Is a “Special Psychology” of Practice Possible?

Abstract

Traditional theories of culture and socialization in the social and behavioral sciences have concentrated on how attitudes and values come to be “internalized” and thus shared by members of a collectivity. The emergence of practice theory challenges the classical theory of socialization and acculturation by shifting the focus of analysis away from explicit symbolic representations and towards tacit, motor-schematic procedures. In this paper I argue that even as they reject the traditional object of older socialization-based accounts, most practice theorists continue to operate with the same outmoded theory of socialization and acculturation inherited from classical sociology. I use Wacquant’s (2004) “carnal ethnography” of becoming a boxer to outline an alternative approach—grounded in recent research in cognitive neuroscience—which provides a more adequate explanation of how practices come to be acquired and transmitted from person to person.