weeden, conceptualizing culture

American Political Science Review Vol. 96, No. 4 December 2002

Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political ScienceLISA WEDEEN University of Chicago

This essay makes a case for an anthropological conceptualization of culture as “semiotic practices”and demonstrates how it adds value to political analyses. “Semiotic practices” refers to the processesof meaning-making in which agents’ practices (e.g., their work habits, self-policing strategies, and

leisure patterns) interact with their language and other symbolic systems. This version of culture can beemployed on two levels. First, it refers to what symbols do—how symbols are inscribed in practices thatoperate to produce observable political effects. Second, “culture” is an abstract theoretical category, a lensthat focuses on meaning, rather than on, say, prices or votes. By thinking of meaning construction in termsthat emphasize intelligibility, as opposed to deep-seated psychological orientations, a practice-orientedapproach avoids unacknowledged ambiguities that have bedeviled scholarly thinking and generatedincommensurable understandings of what culture is. Through a brief exploration of two concerns centralto political science—compliance and ethnic identity-formation—this paper ends by showing how cultureas semiotic practices can be applied as a causal variable.

In epistemologies ranging from literary studies torational choice theory, issues broadly construed as“cultural” have been animating academic debates,

encouraging interdisciplinary exchanges, and inspiringbattles over the methods, evidence, and goals of schol-arly research.1 In this essay, I offer a critical analysis ofthe problems involved in current usages of the term inpolitical science, make the case for a conceptualizationof culture as semiotic practices, and show why it hasvalue for, and how it might be employed by, politicalscientists.

In political science, the concept of culture used to beassociated primarily with the literature on political cul-ture that emerged in the context of postwar political so-ciology, with its interest in policy initiatives intended toreproduce the conditions of Western democratizationabroad (Somers 1995, 114). Derived from Max Weber’s([1905] 1958) classic analysis of the “elective affinity”between the Protestant ethic and the rise of capitalism

Lisa Wedeen is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Univer-sity of Chicago, 5828 South University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637([email protected]).

The author wishes to acknowledge the valuable comments re-ceived on this paper from colleagues, students, friends, and compan-ions. In particular, I would like to thank Nadia Abu El-Haj, CarlesBoix, Matthew Cleary, John Comaroff, Yasmin A. Dawood, MichaelDawson, Sujatha Fernandes, Andreas Glaeser, Deborah Gould,Stathis Kalyvas, Mathew Kocher, David D. Laitin, Adria Lawrence,Doowan Lee, Patchen Markell, Jennifer Mitzen, Anne Norton,Hanna Pitkin, Don Reneau, Martin Riesebrodt, Jennifer Rubenstein,Danilyn Rutherford, James C. Scott, William H. Sewell, Jr., RonaldSuny, Evalyn Tennant, Jeffrey Tulis, Robert Vitalis, and AlexanderWendt. I am also grateful to Michael Chwe for providing me with acopy of his manuscript. Previous versions of this essay were presentedto audiences at the University of Chicago’s Comparative PoliticsWorkshop, the Wilder House Center for the Study of Politics, History,and Culture, and the American Political Science Association’s annualmeeting (summer 2000). This essay is dedicated to the memory ofMichael P. Rogin.1 Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s (1952) historical overview of the chang-ing meanings of the word “culture” in German, French, and Englishestimated that there were over 160 definitions in use in the 1950s(Brownstein 1995, 313; Steinmetz 1999, 5). Raymond Williams (1983,90) limited his analysis to four main ordinary and academic uses, buthe also observed that culture was “one of the two or three most com-plicated words in the English language” (Sewell 1999, 39; Steinmetz1999, 5).

in the West, these studies attempted to show how cul-tural attitudes and beliefs either hindered or enabled“progress” (Banfield 1958; McClelland 1961, 1963; Pye1965). Conceived in terms of an alleged set of residualvalues and norms—what Sherry Ortner (1997, 8–9) hasaptly characterized as “a deeply sedimented essenceattaching to, or inhering in particular groups”—thisnotion of culture was prominent in the sociology ofTalcott Parsons (1949, 1951, 1965) in modernizationtheory, and in the American cultural anthropology ofFranz Boas (1986, 1911), Margaret Mead, and RuthBenedict ([1934] 1989), as well as in the behavioristrevolution of the 1950s and 1960s. In political science,it was Gabriel Almond’s (1956) seminal essay, alongwith his subsequent collaboration with Sidney Verba(1963), that produced one of the most influential under-standings of political culture in terms of “orientationstoward the political system,” whereby some popula-tions had civic “cultures” and others did not.2 SamuelHuntington’s 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, “The Clashof Civilizations?” and his subsequent book The Clash ofCivilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996)mark perhaps the most prominent and polemical recentexample of this kind of political culturalism in politicalscience.

Political culture accounts, with their tendencies to-ward cultural essentialism, have rightly come in for crit-icism by many political scientists. Rejecting such viewsas either fundamentally tautological or empirically in-valid, some critics have opted for one or another strictly“materialist” approach, objecting to the considerationof cultural variables in any form (see, e.g., Hirschman1984, Jackman and Miller 1996, and Tilly, 1975, 603–21).3 The ascendance of methodological individualism

2 This summary of the political culture school admittedly simplifies acomplex group of approaches. In political science, the “classic” studywas Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba’s (1963) The Civic Culture:Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. See also Pye 1965,512–60. For one of the most recent influential books in this genre,see Putnam, Leonard, and Nanetti 1993. For an insightful extensionof Putnam’s concept of “social capital,” see Boix and Posner 1996.3 Middle East studies is one field in which the concept has been espe-cially charged. I have in mind scholars such as Lisa Anderson, KirenAziz Chaudhry, and Michael Hudson, all of whom use “culture” to

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and rational choice theory in the mid-1980s also ledpractitioners to argue that the analysis of group val-ues or customs such as those associated with the termculture was irrelevant to political inquiry (Przeworski1985). Politics concerned material interests and the rel-ative success or failure of the individuals articulatingthem. Symbolic displays and rhetorical practices wereepiphenomenal.

Although individual rational choice theorists haveoften been at pains to reject culturalist arguments astautological, untestable, or beside the point, faced withexplaining postcommunist upheavals, ethnic violence,“identity” politics, religious “fundamentalism,” and theongoing problems of democratic transitions, othershave resorted to culture as a “fallback” position, a wayof accounting for divergent and often disappointingpolitical outcomes (Kuper 1999, 10). By claiming that“cultures” have “peculiarities” that explain the failureof those nation-states to democratize, or by assertingthat political conflict is the outcome of “irreducible cul-tural differences” (Bates et al. 1998; Greif 1994, 912–50;Rogowski 1997, 14), these theorists have responded togenuine explanatory needs by reviving an outmodedand unhelpful understanding of the concept. A con-cept of culture defined from the perspective of politicalscience, but informed by the debates in critical anthro-pology, would require changes in the ways the term isapplied and in how political phenomena are analyzedand explained.4

The purpose of this essay is to show how a critical un-derstanding of culture as practices of meaning-makingfacilitates insights about politics, enabling political sci-entists to produce sophisticated causal arguments andto treat forms of evidence that, while manifestly po-litical, most political science approaches tend to over-look. Studying meaning-production entails analyzingthe relations between agents’ practices (e.g., their workhabits, gendered norms, self-policing strategies, andleisure patterns) and systems of signification (languageand other symbolic systems) (Sewell 1999; see alsoOrtner 1997). The words “semiotic practices” are short-hand for this approach. This conceptualization oper-ates on two levels. First, culture as semiotic practices

mean identifiable essences or sedimented values inhering in particu-lar groups. Chaudhry (1994), in particular, tends to confuse SamuelHuntington’s invocations of the term with any interest in “culture”or cultural studies. See also Anderson 1995, 77–92, and Hudson 1995,61–76.4 Two political scientists who do follow debates in critical anthro-pology and consider everyday practices and systems of significationin their work are James C. Scott (1985, 1990) and Timothy Mitchell(1988). To my knowledge, neither has theorized culture explicitly,however, nor have they focused on the conceptual conundrums posedby the term. A recent book attempting to bring anthropologistsworking on the “culturally specific” into conversation with rationalchoice theorists in political science was designed to debate the natureand importance of comparison. Although the encounter may haveenabled participants to share “a sense that the world’s complexitydemands some respect,” the engagement did not (nor was it intendedto) produce clear understandings of what “culture” means (Bowenand Petersen 1999, 2). Indeed anthropologists associated with theproject unwittingly reproduced some of the confusions I identify inPart One. For debates about the culture concept in anthropology andelsewhere, see Bonnell and Hunt 1999, Clifford 1988, Clifford andMarcus 1986, Fabian 1983, Gupta and Ferguson 1997.

refers to what language and symbols do—how they areinscribed in concrete actions and how they operate toproduce observable political effects. In this sense, cul-ture can be used as a causal or explanatory variable.At the same time, insofar as semiotic practices are alsothe effects of institutional arrangements, of structuresof domination, and of strategic interests, activities ofmeaning-making can also be studied as effects or de-pendent variables. Second, culture as semiotic practicesis also a lens. It offers a view of political phenomenaby focusing attention on how and why actors investthem with meaning. While every activity has a semioticcomponent, the point here is not to assert that poli-tics must be examined from a semiotic–practical pointof view. Whether one does or does not explore pro-cesses of meaning-making will be determined by theparticular research problem one confronts. At issueare approaches to political phenomena that do seekto encompass cultural considerations. Unlike currentinvocations of culture in political science, in an em-pirically grounded, practice-oriented approach to cul-ture, meanings are understood to exist inside historicalprocesses, which themselves are always enmeshed inchanging relations of power (Asad 1993, 43).

