Introduction: Towards an Ethnography of Ordinary Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 5

is positioned in ethnographic projects. In their opening manifesto to the first issue
of Ethnography (2000) for example, Willis and Trondman argue for '”theoretically
informed” ethnographic study' (2000, 6), but for them the knowledge produced
by ethnography should never be 'pre-figured' by theory. Rather, as Willis argued
in 1980, ethnography, 'has directed its followers towards a profoundly important
methodological possibility - that of being 'surprised' , of reaching knowledge not
prefigured in one's starting paradigm' (Willis 1996, 90). Ideally for Trondman and
Willis (2000), ethnographic evidence should actually modify and refine theory:
'ethnographic writing,' they argue, 'has a crucial role to play in reshaping “theory”
and in finding accommodations between, as well as forging new lines and directions
from, social theorists' (Willis and Trondman 2000, 8). Some ethnographic work
demonstrates how agency can contribute to the production of structure. In Learning
to Labour (1977) for example, Willis demonstrates how the agency of 'the lads', their
decisions and strategies for coping with the British class system, partially helped
to structure the reproduction of class divisions. In this way, ethnographic methods
enable the researcher to reconstruct a perspective from below in a way which shows
the link between subjective micro-politics of everyday life and the macro-power
structures which inhere within culture.
While I have so far sought to trace the mutual connections between cultural
studies and ethnographic methods, there are also intellectual affinities between
cultural studies and feminism. Both are concerned with the oppressed and with
the role of lived experience (Gray 1997). Both have valorised the aim to represent
the lives, voices and experiences of the silenced and the subaltern and both have
fought a mutual antagonistic battle with academe as a consequence. 3 There have
been a number of feminists working within media, film and cultural studies who
have also been influenced by audience-reception studies, whose work focuses
specifically on women's uses of the media. Studies such as Hermes's (1995) Reading
Women's Magazines examines women's reading repertoires and everyday modes
of consumption of magazines; Stacey's (1994) Star Gazing investigates acts of
spectatorship and the role of female film stars in women's memories of wartime
and post-war Britain; and Gray's (1992) Video Playtime examines class and taste in
relation to women's use of VCR technology in the context of the gendered power
dynamics of the household.
I want to place my own research within these traditions: the culturalist strand
of cultural studies and feminism. I draw on its techniques because its methods are
suitable for the kind of knowledge about ordinary gardening my topic aims to produce.
This study shares the early culturalist mission to value peoples' lived experience at
the level of ordinary, everyday culture. It seeks to uncover the shared meanings
and collective activities which inhere in gardening and it relates them to the wider
cultural context in which experience is located. It envisions people as active agents,
capable of creating their own sense of being-in-the-world. And it aspires to develop
and represent local knowledge - as far as possible, on its own terms - about the
3 I do not mean to deny that while the two disciplines are affined in some ways, the
relationship has been without problems. For an account of the tensions at BCCCS during the
1970s and 1980s see Brunsdon (1996) and Gray (1997).