Series Editors: Jean Comaroff, Andreas Glaeser, William Sewell, Lisa Wedeen

'Practices of meaning'

Since its inception in 2004, the Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning book series with the University of Chicago Press has published five titles with several more in the works.

Our series has distinctive theoretical goals, which are signaled by its title, and we aim to stimulate a broad interdisciplinary conversation that combines and transcends the interests and thematics of all four of our home disciplines: anthropology (Jean Comaroff), sociology (Andreas Glaeser), history (William Sewell), and political science (Lisa Wedeen).

Over the past two decades, the social sciences and humanities have been swept by a massive “cultural turn.” Once regarded as the exclusive province of anthropology, the study of culture has become a major preoccupation of nearly all disciplines in the social sciences ­ with the major exception of economics ­ and has given rise to the fledgling discipline, or quasi-discipline, of cultural studies. We see our book series as operating on the terrain opened up by this burgeoning, uneven, and sometimes polyglot study of culture. But we adopt a particular interdisciplinary theoretical perspective, designated by our use of the terms “practice” and “meaning” rather than “culture.” The term culture has been used so promiscuously over the past two decades in both academic and popular discourse as to produce unacknowledged ambiguities in our thinking. Among its most prominent uses is one we especially wish to avoid ­ the reified concept of culture as the sedimented and essentially permanent values of a particular racial, ethnic, or national group. Finally, the study of culture has increasingly come to concentrate on visual or textual displays of meaning without sufficient consideration of the material and social conditions of their possibility.

We prefer the term meaning because it avoids the reification and the 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 like ritual, art, writing, or oratory. The production of meaning is a practical activity, achieved in patterned but never fully predictable human actions and interactions. Symbolic orders that shape social relations are themselves the products of those social relations ­ of the conflicts, constraints, strategies, resource distributions, and interplays of agency that characterize a given society in a specific time and place.

We are interested in the widest possible range of practices of meaning ­ in ritual, political theory, work, urban design, religion, shopping, social movements, music, economic exchange, science, leisure, kinship ­ any arena or aspect of human life in which meanings are made. We intend to delimit the interests of our series not by restricting it to certain sorts of activities or to particular geographical regions or historical eras, but by a specific interdisciplinary conception of practices of meaning and of their relation to history and politics.

As we understand it, the term “practices of meaning” has three specific implications.

(1) Meanings are produced in a material nexus. Human actors make meanings in specific times and places, utilizing specific media of communication (for example, film, labor, ritual objects, conversation, books, theaters, bodily gestures), and must use certain resources to do so. The media and their modes of circulation impose certain limits and confer certain possibilities ­ for example, printed materials can reach larger and more anonymous audiences than oral conversation can, but will probably be more subjected to market forces; patterns of access to computers, which are largely a function of class and world-location, will influence what meanings get constructed and circulated over the internet. At the same time, to make meanings is to mobilize social power and economic resources and to affect their distribution in society. Practices of meanings must always be understood in their political-economic context.

(2) Practices of meaning are political. By politics, we mean the activities of state institutions, of formal political organizations, and of citizens attempting to influence these ­ but also the exercise of power through variegated, complicated everyday practices of domination and subordination. Politics implies hierarchy and leverage, but also collective action, the transformative possibilities embodied in organized and spontaneous social movements, when conventional institutions are called into question and new forms of intervention generate critiques of the familiar. We recognize that political power is diffuse, protean, many-sided, and generative, and that it can be exercised by elites, by grassroots organizations, or by ordinary citizens whose interests or desires propel them to act. We expect work in our series, whether focusing on the experience of local communities or on such domains as international relations, state policy, or macro political economy, to explore the imbrications of practice, meaning, and politics.

(3) Practices of meaning must always be understood historically, in three different senses. Meanings and practices change over time, as do the social contexts they shape and are shaped by. To account for practices of meaning in any present, it is necessary to describe and analyze how they come into being and how they are reproduced and transformed. To say that the works we intend to publish will be historical does not imply that their objects of study must be located in a past era, although some of them will be. We are equally interested in studies of contemporary problems that situate their subject matter in sequences of historical change and demonstrate an awareness of the susceptibility of contemporary practices to the forces and vicissitudes of history.

Practices of meaning are also historical in the sense that they are located in a particular time and place and are fundamentally shaped by factors pertaining to this location. An historical study, in this sense, is one that relates the practices and meanings it investigates to the distinct possibilities and constraints of the historical context in which they are carried out. To be historical requires placing practices of meaning within the contemporary distributions of power, horizons of possibility, and textures of social interactions that constitute the world of a particular historical era.

Finally, the series encourages authors to think historically in a third sense: to reflect upon what their analyses of practices of meaning tell us about our own contemporary historical conjuncture ­ to engage, that is, in a theorization of the present. The editors regard the contemporary historical conjuncture as a major conceptual and political challenge. The demise of the Soviet Union, coming at the end of a decade and a half of extraordinary transformations in the structure of international capitalism, seems to mark the beginning of a new political era, but one whose outlines are still uncertain. The current era is marked by the triumph of formal democracy as the international standard of political legitimacy; by the collapse of socialism and the dwindling even of moderate welfare-state alternatives to the neo-liberal capitalist order; by the increasing inability of nation-states to regulate the economies on which their citizens depend; by the burgeoning globalization of populations, economic activities, identities, and discourses; by the widening gulf between the destinies of the wealthy and the destitute, both within and between the developed and less-developed countries; by the emergence of supra-state social movements and forms of governance simultaneously with virulent nationalisms and fundamentalisms; by an unprecedented concentration of military power in one country; and by an historically unparalleled volatility of identities. The currently dominant neo-liberalism celebrates the post-1989 world as the definitive triumph of freedom, as, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, “the end of history.” We see this new era as both a promise and a threat, as an intellectual and political conundrum of the first order, ­ one that can be illuminated significantly by the studies we envision for this series. We hope that all books in the series, whether they are devoted to contemporary affairs or to more remote historical periods, will contribute in some way to theorizing the present.

We seek out distinguished scholarly manuscripts that share our methodological and epistemological commitments to interpretive social science, to probing interdisciplinary contact, and to work combining serious theoretical reflection with empirically rich accounts of local experience. We also seek out studies of practices of meaning in all geographic areas of the world.