Feeding Distinction: Constrictions and Constructions of Dietary Compliance

Filippo Oncini

• Publisher: Ledizioni
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9788855263658
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Building on Bourdieu's theory of capitals, this book provides an in-depth analysis of the social stratification of food consumption in Italy, with a special focus on the role of the school canteen as a possible enhancer of children's dietary compliance. Making use of large survey data, semi-structured interviews with parents, and long ethnographic fieldwork in four primary school canteens, the study presents new insights on the ways inequalities shape eating and feeding practices between home and school.

1. Towards a Theory of Feeding Practices

1. Introduction

The cultural turn of the 70s has been characterized by the rise and success of the so-called practice theorists. In an attempt to overcome the long-lasting ontological and epistemological antinomies that have afflicted the social sciences ever since, an outstanding proliferation of accounts has been proposed. Heavily influenced by Marxism, phenomenology, structuralism, semiotics and late Wittgenstein these approaches have all suggested new paths for an understanding of the main dilemmas regarding what can be heuristically called the formation of social action. Whilst ‘formation’ closely regards the dialectic between materialism and idealism, ‘social’ and ‘action’ are more deeply concerned with social theory itself, namely with the structure-agency debate and with the opposition between normative and utility oriented types of action (Reckwitz, 2002).1 In sociology, ‘bringing culture back in’, as opposed to Homans’ programmatic article for a neo-utilitarianism (1964), became a common feature of different approaches.2 The landscape of practice theorists is all but coherent and devoid of conflict. Bourdieu’s ‘righteous wrath’ against Latour (2004) or the amusing ditty composed by Shalins on Foucault (Sahlins, 2002: 20)3 are just but a few patent examples. Yet, as Sherry Ortner (1984) elucidated, central axes of the theory can actually be retrieved. In presenting her concise essay on anthropological social theory since the ‘60s, she convincingly stated that those new practice theorists, amongst whom she put herself, were not bonded by a particular method or theory, but rather by a set of similar interests. As a matter of fact, they were drawn together by a common dissatisfaction with the antinomies that governed social sciences, and by the idea that the answer relied on a particular view of the concept of praxis. Praxis, ‘the whole of human action’, was then to be interpreted as the theoretical locus where the alternatives to the conflicting dualisms could be formulated. They were by no means escaping the influence of their masters; rather, they were exploiting them to shape a third way. In this sense, the logic of praxis prepares the ground for establishing a dialogical relationship between the objectivism-subjectivism and the structure-agency dilemmas. This is not to say that those particular questions were ever solved, but new perspectives for their understanding eventually flourished. After all, also functionalism and utilitarianism can be very miscellaneous within their core, but common features can still be identified. Depending on authors, different aspects and influences can be highlighted. Reckwitz (2002), for instance, sustains that practice theory is a specific trend within the cultural turn, and makes explicit reference to Bourdieu, Giddens, Latour and Schatzki; Turner S. (1994), in his unsympathetic critique, labels all cultural theorists as practice theorists. Ortner (2006: 16), dissimilarly, points the attention towards those authors that stressed the intertwining of power, history and culture in constructing ‘a theory of the production of social subjects through practice in the world, and of the production of the world itself through practice’.

As far as I am concerned, I see the strength of practice theory in its conceptual openness.4 Nowadays, the term identifies a vague and large set of approaches that generally share the view that a loose set of organized, identifiable and intertwined activities (i.e. doings and sayings) are socially constituted and characterized by ‘material, embodied, ideational and affective components’ (Welch and Warde, 2015: 85). The focus on human praxis suggests indeed a possible pragmatic usage of these notions, eventually resulting in actual practical interventions in public policies for promoting change (Hargreaves, 2011; Shove, 2014). Nonetheless, since some authors within practice theory have admittedly proposed their own research program as one that by definition avoids issues of social stratification,5 I find comfort in heading back to Bourdieu’s theoretical framework whilst acknowledging some major problematic aspects of its work. The chapter is structured as follows: first I lay out the epistemological foundations of the research as a dialectic between structuralism and constructivism; second, I present the theoretical and conceptual backbones of the thesis through Bourdieu’s concepts of doxa, capitals and habitus; third, I define and delimit feeding practices as the array of endeavours for the nourishment of infants and children; finally, I outline the methodological translation of this approach.

