Abstract
Keywords
Introduction
Studies engaging with theories of practice form a vibrant and expansive patch of research within sociology of consumption, and have been recently discussed in this journal too (Welch et al., 2020). Put simply, theories of practice see practices constituting our social worlds, their stabilities as well as transformations. A practice can be defined as: a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge. (Reckwitz, 2002: 249)
Since doing research is always a practical activity with limited resources, ruling out ‘complete descriptions’ (Becker, 1998: 71), it has been inevitable that some aspects of practices have received more attention than others. ‘Things’ and their use have been studied extensively, specifically within research on sustainable consumption (e.g. Evans, 2012; Hand and Shove, 2007; Rinkinen et al., 2015; Sahakian and Wilhite, 2014; Twine, 2018), as well as understandings, knowledges and know-how in the context of food – for example, by looking at cooking competences and skills (Laakso et al., 2022; Truninger, 2011), the role of medialized knowledges, discourses and experiences in food consumption (Halkier, 2010) or how the experiences and symbolic significance of dining out change (or not) over time (Warde et al., 2020). As a result, other dimensions of consumption practices have not been explored as scrupulously. One of these is ‘states of emotion’ and affects. 1
Emotions and affects have inspired researchers within the wider field of sociology and social sciences for some time now (e.g. Halley and Clough, 2007; Hochschild, 2012; Illouz, 2007; Thrift, 2008). Somewhat paradoxically, while it seems that the importance of affects and emotions has also been recognized within theories of practice in general and within practices of consumption in particular, empirical research on the topic is still sparse and fragmented. Indeed, researchers of consumption have called for increased attention to the affective dimensions of consumption practices (Warde, 2014: 294; Welch, 2020: 65), as well as to the embodied and sensory aspects of eating, since these influence the social, normative, aesthetic and temporal dimensions of food consumption practices and vice versa (Darmon and Warde, 2016; Warde, 2016: 61–66). It has also been argued that practice theories in general should engage more deeply with affects and their analysis (Bille and Simonsen, 2021; Everts and Wagner, 2012; Reckwitz, 2012, 2016).
Despite these attempts at goal setting, most existing work on the connections between affects and practices is theoretically oriented (e.g. Bille and Simonsen, 2021; Burkitt, 2014; Gherardi, 2017; Scheer, 2012; Spaargaren et al., 2016). Empirical research that explicitly focuses on affects and affective relations within consumption practices presents a small, nascent area of interest. While there are some studies that have paid attention to the affective and visceral dimensions of food waste practices (Ames and Cook, 2020; Waitt and Phillips, 2016), to tasting practices (Jackson et al., 2022) or to the connections of emotions and norms in consumption practices (Sahakian, 2022; Sahakian et al., 2020; Sahakian and Bertho, 2018), the focus in these studies is on affects or emotions as parts of certain practices (affects
One potential explanation for the relative scarcity of empirical analyses could be that studying emotions and affects can be a virtual quagmire of complicated conceptual, methodological and theoretical questions. If affect gestures ‘towards something that perhaps escapes or remains in excess of the practices of the “speaking subject”’ (Blackman and Venn, 2010: 9) and thus requires finding ‘a vocabulary [. . .] for that which is imperceptible but whose escape from perception cannot but be perceived, as long as one is alive’ (Massumi, 1995: 97), it is no wonder that thorough theoretical groundwork has needed to be laid down before affect lends itself to empirical studies. Of course, the consequent issue to take on is mediating and operationalizing these theoretical accounts into concepts for empirical work; a project that could be seen as developing dynamic middle-range theories in the spirit of Robert K. Merton (Kaidesoja, 2019). In this article, I seize this task of mediation and present a hopefully useful conceptualization for engaging with affects and emotions within sociological research interested in the practices of consumption.
I build this conceptualization by combining Margaret Wetherell’s theory on affective practices (Wetherell, 2012) with Shove et al.’s theory of practices as interconnected elements of meanings, materials and competences (Shove et al., 2012). To flesh out this conceptual combination, I use examples from my research data on everyday meat consumption practices. The focus will be specifically on the affective practice of disgust since disgust came up in several different situations during the data collection and felt like a fascinating topic to explore further. Moreover, disgust occupies an interesting place regarding both meat and affects. It has been argued that within food, disgust is closely intertwined with animals and their products (Rozin and Fallon, 1987), specifically with increased animality of meat also increasing disgust (Kubberød et al., 2008). Furthermore, disgust can be ‘visceral’ or ‘moral’, wherein visceral disgust concerns physiological, automatic reactions towards things which widely repulse, such as faeces, slime or rot, while moral disgust refers to ethically unsavory doings, such as lying or abuse (Miller, 1997). These categories can and do overlap. Nowadays, disgust within meat consumption is further complicated by the mounting sustainability, health and animal rights concerns that meat consumption mobilizes (Godfray et al., 2018; Potts, 2017; Willett et al., 2019). These symbolically charged aspects related to meat show that emotions and affects connect to fundamental questions around ethics, values and how we relate to others, making meat consumption a rich context for exploring affective practices.
