Digestive dialectics: Everyday life, food, and social change in contemporary Japan

In the field of social research, the concept of change has been dissociated from its practical foundations, recast as a function of structural manipulations and conceptual processes. The living, breathing body of people in their everyday lives has been annihilated by the panoptic gaze of "objectivist" science, its somatic knowledge reduced to a residue. But for all of this technocracy, the lived--everyday life--is no mere repository of conceptual knowledge, but the soil which supports the whimsical adventures of these plants--the so-called "higher spheres"--pullulating from its nourishing base. This thesis, therefore, attempts to relocate the living body in the matrix of gastropractical forces, micro and macro, in two specific contexts in contemporary Japan. Its objective, then, is to discover this body and the forces it confronts in everyday acts of food consumption in rotary sushi bars and Korean barbecue restaurants, the perceptual limits that constrain the ability of actors to "see" the potential for change immanent to repetitious gastropraxis.;By utilizing theoretical and methodological precepts fashioned by the work of French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre, this research project moves to tackle the issue of social change from a phenomenological perspective. That social space and time are a component of the eating process is apparent. By focusing on a confluence of issues, both immediate and mediate, I take the viewpoint of an actor within these contexts and subject it to rigorous examination. From this perspective things like environmental destruction, culture, aesthetics, political economy, and colonization are analyzed dialectically. Only by problemitizing these forces at the level of the body will the potential for change be uncovered, by laying bare the epistemic barriers that have been erected to reduce its visibility. If social change is to be enduring, affective linkages and embodied knowledge must be integrated into the conceptual whole, which can only happen by recognizing the barriers which prevent its incorporation.