Practices as Models: A Methodology with an Illustration Concerning Wampum Diplomacy

Introduction

Over the last 10 years, the practice turn has hit the discipline of International Relations (IR). In this article, we apply an old saw to this new development. The old saw is perhaps best pictured by René Magritte’s painting This Is Not a Pipe, which represents a pipe. A phenomenon is something different from a representation or a model of that phenomenon. We will argue, at some length, that this simple, and hence basic, insight is not adequately reflected in the discipline’s turn to practices.

The everyday meaning of the concept of practice is something like ‘doings’ or ‘what is being done’. Its everyday counter-concept is theory. Intuitively, this may lead us to think of practices as what is really going on in the world – that is, as a phenomenon – as opposed to a model of that phenomenon. Each time we make such a distinction, we reinforce the traditional separation between theory and empirical reality. In this article, we argue that much of the ongoing ‘practice turn’ in the social sciences rests on the idea that we study practices directly, as a phenomenon rather than as a model of a phenomenon. We go on to argue that this is detrimental to our understanding of practices, because it will easily turn the concept of practices into something meaninglessly wide.

Max Weber’s strategy in much of his conceptual work was to ‘rehabilitate everyday concepts fraught with transcendental normative content and fashion usable analytical tools out of them’. ¹ Taking Weber’s lead here, we will make the methodological argument that for practices to add analytical leverage to the study of world politics, the concept must be included and defined at the level of models. Practice should be conceptualised as the representation or model that may link scholars to the social world we want to study. We argue that conceptualising practices as models has three advantages. Firstly, defining practices as models of phenomena rather than as phenomena as such gets us around an often tacitly assumed understanding of practices, namely that practices are somehow ‘shared’ by their doers. Against this assumption, we will argue that one of the key things the practice turn may do, actually is supposed to do, for us is to get us out of this idea about motivations. By arguing that practices can be captured by the analyst in the form of a model, rather than simply existing on the level of shared assumptions, we make the concept of practice an analytical one, rather than a hermeneutic one, and do away with the need to postulate unobservable ‘motivations’ when doing empirical research. This offers the analyst the great advantage of ridding her of the need to make problematic claims about the state of mind amongst the people who perform the practice – ontological claims that are difficult to warrant empirically. Individual judgements only make sense within a practical activity relying on impersonal rules, so the subjective consciousness of people involved in a practical activity becomes redundant, whilst visible, practical arrangements of experiences is what counts. ²

Secondly, a further advantage which flows from the first is that doing away with states of mind rids us of the need to separate analytically between the material and the ideational. The analytical focus is allowed to be thoroughly relational; it rests on the practices themselves, as distinct from being directed towards the state of mind of their doers, or on some postulated cultures or rules or norms that inform the practices. Lastly, being explicit about using models, and what one’s model of practices looks like, adds analytical specification and also confines the area of investigation, making data selection easier.

As an illustration of what such a methodology using models in the analysis of practices might look like, we include a case study of diplomacy as practice, and contrast it with past approaches to practice and diplomacy. In order to be useful, this model will have to demonstrate how it is practical involvements that give rise to the rules of this particular game of diplomacy, with these particular rules and norms, rather than vice versa. The crucial thing is to demonstrate that the model need not invoke interests, subjectivities, identities or an external structural context as pre-filling for the model to be useful. To put some distance between most readers and the example, we have chosen a case of diplomacy that centres on a practice which is of non-European origin and which has, to our knowledge, not been the object of previous IR scholarship. The case therefore has the potential to make what is familiar to most IR theorists strange. Distancing readers from the material to be analysed goes some way towards ensuring that readers will have fewer presuppositions about the case. In addition, we will contrast our approach with extant approaches to practice and diplomacy. All this taken together will make it easier for the readers to judge for themselves whether using models in general, and our model in particular, is effective and gives a satisfying account of what is being analysed. Assumptions of ‘sharedness’ and analytical separations between objects and agents become more transparent. In this sense, we have chosen a critical case.

The phenomenon to be analysed is what we, as distinct from the doers of the practice themselves, will call wampum diplomacy. Iroquois negotiations focused on ritual exchanges of wampum belts. Words were useless if not accompanied by these artefacts. Institutionalisation of the practice differed widely from the European diplomatic tradition. This makes it easier to demonstrate the value added by explicitly conceptualising practices at the level of a model, for the case is a practice that emerged as something different from what existed before. Before wampum diplomacy, one party spoke about wampum but not diplomacy and the other about diplomacy but not wampum.

The first part of the article, detailing the general benefits of using models in studying practices, and the second part, outlining a specific model and using it on the case, broadly correspond to what Charles Tilly held to be two different theoretical issues: one concerning explanations of the evidence concerning a phenomenon, and the other concerning explanations of the phenomenon under investigation itself. The two interact, but ‘they stem from different “originating questions” … questions about certain phenomena and questions about the generation of knowledge concerning the same phenomena’. ³

The first three sections mainly address the methodological ‘questions about the generation of knowledge’ concerning practices. The succeeding sections will aim to show the specific purchase of the general arguments made in this first part by addressing the ontological questions concerning practices as ‘a certain phenomenon’.

We begin with a brief introduction to the ‘practice turn’, and fault it for not analytically separating the phenomenon of practice as lived reality from our scholarly models of that phenomenon. The second section clarifies what is meant by models, and discusses the general importance of models for the study of international politics. We argue that models do not necessarily mirror reality, but rather represent it in specific ways to bring about a reading of a specific piece of reality. In the third section, by contrasting our methodology with one that sees practices as raw data, we draw out the implications of thinking practices as models for actual empirical research in IR. In the fourth section, the focus is no longer on models as a methodological tool, but on the contents, or ontology, of one specific model of practices. Based on this, the fifth and final section puts the idea of practices as model to work on the case of wampum diplomacy.

