Through empirical analysis of recurrent, ritualized, mundane practices of wine tasting in a restaurant in France, this study clarifies and extends the concept of sociomateriality, which was developed based on agential realism. Its fundamental thesis that practices do not simply use material objects but are themselves material has remained unclear at the empirical level and is therefore theoretically underdeveloped. This detailed analysis of videotaped wine tasting scenes shows that coordinated body arrangements demarcate a subject taster and a wine object. This demarcated subject-object tasting is further enfolded in multiple layers of bodily arrangements that indirectly alter the subject-object relation, for instance, by objectivating the subject. This analysis clarifies how materialization, which makes subjects and objects more determinate, is achieved within the practice, not prior to it, and thereby help eliminates the transcending subject position that prior studies have ambiguously preserved. It also shows that the subject-object relation is not only performed but also challenged, altered, and resignified through ritualized, mundane practices, rather than by episodic and heroic acts of changing the material environment. To understand this complex endogenous order and change within practice, this study highlights the importance of what is excluded from the focal practice but upon closer examination is an inherent part of it. These insights provide a broader standpoint for explaining why and how a particular practice, but not others, happens, by highlighting the often ignored layers of body and material organizing.
