The Practice Of Eating By Alan Warde Analysis

Some human activities are understood, by dominant social sciences, as simple points of access to unveil other instances from society. According to Alan Warde’s book The Practice of Eating, that has diminished their ability to understand practices as something worthy of consideration by themselves, while gaining a deeper understanding of the relationship between individuals, the social context, the body and everyday life. With this in mind and using eating as focal point, he invites to recover the analysis on Practices, considering them as the minimal unit of social analysis.
Eating is a basic human activity weakly regulated but with clear common points that make it recognizable almost everywhere. The argument that Warde develops departs from …show more content…
Each of them has its own symbolic meaning built by discourses, knowledge and texts. Each one is constantly trying to be the prevailing source of coordination from a particular point of view that cannot be easily overlapped, as Warde notes, eating healthy and tastefully seems difficult to achieve. To deal with this kind of multiple convergent practice the author uses the concept of Compound Practices, which considers the way in which individual negotiates with these differentiated accounts in specific situations. Those regulative entities not only attempt to impose normative behaviours, by codifying the practice of eating, but to develop the cultural meanings around it through different forms of …show more content…
In his chapter about Habituation Warde dismounts the idea of the highly deliberative individual to consider the embodied repetition as a requisite for habituation. Habit acts not only the result of repetition, but as the result of everyday contextual constrains and conventionalized knowledge. This allows the author explain habit as the externalization of social arrangements and the relation with other specific practices.
The chapter entitled Repetition and the Foundations of Competence closes the argument of the book by explaining how practical knowledge creates a set of accounts in which the individual become competent. This competence in practice is a notion about the disposition that incorporates not only the routinely action, but the field of action that the individual has to make permutations and changes in everyday life. According to the author, this is crucial for the transmission of the practice across generations, new member of a community, and the way in which innovation and change can be grasped by