Turner’s The Social Theory of Practices effectively criticized conceptions of social practices as rule-governed or regularity-exhibiting performances. Turner’s criticisms nevertheless overlook an alternative, “normative” conception of practices as constituted by the mutual accountability of their performances. Such a conception of practices also allows a more adequate understanding of normativity in terms of accountability to what is at issue and at stake in a practice. We can thereby understand linguistic practice and normative authority without having to posit stable meanings, rules, norms, or presuppositions underlying the manifest diversity of social life.
Turner did not use the terms “regulist” and “regularist”; I have taken them from Robert Brandom’s (1994) discussion of two inadequate ways of understanding the normativity of dis-cursive practices. Turner instead drew a parallel distinction between practices as presuppositions and as causes. I think Brandom’s terms are more perspicuous, because they show the connection between these two approaches as two different but inadequate ways of conceiving the normative unity of a practice (either as governed by a rule or as exhibiting a regularity).
2.
Although I do not put it in these terms, in Rouse (2003) I argue that it is a misreading of Kuhn to treat him as a regulist or presupposition theorist for the reasons that led Kuhn (1970, chap. 5) to contrast paradigms to rules. Properly understood, I think, Kuhn was groping toward a normative conception of practices, although he did not yet have the resources to articulate the significance of its difference from regulism.
3.
Donna Haraway (1997) develops what I take to be parallel criticisms of regulism and regularism in terms of the implicit narrative structure of practices as the repetition of the Sacred Image of the Same rather than in terms of normativity. Like me and unlike Turner, she then looks to an alternative conception of cultural practices that accommodate difference rather than challenging the apparent continuity of such practices or the theoretical and political utility of taking seriously that continuity across differences.
4.
For more extensive discussion of this conception, see Rouse (2006; 2002, chap. 5).
5.
I adapt this example from Wheeler (2000, chap. 6).
6.
For further explication of this reading of Foucault, see Rouse (1996, 2005).
7.
I take the term “intra-action” from Barad (2007). The point, which I discuss more extensively in Rouse (2002), is to reject the connotation that an “interaction” has interacting components that can be identified apart from the mutual interaction.
8.
Ultimately, time and temporality must also be understood within the idiom of practices rather than situating practices within an independently determined temporal metric. Both the constitution of practices and norms for measuring temporal increments and the timing and historicity of such practices in turn need more extensive analysis. This topic is far beyond the scope of this article.
9.
The article that canonically identifies and articulates anthropologists’ initial turn from a conception of relatively stable, unifying, and undifferentiated cultures to a more dynamic account of cultural practices is Ortner (1984). A distinctive feature of the anthropological literature on practices is its recurrent emphasis on situating cultural meaning within the dynamics of political economy. For some further discussions and extensions of the practice idiom within anthropological theory, see Sahlins (2000), Ortner and Dirks (1994), Dirks (1998), and Ong (1999). Thanks to Elizabeth Traube for suggestions of and conversation about these references. My own familiarity with these themes in anthropology is primarily drawn from recent work in anthropological science studies; some prominent examples of that work include Strathern (1992), Martin (1994), Rabinow (1996), Downey and Dumit (1997), and Goodman, Heath, and Lindee (2003).
10.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
11.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The logic of practice. Translated by R. Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
12.
Brandom, Robert. 1979. Freedom and constraint by norms. American Philosophical Quarterly16:187-196.
13.
Brandom, Robert. 1994. Making it explicit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
14.
Davidson, Donald. 1986. A nice derangement of epitaphs. In Truth and interpretation, edited by E. LePore, 433-446. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
15.
Dirks, Nicholas. 1998. In near ruins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
16.
Downey, Gary Lee, and Joseph Dumit. 1997. Cyborgs and citadels. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
17.
Fine, Arthur. 1986. The shaky game. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
18.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The history of sexuality, volume 1. Trans. R. Hurley. New York: Random House.
19.
Foucault, Michel. 1982. Afterword: The subject and power. In Michel Foucault, edited by H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, 208-226. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
20.
Goodman, Alan, Deborah Heath, and M. Susan Lindee. 2003. Genetic nature/culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1980. Epistemological crises, dramatic narrative, and the philosophy of science. In Paradigms and Revolutions, edited by G. Gutting, 54-74. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
25.
McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and world. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
26.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1954. The portable Nietzsche. Ed. W. Kauffman. New York: Viking.
27.
Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
28.
Ortner, Sherry. 1984. Theory in anthropology since the sixties. Comparative Studies in Society and History26:126-166.
29.
Ortner, Sherry, and Nicholas Dirks. 1994. Culture/power/history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
30.
Rabinow, Paul. 1996. Essays on the anthropology of reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
31.
Rouse, Joseph. 1996. Beyond epistemic sovereignty. In The disunity of science, edited by P. Galison and D. Stump, 398-416. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
32.
Rouse, Joseph. 2002. How scientific practices matter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
33.
Rouse, Joseph. 2003. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Scientific Practice. In Thomas Kuhn, edited by T. Nickles, 101-121. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
34.
Rouse, Joseph. 2005. Power/knowledge. In Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd ed., edited by G. Gutting, 95-122. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
35.
Rouse, Joseph. 2006. Practice theory. In Handbook of the philosophy of science, vol. 15: The philosophy of sociology and anthropology, edited by S. Turner and M. Risjord, 639-681. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Elsevier.
36.
Sahlins, Marshall. 2000. Culture in practice. New York: Zone.
37.
Schatzki, Theodore, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny. 2001. The practice turn in contemporary theory. New York: Routledge.
38.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1992. After nature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
39.
Turner, Stephen. 1994. The social theory of practices. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
40.
Wheeler, Samuel. 2000. Deconstruction as analytic philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
41.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan.
