Introduction: Towards an Ethnography of Ordinary Gardening - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 13

shares ordinary life dimensions, one of the main arguments of the topic is that people
are always subjectively located by class and gender. Chapter 3 turns to the theoretical
framework of the topic. Arguing that Bourdieu's theoretical concepts and theories
hold 'explanatory power' for understanding social class, I draw on his notion of
habitus, field and forms of capital (1977, 1986), his approach to taste and aesthetics
(1986, 1990b) and his theory of symbolic violence (1990a). Despite the charge that
class is losing its credence as a social category of identification in contemporary
culture (Chaney 1996), I discuss recent empirical literature on lifestyle and class
difference, classed boundaries of belonging and identification and on taste, working-
class (dis) identification and the inequality of lived subjective relations of class and
gender, which show the continued salience of class as a concept. Turning to questions
of gender, I outline why Bourdieu's theory is inadequate for an understanding of
gender, arguing that Butler's (1990) theory of performativity has more to offer my
analysis of modes of gendered gardening. Chapter 4 discusses inter-disciplinary
literature, with a view to historicise and geographically locate my ethnographic study
of ordinary gardens in a small semi-industrial town in West Yorkshire. I argue that
while much has been written about the garden - from liberal humanist, Marxist and
feminist perspectives - it is recent work on the social history of the private domestic
garden which offers the most productive contextual backdrop for the insights about
gardening produced by this topic. Drawing on contemporary social theory, Chapter
5 analyses the textually mediated images of gardens, gardeners and 'personality-
interpreters' provided by the local and national media at the time the ethnographic
data was gathered in the late 1990s. I investigate the importance of lifestyle for the
media and culture industries. Using examples, I look at the predominant themes
and aesthetic concerns of the then contemporary garden. Using both the role of the
'personality-interpreter' and examples of ordinary people in lifestyle programming,
I examine the increased significance of 'ordinariness' in contemporary culture.
Chapters 6, 7 and 8 reveal my ethnographic findings on class, gender and lifestyle
media consumption. Using a Bourdieusian theoretical framework in chapter 6, I
analyse the differences between middle- and working-class gardeners in relation to
what gardening means and the differences in aesthetic disposition of each. Chapter
7 uses ethnographic data to show gardening practises are used to try on (classed)
gendered identities. Using Butler's (1990) notion that gender is a masquerade, and
as a means to examine how the men and women of my study inhabit gendered modes
of being, I ask what tasks men and women perform in the garden. Using a case
study of floristry and flower arranging I ask whether there is a gendered gardening
aesthetic. Using cultural studies literature on media audiences and focusing on the
socio-variables of class, gender and age, I examine the mode of consumption garden
lifestyle takes in chapter 8. By analysing my respondents' approach to the action
of their garden projects, I explore how/ if they imaginatively interpret/ execute
mediated lifestyle ideas. Using Chaney's (2001) work on the contemporary cultural
transition from 'ways of life' to 'lifestyle' I examine what the investment in ordinary
gardening practises meant to the people of the study. Chapter 9 concludes the topic
by arguing that a new kind of capital, 'sentimental capital', is required for attempting
to understand how forms of emotional valuing become fastened to everyday routine
gardening practises - especially amongst the working-class people of the study. I