John Peto, Lincoln and the Phleger Stretcher, 1898

This portion of the website includes definitions of practice from various sources, including:

talal asad
dorothy bass
catherine bell
pierre bourdieu
john calvin
michel de certeau
dictionaries
david d. hall
colleen mcdannell
alasdair macintyre
karl marx
sherry ortner
oxford english dictionary (entire entry)

dictionaries

from the oxford english dictionary (2000) definition of 'practice':

noun (1) a. The habitual doing or carrying out of something; usual or customary action of performance; action as opposed to profession, theory, knowledge, etc.
    b. A custom; a habit; a habitual action.
    c. An established method of legal procedure.
spec. (2) The carrying out or exercise of a profession or occupation; the business to which a lawyer, doctor, etc., belongs for this purpose.
         (3) a. The action of scheming or planning, especially in an underhand or evil way; treachery; trickery, artifice, deception.
    b. Dealings, negotiation; especially underhand dealings, intrigue.
    c. A scheme, a conspiracy; an artifice, a trick.
         (4) Repeated exercise in or performance of an activity so as to acquire or maintain proficiency in it; activity undertaken to this end.
               Formerly also, proficiency so acquired.
         (5) a. The action of doing something; performance, operation; method of action or working.
              b. An action, a deed; in plural, doings, proceedings.
   c. Philos. The practical aspect or application of something as opposed to theoretical aspect.
   d. In Marxism, the social activity which should result from and complement the theory of Communism.
         (6) An exercise, a practical treatise.
         (7) An arithmetical method of finding the price of a given number of articles or the quantity of a commodity at a given price,
              where quantity or price or both are expressed in several denominations.

for an etymology of "practice" taken from the online oxford english dictionary, click here.
 

from the american heritage dictionary of the english language (2000):

Theodoros Stamos, Cathedral, 1949

prac·tice   Pronunciation Key  (pr k t s) v. prac·ticed, prac·tic·ing, prac·tic·es v. tr. 1. To do or perform habitually or customarily; make a habit of: practices courtesy in social situations. 2. To do or perform (something) repeatedly in order to acquire or polish a skill: practice a dance step. 3. To give lessons or repeated instructions to; drill: practiced the students in handwriting. 4. To work at, especially as a profession: practice law. 5. To carry out in action; observe: practices a religion piously. 6. Obsolete. To plot (something evil). v. intr. 1. To do or perform something habitually or repeatedly. 2. To do something repeatedly in order to acquire or polish a skill. 3. To work at a profession. 4. Archaic. To intrigue or plot. n. 1. A habitual or customary action or way of doing something: makes a practice of being punctual. 2. a. Repeated performance of an activity in order to learn or perfect a skill: Practice will make you a good musician. b. A session of preparation or performance undertaken to acquire or polish a skill: goes to piano practice weekly; scheduled a soccer practice for Saturday. c. Archaic. The skill so learned or perfected. d. The condition of being skilled through repeated exercise: out of practice. 3. The act or process of doing something; performance or action: a theory that is difficult to put into practice. 4. Exercise of an occupation or profession: the practice of law. 5. The business of a professional person: an obstetrician with her own practice. 6. A habitual or customary action or act. Often used in the plural: That company engages in questionable business practices. Facial tattooing is a standard practice among certain peoples. 7. Law. The methods of procedure used in a court of law. 8. Archaic. a. The act of tricking or scheming, especially with malicious intent. b. A trick, scheme, or intrigue.  [Middle English practisen, from Old French practiser, alteration of practiquer, from practique, practice, from Medieval Latin practica. See practicable.]  prac tic·er n. Synonyms: practice, exercise, rehearse.  These verbs mean to do repeatedly to acquire or maintain proficiency: practice the shot put; exercising one's wits; rehearsed the play for 14 days. See also synonyms at habit.
 
 

from webster's revised unabridged dictionary (1998):

\Prac"tice\, n. [OE. praktike, practique, F. pratique, formerly also, practique, LL. practica, fr. Gr. ?, fr. ? practical. See Practical, and cf. Pratique, Pretty.] 1. Frequently repeated or customary action; habitual performance; a succession of acts of a similar kind; usage; habit; custom; as, the practice of rising early; the practice of making regular entries of accounts; the practice of daily exercise

\Prac"tice\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Practiced; p. pr. & vb. n. Practicing.] [Often written practise, practised, practising.] 1. To do or perform frequently, customarily, or habitually; to make a practice of; as, to practice gaming. ``Incline not my heart . . . practice wicked works.''

