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7/29/2019 Phenomenological Inquiry in Tribal Engagement
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Running Head: Phenomenological inquiry in Tribal Conflict
Phenomenological Inquiry in Tribal Conflict Engagement
Patrick James Christian Ph.D Student
NSU-Graduate School of Humanities & Social Science
Department of Conflict Analysis & Resolution10 November 2011
Abstract
International efforts to engage and mitigate violent intrastate conflicts have seen spectacular
failures recently including the United Nations Missions in Somalia, Darfur, South Sudan, the
Congo, Rwanda, Bosnia, and southwest Asia. This paper asserts a requirement for
phenomenological inquiry as a fundamental part of the praxis of engagement and mediation
of violent conflict within and between emerging cultures and tribes. Such inclusion of
qualitative research is essential to adequately discover the range of issues affecting the
conflict parties and how the various phenomenological conditions affect their sociological
and political behavior.
Left to Right: wooden texts from Baldong Village, Darfur Sudan; pre-Amaric stones with captions in Giza from Axum,
thio ia; Shackled human remains rom the irls’ school in um Berro Villa e, Dar ur Sudan
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Introduction
Phenomenological inquiry is not yet a commonly accepted methodology of field research
in tribal conflict engagement. Instead, positivist influenced forms of research dominate the
discourse of tribal and emerging culture engagement of violent conflict within the regional
and international governing bodies that sponsor such activities. Such engagement teams haveeternally approached emerging cultural conflict from an etic research perspective despite
their immersion in the intercultural and/or ethnic conflict that drew them there. Etic and its
opposite, emic, are two words derived from the linguistic terms phonetic and phonemic
respectively. These terms relate to a linguistic perspective where the participant views and
evaluates language from within (phonemic) or from without (phonetic). The words emic and
etic were derived by analogy 1 from their linguistic parents to denote perspective and
understanding from within or without the cultural center (Lett, 1990). Etic oriented
researchers emanate from decision making structures that continue to rely on scientificresearch strategies that share a common epistemology; one that seeks to “restrict fields of
inquiry to events, entities, and relationships that are knowable by means of explicit, logico-
empirical, inductive-deductive, quantifiable public procedures or "operations" subject to
replication by independent observers” (Harris, 1976, p. 329). Field engagement teams that
conduct various forms of government sponsored research in conflict zones often fail to
understand or even discover the underlying cognitive structures or psychological and
emotional forces that drive the violence into intractability. The former global ideological
construct of bi-polarized political stalemate based on totalizing enforcement not only
tolerated such failure, but artfully integrated it into the conflict discourse. Since the collapse
of that discourse with the fall of the Berlin Wall, government sponsors are beginning to ask
for better research, clearer answers and strategies that are evolved from an internal or emic
understanding rather than the researcher’s etic approach. Between the emic tribes in the
throes of violent confrontation and the etic researchers struggling to makes sense of a
chaotic human tapestry, there exists a reality that even ethnography fails to penetrate.
Introduced correctly, phenomenological inquiry offers relief from the opacity of the
sociological confusion that accompanies tribal conflict. Defining phenomenological inquiry in tribal engagement
Reduced to its most basic explanation, phenomenological inquiry seeks to understand the
cognitive and emotional representations of what those humans we are researching, advising,
mediating with or otherwise engaging are experiencing. Phenomenology is less concerned
1 By Kenneth Pike, a linguistic anthropologist in 1954 based upon the words Phonetic and Phonemic.
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Phenomenological inquiry in Tribal Conflict
with the actual reality that creates the cognitive and emotional representations in the mind of
the participants, but rather what appears to them (Smith, 2011). Phenomenology is
concerned with what the participants perceive to be emanating from the reality they are part
of and the “meaning-intention or meaning fulfillment (Husserl, 2001, p. 167)” of their cognition
and emotion as expressed in language, thought or reason. Although separate activities,cognition and emotion interact as variable-or-result and can present themselves
simultaneously (Eysenk & Keane, 2000). The cognitive processing of terror for instance can
be simultaneously mirrored by the emotional state of terror and both represent human
experience and a phenomenological representation of the objects that produced them. The
phenomenon studied is how the object that produces the terror appears to those who
experience it. Perhaps one of the clearest descriptions of phenomenology is by Sokolowski
(2007) who writes that such an inquiry is “the study of human experience and of the way
things present themselves to us through such experience” (p. 2). In the example above,terror manifests itself through the experiential cognition and emotion of sensory perception.
