experience

is the opposite of narrated experience (which would suggest that it is formless, structureless, fragmented) but seen as always ordered by remembrance and anticipation.

Mattingly suggests that anthropologist often define experience in opposition to narrative, which is understood to be a 'distortion' of life-as-lived-through, that results from the functioning of a retrospective stance, temporal remove and the condensation of complexity. Indeed, she (Mattingly, 1998: 32) argues that the general picture of experience emerging in anthropology is as largely non-narrated, formless, structureless, fragmented and lacking in coherence and continuity. Against this view of experience as an incoherent 'prelinguistic bombardment of the senses', she (Mattingly, 1998: 45) asserts that 'narrative imitates experience because experience already has in it the seeds of narrative'. Ultimately, she sets out to challenge the 'anthropological dichotomy between experience as narrated and experience as lived', for she argues that lived experience is ordered by remembrance and anticipation and is thus not merely the blind succession of events in a linear series. According to Mattingly, there is an intrinsic 'toward which we are heading' quality of lived experience that is situated in the context of anticipations partially predicated upon a recalled past. (Throop 2003:221)

MattinglyThinkers

Mattingly