Daily material practices express the totality of a group’s social relations.

Evidence

On the other hand it is also true that “man is what he eats”, in so far as diet is one of the expressions of social relations taken as a whole, and every social group has its own basic form of diet. But one might equally well say that “man is his clothing”, “man is his housing” or “man is his particular way of reproducing himself, that is, his family”. For, together with diet, housing, clothing and reproduction are among the elements of social life in which social relations as a whole are manifested in the most evident and widespread (i.e. mass) fashion. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1266

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci’s point that mundane everyday practices (diet, housing, clothing, family) index social relations — a tool for later readings of how everyday markers carry ideology.