Entanglements of experience: sketch for a sociological phenomenology of nature

Abstract

The article presents a social phenomenology of naturalism. Starting from Stefan Bargheer’s Moral entanglements (2018), it argues that to understand the transformations of naturalist practices, we have to focus both on the shifting typifications of activity and their organizational moorings, but also on the experiential affordances of practice. Drawing on the work of Schutz and Merleau-Ponty, I focus on the transformation of animals from background into figure, the peculiar province of meaning that naturalist practice entails, as well as the experience of “play” that Bargheer highlights. Doing so, I argue that the affordances of experience are a constitutive aspect of any historical account of practice: that a phenomenological approach is crucial not only for the micro-sociology of interaction and experience, but for understanding larger historical processes and transformations.