2. The Logic of Practice: Epistemological Foundations

Among practice theorists, Bourdieu’s attempt at synthesis is of particular significance. Being a scholar much devoted to a systemic and theoretically informed empirical work, he left a coherent sociological toolkit that can be used on a variety of topics. Bourdieu’s program had an accurate vocabulary (habitus, field, capital), a coherent and heterogeneous combination of methods (ethnography and Multiple Correspondence Analysis), and, most importantly, a proposal for the understanding of the subject-object dichotomy that could sustain his scientific approach to sociological research. This is not to say that his work is devoid of hurdles or flaws. All in all, thinking ‘with Bourdieu’ also requires thinking beyond and against him (Wacquant, 1992; King, 2000). As Wacquant (2014b) suggested, Bourdieu’s methodological tools are still be able to accommodate certain problematic aspects of his theory as long as those very central concepts are considered as means (and not as ends) of the research process itself.

Bourdieu’s theory of practice emerges as a consequence of his dissatisfaction with the objectivism of i) structuralism, which ends up neglecting ‘the functional properties the message derives from its use in a specific situation, and, more precisely, in a socially structured interaction’ (1977: 25) and with the ‘biographical illusion’ produced by ii) phenomenology (or, more specifically, ethnomethodology), which maintains that ‘scientific knowledge is continuous with common-sense knowledge, because it is only a ‘construction of constructions’’ (Bourdieu, 1990a). These two points deserve a specification, since Bourdieu’s theory of practice eventually results from their dialectic more than from their rejection tout court.

2.1 Structuralism

Structuralism, and especially its Marxist version, influenced the French sociologist right from the very beginning of his career, and particularly during his Algerian fieldwork (Bourdieu, 1990b). Bourdieu holds firmly that the major failure of the structural reason is the estrangement of agents from their conducts, that in turn annihilates the object of social research itself, viz social action. Nonetheless, taken as a moment of the dialectic, it constitutes a necessary step of the research process because it sheds light on the unconscious ‘grammar’ of society. Macro-structures, that may take the form of constructed empirical regularities, delineate ‘the possibilities and impossibilities, freedoms and necessities, opportunities and prohibitions inscribed in the objective conditions’ (Bourdieu, 1990b: 54). Yet, the same process of formalization, if abstracted from the practical reason of individuals, is doomed to intellectualist fallacy: it fails to disentangle the difference between ‘the model of reality and the reality of the model’ it proposes (in Swartz, 1998: 58). The set of rules that emerge from empirical regularities of practices, are certainly ‘heuristically useful’, but they cannot be confused with their application, which must be meaningful for the subject that governs them (Crossley, 2001). This point is indeed at the base of Bourdieu’s usage of a mixed methodology: whilst statistical analysis can discover actual distributions of practices by means of different endowments of capital, ethnographic insights give back to the actors partial ‘authority’ over their actions (Swartz, 1998; Vandenberghe, 1999; Robbins, 2007).6

The tension between the opus operatum and the modus operandi thus results in a proposal for the structure-agency resolution very much analogous to Giddens’ structuration theory7 (Giddens, 1979; 1984; Vandenberghe, 1999; Joas and Knöbl, 2009). Sociology, eventually, has to simultaneously take into account ‘the things we do and the things which happen’ (Louch, 1966). This is not to say that Giddens and Bourdieu have similar conceptions of structure and agency. Whilst the former holds that ‘structure is implicated in that very ‘freedom of action’’ (Giddens, 1984: 174), and does not constitute an outer limit, the latter eventually gives a causal effect to structural properties. However, for both authors, day to day activities and routines represent a fundamental expression of this process of duality. Giddens (1984) stresses that routines are able to minimize sources of anxiety and that the repetitive nature of habits foster the reproduction of institutionalized practices. Bourdieu (1984), much more concerned with empirical research, shows how daily practices are structured and reproduced through social classes, constrained by and contained in the habitus as an individual and collective feature.

A second major influence of structuralism, however, lies in the relational mode of thought, which Bourdieu directly draws from Saussurian linguistics. As the meaning of a particular word arises from its differentiation from other signifiers, practices make sense inasmuch they are defined in relation to one another. As de Saussure (1993) explains, within language, words are related by their syntagmatic linkage.8 The juxtaposition of magn- and animus, or the formulation of a sen...