The Organization of Chipped-Stone Economies at Piedras Negras ...

can overlap through religious and social practice, confirming that “ethos is the approved
style of life and world view is the assumed structure of reality” (Geertz 1973:125).
Through practice, the self is situated “correctly” in the world, but Geertz pointed out that
that this process is often not reflected upon and world view and ethos usually fall into
what Bourdieu termed as doxic knowledge or experience (i.e., taken for granted as true).
Kearney (1984) outlined a much broader definition of world view as an
ethnophilosophy, and as a concept, which encompasses ethos and world view (see Geertz
1973). This version of world view sees individual moods and the perception of self as
part of a continuum in line with the cosmological understanding of the structure of the
world. For Kearney, the foundation of world view is a relationship between the ‘self’ and
‘other,’ as part of world view universals. The world view framework proposed by
Kearney can be related to what Bourdieuvian (1977:169) concepts of habitus, doxic
experience (i.e., describable, but not necessarily reflected upon in practice), but also
heterodoxic knowledge, which may be argued or contested beliefs.
The world view concept is a nuanced and textured category that reflects a body of
both doxic and heterodoxic knowledge, perhaps best differentiated by Silliman (2001) as
practical politics. Practical politics describes the grey area between doxic and heterodoxic
experience where world view is cognized and used for small-scale personal gain or
negotiation. Although the model of beliefs proposed by Bourdieu (1977:198),
doxa/heterodoxy/orthodoxy, is useful for describing cognition in social practice, it cannot
stand alone as a descriptive device for different kinds of ideas. These concepts have a
tendency to remain vague, and are difficult to related to larger movements of social
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