In what follows, I will map out the theoretical connections between theories of practice, emotions, and affects in previous research. Then, I will present Wetherell’s theory on affective practices in more depth and bring it together with Shove et al.’s conceptualization of practices as meanings, materials and competences. After this, I will briefly describe the research project that provides examples of the affective practice of disgust for this article. Then, I will show how seeing affective practices as intertwined meanings, materials and competences provides a nuanced understanding of affects as practices. Finally, I will discuss what affective practices can give to sociologically oriented research on (food) consumption practices.
Affects, Emotions and Practices
Theories of practice have their roots in varied intellectual traditions, drawing inspiration from, for example, Marx, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and, later on, Giddens and Bourdieu (Nicolini, 2012). While the sensuous, embodied and emotional are not absent from these classics, they have not been in the limelight either. Before delving into the specifics of these theoretical connections between practices and the emotional and affective dimensions of the social, a conceptual note on the definition of affect.
Affects are sometimes defined as clearly separated from emotions (e.g. Gherardi, 2017). These kinds of separations often characterize affects as embodied, pre-cognitive flows of intensity and emotions as the socio-cultural, conscious expressions of these flows. However, this approach has been criticized for re-establishing the dualisms it seeks to dismantle, as it separates body (affect) from mind (emotion) as well as hides from view the embodied dimensions of emotions (Bille and Simonsen, 2021). In contrast, affects can be seen to contain both socio-cultural
This definition of affect resonates with practice theories, which place the social in practices. Practices are collectively shared and recognized doings and sayings that involve (tacit) knowledge as well as various materials and are carried out by embodied beings, often in routinized patterns which nonetheless also include potential change 2 . Indeed, it has been suggested that practice theories have affinities with theories on affect: both emphasize ‘(1) a relational epistemology, (2) the body and (3) sociomateriality’ (Gherardi, 2017: 324; see also Reckwitz, 2016; Wiesse, 2019). This focus stems from both practice- and affect-theories’ interest in untangling persistent dichotomies between, for example, the mind and body, the cognitive and affective, and the social and natural (Gherardi, 2017).
Considering the role of affects, emotions and embodied experiences in practices is not unfamiliar in the tradition of practice theories. Andreas Reckwitz lists ‘states of emotions’ as one element in his classic definition of what a practice is (Reckwitz, 2002: 249), Theodore Schatzki’s conceptualization of teleoaffective structures also potentially directs attention towards affective issues, since these structures comprise ‘hierarchies of ends, tasks, projects, beliefs, emotions, moods, and the like’ (Schatzki, 1996: 99), and Shove et al. (2012) ascribe emotions to the element of ‘meaning’ in their conceptualization of practices as a combination of meanings, materials and competences. Perhaps most notably, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory on habitus can be seen to implicitly involve embodied expressions of emotions (Bourdieu, 1984), and it has been a basis for analyses on emotional capital (Reay, 2004) as well as on the emotional dimensions of social and cultural capital (Holt et al., 2013). However, these brief or implicit mentions of affects and emotions leave much room for further developments, which only a few notable exceptions have taken up thus far (e.g. Jackson and Everts, 2010; Reckwitz, 2016, 2017; Scheer, 2012).
