This chapter critiques the All-Affected Principle (AAP) for its inattention to structural power relations. Illustrating with the case of school desegregation in the American metropolis, it argues that people are significantly affected not only by decisions, but also by nondecisions, doxic norms, and positioning in systemic relations of domination. It makes the case for reformulating the AAP in a way that broadens it to focus on people’s social capacity to shape the power relations that delimit their fields of possible action.

This chapter shows that while African journalists are upset at being marginalized in the global narrative construction about events in Africa, they, too, are vital players in marginalizing African voices in the source selection processes. Thus, an African reader is much more likely to know what an American senator thinks about an international event on the continent than they are likely to hear from a regional expert immersed in the unfolding event. It empirically shows that African journalists are crucial players in silencing African voices despite their complaints of marginalization in Chapter 4.

There is a tendency to treat African journalism fields as insignificant to scholarship unless the scholarly focus is on “improving” or “modernizing” them. This chapter argues against this tendency by arguing that African journalism is engaged in knowledge production and all its attendant politics. It argues that by taking a conflict such as Darfur as a locus, scholars can excavate the multiple discursive struggles over questions such as the role of African journalism, the place of African news organizations in global narrative construction about Africa, and the politics of belonging in which African journalists debate what it means to be African. Relying on field theory, postcolonial theory, and the sociology of knowledge, this chapter argues for a de-Westernization of journalism studies while cogently locating the origins of field theory in Algeria; thus connecting it not just to the colonial project but specifically locating field theory with a larger discourse of postcoloniality.

This penultimate chapter shows how the story of the constitution is not only told by the written text of a constitution but (even predominantly so) by symbols, images, icons, gestures, behaviour, flags, rituals and so on. The constitutional story is conveyed directly and indirectly in very many (unstudied) ways.

This chapter addresses the book’s first question by focusing on what classical Pragmatism can tell us about the ‘practice turn’ in International Relations. It assesses the value – both descriptive and normative – of defining practice as pre-reflexive or habitual. Dewey was clear: habits can be useful, but only if those subject to their hold can improvise when practice produces unwanted consequences. Applying this to International Relations, the chapter shows how a failure to adequately reflect on the situational value of an ideological commitment to ‘democracy promotion’ – what Bourdieusian-informed Practice theory might call a Western ‘habitus’ – contributed to the maladapted response to the humanitarian crises in Syria and Myanmar. This again points to the centrality of reflection, deliberation, judgement and learning to the Pragmatist approach. The chapter develops that argument by examining how Dewey’s ‘pedagogic creed’ aimed to put individuals and societies in control of their habits and how his critique of the unhelpful hierarchies in formal education was extrapolated to form a theory of social learning, which included an emphasis on the role democracy plays in facilitating the reflexivity and deliberation.

James Baldwin’s account of “looking away” in “Nobody Knows My Name,” points to the prevailing habit of ignoring the history and facts of blackness that continues to be replicated in American culture. “Looking away” is, however, only partial since it simultaneously demands and denies black existence, a paradoxical strategy designed to facilitate the work of whiteness and the cultural formation it engenders. One can be resistant to the facts of race while being preoccupied with the idea of race as advanced within a critique of modernity. This chapter argues that these complex and pervasive strategies inform a mental practice, a white epistemology that is the product of historical formation, from which the reader and reading are not immune. By contrast, the chapter’s review of early modern and current theories of reading indicates the continuing trend of racial avoidance. Building on Michel de Certeau’s class-inflected analysis that “the text has a meaning only through its readers,” this chapter argues, however, that whiteness exercises an elite racial function in reading that, following Charles W. Mills’ critique, produces distortion and misinterpretation.

The chapter argues that fieldwork – specifically multi-sited, semi-structured interviews and participant observation – is uniquely suited for unpacking how the constraints of daily practice within national courts frustrate the subnational reach of the European Union's (EU) legal authority. Deriving methodological insights and practical lessons from fifteen months of fieldwork in Italian, French, and German courts, the author shows how fieldwork reveals judges to be neither solely driven by individual attitudes nor by strategic quests for power: they are also employees within a bureaucracy. Anchored by the demands of established practice, knowledge, and everyday work, judges can develop an institutionally rooted consciousness resisting disruptive confrontations with new and unfamiliar rules like EU law. Through on-site iteration and triangulation, field researchers can trace, unpack, and corroborate this consciousness in real time, with an eye to also hypothesizing the conditions under which resistances to Europeanizing change can be overcome. In so doing, the researcher can intercept what one judge referred to as a ‘bureaucratic silence’ within which EU law ‘dies’: A web of habitual institutional practices scarcely detectable via other modes of social inquiry.