\Prac"tice\, v. i. [Often written practise.] 1. To perform certain acts frequently or customarily, either for instruction, profit, or amusement; as, to practice with the broadsword or with the rifle; to practice on the piano.
 

from the wordnet (1997) definition of 'practice':

n 1: a customary way of operation or behavior; "it is their practice to give annual raises"; "they changed their dietary pattern" [syn: pattern] 2: systematic training by multiple repetitions; "practice makes perfect" [syn: exercise, drill, practice session] 3: translating an idea into action; "a hard theory to put into practice"; "they put their plans into practice" 4: the exercise of a profession; "the practice of the law"; "I took over his practice when he retired" 5: knowledge of how something is customarily done: "it is not the local practice to wear shorts to dinner" v 1: carry out or practice; as of jobs and professions: "practice law" [syn: practise, exercise, carry out, do] 2: learn by repetition [syn: drill, exercise, practise] 3: engage in a rehearsal (of) [syn: rehearse, practise] 4: avail oneself to; "apply a principle"; "practice a religion"; "use care when going down the stairs" [syn: apply, use]
 

talal asad

from "reading a modern classic: w.c. smith's the meaning and end of religion" in history of religions (2001):

When [W.C.] Smith writes that 'the formalities of one's religious tradition are at best a channel, and at worst a substitute,' he comes close to saying that anyone who insists on the indispensability of particular 'formalities' cannot be accounted 'genuinely religious.'  This, I would suggest, is in essence the missionary's standpoint.  The missionary cannot re-form people unless they are persuaded that the formal ways they live their life are accidental to their being, channels for which other channels can be substituted without loss.  And thus from one religion to another, or from living religiously to living secularly.  Different practices are mere externals, at best only the means for receiving the essential message.  Yet channels (how messages are communicated) do matter to what is communicated.  This is why-- to take one example-- most nonmodernized Muslims would deny that reciting and listening to the Qur'an is simply receiving a meaning that could have been conveyed by other means.  And this is why they hold that the Qur'an cannot be translated, only interpreted.
 

dorothy bass

from practicing our faith (1997):

We invite you, in particular, to think with us about practices.  Practices are those shared activities that address fundamental human needs and that, woven together, form a way of life.  Reflecting on practices as they have been shaped in the context of Christian faith leads us to encounter the possibility of a faithful way of life, one that is both attuned to present-day needs and taught by ancient wisdom.  And here is the really important point: this encounter can change how we live each day. (xi)
 

catherine bell

from "the features of practice" in ritual theory, ritual practice (1984):

To focus on the act itself practice must be taken as a nonsynthetic and irreducible term for human activity.  I will use the term to highlight four features of human activity.  Practice is (1) situational; (2) strategic; (3) embeddded in a misrecognition of what it is in fact doing; and (4) able to reproduce or reconfigure a vision of the order of power in the world, or what I will call 'redemptive hegemony'. (81)
 

pierre bourdieu

Bourdieu defines practice in terms of a dialectical relationship (the "dialectic of objectification and incorporation") between a structured environment and the structured dispositions engendered in people which lead them to reproduce the environment even in a transformed form. (Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 78) To get a better sense of Bourdieu's position, see below.

from "practice and discourse about practice" in outline of a theory of practice (1977):

Reaction against legalist formalism in its overt or masked form must not lead us to make the habitus [habitus, for Bourdieu, is the set of habitual dispositions through which people "give shape and form to social conventions"] the exclusive principle of all practice.  In reality, even in social formations where, as in Kabylia, the making explicit and objectifying of the generative schemes in a grammar of practices, a written code of conduct, is minimal, it is nonetheless possible to observe the first signs of differentiation of the domains of practice according to the degree of codification of the principles governing them.  Between the areas that are apparently 'freest' because given over in reality to the regulated improvisations of the habitus (such as the distribution of activities and objects within the internal space of the house) and the areas most strictly regulated by customary norms and upheld by social sanctions (such as the great agrarian rites), there lies the whole field of practices subjected to traditional precepts, customary recommendations, ritual prescriptions, functioning as a regulatory device which orients practice without producing it.  The absence of genuine law-- the product of the work of a body of specialists expressly mandated to produce a coherent corpus of juridicial norms and ensure respect for its application, and furnished to this end with a coercive power-- must not lead us to forget that any socially recognized formulation contains within it an intrinsic power to reinforce dispositions symbolically. (20)
 

john calvin

from institutes of the christian religion (1599):

John Calvin struggled in his terming of practice, alternately denouncing it as representative of the ‘old’ religious belief and praising it as the tool for the “new devotion.”  Practice in the former contexts is understood by Calvin as “perverse...a kind of torch by which the infatuated proneness of mankind to idolatry was kindled into a greater blaze.”  In his moments of praise, practice is a command: practice repentance, practice mercy, and practice justice, he argues.  It is only through enacting God's method that we will be wise:

