Social Practice, Interdisciplinary Perspective

Abstract

The structuration and definition of disciplines – an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century project – gave way, in the second half of the twentieth century in the European and American academies, to their destructuration, although certainly not everywhere, nor to unanimous approval. For all the resistance that it has encountered, however, this movement towards the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries has taken root. It can be traced back to the 1960s, a period whose economic growth and economic optimism freed up mental space, allowing energies to focus on political and sociocultural injustices and inequalities and thereby fermenting that ‘cultural revolution’ for which the 1960s are now most remembered in the affluent ‘western’ world. ‘Cultural’ here embraces, as it did at the time, the anthropological notion of culture as belief, knowledge, morals, customs and, among others, symbolic representation, thus also theatre and performance.