Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn: The Case of Diplomacy

Abstract

The linguistic turn in the social sciences has been fruitful in directing attention towards the preconditions for action, as well as those actions understood as speech acts. However, to the extent that the linguistic turn comprises only textual approaches, it brackets out the study of other kinds of action, and so cannot account for social life understood as a whole. We should return to seminal theorists such as Wittgenstein and Foucault, who complemented a linguistic turn with a turn towards practices. Drawing on the work of ethnographers such as Michel de Certeau and sociologists such as Ann Swidler, in part one of this article I suggest that this may be done by using a simple model of culture as a mutually conditioned play between discourse and practices. In part two, I use this model to study changing Norwegian diplomatic practices in the High North in the aftermath of the Cold War. The claim is that capital-based diplomatic practices are being complemented by emerging local practices which may only be governed from the capital by indirect means. Diplomacy thus changes from being a centralised to being a multibased practice.