Writing the History of Practice The Humanities and Baseball, with a Nod to Wrestling

• Autores: Bruce Kuklick
• Localización: Reconstructing history: the emergence of a new historical society / coord. por Elizabeth Fox Genovese, Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, 1999, ISBN 0-415-92278-X, pág. 176
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • A practice is a coherent and complex form of cooperative human activity, with a history and standards of excellence. In trying to meet those standards, practitioners achieve specified goals. Tick-tac-toe is not a practice, nor is planting carrots, bricklaying, nor throwing a baseball skillfully. External goods, like fifty cents worth of candy, are contingently related to practices by the accident of social circumstances. For grownups who play baseball professionally, external goods include prestige, status, money. The competition for external goods differs from the competition to excel, which results in internal goods. The more external goods one person has, the fewer there are for others. Since practices and institutions and internal and external goods are intimately linked, we dare not compartmentalize on-the-field and off-the-field behavior. The competitiveness of a practice's institutions for external goods has a tension-laden relation to the practice itself.