The practice turn

An exploration

Marte Simmons, 0512222 E-mail: MM.Simons@student.ru.nl Redmar de Haan, 0236969 E-mail: A.R.deHaan@student.ru.nl

Contents
Introduction The emergence of practice Shared practices Key Thinkers in the practice turn Practice turn in Human geography Literature 2 4 6 7 9 11

Introduction

In this paper we will explore the multidisciplinary and much used term practice. Practice addresses key issues in social theory such as the basic structures of social life, the character of human activity, and nature of individuality. This subject is difficult to fully comprehend and we could not agree more with Barry Barnes (2001, p. 18) when he states: For all its merits the relevant literature remains unsatisfactory, even in the most elementary respects. It fails to make clear just what social practices are. This created a challenge to make a clear and understandable description. The first paragraph will create an exposition of the emergence of practice and after this we will discuss practice as a collective action. Main thinkers of practice (e.g. Bourdieu, Giddens) will make our exploration complete. Then there is a little step outwards to our own area: geography. We would like to end this introduction with the note that this paper doesnt give an all-embracing description of the subject. Practice is used in so many ways and by so many different people that it is impossible to be fully comprehensive in this paper. If you find the subject interesting we suggest the books and articles in our literature list. We think they provide a good starting point for a more thorough study after finishing this paper.

The emergence of practice

Most people mean some kind of training when they use the word practice' in every day life. It is the act of repeating something with the aim of learning (e.g. playing an instrument or writing a paper at the university). We will use a more boarder definition of practice. Very simplistic you can say that a practice refers to a way something is done'. This definition is also vaguer as you will notice when reading this part of the paper. The term practice is often used in a multi-various way (Schatzki, 1996). Contemporary academian in diverse disciplines think about practices. Philosophy, cultural theory and history to sociology, anthropology, and science and technology studies, they all use practice in one way or another. Social practices for instance are related to customs for how various people enact various works or events. When looking at the emergence of practice we have, according to Schatzki, to consider the nature of social life. Schatzki says that social theory always availed itself of two master concepts; totality and the individual. The opposition between these two ways of thinking has subsided, but the division in thinking is still existent. In recent history challenges have arisen to the integrity of both of the concepts. These challenges are frequently marked with the much used term postmodern. Before we can say more about the emergence of practice we first have to deal with the concept of social totality. This is the concept that social whole is something more than its parts (Schatzki, 1996, p. 2). It is thought that the whole should be governed as a whole thereby defining and specifying the operations of the parts. Plato was the first to mention the society as a bounded en unified totality. He guided theorist such as Hegel and Marx. According to them social phenomena such as rituals, political institutions, and ideologies are necessary for the functioning of society. Nowadays critics of the social totality emphasize the pre-eminence of the particular and the local. Zygmunt Bauman states in his book Intimations of Post modernity (p. 189); What the theory of Post modernity must discard in the first place is the assumption of an organismic, equilibrated social totality. The sought theory must assume instead that the social condition it intends to model is essentially and perpetually unequilibrated. All order that can be found is a local emergent and transitory phenomenon; its nature can be best grasped by a metaphor of a whirlpool appearing in the flow of a river, retaining its shape only for a relatively brief period and only at the expense of incessant metabolism and constant renewal of content.

Power is an important issue for most theorists when discussing social relationships. Michel Foucault describes power as a web of relations of force among individuals (Schatzki, 1996). He sees social life as a spectacle determined by heterogeneous and local forces that continually move and have an uncertain future. Anthony Giddens who is another main thinker about this subject has developed another view on the social world. He portrays social reality as a mosaic of interpenetrating, interdependent, and shifting practices. He uses multiple sets of recurring practices which are rarely demarked in space and time when defining society. Totality, in short, has become problematic today. Then the following question arises: is maybe individualism the way to look at the social life? Is society constituted by interaction and interrelations between individuals alone? The theorists that deal with individualism all see the importance of the actions, strategies, mental states, and rationalities of individuals. They also stress the human independence and the importance of individual self-reliance and liberty (wikipedia.org). Great thinkers such as Nietzsche and Freud question the human independence. Nietzsche had ontological critique of the independent individual subject as he argues that the mind is a community of agencies. Freud joins him in questioning the human self-reliance. In his later work he divides the human mind in three parts namely, the Ego, the super-ego, and the id. According to Freud the conscious ego is in principle unable either to control or to fully comprehend. Identity is in individualism an important concept, but some writers deny that identity is best considered as a property that is already present before a person acts. Chantal Moeffe is one of them. In shorts she presents the following. She speaks about subject positions that determine someone. Examples of such positions are: brother, teacher, taxi driver, etcetera. As you can imagine these positions can overlap (e.g. a brother can also be a taxi driver). Who a person is, is determent by a mlange of constantly changing and to the society exposed positions. The identity is of a person thus very unstable and not suitable for explaining social life. Of course there are still streams in the contemporary theory that use totality and the individual, but many authors thought there was the need of an alternative starting point. According to Schatzki one of the most promising impulses is the practice theory. Theorists like Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, Jean-Franois, and Charles Taylor see practices as the central social phenomenon by reference to which other social entities such as actions, institutions, and structures are to be understood. It is good to remember that this is not a totally unified way of thinking and that the theories diver greatly among themselves but they have a great deal in common.

