Lebendige Anschaulichkeit : Anthropologisierung der Sinne und der Erfahrungsbegriff im 18. Jahrhundert

In the 18th century the call for lively vividness was strongly tied to epistemological and philosophical reflections about nature, society and mankind in general. Empirism, observation, perception, sensation, and experience became keywords within a broad anthropological debate about man. These notions and the empiricist concepts behind it are of great interest for the discipline of European Ethnology/Cultural Anthropology. I would like to trace back the success story of the concept of experience to the 18th centuries discursive formation of the anthropology of the senses. The analysis uses Friedrich Justin Bertuchs Bilderbuch für Kinder (1790-1830) as a vantage point for contemporary discussions about vividness and perception. This is were the history of the (knowledge-)picture lies at the core of the ongoing debates about cognition and knowledge. It was thought to generate impressions, a concept which is and was very much linked to the concept of experience itself. Nevertheless, this article’s close look upon experience is not only interested in its emergence but very much in the way it worked and still works epistemologically and (science)politically. This article is thereby concerned with a reflective analysis of sensual, empirical-experiental categories which not only boom at the moment within the fields of sensual ethnography and anthropology of the senses but which lie at the heart of the disciplinary identity.