Mainstream theories on household energy consumption arecharacterized by reductionist assumptions about consumersand the socio-material contexts of choice. Much of the socialscience attention on consumption has focused on mentalstates, meaning, cognition, and rational choice. In mainstreamtheory, body is collapsed into mind and the demand for goodsis both disembodied and decontextualized from social andmaterial worlds. These reductions hinder the development ofa robust theory of consumption and new thinking in energysavings policy. In this paper we bring the body back to consumption.We argue that people’s exposure to practices, both inthe form of personal and culturally mediated experience, embodiesknowledge (and meanings) and this in turn affects theways we perform energy-consuming acts. We draw on workon body, habitus and perception by anthropologists MarcelMauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Pierre Warnier and philosopherHenri Bergson, as well as more recent perspectives framedunder the heading of social practice theory. It is argued thatbody agency in energy practices is related to enculturation andrepetition, but also to the density and complexity of materialsinvolved in the practice, the latter particularly relevant in homecentered, material-dense energy practices such as cleaning,heating, cooling and preparing food. We develop the idea thatnot only agency but also memory is distributed between body,mind and the material objects that are integrated in the performanceof a practice. In conceiving bodies as sites of physiologicaland cultural processes, we show that practices changethrough perceptions and the constitution of memory. We concludethat policy which aims at changing practices should befocused on experiences and experiments in which bodies areexplicitly involved.
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