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Abrahams, Roger D. 1981. “Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience.” In The Anthropology of Experience, Victor Turner, ed. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, pp. 45-72.

“Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience”
Roger D. Abrahams

[beginning of page 45]

With the explicit opening up of the discussion on the anthropology of experience, we acknowledge that we are moving out of the discourse on social institutions and into the realm of cultural performance and display. I take this to mean that we are no longer looking for the chartering legislation that puts a social group into business and keeps it there through the exercise of authority; rather, we seek the techniques by which the individuals in some sort of collectivity develop ways of acting that will authenticate both the actors and the group simultaneously.

As teachers and scribes we share in the crisis of legitimation. When words become only the basis of establishing meaningful relationships and other such egalitarian fictions, then the voices of authority are no longer given value or trust, and all of those who wear robes and speak from the pulpit or the dais can no longer expect to be listened to simply because of the authority given us by our filling such roles. When holy offices no longer automatically carry the power to irreversibly transform peoples’ status through simply performing acts vested in the roles, then who will listen to teachers who simply seek to inform and reveal the ways of the world?

As true modernists we respond by seeking to find new and more powerful ways of describing the ways such things work, so that our abilities to examine and perceive more deeply will be accorded some respect and admiration. Modishly, we replace the vocabulary and the practices of vested authority with terms and procedures proclaiming equality of humankind and the need to make a place in our systematic analyses for the achievement of [beginning of page 46] authenticity by the individual, as each person becomes part of a community and a society.

Surely that is what is going on here, is it not? We gather to mark the demotion of the key terms of authoritative rhetoric -- “tradition,” “custom,” even “institution” -- as we make one further effort at finding in everyday speech a vocabulary that will assist us in celebrating the project of self-possession, self-fashioning, self-expression; a project that sees all life as a constant achievement and all agreed-upon practices as techniques for simultaneously amplifying and questioning what it is we have agreed to in our own little groups. Thus “experience” and its associated vocabulary is elevated to the realm of the new holy word. In this social dispensation, individuals may find a new redemption -- or at least a validation -- in the world of the here and now, even if it is no longer attached to a divinely sanctioned plan.

By building on this word, which embodies that segment of life carved out by each of us, we follow in the great line of secular theologians, the clerisy, who make holy words of those which are otherwise most mundane and who seek in the process to raise the place of the examining self to one of such dignity that the older and more wrathful gods, if not appeased, can at least be ignored. This has been the holy practice of secular humanism: the ritualizing of the construction of one’s self. Going one further step in this reflexive development, we now acknowledge that all life involves the construction of agreed-upon fictions and that the least harmful, the least hegemonic, are those that assert self worth. All terms connected with institutional practice become a little suspect because of the power distribution and systems of control they have carried with them -- at least in past ethnographic analyses. Culture now achieves a new meaning, the achieved agreements of social practices, an agreement given reinforced value and meaning in each act of sociability. And such practices, when they are writ large in cultural displays and performances, have added power because they achieve their force through the coordination of the energies of the group involved in the celebration.

Erving Goffman, who spent many years in service to this humane discipline, left us with this litany: “Many gods have been done away with, but the individual himself stubbornly remains a deity of great importance. He walks with some dignity and is the recipient of many little offerings. He is jealous of the worship due [beginning of page 47] him, yet, approached in the right spirit, he is ready to forgive those who may have offended him” (1967:95). As a human, and therefore a social animal, the individual operates on the principle of goodwill, assuming until proven otherwise that unmannerly actions and breaches in the ritual of common courtesy arise from ignorance or ineptness, this too a part of the human condition. And so let this essay, even this book, be one of those offerings to the individual.

***

Under such radically secular conditions, the problem facing the humanist is not so much one of replacing the gods but finding a language to effectively replace the Word with new sacred words that will allow us to celebrate the survival of the human spirit. For many years “civilization,” “progress,” and “culture” bore this burden, gracefully submitting themselves to elevation. Of these, only the last has retained its haloed effect, through the efforts of those who recognize in the word’s capacities the possibility of linking together the way the peoples live, throughout the world.

But can any such “god term,” to use Donoghue’s (1976:123) designation, remain holy in the relentlessly self-examining environment in which we live? Words in this world are hallowed only so long as they retain their novelty as a sign of their vitality. And so the members of the clerisy continue to search through our everyday speech for these god terms knowing that they are not going to come from on high. As was done by Arnold, and more recently by Lionel Trilling, Erving Goffman, Raymond Williams, and Victor Turner, can new ones be recovered from the passing talk of the streets and parlors and reconstituted, like frozen orange juice, simply by adding water when needed? (1) Such key words, or root metaphors (to use some names by which such god terms have been discussed in the past), must contain such integrity and value that they can be employed, defended in their use, redeemed and re-redeemed for the spirit that resides within them. If we have such a term, “experience” is surely it. But let Donoghue’s (1976:123) warning be one that we keep in mind: “There is always a temptation to assume that because a god term is holy to its celebrant[s] it must be holy to everyone; a writer may make the mistake of thinking that he does not need to establish the sanctity of the word, that he has only to invoke it.”

Such a caution is especially appropriate in the present cir- [beginning of page 48] circumstances, where, as ethnographers of the behavior, performance, display, and celebration of diverse peoples, we must worry ourselves over the two kinds of errors into which enthusiasts fall. The first and most dreadful is that we so love our new holy words that we turn them into cliches and commonplaces, forgetting for the moment that we must maintain their spirit as well as their meaning. The second is that in our pursuit of insight we forget that the moral lesson of the new creed is that communication of deep meanings is difficult under any circumstance, and we find correspondences between cultures especially filled with obstacles to understanding.