The ‘Practice Turn’

In IR, a focus on practices was briefly introduced during the so-called ‘third debate’, but that debate substituted the more static notions of norms and ideas for practices. ⁴ The recent ‘practice turn’ in IR started to gain momentum from the early 2000s. Neumann drew on recent scholarship within sociology and science studies to argue that ‘returning practices to the linguistic turn’ could help scholars focus their attention on the complex web of everyday practices that are constituting and reconstituting social phenomena. ⁵ The notion of ‘practices’ quickly became central to constructivist IR scholars. ⁶

Social theorist Theodore Schatzki defines the practice approach in the social sciences as ‘a loose, but nevertheless definable movement of thought that is unified around the idea that the field of practices is the place to investigate such phenomena as agency, knowledge, language, ethics, power and science’. ⁷

In IR, collecting approaches which bear a family resemblance together in an edited volume is a well-established way of trying to nudge those approaches towards the centre stage of the discipline. ⁸ Where the practice turn is concerned, this job is undertaken in the recent book International Practices, which presents itself as a well-rounded conversation between frameworks and paradigms. In trying to come up with a common denominator for the plurality of understandings of practices in IR, the editors, Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, define practices as competent performances. They claim that disaggregated practices are performed by individual beings, and equal human agency, whilst collective or shared practices are ‘structured and acted out by communities of practice and by the diffusion of background knowledge across agents in these communities’. ⁹ Practices are seen as the instantiation of background knowledge, as they ‘turn contexts and structure into (individual and corporate) agents’ dispositions and expectations’. ¹⁰ We want to take issue with one possible reading of this understanding of practices, namely that practices are real existing everyday phenomena. We present our critique in the same spirit as Adler and Pouliot present their volume, namely as an attempt at further specifying our understandings of practices (in our case, by trying to root out one possibility) so that a practice approach may offer itself to the discipline as a good complementary alternative to more widely used approaches.

Models as Scholarly Constructs

Let us start with a bit of immanent critique. Elsewhere, Adler and Pouliot claim that what is at stake in the study of practices is ‘to explain and understand how world politics actually works, that is, in practice’. ¹¹ One reading of this is that practices equal how world politics actually work, and practices are seen as the empirics, the facts, the data that we now must ‘turn to’ to make new sense of international politics and dynamics. Due to the prevalence of the theory–practice distinction in common parlance, this will easily lead us to search for what practices really are, and put off the question of how to study them until they have been identified. We will rather argue for a different procedure. Contra critical (and scientific) realists, we start from the premise that stuff, practices included, cannot be grasped without the use of a model. Practices, be that scholarly practices or the practices studied by scholars, make up an ontic category, but since ontic stuff cannot be grasped directly, it must be grasped in terms of the methodology of using models.

In order to grasp practices, then, we first have to have an understanding of models. Models are not like theories, they are not explanatory. Models are descriptive. They are stylised categories that we draw on to get a handle on the world. They explain nothing but are rather short-cuts for grasping the world, in the sense that they help us to outline certain stuff from other stuff. From a scholarly point of view, models delineate what is to be explained, but models do not in and of themselves do any explaining. They are representations, in the sense that they process data and produce the world in specific ways. A scholarly model is a re-description of the world that offers new ways of producing facts on which the scholar may draw in order to develop a new explanatory theory. It follows that facts are the result of the systematic application of a model to very specific situations (see Figure 1 below). Models are used in order to produce facts, and a theory is a specific arrangement (or set of arrangements) of such facts that will ideally add up to an explanation.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1:

‘Model of a model’: a model represents the world in specific ways. The ‘presentation’ of some structural concept and data are ‘represented’ in a model to facilitate the systematic making of facts, which are in turn dependent on the model.

In terms of IR’s practice debate, the basic point is that we must understand different practice approaches as different models that serve different analytical ends. Here we can learn from natural scientists, who in important respects, and perhaps paradoxically, are more aware of the importance of such separation than are social scientists. With reference to known scientific models such as gravitation in spinning spheres, evolution in isolated ecosystems and rational exchange of goods with perfect information, Roman Frigg writes that:

A model would usually also include some purely structural concept, for example a specification of the ways in which generic entities relate to one another. Still, a deductive structure is by itself no model, for a deductive structure does not represent anything in particular. Structures are empty tools without data that stem from an engagement with the world researchers study. ¹³ The standard way of making a model is to mix observable data with some kind of structural form. A model is a representation and must therefore stand for something else. A structure by itself (e.g. unspecified entities relating in specific ways, or any mathematical structure for that matter) does not represent anything empirically observable at all. ¹⁴ This means that models cannot represent the world without the mediation of non-structural concepts.

One corollary is that models are not purely structural postulates or an empty container. Neither are they simply representations of data. Models rather represent experienced phenomena, such as the pervasiveness of social practices. It follows that a model of practices is not about the data we gather to find out about a practice (data such as numbers and unit counts, narratives from secondary accounts, interview transcripts, observational data, etc.). To understand practices as models does not limit us methodically, by making certain kinds of data collection irrelevant. All practice approaches are pragmatic when it comes to the choice of data; the ideal is to use data that make the distance between the representation of the practice (i.e. the model) and the practice itself as small as possible (with reference to our case study, which is historical, it is not ideal to forgo observation and interviews, but those options are simply not available for historical studies). Understanding practices through models is not about method (understood as execution of data collection) but about methodology. It is about forging a tool that can systematically produce (model-dependent) facts about the world by contextualising data. Note that the facts are by necessity model-dependent, in the sense that they are not preceding the model and presented to the scholar as ready-made things. Rather, facts are produced through the model. We will give further examples of this when we discuss the case study in the fifth section below.

