Aesthetics of attachments: Reflexive insights on taste construction in climbing

Drawing upon ethnographic research, this article focuses on taste construction in climbing. Through fieldwork carried out in Western Europe and the USA, I engage with the work of Antoine Hennion to emphasise the "attachments" between climbers and their cultural practice. Hennion (2004b) argues that taste is not inherent to the participants. Rather it emerges from individual and collective constructions around the same activity. The aim of this article is therefore to inform and underpin a reflexive approach on taste within the framework of lifestyle sports, mainly influenced by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. In so doing, I stress two environments of the activity, respectively indoor climbing and rock climbing, suggesting that they cannot be studied independently, and briefly acknowledge the modalities of taste construction in both contexts.