This second area for potential error is especially perilous for the ethnographers who quite naturally pride themselves on being sensitive to cultural differences. It is therefore important to remind ourselves in our pursuit of an anthropology of experience that “experience” itself is a deeply coded word in our own culture; that is, the very conditions of modernity, especially as pursued in the United States, value experience for its own sake. Not only do we hunger and thirst for significant doings, but when we find them, simply by recognizing them as significant, by thinking and writing about them, we may elevate such occurrences to a status that makes considered examination difficult. Trilling (1979:82) points to just such a tendency in the works of those critically examining cultural texts: “When we yield to our contemporary impulse to enlarge all experience...we are in danger of making experience merely typical, formal and representative and thus losing one term in the dialectic that goes on between spirit and the conditioned.” This enlargement occurs simply in reporting the experience, isolating it from the course of everyday happenings, providing it with significant form after the fact. Lost in such a translation, Trilling continues, is “the actuality of the conditioned, the literality of matter, the peculiar authenticity and authority of the merely denotative.” By elevating our actions to stories and even more dramatic replayings, we lose some of the spirit that resides in actions simply because they are humdrum. Such a loss is hardly inconsequential, for we cannot allow ourselves to enter into an unexamined agreement with the thrill seekers and the hedonists that we will be interested in the manifestations of the human spirit only in aroused states; we must [beginning of page 49] manifest our interest in the quotidian experiences as well, and perhaps even in the depressed states of boredom, lassitude, even dispiritedness.

The problem arising for the observer of the regularities of human behavior and conduct is that the simple process of observation and reporting does, indeed, alter the significance and perhaps even the meaning of the activities themselves. This problem becomes all the more intense when reports are committed to paper or some other medium of record. With the increasing distance between the act and the apprehension of it by the reader, the hearer, the viewer, a loss of the spirit is more likely. This kind of recording may make the event itself seem more significant, for now it has been elevated almost to the status of performance, while at the same time making it seem merely typical, inasmuch as it becomes a “representative anecdote.”

Do not mistake me: I am not arguing that we should back away from the enterprise of discussing culture directly and openly in terms of personally registered actions. The word “experience” has such flexibility and can serve us so well in tying together the ordinary and the extraordinary; so much of life is already there, enshrined in its circle of meaning as it is used in the vernacular. Experiences happen to individuals and are therefore sometimes to be regarded as idiosyncratic; but these very same occurrences might, under other circumstances, be usefully regarded as typical. Morris (1970:115) argues in such a direction by distinguishing between “private experiences” and “common experiences.” Experience is, at one and the same time, illustrative of what individuals do and of the conventional patterns of culturally learned and interpreted behavior that makes them understandable to others.

Moreover, as a concept, experience underscores the ongoingness of life and the open character of ongoing actions, yet it also encourages us to see actions as units of behavior that can be separated from the rest of the action and talked about later. It is a term of connections because it encourages us to discuss life in terms of how present activities of even the most threatening sort may be drawn on and replayed in some form in the future: “Experience is the best teacher,” “Live and learn,” and all that. Experience contains ordinary acts, from the casual to the most eventful occurrences. It embodies both meanings and feelings, the [beginning of page 50] flowering of individual response that continually gravitates toward typicality, so that afterward we, can find words to talk about what happened.

Because our individual experiences are so central to the ways in which we put together a sense of our own identity, to underscore the typicality is to confront one of our dearest held beliefs: that having been made individuals, we should do everything we can to hold on to our sense of uniqueness. Yet experience tells us that what happens to us is never so original, especially as we must discuss it. This discussion makes us all the more sensitive to the ways we ourselves are not so original, especially as we recognize ourselves as members of a generation, a network, a community. Without the deep investigation on our own part of how our experiences reflect our deepest cultural concerns, and the patterns we unwittingly impose on developing peoples, we have just another Western ethnocentric model of analysis. Further, it seems especially important to develop this self-consciousness of our own cultural patterns and limitations, because those involved in developing experience as a term of art do so in extension of the idea of the performance of culture -- that is, by looking at the ways in which cultural displays, like shows and ceremonies, festivals and rituals, make explicit what is regarded by the membership of the culture itself as the significant moments of life. However, culture lies not only in such singular activities but in the connections between the everyday and these more intense, framed and stylized practices.

My worry begins, I suppose, in recognizing that as a nation of individualists, Americans have placed ever greater importance on experience, relating it to our notions of the person in constant development, always heading toward some kind of self-realization. We have been searchers after experience, always preparing ourselves for significant actions that may enhance our lives if we remain open to the new. Our “native theory” of significant action reflects this: newness, novelty, and a desire to be in on the news has been at the front of the American agenda since the beginnings of our history. Apparently the encounter with the new has been tied up in our imaginations with the prospect of social, cultural, and personal renewal. Indeed, one of the important meanings of the word refers, in shorthand, to conversion, to being saved. This obsession with novelty, accompanied by a fear of boredom, is [beginning of page 51] deeply implicated in the almost compulsive need to move on. From the figure of the pilgrim-stranger to the romanticized hobo, our most admired protagonists are the ones who were able to move on...and sometimes move up. Traveling on has been almost institutionalized through its connection with the missionary, the peddler, or the member of the Peace Corps -- all processes of Yankee ingenuity that are not too distantly related to “doing anthropology” (especially of the “applied” sort).

All of us have a double consciousness and a sometimes self-contradictory value system about the meaning of these new experiences in the creation of ourselves and the needs and rights of others. Daniel Schorr, the former newscaster who was caught up in the Pentagon Papers controversy, nicely discusses this double consciousness. To him, “reporting” and “reality” are deeply connected; he notes (Schorr 1977:vii) that as a reporter he was constantly confronted with the need “to discover the ‘real story’ or to extract it from the mists of vagueness and pretenses.” A mighty calling, and one that demanded a certain amount of distance from the frantic events to which he and the people he interviewed were witness. This man, who could truthfully claim to be engaged directly in “the action,” nevertheless responded to the experience as more the observer than the participant:

It made me feel more real not to be involved. Participants took positions, got excited, shaped events for woe or zeal, but what a strange paradox that seems -- to feel more real not be involved -- to be where it is happening but not to be engaged. To keep the action sufficiently distanced to be able, still, to call it an event, yet because that very distance provides the objectivity necessary to sort out important details of “the story.” In fact, just being there, seeing the picture without being in it, qualifies the activity as an experience precisely because one is able to report, firsthand, what really happened. I remained the untouched observer, seeing the whole picture because I was not [actually] in the picture. (Schorr 1977:vii)

Schorr might be describing our work as ethnographers. Does not the field experience call for us to become professional naifs, demanding that we self-consciously retrack ourselves? A creative regression, if you wish, but a regression nonetheless. Placing ourselves in this position, we may observe and ask and even imitate, without taking the social risks such acts might produce were we [beginning of page 52] taken to be adults. This is carried out, moreover, with the knowledge that while we seem to our informants to act like children, in some ways because we are outsiders who come with devices of a powerful technology (like cars and tape recorders), we can hardly be treated as less than adults.

