Page 158 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Practice 141

culture. Drawing especially from Marcel Mauss, who analyzed “techniques
of the body” across cultures and religions, Bourdieu’s notion of habitus also
echoed Marx’s contention that practice is a “state of the body” (Bourdieu
1990a: 68). For Bourdieu, the “common sense” of being a body in practice
in a particular culture was not natural; instead, the “feel for the game” that
was practice was “social necessity turned into nature” and thus obscured
(Bourdieu 1990a: 69). Not natural but naturalized, practice contained within
it both cultural competency and cultural domination.
Bourdieu understood practices to make sense in particular cultural “fields,”
such as education, art, or religion. The ways in which actors related to each
other in these fields had much to do with their different levels of not only
economic but cultural and symbolic capital; the knowingness and authority
that one commands in a boxing ring, for example, is based on different kinds
of capital than those operative in a lecture hall. In its demonstration that
particular kinds of practices make sense in one field and not another and
its analysis of conflict within fields, Bourdieu’s theory of fields of cultural
production was particularly useful for bringing together his theory of
practice with the study of media (Bourdieu 1984; 1993; cf. Peterson and
Anand 2004). Bourdieu’s own attention to religion in particular was more
sporadic, but his theories of practice, habitus, and symbolic capital have
deeply influenced the study of religion (e.g., Bell 1992).
Another strong current among practice theory was the work of the French
historian Michel de Certeau, who argued that Bourdieu’s “logic of practice”
sacrificed the embodied knowingness of practices for benefit of constructing
his theory: “Scrupulously examining practices and their logic—in a way that
surely has had no equivalent since Mauss—[Bourdieu’s] texts finally reduce
them to a mystical reality, the habitus, which is to bring them under the
law of reproduction” (de Certeau 1984: 59). Most troubling for de Certeau
was Bourdieu’s insistence that practice was defined by the unknowingness
of its actors—once an actor reflected on her actions as a “practice” it was
no longer naturalized or common sense, and thus no longer a practice. De
Certeau, by contrast, thought of practice as a more knowing disposition,
made up of both “strategies” and “tactics.” For de Certeau, strategies
were practices calculated by those individuals, organizations, or bodies of
expertise that had power over others and that were able to claim a space
of their own—for example, armies, businesses, and scientific institutions. A
tactic, by contrast, was a calculated practice of the “weak” or those who did
not have a protected place from which to operate and who were forced to
act within the territory of those who held the bulk of the (violent) power (de
Certeau 1984). His articulation of strategies and tactics allowed de Certeau
to make space for resistance or for practices that were knowingly counter
to dominant views, though he could not be considered entirely optimistic