The second is the appreciation of the context-bound nature of discourse. The third is the idea of discourse as social action. The basis of a discursive practice approach is the insistence that discourse is action and not merely representation. The analyst must attend constantly to what is being accomplished through the discourse. So, for example, proverbs are treated not as general bits of cultural wisdom, but as resources available for use in certain situations.
Cultural knowledge tends to be ambiguous, flexible, and negotiable.
So, for example, the question of whether morality is absolute or culturally relative is put aside in favor of an analysis of how morality is invoked and negotiated in discourse. In general, a discursively oriented anthropologist studies as topics of inquiry whatever participants use as resources, seeking to discover how social activities are organized and brought off. It also reconsiders the usual ethnographic reliance on interviews of informants, concentrating on events in naturally occurring contexts. Conversations with informants remain a source of possible insight, but are not treated as a definitive source of knowledge concerning the topics discussed. Just as we can speak without knowing how to describe our grammar, so can someone be a competent member of a culture without knowing precisely how its social life is organized.