A practice-oriented cultural approach can help us ex-plain how political identifications are established; howrhetoric and symbols not only exemplify but also canproduce political compliance; why some political ide-ologies, policies, and self-policing strategies work betterthan others; what terms such as “democracy” (Schaffer,1998) and “religion” mean to political actors who in-voke or consume them and how these perceptionsmight affect political outcomes; and why particular ma-terial and status interests are taken for granted, areviewed as valuable, or become available idioms for dis-semination and collective action. By paying attentionto the ways in which certain meanings become author-itative while others do not, political scientists can usethis practice-oriented concept of culture to help explainwhy recognizable events or empirical regularities oc-cur. At a minimum, studying culture by identifying rel-evant semiotic practices has added value to the extentthat it allows for nuanced, valid understandings of pol-itics that are capable of undermining previous beliefsand affecting our prior assumptions about the world.5

This article is divided into two parts. In Part One,I examine the shared problems and epistemologicaldisagreements that have hobbled debates about cul-ture among political scientists of various orientations.Without overlooking what may be irreconcilable dif-ferences, I suggest possibilities for fruitful collabora-tion. In Part Two, I begin by discussing what practices

5 By “valid” I mean—as Bowen and Petersen (1999, 12) write—“the degree to which the account of something picks up processes,ideas, or relationships that are indeed there in the world. Insistingon ‘validity’ does not imply a correspondence theory of truth (thata true description maps one-to-one onto the world), but only thatsome descriptions are better than others, and that the kinds of thingsanthropologists do when in the field –checking with many people, lis-tening in on discussions, and living through events—are particularlygood ways to arrive at a good description.” I would argue that gooddescriptions help to ensure accurate explanations of political life.

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of meaning-making are and how we should go aboutstudying them. I propose an account of meaning basedon intelligibility and then examine concrete method-ological strategies for how a version of culture assemiotic practices might be applied as an explanatoryor independent variable in political analyses. Through abrief exploration of two concerns central to current re-search about politics—compliance and ethnic identity-formation—I show how culture can operate as a causalvariable, as well as a corrective to prevailing assump-tions about political life.

PART ONE: “CULTURE” IN POLITICALSCIENCE

Culture Concepts

Declaring the onset of “a new phase in global his-tory,” Samuel Huntington defines “the fundamentalsources of conflict” in the current world, not as eco-nomic or ideological in nature, but as “cultural.” ForHuntington, each civilization has a primordial culturalidentity, so that the “major differences in political andeconomic development among civilizations are clearlyrooted in their different cultures.” He warns, “Cultureand cultural identities . . . are shaping the patterns ofcohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-ColdWar world . . . . The rivalry of the superpowers is re-placed by the clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1993,22; 1996, 20, 28, 29). For Huntington, “culture” refersto the purported enduring values harbored by “highlyintegrated civilizations”—also sometimes confusinglytermed “cultures.”

This understanding of culture as a specific group’sprimordial values or traits is untenable empirically. Itignores the historical conditions and relevant powerrelationships that give rise to political phenomena suchas “democratization,” ethnic conflicts, and contempo-rary radical Islamicist movements. The group traits ver-sion of culture, moreover, rides roughshod over thediversity of views and the experiences of contentionwithin the group or groups under study. In the caseof Huntington’s depiction of the Middle East, for ex-ample, such claims of sedimented essences have ledscholars of culture to pass over such now obviously ur-gent matters as the contemporary nature of Islamicistmovements, the causes of their recent emergence, andthe ways in which communities of argument exist overwhat makes a Muslim a Muslim, what Islam means, andwhat, if any, its political role should be. Treating cultureas a set of traits that purportedly distinguish one groupfrom another also neglects the terrains of solidarity andfluidity that exist among groups, the ways in which po-litical communities of various sorts have depended onthe cross-fertilization of ideas and practices. In short,by ignoring historical processes and specific relationsof political power, the treatment of culture in politi-cal science has downplayed the heterogeneous ways inwhich people experience the social order within andamong groups, while exaggerating the commonality,constancy, and permanence of intragroup beliefs and

values. As a result, cultural essentialist explanations ofpolitical outcomes such as ethnic or religious violencetend to naturalize categories of groupness, rather thanexploring the conditions under which such experiencesof groupness come to seem natural when they do.

Some practitioners of rational choice theory use cul-ture similarly to refer to an already-given communitythat can be studied by listing its fixed shared beliefs orvalues. The APSA-Comparative Politics Newsletter ofsummer 1997 (see “Notes from the Annual Meetings:Culture and Rational Choice.” 1997), which featuressummaries from a roundtable debate entitled “Can theRational Choice Framework Cope with Culture?” aswell as solicited contributions, provides a case in point,exemplifying the conceptual confusions and empiricalproblems in current formulations of culture. On the onehand, scholars contributing to the Newsletter and thoseinvoked within its pages have various understandingsof culture and how it works—as common knowledge(Chwe 2001), as symbolic action (Johnson 1997), as “be-liefs off the equilibrium path behavior” (Greif 1994),as pertaining “directly to the production of preferenceorderings” (Lustick 1997), and as “a socially shared andlogically interrelated set of symbols, codes, and norms”(Rogowski 1997 and Lustick 1997). “Culture” is usedin these examples as an analytic concept, which, asWilliam H. Sewell, Jr. (1999, 39), points out, is usu-ally “contrasted to some other equally abstract aspector category of social life that is not culture, such aseconomy, politics or biology.” On the other hand, thesesame scholars invoke “culture,” as Huntington would,to denote the beliefs, values, and customs of a specifiedgroup. Despite Rogowski’s dismissal of the tautologicalarguments of “political culture” theorists, for example,he nonetheless takes for granted the existence of “re-spective cultures” with possible “cultural peculiarities”and “irreducible differences,” so that “culture” refersboth to a “socially shared and logically interrelated setof symbols, codes, and norms” and to a particular com-munity, such as “Catholic culture” (Rogowski 1997, 14).Similarly, James Johnson’s (1997, 9) knowledgeable ac-count of “culture” as a symbolic system or as symbolicaction is sometimes confused with “cultures”—the plu-ral, concrete, highly integrated worlds within whichsymbolic systems (cultures) operate.

Despite the multiple understandings of the cul-ture concept, all of these formulations share prob-lems that can be traced at least in part, to politicalscientists’ heavy reliance on Clifford Geertz (whoseown understandings of the term were influenced by histeacher, Talcott Parsons, and by Max Weber).6 Geertz’s

6 I have in mind Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays(1973); Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropol-ogy; and his important case study, Negara: the Theater State (1980). InGary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba’s (1994) influen-tial political science handbook Designing Social Inquiry, the authorsrely on one essay by Geertz, “Thick Description,” to discuss culture(pp. 37, 38-40). Abner Cohen’s (1974) Two-Dimensional Man: AnEssay on the Anthropology of Power and Symbolism in a ComplexSociety—a rational choice analysis of the strategic manipulation ofsymbols—was also important to rational choice students of culture(Johnson 1997; Laitin 1986, 1998, 1999).

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definition of a “system of symbols” was one that insistedupon coherence—on a reified, frozen system of mean-ing, rather than on what symbols do. When he studiedBali, for example, he looked for a closed and alreadyconfigured set of meanings and, thus, was blind to theprocesses by which ongoing practices and systems ofmeaning change, are sites of political struggle, and gen-erate multiple significations within social groups. ThusGeertz could invoke the same word “culture” to con-note both a fixed, synchronic entity, such as Balinese“culture,” and the performances through which the re-searcher interprets meanings, such as cockfights, teethfiling rituals, state pageants, and funeral rites. The dualconnotations of culture as an already given communityand as a symbolic system were often made analyticallycompatible in Geertz’s work by the suggestion that thetight integration of a particular, bounded culture wasdetermined by its semiotic coherence as a system ofmeanings. The insistence on semiotic coherence ledGeertz to ignore possible discrepancies between therepresentation of events, conditions, and people andthe ways in which such representations were received,negotiated, and subjected to risks by those who pro-duced and consumed them (Wedeen 1999). People’sown divergent interpretations of what a particular rit-ual or practice meant were of little significance. Analy-ses of meaning-making focused on an already given,consensually understood “cultural schema” continu-ally performed by actors of particular “cultures” whowere seemingly unaffected by historical changes. ForGeertz, power and processes of meaning-making be-came purely symbolic, as did culture and analyses ofit.7 In his “significative system” there is no agency, onlyan intelligible, seamlessly coherent script or master nar-rative that actors follow in particular “cultures.” Suchtheorizations of culture also led Geertz to sample on thedependent variable, selecting symbols and meaningsthat were particularly prone to coherence or system-aticity (Sewell 1999: 47).