Doing controlled observation reflects an approach to events as experiences that provides a kind of spiritual hedge against interpreting experience-at-a-remove as simple thrill seeking or voyeurism. With our immense hunger for experience, having achieved this psychological distance while we make our professional observations, the feeling of noninvolvement -- indeed, of the inability to involve ourselves fully -- begins to affect the quality of our observations. Somehow we find a substitute with sufficient sustaining power to be able to say we were not actively involved. Being on the sidelines merely watching the big plays permits us to replay them later to those who were not there, on the spot; there is sufficient energy in such happenings for all those present to be recharged by the action. But even so, those who are only looking on and reporting develop a double consciousness about the activity that always threatens to undercut any claims for uniqueness.

The problem of this double consciousness is great, far greater than I am able to get a handle on here, for it has so much to do with our notions of what constitutes learning and to what extent and purpose we really do live and learn. Moreover, with the growing emphasis on the individual’s control over his or her own identity, the institutional ways of engineering personal transformations have lost much of their power. For such socially sanctioned transformation to occur, we must believe in the power of those invested with authority to mark these changes for us. But in many ways such authority has been undercut because of our belief that we should do such changing on our own. This is authentication substituted for authority. If success in life were a given, there would be little question, I suppose, that experience could be a useful teacher, if not always the best one. But a corollary of our American Dream is what might be called an American Dread, of finding out that growing means eliminating some of our options. Failing in a task will do this, of course, but so will succeeding too well and being promoted in some way because of the success. Our dread is always that we can’t go back.

In fact, many of the formative thinkers on the subject of the [beginning of page 53] relationship between narrated experience and life and art have worked their profundities in witnessing failure. Donoghue (1976:104) takes note of just this dynamic in discussing how American writers draw on the experience of personal failure, making it into “aesthetic forms and ceremonies...to take away some of its ‘stress,’ thus entering into the all-too-human process of assimilating it.” His response is that of the literary critic still adhering in some degree to the “wound and bow” approach by which great art is forged out of deep personal hurt. Donoghue discerns in American letters a pattern by which the genre “achieves its vitality by a labour to transform the mere state of failure into the artistic success of forms and pageants; it learns a style not from a despair but from an apparent failure -- some, like Henry Adams, by making the worst of it”; others, like Henry James, “by making the best of it, and the best of it is the same thing as the most of it” (1976:104).

The perception is important because it recognizes in such a dynamic and often self-contradictory form our attraction to experience for its own sake and our ambivalence about why we are so drawn to it. Both success and failure are useful outcomes, especially as the experience is talked about and written about later. While there is little problem for the anthropologist to recognize this complex motive in modern life, just how much does enter into the decision to become an ethnographer, to go into the field, thus testing oneself and one’s own cultural moorings by a people living and identifying with the writings about the systematics of those who live according to different cultural ways? We know of this problem because doing fieldwork is regarded as a rite de passage for the social and cultural anthropologist.

Just how American this double consciousness of experience is emerges when looking at the number of our lasting works of literature that draw on the contrast between the doer and the watcher the Henry James who so glories in the achievement of the occasional moment of felicity in the midst of decorous, if frivolous, doings; the Henry Adams who can only scorn the present because of its deep duplicities and its failure of nerve. There are, of course, many American works of fiction built around a pair of characters who dramatize the problem: one deeply involved in the action, whether successfully or not, the other a witness to it all and only sometimes a judge as well. While one reading of The Adventure of [beginning of page 54] Huckleberry Finn would make Huck and Jim into such a pair, the great example of this type of narrative is, of course, Moby Dick, with Ishmael being drawn unwittingly to the sea and to the cruise -- drawn, as we find out, by a force of life confrontation epitomized in Ahab’s obsession. More recent outstanding examples of such onlookers and reporters are Nick Carraway in Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby; Nick Adams in Hemingway’s short stories; the more world-weary Jake Barnes and his attitudes toward bullfighting and war in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises; and Stingo in Styron’s Sophie’s Choice.

We identify all of these characters with the storyteller-author and his growing up through having experienced the energy and the frenzy of these more charismatic presences, these larger-than-life figures, the Ahabs and Gatsbys who represent a mysterious power resource that guarantees that wherever these figures are, significant things will occur. These quintessential American novels are constructed around the interplay between the characters who instigate the action and those who are there to observe and record, who are caught up in the swirl of transforming events but emerge much wiser, perhaps bruised by events but relatively unscathed, “so the story can be told.”

We are now informed of the ongoing American concern with experience, but what of its potential in developing ethnographic strategies? With few exceptions, most formal ethnographies tell us little about the experience of the fieldworker and almost as little about the experiences of the people being observed. Rather, we have records of the system and institutions that order the lives of people in groups, enlivened every once in awhile with a representative anecdote. On the whole, however, the reflexive dimension of the ethnographic literature has not been well developed. While we have a number of fascinating autobiographical reports from the field, there is very little address on the part of the fieldworker as to how cultural norms and professional expectations entered into the collection and reporting of materials, much less what was happening to the collector that might have made a difference (cf. Bose 1982). Even behavior on the experiential level is not often in our monographs. To be sure, there have been a series of revealing field reports that focus on the phenomenological dimensions of the discovery of self and others, through developing relationships in the field situation (Rabinow 1977 and Crapanzano 1980 are two [beginning of page 55] that come to mind), in addition, to the classic anthropological novels that elaborate on the representative anecdote technique. However, as ethnographic reports get even closer to the details of recurrent expressive behaviors, there has arisen a felt need to discover how individuals within a community learn cultural performances, how to prepare for them and judge them, and how to feel about them before, during, and after the actual occurrence. With this switch, more ethnographic attention is being paid to native theories of emotions and feelings, as well as to the more objective utilitarian and symbolic orders provided for participants in a culture simply by having grown up within a specific milieu (cf. Lutz 1982; Feld 1982; Myers 1979; in the area of folklore, cf. Glassie 1982).

