Social practice has become a key concept of postprocessual social archaeology. Experience is a related but wider and less abstract term, a means of embodying the concept of practice. Lacking from experience can be notions of intentionality (an experience may just happen to you). Experience can be passive and contemplative, personal as well as social, emotional as well as intellectual or physical. Someone who is experienced has knowledge acquired through practice (they may be considered ‘expert’) or through having undergone things. Etymological roots are the Greek peirao, try, and perao, pass through. A peril (a related word) is a trial undergone, and all aspects of perception are invoked - from intellectual awareness to physical suffering. Experience is knowledge acquired through trial. An experiment is a tentative procedure which makes trial of things. Here experience may contain a notion of knowing reality not through simply having been told, but by having undergone trial, or by making trial of things; reality comes to be that which has resisted trials made of it. An experience is an event by which one is affected, an action or condition viewed from the person or self, subjectively. Concomitantly to experience is the condition of being consciously the subject (in all senses) of a practice, state or condition.

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