Patton (1990) writes that phenomenological study is "focused on descriptions of what
people experience and how it is that they experience what they experience" (p. 71). Using
Creswell’s (2007) replacement of what with texture and how with structure (p. 60), the
texture of how terror might be experienced consists of received visual, audible, tactile, and
olfactory stimuli combined with internal cognitive functions of memory, awareness and
imagination (among others) to create a mental object. In the arena of tribal conflict analysis,
the how (structure) of that experience is often the most frequently described portion of the
event, even to the exclusion of the what (texture) of that experience. This is because the
structure constitutes the participant’s representative account of actors involved and the
activities as they seemed to occur that invoked or created the conditions for the experience.
The most visible part of the phenomenological inquiry, the structure is what is most often
related in communication because it is the least invasive to the participant. Left unrelated is
often the completion of the meaning experience. The phenomenological texture is avoided
at best, painfully invasive as the description of such reenactments must be, in contexts where
suffering and dying are an integral part of the landscape. At worst, texture is substituted by
the researcher for “the naïve acceptance and assessment of objects, whose existence hasbeen posited in the acts now receiving phenomenological treatment” (Husserl, 2001). These
surface understandings gleaned from past personal experience are small measure of
replacement for the realities that shape and construct the complex narratives of tribal
conflict.
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If such substitution of the etic articulation of reason over the emic description of the
object’s appearance is to be avoided, phenomenological inquiry must capture and describe
both the structure and the texture of the object to be studied. A phenomenological object of
terror for instance is not complete without both parts of its essence. The midnight raid of
an opposing militia; bullets that puncture the walls of a fragile abode; the roaring mix of riders on horses and militia on technicals mounted with machine guns and the audible
expulsion of empty casing cartridges as they spatter the ground around the entry of the
village and the houses within constitute the structure of an experience in terror. The blast of
noise that pulls the sleeping occupant awake during the raid; the smell of cordite mixed with
the tactile feel on hands and legs of something wet and warm smelling of coppery cinder; the
cognition of blood that is not his and therefore his child’s; the explosive startle as holes
explode in the walls above the bed raining wood and mud brick down upon the bedclothes
soaked with wet, warm fluid and the new smell of excrement constitute a glimpse of thetexture of an experience in terror. The verbs of feel, sleep, awaken, startle, touch, smell, and
hear describe the intentionality of the man’s experience. The direct object expressions such
as bullets that puncture and casings that spatter the ground articulates the presentation of
structure and its link to the texture of the experience; the man hears the casings spatter, sees
the bullets puncture and feels the wet, warm fluids from his first person perspective. He
reacts not to the external events, but rather to what the external events mean, how they
appear, what they portend (Laverty, 2003). Together, the interior perceived texture
combined with the structure of how he experienced the appearance of the object of terror
constitutes what Creswell calls “the essential, invariant structure (or essence) (Creswell, 2007, p.
62)” of the phenomenon. Written descriptively in research, phenomenological presentments
provide a cognitive and emotive understanding to the reader of what the subject
experienced. Such rich descriptions of lived experience must be based on meanings that are
inspired by intimate, clear, authentic perceptions gained by a return “to the ‘things
themselves’” (Husserl, 2001, p. 168) rather than the individual assumptions of distant
decision makers.
