On Human Concern: Toward a Phenomenological Anthropology

On Human Concern puts anthropology into conversation with phenomenology in order to trace the complex pathways by which forms of human concern prove central to our existence. Drawing on over two decades of ethnographic engagement with Yapese communities in Micronesia, intermingled with reflections on life as a migrant of Canadian settler colonial heritage in the United States, the book examines a range of worldly situations that disclose differing modalities of concern: from experiences of loss and mourning, to bodily decline and illness, to despair in the face a once looming Covid-19 pandemic, to climate change and the specter of ecological collapse.

Cross-cutting these distinctive situations is a core dimension of human concern: its ethical and moral entailments. That we are responsive to the worldly situations that we find ourselves living through, and that we are concerned about how we and others are coming along in the world, speaks to the kinds of beings that we are: beings who are ethically attuned to the conditions that in turn condition us. Collectively, the chapters produce a phenomenological anthropological analysis of the variegated ways that historically situated individuals and communities are responsively attuned to the worldly conditions that shape their possibilities for being.

C. Jason Throop is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap (California, 2010), coeditor, with Keith M. Murphy, of Toward an Anthropology of the Will (Stanford, 2010), and coeditor, with Douglas Hollan, of The Anthropology of Empathy: Exploring the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies (Berghahn Press, 2004).