speak for a wider human population? Wouldn’t an adequate phenomenological study require people from a broad spectrum of lifeworlds?
Conventional scientific methods require statistically proper procedures as a prerequisite for legitimate generalization. Groups used for study are subject to carefully defined sampling requirements. Phenomenology, in its acceptance of interpersonal corroboration, assumes a different measure of accuracy and objectivity.
Phenomenology, in its acceptance of interpersonal corroboration, assumes a different measure of accuracy and objectivity.
Phenomenologically, one person”s situation speaks for the human situation at large. What is reported about experience in a small group of limited composition may genuinely reflect patterns of experience which have bearing on a wider human sphere.
At one level of human existence, each of us is unique‑-affecting and affected by cultural, economic and other similar groundings of life. At another plane of existence, however, we each share certain common characteristics. We have four limbs. We move and rest. We more or less have access to the same five sense modalities (cf. Lowenthal, 1961; Tuan, 1974). At this level of study, participants in group inquiry are typical human beings. Their experiential descriptions reflect human experience in its typicality. Certain themes and characteristics pointed to in one participant”s experience may find echoes in other people”s experience. The aim of the group process is to search out these thematic commonalities and explore them with as much precision as possible.
The question of accuracy is a second problem of group inquiry: are experiential descriptions provided by participants reliable? Do reports genuinely depict the events they purport to describe? Von Eckartsberg (1971, p.72) has called this difficulty selective attention‑-people experience themselves in their interaction with a particular situation, but they do this selectively, filtering out particular aspects of the experience which they intentionally block from view or don’t notice. Because of this difficulty, many social scientists have hesitated to use experiential accounts or have constructed some kind of methodological tool‑-people experience themselves in their interaction with a particular situation, but they do this selectively, filtering out particular aspects of the experience which they intentionally block from view or don’t notice. Because of this difficulty, many social scientists have hesitated to use experiential accounts or have constructed some kind of methodological tool‑-lie-detector, questionnaire, semantic differential‑-to convert these qualitative descriptions into some quantitative form acceptable to pre-defined criteria of validity.
In supposing, however, that selective attention is ak problem, one also supposes that he or she can arrive at a complete, objective portrait of environmental behavior and experience. This claim, so often unquestioned in behavioral research, derives largely from a scientific stance that assumes human behavior and experience to be completely describable and explainable. What, on the other hand, if selective attention is not viewed as a problem, but as a basic characteristic of human nature‑-that the reach of human awareness is partial and can only elucidate a portion of each experience in which we partake? As Von Eckartsberg writes,
Each event is given in inexhaustible life-process-richness of which we as individuals can become aware only in limited aspects in conscious experience. The reach and focus of our consciousness is limited and elucidates only certain aspects of the totality-event-process in the situation (1971, p.76).
An individual”s description of experience may be limited in range and understanding, yet it is an important “first trace of the experienced event” (ibid., p.76). Group inquiry gathers accounts on experience provided not by just one person but by several people who are willing to consider and question each other”s reports. In this sense, the method extends the limited descriptive powers of the single individual to a wider base of intersubjective corroboration and critique. Different people”s descriptions highlight different aspects of the phenomenon. Out of the sum arises a composite picture which is greater than each description alone.
Worcester, Massachusetts, is a New England industrial city of some 160,000 persons. Visitors call it dirty and unpleasant. “Why would you want to live there?” most of them say. Worcester is perhaps best symbolized by the triple-decker, a housing type that looks like a top-heavy shoebox, built in times of economic boom for a flood of new labor. Worcester is a city of immigrants and elderly people. Its streets are twisted and its downtown has a new shopping mall and two short skyscrapers. Worcester is a unique place in many ways, yet at the same time it is a typical human environment in which typical human environmental experience takes place.
Clark University is located in Worcester. It has some 2,200 students and is a small campus‑-just a few city blocks. Located on Main Street in the heart of a neighborhood slowly sliding into decay. Clark is surrounded by Worcester and is something of an anomaly. Its image of liberalism‑-even radicalism‑-has never been completely accepted by the typical Worcesterite, who speaks of Clark with a curious mixture of affection and distrust.
