Introducing Affective Practices: Disgust in Finnish Consumers’ Everyday Meat Consumption

Abstract

The affective turn has highlighted the need to study emotions, visceral reactions and embodied experiences within social sciences, and its importance has also been recognized within theories of practice. However, practice theoretical discussions of affects, especially empirically grounded ones, are still sparse and fragmented. This article seeks to further these nascent discussions by arguing that affective practices present one fruitful avenue forward. Originally introduced by Margaret Wetherell within social psychology, affective practices are theoretically developed further in this article within sociological research on consumption practices. This is done by suggesting that affective practices can be operationalized as meanings, materials and competences, following Shove, Pantzar and Watson’s work. To explore how these three interdependent elements fit within affective practices, the article utilizes examples of disgust as an affective practice from a research project on everyday meat consumption practices among Finnish consumers. This provides a rich area of enquiry, since meat consumption mobilizes many affects in these times of mounting sustainability, health and animal rights concerns, and disgust within it entangles with visceral reactions as well as moral aversion. Altogether, the article provides a conceptualization for studying how affects themselves are constituted practically (affects as practices), to compliment previous research that has considered affects or emotions as parts of certain practices (affects within practices). Approaching affects as practices makes it possible to see affects’ ontological variability and trajectories over time, as well as their relations to cultural and social values and feeling rules.