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This book is an anthropology book, not a social and cultural anthropology book, but an existential anthropology book. It presents a critique of the theories and methods of the social sciences, which Albert Piette reproaches for side-stepping human beings, their modes of being and more generally the fact of existing. The book also offers an original combination of methods for exploring the details of existence: the particularities of each person in a group, the succession of situations in a day, and the subtlety of moments of presence. It gives rise to new theoretical propositions on what constitutes the specificity of human existence and social life.

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Introduction

Part One: Wholes and Particularities

I. A critique of the operation of the social sciences: 1. The "good" sociological object - 2. Cultural ethnography and interactional ethnography
II. Leftovers of details: a photographic experiment
III. What is the minor mode of the reality?

Part Two: Existence and Days

I. Displacement and continuity
II. Plurality, laterality, singularity
III. Existential anthropology: from sociology to nonsociology

Part Three: Presences and Intensities

I. "Entering into" presence
II. Reposity chart and intensitometry
III. Mitigated humans: what can be concluded?
IV. Phenomenographic paths for analyzing presence

Conclusion

References

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Albert Piette is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Paris-Nanterre and Researcher at the Centre for Ethnology and Comparative Sociology (CNRS). He is the author of books in French about anthropological theory, methodology of details, religious phenomena, and especially existential anthropology.

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