Emotion and practice

While emotions are a central facet of consumer culture, relatively little is known about how they are tied to the embodied and tacit aspects of everyday living. This article explores how practices organize emotions and vice versa. Pairing Schatzki’s teleoaffective structure with emotions understood as intensities that are deeply inscribed in the structural blueprints of practices, we propose that the organization of emotions and practices is recursive and based on three teleoaffective episodes: anticipating, actualizing, and assessing. To illustrate this, we present an analysis of empirical material from an ethnographic study on mothering. The practice–emotion link we unfold contributes to understanding the operation of emotions in consumer culture by specifying how practices and emotions are co-constitutive. This offers novel insights into the embodied and routinized nature of emotions, illuminates the connection between practices and individuals, and highlights the role of emotions in practice change.