ABSTRACT
The anthropological study of modern-day Britain was, with the partial exception of the Mass Observation project between the two World Wars, originally the province of geographers and sociologists. An Irish specificity is also seen reflected in its anthropology – the subject, of far more work than Britain. If anthropology in Britain is paradigmatic of the discipline’s essential project in this way, then it is also instantiatory of the discipline’s breadth and diversity. The significant tensions in this anthropological reorientation are between individual and other, between individual action and inaction, and between the forms in which life is conducted in socio-cultural milieux and the meanings of those forms for the individual participants. An existential anthropology would thus provide evidence for a general understanding of the workings of human consciousness and the environing worlds to which it gives rise, worlds whose substance might be expected to remain particular and individual.