As I see it, this drawing on experience in anthropology is a part of the process of internal monitoring of basic terms and concepts that must take place in every professional discipline. In the social sciences -- especially sociology and anthropology -- we have unique problems in taking stock of special terminology as key words are derived from everyday talk (see Williams 1979:180 for an indication of the importance of experience in his ongoing concern with key words). As native interpretation becomes more and more important in our ethnographic reports, experience gives promise of tying together our everyday feelings with those encountered during Big Times. Experience addresses the ongoingness of life as it is registered through the filter of culture -- that is, through acts we have already learned to interpret as experiences or, in the case of shock, surprise, embarrassment, or trauma, through acts we reprocess as experiences after the fact, by talking about them and thus making them seem less personal, more typical.

At this point it is probably most useful to point out our commonsensical distinction between events -- things that happen -- and experiences -- things that happen to us or others. The distinction is important for a number of reasons, not least of all because notions of who we are as individuals are often tied up with those unique-if-typical things that have happened, especially when those happenings have become stories we tell ourselves. In this dimension individual experiences enter into the.putting together of our “identity kit,” to use Erving Goffman’s term. Rose (1982:220) is one of the few social scientists who has addressed the notion of experience and has consistently made distinctions between what [beginning of page 56] “experiences we ...recognize as meaningful as they are occurring”; the semiotic systems by which we are able to order experiences as we are having them; and an economy of experiences in which those we have are to be regarded as personal resources that may be used in interpersonal exchanges as a way of authenticating ourselves.

This last, our using experiences as part of our personal economy, is perhaps the dimension least easily and readily dealt with by ethnographers. Stories about one’s own experiences provide an important resource for not only establishing one’s place in the community (because of one’s special knowledge) but also for establishing one’s identity, should that be an important feature of the culture. Such stories are commonly told to those who will respond in kind, or at least with some other kernel of information regarded as equally valuable. Should we bear such notions in mind, we would not be so surprised when many of the questions we ask of our informants are regarded as strange precisely because the answers call for a giving away of scarce resources.

The experience of being asked to “give yourself away,” however, is far from unusual in our own most personal interactions: examine how you feel when someone tells one of your stories, one that is about something you have experienced and told about in the past. Your response is likely to be one of feeling mimicked; or worse, your ability to speak for yourself is put into question. I am not arguing that this is the feeling inspired in all cultures when personal stories are expropriated, only that a truly reflexive anthropology would make one aware of the possibility.

This domain of radical individuality, of the need to feel unique, is not held by the rest of the world. As Geertz (1976:225) has cannily put it: “The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and action organized into a distinctive whole is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the concept of the world’s cultures.” Nonetheless, he recognizes the draw that such a conception of personhood might have on ethnographic studies that attempt to get at the everyday experiences of those under observation. His caveat is a commonsensical one, even if difficult to abide by: “Rather than attempt to place the experience of others within the framework [of “person” or “self”] we must...view their experiences within the frame- [beginning of page 57] work of their own idea of what selfhood is” (1976:225). This calls for the collection of “native exegeses” of the experiences regarded as meaningful; that is, discussion not only of the experience itself but its value from the perspective of the one to whom it happened and others within the same interpretive community -- the emic way of describing culture. But more commonly, in developing perspectives to effectively convey the idea of experience in any culture, we will draw on our own metaphors -- that is, we will use an etic perspective and the anthropological terms of art that go along with it -- for getting at the ways in which repeated actions within a culture are systematized and anticipated.

For some decades, for instance, following the fashion of couching matters in evolutionary terms, we discussed not only cultural history but everyday practices in specific groups in terms of the “flow” of life. This draws on the power of hydraulic metaphor that depicts “what happens” in a culture in terms of the pull of gravity on a growing stream or the pushing along of that water by some pumping mechanism. More recently, we have changed our metaphoric sources somewhat, depicting life in one or another kind of performance (those calling for “scores” or “scripts” or “scenarios”), or we have resorted to the closely related image of life as a game whose rules and plays and moves may be usefully described. The present appeal of the terms “experience” and “event” seems to respond, at least in part, to a sense that these analogical strategies have begun to lose their descriptive power, precisely because the models from which the analogies arise are ones that are privileged within our own culture and may, ethnocentrically, place the units of experience-in-common in the culture under observation in a misleading universe of discourse.

The notion of describing cultural activities in our own vernacular terms for goings-on -- terms like “action,” “practice,” “occasion,” “event,” “experience” -- seems, then, to be an attempt to sidestep the limitations of the tropes derived from these play activities. We are pulled toward a vocabulary drawn from the “real” exchange of energies for serious purposes with such terms: a vocabulary deeply implicated in our own very American and modern discourse on individuality and selfhood, our native notions of personhood, as discussed by Geertz.

The American pragmatic tradition of philosophy has brought this weighting of the everyday and transitional character of life as [beginning of page 58] lived into the open (cf. Turner 1982 for another genealogical view). As anthropologists we are drawn to the idea for many of the same reasons our philosopher forebears were: to escape the imprisonment of using a priori ideal categories of the significant, such as the metaphysical philosophical tradition provided us in such notions as “sublimity,” “virtuosity,” “genius.” The pragmatists sought instead to encourage a pluralistic cast of mind that would deprivilege the extraordinary moment of vision in favor of the more spontaneous chance occasion available to anyone, not just those who had refined their sensibilities and pursued their genius.

