ABSTRACT
Many studies of violence focus on factors – features of perpetrators and sometimes victims or neighbourhoods – to assess the likelihood for violence to occur. This work tends to overlook what is actually happening in violent incidents, and it has been noted that one way to advance social scientific insight in this domain is to put the situation centre stage (Collins, 2008; Katz, 1988; Athens, 1980/1997). Practice approaches, with their focus on the actual doings and sayings, might be well equipped to this task. However, it seems awkward to regard destructive acts of violence as a practice. Without denying that conflict, antagonism or opposition occur in all practices, most practice approaches depart from the idea that people work towards a common goal, mutually adjusting their doings and saying in the light of that aim. Also, most work in this tradition considers practices as routine, repetitive activities in everyday life. While the notion of violence is used to capture a great variety of human action, ranging from symbolic or structural violence to the intentional physical harm doing (Spierenburg, 2009), most notions of violence neither regard it as routine action nor as a form of mutual alignment toward a common goal. Nevertheless, practice approaches claim to offer an encompassing perspective on social life as a vast intermeshing of a great manifolds of doings and sayings (Nicolini, 2012; Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 2010). Consequently, there is no good reason why the ugly and awful doings and sayings among them should be excluded from the domain of study. This chapter aims to answer three questions. First, can violence be regarded as sets of doings and sayings in which people mutually attune their actions toward a shared goal and if so, how? Second, how are these teleological actions related to material arrangements, more specifically human bodies and weapons? Third, what can be learnt from approaching violence in this way? By attempting to answer these questions, the chapter also attempts to evaluate how a practice approach may contribute to the study of violence, in particular vis-à-vis interactionist (Luckenbill, 1977; Felson, 1982; Felson and Tedeschi, 1993) and microsociological (Collins, 2008) perspectives that also give analytical priority to the situation rather than to individuals.
