Coincidentally, I wrote a small paragraph with a similar observation in an earlier draft of the post — Connor’s history of skin reminded me of an essay by the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga (of The Waning of the Middle Ages) who wrote somewhere that we should also be interested in the history of smaller cultural objects — he proposed a history of the hat, I remember. Also, Connor’s ideas reminded me of the recent work of Alain Corbin, who wrote a book on bells and the culture of the sense in nineteenth-century France. This kind of history of representations/ mentalities seems to come close to what Connor proposes.

Perhaps all turns are in a sense re-turns, but with a difference? What makes Connor’s approach different, I think, is that he proposes a way of writing a history of experiences that situates itself “amid” the object, instead of descibing it from a critical distance. He describes the experience of objects, and explores their possibilities in a way that is different from Annales history. Here is his piece on corridors as an example of that style of writing. As I wrote in my post, the idea takes me some getting used to, but it interests me. This is no traditional history, it is an essayistic exploration of (historical) experiences of corridors.