The philosopher who most fully and poetically developed this point of view was William James. “Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected,” he insisted. “Often, indeed, it seems to be there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real living line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn” (in McDermott 1967:212-13). The tradition was set in motion by Ralph Waldo Emerson, especially in his later essays when he was extending his thought to the importance of the momentary. Emerson’s (1903-4, III:64) personal battle was with the moral life that could overwhelm the possibility of happiness in quotidian life: “We must set up the strong present tense against all rumors of wrath, past or to come.” The only way to get out of this hold of the past, and of its inherited moral precepts, was “to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them” (1903-4, III:59).

James went one further step, giving moral weight to everyday experience as a way of putting such rumors to flight. He asserted that we must find means for a “reinstatement of the vague and the inarticulated in its proper place” (in McDermott 1967:212), and pursued this line to underscore the importance of “openness” in achieving meaning and purpose in our interpretive scheme. Repeatedly he asked us to contemplate the power of achieved relationships between things as well as people. However, what this perspective loses in the translation from Emerson and other transcendentalists to the pragmatic point of view is the importance of risk in the recognition of the moral weightedness taken on by our personal actions. Bloom (1984:20) evokes the problem as a gloss [beginning of page 59] on Emerson’s argument in “Self Reliance”: “American restlessness...puts all stable relationships at a relatively [low] estimate, because they lack the element of risk.” Neither those who employ the various play analogies, such as Goffman or even Victor Turner, nor James and Dewey, who drew on tropes from fire and other natural (and sometimes unpredictable) processes, have reinstated this Emersonian concern with the risk involved in valorizing the transitional, the vague and inarticulated.

In the translation from the Emersonian to the Jamesian perspective, personal moral probation is neglected in favor of emphasizing everyday life as the baseline against which other kinds of experiences are recognized and interpreted. We become more concerned with the human condition than we do with the questions posed by the morally tentative person in everyday dealings with others. Perhaps this is because James’s vision encourages the equation of time and space in the experienced moments or transition. It is at such moments in which past time and present life most vibrantly come together, those moments when connections may be perceived and relationships established, that “enable us to live prospectively as well as retrospectively. [Experience] is ‘of’ the past, inasmuch as it comes expressly as the past’s continuation; it is ‘of’ the future insofar as the future, when it comes, will have continued it” (James, in McDermott 1967:213). (2)

While James opened this subject up to philosophical speculation from the pragmatic perspective -- that is, without tying it to metaphysical concerns -- Dewey placed “experience” in everyday life at the center of his philosophical concerns. He noted, for instance, that “like its congeners, life and history, experience includes what men do and suffer, what they strive for, love, believe and endure, and also how men act and are acted upon, the ways in which they do and suffer, desire and enjoy, see, believe, imagine” (Dewey 1929:10). He encouraged us to link two notions of clear importance for anthropology: life is best conceived as being carried on by individuals who have a capacity to remember and thus to build a future patterned on the doings of the present; and existence is thus describable on a commonsense level, as an active and unfolding process. By understanding the individual’s role in the process, we secure a place in the description of culture patterns for both invention and idiosyncrasy. Thus, experience as [beginning of page 60] both a personal and a social construct looks on life as being made up of rules of thumb rather than of formal and regulated patterns of behavior.

It is this very notion of personal negotiation and play that undergirds a pluralistic approach to the contrapuntal operations of the individual mind, on the one hand, and to the many interwoven voices and styles of society and culture, on the other. In the situation involving the coming together of peoples of different cultures and historical conditions, this multiplicity of voices becomes the problematic facing any attempt to adequately describe experiences. Putting forth a theory of adequate description based on experiences under conditions of high mobility, especially in frontier situations, asks not for a full-out rejection of such notions as “tradition,” “custom,” even “rituals.” Rather, it asks for a transvaluation out of the realm of authoritative practices and into the domain of socially devised units of activity, which are valued because they are agreed on by all of those participating and because they embody patterns of expectation that can be learned and rehearsed and practiced together. Emphasizing the common features of experience calls for a redefinition of culture itself, away from the officiated practices, the regulated and obligatory behaviors of our shared lives, and toward something more like the relative “typicality” of what happens again and again to individuals finding themselves in similar situations.

When an experience can be designated as typical, then the doings of the individual and the community become shared, not only with regard to what actually happens under those circumstances, but also how one feels about the happenings. Simply stated, it is not just experiences that are shared but the sentiments arising from them as well: the doings and the feelings reinforce each other. Moreover, this system of typicality of event and sentiment provides us with a linkage between past and future, for the very recognition of typicality rests on others having gone through that experience (or something like it) before.

Then there enters the existence of the experience of experience, that is, the recognition even while something is taking place in one’s own life that it is a replaying, in some dimension, of things that have happened to others. This self-perception is especially important when the experience is not only typical but intense and potentially disruptive. At that point, being able to re- [beginning of page 61] cognize typicality becomes a means of recognizing how to feel and interpret what is going on. Through such reflexive activity we can recognize the difference between the more and the less ordinary, the everyday and the special event, as it is becoming an experience. This is a distinction Dewey (1934:35) pointed out: “Experience occurs continuously, because the interaction of live creatures and environing conditions is involved in the very process of living .... Oftentimes [this means that] the experience had is inchoate. Things are experienced but not in any way that they are composed into an experience.”

The distinction between levels of self-conscious apprehension achieved a place of such importance in Dewey’s scheme because he wished to reveal the continuities between art and life. Therefore, he underscored those happenings in everyday life that are most like our ways of encountering works of art within the Western tradition: by the disjunction that occurs in the flow of experience that calls for a consideration of the event as a “thing apart.” “Life,” Dewey (1934:36-37) argued, “is no uniform uninterrupted march or flow. It is a thing of histories, each with its own plot, its own inception and movement toward its close, each having its own particular movement.” His interests were in excerpted actions that have a sense of beginning, development, and end, like a wellcrafted piece of the storytelling art. Perhaps he was guided by his own underlying feeling that an experience not only involves an intensity of feeling that takes it out of the flow of the everyday but also a framing operation by which the ongoing activity is translated into a reportable story. Histories, in this sense, must be sufficiently interesting as well as unusual for others to agree to classify them as an experience. But who will thereby listen to the recounting of the happening?