Around 6000 cal BC on the Konya plain in central Anatolia the nature of ceramic assemblages changed considerably, with higher quantities of pottery in use, a greater range of vessel shapes and new forms of surface treatment, principally comprising painted geometric motifs. Based on quantitative analysis of a pottery assemblage from the West Mound of Çatalhöyük, this chapter explores the details of these changes and their implications for understanding Anatolian societies at the turn of the 6th millennium. The argument turns on the need to interpret ceramic decoration in the context of broader networks of material practice.

Chapter 3 unpacks why national judges broadly eschewed turning to European law and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) when doing so could bolster their own power. It reveals historically rooted practices and knowledge deficits embodied in the trudge of daily work within civil service judiciaries that fostered what I call an “institutional consciousness” of path dependence: An accrued social identity tied to institutional place that magnifies the reputational risks and labor costs of mobilizing European law. This consciousness reifies judges’ sense of distance to Europe, legitimating a renouncement of agency and resistance to change. The core of this chapter revolves around interviews and oral histories with 134 judges across French, Italian, and German courts, contextualized via ethnographic fieldnotes, descriptive statistics, and secondary sources. The chapter will speak to readers interested in a historical and sociological understanding of what path dependence looks, sounds, and feels like in the courthouse, why judges in civil service judiciaries can be likened to street-level bureaucrats, and how immersive fieldwork can illuminate the habitual practices calcifying the behaviors and identities of judges.

The worldwide exportation of the nation-state went hand in hand with the diffusion of the Western concept of religion, both of which are notably related to the expansion of the Westphalian order. Exploring the diffusion of the twin concepts of nation-state and religion intersects with two bodies of knowledge: nationalism and secularization. Combining them helps explain why and how religion and politics influence each other. Historical institutionalism and conceptual history are used to establish areas of politicization of religion in the qualitative phase of the research and to identify patterns in big data bases in the quantitative phase of the research. This approach is applied to the politicization of religion in Syria, Turkey, India, China and Russia.

Chapter 2 focuses on the autobiographical memory of the zhiqing who have lower and middle class positions today. Also, the end of the chapter presents a summary of the major arguments and some discussions of additional issues about autobiographical memory.

Chapter 4, I examine “sites of memory”: the exhibits in the 1990s and museums since the 2000s. I show that memory entrepreneurs and dynamics of cultural production fields result in a pattern of representation centered on “people but not the event.” Such a pattern, however, provokes even more public debates than expected.

In Chapters 1 and 2, I use qualitative and quantitative analyses of the life history interviews with the zhiqing to describe and explain various patterns of their autobiographical memory. Their autobiographical memory varies greatly, and the variation can be explained by “class,” including their present class positions and their chushen and habitus formed in the Mao years. Chapter 1 focuses on those zhiqing with higher class positions today.

This chapter explores drummers’ experiences inside recording studios from social, spatial, and technological viewpoints to highlight the drummer’s place in the creative processes of making popular music recordings. Through our ongoing ethnographic research in studios, this chapter draws from observational fieldnotes when both authors were acting as ethnographers and drummers (‘drummer-as-ethnographer’) and a series of semi-structured interviews with eight drummers of varied backgrounds and experiences. Our analyses critique widely-accepted beliefs about drummers (or in Bourdieu’s terms “Doxa”) by spotlighting three key areas: (1) the social spaces of drummers in studios (i.e. where drummers ‘belong’, or not); (2) the production of social identities in studios (i.e. who drummers are in relation to power hierarchies within the recording process); and (3) the knowledge and involvement of drummers within the creative process of record-making (i.e. what drummers ‘know’ and are able to do with their knowledge in studios). We conclude the chapter by highlighting that although they are often overlooked, drummers are vital actors within the social, spatial, and technological worlds of the recording studio.

Chapters 3 and 4 focus on “public memory.” Chapter 3 focuses on various patterns of literary memory in the 1980s and later and shows that the pattern of “good people but the bad event” became dominant. The variations and trend in the literary memory can be explained by the interplay of several factors: the dominant doxa of realism and unusual dynamics in the literary field in the 1980s, major authors’ habitus, the lower-class position of the returning zhiqing, and the state’s political use of the Maoist past.

The illegitimacy of present accounts of privacy is revealed by the manner in which normalisation has long taken place through a series of social transitions. Other historical perspectives of societal evolution have been adopted, but the mythological analysis here is distinctive. Following Christian confessionalism and pastoralism, we see the methods of governmentalizing discipline that led to the civilising of the sovereign State through the rise of the bourgeoisie; then the liberalism and neoliberalism that ultimately promoted the dominance of the Market over the State, by which the consumer has been constructed; and now the Technological ‘algorisation’ of social and individual perspective and practice. Many of the elements that have accumulated in this long process are thereby being brought to bear in technologies of the self as self-creation. Each of these regimes was founded on the distancing and camouflage of existential reality, inducing subjection to the ideas and practices promoted within these mythological magnitudes and primarily for the benefit of their respective dominant interests.