Despite these problems, Geertz’s (1973) enormouslyinfluential book, The Interpretation of Cultures, gavesome political scientists a compelling reason to takesymbols seriously. As David Laitin (1986, 12) argued,“Symbols are important because they provide to indi-viduals a sense of meaning. For Geertz, these symbolsor, better, the various systems of symbols constitute‘culture.’” Geertz’s refusal to produce falsifiable argu-ments was at odds with the positivist project of rationalchoice theory, but his attention to meaning allowed po-litical scientists such as Laitin to discover “the natureof group values” (Laitin 1986, 16). According to Laitin

7 Some critics of Geertz charge that he has no understanding of, orinterest in, power relations, but this seems unfair. As Geertz (1980,120) suggests in his study of political spectacles in nineteenth centuryBali, “The pageants were not mere aesthetic embellishments, cele-brations of a domination independently existing: they were the thingitself.” Moreover, in his famous essay “Thick Description,” Geertzclaims (1983) that his “interpretive approach,” unlike the structural-ism he opposes, is going to take into account considerations of powerand history. His ethnographic work, however, does not execute thisintention.

(1986, 16) Geertz’s “thick descriptions” of systems ofsignification were “methodologically useful” becausethey registered “the deeply held values of a culturalgroup.” For Laitin (1986, 16),

The database consists in symbolic structures. Only with akeen understanding of the meanings embedded in sharedsymbols . . . can one adduce cultural preferences withouttautologically claiming that preferences can be derivedfrom the behavior of actors who are assumed to be rational.

Geertz invited political scientists such as Laitin topay attention to culture as a system of symbols fromwhich researchers could read meaning, but politicalscientists thereby adopted many of the problems of theGeertzian concept of culture: that the system was rei-fied and fixed, that it was identifiable as bounded, andthat meanings were always already set in a given “text.”Thus in Laitin’s reading of Geertz, culture refers bothto “systems of symbols” and to the “deeply held val-ues of a cultural group” (emphasis mine). This slippagecould remain unacknowledged because, for Laitin, asfor Geertz, to refer to culture as a system of symbolswas to claim that culture was a contained system of“deeply held” values and beliefs. Of course Laitin’sinsistence that “thick descriptions” could be treatedas a “database” may seem odd, given Geertz’s philo-sophical insistence on ethnography as an enterprisemediated through the anthropologist’s creative inter-pretation. Geertz’s own penchant for treating a par-ticular practice, such as the Balinese cockfight, assynecdochic for Balinese culture made him a partic-ularly blatant and, in many ways, self-professed medi-ator. In short, political scientists beholden to Geertzimproved over the political culture literatures of oldby producing theoretically motivated work that em-phasized the importance of symbols and took ethno-graphic evidence seriously. However, Geertzians ofvarious stripes unwittingly conflated various uses of cul-ture in their analyses, thereby perpetuating confusionsand compromising the term’s explanatory purchase byinsisting on the semiotic coherence of a particular com-munity, system of symbols, or “culture.” Culture be-came not only what a group has—beliefs, values, ora symbolic system—but what a group is (a Balineseculture). More importantly, theories of culture tendedto render historicized analyses of practice and processimpossible or irrelevant, explaining political outcomesas the result of empirically untenable, untestable as-sertions of uniformity and fixity. Most political scien-tists continue to think of culture as connoting fixedgroup traits.

Real Differences: The IndividualistOrientation as an Example

Despite shared problems in formulations of the con-cept, divergent political, methodological, and episte-mological commitments also divide political scientistsand are responsible for treatments of culture being lessrobust than they otherwise might be. One commonly

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cited rift is between rational choice theorists and inter-pretive social scientists (on interpretive social science,see Rabinow and Sullivan 1987). Although I do notintend to reify this distinction, different assumptions,vocabularies, sources of information, and standards ofevidence have produced recognizable communities ofargument. Unequal access to institutional power andto material resources has also created experiences ofgroupness that hinder scholarly discussion. For my pur-poses here, one key difference is the importance theindividual plays in analyses of political life.

In rational choice theory—as in the behaviorist polit-ical culture literature—the individual is the privilegedunit of analysis, even if individual responses are subse-quently aggregated for statistical purposes. As GeorgeSteinmetz (1999, 19) argues, “This individualistic bias[is] at odds with the point made even by Parsons thatculture is not (or not primarily) a property of individ-uals.” This bias tends to produce arguments in whichideas, beliefs, or values, such as “national pride,” areoften “misleadingly wrenched” from “the social condi-tions in which they [are] embedded and within whichthey receive [. . .] their specific meaning.” Similarly,“individualism,” as Alexander Wendt (1999, 166, 169)points out, implies that persons are “independently ex-isting” rather than constituted through their linguistic,institutional, and practical relations with others.

Interpretivist approaches, among which can becounted the important innovation of practice anthro-pology in the 1980s, frequently invoke an agentiveindividual, but they do not assume a maximizing, cost–benefit calculator who is unproblematically divorcedfrom actual historical processes (e.g., Bourdieu 1978).The rational choice formulation of the decontextual-ized, universalizable individual, whose ideas, beliefs,and values can be extracted from the social and polit-ical conditions under which they were generated, pro-duces objects of inquiry that are incommensurable withinterpretivist social science. Of course many rationalchoice theorists do analyze the conditions under whichindividuals make choices. The individualist bias, how-ever, tends to require that culture be conceptualizedas a “constraint” on individual’s strategic actions, or“as information for equilibrium selection,” or, in theplural, as “manifold equilibria” (Tsebelis 1997). An ap-proach to culture as processes of meaning-construction,in contrast, assumes that actors understand themselvesas individuals and as strategic, and as group membersand nonstrategic, and that such self-understandingsare always mutually constituted and affirmed by oth-ers. Meaning-making, in short, implies a social processthrough which people reproduce together the condi-tions of intelligibility that enable them to make senseof their worlds—a point to which I return in Part Two.Such a view of culture restores a manifestly collectiveaspect to political analyses that many individualist ac-counts lack, without requiring the shared coherencethat many culturalist accounts exaggerate.

With innovations in game theory and computationalmodeling, scholars have begun to introduce learn-ing, information updating, and adaptation into ratio-

nal choice and agent-based analyses.8 Dissatisfactionwith the externalization of preferences in neoclassicaleconomics has encouraged a focus in political scienceon preference formation, including attempts to makepreferences “endogenous” to the models. This con-cern has led some rational choice theorists to exam-ine how political identities and preferences are formed(Gerber and Jackson 1993; Hardin 1995; Laitin 1998).Yet even in as impressive a study as Laitin’s (1998)Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Popula-tions in the Near Abroad, the phenomenon of identityis ultimately reduced to a strategic choice in which indi-vidual actors calculate whether to switch from Russianto the titular language on the basis of what they thinkothers will do. These works assume without questionthat individuals can be adequately conceived for pur-poses of political science as goal-oriented beings at-tempting to maximize their interests, given existingconstraints (Tsebelis 1997, 16). Indeed, a “constructed”identity, for Laitin (1998, 3–35), is synonymous with astrategically chosen one. Laitin’s ethnographic sectionsare thus devoted to sorting out what his informantswere strategic about, rather than analyzing “identityin formation”—how selves are constituted or how lan-guage might actually operate, or not, to generate feltidentifications.

Rational choice theorists in political science may, ofcourse, differ in the degree of rationality they accordto agents or disagree about how to understand equilib-rium, but they are likely to share the common beliefamong economists that “institutions and patterns ofbehavior can be explained as the product or outcome ofmany individual decisions” (Young 1998, 4). Interpre-tivists might question not only the view of individualssuch studies put forth, but also the degree of power orefficacy that individuals have within institutions. Themain point to be registered here is simply that insofaras individualism presupposes agents who are forward-looking strategists forever calculating costs andbenefits, there will be a serious ontological and episte-mological divide between most rational choice and in-terpretivist theorists.9 Interpretivists can rightly claim,in my view, that individualist assumptions prevent ra-tional choice scholars from posing questions that are ofmanifest importance to politics, not the least of whichis how interests are collectively generated and defined,or how we come to know that people maximize theirinterests, if they do. These disagreements are importantones. It remains to be seen whether further substantivediscussion will be worthwhile, but there is no need forsuch disagreements to foreclose possibilities of coop-eration. Nor is there any theoretical warrant, from ei-ther side of the epistemological divide, for resisting the

8 For a sophisticated consideration of learning and adaptation inrational choice theory, see (the economist) Young (1998). For acomputational model that attempts to explain how “culture” dis-seminates, see Axelrod 1997, 148–77.9 David Laitin (1999) does point out that this understanding of theindividual is not necessary from a rational choice perspective, but hedoes not operationalize another one.

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introduction into political science of a post-Geertziananthropological conceptualization of culture.