"Wherefore, if we would be duly wise, we must renounce those vain babblings of idle men, concerning the nature, ranks, and number of angels, without any authority from the Word of God. I know that many fasten on these topics more eagerly, and take greater pleasure in them than in those relating to daily practice. But if we decline not to be the disciples of Christ, let us not decline to follow the method which he has prescribed."
 

michel de certeau

from the "introduction" to the practice of everyday life (1980):

These 'ways of operating' constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production.  They pose questions at once analogous and contrary to those dealt with in Foucault's Discipline and Punish: analogous, in that the goal is to perceive and analyze the microbe-like operations proliferating within technocratic structure and deflecting their functioning by means of a multitude of 'tactics' articulated in the details of everyday life; contrary, in that the goal is not to make clearer how the violence of order is transmuted into a disciplinary technology, but rather to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and make-shift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of 'discipline'.  Pushed to their ideal limits, these procedures and ruses of consumers compose the network of an antidiscipline which is the subject of this book. (xiii)
 

david d. hall

from the "introduction" to lived religion in america (1997):

Though it is surely the case that no single key unlocks the door to lived religion, one term--'practice'-- does have particular importance.  The complicated history of this term within Western philosophy and social theory is not resolved or for that matter explicitly addressed in the essays that follow.  Where they may be said to enter this long conversation is at the point many other reached in the 1980s, an interest in "culture in action."  As most of us use the term, it encompasses the tensions, the ongoing struggle of definition, which are constituted within every religious tradition and that are always present in how people choose to act.  Practice thus suggests that any synthesis is provisional.  Moreover, practice always bears the marks of both regulation and what, for want of a better word, we may term resistance.  It is not wholly one or the other. (xi)
 

colleen mcdannell

from the "introduction" to religions of the united states in practice, volume one (2001):

The anthology is indebted to the recent movement in the study of American religions that places religious practice at the center or religious life.  Religious practice and behavior range from formal, communcal rituals with long histories to spontaneous actions that an individual may understand as religious.  Regardless of their history, all religious practices convey knowledge through action. (2)

Religious practice is more than merely lived.  Religious practice is also imagined. (3)
 

from theses on feuerbach (1845):

(I) The principal defect of all materialism up to now-- including that of Feuerbach-- is that the external object, reality, the sensible world, is grasped in the form of an object of an intuition; but not as a concrete human activity, as practice, in a subjective way.  This is why the active aspect was developed by idealism, in opposition to materialism-- but only in an abstract way, since idealism naturally does not know real concrete activity as such.

(III) The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.

(VIII) All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.
 

alasdair macintyre

from after virtue: a study in moral theory (1981):

By a 'practice' I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.  Tic-tac-toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess.  Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is.  Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is.  So are the enquiries of physics, chemisty and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music. (175)
 

sherry ortner

from "theory in anthropology since the sixties" in comparative studies in society and history (1984):

For the past several years, there has been growing interest in analysis focused through one or another of a bundle of interrelated terms: practice, praxis, action, interaction activity, experience, performance. (144)

Modern practice theory seeks to explain the relationship(s) that obtain between human action, on the one hand, and some global entity which we may
call 'the system,' on the other.  Questions concerning these relationships may go in either direction-- the impact of the system on practice, and the impact of practice on the system. (148)

The point is that practice anthropologists assume that society and history are not simply sums of ad hoc responses and adapatations to particular stimuli, but are governed by organizational and evaluative schemes.  It is these (embodied, of course, within institutional, symbolic, and material forms) that constitute the system. (148)

It is precisely in those areas of life-- especially in the so-called domestic domain-- where action proceeds with little reflection, that much of the conservatism of a system tends to be located.  Either because practice theorists wish to emphasize the activeness and intentionality of action, or because of a growing interest in change as against reproduction, or both, the degree to which actors really do simply enact norms because 'that was the way of our ancestors' may be duly undervalued. (150)

Newer practice approaches pace greater emphasis on the practices of ordinary living...All of these routines and scenarios are predicated upon, and embody within themselves, the fundamental notions of temporal, spatial, and social ordering that underlie and organize the system as a whole.  In enacting these routines, actors not only continue to be shaped by the underlying organizational principles involved, but continually re-endorse those principles in the world of public observation and discourse. (154)

One question lurking behund all this is whether in fact all practice, everything everybody does, embodies and hence reproduces the assumptions of the system.  These is actually a profound philosophic issue here: how, if actors are fully cultural beings, they could ever do anything that does not in some way carry forward core cultural assumptions.  On the more mundane level, the question comes down to whether divergent or nonnormative practices are simply variations upon basic cultural themes, or whether they actually imply alternative modes of social and cultural being. (155)