These exceptions approach affects and emotions in varied ways. For Reckwitz, there are no practices without their respective affects: ‘every social practice is then affectively tuned in a particular way and has, as such, a built-in affective dimension’ (Reckwitz, 2016: 118). In other words, Reckwitz places affects within practices instead of focusing on affects as practices in their own right, going on to say that artefacts (persons, things, ideas) can act as ‘affect generators’ that can bear positive or negative affects (Reckwitz, 2016: 122–123). In contrast to Reckwitz, Monique Scheer builds upon Bourdieu’s habitus to develop the concept of emotions
While these theoretical and empirical approaches have resulted in valuable knowledge of affects and emotions within practices, they omit certain aspects. Reckwitz’s approach does not illuminate how affects themselves are constituted practically, which, I argue, risks hiding some of the key aspects of affects themselves, such as their relational character as they circulate between different practices, contexts, and temporalities. Furthermore, delimiting affects as being built-in to specific practices or focusing on, for example, ‘affect generators’, can gloss over the nuances of how affects themselves are constituted socially and collectively, in embodied encounters that involve tacit know-how. Scheer’s approach avoids these gaps as it focuses on emotions-as-practices. However, her emphasis on mobilizing, naming, communicating and regulating emotion can potentially direct attention away from studying how the different, interdependent components of a specific emotion actually come together and interact as a practice; that is, what happens before an emotion or an affect can be, for example, named or regulated. To address this gap, I suggest that emotional and affective practices can be seen as a process of integrating meanings, materials, and competences, thus providing a complimentary conceptualization to Scheer’s.
However, a few studies have already focused on affects
This resonates with both Scheer’s emotions-as-practices as well as this article’s focus on disgust as an affective practice; affects are
Wetherell’s Affective Practices
Affective practices, developed by Margaret Wetherell (2012), refer to patterns of emotions, sensual experiences and embodied meaning-making that are rooted in specific social, historical and material situations. The term ‘affect’ brings into view the multiplicity and fluidity of emotions and visceral experiences in lieu of ‘neat emotion categories’ (Wetherell, 2012: 4). Affective practices are also distinct from other concepts concerning cultural phenomena such as cultural schemas or cultural repertoires in that they place emphasis ‘on emoting and the performance and modification of affect’ (Wetherell et al., 2020: 15). That is, affective practices enable studying affects
Wetherell’s motivation for developing affective practices as a theoretical approach has been to bring together the embodied and felt
Concretely, Wetherell (2012) defines affective practices as patterns of an affective practice is a figuration where body possibilities and routines become recruited or entangled together with meaningmaking and with other social and material figurations. It is an organic complex in which all the parts relationally constitute each other. (Wetherell, 2012: 19)
This definition points, firstly, to the ontological variety of affective practices. They can be mere possibilities, potential barely-there figurations or routines so established they seem set in stone. In this way, affective practices direct attention to the rhythms of affect that can become recognizable patterns, though always subject to change or disappearance (Wetherell, 2012). Indeed, a second key point is to approach affective practices relationally, as patterns that have a history, a potential trajectory that is also influenced by social and material relations (Wetherell et al., 2020: 29). Finally, affective practices connect to power and values, in that through them things become defined, for example, as disgusting or worth aspiring towards, since ‘affect powers and intertwines with cultural circuits of value’ (Wetherell, 2012).
Conceptualizing Affective Practices as Interdependent Elements
Altogether, Wetherell’s conceptualization of affective practices resonates strongly with theories of practice. These theories also understand action as interconnected patterns, embedded in social and material conditions, and, crucially, as dynamic: practices are enacted by practitioners in ways that both perpetuate and (more or less) subtly transform practices (Hui et al., 2017). As such, affective practices provide an apt tool for examining affects within practice theories, particularly how affects themselves are practically constituted and done. In order to build this conceptualization for studying affective practices, I now turn to Shove et al.’s work on practices.
For Shove et al., practices consist of three interconnected elements: meanings, materials and competences. Meanings include ‘symbolic meanings, ideas and aspirations’ (Shove et al., 2012: 14), representing ‘the social and symbolic significance of participation [in a practice] at any one moment’ (Shove et al., 2012: 23). Materials refer to the ‘objects, infrastructures, tools, hardware and the body itself’ within a given practice (Shove et al., 2012: 23). Finally, competences are built of know-how, understandings, skill and background knowledge (Shove et al., 2012: 14, 23). All three elements need to be integrated for a practice to exist; this happens ‘through the process of doing’ practices in everyday life (Shove et al., 2012: 41). Consequently, practices persist, transform or fade away when connections between these different elements are made or broken (Shove et al., 2012).
From this premise, we can start to see how Wetherell’s and Shove et al.’s work on practices resonate together. First, similar to Wetherell, ontological variety permeates Shove et al.’s understanding of practices. Since the existence of a practice is based on integrating its three elements through mundane performances, the stability of practices is always provisional; as mundane performances transform, so does the associated practice. These dynamic patterns that practices as interconnected elements form, correspond to the fluidity and malleability of affective practices.
