Introduction: Towards an Ethnography of Ordinary Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 4

practise?; do men and women practise different types of gardening?; are cultural
resources gendered?; and is there a specifically gendered collection of aesthetic
practises forged out of a specific set of socio-cultural factors?
Turning to the relationship between the media and its gardening audience, I
explore how class, gender and age impinged on lifestyle media consumption during
the period. I investigate whether gardeners felt incited to use or interpret lifestyle
ideas or projects and, using the garden makeover genre in particular, I ask gardeners
about their relationship with garden 'experts'. Were local gardening competences,
which reside in dimensions of ordinariness, preferable to lifestyle ideas mediated
at the national level? And finally, I ask whether ordinary gardening as a traditional
way of life was preferable to lifestyling: might these practises enable people an
imaginative means to cope with rapid social change?
This section has placed the topic's historical perspective on the garden as a specific
moment in late 1990s British television, media and culture. In what follows I discuss
how the people of the study were contacted and recruited, their brief biographies,
how they were 'classed' and how the interviews in domestic settings took shape.
Towards an Ethnography of Ordinary Gardening
Why ethnography?: key traditions in cultural studies and feminism
Cultural studies has always sustained a steady stream of ethnographic work (Moores
1996; Murdock 1997; Turner 1990) and the two traditions share common concerns.
Historically, as a mode of enquiry, ethnography has links with the ethos of how
culture was theorised by early writers in British cultural studies (Van Loon 2001). In
the historiographical accounts of early culturalists (Hoggart 1957; Williams 1989)
for example, the historical continuity of the English working-class, (outlined in
more detail in chapter 2), operated at the mundane level of ordinary, everyday life
experience. Research in the culturalist tradition centred on the generation of shared
meanings by members of groups or societies in the midst of particular cultural
phenomena. For them, ordinary people were theorised as active agents, responsible
for generating their own sense of world-being. These emphases show the intrinsic
connections between culturalism and how ethnography can be deployed: 2 both
underline the pivotal role of everyday life and its meaningfulness for members as
they define it 'from below'; both place an emphasis on charting specific examples of
sense-making in lived culture; both are committed to uncovering and valuing local
knowledges; and both are concerned to chart these meanings on their own terms.
For thinkers who align themselves with the culturalist strand of thought in cultural
studies, the act of deriving meanings from sustained social contact with agents
and recording and representing them on their own terms impacts on how theory
2 It is important to stress that ethnographic methods are not essentially linked to either
cultural politics or feminism. As Skeggs (2001) argues, ethnographic methods have been used
as tools for government agencies and for justifying colonialism, in other words ethnography,
in some hands has been used for 'highly dubious ends' (2001, 5). It can, however, as I argue
here, be used in politically empowering ways.