In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

n 1 CHAPTER 1 Phenomenology of Everyday Life: Fenomenología Cotidiana y los Hispanos It is impossible to derive the basic logic of a science of persons from the logic of nonpersonal sciences. No branch of natural science requires us to make the particular type of inferences that are required in a science of persons. R. D. Laing, Self and Others This book is a study of epistemology, which I define as what people know in their daily lives. Becker and Laing are used as starting points for a general depiction of Hispano thought, which includes the study of how language develops an understanding of the world of everyday life. Language usage is the vehicle for understanding how people name events, interactions, attitudes, and values. Understanding how words are used to construct the edifice of everyday life is best accomplished by using concepts from phenomenology. Phenomenology allows one to study the elements of everyday life as phenomena. In order for us to make a reasoned inquiry about something (e.g., mortificación) as a lingual event, we must be willing to suspend whatever beliefs and preconceptions we have about this term in order to develop an understanding of it and what it signifies. We need to learn how this word is understood and used by people in everyday life. In this approach, I treat everyday life—that is, “lived experience”—as phenomena and not as part of that which is taken for granted. I need to become a stranger to this reality—and sometimes to my own reality—in order to reexperience it and be able to say something about its nature. The world of everyday life is structured in terms 2 n Chapter 1 of words. Hispanos, like other people, have a vast array of words and concepts that they use in dealing with daily life. In 1964, Ernest Becker called for a “quiet revolution” in psychiatry, in which an invasion of psychiatry by philosophy and the social sciences would change the reductionist medical view of human problems. Becker’s work in part sets out to redefine and reexamine psychiatric symptoms and, in his words, “to merge [psychiatry] into a broad, human science so that the study of man in society, to which an enlightened social psychiatry will be a contributing discipline” (Becker 1964, 2). Philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and the other perspectives (e.g., existentialist thought) would enlarge the psychiatric view of man. This proposed revolution in psychiatry was prompted by two converging sources of dissatisfaction: the medical model as a perspective for the amelioration of human ills, and the physical science model for research on human problems. Part of the dissatisfaction with these concepts, argues R. D. Laing, is that the technical vocabulary used to describe psychiatric patients splits human beings into such dichotomies as inner and outer reality, mind and body, psych and soma, and physical and psychic reality. These terms serve to isolate humans from each other and from the world (Laing 1976, 24–26). When parts of this chapter were written many years ago, my intent was to break loose from reductionist views of Hispanos as portrayed in the social sciences, and also from a “science” perspective that defines concepts in terms of how they are to be “operationalized” and measured. I once presented a paper on the Hispano view of vergüenza and was asked what steps were to be taken to develop it into a “shame” scale. Similar questions were asked of a paper on mortification. Why had a survey not been conducted to situate the concept? The mortificación paper, as it was judged, needed not only an operational definition of the concept showing how one was going to measure it, but also a survey and a statistical analysis to “prove” the existence of the concept. The paper was rejected for publication because it failed to meet “scientific exactitude.” Another bone of contention stems from the predilection in mental health for defining a concept in terms of its remediation. A tendency exists among human services professionals to “medicalize” social problems and to define some issues in terms of their remediation. People suffer gravely from mortificación because it involves a social interaction in which one family member vexes another. I once received a telephone call from a state mental hospital employee saying that a recently admitted woman was suffering from mortificaciones (as the lady described her situation). Someone knew...

Share