Second, practices as intergrated elements means that practices are inherently relational, similar to how affective practices are ‘an organic complex in which all the parts relationally constitute each other’ (Wetherell, 2012: 19). By focusing on practices as combinations of elements, it becomes possible to pay attention to what kinds of things are connected within a practice and how. This also provides a concrete way of mapping out how the different parts of an affective practice constitute each other if it is conceptualized as meanings, materials and competences.
Third, it is important to note a point of divergence between Wetherell and Shove et al. in how differently they relate to materials. Shove et al. emphasize that a key feature of their approach is ‘the constitutive role of things and materials in everyday life’ (Shove et al., 2012: 9), which de-centres human agency by being aware that ‘agencies and competencies are distributed between things and people’ (Shove et al., 2012: 10). In other words, practices are reproduced as well as reconfigured by embodied practitioners in relation to things and materials. In contrast, while Wetherell includes materials in her definition of affective practices, she states that she is ‘not really interested in non-human affect’ (Wetherell, 2012). This is also evident in her empirical work on, for example, affective-discursive positions and repertoires or affective-discursive patterns (Wetherell et al., 2015, 2020), which leads her to minimize the role of materials and bodies (also noted by Bille and Simonsen, 2021: 299). However, I argue that keeping bodies and materials in the picture adds depth to studying affective practices. For example, a central feature of disgust is ‘a movement of flight and turning-away’ (Kolnai, 1998: 587) as we try to avoid intimate contact with the object of disgust. To describe the relations of affecting and being affected within the affective practice of disgust, we must therefore consider the object of disgust (as a material) as well as the subject experiencing disgust (the body, embodied reactions).
Based on this, I propose that Wetherell’s and Shove et al.’s conceptualizations can be seen to connect with each other. I present these parallels in Figure 1.
Parallels between Wetherell’s and Shove et al.’s conceptualizations.
If we approach affective practices as
In what follows, I will illustrate the affective practice of disgust with examples from data gathered from Finnish consumers. In accordance with theories of practice, I see these individual consumers as carriers of the affective practice of disgust: ‘agents are body/minds who ‘carry’ and ‘carry out’ social practices.’ (Reckwitz, 2002: 256). As such, consumers can both consciously reflect on their practices as well as subscribe to them without much thought, similar to how we sometimes get caught up in emotions and affects, while at other times we might cultivate them more consciously – for example, by listening to melancholic or uplifting music.
Data: How to Illustrate Affective Practices?
While this article is theoretically driven, I still call upon empirical examples in order to illustrate the different elements of affective practices. These examples come from my research project ‘Everyday food practices involving meat as multiple relations of care’ (2019–2023), wherein I have explored Finnish consumers’ practices of meat consumption specifically from the viewpoint of care relations. The participants represent a wide variety of ways of acquiring and consuming meat, from (ex)hunters to dedicated omnivores to those who have reduced their meat consumption. All of the participants consumed meat, in one way or another. I have interviewed all the participants and done participant observations of shopping trips and cooking situations with a smaller group of them (for more information on the data and methods used in this research project, see Koskinen, 2022).
To find examples of the affective practice of disgust for this article, I went through the data to gather the moments when disgust was present. To recognize disgust, I relied on two different approaches. First, direct definitions: when the participants explicitly said that something is disgusting or that something makes them feel disgusted. Secondly, embodied expressions: when the participants expressed disgust through recognizable embodied ways, such as making disgusted sounds (such as ‘yuck’ or ‘blaarggh’, imitating retching or vomiting; I have included these kinds of sounds in the transcriptions) or expressions, like wrinkling one’s nose and turning physically away (included in the interview notes). Sometimes these direct definitions and embodied expressions also overlapped. I have relied on these two approaches to ensure that I reach both the discursive meaning-making
Disgust as an Affective Practice: Meanings, Materials and Competences
I will present the three elements of affective practices one at a time, starting with meanings, moving on to materials and concluding with competences. This separation of the different elements might seem counterintuitive, since a practice can only exist when all three elements are intergrated. However, my aim is to offer a suggestion of the key contours of each element in the context of affects and emotions. For this purpose, the heuristic separation that follows enables me to present a clearer picture of the special characteristics of each element. This, I hope, provides the foundations for future research to look in more detail at how the complex linkages between the elements are made, broken and changed over time and how, for example, meanings intertwine with materials and competences.
I have grouped the examples based on which element within them seems to carry the most weight in a given situation. Altogether, the three elements show that the affective practice of disgust is enacted through rejection and turning away; that it is imbued with notions of the ambivalent and out-of-place; and that it often defines its object as unpleasant, inferior or objectionable.