Types and forms of phenomenological inquiry The decision to include phenomenological inquiry as a component of the praxis of
engaging tribes or cultures in conflict is based on the scientific evaluation of research
requirements. Questions that I would think to be relevant in this decision might be: can the
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teams engaging people who are participants to violent conflict make sense of the sociological schemas 2 before
them without delving into the meaning of some of the experiential phenomena? The relevancy of this
question might be explained by reviewing participatory action research attempts at
expanding agricultural production in drought prone areas of eastern Chad: how did last year’s
famine caused by two years of drought affect the participant’s perspectives on farming, food production, and survival? Famine is an important phenomenological object that interferes with participant
goals of adaptation of new agricultural methods. It has an ideation of its own, secretive in its
shame and ruthlessness, which lives in the cognition and narrative of those who’ve
experienced its deadly intimacy. Unless the researchers understand the texture and structure
(the essence) of the mental object of famine as it appeared to the participants and the
meaning they created out of their hunger and death of their children, they may well never be
able to engage the meaning laden discourse with the tribe. This prevents the introduction of
agrarian reform solutions that might alleviate the conditions and causes of future famine.Understanding the mental representations by the participants of the phenomenon (such as
hunger, terror, loss, alienation, and shame) extant in their Lebenswelt is essential to the
praxis of mediation, facilitation, negotiation, and participatory action strategies that reduce or
mitigate violent conflict. Into these questions the researcher incorporates analysis of the
type of phenomena dominating tribal discourse and reviews some of the forms of
phenomenology to determine research design.
The forms and methods of phenomenological research can be systematic and scientific
as the researcher applies methodological design to meet the needs of his inquiry. “Like all
good science, they require critical thinking, creativity, and reflective decision making that
give rise to many procedural variations and innovations” (Wertz, 2005). As a beginning
point for selecting phenomenological form, the particular psychological or sociological
obstacle to tribal defense or development initiatives establishes the discursive forum for the
researchers to begin exploration. Using the earlier example of the mental object of famine,
the particular underlying issue to be explored might be a phenomenological representation
of hunger and loss. Alternatively, it might be a different representation linked to aleatory
expectation of desert societies, or psycho-geological identity imprinting that prevents some
sociological schemas from adapting to forced relocation (eg: from mountain to agriculturalpreserve)3. The loss of a geological, geographical habitat can be every bit as delimiting to
survival adaptation as other forms of cultural dissonance present in such communities (Stein,
2 I use the term sociological schema to refer to the collective social structures within a given community of
communication, activity and the making of meaning that reflects a particular identity group’s Lebenswelt or life‐
world (Sokolowski, 2007, p. 146). 3 The Teuso or Eke Tribe of northern Uganda is an example of such psycho‐geological identity imprinting.
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1984). Between the engaged tribe’s failure of survival adaptation and the absence of
researcher knowledge of how to develop engagement strategies is the arena of research for
the phenomena involved. For Wertz, this constitutes “some gap between knowledge and
reality that requires qualitative knowledge, that is, an understanding of what occurs” (p. 170).
By understanding how the phenomenon involved ‘appears to’ the participants combined with their descriptions of how it affects them in beliefs, choices and attitudes, developmental
and defensive strategies can be altered or created anew to meet survival adaptation needs of
the conflict culture in question.
There are several variant forms of phenomenological inquiry that offer substantive
differences for field researchers assembling their praxis of conflict engagement. These
variant forms can be linked to some of the more expected adaptation and survival issues that
tribal engagement practitioners face. Without trying to make a one-for-one selection of
phenomenological form for tribal conflict issue, some natural points of inter-operativecomparison can be made to assist in the analysis of the variant forms and selection for use
by the researcher in the field. First, there appear to be more forms or variations of
phenomenology either in use or development than shared here; those that I have chosen are
supported by a number of phenomenological research leaders including Patton (1990),
Moustakas (1994), and Creswell (2007) who strive to operationalize the philosophy of
phenomenology into the research method of phenomenological inquiry. Much of this
philosophical discipline is widely debated with major schools of thought divided between the
early architects of this approach including Husserl and Heidegger and those schools of
thought have contributed to the development of the forms of phenomenology that are
available to field research in tribal conflict. Roughly, the primary forms that I believe to be
most useful to field research in tribal conflict include, hermeneutic, existential and
psychological or transcendental phenomenology. A final form of interest to emerging
culture conflict is ethical phenomenology which has applications for extreme inter/intra-
tribal violence.
