Albert Piette

Albert Piette (born April 18, 1960) is a French anthropologist. He holds the position of professor at Paris Nanterre University.

Piette has conducted research with a focus on observation, particularly within the realm of religion. He has conducted analysis of everyday life, referring to it as the "minor mode of reality."

For several years, Piette has been dedicated to elaborating anthropology as a distinct discipline, delineating it as a science of the human being separate from sociology and ethnology. He advocates for precise theoretical and methodological frameworks within anthropology, aiming to incorporate the human being as a distinct entity within the field. While traditional anthropology focuses on cultural sets, social systems, situations, actions, and relations, Piette proposes existential anthropology to observe, describe, and analyze the micro-continuity of human existence, emphasizing various modalities of presence-absence and passivity-activity. He views existential anthropology as crucial for the future of anthropology, emphasizing its importance in distinguishing anthropology from other social sciences. Piette considers the concept of the "minor mode" as an essential element in defining anthropological difference within this framework.

Piette suggests that for detailed observations of human beings, phenomenography may be more suitable than ethnography, which typically concentrates on activities and groups. Phenomenography, focusing on singular individuals, examines movements, postures, gestures, and, as an empirical counterpart to phenomenology, describes states of mind and feelings within the continuity of moments.

Expanding on this perspective, Piette introduces the concept of "volume" to elucidate existential anthropology's emphasis on the human being, which he terms as a "volume of being" or a "human volume." This concept, linked with volumography and volumology, enables him to emphasize the unity, entirety, uniqueness, and stylistic continuity of the human entity. Provided by Wikipedia