Worcester and Clark are the setting for the environmental experience groups. All participants except one (an unemployed schoolteacher) were Clark students ranging in age from nineteen to twenty-six (Table 2.1). These people were originally contacted through posters, letters and word of mouth. They received no academic credit for the project. During two semesters, enough people volunteered for the organizing of four groups‑-two beginning groups in the fall and one advanced and one new beginning group in the spring. In total, nineteen persons‑-ten women and nine men‑-had some active part in the groups and offered at least a few observations. Some of these people dropped out and others came only irregularly. A core of seven people, including myself, met regularly throughout the two terms on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, usually for an hour and a half. We sat around a small wooden table in a Clark professor”s office. The atmosphere was informal and friendly. The aim was to create a situation where people felt free to share experiences and memories with as much clarity and accuracy as possible.1
Table 2.1: Characteristics of Group Members
|
|
Age |
Father's Work |
Mother's Work |
Places lived in and years |
Class* |
|
1 |
23 |
Dept Store Merchandiser |
Housewife |
Cleveland, OH (18) Baltimore, MD (2) Ann Arbor, MI (2) Worcester, MA (1) |
M |
|
2 |
20 |
Elementary School Teacher |
College Student |
Fresno, CA (5) Fremont, CA (14) Worcester, MA (1) |
LM |
|
3 |
21 |
Sales Manager |
Office Manager |
West Orange, NJ (18) Middlebury, VT (2) Worcester, MA (1) |
M |
|
4 |
19 |
Professor of Engineering |
Spec. Education Teacher |
Tenafly, NJ (18) Worcester, MA (2) |
UM
|
|
5 |
20 |
Grocery Store Manager |
Librarian/ Secretary
|
Shrewsbury, MA (5) Needham, MA (13) Worcester, MA (2) |
M |
|
6 |
19 |
Lawyer |
Secretary |
Alexandria, VA (13) Arlington, VA (4) Worcester, MA (2) |
M
|
|
7 |
19 |
Advertising Executive |
Housewife |
Philadelphia, PA (17) Worcester, MA (2) |
M |
|
8 |
21 |
Lumber Dealer |
Secretary |
Loveland, CO (18) Boulder, CO (20 Worcester, MA (1) |
M |
|
9 |
20 |
Business Executive |
Housewife |
Spring Valley, NY (18) Worcester, MA (2) |
UM |
|
10 |
19 |
Chemical Engineer |
Housewife |
Metuchen, NJ (17) Worcester, MA (2) |
M |
|
11 |
23 |
Unemployed; previously Advertising |
Law Student |
Huntington, MY (18) Delaware, OH (2) Worcester, MA (3) |
M |
|
12 |
20 |
Salesman |
Psychologist/ Counsellor |
Philadelphia, PS (18) Worcester, MA (2) |
UM
|
|
13 |
19 |
Accountant |
Teacher |
Brockton, MA (18) Worcester, MA (1) |
M |
|
14 |
26
|
Garage Mechanic |
Housewife |
Richfields Spa, NY (18) Albany, NY (4) England (1) Worcester, M(3) |
LM |
|
15 |
21 |
Supermarket Manager |
Housewife |
Bridgeport, CT (18) Worcester, MA (3) |
UM? |
|
16 |
21 |
Social Services |
Housewife |
Silver Spring, MD (18) Worcester, MA (3) |
UM |
|
17 |
19 |
Dentist |
Housewife |
Teaneck, NJ (18) Worcester, MA (1) |
UM |
|
18 |
21 |
Attorney |
Housewife |
Highland Park, IL (19) Worcester, MA (2) |
UM |
* M = middle class, UM = upper middle class, LM = lower middle class.
I tape recorded each meeting, made transcriptions, and then sent copies by campus mail to group members, who could review and reflect on observations.2 Weekly, too, I sifted through all past and present transcriptions, allowing their contents to reverberate‑-seeking out thematic linkages which were partial or unnoticed before. By the tenth week, I realized that most reports could be well described in terms of movement, rest and encounter. At the same time, I became aware of important supplementary themes‑-e.g. the role of body in everyday movement, the emotional link between person and place.
