what anchors cultural practices

In this book chapter from an edited collection, Ann Swidler investigates the problem as to what anchors cultural practices. This problem stems from the practice turn. The practice turn happened when sociologists found the arguments of folks like Talcott Parsons dissatisfying. Parsons argues that there's a distinction between structure and culture. The same could be said for Max Weber, who thought that ideas were necessary in order for cultural change to take place. The example in the chapter is China versus the West. In the West, you have these structures (like the example of the architect's plan), structures which amount to (I think) potential for action. Technology. Science. Networks. Communication. Division of labor. Etc. Both China and the West had similar underlying (which I think is an appropriate word here) structures, yet only the West had the Protestant ethic (although Swidler never uses the phrase), and yet that ethic (or culture) was necessary in order for real change to occur (which is a change of what exactly? structure? culture? constitutive rule? society?). In any case, Parsons and Weber imagine a separation between the ideal and the material, or cultural and structure. But why is this a problem exactly? 

I'm going to brainstorm as to why the separation could be problematic. The separation could be problematic because

• then you have to imagine a causal link between the two
• then culture is an abstract thing in peoples' heads that is unobservable, which implies that you have to postulate a causality between the ideal and the material based on something you can't measure

That's in the chapter. Let's go with that. Swidler references Foucault and Geertz here, both of whom begin to study practices. 

The enormous fruitfulness of the contemporary study of culture, after its older

variants seemed to have run out of steam, has come from this renewed focus on a

definable empirical object. The interpretation of such objects may vary, and the

underlying structure of which these observations are the supposed signs may be

debated, but Foucault’s (1979) descriptions of the practices of punishment, of

diagnosis and confinement of the mentally ill (1965), or of the diagnosis and

categorization of sexual ‘perversions’ (1978), like Geertz’s (1973) depictions of

Balinese cockfights or Berber tall tales, or Knorr Cetina’s (1981) detailing of the

routines of scientific laboratories seem to provide direct ways in which social

knowledge, or culture, and the implicit logics they contain, can be directly

observed.  

Foucault again

Theories of practice solved these problems in two complementary ways. First, they de-emphasized what was going on in the heads of actors, either individuals or collectivities. Instead these theories emphasized ‘practices’ understood as routine activities (rather than consciously chosen actions) notable for their unconscious, automatic, un-thought character. Practices can be the routines of individual actors, inscribed in the ways they use their bodies, in their habits, in their taken-for-granted sense of space, dress, food, musical taste—in the social routines they know so well as to be able to improvise spontaneously without a second thought (Sudnow 1978; Bourdieu 1976, 1984). Practices can also be trans-personal, imbedded in the routines organizations use to process people and things, in the taken-for-granted criteria that separate one category of person or event from another—‘art’ from what is not art (Williams 1981; Becker 1982), or the sane from the mad (Foucault 1965, 1983). But whether ‘practices’ refer to individual habits or organizational routines, a focus on practices shifts attention away from what may or may not go on in actors’ consciousness—their ideas or value commitments—and toward the unconscious or automatic activities embedded in taken-forgranted routines. 

The problem referenced is the link between culture and action, so what I was talking about a section ago. I guess maybe action was the word I was thinking of. 

Like CHAT, then, there's a desire to think of action? as spread out across three different levels, discourse (macro), ideas (meso), and practices (micro). It seems like the middle level gets short shrift, or perhaps that's the layer of ideology. 

Ok, so there's a problem about the separation between the material and the ideal, culture and structure. She points to the likes of Giddens, Bourdieu, and Sewell as dealing with this problem by making structure dual. Giddens does this for sure. Bourdieu does get taken to task in this chapter, but that's because habitus can't explain the change in the SF Gay Price parade thing. 

Armstrong argues that a critical anchor for the constitutive rules that define the lesbian/gay community is the Lesbian/Gay Freedom Day Parade itself. She argues that the practices involved in setting up the parade, in which groups apply to have a contingent or a float included in the parade, and the parade itself, in which the more different groups participating and the more diverse their identity displays the more successful, exciting, and newsworthy the parade is, themselves anchor the definition of the ‘community’ as composed of multiple identity groups. Thus a practice, of recent origin, and very much a public ritual rather than an inscribed habitus, anchors a larger set of constitutive rules and their attendant discourses. In essence, the parade creates a situation of action in which the enacted schema is that membership in the community equals having a group to identify with, and a set of practices in which asserting one’s membership in the community means creating or joining a group which then claims a spot in the parade. Thus a practice encodes the dominant schema—encodes it as a pattern of action that people not only read but enact—a schema that is never explicitly formulated as a rule. 

This is important because, by thinking with Bourdieu, we'd want to think of action as only stemming from the long dure of the habitus. You'd need to draw on that resource, which only becomes potent by marinating for so long, for action/improvisation possible. The keys bits are

• public ritual (and thus directly observable)
• of recent origin

Both of these kind of explode Bourdieu in a fun way, although there is reference to schemas in there, and that's Sewell. But Sewell change's his? her? mind. I can't find anything about the mind change, but it does seem like Sewell advances on Giddens in making schemas transposable

Practices are structures in just this sense, simultaneously material and enacted, but also patterned and meaningful, both because they enact schemas and because they may be read for the transposable schemas they contain. Sewell (pp. 16–19) has brilliantly argued that this revised conception of how structures are formed from schemas and resources allows a substantive account of human agency. Because structures are multiple and intersecting, because schemas can be generalized to new situations and can sometimes generate unpredictable resource outcomes, and most importantly because the schemas implicit in arrays of resources can be ‘read’ in multiple and sometimes competing ways, transformation as well as continuity of structures is possible. 

