Michael
Schnegg

In public debates, the lack of financial resources is often identified as the main problem of German universities. In my experience as a scholar in the humanities, money is certainly necessary to be scientifically productive, but it is not sufficient. Often, my main problem lies elsewhere: in the lack of time and opportunities to work with colleagues on research and writing projects. In 2023, the HIAS (Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study) gave me and my tandem partner, Thiemo Breyer (Professor of Phenomenology and Anthropology, University of Cologne), a unique opportunity to do this. I will briefly reflect on how this came about and what this gift meant to us.

I work as an anthropologist at Universität Hamburg and recently developed a strong interest in phenomenology, a branch of philosophy. In my view, phenomenology provides very sophisticated concepts that describe modes of experiencing (Schnegg 2023). The notion of «empathy» through which people connect with others, and the notion of «atmospheres» that permeate situations more holistically and that describe a situation’s overall feel or tonality are examples of productive tools from phenomenology that I use to theorize ethnographic observations.

Engaging with philosophical texts, I experienced some insecurity as to whether I was getting things right. It did not help that in anthropology, these philosophical texts are interpreted in diverse and partly contradictory ways. To gain more security, I consulted Thiemo Breyer, a well-known expert in the field. I reached out to someone within the distance of a train ride because in my experience, novel interdisciplinary communications like this require a mutual understanding that takes time to build. Such an understanding is reached more easily if we sit in the same room and we have the opportunity to exchange «off the record» thoughts, thoughts that often do not appear on a preset agenda.

The collaboration with Thiemo became so productive that we decided to apply for a HIAS fellowship that would allow him to stay in Hamburg for some time. With this time, we wanted to finish the projects on empathy we had started. Furthermore, we wanted to begin working on new ideas we had been talking about online. Thankfully, the fellowship was approved. What then made the collaboration especially productive was the fact that I was eligible for a sabbatical during his stay. This allowed both of us to focus on the joint projects.

The first project we realized was on empathy. I had observed that the pastoralists I work with in Namibia empathize with human and non-human beings and that this strongly shapes their perception of reality. I was curious to learn whether the phenomenological concept of empathy would facilitate theorizing this. Together we found that Edith Stein’s notion of empathy is a very productive tool for distinguishing how people empathize differently with different beings, including livestock, elephants, and tricksters. In this empathic process, assumptions about the other’s bodies and their sensual capacities play a central role. To describe this process, we coined the term ‘pre-reflective other-awareness,’ which aptly describes the empathic relations in Namibia and adds to the phenomenological debates (Schnegg and Breyer 2022). Taken together, our results show that by empathizing in a particular way, a multispecies world emerges that is different from any world in which those perspectives do not exist.

Inspired by this success, we planned and outlined an introduction to phenomenological anthropology. During the months Thiemo stayed in Hamburg, we wrote (and threw out) numerous tables of contents and texts. I am rather sure that we would have lost confidence if we hadn’t had the chance to debate what the other had thought and written at length and in depth, sitting at a table in the office or in a café. In my experience, such a project requires people to be in one place for some time. Even if the project cannot be finished on the spot, these joint experiences give us the energy to persist. We are still working on the manuscript, and while progress slowed as we fully re-immersed ourselves in our regular routines, we are confident we will finish it. To do so, we organize regular meetings for working on the draft. We had one such meeting in Cologne this spring and we will have another in Hamburg this summer.