A brief illustration will demonstrate the general operation of a model and the difference between empirical data, models and facts. In the late 1700s, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was looking for a more dynamic alternative to the Newtonian mechanistic approach of his days. During his travels in Italy, he came up with the idea to study plants ‘morphologically’ – by seeing all plants as one aspect of a segregated whole. All instances of plants could be seen as a metamorphosis of a single form, an Urphänomen, in this case an Urpflanze, or the ‘original plant’. At first, Goethe regarded this as an actual plant that might be discovered. When collecting data in Italy, experiencing the variety of plants, he noted: ‘Among this multitude might I not discover the Urpflanze? There certainly must be one. Otherwise, how could I recognise that this or that form was a plant if all were not built upon the same basic model?’ However, shortly after writing this, his conception of the Urpflanze had changed in important ways. ‘The Primal Plant’, Goethe writes, ‘is going to be the strangest creature in the world, which Nature herself shall envy me’. His plan was to create the Urpflanze himself and use it to measure possibilities. ‘With this model and the key to it, it will be possible to go on for ever inventing plants and know that their existence is logical; that is to say, if they do not actually exist, they could.’ Goethe was the first to use the holistic concept of ‘Gestalt’ for such phenomena, but there is a different aspect of his thinking that is of the essence here. Goethe invented a fictional model of plant-life, something that is not an object or merely a collection of data, but through which we can recognise a likeness. Such an imagined, fictional model is at the same time an idea and an object of experience. ¹⁵ It does not exactly correspond to the world but represents aspects of it to make it comprehensible. Through his fictional model, it was possible to create facts about plants and what they are. We can find similar thoughts in the writings of Weber, Wittgenstein and Popper, ¹⁶ amongst others, and it has become the common view of scientific models.

To generalise, models will always ‘freeze’ an array of phenomena for analysis. This is as it should be, as long as one keeps firmly in mind that models are always ‘utopian’, in the sense that they are tools to facilitate investigations of a messy world. Instead of starting from an assumption of a possible correspondence between the world and our ideas about it, the starting point for a practice analyst could be a never-achievable and utopian model, against which one can pragmatically compare (as opposed to test) the empirics. Given its methodological ‘as if’ character, a model can be more or less useful or effective as an explanatory tool, but it cannot by itself be true or false relative to the world, as the data we use to fill out the model are never true descriptions of the world. Truth claims about models can only be made about its assumptions and about the use made of it relative to the world.

Our understanding of a model, which builds on standard usages in both the natural and social sciences, foregrounds an oft-overlooked point, particularly in discussions of practices: the view of what the ‘world’ is is different when seen by the researcher and by the objects of research – the participants in a practice. ¹⁷ The model is specifically geared towards something going on in the world that is of interest to the researcher. In short, modelling in the above sense is a way of producing knowledge that is almost exclusively used by academics/scientists.

This may seem obvious, but, particularly in practice approaches, there is a tendency to see the activities of the researcher and her objects of research as two parts of the same broad endeavour, exactly because practices in many instances are seen to be data about an aspect of the social writ large – an ontological category on the ‘target’ side of models, covering all that is social. Research, it is said, is also a social category, involved in what it investigates. That is a valid epistemological point. It does not follow, however, that an ontology of practices must therefore by necessity include what the researcher does. Practices are often seen as inherently reflexive. They need not be. ¹⁸ If practices are defined as, let us say, ‘intersubjectively established, limited domains of activity’, it does not logically and automatically follow that the knowledge the researcher produces is generated in ‘intersubjectively established, limited domains of activity’. It is, for example, perfectly possible to study practices thus defined by using regression analyses or any other supposedly ‘non-constructivist’ procedure for generating knowledge. The model as a creation of the researcher is logically distinct from what the model is said to represent, for example practices. ¹⁹ To include ‘practices’ in a model is an ontological move done by the researchers. It is to claim that certain things in the world are more important or central than others in the model. That is a claim that might or might not be helpful when studying international politics. ²⁰

To sum up so far, a model is by definition fictional, but it can still be used to study the world. Indeed, scholars within both the natural and social sciences do it all the time. The very status of models as fictional does not depend on specific methodological or ontological inclinations. ²¹ This is important for practice approaches, for it demonstrates the potential benefit of being explicit about our different models of practices. If practices are not explicitly forming part of a model, it can easily be dismissed based on the colloquial theory–practice distinction. If practices are not a model of the world, it is just the world – the world of ‘just what people do’, or the world of practitioners, which may serve to reinforce a distinction between theory and empirical reality. This will add little new to the study of international politics, a discipline established by practitioners. We therefore argue that for practices to add both clarity and analytical leverage to the study of world politics, the concept must be included and defined at the level of models, and not just as the practical counterpart in the world to a model of some other phenomenon. Practices should not be what is represented by the model. Practice should be the representation. In the next section, we go on to detail the potential scholarly benefits of conceptualising practices as part of models.

The Value of Thinking Practice at the Level of Models

Whether one chooses to use models in research or not, regarding practices, most would agree on at least two things: practices as a concept is not mainly about the methods we use to investigate such practices (ethnographic studies, participant observation, statistics, etc.), and practices are not mainly about methodology, that is, the specific logics and ways of processing data to make facts (unless methodologies are the objects of investigation in a sociology of knowledge). Practices are, then, rather part of an ontology, or a catalogue of what is said to exist in the world. As such, one may choose to consider practices as phenomena that are not included in a model, and external to it, simply serving the role as raw data. Another option is to say that, in principle, we may study almost anything as a practice through a model of how practices work. This latter approach to practices is our preferred option.

Concerning the former approach, we will single out Vincent Pouliot, who, in our view, otherwise has done the most stimulating and sophisticated work in IR on methods and methodologies concerning practices. Later we will contrast our case with de Certeau’s approach to practice, ²² yet another way of treating practices, more substantially related to diplomacy.

