ABSTRACT
The dominance of participant observation as methodological credo in anthropology has been founded on an idea that can understand another culture through sharing the experience of the practitioners themselves as far as possible. In anthropology, contextualization goes beyond the unfolding situation; context is determined by experiential luggage of the participants including the participant-observer, and the way in which such learned disposition intersects with new experience. New experiences are screened against the experiential luggage, and if they make sense they are added to stock of knowledge, skills and recipes for action. The transformation from experience to knowledge passes through stages of increasing articulateness can take the following course. Experience is initially stored in the form of images or gestalts, mental representations which can serve as models for future action without being articulated. But the acts themselves are observed by others as they are carried out, where-by they acquire a communicative aspect, they come to function as representations on an intersubjective level.
