Rethinking Experience in Cultural History: Towards the History of Being-in-the-World

The article explores the roots of the history of experience from the perspective of cultural history. It traces the trajectory of cultural historical research from the 1990s to the 2010s, highlighting the evolving efforts of historians to comprehend the intricate relationship between emotions and experience. In the aftermath of the cultural turn, the interconnectedness of histories related to emotions, senses, and gestures was often emphasised. In contemporary research, however, experience has emerged as a holistic concept, linking the history of emotions to the interactions the people of the past had with their environment. The article draws on theoretical and methodological reflections on cultural history especially in the early 2000s, from different language areas (including such authors as Alessandro Arcangeli, Peter Burke, Ute Daniel, Anna Green, Achim Landwehr, Michael Maurer, Pascal Ory, Philippe Poirrier, and Miri Rubin). The second resource is the Finnish book series Cultural History – Kulttuurihistoria. The series comprises 17 volumes published since 2002, and it includes both theoretical and methodological texts and empirical studies in Finnish and English. The article concludes by examining Martin Heidegger's idea of being-in-the-world (‘in der Welt sein’) as a conceptual framework for approaching and analysing the evolving status of experience within the toolbox of the cultural historian.