2.5 Culture as a system of practices

in itself does not open the door for me. It serves merely as a sign that somebody is to come to open it for me. To knock on the door is a substitute for the more primitive act of shoving it open of one’s own accord. We have here the rudiments of what might be called language. A vast number of acts are language in this crude sense. That is, they are not of importance to us because of the work they immediately do, but because they serve as mediating signs of other more important acts. (Sapir 1949a: 163–4)

What are these other “more important acts”? Probably the fashions of speaking, the ways of being in the world suggested by the ways we speak of and in the world. Language is a “guide” to social life because it stops us from acting in a certain way (e.g. opening a door by shoving it), that is, it suggests and implements alternative ways of relating to objects and people (see section 3.2).

2.5Culture as a system of practices

The notion of culture as a system of practices owes a great deal to that intellectual movement known as poststructuralism. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of European scholars started to question some basic assumptions of the structuralist paradigm, including the idea that there is a one-to-one correspondence between a meaning and its expression. Generalizations about entire cultures and abstractions based on symbolic oppositions – like the ones used by Lévi-Strauss (see section 2.1.3) – were criticized as “essentialist” or “metaphysical” and there was more interest in the moment-by-moment and dialogic construction of interpretations. The interest in the stable aspects of cultural systems was replaced by a return to diachrony and historicity. The search for societies where one might still find “primitive” forms of organization and thought intact was replaced by a widespread recognition of the fluidity of cultures, their inherently contaminated nature. The same ideas motivated contemporary interest in multiculturalism and transnational communities.

It is not by accident that poststructuralism originates in France, especially in the writings of scholars like Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida (Sarup 1989). Postwar French intellectuals had been strongly influenced by Martin Heidegger’s philosophy and this philosophy can be seen as at the heart of the poststructuralist agenda, regardless of its different versions and beyond its criticism of Heideggerian thought.

In the late 1920s, Heidegger (1962, 1985, 1988, 1992) argued that what philosophers and scientists so easily identify as the “objects” of their study are not the most basic entities of our experience. The rational thinking Subject identified by the great philosophers of Modernity – Descartes, Kant, and Husserl – is not the

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exclusive or privileged source of our understanding of the world. Our abstract, conceptual, “theoretical” understanding of the world is not primary but derived from other existential premises including our being immersed in an environment where objects are encountered as pragmatically useful, situations are experienced in the context of particular attitudes or “moods,” and people are beings to be-with. These relationships with the world cannot easily be represented with the analytical tools used by social scientists who are experts at isolating elements out of their context. The extension of Heidegger’s reasoning to contemporary social science brings the realization that binary oppositions and propositional knowledge are no longer the conditions or causes of our experience of the world, but generalizations and representations that presuppose other, more fundamental dimensions of human experience, including historicity (Dilthey [1883] 1988) and what Heidegger called Befindlichkeit “affectedness” or “disposition” (Dreyfus 1991; Heidegger 1962).

Despite Bourdieu’s criticism of Heidegger’s philosophy,12 practice theory is a good example of a poststructuralist paradigm that builds on some of Heidegger’s intuitions about the existential roots of human knowledge and human understanding of the life-world. For example, Bourdieu stresses the inextricable relationship between knowledge and action-in-the-world, past and present conditions (Bourdieu 1977, 1990). For him, social actors are neither completely the product of external material (e.g. economic or ecological) conditions nor socially conscious intentional subjects whose mental representations are self-sufficient:

The theory of practice as practice insists, contrary to positivist materialism, that the objects of knowledge are constructed, not passively recorded, and, contrary to intellectualist idealism, that the principle of this construction is the system of structured, structuring dispositions, the habitus, which is constituted in practice and is always oriented towards practical functions. (Bourdieu 1990: 52)

As a unit of analysis, Bourdieu introduces the notion of habitus, a system of dispositions with historical dimensions through which novices acquire competence by entering activities through which they develop a series of expectations about the world and about ways of being in it.13

The habitus – embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history – is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product. As such, it is what gives practices their

12See especially Bourdieu (1988) and Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992: 150–6).

13For an earlier use of the term habitus as socially transmitted habits, see Mauss ([1935] 1979: 101).

