Existence in the Details.

This book is an anthropology book, not a social and cultural anthropology book, but an existential anthropology book. It presents a critique of the theories and methods of the social sciences, which Albert Piette reproaches for side-stepping human beings, their modes of being and more generally the fact of existing. The book also offers an original combination of methods for exploring the details of existence: the particularities of each person in a group, the succession of situations in a day, and the subtlety of moments of presence. It gives rise to new theoretical propositions on what constitutes the specificity of human existence and social life.

Albert Piette is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Paris-Nanterre and Researcher at the Centre for Ethnology and Comparative Sociology (CNRS). He is the author of books in French about anthropological theory, methodology of details, religious phenomena, and especially existential anthropology.