The Routledge International Handbook of Existential Human Science

This volume is the first handbook to explore existentialism as epistemology and method. Trans-disciplinary in scope, it considers the nature of human subjectivity and how human experience ought to be studied, examining the connections that exist between the individual’s imagining of the world and their everyday practice within it.

Huon Wardle is an Anthropologist at the University of St Andrews. Author of An Ethnography of Cosmopolitanism in Kingston, Jamaica (2000), he focuses on the Caribbean, Kant’s Anthropology, and on cosmopolitan and cosmopolitical phenomena. Volumes include (with Moises Lino e Silva) Freedom in Practice (2017), (with Justin Shaffner) Cosmopolitics (2017), and (with Nigel Rapport) An Anthropology of the Enlightenment (2018). His essay, ＂The Artist Carl Abrahams and the Cosmopolitan Work of Centring and Peripheralizing the Self＂ won the Royal Anthropological Institute’s J. B. Donne Prize in 2014. With Paloma Gay y Blasco, he recently revised How to Read Ethnography (2019).

Nigel Rapport, MA (Cambridge) PhD (Manchester), is Emeritus Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where he was Founding Director of the St Andrews Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. He has also held the Canada Research Chair in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice at Concordia University of Montreal. He has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and of the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW). His research interests cover social theory, identity and individuality, community, conversation analysis, and links between anthropology and literature and philosophy. His recent books include: Anyone, the Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology (2012); Distortion and Love: An anthropological reading of the life and art of Stanley Spencer (2016); and Cosmopolitan Love: Ethical engagement beyond culture (2019).

Albert Piette is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Paris-Nanterre, researcher at the Centre for Ethnology and Comparative Sociology (CNRS). He has widely written about epistemology and methodology of anthropology. He claims a human-centered anthropology. His main books in French are Ethnographie de l’action (1996 and 2020), Le fait religieux (2005), Anthropologie existentiale (2009), Contre le relationnisme (2014), Le volume humain. Esquisse d’une science de l’homme (2017) and Anthropologie existentiale, autographie et entité humaine (2022). His books in English are Existence in the Details. Theory and Methodology in Existential Anthropology (2015), Separate Humans. Anthropology, Ontology, Existence (2016), Theoretical Anthropology or How to Observe a Human Being (2019). He has co-edited with Michael Jackson What is Existential Anthropology? (2015).