ABSTRACT
Experience is a crucial evaluative concept in anthropology. But the word also stands as an emblem for the demand that anthropologists should recreate experience so that it is directly accessible to readers. Events are important because they are part of experience, even if some of our colleagues find it convenient to deny them the right to an anthropological explanation. Other people's experience is inaccessible, except in momentary and partial glimpses, but it is a touchstone. One aspect of experience represented in a kernmantel diagram is change. In order to explain social change of a kernmantel kind, which emphasize the experience of decision-makers, the shape of sectors of their social world, which may have a fairly close approximation to how it was experienced. It may even be useful to use computers and statistics to help identify the choices which people have in fact made, and helps the anthropologists to imagine the experience which influenced decisions.