Fruitful Collaboration

The fact that rational choice theory has engaged withstudies of culture invites conversation, and possiblyproductive argument, between methodological individ-ualists and interpretivists. Game theorists, in particular,have begun to use culture to connote “common knowl-edge” in their analyses. “Common knowledge” helpsto solve games in which preferences and capabilitiesgenerate “multiple equilibria”—stable outcomes fromwhich a rational actor has no incentive to deviate. Theidea of common knowledge enables rational choicetheorists to solve these games by identifying “focalpoints around which actors’ expectations can con-verge, thereby limiting transaction costs and enhanc-ing the possibilities for coordination under conditionsof complexity and uncertainty” (Schelling 1960, 55–56;Chwe 2001, Goldstein and Keohane 1993, Weingast1995, and Wendt 1999).10 An oft-repeated exampleis Schelling’s “tacit coordination (common interests)”problem: “You are to meet somebody in New YorkCity. You have not been instructed where to meet; youhave no prior understanding with the person on whereto meet; and you cannot communicate with each other.You are simply told that you will have to guess where tomeet and that he is being told the same thing and thatyou will just have to try to make your guesses coincide”(Schelling 1960, 55–56). Schelling (1960, 55) tried thisproblem on an unscientific sample of respondents fromNew Haven, Connecticut, and found that an “absolutemajority” managed to meet at Grand Central Station’sinformation booth, and virtually all persons succeededin meeting at 12 noon.

Some of the problems with culture as commonknowledge are indicated by the example. The concepttends to assume the shared quality or commonness ofknowledge rather than to question how—or the ex-tent to which—such understandings are, in fact, tac-itly understood or consensually shared. In other words,“common knowledge” derives from a consideration ofknowledge that can reasonably be considered common,rather than from a consideration of culture as a man-ifold outcome of human activity. How do we knowwhether the outcome in Schelling’s Grand Central sta-tion example demonstrates common knowledge, or,say, the practicalities of train schedules, or some com-bination of the two? Are those who do not have thiscommon knowledge outside culture? In those who useSchelling’s account, “common knowledge” seems anal-ogous to nature, a background condition—always al-ready there. By naturalizing the concept of culture inthis way, rational choice theorists forgo the ability toknow whether common knowledge actually exists inany particular instance or whether another, unspeci-fied, variable is doing the work of coordinating action.By tracking how common knowledge gets produced,

10 Game theory’s adoption of culture as “common knowledge” isdiscussed in Wendt 1999, chap. 4).

is subject to change, or is implicated in political rela-tionships of leverage and domination, we can producerobust explanations of why people coordinate theiractions when they do, while avoiding erroneous causalinferences.

To be fair, nothing inherent in the idea of commonknowledge interferes with asking how that knowledgeis acquired or changed, although little practical workhas been done on such matters thus far. To put mycriticisms in the language of rational choice theory:(a) Common knowledge is one of the descriptors ofan equilibrium state; (b) “given that the coordinationdynamics on which common knowledge models oper-ate have multiple equilibria, change to different equi-libria is theoretically possible; (c) the problem is thatnoncooperative game theory hasn’t seriously modeledthe move from one coordination equilibrium to an-other. Noncooperative coordination games with multi-ple equilibria are potentially dynamic,” but so far havebeen clunky and static.11

Other problems with current uses of common knowl-edge make it less helpful than it otherwise mightbe. In a typical example—Michael Suk-Young Chwe’s(2001, 7) ambitiously eclectic book, Rational Ritual:Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge—common knowledge means “knowledge of others’knowledge of others’ knowledge, and so on.” Butthe examples of common knowledge Chwe providesmuddy his analysis and multiply the meanings of theterm. Sometimes “common knowledge” means thecondition of having the awareness that other peopleknow what you know, and sometimes it seems to indi-cate the process of coming to know that others know.The “publicity” of public ceremonies sometimes gener-ates common knowledge; at other times publicity refersto “common knowledge generation” (compare pp. 8and 18). Most importantly, “common knowledge” slipsfrom referring to the knowledge that other people areseeing the same commercial, ritual, or television pro-gram to referring to the knowledge that others under-stand what they see in the same way. And Chwe seemsto imply that “common knowledge” is the knowledgethat others know that they are interpreting what theysee in the same way that each individual viewer does.How do we researchers know (without ethnographicor survey work) that “everyone knows that everyoneknows it” or that “knowing it” means the same thingto everyone in question? Perhaps Chwe’s assumptionsabout coordination and conformity have to do withthe primary areas with which he was concerned: ad-vertising and rituals. But the latter are often less aboutgenerating actual coherence than about representingit publicly. The “common knowledge” that the regimecan orchestrate the ritual is not matched by the “com-mon knowledge” of what that ability means: Does itprove societal coherence or demonstrate state poweror both, for example? Furthermore, Chwe’s operatingassumption is that people will want to conform. Whatabout instances of resistance and transgression? What

11 This is David Laitin’s formulation in a personal communicationwith the author.

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of critiques of prevailing normative orders? What ofdesires to be different, to be unusual, or to stand out?What of ambivalence? I can imagine conditions underwhich people conform, basing their actions, as Chweand others assume, on what they think others are go-ing to do, but I cannot imagine that such pressures arealways operative, let alone decisive. Certainly, they arenot exhaustively descriptive of politics.

In short, the concept of common knowledge assumesa coherent logic and a level of consensus that may notbe empirically demonstrable. It is unclear what addedvalue scholars derive from this a priori treatment ofknowledge as common or of desires to conform asgiven. One justification might be, as Laitin points out,that “if a model has observable (and testable) impli-cations, it can be empirically supported without directinformation on the values of the independent variable(in this case, the existence of common knowledge).”12

Yet scholars may thereby impute the presence of com-mon knowledge when it does not exist or when de-grees of common knowledge more accurately reflectcitizens’ experience. Indeed, such studies often pro-duce arguments that rely on the assumption of commonknowledge in order to prove it. By assuming deeplyembedded understandings rather than showing theirexistence, scholars tend to produce static, synchronicarguments that do not register transformations in lev-els, or fractures in systems, of knowledge. Moreover,Chwe’s version of common knowledge is sometimesgenerated by “cultural practices,” such as rituals or per-formances, and sometimes seems to be what culturemeans. His reliance on a Geertzian understanding ofculture makes the work vulnerable to the conceptualconfusions, empirical troubles, and theoretical limita-tions discussed above. In other words, “common knowl-edge” often operates as a fixed, frozen, “always alreadythere” category, much like a Geertzian script or schemadoes.

Political scientists’ reluctance to tackle post-Geertzian theorizations of the concept forecloses pos-sibilities of learning from, and contributing to, currentwork on culture. This reluctance may have something todo with the unfamiliarity of the language used, particu-larly in poststructuralist studies of culture. In addition,the disavowal of modernization theory in political sci-ence has not been as total as it was in anthropology. Norhave political scientists engaged in the self-reflexivework on knowledge production that has animated re-search in other disciplines. The focus on the mentaliteof the researcher among 1980s anthropologists—whichis often what self-reflexivity entailed—dissuaded polit-ical scientists from reading anthropology, as did po-litical scientists’ preferences for conceptual parsimonyover the complicated, messy narratives of anthropolog-ical inquiry. Attacks on positivist social science gener-ated by poststructuralism may also have driven awaysome political scientists. Whatever the reason, all stu-dents of politics—whether dependent on Parsonianversions of political culture, appreciative of Geertz and

12 Personal communication with the author.

rational choice, or dismissive of the culture conceptaltogether—would benefit from becoming familiar withan anthropological, diachronic, practice-based notionof culture.

Contemporary work on culture in anthropology, al-though indebted to Geertz’s cultural anthropology ofthe 1960s and 1970s, also acknowledges importantcritiques of that tradition. Recent years have seen an-alysts, influenced by practice theory in anthropology,challenge culture (in its abstract sense) as a seamlesssystem of meanings whose consistency is logical andresistant to change. Anthropologists inspired by worksas diverse as those of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu,Jacques Derrida, and Michel de Certeau have empha-sized the fragility, ambiguities, and historical rupturesevident in symbolic systems.13 When examining semi-otic practices, these theorists have invited us to seepractices, texts, and images as signs whose meanings areboth fixed by conventions and also always at risk—partof overlapping semiotic systems open to various inter-pretations and saturated by complicated, contentiousrelationships of power. “Power,” despite the term’sconsiderable conceptual fuzziness, becomes more thanjust “leverage” in these accounts. It is many-sided, elu-sive, and diffuse (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991). Tostudy culture in the critical anthropology sense is toexplore the processes of meaning-construction in whichpeople’s practices and their material realities—theirpolitical, economic, and social situations—operate indialectical relationship with their systems of significa-tion. By “dialectical” I mean a relationship in whichactors’ practices and their systems of signification domore than merely influence each other. Practices and

