ABSTRACT
This chapter brings critical phenomenology and nonideal social ontology into conversation to reassess their relevance for ethnography, and vice versa. Both traditions, social ontology and phenomenology, have long been concerned with the conditions of human experience and social coordination – and in recent years, each has undergone a critical turn. In phenomenology, critical scholars have foregrounded how embodied experience is shaped by racialized, gendered, and disabled positionalities. In social ontology, philosophers have challenged idealized models of shared agency, emphasizing instead the constitutive role of power asymmetry, conflict, and opacity in social interaction. These developments make both traditions newly salient for methodological reflection. Walking together – as a canonical example in theories of small-scale shared action as well as a paradigmatic human activity – is reframed in terms of its deictic function: its capacity to point beyond itself. Rather than presuming harmonious coordination and flattened hierarchies, the chapter explores how walking together as an exemplary shared action can make visible the power dynamics and structural inequalities embedded in even the most mundane forms of bodily alignment, thus redirecting theory from the ground up. By tracing the shift from classical to critical approaches in both fields, the chapter offers new conceptual resources for both philosophical and anthropological research.
