From its very beginnings, the social study of culture has been polarized between structuralist theories that treat meaning as a text and investigate the patterning that provides relative autonomy and pragmatist theories that treat meaning as emerging from the contingencies of individual and collective action—so-called practices—and that analyze cultural patterns as reflections of power and material interest. In this article, I present a theory of cultural pragmatics that transcends this division, bringing meaning structures, contingency, power, and materiality together in a new way. My argument is that the materiality of practices should be replaced by the more multidimensional concept of performances. Drawing on the new field of performance studies, cultural pragmatics demonstrates how social performances whether individual or collective can be analogized systematically to theatrical ones. After defining the elements of social performance, I suggest that these elements have become “de-fused” as societies...

Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy*:

A perusal of the contents of any social science journal will indicate that ethnicity has been a popular topic during the past two decades. Yet despite the volume of material produced, this period has not seen a notable increase in theoretical sophistication in the field (Drummond 1983:803; Young 1983). For the most part students of ethnicity remain mired in antique arguments about motivation that obscure as much as they illuminate. The following discussion attempts to break through some entrenched conceptual blinders by drawing on the theory of practice outlined by Pierre Bourdieu (1977). This theory avoids the explanatory gaps and fallacious reasoning and at the same time allows richer interpretations of ethnic phenomena, individual and collective, than do conventional models of ethnicity. Since individual and collective expressions of ethnicity have elicited divergent theoretical treatments, the practice theory of ethnicity promises to give new unity to a fragmented field of study.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S001041750001433X

Ethnicity and Practice

This article examines methodological issues that arise when using information from one historical period to illuminate another. It begins by showing how the strengths and weaknesses of methods commonly used to compare institutions or regions reappear in comparisons between times. The discussion then turns to alternative approaches. The use of narrative and of path dependency to construct explanatory sequences are strategies that strike a welcome balance between causal generalization and historical detail. But these approaches typically fail to identify either the causal mechanisms or the trajectories that link events in different eras. These gaps can be filled by rethinking sequences of events across periods as reiterated problem solving. Successive U.S. industrial relations regimes since 1900 are used to illustrate this methodological strategy.

/pdf/making-use-of-the-past-time-periods-as-cases-to-compare-and-1h0sm1pbgx.pdf

Making Use of the Past: Time Periods as Cases to Compare and as Sequences of Problem Solving

This analysis of the public debate and riots about abolitionism in antebellum Cincinnati uses constructivist approaches to demonstrate how discourse makes some forms of action possible and legitimate and, conversely, how collective action transforms the meaning and structure of discourse. Two incidents of mob violence in Cincinnati interrupted the discursive struggle over abolitionism, undermining some diagnoses and solutions while making others more compelling. Speakers incorporated the events into their discourses, thus creating new definitions of the situation and new means to resolve the problems it raised, abandoning or reworking discredited arguments, and reframing the issues in the debate. The conclusion discussed this study's implications for understanding the dialectical relationship between cultural representation and social action.

Understanding the Dialectic of Discourse and Collective Action: Public Debate and Rioting in Antebellum Cincinnati

Over recent decades, Islamism—the belief that Islam should guide social and political as well as personal life—has become a powerful force throughout much of the Muslim world. Through a discussion of the Egyptian case, this essay shows how the rise of Islamism can be illuminated by findings of the literatures on revolution and civil society, and vice versa. As many leading theories on revolutions would predict, the necessary precondition for Islamism's rise has been the declining efficacy and legitimacy of the state. Yet what has occurred in Egypt (and other parts of the Arab world) is not a successful revolution but a peculiar stalemate in which the existing regime retains political power while ceding substantial control over the societal and cultural spheres to the revolutionary challenger—an outcome that the literature does not envision. This stalemate, in turn, is largely a consequence of Islamists' ability to expand their presence in civil society. This expansion in Egypt and other Arab countries over recent decades is thus best understood as a sign not of benign liberalization, but rather of profound political failure, and as an incubator for illiberal radicalism.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3688899.pdf

Islamism, Revolution, and Civil Society

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Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848