From Culture to Claimsmaking

Conceptual approaches to claimsmaking often feature the overarching symbolic templates of political culture or else the strategic actor of the social movement framing approach. Both approaches have value, but neither shows adequately how cultural context influences claimsmaking in everyday situations. To better understand cultural context and situated claimsmaking together, we retheorize the concept of discursive field, showing how such a field is sustained through interaction. Claimsmakers craft claims from basic symbolic categories, in line with the appropriate style for a scene of interaction. Scene style induces external and internal boundaries to a discursive field, making some claims illegitimate and others inappropriate or else subordinate in a given scene. Conceptualizing how culture works in a discursive field helps us better understand what claimsmakers can say, how, and where. We illustrate the theoretical reconstruction with an ethnographic and archival study of different settings of a housing advocacy campaign.