Vincent Pouliot’s Bourdieusian approach to practices ²³ has become a well-known, methodological approach to practices and the study of diplomacy. He characterises his approach as inductive, since practices are the empirical basis for consequent theorisation. Pouliot proceeds in three steps. Firstly, he gets access to practices, which are understood as ‘the raw data of social science’. ²⁴ Pouliot’s second step is to reconstruct the ‘dispositional logics’ of the agents that make practices possible, and the third is to construct ‘positional logics’ – a further contextualisation including the rules of the game, the distribution of symbolic and material resources, and historicisation. The general movement is from the ‘insider’s’ account, or the subjective, to the ‘outsider’s’ account, or the objective.

Despite his frequent use of the epithet methodological, however, Pouliot does not focus much on methodology, the goal and logical structure and procedures for empirical research. Instead, he concentrates on discussing methods, that is, procedures for data collection. This is in keeping with his recipe, where the first steps are about method, with theories and models only entering the picture as part of the last steps. In other words, previous data collection is supposed to illuminate agents’ dispositions and positions. Here we have a practice approach that jumps straight into assumed ontological features of the world – agents ‘doing’ stuff – without any anterior consideration of the multiplicity of possible worlds that the researcher can choose to engage through her methodologies. In other words, far from being a function of models, practices are treated as raw data. We find this to be problematic, for if practices are accessible as raw data, then the ‘practice turn’ cannot add much new to our understanding of the world we are investigating, for we will simply fall back on old categories and debates. ²⁵

Compared to our own trust in models, Pouliot’s approach comes across as the inverse procedure for studying practices. Practices become the epiphenomenal empirical manifestation of the ‘habitus’ (agents’ internal disposition) and the resource game (the ‘field’). Even if this can certainly be a valuable and efficient procedure in its own right, the problem with such a procedure when it comes to the ‘practice turn’ is that it gives us no clear definition of what practices are supposed to be, or what they do for the analysis.

‘Different researchers’, Pouliot writes, ‘never recover exactly the same practical meanings. But that does not mean it is not worth trying to be as faithful and accurate as possible.’ ²⁶ We are sympathetic to this idea but would also rephrase it and say that this does not mean it is not worth trying to be as systematic and consistent as possible through one’s methodology. That is because ‘interpretation as the “objectification” of meanings’ ²⁷ is constant – it never starts or stops – so the goal and position of the researcher should be made clear and systematised from the start. Using our methodology of a model, treating something as a practice, one can look at states, organisations, wars, social movements, class or even personhood as practices. This does not require that the participants are subjectively aware that they through their activities are ‘stating’, ‘organisationing’, ‘warring’, ‘social movementing’, ‘classing’ or ‘personing’. It does not rely on assumptions of conscious, rule-following behaviour. As what practices are is specified in the model, and not dependent on the subjectivities of the objects of research, it is possible to study something as a practice, despite the fact that the participants in it do not see it explicitly as one. Therefore, in using models, it would typically make sense to talk about practices as an ontological category, and not practising something else (or, generically, ‘x-ing’ something). ²⁸

Seeing practices as the raw data of the social, as ‘doings’, ‘what is being done’ or ‘performed actions’ in a social context, supposedly as opposed to theoretical constructs, might intuitively lead us to think of practices as the empirical ‘target’ – that is, as what is really going on in the world, as opposed to models. Practices are here seen as initial data or facts. This, we argue, is part of the explanation for the difficulties of formulating a ‘practice approach’ and the vagueness of the concept of ‘practices’. When studying the social world, practices can easily come to mean everything and thus nothing at the same time, since what ‘social’ denotes is often implicit in the definition of practices as performed in the world (as recognition, meaningful action, knowledgeable actions, etc.).

However, the ambitions of practice as a new approach to IR should be higher – we should somehow also be able to study practices that are not based on assumptions of conscious, rule-following behaviour, to be able to supplement traditional accounts based on interests, identity, structural contexts and so on; that is, to study practice as a phenomenon in its own right. If that is the goal, there are at least three general benefits of using a model to investigate practices.

If not specified analytically, practices can easily come to be seen as just what practitioners (and also some historians) are claiming they are doing all the time – being concerned with practice and what is really going on, as opposed to academic concepts. However, being explicit not mainly about what practices are but what such a concept can do for us, models of practices may serve to efficiently connect our data and empirics to theory. A benefit at a broad level, then, is that if one understands the premises and assumptions as explicitly specified in a model, it eases the terms of the debate both between different concepts of practices within the academic community and between academics and practitioners. This is a particularly important consideration when discussing ‘practice theories’ precisely because the term ‘practice’ may lead to confusion because of its everyday use as a counter-concept to theory.

Furthermore, as indicated above, being explicit about using models can, first, help us to avoid the notion that practices are somehow ‘shared’, and, second, using fictional models means that one does not need to commit to any analytical separation between the material and the ideational, as would easily have been the case in an understanding of theoretical models and empirical reality as a dichotomy. As there is no theory–practice separation implied in seeing practices as part of the model, one can consistently look at both ‘objects and actors’, the ‘material and ideational’, through the same analytical framework.

Lastly, being explicit about using models, and what one’s model of practices looks like, adds analytical specification and confines the area of investigation, making data selection easier. The danger of slipping between a model of reality and the reality of a model is reduced, and this adds consistency to empirical research. A further advantage of thinking practices as models is that practices can be seen as both structural and contingent. Structuring data to produce facts is really what models are all about. What a structure does is to externalise certain elements of an explanation. Without doing this, there would be no basis on which to select data. If we define practices as doings, and do not add a model structure, the task of selecting and explaining practices might become insurmountable.

Outline of a Model of Practice

Having addressed the general benefits of conceptualising practices in models, we will now turn our focus to the ontological question concerning the contents of a specific model. We will try to illustrate the suggested benefits mentioned above by proposing some elements of a model of practices, which we will use in investigating a case of diplomacy. This is an important shift in focus. Now, we will not be talking about methodology or what models are. The focus is no longer on models as a methodological tool, but on the contents, or ontology, of one specific model of practices that we will apply to our case of diplomacy as practice. It might be wrong to claim this to be a fully fledged model. We make some fictional assumptions and show how this can work in our case, and we will argue that it can describe diplomacy in new ways and, not least, that it makes practice a manageable and systematic concept that can be put to systematic use in concrete investigations.

