Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 9
Emotion and Value
Introduction
In this final chapter, I want to encapsulate the topic's historical findings on classed
and gendered taste cultures in the ordinary garden and its relationship to lifestyle
media culture, recording as I do my concluding remarks about a particular moment
in British media and cultural history in the late 1990s. I also want to end the topic
by tentatively sketching out an attempt to theorise how the working-class people of
the study use and make their own forms of value through gardening. In doing so,
I revisit Bourdieu by extending his concept of capital as a means of exploring the
emotional resources, produced out of affective familial ties, which become fastened
to the skills, knowledge and assets that are drawn upon to make gardens. Arguing
that such a resource is held, circulated, exchanged and traded in local contexts I draw
on both Nowotny (1981) and Reay's (2000) concept of 'emotional capital' to argue
that the valuing located in this small-scale study might act as a form of 'sentimental
capital.' I chart how gardening with sentimental attachments became manifest in the
empirical data: through what gardening means, familial passed down practices and
in relation to sentimental feelings provoked by condemnation of lifestyle garden
television. For it was here, where opposing aesthetic value systems (national vs.
local and lifestyle vs. ways of life) met, that I got a clear sense of how the working-
class gardeners in particular, had developed a way of conceptualising their hobby
using emotional resources of self-valuing. In this final chapter I argue that these
affective resources are expressive of a local alternative value system that insists on
reproducing community valued aesthetics in an emotional politics of resistance to
lifestyle culture, aesthetics and consumerism.
Gardening with Sentimental Attachments
One of the findings that emanated through the study was the specific set of emotions
experienced by the respondents. What comes through aspects of the data, was that
in talking about their gardening as an everyday enthusiasm, the people of the study
felt at certain points, 'tender, comforting emotions and gentle feelings' (Knight
1999, 411). They felt caring, affection, sympathy and sharing but also wistfulness,
nostalgia, maudlin: emotions that are commonly associated with sentimentality.
Some of them were powerful - particularly in relation to the deeply sentimental
Search WWH ::
Custom Search