13 Despite the different epistemological orientations of these theo-rists, they are often grouped together under the vague rubric of “post-modernism” or, sometimes, “poststructuralism.” Anthropologists, inparticular, have been inspired by Bourdieu’s theorizations of practicein Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) and The Logic of Practice(1990), but Bourdieu’s own ethnographic work remains structuralistin its execution—identifying the systems of parallels and oppositionsthat reveal the structure of a society. Emphasizing ambiguities andhistorical ruptures has led some practice-oriented anthropologists tocite passages from Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume One(1978) that stress resistance, although there is nothing inherent in astudy of practices (or in Foucault’s work) that makes this necessary oreven obvious. For a particularly sophisticated example, see Comaroff1985. In Comaroff and Comaroff 1991 this emphasis on resistanceis coupled with a study of the workings of colonial ideology and”hegemony,” inspired, in part, by Gramsci’s (1971) Selections fromthe Prison Notebooks. Postcolonial studies more generally invokethe term “practices” and investigate the dynamics of power and re-sistance to colonial domination, but most scholars assert the powerof discourses rather than the ways in which such discourses actuallyoperate in practice. James C. Scott’s (1985, 1990) work in politicalscience may also be viewed in the resistance tradition, as can theprojects emerging out of subaltern studies. For an essay surveying theliterature and critical of romanticizing resistance, see Abu-Lughod(1990, 41–55). Recent studies in practice-oriented anthropology (andsociology) have begun to reverse the trend, minimizing the role ofresistance and focusing on the ways in which scientific and socialpractices generate hegemony. These works are also beholden to pas-sages in Foucault’s History of Sexuality, as well as to his theorizationsof power in Discipline and Punish (1979). Nadia Abu El-Haj’s (2001)Facts on the Ground is exemplary, demonstrating how the practiceof archaeology and its disciplinary dynamics work to substantiatehistorical claims and remake conceptions of territory in Israel.

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signification are defined and generated in referenceto each other, yet can come into conflict, both con-ceptually in their meanings and causally in the world,so that the only way of handling such material is bysynthesis—i.e., by maintaining an overview that in-cludes both sides without stifling the conflict or deny-ing their logical incompatibilities.14 As we shall see, adialectical understanding of culture allows us to viewmeaning-making activities as being both stable andchangeable, both a single system and internally var-ious and conflicted, an aspect of both structure andagency, both (potentially) an independent and a de-pendent variable, depending on the research questionand strategy adopted. This conceptualization connotesdynamism rather than stasis and allows for inconsis-tency rather than simply implying strict coherence.15

Culture in these accounts does not refer to essentialvalues that identify a particular group or to particu-lar traits that isolate one group from another. Rather,culture designates a way of looking at the world thatrequires an account of how symbols operate in practice,why meanings generate action, and why actions pro-duce meanings, when they do. Such a version of culturedoes not require forsaking parsimony or the generaliz-ing impulses many political scientists value. Focusing onsemiotic practices dialectically may require, however, atheorization of how specifiable contradictions and am-biguities themselves work to produce political order,stimulate change, or generate leverage in negotiations.

It would be tempting to see this view of culture asmapping neatly on to the familiar structure–agency bi-nary. Indeed, practice theorists themselves often ar-gue that practice is “not an antagonistic alternativeto the study of systems or structures, but a necessarycomplement to it” (Ortner 1984, 147). I want to ar-gue somewhat differently: Systems of signification andpractice entail both structure and agency. The word“systems,” of course, implies structure, but the lan-guage and symbols constitutive of any “system of sig-nification” are created, reproduced, and subverted byagents speaking and acting in the world. I am not surethat there can be human signification without agency—people doing the work of interpreting and making in-telligible signs. We nevertheless reproduce ourselves asagents or “subjects” within the confines of institutionaland semiotic “structures,” what game theorists call“choice under structural constraint.” Practices, more-over, often have a structure to them (e.g., habits, rou-tines, and institutional roles) at the same time that theyrefer to agents acting in the world, as the term “prac-tice” suggests. Practices are actions or deeds that arerepeated over time; they are learned, reproduced, andsubject to risks through social interaction. Practices,

14 I am grateful to Hanna Pitkin for suggesting that I bring this themeto the fore.15 Recent essays on “culture” in social movement theory often em-phasize the term’s contestatory elements. But we do not learn whatculture means or what would make a culture one culture (ratherthan two or 12). Nor do we have a sense of what would make asymbolic system one system (and systematic) to the extent that it is.We learn only that “culture” is not static. See, for example, Johnstonand Klandermans (1995).

like actions (as opposed to “behaviors”), are also, in thesense that I use the term, unique to human beings. Likeactions, they involve “freedom, choice, and responsibil-ity, meaning and sense, conventions, norms and rules”(Pitkin 1993, 242). They may be self-consciously exe-cuted, but they need not be. They tend to be intelligibleto others in context dependent ways. Practices, like hu-man actions, are ultimately “dual,” composed both ofwhat “the outside observer can see and of the actors’understandings of what they are doing” (Pitkin 1993,261). What a practice approach has made possible in an-thropology is an attention to politics, to social asymme-try, historical contingencies, and political domination,key dimensions of both action and structure (Ortner1984, 147). In contrast, the way the concept of culturehas generally been understood in political science haslimited its utility for political analysis. To the extentthat “culture” suppresses lived political experience inits Parsonian, Huntingtonian, and Geertzian formula-tions, it sacrifices explanatory power.

Our conceptualizations have constrained our way ofknowing and the kind of work we do. The concept of“political culture” or “common knowledge” with whichmost political scientists operate presupposes an inter-nal coherence and stability that is indefensible empir-ically. My objective is to shift our conceptualizationaway from culture as a fixed system of meaning to cul-ture as the practices of meaning-making through whichsocial actors attempt to make their worlds coherent.16

In Part Two, I show that by adopting a notion of cultureas semiotic practices, political scientists can ask novelquestions, use new kinds of evidence, embrace freshperspectives, and develop original answers to concernsof abiding relevance to politics.

PART TWO: THE POLITICSOF INTELLIGIBILITY

Thinking Through Practicesof Meaning-Making

Understanding semiotic practices requires an analysisof the ways in which people use words, establish andinterpret signs, and act in the world in ways that fosterintelligibility. Intelligibility, in turn, works on multiplelevels. Certain kinds of practices are intelligible andtheir meanings can be ascribed and described withoutmuch knowledge of language and context. The politicaltheorist, Hanna Pitkin, whose work draws on ordinarylanguage philosophy, gives one example. We might be-gin by saying, “I don’t know what they mean to bedoing, but I can see that in fact their movement scat-ters those seeds in fertile spots, and later they harvestthe fruit. It may be a game or a religious ceremony orsomething else, but in fact they are planting” (Pitkin1993, 258). To discover whether the scattering of seedsis a game, a religious ceremony, or something else,ethnographic fieldwork or survey research data or both

16 This formulation is beholden to an anonymous reviewer, to whomI am grateful, at American Political Science Review.

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may be required. We would thus be able to considerthe attitudes of those who partake in the practice, thelanguage they use to describe it, and the fieldworker’sinterpretation of what is transpiring. We might con-ceive of political practices similarly by saying: I don’tknow what they mean to be doing, but I can see thatin fact their movement takes a pen and checks off abox with a name beside it on a piece of paper, depositsthat paper in a box, and later they tally the numberof times each name is checked off and the one withthe most votes makes political decisions for the nextfour years. It may be a game, a religious ceremony, afarce, a political event, or something else, or it may be acombination of these things. In many cases, what infor-mants say they are doing and what the social scientistclaims they are doing are not either/or choices. Rather,informants are “doing one by way of the other” (Pitkin1993, 259). Social scientists must be able to know andto show that their interpretation is based on a graspof native intelligibility, that in checking off a ballot thecitizen is affirming the community’s norms, or voting, orboth, or neither. To demonstrate that voting is a way ofaffirming the community’s norms, social scientists mayhave to relate the practice to local concepts, texts, andtraditions. They may also check whether such practicesactually work to affirm the community’s norms by ex-amining the practice’s effects—the ways in which suchpractices are negotiated by, and generate consequencesfor, those who participate in them. How social scientistsdeal with ambiguity, complexity, and the fact of multiplesignifications will depend on the questions asked andthe objectives desired. Although multiple significationsoften exist, they are not limitless, as the examples ofscattering seeds or checking off a ballot make obvious.The contexts within which an action occurs help deter-mine the range of significations that are possible andpertinent.

The advantages of conceiving of meaning-makingpractices in terms of levels of intelligibility are as fol-lows: Intelligibility does not presuppose grasping aninner essence or getting into the heads of informantswho are captive minds of a system but, rather, centerson the ways in which people attempt to make appar-ent, observable sense of their worlds—to themselvesand to each other—in emotional and cognitive terms.In stark contrast to grasping an inner essence, such aconceptualization of culture and of meaning requiresthinking pragmatically, discovering what we know (thatseeds are beings scattered or ballots are being checkedand counted) and what we need to know (what workthis seed scattering or ballot tallying is doing, for ex-ample), even when we have only a minimal familiar-ity with context and language. It then prompts us toprobe deeper, to ask questions about the conditionsunder which specific material and semiotic activitiesemerge (terrorism, for example), the contexts withinwhich they find public expression, the work they doin the world, and the irregularities they generate inthe process of reproduction. In short, the approach Iam recommending generates empirical findings withobservable implications of manifest importance topolitics.

