Bodies and embodiment in practices of valuation: Challenging the sociology of valuation with the sociology of the body

Abstract

For more than a decade now, a sociology of valuation has come to be established at an international level (Lamont 2012). In the wider sense, it comprises a multitude of family-like research directions that deal, for example, with comparison (Heintz 2016), quantification (Espeland and Stevens 2008; Diaz-Bone and Didier 2016) or accounting (Vormbusch 2004;Mennicken 2011). The diverse empirical and theoretical studies from this field have provided fundamental insights into valuation practices and cultures (Berli et al. 2021). At the same time, sociology has undergone a "body turn" (Gugutzer 2015; see also Meyer et al. 2017;Turner 2008 Turner [1984; Featherstone et al. 2001Featherstone et al. [1991). Taking off with the second generation of classics (Bourdieu, Elias, Goffman, etc.), this turn has gained particular momentum since the 1990s. Even though the reference to its object does not provide a sociology of the body with any really sharp contours as a distinctive sub-area sociology, a plethora