Our assumptions are rather generic. All the same, it is one of many possible models. A number of different models can be useful to apply in empirical investigations of a phenomenon. One model is seldom sufficient for effective explanation of phenomena, but the important point in this context is the awareness of how models help identify practices, and our outline of a model might serve both as a useful illustration and also as a substantial addition to the practice literature.

The elements of our model of practices comprise four principles: 1) letting the participants in a practice specify what that practice consists of; 2) a focus on processes first, and not entities; 3) no analytical separation between material objects and ideational contents and 4) practices are 100% observable – they have no elements that cannot be seen, heard or felt.

As noted, some structural concept is part of a model, together with empirical data. One structural limiting condition in our model is to let the participants in a practice specify what the practice consists of. This means not that the participants need to be consciously aware that they are taking part in a specific practice, but that it is the account of participants’ experiences that is the point of departure – directly from the participants or, as in the case below, recounted observed experiences. That the participants are to specify what the practice consists of is not dependent on direct, first-hand observation, but could equally rely on second-hand sources (in other words, it is possible to study practices historically). However, what is taken from second-hand sources would not be the scholarly definitions or concepts, or jargon internal to an academic setting. What is said to exist in the world is not, for example, ‘feedback loops’, ‘regression effects’ or other ‘academic’ concepts. The point of departure is the (recounted) experience of the participants, including any concepts they would choose to use. This is a general ontological priority made within the model, excluding other potential ontological conditions (e.g. letting the researchers specify it, as in the example above).

But if practices are about how people themselves specify their activities, how can that be compatible with us modelling it? Again, we return to the separation between the model as fiction, as a research procedure, and the objects under investigation. The model is a methodological tool. To let participants specify what a practice consists of in any particular case under investigation is an ontological choice to limit the substantial content and appearance of objects in a model. ²⁹ That is a different question from that of modelling. Letting participants themselves specify what they are doing is not opposed to the methodological move of using a model of what they are doing, but is an ontological priority set within the model. It is an analytical priority and not a self-evident fact about what practices really are. As such, the decision on the part of a researcher to let participants specify their own social situation and involvement is a structural element of the model. The actual specification by participants is data. This in turn implies that social meaning is defined as use and not as dispositions, content or attributes, as in ‘identities’ or ‘interests’. We take how participants specify their situation as data but do not lean on assumptions about inherent rationalities, dispositions or conscious rule-following. This leads us to another structural concept in our model.

Whilst the above refers to how the contents of a practice are specified, the second structural concept in our model concerns how these contents relate to each other. In our model, we choose to focus on processes first – not entities, attributes or dispositions. This connects to the more general advantage of using a model: we do not need to a priori include an analytical separation of ‘material objects’ and ‘ideational mental content’ in the model of practices (‘need’ is emphasised here, because one could; but there is no methodological push towards doing it). One can consistently look at both ‘objects and actors’, the ‘material and ideational’, through the same analytical framework, focusing, for example, on co-production and performances of objects. Therefore, practices are not ‘shared’ in the sense that there is some similar, causal attribute that is lodged within individuals’ minds or stored in an invisible structure; they emerge out of practical engagements and performances.

In the model, therefore, we also conceptualise practices as being 100% empirically observable. This is an important point, as it indirectly addresses the notion of ‘structures’. Traditionally, ‘structure’ has been seen as an inherent feature of the organisation of social life. For theories traditionally labelled as ‘structuralist’, structure originates ‘outside of heads’ – in capitalism or systems of signifiers or symbols. Structure in individualist and mentalist theories, on the other hand, originates from subjective knowledge, ‘motivations’, ‘dispositions’ or the coming together of individual rationalities, both located ‘inside heads’.

Often, such structures are seen as objectively real with causal effects, and not only as scholarly constructs or models. ³⁰ However, structures, be they ‘class’ or ‘motivations’, cannot be observed through a microscope. Such a realist (in the philosophical sense) commitment to the existence in the world (not in a model) of a structural realm beyond experience that cannot possibly be observed is problematic if one wants to do empirical research. This problem certainly has a direct relevance to practice approaches, as practices are often understood as ‘tacit knowledge’ and ‘know-how’ that is shared by a group. In his book The Social Theory of Practices, Stephen Turner argues against such presumably invisible and non-public common objects and concludes that we have to discard the concept of practices altogether. ³¹ The sharing and transmission of practices is the problem, as this, in his causal framework, would imply something that needs to be common to all participants in a practice. This is impossible to specify empirically, and if one were to exclude the ‘shared’ element, practices are merely habits at an individual level. Practices are rather that which people learn, in a heterogeneous way, to be the best way to achieve whatever goal they may have. ³² The paradox is that Turner seems to imply that ‘practices’ indeed have an objective meaning, but that the meaning cannot be realised or investigated because of the impossibility of objectivity on the level of collective phenomena. Turner does not object to the reality of unobservable phenomena, but only to unobservable collective phenomena. ³³ Thus, the neat trick that Turner pulls is to remake an unobservable structure as ‘internal’ instead of ‘external’ to human minds. As we want to treat practices as open for empirical scrutiny, such notions grounding practices in either internal or external invisible structures do not help us.

Instead of discarding the notion of practices altogether, as does Turner, we argue that a better way of conceptualising such shared ‘hidden’ or ‘tacit’ practices is as in principle 100% empirically observable – publicly available and concrete – but just not framed as such yet. Instead of meticulous procedures to come closer to the truth about thought or internal motivations, we dispense with the whole problem by defining meaning through use. Meanings, then, are publicly available. How do we deal with the impossibility of getting into people’s brains and discovering what they objectively and really think, and the impossibility of empirically asserting the existence of real but invisible structures? The answer is precisely a model of practices.

