Roberta Sassatelli

Consumption, Pleasure and Politics Slow Food and the politico-aesthetic problematization of food

A growing field of research is documenting the political investment of the consumer. Yet, consumers are invested of political responsibilities in many different ways, which respond to different visions of politics and consumption, culture and the economy. In this article we critically explore the particular stance of an increasingly international actor such as Slow Food, placing it in the context of current debates on the scope of alternative food networks and on the moral boundaries of the market. Starting from the Slow Food core in Bra, Italy, and through a variety of qualitative sources, both primary (interviews) and secondary (publications, public speeches), we show that while Slow Food contributes to the current political investment of the consumer, it does so in distinctive ways which bear witness to its gastronomic origin and middle-class constituency. Slow Food rhetoric works out a politically-thick vision of taste refinement: its imagined consumer is an ‘eco-gastronome’, someone who adds ecological concerns onto a continuously trained aesthetic appreciation of food. The article considers the scope of what Slow Food has defined as the ‘right to pleasure’ in the face of a tension between inclusion and exclusion running through contemporary consumer culture. It concludes by exploring Slow Food’s current shifts towards issues such as economic growth, access to resources and environmental protection — crucial in defining the complex world of critical consumption — through a politico-aesthetic problematization of food consumption.

Fitness Gyms and the Local Organization of Experience

One of the peculiarities of fitness gyms is the succession of people who try and follow a training programme and are not able to stick to it. Based on ethnographic research I try to account for this phenomenon. For regular participants, fitness training is not only important for the kind of body it will hopefully produce in the long run, but also for how it is lived in the present. I will try to show that the way gyms are locally organized - spatiality and interaction rules during training - is as important for exercise adherence as the culturally shaped ideals which sustain fitness culture. In particular, gyms need to provide not only for the substantial body objectives pursued by clients but also for their expressive demands. They need to offer not only competent trainers, but also training spaces where clients may feel secure enjoying a measure of discretion and sober informality. Still, the correct attitude towards fitness work-out is not a passive lack of desire. Fitness work-out asks for the demonstration of a particular kind of desire: each client can and must learn to concentrate only on him or herself in the attempt to improve his or her own exercise performance. Elaborating on my fieldwork, I propose that the more participants in fitness measure themselves against each other and a fantasized body ideal the less will be their capacity to continue attending the gym regularly. The more the desired objectives are perceived as vital, the more participants will feel inadequate, and the more difficult will be for them to concentrate on performing each and all movements and, consequently, to construct and continue a fitness programme. The possibility of filtering body ideals while pursuing an activity which is aimed at their achievement is decisive in protecting individuals from the dangerous exposure of their inadequacies. I conclude on the nature, importance and consequences of this paradoxical construction of experience.

An Interview with Paul Willis: Commodification, Resistance and Reproduction

As a major contemporary figure in sociology and cultural studies, Paul Willis is best known for his rich ethnographic studies of working-class youth culture – from Learning to Labour to Profane Culture to Common Culture. A prominent member of the celebrated Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Willis is the joint founding editor of the journal Ethnography. Translated into many languages, his work is widely read in sociology, anthropology and education. His insights have informed much contemporary work on topics such as socialization, consumer culture, music and popular culture. Theoretical reflection is in many ways central to Willis’s work, thriving on field experiences and the intimate portrayal of people’s everyday creativity. His studies are instructive examples of what has recently been called ‘peopled ethnography’ (Fine, 2003), a type of fieldwork-based research that not only provides thick descriptions sensitive to the peculiarities of individual subjectivities, but also offers theoretical insights on broader socio-cultural dynamics. They have been drawn upon by a number of social theorists, including Giddens (1984), to capture human agency as both productive and bounded, as embodied and discursive consciousness which produces and reproduces given social structures. This interview takes the reader on Willis’s intellectual journey to insist on the main theoretical thrust of his work. Since Profane Culture (Willis, 1978), Willis has shown that mass commodities may become occasions for popular resistance and catalysts of cultural innovation. With the backdrop of a Gramscian perspective, he has emphasized the symbolic work performed on commodities in ordinary life, which may help marginal groups explore alternative ways of imagining themselves as against dominant classifications. Even though consumerism has often been a whipping boy, youth cultures since the 1960s have been cultures of consumption – the motorbikers and the hippies studied by Willis appropriated mass commodities as elements for the constitution of the group. Willis notoriously characterized hippy culture as ‘an immanent critique of the Protestant ethic’: the hippies celebrated the natural through mass commodities in a hedonistic but cerebral search for pleasure that transfigures dominant values and creates new values: European Journal of Social Theory 12(2): 265–289