Even at the level of typicality by which experience becomes an experience, the term’s semantic field is far from fully described. Indeed, there is an even higher and more general level of typicality that enters into our discussions of how individuals enter into happenings and feelings that are so characteristic of the larger developmental patterns we call Experience -- the American Experience, the Jewish Experience, the Sixties Experience, even the Growing-Up and Growing-Old Experience. In a similar acknowledgment of differences of intensity and significance, we make a distinction between events and something that become the Event, [beginning of page 62] even the Big Event, referring usually to being involved in a rite of passage or something close to it.

Although it is difficult, of course, to hold this range of meanings in mind while constructing an anthropology of experience, it is necessary to do so. For while “experience” is usefully employed to discuss meaningful actions from the most ordinary to the extraordinary, we expect the more intense occasions to have a point, even to carry a message. This is true of rites of passage themselves; inasmuch as other big experiences share in this sense of the momentous, our native theory of action carries the expectation that we will be transformed in some way, simply because of the intensity of the experience itself. To regard all activities making up an experience or part of a significant event as necessarily having such potential would severely undercut the usefulness of the idea of experience as a way of connecting the everyday with the special, and the ordinary person with the representative human.

Yet just as surely there is a difference between the way we interpret everyday experiences and those that jump out at us as being significant. This difference is carried, in part, by the interpretive apparatus we use to discuss any experience. Somehow and somewhere between experience and the Big Experience we impose a frame on the activity by calling attention to its extraordinary character. This attention commonly is elicited by the self-conscious stylization of the activity and through developing some kind of preparation for it, through rehearsal, warming up, or simply through special kinds of anticipatory behavior.

The kind of framework I am referring to is as simply accomplished as saying “Not it!” to instigate a game of tag. But it may also be as complicated as the various ways a family anticipates Christmas or a community prepares for a pageant, picnic, or parade. Such are those times out of time when an agreement goes into effect that everything that takes place within the confines of that set-aside time and space will be judged by its own criteria of the permissible. This is such a commonsense kind of cultural device that it can be evoked by the reminders of the subjunctive character of the practice, as Victor Turner named it, the hedging that occurs whenever we say, “We’re just playing,” or “It’s only make-believe.” Any time we can agree among ourselves to enter these realms, we achieve a particular relief from responsibility for our actions. We are able to say that we are not ourselves in one way or another when we are in such a state.

[beginning of page 63] This suspension of the rules may be brought into play precisely because when we are within such frames we are involved not so much in experiencing things directly but in replaying them. The elements of preparation and rehearsal and recapitulation introduce a kind of distance from the actions as they might be enacted in the “real” world. Once having said this, however, we must also recognize that any kind of replay involves the risk that the original will be so adequately represented that the frame itself may dissolve. Will any subjunctive activity operate effectively if the “as if” quality does not threaten to dissolve at any time, the players jumping squarely into the spectators to slash at them with their bats, or the firewalker pulling someone from the audience onto the coals with him?

To cast experience in the terms I have been employing, there seems to be two kinds of an experience: those arising directly out of the flow of life, with little or no explicit preparation; and those for which we plan and to which we look forward, where the parts are precast and each role has its set of lines. The two share a scenic wholeness and a heightening of awareness, as well as the possibility of being repeated in form or reported on in substance. The greater the degree of self-conscious preparation and stylization, the more the experience may be shared, but also the higher the risk that the prepared quality of the event will be regarded as restricting rather than liberating. This becomes problematic more in those areas left to us in which the experience is ceremonial, for here the frame placed around the event calls for us not to take on alternative selves, as in play, but to be our best selves, to present ourselves in the best possible light...only more so, to be on our best behavior. On such formal occasions there is no relief from being judged for what we do and how we act; on the contrary, such experiences are ones in which individual status enhancement is the raison d’etre for the activity.

Having thus pointed out the disjunction between everyday experience and these larger and more openly fictive displays, it seems equally important to remind ourselves once again of the various ways in which we have guaranteed the sense of continuity between these various realms. The point is that in spite of the differences of feeling and apprehension between everyday experiences and those arising from the Big Times of our lives, American culture wishes to optimize the ease of passage between the two states. In nearly all things we value openness and apparent spon- [beginning of page 64] taneity, even while we depreciate most expressions for following form and convention. In our desire to optimize authenticating acts at the expense of authoritative ones, we seem to appreciate most those moments we can say afterward were big but which stole up on us and took us unawares. To encourage such moments, however, we must expend a good part of our energies secretly preparing for these breakthroughs, for these spontaneous times in which we are overcome by the fulfillment of the expectations we hardly could admit to having -- like those “first-time experiences” which, when successful, are so surprising because we hear about them and even talk about them but they seem to sneak up on us anyhow. We are surprised only by the fulfillment of expectations.

Perhaps only the demystifyers in our midst, the poets and the sociologists, discuss such secret subjects openly. Such are the moments Paul Valery refers to as “the active presence of absent things,” when the accumulation of the already discussed and the anticipated come together with those experiences that occurred so early and were repeated so often that they became an unacknowledged part of our repertoire. This active forgetting, then, becomes an exercise in what we used to call “custom,” or even “habit”: “The social world seems to us as natural as Nature, although it is only held together by magic. Is it not, in truth, an enchanted structure, a system found... obedience to words, the keeping of promises, the power of images, the observance of customs and conventions -- all of them pure fictions?” (Valery 1962:508-9). Because of their fictional character, perhaps, we have allowed ourselves to actively forget that they are part of our cultural character-in-common.