Our four principles add up to the assumption that both the individual minds and the world in which they operate emerge out of practices. There are ‘thoughtless’ activities, like opening a door or descending a stairway, which do not require any separate analysis of intentions, on the one hand, and the object towards which intention is directed, on the other (a piece of metal attached to the door, or alternate horizontally and vertically positioned wooden planks). In the model, there is no need to separate subjective minds from external, material conditions, as it is the external and circumstantial performance of practices that is the point of departure. ³⁴ Such immediate, practical grasping of objects is crucial in the model, as opposed to detached reflections on objects or activities. This is intuition, experience, judgement – not as subjective properties, but located in ‘a public place external to the individual minds of the participants but not therefore independent of all minds in general’. ³⁵

What is the role of such things? Our four elements of a model mean that logically based action is analytically replaced by experientially based action, and is as such not about a shared ‘logic of practice’ or ‘logic of practicality’ even if practices are intersubjective in the above sense. ³⁶ Importantly, then, such use of a model implies that one can generate valid knowledge about practices without the requirement that the practitioners reflect on their involvement in a case of practice. We do not have to be preoccupied with dispositions or subjective states of mind, reflecting on the logic behind their actions, even as participants supply us with their accounts. We aim to explain ‘rule-based behaviour’, but without grounding it in concepts external to practice. In the model, practices are rule-based behaviour that can be done well or badly relative to the social circumstances in which a rule is commonly accepted and legitimate.

Using these model elements in our case, we will not look at the practising of diplomacy, but we will see diplomacy as a practice. The difference is that, in our case, it is a model of practices that forms the point of departure for studying diplomacy, and not vice versa. We bridge Pouliot’s and others’ inductive ontological leap of faith between empirical evidence, on the one hand, and assumptions, on the other, by means of a model. Practices in our conceptualisation are not epiphenomena. In our case, they come neither from the identities or the religious habitus of the Iroquois, nor from instrumental interaction, positional agency or ‘shared assumptions’. Where Pouliot makes the choice of beginning with practices as raw data, and leaves it to the researcher to decide what that might be, we begin by the ontological specification of practices in a model.

We will look at the emergence of a common practice between the English/French and the Iroquois – not by peeking into their brains to see how they were calculating, or how diplomacy was played out in ‘practising’ it, but by treating meaning as process and as use, as evolving and created from within practical activities as specified by the participants in it. ³⁷ A practice, in this sense, is indeed a collective accomplishment but not a collective possession. It is individual without being a habit, collective without being an object. ³⁸ Still, it is public and therefore empirically observable.

Our data are based on secondary sources (i.e. recounted experiences). Paired with our model, our case is a re-description of diplomacy, in which the activities that make up the phenomenon of diplomacy are specified by the participants, in which relations between actors constitute both the actors and the context, and in which the material/ ideational cannot be analytically separated in any meaningful way.

Once we are clear that we are using a model where practices are specified ‘fictionally’, as an assumption, we can analytically specify our area of investigation without having to lean on a definition of practices that forces us to take into account all that is being done to be consistent. We are interested in something specific here – not chosen based on data initially speaking for themselves, but on our model. We must also be clear that our model explains nothing at all. It only describes diplomacy in new ways, based on the model, which in turn leads us to produce new facts about the situation at hand. It is not a new theory of practices, but a re-description – a representation.

Wampum Diplomacy: A Practice Account

Amongst the Iroquois Confederacy or League, or, more correctly, the Haudenosaunee (People of the Long-House), the specialised literature identifies what it refers to as a highly ritualised diplomacy – ‘forest diplomacy’ – centred on two loci, namely meetings at the wood’s edge and, subsequently, in conference. The two key spaces in which Iroquois diplomacy primarily played out were the wood’s edge and the Principal Place. The locus of the wood’s edge is fairly straightforward:

The locus of the Principal Place is not so straightforward. The Principal Place seems to be where actual business was carried out. We know that this happened at a campfire. Since data are most abundant regarding conferences with the English and French, we will concentrate on these conferences.

To our knowledge, none of the parties referred to their interaction as diplomatic. This is an analytical term that only came into use quite recently. Historically, the literature on diplomacy did not take much note of it. ⁴⁰ The key reason is that the literature simply excluded the kinds of encounters discussed here. Two critical examples will suffice, one from what was the standard work on diplomacy for half a century after its publication in 1939, another from what remains the standard work on the emergence of diplomacy.

In his 1939 book Diplomacy, Harold Nicolson systematically excluded non-state actions as possible candidates for diplomacy, for Nicolson includes the ontological assumption that only states can have diplomacy. ⁴¹ By contrast, when we apply our model of practices below, we complement Nicolson’s understanding of diplomacy by availing ourselves of a model based on intersubjective, practical processes rather than internal properties of polities or other actors. One key advantage of our approach is that we may trace the origins of a hybridised diplomacy that grew out of two sets of disparate practices. Since Nicolson represented one of these sets of practices as non-diplomatic, even if he had discussed this case, he would simply have seen how one set of practices that were increasingly colonial spread, rather than seeing how two sets of practices produced something new. Such an approach elides not only what we refer to as forest diplomacy, but also the existence of the Iroquois polity.

