Lecture 14 Practice theory: Agency

1
Lecture 14 Practice theory Agency
2
Fredrik Barth the problem with culture

• Internally homogenous and externally bounded
  abstraction
• No room for agency

3
Knowledge

• What a person employs when they interpret and act
  upon the world.
• Facts and information, but also feelings and
  attitudes, embodied skills, and concepts.
• People experience events directly and
  immediately, but they interpret them in terms of
  their stock of knowledge.

4
Traditions of knowledge

• A corpus of substantive assertions and ideas
  about aspects of the world
• Communicated in the form of words, concrete
  symbols, and actions
• Distributed, communicated, employed and
  transmitted within a series of instituted social
  relations

5
Knowledge and agency

• People hold, learn, produce and apply knowledge
  in the course of day-to-day living
• Knowledge is continually being interactively
  interpreted, applied and modified
• Emphasises practice and experience, not
  institutions and collective representations

6
The anthropology of any particular tradition of
knowledge should thus above all be asked to
account for how certain compositions and
distributions of knowledge are (re)produced and
modified, how the processes of codification,
transmission and creativity generate the
pattern of variation which the ethnographies
record, not how the first bit of knowledge might
be created. (Cosmologies in the Making p. 83)
7
Baktaman initiation economy of knowledge

• Validity depended on knowledge having been
  received from ancestors under constraints of
  secrecy
• Time lag between initiations and memory
• Performative effect more important than an exact
  reproduction of the details
• Changes in the knowledge focused on the richness
  of harmonisation of idioms, the consistency and
  coherence of secret knowledge, and the shock and
  surprise value of new revelations to the novice.

8
Traditions of Knowledge in Bali
Culture-in-the-making

• People are not bounded by one tradition of
  knowledge
• They make decisions and act under conditions of
  uncertainty. Multiple causes for any particular
  event
• Events are interpreted and reinterpreted in
  interaction with others
• People look for practical answers, not a
  perfectly coherent system
• Every performed and interpreted act will slightly
  change the meanings that are ascribed to any
  following choice, act or expression

9
Michael Lambek practical knowledge and moral
practice

• Bourdieu reduces practice to unconscious habit
  and strategy and ignores the ethical dimension.
• Praxis involves judgement and deliberation
• Phronesis a practical intervention in
  particular events and circumstances by means of
  universal values which transcend them.

10
Moral reasoning

• The social system is not just a force imposed
  from above (power), which is adhered or rejected
  from below (desire).
• Morality is not simply an acceptance of an
  obligation but includes the reasoning behind
  choosing to do so.
• The practical judgements people make about how to
  live their lives wisely and well.