Hermeneutic phenomenology, or hermeneutics, as a form of research originated with
philosophical theories of Martin Heidegger (Laverty, 2003). But the application has
expanded throughout most of the social sciences to include archaeology (Johnsen & Olsen,1992), anthropology (Ranco, 2006), Sociology (Schröer, 2009), International Relations
(Rogers, 1996), and Psychology (Wertz, 2005) amongst other fields. A central challenge of
any tribal or emerging culture engagement activity is the inherent “unreachability of others'
subjective awareness [and] the context-boundedness of linguistic utterances (Schröer, 2009, p. 2)”
between members of different cultural contexts. Early hermeneutics involved the study and
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interpretation of often religious texts laden content reflecting social, historical, and cultural
context that continues to remain central to our task of engaging emerging cultures in
conflict. This is especially so as the field has evolved from principally text based forms to the
full range of human communication to include multi-media. What makes hermeneutics
important and useful as a method of inquiry in tribal conflict is its focus on the hostperspective and the historical, social and cultural context that the perspective is embedded
within. A central question that illustrates such an approach to research might be the
following question: What is the nature of the participants’ interpretation of reading and comparing their
historical accounts of Arab versus their African heritage? Such a question would be a prerequisite for
disentangling tribes engaged in violent contest over the meaning and ownership of Muslim
forms of social construction that benefit one cultural group and detriment another. This is
where hermeneutics can become a powerful tool to exposing the hidden context that
permeates the Lebenswelt of the conflict society:Hermeneutic research is interpretive and concentrated on historical meanings of experience and their developmental and cumulative effects on individual and social levels. This interpretive process includes explicit statements of the historical movements or philosophies that are guiding interpretation as well as the presuppositions that motivate the individuals who make the interpretations (Barclay, 1992; Polkinghorne 1983) (Laverty, 2003, pp. 15-16).
Without unpacking the complex meanings associated with each cultural participant
group’s narrative story, field researchers will have a difficult time understanding the issues in
such high context societies. This is because they (and often their external interpreter
support) are immersed in a “historical context different from that in which the actions and
texts they seek to understand are situated…[and] it would appear that we could never be
assured of confronting anything other than a construct of our own socio-historical horizon”
(Owensby, 1994, p. 3). Mediation, facilitation and other engagement strategies do not come
with a translation service and the field researcher conducting tribal engagement is left to
their own devices to avoid inadvertent replacement of social reality with “a fictional non-
existing world constructed by the scientific observer” (Schultz, 1970). An example of this is
the Fur tribe of Baldong Village in Jebel Mara, Western Darfur. This community’s African
tribal history is intricately mixed with the tenants of Islamic law and social order, but in a way that provides women a higher, more elevated position within the social order. This
history is written in Arabic on large carved wooden plaques that are communal in ownership
between the village heads of families. To read them is an exercise in fantasy and fiction
according to Arab Muslims who have been able to see them. Such dismissive attitudes result
from a belief that these intricate mixtures of African, Arab and Muslim meanings constitute
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heresy and blasphemy and the wooden plaques of tribal history have been singled out for
destruction during inter-tribal conflict. Hermeneutic inquiry into the wooden texts then,
allows the conflict researcher to map out the cultural and identity positions and interests
underlying the psycho-cultural needs of the community as part of the mediation, facilitation
and engagement process.Existential and transcendental phenomenology are similar to hermeneutical in that they
are all concerned with the perspective and meaning making of the participant individually
and within the collective. Where hermeneutical adds in the requirement of historical meaning
and context as an element of understanding how they affect or filter the present, existential
and transcendental forms of phenomenology focus on the placement of the researcher. In
existential forms of phenomenology, the focus is on the ontology of being in the world
rather than transcending the lived world. Thus research questions such as how do the survivors
of an inter-tribal attack on a village understand and perceive the nature of their realities, seek tounderstand what has changed or what has stayed the same. His research questions might
focus on understanding their connection to tribal lands and resources, sociological structure
of the tribe and its relations with other tribes all up against the backdrop of the ongoing
violent conflict as a necessary precondition for the co-creation with the tribe of strategies for
defense and development.
