Researching Albert Piette

His researches has first focused on the questions of observation, especially in the religious world. He describes and analyses details and ordinary forms in situations of everyday life - what he named the minor mode of reality.

For several years, the objective of Albert Piette has been to elaborate anthropology as a specific discipline, a science of the human being, different from sociology and ethnology, with precise theoretical and methodological orientations and themes. The aim is to let in the human being, as a specific entity, inside anthropology, which he considers focused on cultural sets or social systems, and also on situations, actions, relations. In contrast, the task of existential anthropology would thus be to observe, describe and analyze the microcontinuity of the human being, living the moments and situations according to various modalities of presence-absence and passivity-activity. Albert Piette does not want to regard existential anthropology as secondary; on the contrary he considers it as crucial for anthropology, its future and its detachment from social sciences. In this project, he continues to make of the minor mode an essential element to define the anthropological difference.

With the aim of detailed observations of human beings, Albert Piette thinks that ethnography, working especially on activities and groups, is less appropriate than phenomenography, which focuses on singular individuals. As the word implies, phenomenography studies on the one hand what appears, movements, postures, gestures, and on the other hand, as an empirical counterpoint to phenomenology, it also attempts to describe states of mind and feelings in the continuity of moments.

Developing this perspective, Albert Piette calls upon the notion of volume to clarity the focus of existential anthropology on the human being, which he calls a volume of being or a human volume. This notion, associated to that of volumography and volumology, allows him to insist on the unity of the human entity, its entirety, its unicitiy and also its stylistic continuity.