Practices are seen as arrays of human activity. There are some theorists who include actions of non humans such as machines, but we will exclude them for this paper because they represent a small portion within the theory of practice. Most thinkers agree that human actions depend on shared skills or understandings (Schatzki, 1996, p.3).

Shared practices

To further clarify the concept practice we will discuss practice as a collective action. Social systems have been seen as ongoing, self-reproducing arrays of shared practices (Barnes, 2001, p. 17). And to understand and describe these social systems you have to, according to some sociologists, only need to understand practice. Barnes uses the following definition: practices are socially recognized forms of activity, done on the basis of what members learn from others and capable of being done well or badly, correctly or incorrectly. He uses three examples to better understand practice. The first he mentions is the example of vegetarianism. Its nicely shows the problems we have to deal with when using practice. You, for instance, can not generalize all vegetarian communities. One community does not necessarily behave the same as another. It is also very hard to centrally govern vegetarians. The other example he gives is acupuncture. This is a nice example for those who define practice in contrast with theory. Doctors who practice (note the slight change in definition of the word) acupuncture are passing on the knowledge they have more as skills than as a theory of what it is and how it works. There are a number of different conceptions of acupuncture, but the most striking is the difference between the Western and the Eastern approach, each of which can develop and grow in its own way. The last example is about the members of a company of cavalry. They have strong shared practices: manifest in their riding, in their use of weapons, and generally in the business of mounted combat (Barnes, 2001, p. 18). To master the practice of such a company you have participate in this group. According to Barnes we have to be careful with the assumption that practice is everything there is to know about social society. He says it is typically of newly introduced theories that some exaggeration come with it. An important aspect about practice that occupies social thinkers is the question what shared practices exactly are. Turner (1994) asks himself the following question: If there are shared practices, then what is shared?. A detailed account of shared practice would reveal all kind of differences in individual behavior and in individual capabilities. Turner agues that the relevant individual capabilities are habits, and that not only practices but also habit en habitation should be taken into account when dealing with social theory. By habits he means: 6

thing that people have learned by repetition so that they can do them smoothly, easily and competently. When you think of this he position is that shared practice isnt anything more then habituated individual behavior. When we look at the example of the horsemen in the cavalry-unit we can see that this totally individual approach can not be the only truth. The riding in formation, for instance, can not be seen as an individual accomplishment alone. The riders have to be actively controlled and correct to stay in formation, and that will include constant adjustment and modification. This kind behavior of is visible throughout all kind of social interactions, especially when you think of the use of social power. The successful execution of routines at the collective level will involve the overriding and modification of routines at the individual level. Practice at the collective level is not a simple summation of practices at the individual level (habits). Shared practice is, as the ethno methodologists say, a collective accomplishment (Barnes, 2001, p. 23). This basis difference between individualist and collectivist approach is one of the core issues within the practice theory. Barnes states that in order to understand practice we have to realize that people are not oriented by their own habits, nor are they oriented by the same collective object; rather it is human beings oriented to each other. Human beings can ride in formation, not because they are independent individuals who posses the same habits, but because they are social agents, linked by a profound mutual susceptibility, who constantly modify their habituated individual responses as they interact with others, in order to sustain a shared practice. So social beings can not be understood as independent calculative individuals, but they have to be seen as interdependent, mutually social agents (Barnes, 2001).

Key thinkers in The practice turn The practice turn did not just fall from the air, but developed itself throughout the years. Various scientists have thought about practice, contributed to theory of practice and caused the practice turn. Here we provide a selection of -according to us - the key thinkers.

Paul Bourdieu(1930-2002) Paul Bourdieu is a sociologist from the Pyrenees in France. His background influenced his interest in social inequality and his political activities in his later life. He studied philosophy at the cole normale suprieure in Paris. In 1968 he founded a research institute

Centre de Sociology Europene and in 1982 he became a professor at the prestigious Collge de France.