The most difficult problem faced by the groups was the choice of focus for weekly discussions. The phenomenologist
faces a dilemma in doing phenomenology: he strives not to pre-judge the thing, yet in order to study it, he must organize some guidelines, some pathway by which he can explore the thing. Otherwise, his efforts will lose direction. He will be unable to distinguish essential aspects of the thing from the non-essentials. He must find some middle point which provides guidance for his study yet at the same time allows the phenomenon to be itself.
In the environmental experience groups, I attempted to minimize this dilemma by use of a weekly theme. At the end of each meeting I gave a topic for the following week‑-e.g. moving in everyday space, emotions in relation to place, destinations, noticing things in the environment (Table 2.2)).3 I asked group members to keep the theme in mind throughout the week and to (1) make observations on any particular experience which might be relevant; (2) reflect on past experiences in terms of the themes. Participants would report their discoveries at the weekly theme meeting. Observations would be given in the order that group members felt like speaking, and it was not mandatory that people speak at all. It often happened that one report would remind someone else of a similar experience, which in turn struck responses in other members. Out of these unpremeditated sequences would frequently arise connections and patterns which were vague or unnoticed before.
Table 2. 2. Themes of the Environmental Experience Groups*
|
___________________ *A detailed description of each of these themes appears in Appendix C. |
I proposed themes in the first few weeks that had arisen out of a previous detailed phenomenology which I had done of my own everyday environmental experience.4 As the groups proceeded, certain past themes resurfaced and new ones appeared‑-e.g. places for things,l the significance of habit and routine. These thematic patterns were sketchy and fragmented at first. In time, they became clearer and suggested linkages with other themes. Often these patterns became themes in their own right. Of the seventeen themes that we used, I had decided on five‑-everyday movement patterns, centering, noticing, moving in space, emotions relating to place‑-before the groups began. The other twelve arose from the group process itself.
Over time, these seventeen themes produced over 1,400 observations ranging in length from sentence fragment to paragraph or more. As I have said, these many observations eventually separated out under the three main themes of movement, rest and encounter. These three themes are the main organizational structure of the book and the reader is advised to establish them clearly in his or her mind.
The adequacy of the group technique used here is dependent on the effectiveness of the following phenomenology. Do its descriptive generalizations apply to most human situations? Can the reader find aspects of his or her own daily life here? Though this phenomenology is based on a limited set of experiences, the argument is that the patterns and linkages discovered apply to other lifeworlds past, present and future. If the groups were conducted in other contexts‑-with Sudanese villagers, Pennsylvania Amish, New York sophisticates, or characters in Thomas Hardy”s novels‑-the specific experiential reports would describe a significantly different lifeworld, but underneath should appear the same underlying experiential structures.
Phenomenology is as much a process as a product: the moments of discovery are as significant as the written artifact that describes the discoveries and makes them accessible to others. Sometimes these moments occurred in the group context, with one, a few, or all group members realizing the discovery. At other times, insights came to me alone‑-as I shuffled through observations, sat reflecting, attempted to write, or even walked down the street.
The chapters which follow articulate my understanding of discoveries made through the group process. I cannot hope to speak for other group members‑-each understood different things to different degrees at different times. Appendix B, describing participants’ commentaries on the group process, gives some indication of what the group meant for others.
In using the chapters which follow, the reader benefits himself most if he seeks echoes of the presentation in his experience and the experience of other individuals and groups with which he is sufficiently familiar. “We must...”, says Grange(1977, p.142), “see our world exactly as we experience it rather than as we construct it through our rational presuppositions and socialized modes of consciousness.” The aim, in other words, is not to think about the discoveries of the group process‑-to argue their validity logically‑-but to search out their existence in day-to-day experience. In this way, the reader touches the experiential source of the group discoveries and accepts or rejects them in terms of his own and others’ daily living. “By grasping our existence”, says Wild (1963, p.20), “we can understand thought, but by though alone we shall never understand existence.”
1. Appendix C provides instructions for organizing an environmental experience group.
2. The tape-recorder made some group members nervous the first few weeks. In time, however, people forgot about its presence and spoke normally and openly.
3. Detailed descriptions of these themes are given in Appendix C.
4. This report is available from the author on request.