Yet we have a number of ways of reminding ourselves of these cherished fictions: by explicitly talking about what they mean and how they have come to mean what they do. I refer here, of course, to events of celebration. Either the discussion can be waged formally, when a ceremony is built into the event, or informally, when the occasion seems to successfully come off with some degree of spontaneity. In the case of the latter, discussion occurs after the fact and usually turns on the intensity of the “good time” and what it takes to have such satisfying experiences. In spite of our distrust of the formal practices of the past because of their being attached to a power system that seems to many to eliminate mobility and choice -- and by extension, self-determination -- we still [beginning of page 65] enter, smiling and gracious, into such times when we ornament life by planning ahead, by getting dressed up and bringing out the best china and silverware. But also consider how much we value those times when a casual “drop-in” becomes a “get-together,” and soon gravitates into a “party,” a “blast,” a “really great time.”

There are many such events that heighten our sense of life without our having to go through extensive formalities. As I noted above, we make our preparations for these in secret, for so much of our sense of self is predicated on maintaining the ability to appear spontaneous that we seem to cling to the idea that parties are best when they happen on the spur of the moment -- about as true as the idea that lovemaking is best when unplanned. Somehow, the appearance of spontaneity has been identified by us with our notions of the authentic self. But the value we place so strongly on authenticity in turn places a very heavy burden on us: in our heart of hearts, for how many of our acts can we really claim true spontaneity? Moreover, such questions of authenticity affect our perceptions of others, both as participants in a culture that privileges self and originality, and as ethnographers constantly testing the behavior of our informants so as to judge whether or not we are being fooled. We must understand our own predisposition with regard to judging the acts of others if we are to more effectively stitch together an anthropology of experience.

***

To some degree, all observers of human behavior seek a corner on the market of reality, for that is our profession, our way of managing our own identities. The project of all of the humanistic disciplines has been to discriminate between the real and the unreal, the genuine and the fake, the realistic and the sentimental or fantastic, the verifiable truth (all those things we call “the facts”) and illusions, the misleading, the mystified, and the mythical. Humanists seek insight into life as a means of living more fully themselves, of experiencing more knowledgeably and more deeply, and thus being able to impart these techniques and this accrued knowledge and wisdom to others.

This is, of course, precisely how Goethe presents the Faustian dilemma to the reader. But the problem and the search is hardly reserved for professional seekers of truth. The drive to distinguish the real from the ersatz is part of Western common culture, used, [beginning of page 66] among other things, as a source of the criteria by which we judge the behavior of others and ourselves, and also as a way in which the relative success of our encounters and our relationships may be assessed. Repeatedly, we find ourselves reacting to the behavior of others by how “real” they seem and, in response, how much we can “be ourselves” with them -- how unguarded we can be in interactions with them and still be comfortable.

Obviously, regarding someone as sincere or a fake, as an original or a show-off, far from exhausts the repertoire of ways by which we judge others. In fact, using the relative “naturalness” of someone as the basic criterion of what is real and what isn’t would almost guarantee that we would be bored by all encounters and relationships. Indeed, there are many circumstances in which the ability to pull off a role with spirit, and in a manner to which we may respond in kind, appears more important than whether the other is being sincere or even authentic. Our continuing fascination with those who openly perform, especially if they are willing to take on the role of the eccentric or the vagrant spirit -- from Hell’s Angels and punkers to hoboes and spielers at carnivals -- reminds us that those who appear to speak and act on the basis of extreme experience often seem more real to us than those involved in more mundane pursuits. In fact, in many situations we seem to judge what “the real thing” is by how fully such others are able to make us recognize the range of experiential possibilities, whether or not we go through such experiences ourselves. Again, our double consciousness is brought into play: the value we place on centered action, and those who seem to engage in life to its fullest, calls forth our admiration and even adulation as well as our fears of involving ourselves in risks.

Under such circumstances, reality is only understandable when we are able to contrast it with other kinds of experience, perception, and judgment. To William James’s classic formulation of the problem (“Under what circumstances do we think things are real?”) must be added, “What do we contrast with what in developing our notions of the ’real’?” In some situations we distinguish between fanciful (or poetic) and real without judging one better than the other; in another range of situations we distinguish between “real” life and “just playing,” again not valuing the former more highly unless the occasion calls for high seriousness or a focus on work. Indeed, play may not only be appropriate to [beginning of page 67] the occasion but may actually heighten reality by quickening our senses. To be sure, ludic activities call for a self-conscious attention to stylistic expression, and therefore depart from “real” life with regard to both preparation (as in practice or rehearsal) and actual play. But any activity that calls for us to act and react together at a high pitch can become a Big Time for us, valued for itself and used in some cases as a baseline against which everyday activity is judged -- in which case the verdict is that life is boring for the most part.

Whether in the form of planned play activities or spontaneous celebrations (or even riots), some among us place increasing value on “the action,” on experience for its own sake. In so doing, the breaks in the routine order of the everyday world come to provide the measure of whether life is being lived to the fullest. Ever greater importance is placed, then, on those experiential departures into the higher and deeper registers of feeling that emerge in rehearsed events and that break our routines by encouraging us to get “deep.” The latter is not only part of the experience of getting serious at the performance of a work of “high art” but also in having Big Times.

These two varieties of serious experience underscore the problems as well as the strengths of the pragmatist’s approach to activity, a limitation shared by the sociological phenomenologists, such as Alfred Schutz and Peter Berger. Both schools use the quotidian as a representation of the “real” world from which all other states of experience depart. Schutz (1970:225), for instance, set up the world of experience in terms of a contrast between “the world of paramount reality” and all others: “the world of dreams and phantasms, especially the world of art, the world of religious experience, the world of scientific contemplation, the play world of the child, and the world of the insane,” all of which he regarded as “finite provinces” of significance. Yet, while noting the ease with which we may travel between these discrete worlds, he argued: “Within a single day, even within a single hour our consciousness may run through most different tensions and adopt most different intensional attitudes to life... Furthermore [there are] regions belonging to one province of meaning [that are] enclosed by another” (Schutz 1970:256).

We operate both within and between these various worlds and their realities. Clearly, one is no more real than another; rather, [beginning of page 68] they differ in what is brought into them in common by the participants, how focused and intense and stylized the activities become, and how important such factors are in affecting the experience itself and the understanding of it. No concept of “a world of paramount reality,” whether it comes from the pragmatists’ idea of experiential flow or the phenomenologists’ characterization of the quotidian, allows us to understand fully enough the role of play, of having fun and making fun; nor can we comprehend the process of celebration with sufficient fullness and clarity.