As reaction against structuralism he came up with theory of practice, which rooted in the opposing tradition of phenomenology and existentialism. It includes a imposition of form upon experience.(Pinto, L.) This protests against The Rational Action Theory stressed that agents did not act to ultimate rational and economic criteria, but that they are influenced by bodily knowledge and all sorts of constraints. According to Bourdieu agents practices were not determined by the society and there environment. He did not go to the extreme opposite site of what for example Levi-Strauss thought, but found a midway. He worked with the terms champ and habitus. Champ standing for the various fields in a society such as cultural, political etc; the field where agents operate in daily life and where they practice. All fields cope with dearth of supplies and agents struggling over them, which causes powerrelationships. The supplies can be divided in three components; economic, cultural and social capital; so not only money is involved, but also skills, education and relationships. The field, according to Bourdieu, does no exist of social classes, it consists of the relationships between various powers and the divisions present in a particular field; for example the division between mind and body and men and women.(Wikipedia) The habitus stands for the skills, institutions and habits -which consist of thought, action and perception - a person has made its own to function in the field. All the individual habits which develop in the field cause institutionalization and thus the rules in a particular field. There is the link between field and habitus; between the object and the subject and the midway between Levi-Strauss and Sartre.

Anthony Giddens(1938-) Anthony Giddens grew up in Edmonton, London and went to Hull University, London school of economics and University of Cambridge, where he became Professor in 1987. He also is political active; he is an advisor for Tony Blair and sits in the House of Lords representing the Labour Party. In his scientific area, sociology, he published 34 books and over 200 essays. For practice theory and the practice turn, his theory of structuration is the most relevant.

In sociology there is always been the problem of joining micro and macro, individual and community, agent and structure. Giddens was also in search for an answer to the question 8

if we were determined by structure or the structure determined by us. Giddens stressed that there is an connection between agency and structure, what is expressed in the term duality of structure which means that people can make there own choices, but are constrained by there environment.(wikipedia,2006) But, however social structure puts constraints on practice, they exist by human agency. So there is no deterministic party, there is just action and reaction and development both for the agent and for structure.

The Practice turn in Human geography Although you cant place the practice turn directly in human geography, one can say that there are influences to be discovered in theory of human geography. People did not anymore move in an objective space, but in an perceptive space. Theories were based on fast structures of movements, which did not include human beings as individually acting creatures. For example the theory of central places of Christaller. His theory was people would always go to the nearest place where goods were offered; surely everybody wants to minimize their expenses for travelling. In 1968, in Washington there was held a conference for geographers; there and then was the beginning of the behavioural thought in geography. But there was criticism on this very individualistic image. According to Hgerstadt there are always physical, coupling and authority constraints that influence choices of people. So the practice turn did influence geography, there came a shift from spatial behaviour to spatial action(Pater,2002). People react on impulses form their environment and can not act on their own. This is a very determinist philosophy. It allows scientists to study human behaviour, without looking to internal mental states. This idea of human behaviour strikes with humanism, a cultural stance which arose in Europe during the Renaissance period and celebrated Man as thinker, creator and actor(Schatzki, 1996). Behaviouralism has this idea as a basis. In the sixties there took a cognitive revolution place through which social en psychological studies fundamentally changed. In sociology phenomena were not merely explained by the environment they took place in, but by the persons who were involved and their arguments to act a certain way. At first it was an individualistic idea. The only constrain an actor had, was the incapability of the brain; the incapacity of a person to obtain and process information. Except for that, there freedom of choice was unlimited(Pater, 2002).

Literature Barnes, B. (2001). Practice as collective action. In T. Schatzki, K. K. Cetina & E. Von Savigny (Eds.). The practice turn in contemporary theory (pp. 17-28). London: Routledge. Bauman, Z. (1992). Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Pater, H. de (2002) , Het geografische Huis, Uitgeverij Coutinho, Bussum Schatzki, T. (1996). Social practices: A Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social. Cambridge: university press. Schatzki, T., Cetina, K. K., & Von Savigny, E. (Eds.). (2001). The practice turn in contemporary theory. London: Routledge. Turner, S. (1994). The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions. Cambridge, Polity Press. Wikipedia, Individualism, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individualism, 16-11-2006. Wikipedia, Anthony Giddens, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Giddens, 12-122006 Wikipedia, Pierre Bourdieu, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu, 16-122006

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