Embodiment

Consumption is an embodied practice. It is shaped by habits, desires, tastes, and an embodied know-how that informs both selection and use of items purchased. To consume is to physically do something: to purchase or use what one has purchased. And in some cases, most obviously regarding food and drink, it involves taking foreign objects and substances into one's own body.

Sociological work on and interest in embodiment has a long history that can be traced back to the origin of the discipline. However, the contemporary concern for embodiment within the discipline can be dated to the mid-1980s. Bryan Turner's Body and Society was an early landmark study in what has proved to be a growth area for social research. This growth was consolidated, in the mid-1990s, with the launch of the Body and Society journal. The area remains diverse, however, and lacks the coherence and shared focus that are apparent in certain other social scientific research areas.

One of the key arguments of much of the work in the late 1980s and early 1990s was that sociology prior to this point had adopted a disembodied view of the social actor. Sociologists were said to have tacitly accepted the—by this time largely discredited—philosophical view that mind and body are separate entities or “substances,” a view famously advocated by Descartes in the early 1600s but with a genealogy dating back to Plato, and to have both accepted that an actor's mind is her essence (again echoing Descartes) and focused on this aspect of agency to the detriment of a proper consideration of embodiment.

This claim is, at the very least, overstated. There is good reason to believe that sociology, from its inception, has managed to circumvent the problem of dualism, and there are many examples, from Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim through to the present, of sociologists addressing themselves to bodily themes. The concern to re-embody sociology has generated various interesting and important research agendas, however, and there is good reason to believe that a disembodied model of the actor has found its way into studies of consumption by means of the economics discipline. Though neoclassical economics has its origins in the work of empiricist and utilitarian authors, for whom bodies, their pleasures, and pains were central, the embrace of highly abstract (mathematical) rational choice models in economics has led to a rather disembodied image of the consumer.

The concept of taste is sometimes used in sociology in a way equivalent to what economists call preference. Our tastes are our purchasing and design preferences. The more literal meaning refers to our embodied sense of taste, however, as indeed the related notion of “aesthetics” references our ability to physically experience the world and objects within it (a denotation more obvious in relation to the “anesthetics” that remove this capacity). Empiricist aesthetic theories, such as that of David Hume, worked with this link. Beauty, for Hume, is that which brings pleasure to our senses, and our tastes therefore have a direct embodied component. In the work of Immanuel Kant, however, this connection was broken or at least challenged. Recognition of beauty, for Kant, entails that we rise above our basic physical pleasures and engage our rationality. Beauty may still strike the eye or the ear but it is a cultivated, even “rational,” eye or ear.

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