| What is experience? What makes it happen? How does individual and/or social experience differ from one society to the other? These questions have fascinated anthropologists ever since they started to reflect on the preconditions of their discipline. However, debates on the significance of culturally bounded experience tended to revolve around the anthropologist as a stranger in the society that he studied. Less frequent were studies of how a society shapes the sensuous experience of its members. Theoretical and methodological issues as well as ques-tions of societal analysis need to be addressed when exploring experience in a comparative, anthropological perspective.
This course will examine several axes along which these questions have been approached. We will study the more general answers proposed by Alfred Schütz, Erwing Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu, and others in juxtaposition with specific ethnographic approaches, mainly from African societies. The course provides an introduction to the theoretical field as well as to a strand in the history of the discipline. |
| A comprehensive reading list will be accessible at the website by April 1st.
Required reading:
Bruner, Edward M. / Turner, Victor (eds.), The Anthropology of Experience. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Pr., 1986.
Goffman, Erving, Frame Analysis: An essay on the organisation of experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1974 [dt. Rahmen-Analyse. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977].
Schütz, Alfred / Luckmann, Thomas, Strukturen der Lebenswelt I, II. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979, 1982.
Stoller, Paul, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The senses in anthropology. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Pr., 1989.
Hastrup, Kirsten (ed.), Social Experience and Anthropological Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1994. |
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