Meanings
Here, the focus is on the symbolic meanings, ideas and aspirations connected to the affective practice of disgust. These aspects of disgust relay its social and symbolic significance.
Moral disgust presents an interesting starting point for considering the meanings and aspirations connected to disgust. It has been argued that disgust can provide certain benefits when expressing moral judgements. As a strong reaction that we feel in our guts, its register might be more familiar in everyday language than explicit talk of ethics (compare, e.g. ‘his behaviour was disgusting’ with ‘his behaviour was ethically untenable’), which connects to how ‘the disgust idiom puts our body behind our words’, making moral disgust a serious, noteworthy, even indisputable notion (Miller, 1997: 180–181). This kind of moral disgust was present when Heli, who defined her diet as flexitarian with a heavy emphasis on vegetables, described her motivation to stop eating chicken meat: At some point during my twenties I realized that actually, factory farming of chickens is really creepy and then I stopped eating chicken meat entirely for years [. . .] In industrial production, it’s mostly nonsense fluff they’re fed with, and then they’re pumped full of all kinds of medicines. And especially if you think about chickens, they’re not even chickens anymore but those broiler lumps, it’s really creepy. (Heli)
Here, Heli defining the conditions of factory farming and ‘broiler lumps’ as ‘creepy’ can be seen to signify the idea that treating chickens in this way is not ethically acceptable, which in turn intertwines with the symbolic, cultural value of animals. This also connects to the social significance of participation in disgust. Heli mentioned that nowadays, for her ‘it’s a secret vice to buy a grilled broiler chicken like once a year’ and, concerning her meat consumption choices in general, ‘I wouldn’t like to say that I’m a bad person, but I could be better, or more ethical’. From the viewpoint of disgust, it could then be inferred that sometimes, participating in moral disgust can signify being a good, ethical person. Indeed, Elspeth Probyn has argued that at its core, disgust is a collective reaction, ‘a public recognition’ (Probyn, 2000: 133): by naming something as disgusting we aim to find resonance with others (they also find it disgusting) and together we distance ourselves from that which is named disgusting, meaning that
However, moral disgust can also have unwelcome effects. Many theorists see it as a profoundly destructive and harmful feeling that dehumanizes its targets and is powered by societal stigmas (Heinämaa, 2020). An example of these types of symbolic meanings within disgust can be found in the complicated ethics of eating insects: disgust felt by many towards, for example, maggots or crickets, might connect with disinterest towards insect welfare and their humane treatment in farming.
Moral disgust might seem to connect more naturally with the symbolic meanings and ideas within disgust. However, visceral disgust can also become laden with social and symbolic significance. An illuminating example of this can be found in Joel Dickau’s (2019) commentary on food texture preferences. Tracing how sensory science in America has participated in defining slimy, greasy, rubbery and stringy textures as repulsive and ‘bad to chew’, Dickau shows that these definitions are tightly connected with class and racialized divisions: for elites, consuming these textures was seen as ‘exotic’ and ‘sophisticated’, while for low-status people eating these same textures was seen to signify ‘making do’ and ‘negative parameters’ (Dickau, 2019: 570). In addition, this example shows how meanings can intertwine with the material dimensions of disgust, as specific textures come to signify repulsiveness.
Finally, the meanings involved with disgust can also be attached to broader societal aspirations. When carried by consumers, disgust can become a harmful hindrance if it negatively defines the social significance of participation in a consumption practice that in itself could be, for example, sustainable or ethical. This is evident in the following example, as Pasi – an omnivore with a ketogenic diet – describes his views on the role of disgust in Finnish food culture, specifically related to meat: I think it’s a cultural thing that we have kind of lost [. . .] we are kind of mollycoddled nowadays, so everything needs to be in fillet form and ‘yuck, what is that’ [. . .] people should change their habits, it won’t change the other way around, because even if they [different kinds of meats] were on offer, people won’t buy them because ‘yuck, it has hairs on it or yuck, that’s a trotter’. People are too picky, food culture should change a little so that we make more exotic, diverse food. (Pasi)
Here, Pasi presents disgust as being aimed at anything that differs from the habitually consumed meat products – the ‘fillet form’. Pasi advocates changing this, in order to make room for a wider variety of animal products, such as trotters, and frames the question explicly in terms of food culture and people’s habits. In this example, the affective practice of disgust comes to signify a hindrance that should be overcome. In addition, Pasi paints the affective practice of disgust as something that can change over time – nowadays we are ‘mollycoddled’, more susceptible to disgust. It is also worth noting that unlike in the previous examples, Pasi himself does not experience disgust – he discusses it from afar, projecting it as something that other people feel. This raises the question of the different ways consumers can carry affective practices (Reckwitz, 2002: 256): Is the strength of an affective practice different if one carries it more reflexively, emphasizing meanings instead of embodied reactions, as in the foregoing example? Is it easier to abandon or adopt a specific affective practice in these circumstances? One way to approach these questions is to look into the embodied, material dimensions of affective practices, which I will turn to next.
