Page 117 - Prathima Volume 12

A Review of Postcolonial Scholarship: Conducting Research on Culture and Society
understand the world by organizing their understanding and meaning, rather than
imposing external forces or a particular objective stance.

Thus, symbols, language, and meaning have played an influential role in modern
anthropological research and writings. In doing so, anthropologists have turned to
paying attention to mental or cultural phenomenon (looking at meanings, language,
and symbols) while shifting from social structure. The meaning is not static, because
people are making multiple meanings about their worldviews. But people also have
access to multiple worldviews; for instance, a Tamil Hindu business owner, and his
access to the worldviews available both in Hinduism and those found in capitalism.
That is to say, people have the capacity to generate multiple meanings because the
human is seen as agency (Giddens, 1984). Agency refers to the capacity of individuals
to act in society and make their choices. Through structuration theory, Giddens (1984)
aimed at reconceptualizing the duality of structure. This dualism is to make difference
between objectivism and subjectivism. Notably, Individuals have power to change and
act their world. Moreover, Giddens (1984) emphasized that society and culture have to
be understood at a given time (temporal awareness). Hence, meanings are not kept
permanently, but constantly changed and differently produced. Therefore, when we
need to study the meanings of peoples' worldviews and human cultures, they have to
be understood along with other possible concepts such as practice, power, and
subjectivity.

In understating culture and meaning, I consider Bourdieu's (1979) notion of practice to
be very important in anthropology. In particular, his critical theoretical discussion was
around the themes of structures, habitus, practices, symbolic capital, domination,
objectivism, and subjectivism (Bourdieu, 1979). In the 1950s, in France, the Social
Sciences were dominated by the fields of objective structuralism of Levi Strauss and
subjective existentialism of Sartre. However, Bourdieu's (1979) major investigation
was to overcome the binary opposition between subjectivism and objectivism. In
Bourdieu's sense, practice actually rests at the site of the dialectic between the
structures and habitus. Thus, he has argued that structures may be passed down from
the past and in a sense inherited from previous generations, while the habitus is created
and recreated through practice.

Anthropologists, however, recognize practice also as a form of power and domination
that has a close relationship with Foucault's (1979) notion of power. He argued that
“there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of
knowledge” (Foucault, 1979, p. 27). Since the time of his writing, I would say, that
media has increasingly become a larger field of contemporary knowledge. How does
the power of media, and the type of knowledge it disseminates relate to contemporary
ideas of practice? How did Foucault (1979) see media as impacting society's relation

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