Social History of Experiences: A Theoretical-Methodological Approach

Abstract

How should we analyse experiences as societal phenomena? This chapter develops a historical-theoretical approach by building on the social theory of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann with Reinhart Koselleck’s temporal structures of experiencing. We first theorize how experiences are socially constructed and how experiences themselves construct the historically changing social reality. Second, we introduce analytic tools for approaching experiences in socio-historical research. The chapter conceptualizes the temporal and spatial structures of experience as layers of experience and scenes of experience, and indicates how they can be traced by exploring the sediments—shared meanings of experience—that are stored in different sign systems in a given historical context.