ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some ways in which 'taste' and its relationship to embodied practice have been variously recognized and theorized in accounts of consumption. It shows how scholars have thought about taste and embodied practice, particularly in terms of studies of material culture and consumption. The chapter considers what attention to taste and embodied practice illuminates about human nature and social phenomena more broadly. State governments mobilized consumer preferences and tastes to promote and achieve particular political and economic goals. Performance theory approaches have similarly disrupted assumptions about connections between consumption and embodied practices. The transformation of taste's embodied dimensions into new states, locations, and experiences poses new challenges and provocative questions for future studies of consumption, beginning with the immediate issue of rethinking relationships between culture and physiology. Innovative hybrids of art, science, and technology deconstruct conventional forms and experiences of consumer objects and taste.
