The landscapes of lives I: An action landscape approach to practices and the interface of individual and society

Abstract

Practices occupy the intersection of human behavior with its personal and societal dimensions, operating in social theory as bridges between high‐order cultural features and on‐the‐ground dynamics that reciprocally shape the conditions of everyday life and animate human experience. Yet precisely how this bridging occurs remains underspecified. We address that gap in this and a companion article (Worthman, Cummings, and Lende 2023). This article situates practices in dynamic action space, while the second details how those dynamics work and applies them to questions of inequity, resilience, and contemplative practice. We trace a spectrum of practices from mundane activities to formal rituals and self‐transformational pursuits. We then situate them within a socioecological framework, drawing on the visual metaphor of Charles Waddington's epigenetic landscape to represent fields of possible practices or action landscapes that are contingent, situated, and dynamically configured to constitute the middle ground bridging social actors and lived experience with sociocultural worlds.

The landscapes of lives II: How social actors navigate dynamic action landscapes

“…Repetition and shared sociocultural bases make practices legible and meaningful to both actors and compatriots; performing practices, in turn, re/produces society and its constituent culture. In this and the foregoing companion article (Worthman et al, 2023), we developed and applied concepts and models that lend analytic power and empirical specificity to ongoing efforts to understand how society and culture on the macro level are linked to behavior and experience in the lives of its members on the existential level. The concept of an action landscape helps to represent the dynamics determining the distribution of practices and people's ability to engage in them.…”

The incremental transformation of the body through freediving: A biocultural approach to reflexive bodily practices

“…Practice shapes practitioners’ behavior and physiognomy, as anthropologists Tim Ingold (2000) and Gísli Palsson (2016) have argued (see also Downey, 2021; Ingold & Palsson, eds., 2013; Lende & Downey, eds., 2012). For this reason, the anthropological study of practices could benefit from biocultural, integrative approaches, especially in psychological anthropology (e.g., Hruschka et al., 2005; Lende, 2005; Worthman et al., 2023; see also Wiley & Cullin, 2016). Practices are sites where cultural regimens inflect the biological variation in our species.…”