Corpi in pratica: habitus, interazione e disciplina

According to the theory of reflexive individualisation, in the conditions of high modernity the body becomes a never-ending reflexive project. In this paper I discuss the limits of this view of action, reflexivity and embodiment. I argue that it relies on some form of body/mind dualism, it is not enough sensitive to the limits to reflexivity imposed by the very fact that our practices are embodied, and it might take what are normative claims about subjectivity for the whole practice of subjectivity constitution. In order to account for both structure and agency I try to develop a three-dimensional model for embodiment as articulated in a socio-genetic dimension (Bourdieus habitus), a situational-experiential dimension (Goffmans organisation of involvement) and a normative-institutional dimension (Foucaults discipline). I critically combine these different dimensions using fitness regimes as an example. Contrary to what theories of reflexive individualization imply, regular participants in fitness seem to become reflexive risk-managers only because they are pushed and pulled to loose themselves in the actuality of physical activity. Similarly they can reflexively construct themselves as the authors of choices only because they have learnt to want certain things as locally prescribed. Power, in other terms, works through locally organised and embodied forms of knowledge whose contingent, ongoing realisation also allows for spaces of change and resistance.

Healthy cities and instrumental leisure: the paradox of fitness gyms as urban phenomena

As urbanisation has come to characterise contemporary societies, large cities have become quite ambivalent places for the human species: they are removing the human body from its perceived natural condition, while increasingly attempting to provide a cure for the ills of a sedentary life. Fitness gyms are presented as the ‘natural’ solution to our ‘unnatural’ lifestyle as urban dwellers and as a therapeutic fix to the ills of metropolitan living. This paper deploys a mix of qualitative methods (ethnographic observation, interviews and discourse analysis) to explore fitness culture as an urban phenomenon. Using data from Italy and the UK, it develops a micro-sociology of the spatiality of the gym that helps to approach this institution from within, deconstructing those claims which contribute to its cultural location as a key ingredient in contemporary urban lifestyles. The paper first looks at how fitness culture is negotiated through the marshalling of structured variety within the spatiality and tempora...

‘You can all succeed!’: the reconciliatory logic of therapeutic active leisure*

Abstract Broad cultural trends such as spectacularization and individualization as induced by consumer culture are transforming the global scene of sport practice with effects that may appear as socially reconciliatory. Commercialization has worked in two directions: while competitive, professional sport is becoming a global media phenomenon, with increasingly global and yet fragmented audiences; ordinary sport practice is being individualized in the Global North and shaped by the individualizing and totalizing logic of therapeutic active leisure. In this paper, the notion of therapeutic active leisure is proposed and explored with particular reference to the development of the fitness field. As I shall show it sits between sport and gymnastics and expresses the socio-economic need to control the health of the population through individualized commercialized formations, by working through consumers’ pleasures rather than citizens’ duties.

