Maintaining a Houseyard as a Practice

Chapter Five takes the question of practice and cultural complexity as its point of departure. Stepping back from the ethnography to consider some of the broader issues at stake, it is noted that so-called ‘practice theory’ seems to cover a diverse range of approaches with equally disparate understandings of what constitutes a practice and the conditions under which enquiry might proceed. It is shown that recourse to ‘the facts’ does not offer viable grounds for adjudicating between conflicting accounts. And so an alternative route is proposed, by way of comparing the central questions, presuppositions and projects of transformation embodied in the work of two prominent social theorists—Alasdair MacIntyre and Pierre Bourdieu.