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2.5 Culture as a system of practices

relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of the immediate present. (Bourdieu 1990: 56)

This approach is an attempt to overcome the subjectivist/objectivist dichotomy in the social sciences by emphasizing the fact that the Subject or human actor can culturally exist and function only as a participant in a series of habitual activities that are both presupposed and reproduced by his individual actions. Such reproduction must not, of course, be thought of as completely predictable, otherwise we would have another form of determinism, which Bourdieu, like all poststructuralist, post-Marxist theoreticians, is trying to escape. For him, culture is neither something simply external to the individual (e.g. in rituals or symbols handed down by older members of the society) nor something simply internal (e.g. in the individual mind). Rather, it exists through routinized action that includes the material (and physical) conditions as well as the social actors’ experience in using their bodies while moving through a familiar space.

Social theorists like Bourdieu have emphasized the importance of language not as an autonomous system – as proposed by structuralists (see section 6.1) – but as a system that is actively defined by sociopolitical processes, including bureaucratic institutions such as schools (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1982, Bourdieu, Passeron, and de Saint Martin 1994). For Bourdieu one cannot discuss a language without taking into consideration the social conditions that allow for its existence. It is, for instance, the process of state formation that creates the conditions for a unified linguistic market where one linguistic variety acquires the status of standard language. A language only exists as a linguistic habitus, to be understood as recurrent and habitual systems of dispositions and expectations. A language is itself a set of practices that imply not only a particular system of words and grammatical rules, but also an often forgotten or hidden struggle over the symbolic power of a particular way of communicating, with particular systems of classification, address and reference forms, specialized lexicons, and metaphors (for politics, medicine, ethics) (Bourdieu 1982: 31). Although Bourdieu’s emphasis on the social meaning of alternative forms or stylistic variations (Bally 1952) is a classic topic of sociolinguistic inquiry (cf. Ervin-Tripp 1972), his reflections force variationists and pragmaticians to look beyond specific linguistic exchanges. What is often forgotten by those linguists and philosophers who stress the power of words to do things (see chapter 7) is that a certain linguistic expression can perform an action (e.g. a request, offer, apology) only to the extent to which there is a system of dispositions, a habitus, already shared in the community (Bourdieu 1982: 133). Such systems are, in turn, reproduced by daily speech acts, organized and given meaning by institutions such as the school, the family, the work place, which are not only established to exclude others, but also to keep

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those who are in them under control, to make sure that the acts they perform and the meanings they attribute to such acts remain within an acceptable range.

These reflections are important because they link individual acts to larger frames of reference, including the notion of community, a concept that has been at the center of much debate within sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology (see chapter 3).

2.6Culture as a system of participation

The idea of culture as a system of participation is related to culture as a system of practices and is based on the assumption that any action in the world, including verbal communication, has an inherently social, collective, and participatory quality. This is a particularly useful notion of culture for looking at how language is used in the real world because to speak a language means to be able to participate in interactions with a world that is always larger than us as individual speakers and even larger than what we can see and touch in any given situation. Words carry in them a myriad possibilities for connecting us to other human beings, other situations, events, acts, beliefs, feelings. This is due to the ability that language has to describe the world as well as to its ability to connect us with its inhabitants, objects, places, and periods; each time reaffirming a sociohistorical dimension of human action among others. The indexicality of language is thus part of the constitution of any act of speaking as an act of participation in a community of language users. We might come into a situation assuming a common language to later realize that it is through acts of speaking that such a language is constituted, challenged, and changed.

If the world is held together by communicative acts and connected through communicative channels, to speak means to choose a particular way of entering the world and a particular way of sustaining relationships with those we come in contact with. It is then through language use that we, to a large extent, are members of a community of ideas and practices.

Any system of participation requires a cognitive component to manage the retrieval of information and the prediction of others’ action necessary for problem-solving, and a corporeal component, which accounts for our ability to function in a physical environment which is full of material objects as well as live bodies. Participation also requires the explicit sharing of existing resources (belief systems, languages, the built environment, people) and their implicit assessment for the task at hand. But it does not assume an equally shared knowledge or control of such resources. In fact, if we start from the notion of participation, it is easier to approach variation, given that we can maintain a sense of the different parties involved while recognizing the fact that they exist socially as part of a larger unit. Participation will be further developed in chapter 9, as we

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