Materials
Here, the focus is on the various material and embodied dimensions of the affective practice of disgust. These dimensions can be seen as especially important for disgust, since disgust ‘adheres to and penetrates its object [. . .] [disgust bears on] the sensible and perceptible nature of things, as distinct from their causal efficiency and impact’ (Kolnai, 1998: 586–587). In other words, disgust is aimed at the thing itself; but in addition to the object of disgust, materials can also be seen to include the infrastructures and tools that connect to disgust. This is exemplified by Kaija, a reluctant omnivore due to allergies, as she talks about sourcing game:
It’s [game] not a carcass that comes from the trunk (laughter) I mean, I couldn’t handle that at all.
Is it easier to handle then. . . (overlapping talk).
It is, it’s the same like at the grocery store, they clean, cut and package it at the slaughterhouse, it’s the same as getting it from the store. But for example blood I can’t handle at all, or liver, I’m so grossed out by the mere idea.
Here, Kaija expresses disgust at blood, liver and carcasses. Blood has been recognized as something that can elicit disgust and lead to avoiding meat (Kubberød et al., 2008), and can, similar to a carcass, be an unwelcome reminder of the animal origins of meat (Rozin and Fallon, 1987). Thus, the materials of disgust connect with its meanings, wherein disgust originates from the ambivalent boundaries between life and death, the organic mess where the living comes into contact with the lifeless (Korsmeyer, 2011; Kristeva, 1982). In addition, Kaija’s example points to the infrastructures that intertwine with disgust. Cleaning, cutting and packaging the meat happens at the slaughterhouse; this enables the individual consumer to avoid disgust that the animal origins of meat could awaken. As such, disgust could potentially play a part in the process of industrializing animal killing, wherein animal slaughter has moved from city streets and farmyards to remote slaughterhouses, becoming invisible to the average consumer (Vialles, 1994). Of course, this process is not unilateral – distancing consumers from the animal origins of meat in this way could also heighten our sensitivity to reminders of animal death (such as blood) and thus foster this kind of disgust. On a more general level, this points to how paying attention to the materials within a given affective practice can be a concrete way of tracing its barriers, stoppages or acceleration lanes: where and how is the affective practice suppressed or cultivated?
The embodied elements of disgust also present one way of tracing the various trajectories of affective practices. Disgust can be an intense feeling that has long-term ramifications for consumption practices in terms of avoiding and turning away from certain goods. For example, Raili described the consequences of her visit to a chicken farm in the following way: I’ve visited a chicken farm once, a long time ago, when I was maybe in my twenties. They [chickens] didn’t have much space, I don’t know how much, but it was an absolutely awful place, it took a long time before I could eat any chicken, and still it kind of grosses me out. (Raili)
However, it is important to note the role that meanings play in relation to experiencing this kind of visceral disgust. Raili mentions that the chickens did not have much space, and elsewhere in her interview she also talked about pitying animals since ‘animals are grossly abused and they often live in terribly bad conditions’, which can be seen to signify ethical concern towards animals. She had also consciously reduced her meat consumption. In contrast, Saara pondered in her interview that ‘an animal that gets a good life, and then if it’s a production animal it’s eaten, isn’t that ok then’, which does not raise the issue of ethical concern for production animals in the same way. Saara also defined herself as a dedicated omnivore. Consequently, when Saara described her visit to a chicken farm, disgust was not present: at the chicken farm [. . .] there were these yellow balls, I mean they don’t grow for that long, and we had these safety protocols like at a nuclear power plant before we were able to go in [. . .] and then somebody complains on social media like ‘it’s awful, three chicks died’ when there’s like thirty-three thousand of them, of course there’s going to be deaths there, it’s crystal clear. (Saara)
Instead of disgust, Saara’s account is focused on safety protocols and the mass of chicks. Raili’s and Saara’s contrasting accounts of chicken farms show that even (presumably) rather similar material conditions and embodied experiences do not necessarily lead to identical affective practices if the symbolic meanings that the consumers carry are different. Moreover, these examples also highlight the relational nature of affective practices, since they consist of tangible encounters between those affecting and those being affected.