To take another example, consider Ragnar Numelin’s The Beginnings of Diplomacy. His approach is an evolutionary one and, as such, rather different from Nicolson’s. Numelin’s evolutionary approach considers all practices of communication between polities as diplomatic, but by privileging heavily institutionalised and large-scale systems based on written communication, he ends up reducing communication between non-state political entities to overtures to ‘proper’ diplomacy between states. By contrast, since our model does not incorporate an evolutionary principle, we may complement Numelin’s understanding of diplomacy by validating specific sequences of diplomacy as worthy of our attention in and of themselves, regardless of genealogical aftermath. ⁴²

In the late 1670s and early 1680s, the Iroquois Confederacy forged an alliance with New York. It turned out to be the beginning of a wider net of formalised contacts between English colonies and Native American nations which became known by the latter as the ‘Covenant Chain’. ‘Relying on those connections, the Iroquois and the English fought, independently but in concert, against New France and its Indian allies in the conflict colonials called King William’s War.’ ⁴³

For a number of years the Iroquois had worked to settle their differences with the Native Americans to their west and to persuade them to relocate closer to their villages and away from French influence. An agreement with the Ottawans in 1695 had not lasted. In June 1700, however, five headmen representing three groups of Native Americans known to the Iroquois as ‘Dowaganhaes’ stood before a council at Onondaga:

In addition to the Covenant Chain, which involved ties with the English, in 1701, a ‘Grand Settlement’ established Iroquois neutrality between the English and the French. Hagedorn generalises about their conduct as follows:

Business beyond the ‘usual ceremonies’ concerned a whole slate of issues, from hunting patterns to the exchange of prisoners. ⁴⁶ Conferences were brought to a close with the English (or French) offering ‘massive gifts of clothing, tools, food, rum, weapons, and ammunition for all the Indians present; these, along with the ritual gift of wampum that accompanied official treaty proposals, the headmen would distribute to followers once they returned home’. ⁴⁷ The Iroquois also offered gifts. Like any other known diplomatic system, the Iroquois one included a gift economy. ⁴⁸

The interesting thing is that such treaties or deals were accompanied by an array of different practices, like preliminary business before negotiation, and the singing of the Six Songs, and the practice of burying the hatchet. If other collectives did not adhere to such practices in all aspects, the consequences could be dire. For example, in 1755, the Mohawks complained to the governor of Pennsylvania that the governor of New York had failed to remove the hatchet from their hands at the close of hostilities against the French. According to Mohawk practice, before peace could be made between two offending parties and normal relations restored, the hatchet of war had to be removed from their hands and heads. New York’s oversight kept the Mohawks from dealing with that colony and led them to approach Pennsylvania instead. ⁴⁹

Our model leads us to start with a focus on practices, instead of the usual research procedure of proceeding from preconceived assumptions about the attributes of ‘diplomacy’. Therefore, we take as our empirical entry point what seems like a pervasive practice based on both Iroquois and French/English participants’ accounts, namely the use of wampum. As noted in the introduction, a key consideration in choosing this case was to make diplomacy strange, in the sense of choosing a case where the practices of the two parties initially were common to the parties to a very limited degree.

The conferences focused on a particular form of messaging involving a particular kind of belt called wampum. Considered as artefacts, wampum were belts consisting of cylindrical beads made principally of quahog shells (venus mercenaria) drilled through from opposite ends. They were then strung in rows with sinew, vegetable fibre and/or thread, forming a rectangular belt that was most often horizontal. Druke writes that the:

The importance of these belts went beyond graphic depiction, for the belt was said to carry the message of one council to another. For our purposes this is crucial, for, without the existence of wampum, communication was considered by the Iroquois side as being not only incomplete but politically worthless. In the case of the ‘Grand Settlement’, for example, the wampum confirmed that a state of ‘perpetual peace and friendship’ now existed between the Five Nations and the tribes to their west. ⁵¹ These messages were literally read into the wampum before it was taken by a messenger to be presented to another tribal council where the messenger lent the message voice. ⁵² Words, it seems, did not come alive without the help of the wampum. ⁵³ This practice actually invested the wampum belt with agency. The wampum was doing the acting. This is reflected in language, as the word for a wampum serving as an invitation is:

The use of wampum in council meetings is a phenomenon that is a direct product of the contact-situation. The wampum practices indicate that the contact and negotiations between groups cannot be seen as mere physical or perceptual requirements of establishing contact. The wampum served as a device not only for keeping track of meetings and agreements, but also for organising them. ⁵⁵ Hagedorn details wampum’s actual use in negotiations:

From the 17th century onwards, as relations with English colonists took on increasing density, they also became increasingly wampum-based. ⁵⁷ Indeed, the English even took steps to make wampum more available. Given missionary activity and the overwhelming differential in general resources between the two parties, it would be misleading to maintain that English colonists were somehow co-opted into Iroquois religion-based diplomacy. ⁵⁸ Nonetheless, we have here a case of European communities adapting to what became a diplomatic practice which also entailed an increase in English acceptance of the practice of investing the wampum with agency. The spiritual underpinnings of the wampum practice meant that the English, through their participation in that practice, took part in a diplomacy rooted in Iroquois religious practices. This does not seem to have constituted itself as a problem for the English, but it was definitely experienced as foreign practice, something which had to be learnt, and learnt well. This took time. On the basis of archival studies, Nancy Hagedorn reports how, on more than one occasion, Iroquois delayed meetings with the English because the wampum sent beforehand was said to be ‘no more than Strings’. ⁵⁹ The English expressed frustration over the meandering preparations ahead of, and the never-ending respites during, conferences. ⁶⁰

On the other hand, the practice of wampum was changed in the process. As the wampum had a mnemonic function as well, William M. Beauchamp has suggested that the use of emblems became more common in the mid-18th century, perhaps as:

What we observe in the case of wampum is a practice creating and re-creating actors and a social environment by being practised. In this sense, we do not have to make any assumptions about practices being shared in either a structural or a mental-content sense. To conceptualise a common practice between the English and the Iroquois, we do not have to consider whether they were calculating rationally. We rather show how knowledge was created and produced from within practical activities, in this case the practice of wampum. In this instance, negotiation over the practice of wampum created a specific type of diplomacy. In our optics, ‘wampum diplomacy’ emerges here more as a management principle produced and reproduced through practices than as a ‘diplomatic system’. Diplomacy is not an entity, externalised by academics, but it is seen as practice – it emerges from the experiences of the participants through practice. Particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, in the literal sense of having agency, wampum played a key role in diplomacy, as it did in law-making. ⁶²