By contrast, transcendental or psychological phenomenological inquiry requires the
observer-researcher to transcend past personal experience and see the conflict elements in
front of him/her from a neutral perspective. To eliminate the preconceptions or
prejudgments about the nature of events and activities in favor of capturing the perspective
or viewpoints of those who are actually involved in and affected by what was happening to
them (Moustakas, 1994). Transcendental phenomenological inquiry focuses on the essential
meanings of individual experiences. Such inquiry seeks to document the invariant structures
of human experiences or of a phenomenon; what is the core that holds the phenomena, or
experiences together. From this explanation, a qualitative question asked under this form
might be: what is the essence of the experience of being a survivor of ethnic cleansing now living in a UN
refugee camp? From such transcendental phenomenological inquiries the researcher gains an
understanding of what is necessary for resettlement of villages or the participant meaning of appropriate levels of physical security to alleviate the conditions of traumatic stress and
begin the process of sociological reconstruction.
One final form of inquiry to consider for tribal and emerging culture conflict is ethical
phenomenology which turns away from a focus on the self of the participant and asks about
the relationship of the participant to the non-self; the other that defines him. While Max
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Scheler is probably the originator of the form, its voice and proponent is a Nazi holocaust
survivor named Emmanuel Levinas (1998). While not yet translated into a separate research
methodology, as a mindset approach, ethical phenomenology can assist the researcher with
understanding how individuals and collectives view the appearance of the opposing other,
especially in extreme inter or intra tribal violence. Howard Adelman (1997) approaches thephenomenology of the other in his explorations of the genocidal slaughter of Hutu refugees
in Burundi camps. Of phenomenological interest to the conflict engagement researcher is
the way that the Tutsi avengers approached the appearance of the Hutu other, with a need to
split off the hated other from the corporate body from which both constructed ethnicities
originated:
One manner of killing Hutu refugees in Burundi entailed first splitting a bamboo in two parts and then splitting the body in two by driving the bamboo up through the anus, or taking a hammer and “splitting the forehead in half”, as if the mode of killing was intended to send the spirit of the dead
into permanent exile, forever alienated from one’s home so that for evermore that individual could never again dream of recovering the imagined lost land as one’s inland (Adelman, 1997, p. 4).
The psychology of this genocidal phenomena is complex, consisting of an inability of the
individuals performing the killing to reconcile the existence of the other without suffering
collapsing individual and group identity. Such gruesome destruction of the physical bodies of
the ‘others’ constitutes the removal of them psychically from the inner sanctum of the
threatened identity. Adelman’s research ideated home and exile as mental representations of
an even deeper split between the secret acknowledgement of connection and the desire for
excommunication between the two halves; Tutsi and Hutu. His phenomenological research
showed that the participants extended this excommunication from the physical to the
metaphysical further increasing the ferocity of the killings. For the purposes of engaging
tribal conflict then, the researchers ability to delve into such difficult conceptions and
distortions of an ‘other’ that is related by blood and marriage would seem axiomatic to any
attempts at resolving the conflict. The particular psychological pathology of the killing within
the Tutsi-Hutu genocide in Rwanda mirrors that which we experienced between African-
Arab genocide in Darfur and requires phenomenological inquiry both to the inner
directedness of self and the outer directedness of other to fully comprehend the powerfulmeanings at work. Without established methodologies for researching and understanding
the mental object centered on self and on other that leads to or creates the phenomena of
genocidal intent, the field researcher will most probably be overwhelmed by the rage and
violence that controls the landscape.
