[Xmca-l] About experience

[Lubomir Savov Popov]

Just a word of caution about using the term experience when talking about LSV and Soviet/East European research. In English, experience can mean both an activity-acquired expertise and a mental/emotional way of experiencing a situation. In Russian, there are two separate words for this, very distinct from each other. One is opit and the other is perezhivanie. My talk here is a bit rough and I don't go in the finest details of this subject matter. 

Opit is something like expertise, but still different and might be used for phenomena that are very different from experience. 

In relation to perezhivanie, there is a system of several related psychological categories starting with oschushchenie and going to perezhivanie. The literature on perezhivanie discusses this system of related phenomena/categories that build upon each other. 

I have always been baffled by the use of experience in English, because of the very different meanings that depend on the social and narrative contexts. I wish that there are different terms for work/life experience and experiencing a situation. The nature of these phenomena is very different. This difference drives the need for different epistemological and methodological approaches for the study of these phenomena.

Best wishes,

Lubomir Popov, Ph.D.