Giddens doesn't even have schemas, I don't think. But the idea of a schema itself (read: genre) implies transposability. So basically activity systems. But how does this play out in the Gay Pride Parade example?

How are the practices that anchor culture practices different from cultural practices in general?

I was thinking of Marxism basically, and quotes like this seem to confirm it:

So the structures of capitalism and its associated practices, such as paying to buy or build a house which one then owns, are more fundamental—more enduring, more pervasive, more influential in shaping or constraining action—than this year’s fad in kitchen countertops, or even the practices of housewifery that make an easy-to-clean countertop desirable.  

But there's one spot that made me question it. It's not quite so simple as saying that the commodity form or labor grounds cultural practices, although that's probably certainly true in some cases. Swidler uses the example of the American volunteerism in group formation. Being nice. American's are nice because groups have to form voluntarily, so we think of disagreement and conflict as being bad because it has can tear a group apart. 

Related, but different:

In a similar way, Erving Goffman (1967, 1971) has delineated the interaction rituals that confirm the status of persons as persons. Moving aside when we pass someone, addressing a person by name, making eye contact, respecting someone’s space—all these practices reconfirm the constitutive rules of modern Western selfhood. 

This is the tautology level of Boltanski. Not a reality test. Truth test. So saying someone's name is a practice that anchors other practices, the practices of being a friend? or having a relationship of some kind? 

This is that part I was thinking of, why it's not as simple as being a Marxist, which is too easy:

Practices also play a key role in recreating the structure of American voluntarism. Varenne himself, who described the underlying code so brilliantly, has focused on discursive practices: the ways in which anything that is said that has ‘un-American’ content or implications is simply reinterpreted or ignored so as to conform to dominant ways of talking (Varenne 1984, 1987). But I do not think discursive practices in themselves hold the key to the reproduction of such structures. Nor do I think the ordinary practices that instill in Americans a distinctive habitus—the tendency to think of themselves as autonomous selves, their experienced facility in making choices (Tobin, Wu, and Davidson 1989), their expectation that each person will have his or her ‘own’ opinion on every possible matter (Jepperson 1992), their willingness to advertise their interests and talents to anyone they meet, or their tendency to evaluate others on the basis of moral character more than cultural accomplishments (Lamont 1992)—are the real anchors for the fundamental schema that constitutes persons and groups. [note the em dash there. it's important. also note the distinction between discursive and ordinary practices there, it's as though she's going back to the macro and the micro from earlier.]

For Americans, the actual creation of groups—establishing church congregations, clubs, support groups, or interest associations—is a recurrent but necessarily intermittent activity. Yet the deep concern with being the kind of self —autonomous, endowed with its own interests and opinions, energetic and ready to take initiative, able and willing to choose—that could form or join a group is a continuing preoccupation (Bellah et al. 1985). For most Americans, the central institutional spheres of action are the market economy, where most people must find places as workers, the bureaucratic state which generates obligations and

claims of rights and benefits, and the family where informal as well as legally

regulated obligations hold sway. In all modern capitalist societies, encounters

with the labor market, in particular, lead individuals to experience themselves as

the possessors of skills and capacities which define their social value (see Collier

[1997] for an analysis of how labor market experience generates individualized

6

personhood). But none of these are the primary locus of voluntarist individualism. The specific practices that reproduce America’s distinctive voluntarist individualism are those people use to negotiate collective action. To act in the wider public sphere, from the neighborhood, to the workplace, to collective political action, to the creation of community alliances and attachments, Americans draw on a diffuse public culture imbued with many elements of the sacred (see Swidler 1992). It is the paradigmatic practices of this wider public sphere, ritual enactments of a civil religion (Bellah 1968), which anchor the fundamental patterns of American voluntarist individualism. Thus when American children choose group activities, or when schools encourage after-school clubs, or when Americans join a church and pay dues, as when on important civic occasions they celebrate ‘freedom,’ they participate in ritual practices that reinforce voluntarist individualism. This pattern is resilient, I think, precisely because it lies outside the major institutions of bureaucracy, market, and family and thus provides the ‘default option’ for organizing collective action. In this sense it has something in common with both the ‘silent practices’ that constituted labor as a commodity in England versus Germany and the public role the Gay Freedom Day Parade played for San Francisco’s lesbian/gay community. In all three cases, a practice anchors other forms of practice and discourse because it enacts a constitutive rule that defines a social entity—the ‘gay community,’ the labor relationship, the ‘group’ or ‘community.’ 

So this is probably why people feel so attacked when we try to take down statues or whatever, or perhaps even this critical race theory thing that's going on. Or saying the pledge of allegiance. Didn't that come up recently too?

But at the same time that doesn't make sense. If you make people learn a certain history or say the pledge of allegiance, how does that "reinforce voluntarist individualism"? is it like a forced to be free thing (Rousseau)?