Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning

In collaboration with The University of Chicago Press 3CT has also established a new interdisciplinary book series, Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning. To date, the series has published eleven manuscripts, with several more in various stages of review. The series has distinctive theoretical goals, as signaled by its title. Following the so-called “cultural turn” the study of culture became a major preoccupation of nearly all disci- plines in the social sciences – with the major exception of economics – and has given rise to the fledgling discipline, or quasi-discipline, of cultural studies. Our book series operates on the terrain opened up by this burgeoning, uneven, and sometimes polyglot study of culture. But we adopt a rigorous interdisciplinary theoretical perspective, des- ignated by our use of the terms “practice” and “meaning” rather than “culture,” as the latter has been used so promiscuously over the past two decades in both academic and popular discourse as to proliferate a host of unacknowledged ambiguities. We prefer the term “meaning” because it avoids the reification and grand claims so often associated with the culture concept, while putting the emphasis where it belongs – on human sense-making. And we insist on practice to signal that meanings are made, inscribed, reproduced, and transformed in the daily give-and-take of social life as well as in more self-consciously symbolic activities such as ritual, art, writing, or oratory.

Our editors, who come from four different fields of social science: Anthropology (Jean Comaroff), Sociology (Andreas Glaeser), History (William Sewell), and Political Science (Lisa Wedeen), are interested in the widest possible range of practices of meaning – in ritual, political theory, work, urban design, religion, shopping, social movements, mu- sic, economic exchange, science, leisure, kinship – which is to say, any arena or aspect of human life in which meanings are made. They delimit the interests of the series not by restricting it to certain sorts of activities or to particular geographical regions or histori- cal eras, but by a finely articulated interdisciplinary conception of practices of meaning and of their relation to history and politics. To this end, 3CT solicits distinguished scholarly manuscripts that share our methodological and epistemological commitments to innovation in interpretive social science, to probing interdisciplinary contact, and to work combining rigorous theoretical reflection with empirically rich accounts of local experience.