Contrary to the claim made by some anticulturaliststhat studies of culture tend toward too much speci-ficity and are hostile to the generalizing impulses ofcomparative politics or of social science more broadly,the approach to culture I am recommending requireslooking at multiple cases of habit and usage. Thesecases may be confined to a specific geographicallybounded nation-state, but they certainly need not be.Studying culture should not entail insisting on a coun-try’s allegedly specific characteristics, values, or be-liefs. The conceptualization of culture I am recom-mending would specifically exclude any such judgment.Nor need a cultural approach exaggerate the coher-ence of perceptions and practices that structure pol-itics. In this increasingly information-reliant, transna-tional world, discrete societies, peoples, or “cultures”are far less likely to be wholly discrete than they everwere before, and it is easy to adduce historical ev-idence that notions of cultural isolation or “purity”have always been based more on myth or political in-tention than on fact. The notion of boundedness wasalways “constructed”—in the minds of cartographersdrawing the boundaries of nation-states, for example,and by researchers’ own categories of groupness orlocale.

This is not to argue that geographical territories andsemiotic practices are never correlated. There mayat times be what Sewell (1999, 49–50) calls a “thincoherence”—a variable, contested, incompletely inte-grated way in which the inhabitants of a specific terri-tory share a set of semiotic practices. It is probably easyto agree, for example, that people who live in France areby and large committed to some form of republicanism.Any political analysis that seeks to discuss the relation-ship between republicanism and Frenchness must takeinto account the following: (1) Republican ideas cancome to stand for Frenchness because of the ways inwhich they have been used (by politicians, historians,and advertisers) to objectify what it means to be French(see Handler’s [1988] study of Quebec); (2) non-Frenchpeople may also subscribe to republican ideals; (3) notall French people adhere to republican ideals; (4) notall French people interpret republicanism or under-stand its significance in the same way; (5) antirepubli-can French people may not have the same relationshipto republicanism as do antirepublican thinkers and citi-zens elsewhere, but they may; and (6) it is not clear whocounts as a “French” person. Recognizing these possi-bilities invites theorizing about the historical relation-ship among regional political practices, nation-buildingpolicies and imagery, and the production of republicanideals in France, while also facilitating comparisons andcontrasts with other groups or geographical locations.Semiotic logics are themselves an effect of people’s ac-tions, institutional power, and historical circumstances.State institutions, like theoreticians of culture, may,in Sewell’s (1999, 57) words, “subject potential semi-otic sprawl to a certain order—to prescribe (contested)core values, to impose discipline on dissenters, todescribe boundaries and norms—in short, to give acertain focus to the production and consumption ofmeaning.”

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An understanding of meaning-production as a pro-cess through which conventions become intelligible toparticipants through observable usages and effects sug-gests that meanings are open to various and chang-ing interpretations, while also sometimes appearing tobe overly coherent, fixed, or inevitable. The analyst’stask, then, may not be to specify the relationshipsthat govern this semiotic logic (structuralism), or tosearch for silently intended meanings (hermeneutics),but rather to identify the range of semiotic practices rel-evant to explanations of a given political phenomenonand explore how such semiotic practices work. Con-sider, for instance, the study of patriotism in the UnitedStates. We might select pledging allegiance to the flagas one semiotic practice in the range a scholar in-vestigates in studying patriotism in the United States.We would want to do more than analyze its con-tent or infer symbolic patriotism from its family re-semblance to flag ceremonies elsewhere. We wouldinquire into the effects of the relationship betweenpledging allegiance and patriotism, a task that callsfor a number of additional studies. We might researchthe history of pledging allegiance, including the mech-anisms by which the ritual was enforced over time. Wemight observe the practice ethnographically in areasselected for their varying regional, ethnic, racial, class,and political affiliations. We might conduct open-endedinterviews and surveys, asking a wide variety of peo-ple about the meanings they attribute to pledging al-legiance and the effects it produces in them: Was theflag salute mind-numbing, uplifting, apathy-inducing,or irrelevant? Finally, we might collect transgressivematerials, such as evidence from court cases and protestmovements, as well as source materials from “popu-lar culture” media, such as newspaper reports, films,jokes, cartoons, and songs, that may offer alternativeways of seeing the pledge of allegiance. Such an anal-ysis would allow us to discern whether the pledge ofallegiance could be a banal, routinized practice, anactivity invested with and productive of patriotism,or both.

Although the meanings people might attach to aparticular practice such as pledging allegiance to theflag are multiple and unstable, to be intelligible—bydefinition—they need to be recognizable by others. AsFerdinand de Saussure argued, the meaning of a sign isa function of its contrasts with other signs in a semioticsystem. People form a semiotic community to the ex-tent that they recognize the same set of contrasts andtherefore are able to engage in mutually comprehen-sible symbolic action.17 Resistance and obedience areintelligible insofar as they make reference to this sharedset of oppositions, without which political activities orspeech acts would hardly make sense. Saussure’s ac-count may exaggerate coherence, but his insight—thatintelligibility requires both a minimally shared set of

17 Saussure’s (1959, 14) concerns were with language, which he sawas “the social side of speech, outside the individual who can nevercreate nor modify it by himself; it exists only by virtue of a contractsigned by the members of the community.” For his discussion of thenature of the linguistic sign, see pp. 65ff.

relations among signs and a group of people able torecognize them—is critical for our thinking about thepolitical import of meaning-production (Sahlins 1985,143–56; Saussure 1959; Sewell 1999, 23–24). Intelligibil-ity does not imply that linguistic or semiotic meaningsare stable, but it does require at least enough stability sothat what one actor learned still applies when anotherspeaks. Put differently, intelligibility suggests that insta-bilities in discourse and in practices make sense onlywithin the signifying operations of a shared concep-tual system (Saussure 1959; Sewell 1999, 50; Wedeen1999, 85).

Initially, this formulation of intelligibility may seemsimilar to a “common knowledge” approach, butintelligibility differs from common knowledge in atleast two fundamental ways. First, “intelligibility”refers to conditions that are observable rather thanassumed. Second, intelligibility connotes a minimalistsense of what is shared rather than a highly integratedone; a common conceptual system (intelligibility) isnot the same as a shared episteme (“common knowl-edge”). When we see children pledging allegiance tothe flag in elementary school, we do not think that theyare ordering an ice cream soda at the drugstore. Thewords that they utter signal that they are reciting anoath of loyalty to the United States and that the flagsymbolizes the United States. We do not know whetherthey experience this particular recitation as an avowalof their patriotism or indeed whether they ever havesuch feelings. We do know, however, because of ourshared experiences of language acquisition, that theiraction is intelligible as an outward demonstration ofallegiance. Wittgenstein argues that we learn the mean-ing of words such as “flag” and “allegiance” throughother people’s uses of words in contexts such as pledg-ing allegiance to the flag. According to Wittgenstein(1958, 225) “What ‘determining the length’ means isnot learned by learning what length and determiningare; the meaning of the word ‘length’ is learnt by learn-ing, among other things, what it is to determine length”(Wittgenstein 225). Similarly, the meaning of the word“flag” is learned by learning, among other things, whatit is to pledge allegiance to it.

To summarize, “meaning” connotes intelligibility,which is produced through and compounded by re-peated, context-dependent use that is observable.Language and symbols are intelligible insofar as theyare made manifest through practices. Practices makesense because they are reproduced historically andconceptualized through language. Practices and signsmay be “thinly coherent” (Sewell) in the sense thatthey relate differentially to other signs (Saussure)and yet have a recognizable range of applications(Wittgenstein). Yet they rarely exhibit the sort of highlyintegrated, logical consistency attributed to them bystructuralists or by semioticians such as Geertz. At-tention to dynamism, risk, misunderstandings, ambi-guity, and historical encounter calls for an analysis ofthe effects of semiotic practices: the ways in which, forexample, official rhetoric in Syria or negative politicaladvertisements in the United States affect people’sactions and interpretations, which, in turn, play a

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role in determining future actions. Systems of signsare inscribed in material, observable practices; semi-otic practices produce material effects, the observableimplications of which are so important for positivistsocial science. And material effects reproduce systemsof signification, which are communally intelligible andtherefore open to interpretation.

Applying Semiotic Practices

How might this understanding of culture as the dialec-tical relationship between people’s practices and sys-tems of signification be applied as an “explanatory”or “independent” variable in current political scienceresearch? Through an investigation of two examples—compliance and ethnic identity-formation—I show howculture (as semiotic practices) can be used in causalanalyses.

