From Sites of Practice to Collective Action: Examples from Commemorative and Protest Movements

It is often assumed that social movements can be conceptualised solely in terms of agendas, strategies and outcomes. The only alternative sometimes appears to be a rather undifferentiated realm of culture and emotions. This paper attempts to go beyond such assumptions and to specify the ways in which strategic behaviour and emotional attachments are articulated in collective action. Building on the study of regimes of engagement developed in French pragmatic sociology, it looks at how a person’s investment into emotionally charged sites of practice, or common-places, can telescope into collective action of different kinds. The empirical data for the paper comes from (a) research on protest movements in contemporary Russia, (b) a multi-year, eleven-country collaborative research project on post-socialist commemoration and war memorials, and (c) the study of an international initiative titled Les nouveaux commanditaires that seeks to enable ordinary citizens to commission locally relevant works of public art directly from artists, without using curators or administrations as intermediaries.

In particular, the paper shows how the study of sites of practice can help us understand two types of movements that often remain outside the field of vision of social movement studies: non-progressivist social movements, such as the commemorative movements that are remarkably powerful in a number of non-Western countries; and the populist movements that have recently risen to prominence in countries ranging from India to the United States.