The landscapes of lives I: An action landscape approach to practices and the interface of individual and society

Abstract

Practices occupy the intersection of human behavior with its personal and societal dimensions, operating in social theory as bridges between high-order cultural features and on-the-ground dynamics that reciprocally shape the conditions of everyday life and animate human experience. Yet precisely how this bridging occurs remains underspecified. We address that gap in this and a companion article (Worthman, Cummings, and Lende 2023). This article situates practices in dynamic action space, while the second details how those dynamics work and applies them to questions of inequity, resilience, and contemplative practice. We trace a spectrum of practices from mundane activities to formal rituals and self-transformational pursuits. We then situate them within a socioecological framework, drawing on the visual metaphor of Charles Waddington's epigenetic landscape to represent fields of possible practices or action landscapes that are contingent, situated, and dynamically configured to constitute the middle ground bridging social actors and lived experience with sociocultural worlds.