On the one hand, there is a flow of activity, and on the other, distinctive marked-out acts and events, all going under the name of experience. Moreover, the very flow of the everyday assures the continuity between routine activities and the more extraordinary ones. We have become aware of the continuities between the ordinary and the “deeper” or “higher” events through performed mimetic experiences, which openly imitate (and stylize) everyday acts and interactions. Far from exhausting the relationship between the ordinary and the otherwise, such imitational play only begins the discussion. Indeed, how the disruption of the patterns of expectation in ordinary interactions are remedied, even transformed and used in play events, may prove to be the most important point of connection between the different states of apprehension and understanding.

Each subjunctive event is more than simply a rendering, direct or inverted, of a social practice, it is an experience itself. Each draws on a community’s concern with disruption, clumsiness, embarrassment, confusion, and conflict in the everyday. But in forming and stylizing the reported events, each develops a life of its own. Each performance, for instance, draws on energies and patterns of expectation brought to the occasion not only because it embodies some life situation but because it departs from the everyday to the degree that it is self-consciously and artfully imitated, replayed, performed.

Consider, then, the complexity of the relationship between activity as it is practiced and the rendering of it as it is reported, reenacted, and intensified. Must life precede art for art to be understood? Can we not comprehend a feast without knowing everyday eating habits? Too often the line of actual experience goes the other way -- someone goes through some hard times, yet to the extent that they are able to see the situation as typical, [beginning of page 69] they maintain a sense of control over the individual upset. Is it not useful, then, to avoid drawing a hard-and-fast line between the finite representations of repeated events and any conception of paramount reality? In different kinds of scenes and interactions there are various relational features that past practice enables us to understand and appreciate: levels of formality, of scenic wholeness, of intensity of frame, of calls on our attention, of reaction and judgment.

My argument may seem somewhat self-contradictory. On the one hand, we have a sense of disjuncture between the flow of everyday experience; an experience; a typical experience that is reportable about ourselves as a means of playing out our having entered, individually, into life’s recurrent problem situations; and a large-scale experience in which we recognize that over a period of time the progress and pattern of our activities are part of a much larger story, one that began long before we were born and will continue after our death. On the other hand, the placement of the openness of experience within the American ideology of self-determination makes us conscious that the distinctions between the ordinary and the extraordinary commonly do not arise from either formal demands emerging from the ceremonializing of life, nor from any hard-and-fast distinction between the serious and the playful. Rather, we see life as organized around times, places, and occasions to encourage the participation of a greater or lesser number of people in a common activity. This approach sees both the larger and the smaller experiences as creative achievements; each experience, whether planned for in some manner (practiced, run through, rehearsed) or not, is interesting only insofar as it is able to enlist participation; that is, if the planning produces some sense of discovery, some appearance of spontaneous exchange of energies (as well as information) with others. For Erving Goffman the experience of even the smallest understandings (much less our larger mutual celebrations) seemed like a new rendering of an archaic holy act, one that acknowledges the existence of others and signifies a willingness to be involved in the flow of vital cultural information and, on occasion, to be exuberant in passing on this knowledge as a way of tying together self, others, and the larger worlds.

By turning to one of our new holy terms, ”experience,“ and developing it into a moving “term of art,” what might we reasonably expect from anthropologists propelled by the desire to get [beginning of page 70] down on paper what has been experienced in the field? First and foremost, such ethnographers will carry into participant observation a recognition of their own culture’s notions of significant actions and their related emotions and sentiments. From this will arise a willing suspension of disbelief in the “poetics” of the new culture -- the things that are regarded as being in the same category, the things that may be compared and those that suggest other things in spite of not being in the same category. An anthropology of experience might well begin by noting the range of expressive means and affects, techniques and sentiments -- that is, the most common and ordinary activities in the flow of life of the group under observation. And it might then provide a calendar for the events that are already set aside as extraordinary. Finally, an anthropology of experience might look for the ways in which the ordinary and the extraordinary coexist; how convention permits the framing and stylizing of activities, calls to attention the participants, and encourages a spelling out of the meanings and feelings carried within these activities. Because any anthropology of experience is going to be initially attracted to the display events of the group, the preparations for these activities will be as significant as the means and messages carried within the event itself.

As anthropologists, then, our objectives remain what they have been for some time: to demonstrate the diversity of human behavior in groups and to reveal the patterns of action and feeling that underlie this heterogeneity. Now that we have begun to move the idea of experience to the center of our concerns, however, we make it possible to elevate the representative anecdote to the same place of importance as the rite of passage. Our great discovery is not that everyone has experiences that are both unique and typical, but that everyone does seem to have a way of organizing these doings so they may be shared.

Notes

Thanks are due to a number of people who assisted in thinking through and writing this argument: Anthony Hilfer, early on, and Ralph Ross, most recently, helped me read the pragmatists; Fred Myers and Donald Brenneis were helpful in many ways, especially in considering the relationship between feelings and reports of feelings as they have been considered by ethnographers dealing with the other cultures; David Stanley discussed the double consciousness argument [beginning of page 71] with me on a number of occasions; Vic and Edie Turner first brought me into the engagement on the subject; Ed Bruner sustained my enthusiasm and interest throughout the writing; and Janet Anderson was, as always, the best and most commonsensical commentator on my prose and my argumentt.

1. The most important dimension of this literature for the social sciences has to do with the words “culture,” “society,” and “community.” I include James and Dewey on my list of the high priests of this literature because they not only brought to their writings a strong interest in the relationship between key words and social theory but they also infused their discussions of key words with a concern for dignity and the human spirit.

2. Just how deeply this concept is an invention of James’s generation becomes clear in the writings of the commentators on the American language. Mencken (1919:168), the most trenchant among them, noted that the verb form of “experience” was a recent American abomination, attributing the neologism to Henry James’s friend, William Dean Howells.

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