Finally, the material elements of disgust can connect to different kinds of ‘career’ trajectories for individual consumers carrying an affective practice (see Shove et al., 2012: 39). This was apparent as Maria, who had reduced her meat consumption, reminisced about smoked ham from her childhood: There was very little meat, but we had our own pig and from that we made this awful cured smoked ham [. . .] I really enjoyed that smoked ham but it was so very heavily salted, looking back on it now. (Maria)
Seemingly paradoxically, Maria describes the smoked ham as both ‘awful’ and enjoyable. One explanation for this could be found in how individual careers within an affective practice exist and accumulate alongside each other, in other words, how there is always something ‘emergent and collective’ about practices (Shove et al., 2012: 39). In Maria’s childhood in the 1940s, the collectively accumulated experiences and food preferences related to meat consumption practices were quite different than in the 2000s (Sillanpää, 1999), which could explain why something previously enjoyable now seems appalling. Therefore, a focus on consumers’ careers within a given affective practice could be a way of discovering wider societal trends and trajectories within consumption.
Competences
The third and final element, competences, consists of know-how, understandings, skill and background knowledge (Shove et al., 2012). A focus on competences demonstrates, first, that engaging in disgust can be performed in multiple ways depending on the understandings and know-how connected to it – distancing oneself from the object of disgust is just one possible performance. An alternative way of relating to disgust was present when I was with Anneli and watched her clean a whole grilled broiler chicken, skilfully separating flesh from bones, fat, tendons and such (see Figure 2). Anneli was an omnivore, though she said she rarely chooses to buy meat, instead receiving it mostly through food aid. She also mentioned that if it was up to her, she would eat nothing but game since it has not been factory farmed and force-fed, thus making it better. However, cleaning a broiler chicken was also a familiar practice for her:
The broiler chicken, cleaned, with Anneli’s hands.
Ah, this is an absolutely lovely part.
What is it?
This is that delightful goo, that absolutely nobody [would eat], it looks like eww filth, I could feed this to my ex (laughter) it has a small bone.
Yeah (bending closer to see).
Then. . . your fingers tell. . . if this doesn’t look like snot then nothing does.
Mmm.
Should I get you a puke bucket, you look a bit nauseous.
I’ll survive (laughter).
As the example demonstrates, Anneli finds delight in the meat-adjacent bits that she defines as disgusting based on their materiality (‘goo’) and on transgressions between boundaries (‘snot’ or ‘filth’ next to food), echoing how the disgusting can sometimes be transformed into the delicious or fascinating (Korsmeyer, 2002). My reaction to the same meat-adjacent bits reveals the differences in our skills and background knowledges within disgust: not having the same kind of experience and familiarity with cleaning broiler chickens, I was not able to enjoy the disgustingness in the same way. This was also apparent in my expression, leading Anneli to jokingly ask me about the bucket.
Second, a focus on the competences can show how increased background knowledge can lead one to become involved with disgust. For example, Kaija described how learning biology made certain dishes inedible for her: It’s so horrible, especially liver or something [. . .] [when we were kids] blood pancakes were okay, then I started to learn about biology and how everything travels through blood and all the kinds of things it can contain, or how kidneys or liver filter everything, then I stopped – I think liver casserole is Schafer food. (Kaija)
This also highlights the relationality of the different elements within disgust. For Kaija, blood pancakes used to be delicious ‘fried in butter, with crushed lingonberries’ (Kaija), but even though their materials remained the same, the increased knowledge transformed the meanings Kaija associated with blood pancakes, which in turn made them disgusting to her. Put differently, within disgust, the different elements can have different weight in terms of creating disgust. On the other hand, Kaija still expressed the disgust she felt in a very embodied way: I noted in my field diary that when talking about blood pancakes, she shuddered, scrunched up her face and made an X-sign with her hands – which I interpreted as a total rejection, a turning away in disgust. That is, paying attention to both more cognitive competences and embodied reactions can help not only in recognizing disgust but also in discerning the relations between its elements.