To the Iroquois, the practice of wampum seems to have been to the spoken word what writing is to the spoken word in literate cultures. In both cases, at formal occasions between two communities, the two go together. In both cases, the spoken word takes second place. From the admittedly limited and secondary material we have consulted, the key difference seems to be that whereas in Western tradition, as demonstrated best by Derrida, a strong current from the ancient Greeks onwards has always favoured the spoken word, in Iroquois tradition, this does not seem to be the case. ⁶³ For example, at the ‘grand treaty council’ between Iroquois and New France in July and August 1701, in response to General Governor of New France Louis-Hector de Callière’s reiteration of a promise to mediate between the Iroquois and their western neighbours, the Iroquois spokesman stated that ‘we are delighted at all that you have done, and we have listened to what you have said, in recognition of which here are our words (gave four wampum belts) to assure you that we will adhere firmly to your requests’. ⁶⁴ This explicitly speaks to the point that meaning is defined in use. Our model helps us focus consistently on the negotiation in and over practices.

A corollary is that, in this model of practice, it is analytically impossible, and also irrelevant, to separate somehow between ‘language’ and ‘practice’, or the ‘material’ and the ‘ideational’. If one were to accept the separation in the first place, we could say that both are involved, and that it is impossible to analytically separate where the one ends and the other begins. This makes an analytical separation between material and ideational properties eminently unimportant to the analysis. Again, practices are defined by the experiences of the participants involved, and must therefore involve both.

As has been seen, contra Pouliot, wampum practices are here not considered raw data, as an epiphenomenal empirical manifestation of something else, like the English and the Iroquois’ diverging internal dispositions or strategic action in a social field. Our concern in this case is practices as an endogenous phenomenon, and a model allows us to operate with a workable category of ‘practices’ as such. Yet another alternative practice reading, however, is the one proposed by Michel de Certeau, and today perhaps best known from James C. Scott’s work. ⁶⁵ Rather than focusing on the practices themselves, they focus on the tacit knowledge that goes into performing and perhaps altering practices, all the tricks and improvisations which come into play and which are traditionally excluded from social analyses. Given the existence of discourse, and given that practices are embedded in one another, these theorists aim to establish what kind of repertoire of actions exists for a particular type of subject in a particular type of context. Specifically, de Certeau talks about how stories (we could also call them narratives) ‘“go in a procession” ahead of social practices in order to open a field for them’.

A Certeauian practice reading of Wampum diplomacy would, therefore, begin with the story of how the Iroquois Confederacy allied with New York, how the alliance grew into a network between the English and the Native American nations, and ended up as the ‘Covenant Chain’. ⁶⁶ A Certeauian approach would make this story foundational, by assuming that the story of an alliance underpinned subsequent concerted action. That the Iroquois told other nations about the peaceful effects of their league would do the same for the story. A case in point, given the above, would be how, in June 1700, the Iroquois were finally able to gain from the stories they had sent in a procession to others by attracting the Dowaganhaes into their fold. Where our model would locate the dynamic element in the processes of interaction themselves, de Certeau would locate it in storytelling.

De Certeau reintroduced an old Greek term, metis, to cover the performative aspect of practices, and Scott defined it as ‘a wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human environment’. ⁶⁷ De Certeau and Scott would invite us to read wampum as stories, and also to interpret the Iroquois’ scorn of English attempts at producing wampum as resulting in ‘no more than Strings’ as a case of lacking English metis in this regard. Whereas de Certeau’s and Scott’s model quite rightly would produce wampum as a storyteller and the English as technically incompetent when it comes to producing it, our model produces the exchange of wampum as a practice and wampum as an agent. Our model would also produce the fact that the exchange of wampum and the emerging exchange of written messages are intertwined practices which, over time, gave rise to a new, hybridised practice. The latter aspect would not be captured by a Certeauian approach at all.

Concluding Remarks

There is no consensus on what studying practices in IR really entails. This strengthens the position of the everyday meaning of the term, with practices being taken to mean what people do. If the term is supposed to carry the weight of an entire turn in IR, we need more analytically sharp understandings of the term. Our suggestion is to conceptualise the term as embedded in models. We have tried to illustrate what a concept of practices as models can do for us analytically by analysing a sequence of diplomacy in terms of one model. The baseline is that, by using a model, one can have a workable category called ‘practices’ that can be used to make sense of mere empirical data. We stopped short at presenting a model, by which we mean a description that sets specific, analytical limits to what can be consistently seen as a practice in concrete investigations. This is not yet a theory of practices.

The advantage of understanding practices as conceptualised at the level of models is that we do not have to assume that any of the doers of the practices under scrutiny entertain any specific idea that they are ‘performing a practice’. We operate on an analytical level, where self-reflection is beside the point. By understanding the practices in which they partake as a model, we do not need to know what the Iroquois were thinking to produce valid knowledge about what they did. We may specify that by analysing their practical involvement in relations with other parties. We invoke no strategic bargaining between rational actors, no changing of substantial identities, no mechanical socialisation, no diverging dispositions or habitus, no diffusion of norms, and no Western-culture-meets-Native-American-nation assumptions to produce facts. We rather described this particular case through assuming that both the agents and their social environments emerge through practices, in the sense that these phenomena are different as a result of the practices analysed from what they were before these practices appeared.

No model can have general validity, and we would not venture to argue that it is better than other models in any universal sense. The general point, though, is that conceptualising practices through an explicit model can generate new insights without relying on assumptions exogenous to practice, like rational calculation or interests. We would argue that this advantage of understanding practices as models, namely that we may analyse social phenomena without unverifiable assumptions about motivations, dispositions or shared culture, and rather concentrate empirically on endogenous practices, is not only apparent in the case of wampum diplomacy. The procedure may be generalised. Studying practices as models is a way of studying social interaction and relations in general, and so should be a particularly helpful methodology for the discipline of IR.