ABSTRACT
This chapter points to two little-discussed interrelated features – among anthropologists and sociologists – about the nature of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt): that the experience of transcendence is an essential component of human actions, and that lived experience (Erlebnis) is founded on the non-discursivity of the lifeworld, i.e., the pre-predicative background expectancies from which the discursive arises. The author examines the intellectual route of Alfred Schutz, who developed his mundane lifeworld theory from appropriating Edmund Husserl’s notions of appresentation and apperception. Harold Garfinkel later extended Schutz’s concept of lifeworld to the empirical investigations of constitutive social orders. Approaching the end of this chapter, the author raises his concerns about a strain of constructionism in anthropology and sociology, which tends to ignore these two features of lived experience, and misconceives social realities solely as the actor’s discursive accomplishments.
