A code word in Cultural Studies for what people do in the course of their everyday life. Such activities as dating, shopping, walking, watching TV, and the like are generally regarded as examples of practices. Although the term is somewhat out of fashion nowadays, the twofold impetus behind its coinage remains current: on the one hand, the term is used to defend the position that there is no aspect of culture (no matter how banal) that is not significant and therefore worthy of critical attention; on the other hand, it is used as a tacit critique or indeed rejection of the central plank of both psychology and psychoanalysis, namely the assumption that it is possible to know why people do what they do. In this regard, the uptake of the term could be said to signal an empirical turn in Cultural Studies, the basic position of which is as follows: we can know what people do because their activity can be observed and recorded, but we cannot know why they do what they do because their intentions and purposes are not visible. Behind this turn, however, there is also a stubborn repudiation of Marxism. For Marxism, the reason why we do things can and must be explained in terms of ideology. Practices became prominent in Cultural Studies in large part because of Bourdieu, Pierre and Certeau, Michel de, who both used the term in comparable ways. Certeauâs highly influential two-volume study (produced in collaboration with Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol) Lâinvention du quotidian (1980), translated as The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), proposed the hypothesis that practices are the texts of everyday life and that by using the resources of semiotics they can be made legible. He even went so far as to propose that it might be possible to develop a grammar of such activities as walking and introduced the concepts of symptomatic reading as possible analytic terms. John Fiske popularized these ideas in several of his books, particularly Understanding Popular Culture (1989), while John Frow provided a comprehensive critique of them in Cultural Studies and Cultural Value (1995). For Bourdieu, practices are a branch of reason or âsavoir faireâ (âknow howâ) that stems from the body rather than mind. Further Reading: B. Highmore Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (2002).