Hrning/Reuter(2004): Doing Culture: Kultur als Praxis

Cultural turn
Cultural Turn - approach since 1980s in sociology. Return of culture as the basic phenomenon of social
order. In this view, culture is something not made of structures and language, but of action.

The concept of culture widened to describe a the central phenomenon of social order which permeates
almost everything. Instead of seeing culture as having borders and territories and being something
defined and countable, culture is seen as a verb, as a process, as a relation.

Practice turn
What started as a loose bundle of empirical and analytical approaches in the tradition of the cultural
turn, turned into a paradigma of its own, to a practice turn. These include not just new approaches, but
also the discovery of old ones, which are not conceptualized into a singular theoretical approach. In this
paradigma, the central unity of analysis is not culture, but practice. In this, culture is practice, and
practice is culture. The concept of culture is widened as well as the concept of action. Culture as practice
connects the social with the cultural, and is concerned with how social practice is contingent on culture.

From cultural turn to Doing Culture

With the cultural turn, the concept of culture was widened, among others with the help of the school of
cultural studies who made the previously looked down upon as low brow, popular culture, a valid area
of research in its own right. This allowed the concept of culture to now be so wide as it is in Culture as
Practice, to encompass potentially all areas of society.1

In Culture as Practice, a new way of viewing culture is introduced, that brought forth by the cultural turn,
but also a new way of viewing action and the social. A premise from practice theory which states that
culture is practiced. It is an interactive thing which is done, not an objective fact.2

Hrning and Reuter calls these new empirical and theoretical orientations towards the concept of
practice Doing culture.3 Doing culture, according to them, focuses on the practical effort of culture
and not the finished cognitive structures of sense and meaning. It looks towards the relations of practice
in which culture is intertwined and expressed, where it lives and changes

Dynamic concept of culture, as existing in moving, dynamic relations.

With doing culture, the focus is the relations of practice in which culture inevitably is involved, but
doesnt see it as a static system to be uncovered, but sees it as only existing, both solidifying and

1
Ibid 13
2
Ibid; 10
3
What is the difference between practice theory and doing culture? Is doing culture a specific approach withing
the cultural sciences that USE practice theories (from philosophy and sociology etc)? Or maybe they just want to
coin a concept because its cool.
changing, in these relations, in a very dynamic way. How culture actually becomes introduced, enacted
and reproduced, but also unequally distributed an dealt with, becomes central questions.4

Focus not on singular actions of individuls, but collective practices

Culture in action means the familiarized ways of acting and habitual, regularly occuring practices of the
members of society becomes the central point in cultural analyses.

Not all actions are practices. Doing culture becomes more about doing than about culture in its focus on
the execution, embodiment and realization but unlike the concept of performance the focus is not on
the singular, individual execution and presentation. The habits of the everyday, the habitualized actions
which are not even seen as doing anything. All the things we do but take for granted

Breaking a practice becomes visible when something is done wrong knocking in the wrong way, an
unintentional gesture, shows that there is a normal path of interaction. How cultural knowledge
thinking is practiced in not individual, but collective action. The cultural analyses of practice theory is not
about seeing the immediately recognizable and understandable practices as comprehensible but about
working out the cultural forms and connotations behind them, which makes practices appear
immediately understandable and predictable (see Bourdieu 1987).

Concept of culture
This makes culture itself not a territorially fixed entity but translocal, creative and explorative. The
materiality also gets a central role, but it is not a physical or biological materiality, but a practically
shaped materiality, which is connected to other materialities and practices. Everything is culturally
formed, territories, bodies and objects.

Culture is not in things and dichotomies, and the autonomy and quality of symbolic patterns is not what
is important. Instead, how culture operates and reacts is in question. Cultural patterns of meaning as
well as orders of knowledge are not ignored, but the interest is in how they is habitualized and
materialized and historically shaped. The focus on the practices however, does not mean that the
regimes/organizations of culture are believed to be performed in an appropriate way, or that the
meaning of them are always the same. A bodily skill is required to even set them in motion.5 (Like in
the Bourdieu sense? Which are acquired through social milieu and environment?) But seeing the
wrong ways of practice, tell a lot about what the practice entails.

Power and difference

In the practice of culture, power and social injustice becomes not only visible, but actualized. Social
practice always brings with it valuation and the interpretation of self and others. Doing culture is always
doing difference, and both the differences between different groups but also within the practices of the
same group are interesting, the ways in which culture is contaminated because of social practices.

4
Hrning/Reuter 2004; 10
5
Ibid. 12
Bridging the strucures versus agency debate
Where can practice be located? Practice is like a hinge between the subject and the structures.
Experience and knowledge are embedded in practice but are always brought in, experienced and
mobilized in a new way. So these experiences and knowledge, which in other traditions were seen as
static objects, as systems or patterns to be uncovered6, are now seen as dynamic and changing, and
therefore not the central object of analyses.

Doing culture is very broad, and can include both an objectivist and subjectivist erkenntnisweise. Practice
theory sees itself as a blind spot between these two theoretical approaches. Between action and
structure, between micro and macro, interpretive or normative. Also theory is practice! So practice is
above theory, and practice also leads the scientific, academic world of practice. Different analytical focus
points coming up with different answers to how what shape practices take.7 The practice turn requires
scientists to become very meta, and realizing the way their practices are embedded in practices, and
what these are. The practice of theorizing in doing cultural analyses will influence the way practices are
seen. Are practices individual or societal, intentional or mechanical. (Isnt this just always the case with
theoretical schools they form the analyses!?!? And if the social practices can take different forms
depending on the practice of theorizing, what is the point of the concept?

Bourdieus concept of habitus is an example of how a practice theoretical approach attempts to

overcome the structures >< agency, or, as the authors say, objectivist >< subjectivist discussion.

Practice theorists: Bourdieu, Foucault, Butler, Wittgenstein

The cultural and social order/organization lies not either in the structures or in the institutions or in the
heads of the single members of society but in the social practice.

6
For example the views of intepretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz which framed culture as text, as web of
meanings where symbols and language becomes key, that is to be intepreted by the anthropologist. It also stands
in contrast to the structuralism of Lvi-Strauss, critiqued by Geertz, which sees culture as patterns of thought and
hidden rules, disguised under the actions and behavior of people.
7
Ibid. 11