What sort of a practice is eating?

The close of the 20th century witnessed a renewal of interest in theories of prac­ tice, an interest sufficient to make possible the rhetorical announcement of the birth of The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (Schatzki et al. 2001). The move has had some considerable significance, even if Omar Lizardo (2009: 714) may have overstated the case when proclaiming that ‘It can be said without much danger of exaggeration that practices now play as central a role in socio­ logical thinking as values and normative patterns did during the functionalist period.’ Some foundations had been laid three decades earlier. In a widely cited article about trends in theory in anthropology, published in 1984, Sherry Ortner (1984: 127) observed that ‘a new key symbol of theoretical orientation is emerging, which may be labelled “practice”’ (or ‘action’ or ‘praxis’). She described its emergence from the intersection of theoretical schools in anthropology formed in the 1960s, and inter-disciplinary Marxism and political economy in the 1970s. The principal authors credited with the development were two sociologists, Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, the anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins and the social theorist, Michel Foucault. A primary common objective was to account for action in a manner that was complementary to the study of systems and structures (Ortner 1984: 147-8). In European sociology, the legacy of struc­ turalism figured strongly in the intellectual context in which the problem of con­ ceptualizing the relation between structure and agency was given proirity. The concept of Praxis played a central role, and was conceived as a bridging device between equally flawed holist and individualist explanations. Nevertheless, holism was more comprehensively attacked than was individualism; discomfit­ ure with a previously rampant structuralism always threatened that agency might be allowed to dissolve into personal autonomy, a temptation to which many suc­ cumbed. In the process, despite the positions adumbrated in works like Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1972) and The Constitution of Society (Giddens 1984) being seminal for social theory and inspiring empirical studies, the orientation towards the analysis of practice per se palled. It was left to a second generation of advocates to re-centre the concept of practices.