Thinking about Food and Sex

Abstract

Overemphasizing automatic, dispositional cognitive processes, research on social fields has tended to undertheorize the active, reflective dimensions of cognition that shape practice. This has occurred, at least in part, as a reaction to the overly instrumentalist premises of rational action theory. But redressing the errors of an excessively instrumentalist notion of action by overemphasizing the automatic nature of cognition leaves us with a similarly inadequate understanding of how cognition works to influence practice in a field and, as a consequence, the ways in which change may occur from pressures originating within the field itself. In this article, we draw from data on cognition and practice in two kinds of fields—a sexual and a culinary field—to demonstrate how inherent structural pressures encourage instances of deliberate nondispositional cognition and practice. These data suggest an expanded model of practice in field theory that moves beyond a dual-process model of cognition and toward a more nuanced understanding of the relationship of automaticity and deliberation, and habituality and nonhabituality, in the routine practices of a field.