First, in Ambiguities of Domination: Politics,Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria, I(Wedeen 1999) examine the ways in which a particularset of semiotic practices (in this case, patently spuriousofficial speeches and the ironic distancing strategies ofthe citizenry) works to produce political compliance.The object in that study was the “cult” of Syrian Presi-dent Hafiz al-Asad—all of the rhetorical practices andofficial imagery that substituted for discussion of sub-stantive political issues in public. For much of Asad’srule (1970–2000) his image was omnipresent. In news-papers, on television, and during orchestrated spec-tacles, Asad was praised as the “father,” the “gallantknight,” even the country’s “premier pharmacist.” Yetmost Syrians, including those who created the officialrhetoric, did not believe its claims. The book asks, Whywould a regime spend scarce resources on a cult whoserituals of obeisance are transparently phony? The an-swer: Because it works. The book concludes that Asad’scult operated as a disciplinary device, generating a pol-itics of public dissimulation in which citizens acted asif they revered their leader. By inundating daily lifewith tired symbolism, the regime exercised a subtle,yet effective, form of power. The cult worked to en-force obedience, induce complicity, isolate Syrians fromone another, and set guidelines for public speech andbehavior.

Studying “culture” as semiotic practices with polit-ical effects can lead to surprising findings. Contraryto conventional wisdom, the rhetoric and symbols ofAsad’s cult did not produce “legitimacy,” “charisma,”or “hegemony,” enabling political leaders to win sup-port for themselves and their policies by fostering col-lective ethnic, national, or class identifications. YetAsad’s cult was neither epiphenomenal nor unimpor-tant. A focus exclusively on material concerns does notexplain why the Syrian government expended exorbi-tant sums of money and scarce material resources onsymbolic production, instead of marshalling its limitedfunds for either increases in punitive enforcement orthe positive inducements that goods and services couldoffer. Ambiguities of Domination shows how officialrhetoric and images not only exemplify but also pro-duce power for a regime. Asad’s cult cluttered public

space with monotonous slogans and empty gestures,draining citizens’ political energies. The insinuation offormulaic rhetoric and self-serving state symbolism intothe daily lives of citizens habituated people to per-form the gestures and pronounce the slogans constitu-tive of their obedience. Representations of power andobedience in Syria also operated to generate powerand obedience by disseminating credible threats ofpunishment. Although threats, to be credible, must atleast occasionally be carried out, in general they sufficeto ensure the compliance of most citizens. In coercivecompliance, people obey because they fear being pun-ished. The images of citizens delivering panegyrics toAsad’s rule, collectively holding aloft placards forminghis face, signing oaths in blood, or simply displayingpictures of him in their shop windows communicatedto Syrians throughout the country the impression ofAsad’s power independent of his readiness to use it.And the greater the absurdity of the required per-formance, the more clearly it demonstrated that theregime could make most people obey most of the time.Studying Syrian “political culture” in this sense doesnot entail identifying the traits that inhere in Syrians,but investigating the rhetorical practices and symbolsthat generate compliance for the regime.18

On the basis of ethnographic research, I demonstratethat Syrians under Asad both recognized the disci-plinary aspects of the cult and found ways to underminethem. The fact that so many tolerated, politically criticalcartoons, films, and television comedies were publishedor circulated raises the question of why a regime wouldallow symbolic affronts to its official claims of omnipo-tence. To ask the question differently: To what extentcan such individual artistic “victories” be politically ef-fective ways to resist a regime’s politics of “as if”? Onthe one hand, these practices were politically effectiveto the extent that they counteracted the atomizationand isolation fostered by public dissimulation. Whereasseeing others obey may have made each feel isolatedin his/her unbelief, a shared giggle, the popularity of acomedy skit, and the circulation of cartoons and trans-gressive stories enabled people to recognize that theconditions of unbelief were widely shared. Both per-mitted and prohibited methods of registering resistancewere thus partially effective to the extent that they re-asserted this widely shared experience of unbelief. Atthe moment when a joke is told and laughter resoundsin the room, people are canceling the concrete isolationand atomization manufactured by a politics of “as if.”They are affirming to themselves and to others theirshared status as unwilling “conscripts” (Scott 1990, 15).

On the other hand, and paradoxically, it is preciselythis shared acknowledgment of involuntary obediencethat can make a cult so powerful. Asad’s cult was pow-erful, in part, because it was unbelievable. Acts of trans-gression might counteract the atomization and isolationa politics of “as if” produces, but they also shore upanother disciplinary mechanism, namely, the ways inwhich such a cult relies on an external obedience

18 For a sociological formulation of how “culture” as a repertoire or“tool kit” influences “strategies of action,” see Swidler 1986.

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produced through each citizen’s unbelief. Asad’s cultdisciplined citizens by occasioning continual demon-strations of external obedience. External obedience,unlike good judgment or conviction, depends on a self-conscious submission to authority that is predicated onnot believing. Recognizing the shared conditions of un-belief thus reproduces this self-consciousness, withoutwhich a politics of “as if” could scarcely be sustained.In short, such resistance might counteract the atomiz-ing effects of a personality cult, but it also reinforcesthe cult’s own mechanisms of enforcing obedience. Asthe philosopher Slavoj Zizek (1991) points out, even ifpeople keep their ironical distance, even if they demon-strate that they do not take what they are doing seri-ously, they are still complying, and compliance is whatultimately counts politically.

Studying the ways in which semiotic practices pro-duce compliance for a regime need not be confined toauthoritarian cases. One could also imagine scholars ofvoting behavior, for example, considering the ways inwhich consistently false campaign promises might op-erate to depoliticize the electorate. Similarly, scholarsof capitalism might analyze advertising campaigns, in-vestigating how images of the “good life”—of comfort,efficiency, and love—are marketed, consumed, and re-sisted. Such analyses would go beyond readings of pub-lic opinion polls, campaign promises, or advertisementsas texts and look both toward their effects (the sorts ofreactions they stimulate) and to these various practicesas themselves effects of specific, historically contingentrelations of political power.

Existing political science frameworks either fail topay attention to rhetoric and symbols, which meansthat they have no account of the work symbols do, ormake claims about symbols that are unwarranted oruntested empirically (that they generate “legitimacy,”for example). As noted in Part One, some scholarsuse the term culture to refer to an entirely differentarea of inquiry—the identification of purported grouptraits. The way in which we conceptualize culture affectsthe kind of research we do and the evidence we bringto bear on our projects. Analyzing culture as semioticpractices has significant empirical and theoretical pay-offs for political science. Interpreting semiotic practicesovercomes the difficulties of what Timur Kuran (1995)calls “preference falsification,” giving us insight intothe attitudes of citizens, which may be particularly dif-ficult to discern in authoritarian regimes. My work alsoallowed me to pose a puzzle that had been ignoredby political scientists, namely, Why would a regimeuse rituals of obeisance that are transparently phony?The evidence I gathered to code unbelief—publishedand prohibited cartoons, underground and toleratedcomedy skits, short stories, and risky political jokes—suggests the utility of these materials for the analysis oflived political experience. And the process of collect-ing such evidence prompted new questions about theextent to which individual artistic practices could beconsidered resistance to the cult’s mechanisms of so-cial control. Moreover, the book’s dialectical approachallows us to see how both the rituals of obeisance andthe transgressive practices poking fun at political life

work in tandem to generate compliance. The same de-pendent variable, compliance, could be explained byarguing that the cult creates charisma. But political sci-entists lose empirically and theoretically by failing tounderstand that the mechanisms shoring up the regimeare both the “as if” habitual rituals and the practicesof transgression. The patterns we see are not relianton a notion of culture as fixed or natural. Rather, thefissures, tensions, and instabilities in meaning-makingpractices actually work to produce social order, albeita fragile one. The explanations the book provides giveus a new theory of how symbols operate, why regimesspend scarce resources on their deployment, and whypolitical scientists ought to take such modes of socialcontrol seriously.

Turning now to the second example, recent work onethnic identity-formation and ethnic violence in polit-ical science could produce empirically more sophisti-cated causal accounts and more fine-grained codingschema by taking “culture” as semiotic practices seri-ously. Here is one possible application: Whereas under-standings of the “nation” as constructed and imaginedare now taken for granted, “ethnicity” often operatesin datasets as a given category of belonging. People areHutu or Tutsi, Slavs or Germans. Consequently, somework on ethnic violence, particularly in internationalrelations, suffers from the tautological reasoning of for-mer “political culture” analyses: Interethnic tension iscaused by the tensions of interethnicity (Brown et al.1996). As Fearon and Laitin (1996, 715–35), point out,interethnic relations are more often characterized bycooperation than conflict, which suggests that imag-inings or “constructions” of ethnicity may be moreimportant than its seemingly objective existence. Putmore radically, ethnicity may be less objectively real, ormore variable, than some researchers tend to assume.Yet even scholars sympathetic to constructivism havebeen slow to apply its lessons, in part because the cod-ing work entailed in generating a large, constructivist-oriented dataset would be difficult to do (a subject towhich we shall return).

