The poetics of self, body and world: A phenomenological reinterpretation of B.C. ethnography of Aboriginal peoples

The dissertation is a "legitimation study" based in phenomenological sociology which applies aboriginal folkloric accounts of the environment to uncover phenomenological assumptions with respect to "self, body and world" as an interconnected process. By showing the applicability of these categories to the literature on aboriginal folklore and traditions within British Columbia, the phenomenological viewpoint is shown to have merit and applicability as a tool within the field of environmental sociology. The theoretical objective of the dissertation is to evaluate the efficacy of European phenomenology's arguments that the "activities of the lived human body" are the process through which the world comes into being, are the foundation of the experiential self, and thus underlie aboriginal folkloric interpretations of the environment as a parallel non-dualistic approach. Through the application of the categories "body, self and world" to the folkloric world view of aboriginal peoples, the dissertation claims to both emphasize and valorize the presence of an expressive "aboriginal world", rich in the presence of human doing and human possibility as the evidence of a body/world poiesis. In the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The body is never the world or just an object in the world but that very medium whereby our world comes into being". Hence, the task of the dissertation, theoretically, is to move beyond the Cartesian substruction of space and the dualities of mind and body, subject and object and bodily insidedness and outsidedness of entities towards a representation of "the world" and of the environment as a sensuous field of human activity and involvement as shall be looked for in the various aboriginal folkloric accounts. In the phenomenological interpretation of spatiality, the experience of self is realized as that of a "being" transcended towards its world as one who is merged with one's environmental surroundings as a "ratio of the senses". Such an imbrication or merging suggests the absence of a separateness between people and their environmental surrounds and suggests the opportunity of gaining a deeper appreciation of how certain groups with ancestral claims to territory are imbricated in their environments. Thus, we shall seek to prove the argument that folkloric examples of the "aboriginal worlds" chosen for study offer clearer and more convincing examples of the integration of "being and doing" than those that could be shown in cultures founded to a greater degree upon the Cartesian ideal and the substruction of space. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...