Finally, practices in general are standardized to some degree, consisting of recognizable elements that form a coherent practice which can then have various localized, ‘homegrown’ variations (Shove et al., 2012: 37–39). Within affective practices, these kinds of standardizations could be seen as connecting with ‘feeling rules’; emotional conventions which become apparent when there is a conflict between ‘what I do feel’ and ‘what I should feel’ (Hochschild, 2012: 50). One way of mapping out feeling rules within affective practices is focusing on competences; in this case, the skillful and coherent expressions of disgust and specifically instances when an expression is conflicted. This kind of situation arose when I was interviewing Riitta and Matti, a married couple who had recently given up hunting. In their daily life, they consumed mostly vegetarian and fish dishes, occasionally also game.In the following extract, Matti describes how he felt about hunting: I’ve been hunting since I was a kid, but the joy of hunting ends when you have to finish off the animal [. . .] I’ve never enjoyed it [. . .] so I decided to stop tormenting myself with it [. . .] as an experience it’s so repulsive, sad, the killing of an animal. (Matti)
Here, Matti expresses disgust and sadness at having to kill animals, consequently deciding to ‘stop tormenting’ himself with it. As such, it can be seen as a coherent and competent participation in disgust. Later in the interview I asked a follow-up question on gourmandizing when shopping at a specific grocery store during its annual special offers (‘Hullut päivät’ at Food Market Herkku). Interestingly, Matti responded to this in the context of their meat consumption in general: I don’t know about gourmandizing when it comes to meat. . . at some point [my conscience] starts knocking, like those are living animals, and we have them in the freezer, and we make meals out of it, delicious as such, but it’s not extra, extra gourmandizing [. . .] yeah, I got stuck on this gourmandizing-word, it’s not feasting or anything (laughter). (Matti)
This somewhat defensive answer could be explained by a conflict of feeling rules within affective practices. Earlier in the interview, Matti expressed disgust and sadness when it came to killing animals and spoke of his conscious attempts to reduce meat consumption. It then seems that Matti took my follow-up question on gourmandizing to imply that they would feast upon meat in an excessive manner. This kind of ‘extra gourmandizing’, in turn, would conflict with his earlier expressions of disgust and sadness and create a contradiction between ‘what I should feel’ and ‘what I do feel’. Thus, the need for clarification that Matti provided. This example demonstrates that competences can be seen as a yardstick for skilfully carrying affective practices, and when there are (implied) ruptures within competences, it becomes possible to map out various feeling rules connected to a given affective practice.
Discussion
In this article, I have aimed to develop a conceptualization for studying affects within sociological research interested in the practices of consumption. More specifically, I have conceptualized affects
This operationalization has enabled the highlighting of what kinds of aspects the elements of an affective practice can contain. The meanings of disgust connected to defining what is morally objectionable or viscerally repulsive, sometimes powered by societal stigmas, racialized divisions or broader social aspirations. The materials of disgust highlighted the relational dimensions of disgust. Even when similar material elements were present, consumers could either participate in the affective practice of disgust or dismiss it, depending on the meanings that they carried. Finally, the competences of disgust showed that while distancing was a common way of skilfully performing disgust, powered by, for example, background knowledge and feeling rules, it could also become entangled with fascination and delight. As a whole, the affective practice of disgust thus stems from transgressions between boundaries, enacted through turning away and distancing, resulting in defining the object of disgust as inferior or objectionable.
Approaching instances of disgust as interconnected elements of meanings, materials and competences has showed that the relations between different elements can vary (e.g. sometimes meanings can be emphasized over embodied reactions) and that all three elements need to be present for disgust to exist (e.g. the same material conditions do not lead to disgust if the meanings carried by a consumer are different). This highlights the ontological variability of affective practices: as they are continuously reproduced through everyday doings that integrate the different elements, the strength and stability of affective practices is contingent on these processes of integration. The practice perspective also enabled attention to be paid to the different careers that individual consumers can have within disgust, as well as to the trajectories of disgust over time. Another benefit of conceptualizing disgust as an affective practice is seeing how it can intersect with, for example, practices of food provision and cooking, which enables the patterns of disgust to be highlighted instead of compartmentalizing disgust as a separate affective aspect within these food-related practices.
Altogether, affective practices conceptualized as meanings, materials and competences enables affects and emotions to be approached in a way that acknowledges their double character. On the one hand, affects are shared culturally and socially intelligible ways of feeling (
Based on this, I argue that the conceptualization developed in this article could provide a useful basis for empirical research on the complex emotional, affective and embodied aspects of consumption practices. Indeed, the next step would be to utilize this conceptualization in empirical analyses and to detail the intricate relations between meanings, materials and competences as they are integrated in daily sayings and doings (Shove et al., 2012).
Footnotes
Ethical statement
Funding
ORCID iD
