Abstract

Swedberg joins the growing interest for materiality in contemporary social theory showing that economic life in particular needs to be conceived, yet again, as a material process. His paper is mainly deconstructive though, and in my brief note I start from a re-appraisal of Simmel's work on material culture and draw on the scholarship on consumption in order to explore how we can address 'materiality' sociologically. I suggest that to address the economy as a 'material' phenomenon we may resort to a theory of practice which considers consumers as embodied agents and objects as situated commodities.