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Conclusion:
Benefits and Challenges of phenomenological research and analysis in tribal conflict
For the practitioner of tribal and emerging culture engagement, a number of bewildering
issues present themselves the moment that he/she steps foot into the sociocentric world of
an emerging culture. I suggest that the most difficult of these issues includes how to crossfrom their egocentric understanding of sociological structure to a sociocentric version with
all its differences in individual agency, identity and narrative history. Phenomenological
inquiry conducted by egocentric researchers within subject groups that are themselves
egocentric presents the normal requirements of bracketing out personal bias, a necessary
condition for the practice of transcendental inquiry. Doing so however when the
psychological structure of identity is group-centric (sociocentric) is more complex. The
researcher must recognize that the locus of control for the individual is different in such
societies. In egocentric societies’ characteristic of developed and urban communities, thelocus of control is internal to the individual. Parents, school and society teach or imprint
upon children the requirement for individual agency as well as a responsibility to control that
individual agency in terms of social conduct, communication and emotional release. This
internal locus of control together with the emphasis on individual agency that allows the
independent interaction of the individual amongst differing families and cultural groups also
creates and sustains a low context society and bases it on a guilt-versus-innocence
framework of justice.
In sociocentric societies, the locus of control is external to the head of family, clan and
tribe in a system that disallows independent interaction in favor of negotiated relationships
between similar families and clans that share common cultural idealizations and practices.
This creates and sustains a high context society and bases it on shame-of-alienation versus
pride-of-inclusion as a principal framework for social justice (Scheff & Retzinger, 1991).
Phenomenological inquiry and PAR in these situations where the researcher is egocentric
and the subject(s) are sociocentric enhances the difficulties in laying aside preconceived
notions of what mental objects represent and how they are represented. In this instance,
bracketing takes on an added dimension where the researcher has to overcome the intuitive
attempt to view the appearance of object as a single human entity rather than as a sharedsocial-vision of that object.
Second, the issue of bias is not so simple to bracket out when there is so little in
common between the world that the researcher left and the one he/she is to operate in as
mediator, PAR researcher, advisor or trainer. During training sessions with American and
NATO personnel deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan to participate in Village Stability
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Operations (VSO), Female Engagement Teams (FET) or Tribal Engagement Teams (TET),
we have continually had to dissuade deploying members that the societies they would be
engaging did not need a Wal-Mart, McDonalds, Superhighways, Dams, or the many
accoutrements of modern society writ small. This challenge far exceeds the normal
understanding of the need for phenomenological bracketing in inquiry by researchers fromdeveloped societies who operate in underdeveloped communities. Such personnel as
mentioned above however have a requirement to conduct research in order to accomplish
their missions and this can include phenomenological inquiry and PAR at a minimum.
Creswell includes a quote from Jeanne LeVasseur suggesting that “we need a new definition
of epoché or bracketing, such as suspending our understanding in a reflective move that
cultivates curiosity (LeVasseur, 2003)” (Creswell, 2007, p. 62). This is a start in the right
direction and many more such modifications to the practice of qualitative research must be
developed to accommodate the transition of defense & development from an attitude of ‘shoot first then ask’ to one of research dependent action. If such government and NGO
sponsored practitioners are to succeed, they will need to be armed with the tools of
qualitative research and such tools may need to be modified for their use. The development
of instructional methods for these personnel that focus on preparing them for
phenomenological inquiry, participatory action research, mediation, facilitation and technical
training would seem to be principal area for academic growth in support of conflict analysis
and resolution.
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