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Albert Piette

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Name
  
Albert Piette


Albert Piette httpsuploadwikimediaorgwikipediacommonsthu

Albert Piette (born April 18, 1960) is a Belgian anthropologist from Namur, Belgium. He is a professor at Paris West University Nanterre La Défense.

Contents

Albert Piette FileAlbert Piette 2JPG Wikimedia Commons

His researches concern the questions of observation and selection of data. His fields are especially in the religious world. In most of his books, he describes and analyses details and ordinary forms in situations of everyday life. He builds an existential anthropology, especially focusing on minor modes of human presences, in order to understand collective life and the differences between humans and other animals.

In his recent books, from the notions of phenomenography, ontography and ontology, Albert Piette elaborates anthropology as an empirical and theoretical science, different from sociology and ethnology. It would have its own methods of observation, phenomenography and ontography, and its own objects to observe, describe and analyse: humans’ existences and non-human’s existences around people. Piette’s anthropological world is filled with Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, apes and monkeys, gods and institutions, existences and presences, activity and passivity, instants and evolution. According to Piette, that is an existential anthropology.

This consists in studying humans as existing, perceiving their existence as their own, and knowing that they will lose it too. In this perspective, existential anthropology observes the microcontinutiy of the individual, living the moments and situations according to various modalities of presence-absence and passivity-activity. Piette does not want to assess existential anthropology as secondary ; on the contrary he considers it as crucial for anthropology, its future and its detachment from sociology.

In the aim of detailed observations of existences, Albert Piette thinks that ethnography, working especially on groups and activities, is less suitable that phenomenography, focusing on singular individuals. As the word implies, phenomenography studies on the one hand what appears, forms, movements, gestures and on the other hand, as an empirical counterpoint to phenomenology, it attempts to describe states of mind and feelings in the moments’ continuity.

Books

  • Les Jeux de la fête, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 1988.
  • Le mode mineur de la réalité : paradoxes et photographies en anthropologie. Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters. 1992. ISBN 9789068314427. 
  • Les Religiosités séculières, Paris, PUF, 1993.
  • Ethnographie de l'action : l'observation des détails. Paris: Editions Métailié. 1996. ISBN 9782864242147. 
  • La Religion de près. L'activité religieuse en train de se faire, Paris, Métailié, 1999.
  • Détails d'amour ou le lien par l'écriture. Paris: L'Harmattan. 2003. ISBN 9782296312418. 
  • Le Fait religieux. Une théorie de la religion ordinaire, Paris, Economica, 2003.
  • Le temps du deuil : essai d'anthropologie existentielle. Paris: Ed. de l'Atelier. 2005. ISBN 9782708238312. 
  • Petit traité d'anthropologie, Marchienne-au-Pont, Socrate Editions Promarex, 2006.
  • L'Être humain, une question de détails, Marchienne-au-Pont, Socrate Editions Promarex, 2007.
  • L'Acte d'exister. Une phénoménographie de la présence, Marchienne-au-Pont, Socrate Editions Promarex, 2009.
  • Anthropologie existentiale, Paris, Pétra, 2009.
  • Propositions anthropologiques pour refonder la discipline, Paris, Pétra, 2010.
  • Fondements à une anthropologie des hommes, Paris, Hermann, 2011.
  • De l'ontologie en anthropologie, Paris, Berg International, 2012.
  • L'origine de la croyance, Paris, Berg International, 2013.
  • Contre le relationnisme. Lettre aux anthropologues, Lormont, Le Bord de l'eau, 2014.
  • Méditation pessoanienne. Science de l'existence et destin de l'Anthropologue, Paris, Éditions Matériologiques, 2014.
  • Avec Heidegger contre Heidegger. Introduction à une anthropologie de l'existence, Lausanne, Éditions L'Âge d'Homme, 2014.
  • What is Existential Anthropology ?, edited with Michael Jackson, New York - Oxford, Berghahn, 2015. ISBN 978-1-78238-636-0
  • Existence in the Details. Theory and Methodology in Existential Anthropology, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 2015. ISBN 9783428146772
  • Aristote, Heidegger, Pessoa : l'appel de l'anthropologie, Paris, Pétra, 2016.
  • L'humain impensé, Paris, Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest (in collaboration with Jean-Michel Salanskis), 2016.
  • Antropologia dell'esistenza, Venizia, Alvisopoli, 2016.
  • Separate Humans. Anthropology, Ontology, Existence, Milan, Mimesis International, 2016.

    • Online articles and book chapters

    Directly downloadable on Albert Piette's homepage and on Academia.edu

    References

    Albert Piette Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA