ABSTRACT
Imagination and reverie are often thought to be repose from practice, that everyday corporeal engagement with the world. In a similar vein, symbols have been regarded as floating above practices, as storehouse of meaning, expressive, but not constitutive of practice. Imagination, however, does not float above practice. It is deeply rooted in practice – in the relations of embodiment that structure our everyday social worlds, simultaneously salient to the generation and persistence of those practices – it is the organ of reciprocity of material and practice. Through understanding imagination as a generative force of practice, we can reconsider the role it has been scripted in theories of culture. Practice is not that through which we imagine; the cockfight is not a theatre of expression and display of what the Balinese men might imagine themselves to be, as Clifford Geertz argues. Imagination is an imperative of practice itself. The more deeply you imagine, the more deeply you practice – and, conversely, the deeper the practice, the deeper the imagination. Practical imagination, material imagination, the imaginative substance of practice complete with all in which the practice itself is engaged, embedded, intertwined, as a constituent element of practice, is itself constitutive, not expressive, of culture – the lungs of culture.
