Abstract 1:
Leviathan Multiple: Ontology in Social Contract Theory
Two central concerns of
applied evolutionary phenomenology ("AEP") are the
excorporation of an experiential body through
emgroupment, and the encounter of non-cospecific social entities as enabled by a tolerance for ambiguity in
agency perception. Where the former approaches identity as a process of reterritorialization of sedimented agentic singularities onto a body map, the latter uncovers the capacity for
uncanny percepts emergent of deterritorialized deployment of
sociality heuristics among coevolved codomesticates. Hobbes, in the ontological girding of his
Leviathan, anticipates an AEP both of
excorporate identity, articulated through the actor-author structure, and uncanny encounters with a non-cospecific, multitudinous other. Unfortunately, these insights are obscured in contemporary readings which conflate a "Mortall God", multitude in mediated relation to itself, with the actor upon which this identity relation hinges, nominally "sovereign", which unmoored of this fundamental structure, is reified as a heliophallic
power over. This work of
historical praxiography begins an excavation of the corpuscular objects by which
Leviathan was enacted within the mechanistic philosophy of its day, and the very different objects enacted as
Leviathan today. A reading that disentangles a "condition of nature" from post-Boylesian "states of nature" (ascendant in subsequent social theory) presents
Leviathan as a foundational text of AEP.
Abstract 2: Just So Queer: Group Selection for Human Courtship Mediation
Research conceived of as
evolutionary psychology tends towards a caricature of evolutionary theory as reducible to adaptations within a species as linear correlates to problems of biological reproduction and survival encountered by ancestral individuals. Seeking legitimacy by grounding its hypotheses and results in implicit narratives of
genetic fitness, such research more often than not founders on its own production of quasi-teleological explanations for patriarchal, heteronormative social behaviors witnessed among some human populations. Adopting instead a
spandrelist approach to uncover common phenotypes as necessary byproducts of
scaffold architectures of sociality, an
applied evolutionary phenomenology ("AEP") examines predictions of
group selection theory with regards to the reproduction of
public goods upon which genetic transmission of particular individuals is contingent but not determinative. Drawing upon
micro-political feminist theory and queer theory critiques of
identity consolidation, this research situates
leks, and specifically,
human leks, as emergent of natural selection upon social groups, such that the mechanisms of lek formation and
courtship mediation therein can be shown to operate in human social groups irrespective of the sexed bodies or gender identities of which such leks may be constituted. Potential paths of further application of group selection and feminist-queer theories within AEP going forward are outlined.
Abstract 3: Deep Description: Approaching an Empathetic Practice of Ethnography
A methodology of
thick description, as taken up within anthropology, rests on two corollary epistemological commitments: (i) that inherent in any observed act is a
meaning that can only be determined through interpretation within its cultural context; and (ii) that given enough cultural contextual description, a
rational observer can accurately arrive at the singular meaning of said observed act. Within an
applied evolutionary phenomenology ("AEP"), by contrast, meanings are understood not to inhere in acts, but rather in the diagnoses, or analyses, that attach to such acts as objects enacted by
situated observers. Acts, here, as the constituting elements of practices, are not possessed of meaning given by context, but rather are appropriated by an interpretation (also, notably, an act) according to which meaning is attributed. Drawing on the practice of
nonviolent communication, an AEP seeks not to describe the particularity of context
en route to a hermeneutics of specific meaning, but rather to hypothesize singularities of affect pointing to activations of general needs, and then to seek falsification (and/or elaboration) of those hypotheses through joint inquiry with informants. Such a "
deep description" is explored as an ethnographic method for tracing common conditions of human acts, including interpretive acts.
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