Agriculture Reference
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I want to draw on Sara Ahmed's (2004) 'sociality of emotions' model for
thinking about how feelings were shared and exchanged amongst the people of the
study. She argues that objects or practices of emotion circulate and become saturated
with affect within a community. And since this is a 'grey' study, her argument that
emotions accumulate over time in ways that accrue affective value is especially
germane. This chapter is an attempt to cautiously outline the tensions coming out of
my empirical data around the question of emotional value. If the people of the study
make emotional investments in gardening as hobby - what do such sentimental
investments motor? Are they transmitted to other people or do they reside in
practices, skills or in aesthetics? This focus on the question of emotional value takes
me to Nowotny (1981) and Reay's (2000) work - scholars who extend Bourdieu's
concept of capital to develop what Nowotny first termed 'emotional capital'. Could
the emotional resources I identify in my data exist as a type of emotional - or perhaps
even sentimental capital? But if sentimentality is given, as Knight argues, 'near
universal condemnation … taken as a fault that it is taken as a mark of moral decline
(or worse) in moral or aesthetic sensibility' (Knight 1999: 411), can 'sentimental
capital', which I later show is a resource which has shared value for the people of the
study, have any exchange or conversion potential beyond its local contexts?
Emotional Capital
The newcomer to the concept of 'emotional capital' could be forgiven for making the
economistic assumption that emotional capital is generated out of positive attributes
that might confer further forms of capital accumulation. In fact, it is a complex type
of capital, which also carries potential for halts and barriers to further investment
and tradeability because it circulates in classed and gendered contexts. For Nowotny,
emotional capital is a species of social capital that belongs specifically to women
and is located firmly in the private sphere. It consists of 'knowledge, contacts and
relations as well as access to emotionally valued skills and assets which hold within
any social network characterised at least partly by affective ties' (ibid.) Its forms
consist of the resources generated within the affective circle of family and friends,
which are transmitted as investments from mothers to children and husbands; in
this sense it is a self-less form of capital: devoured by others, for the benefit of
others. Moreover, in Nowotny's thinking, emotional capital cannot be converted to
economic capital: 'limited to the private sphere …it is of little value in the outside
world' (ibid.). What Nowotny's model shows, is that emotional capital is generative
of positive attributes - support, skills, valuing and encouragement - but it is a form
of capital that nourishes the tradeability of other capitals. I want to argue that in
relation to my study, where there were scant cultural resources, emotional capital
fuelled forms of self-valuing within local contexts with meagre currency beyond
it. In this way, the link between capitals shows how local affective investments in
particular aesthetic practices continue to reproduce themselves in local alternative
circuits.
Reay (2000) also theorises emotional capital as gendered capital in her empirical
work on mother's involvement in children's schooling, and she builds on Nowotny's
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