Work by anthropologists, such as Liisa H. Malkki’s(1996) “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoplesand the Territorialization of National Identity amongScholars and Refugees,” suggests the political conse-quences of different levels of intensity in ethnic identi-fication. Malkki’s case examines forms of Hutuness—various ways in which semiotic practices (narratives ofidentification and everyday activities) register experi-ences of belonging that are not captured in standardcategorizations of ethnicity. As Malkki shows, residentsof a refugee camp established in western Tanzania afterthe Burundi massacres of 1972 experienced themselvesas “pure” Hutus, whereas Hutu-Burundi refugees liv-ing in the township of Kigoma did not. Camp refugeesconstructed their sense of national belonging to Bu-rundi and their ethnic identification with Hutunessin terms of moralizing commentaries about heroismand homeland. In contrast, town refugees championeda rootless and mobile cosmopolitanism—a creolized“impurity.” They were not essentially Hutu but, rather,just “broad persons” (Malkki 1996, 446, and Eley and

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Suny’s [1996, 432] commentary on Malkki; see alsoMalkki 1995). A semiotic-practical analysis of ethnicidentity-formation would compare the relationship be-tween everyday practices and the rhetoric of belongingwithin refugee camps with the language and everydaypractices of those outside the camps. For formal model-ers or the quantitatively minded, developing a datasetbased on an intensity scale accounting for people’sexperiences of identification would produce a moreprecise and generalizable explanation of how the livedconditions of ethnic identity-formation might deter-mine conflict when they do. Attention to the productionof cosmopolitan understandings might also help to ex-plain the absence of ethnic conflict in cases where suchidentifications are weak.

Coding ethnic groups is an inherently perilous en-terprise. The importance of particular identificationschanges over time, yet scholars have tended to rely on“objective” measures that are one-dimensional, such aslinguistic or religious affiliations. These markers mayhave little to do with people’s experiences of identi-fication. Authoritative compendia of linguistic or reli-gious distinctions may suggest the existence of groupswhose members do not see themselves as a communityor whose shared language or religion have no politicalsalience. Yet because a research project may dependon specifying potential ethnic groups, scholars have todevelop criteria for thinking about what makes a groupa group and under what conditions experiences of po-litical identification might crystallize along, say, ethniclines.

One promising way to improve on, if not avoid,the estimate bias bedeviling datasets such as TedGurr’s (1997) MAR one, is to think about degrees ofethnicity—of Hutuness or Tutsiness or Kurdishness orIrish American-ness. To do that, a scholar could firstlist the range of identifications that might take on po-litical salience, given specifiable criteria, while explain-ing why others are unlikely to do so. Thus, at the veryleast we would have to come up with reasons why cod-ing the intensity of ice cream eaters or Pittsburgherswould seem silly, while coding the intensity of Hutusand Tutsis would not. Harder to justify is the inclu-sion or exclusion of various linguistically distinct sub-groupings of Ashantis in Ghana or of Spanish-speakingCalifornians in the United States, but a semiotic practi-cal approach invites those studying “identity” issues toresearch the conditions under which certain practicestake on political meaning and intensify political claimsof group affiliation.19 Listing actual communities andpotential ones in terms of the intensity of groupnessfor a large dataset might require, as Matthew Kocherhas argued, treating ethnic or nationalist identificationas a phenomenon that cannot be measured directly,but only inferred from a correlation matrix. Factorand principal components analysis might be used to

19 I am indebted to Matthew Kocher for sharing his thoughts onethnic identifications and his experiences attempting to recode theMAR dataset. In a private conversation, he used the example oftrying to code a “subgrouping” of Ashanti in Ghana to demonstratethe persistent dangers of estimate bias and of infinite regress.

measure the intensity of identity indirectly, througha specification of factors or components that aremeasurable.20

For example, we might have theoretical reasons tothink that interstate war affects nationalist sentimentand thus use it as one factor. But we might also havesound theoretical justifications for arguing that it isthe threat of interstate war that consolidates nation-alist sentiments. We might then consider factors of asemiotic-practical nature, such as narratives of conspir-acy or threat and the impact these have on citizens.That impact might be registered in newspaper reports,protest movements, the formation of organized groups,and political speeches, songs, sporting events, and tele-vision serials. Ethnographic and historical work mightalso be used to check various cases, to see, for example,how the categories of Hindu and Muslim have changedfrom 1850 to the present, so that a dataset on Indianriots or one that incorporated intensity measures couldaccount not only for violence, but also for the shift-ing relevance of appeals to ethnicity in riots. We mightlook for evidence of intensity in the content of state-initiated formulations of national identity in laws andpublic spectacles. A semiotic practical approach wouldalso require us to register the observable effects thesehave on various populations of citizens, perhaps byconducting surveys. In addition, we might supply the-oretical reasons for how the presence or absence ofcatalyzing events, such as September 11, strengthensnationalist feelings and use that as a factor; a semi-otic practical approach could help us determine whatcounts as a catalyzing or traumatic event. The locationof a population in a poor, resource-deprived area couldalso be an indicator of group intensity. Malkki’s workon refugees suggests that continual, quotidian experi-ences of severe poverty can induce intense feelings ofgroupness, although these may not be articulated alongexplicitly economic lines. Indeed, political economistswho assert that the poor as a group are prone to revoltwhen they have nothing to lose might explain varia-tions in actual, organized revolts among “the poor”by considering the role semiotic practices play (Boixn.d.; Lipset 1959, 1960; Stokes and Boix n.d.). Whatwork is done by myths such as the Horatio Alger story,for example, in reproducing convictions that economicconditions can be ameliorated through individual ef-fort rather than through collective action? By takingculture as semiotic practices seriously, causal accountswill be more nuanced and precise, even if an accuratecoding schema for large datasets eludes social scientistsintent on constructing one. Datasets that can take intoaccount intensity in the ways sketched above should bemore accurate than current ones.

20 Mathew Kocher has pointed out to me that the locus classicusfor factor analysis is IQ. Like intensity of identity, we cannot mea-sure intelligence directly, so scientists have devised a number of teststhat operate as “functions of intelligence.” A relevant example ofconfirmatory factor analysis is Laitin’s (1998, 217–42, 392–4) use ofthe “matched guise” test created by Wallace Lambert. Laitin usedconfirmatory factor analysis to construct indices of “friendship” and“respect” out of survey responses from bilingual students in the for-mer Soviet Union.

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These examples are suggestive of how studying cul-ture offers us new purchase on perennial and in-tractable issues in political science. Paying attentionto symbolic displays of power, for example, pro-vides scholars with the opportunity to understandthe dynamics of political compliance and to explainwhy regimes spend scarce material resources on suchdisplays. Scholars can document empirically the skir-mishes that take place between ruler and ruled as theyare represented in the regime’s idealized presentationof itself and in people’s reception of it. They can alsotheorize the ways in which symbols themselves create,sustain, and undermine the disciplinary circumstancesthrough which any regime exercises some of its power.Studying semiotic practices generates explanations ofhow political identifications are formed, instances ofgroupness crystallized, and alternative possibilitiesof belonging foreclosed. Investigating semiotic prac-tices can also help scholars to establish important cri-teria for differentiating passionate forms of solidarityfrom vague, mildly constraining experiences of “affin-ity and affiliation” (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, 21).Establishing such criteria would enhance studies of na-tionalism, ethnic conflict, identity-formation, collectiveaction, and hegemony. A semiotic practice-oriented ap-proach can also assist in answering important questionssuch as, When will a subversive organization invokeethnicity to activate violence? How intense are people’sidentifications in particular nation-states? When willstates experience violence from groups who claim eth-nicity? When will organizations that claim to representethnic groups form? When will they be successful atmobilizing support around ethnic or national claims?and How do groups manage to gain public supportand to get their claims taken seriously? A semioticpractice-based approach also draws our attention tothe problems of presuming ethnicity as an objectivemarker. Large datasets using objective categories suf-fer from selection bias toward conflict (Fearon andLaitin 1996). An intensity measure, devised through acombination of statistical techniques and ethnographicones, might produce more reliable large datasets or,at least, point scholars in new directions. Generaliz-able arguments about the conditions under which as-criptive identifications get produced, or become thebasis for organized resistance, or rigidify in state in-stitutions focus attention on the meanings of ethnic-ity in practice, thereby acknowledging some of theactual complexities of political identification, withoutforsaking commitments to causal stories or large-nwork.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The gulf between interpretivists and rational choicetheorists may be too wide to bridge. In many ways,the concerns of rational choice theorists and interpre-tivists are simply incommensurable. Epistemologicalcommitments to uncertainty, ambiguity, and messinessinvite interpretivists to focus on social movements,political resistance, and modern power in ways that

are irrelevant to rational choice theorists. Similarly,epistemological concerns with stability, order, and gov-ernance make those who emphasize the “science” partof the discipline or who look to economics for inspi-ration less compelling to interpretivists than philoso-phers and anthropologists are. For those with aninterest in culture on both sides of the divide, how-ever, there is no reason not to move beyond thetraditional understanding of political culture. Asemiotic practices approach avoids the ahistorical,empirically untenable formulation of culture currentlyinvoked by political culture and some rational choicetheorists. And it gives us explanatory purchase onkey dependent variables, such as compliance and eth-nic identity-formation. Researching dynamic semioticpractices enables both accounts of general political pro-cesses and nuanced causal arguments about particularcases in ways that are more theoretically robust andempirically accurate than mainstream formulations ofculture in political science currently permit.

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