About

C. Jason Throop is a professor in the UCLA Department of Anthropology with research and teaching interests situated at the intersection of medical and psychological anthropology. His work broadly examines human existence through its cultural, moral, and practical dimensions, emphasizing a phenomenological anthropological approach to understanding human ways of being-in-the-world. His contributions include theoretical and ethnographic work on empathy and intersubjectivity, investigations into experience in contemporary anthropological theory, and explorations of the cultural patterning of pain, sensation, emotion, and mood. Throop's research also addresses social suffering, illness experience, agency, will, and the existential and cultural processes underlying ethical modes of being. His regional specialization is Oceania, where he has conducted over 20 months of research on experiences of pain, suffering, illness, and morality on the island of Yap in Micronesia. He has authored a book titled 'Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap' and co-edited two volumes on empathy and the anthropology of will. Currently, he is developing a new empirical project on aging and climate change on Vancouver Island, Canada.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Epistemology
• Psychology
• Philosophy
• History
• Aesthetics
• Communication
• Psychoanalysis
• Visual arts
• Art

Selected publications

• The Anthropology of Empathy: Introduction

  Berghahn Books · 2022 · 11 citations

  • Sociology
  • Anthropology
  • Sociology
  PublisherDOI

• Husserlian horizons

  Routledge eBooks · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Epistemology
  • Philosophy

  This chapter sets ethnographic observations of Yapese moral experience after typhoon Sudal in conversation with the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s theorizing of moods. Moods are a central component of moral experience – not as something locatable in a specific act or thought, but as distributed through a situation as a form of attunement to possibilities, past, present, and unfolding. The chapter introduces Husserl and his theory of moods, paying special attention to their function in “illuminating” not only our life circumstances but also the space of existential possibilities that we may come to inhabit. The chapter then articulates the notion of “moral moods.” Considering Husserl’s writings in light of moral experiences in a Yapese context, the chapter argues that it is important to consider moods as part of moral experience, even if Husserl himself did not. Finally, the chapter discusses the importance of a conversant relation between philosophical and anthropological phenomenology.

  DOI

• Jazz Etiquette

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2021 · 6 citations

  • Sociology
  • Aesthetics
  • Art

  Abstract The interaction among a group of musicians before, during, and after the performance of a jazz standard is analyzed to show the interdependence of jazz aesthetics and jazz ethics. The authors argue that what makes jazz distinct from other kinds of musical traditions is not just the ubiquity of improvisation in the genre but the vulnerability that jazz improvisation always generates—a vulnerability that is due to the genre’s reliance on both shared conventions and partly unpredictable individual choices. Analyzing video recordings of a university course on jazz organized to reproduce the setting of a jam session, the authors examine in detail the interactional assumptions and consequences of choices made by band members during the performance of “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise.” The authors’ analysis shows how musicians position themselves to be responsive to one another as the song progresses, starting from an improvised “introduction” that sets the tempo, rhythm, and style of the song and continuing with smooth transitions from one solo to the next. Drawing from Erving Goffman’s ideas about the presentation of self and the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas, the authors examine the ethical implications of a musical “vacuum” that was created by one musician’s decision to wait to take his solo. In the interaction, the other musicians responded to the vacuum by assuming responsibility for the group’s performance and, more broadly, the performance of the jazz tradition, and this chapter uses their actions to illustrate how “jazz etiquette” operates as a practice that includes aesthetic, ethical, and practical concerns.

  DOI

• Phenomenology

  Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology · 2021 · 20 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Epistemology
  • Sociology

  Phenomenology is one of the most influential philosophical traditions of the twentieth century and has significantly shaped contemporary anthropological and social theory. This entry shows the various ways in which phenomenology has contributed to contemporary anthropology. In so doing, it also shows that a better understanding of the phenomenological tradition and what it offers social and historical analysis could further contribute to the development of anthropology as a discipline increasingly concerned with the relational interconnection between humans, nonhumans, and the worlds they variously share. This is done by focusing on phenomenology’s emphasis on ‘conditions of experience’, and how such conditions shape what and how it is to be human in any situated context. In particular, the entry emphasises the conditions of being-in-the-world, embodiment, and radical otherness, and shows how each of these have been utilised by phenomenological anthropologists in their analyses of socio-cultural life. Furthermore, the entry stresses that phenomenology has always been a critical endeavour. Historically, this was so in terms of the rethinking of some of the most fundamental concepts of the so-called 'Western tradition'. More recently, this critical aspect has focused on the ways in which such conditions of experience as race, class, and gender, among others, significantly shape the range of possibilities for any experience whatsoever.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jarrett Zigon

  2 shared

• Matthew McCoy

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Allen Tran

  University of Calgary

  1 shared

• Heather Spector Hallman

  1 shared

• Cheryl Mattingly

  Aarhus University

  1 shared

• Hildegard Diemberger

  1 shared

• Charles D. Laughlin

  Carleton University

  1 shared

• Thomas J. Csordas

  University of California, San Diego

  1 shared

Similar researchers at University of California, Los Angeles

• Antoni Ribash-218
• Timothy Cloughesyh-173
• Owen Witteh-170
• Yu Huangh-166
• David S. Eisenbergh-159