Gary Alan Fine

This chapter considers the work of Gary Alan Fine, probably the most prolific contemporary cultural ethnographer and one of the key contributors to the sociology of small groups. In the chapter, Fine’s intellectual journey is explored, from his earlier studies on the Baseball little league to his recent research on ‘futurework’ and the way forecast is culturally and organizationally structured. While Fine’s perspective is interdisciplinary, with anthropology (in particular the American tradition related to folklore and language studies), social psychology and sociology being the key elements, theoretically he has developed the symbolic interactionist tradition. He thus highlights the constructed nature of social worlds by emphasizing the set of meanings through which social actors define such worlds and their limits, and in particular he identifies the small group, and its internal verbal interaction, as the foundation of his approach. Our daily lives are conceived as archipelagos of small groups. As we travel by, we shape the map in which they are located and through which we recognize ourselves. Considering Fine’s whole career, the relationship between expressive culture (forms of talk and codes of feelings) and social structure may be said to be the main focus of his empirical and theoretical work. His approach remains evidently linked to interaction, from which he refrains to detach and to which he tries to bring back discourse, or indeed people’s accounts as expressed in the cultural whisperings that swells up into rumors and gossip. Fine is perhaps the most prolific and versatile ethnographer in contemporary sociology. And a sociologist focused on interaction – both as a methodological and as an ontological element – must start from being on the spot. Fine’s importance, lays on his ability of finding places where, by speaking of small fragments of reality, it becomes possible to speak of broad cultural borders – thus the culture of mushroom collectors enables us to focus on the border between culture and nature, while the work of weather forecasters brings us to think about the relationship between present and future. His originality is undoubtedly grounded in his ability to recognize the external reality of social structure as it is translated into specific cultural forms anchored to small group culture. The chapter closes with an overall appreciation of Fine’s contribution to the symbolic interactionist tradition, focusing in particular on his furthering of our understanding of the emotional and the cognitive aspects of interaction.

Le Sociologie e gli Studi Culturali

Le Sociologie e gli Studi Culturali Una conversazione con Roberta Sassatelli di Emanuele Monegato

Spatiality and Temporality

“Fitness work out! You can save your heart, have better sex, improve your body and get back your good spirits” was proclaimed in 1995 on the April cover of Salve, one of the first Italian health and lifestyle magazines, echoing a global mantra that is repeated over and over again in countless fitness texts. Expert discourse, whether consolidated in a fitness manual or spoken by gym staff and trainers, explains that exercise is good for the body, helps to prevent illness, increases strength and vigour and maintains ones figure. Gym instructors and trainers characteristically claim that exercise is useful to “correct faulty postures” that the body “has acquired over the years”, to “eliminate” superfluous “fat”, to “tone” and “harmonise” parts of the body. Fitness discourse, especially as fixed in exercise manuals, is indeed a catalogue of detailed advice on how to perform bodywork, elicited by the spectre of body degeneration and complemented by broader lifestyle tips (notably on food, drink and posture) as well as heavily moralising considerations on motivation, character and selfhood. Such discourse is addressed to the individual, typically called into being as an isolated consumer by texts which play on the body-self relationship to sustain individual motivation. Fitness discourse is all about individual transformation and epiphany – work on your body to get a better, more authentic self. Yet, if we take a look at fitness workout as a practical accomplishment, rather than as a discourse, we discover that certain social arrangements are crucial to sustain whatever individual process might be in place.

Interaction and Relational Codes

“Become a member of a club”, urges the brochure of a major British fitness chain for the 2007 annual joining campaign. The list of benefits provided by membership includes fitness classes, spas, pools, massage services, bars and the “improvement of social life”. The concept of a “club”, which is increasingly associated with commercial fitness gyms, certainly suggests intense sociability as a key element of the institution. Indeed, as the notion of the fitness centre consolidated, gyms increasingly presented themselves as sociable places, where one can meet people and spend some pleasurable time with others. As noticed by Nick Crossley (2006), with membership figures above 10 per cent of the population, “fitness gyms are a significant form of association in contemporary society”. Crossley’s work on fitness training, based on his own participation in a club belonging to a major UK fitness chain, stresses the role of social relations and networks among clients, especially regular, long-term gym-goers. For Crossley, much of the success of a gym has to do with the development of a proper club atmosphere, which provides vital relational incentives to clients. Crossley recognises that social networks are important mainly for enthusiastic gym-goers who attend at regular times and focuses his analysis on evening attendance at circuit-training classes. As he suggests, clients who tend to “make a night” of their gym attendance, spending a few evening hours in their club weekly, will also tend to look for a full leisure experience that may start with training together and end with a late beer in the pub.