Agriculture Reference
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different perspective on the connection between class and culture, began to enjoy
popularity in the 1980s, that class reappeared on the socio-cultural agenda.
Yet while Hoggart and Williams have been criticised even beyond the charges
levelled by Savage (2000a) for over-sentimentalising working-class life and for
romanticising the collectivism of working-class community (Bourke 1994), aspects
of this topic on the cultural practice of gardening rest on tenets of the legacy of
left-culturalism. Firstly, their cultural critique provided a challenge to both liberal
and conservative brands of humanism, political philosophies which have no real
interest in the value of working-class culture. Liberal humanist values continue to
under-pin dominant British national cultural institutions which promote, fund and
disseminate ideas about gardening. As a result, facets of the media, funding bodies,
local councils and historic houses and gardens tend to prescribe cultural messages
about the 'right' garden aesthetics, about 'great' gardens and gardeners and such
messages tend to marginalise the ordinary and the working-class. Left-culturalism
insists that the working-class be included and valued in questions of what constitutes
culture. Secondly, they argued for the recognition that cultural analysis should widen
to include ordinary things, activities and artefacts of everyday culture; the focus
of this study - lifestyle gardening television, gardening practices, gardeners and
the aesthetics of domestic gardens - is an analytical investigation about what is
interesting about the mundane. Thirdly, their work emphasises the value of lived
experience of peoples' 'whole way of life' as a worthwhile addition to the agenda
of the culturally valuable. And finally, they believed that common people have the
collective capacity to actively generate creative practices and shared meanings.
However, while I am indebted to early cultural studies work in terms of aspects
of its principles on class, my work is also concerned with dynamics of both class and
gender. Unfortunately, as feminist critics have argued, early cultural studies work
has been attacked by feminists for charting historical accounts on class which ignore
the lived experience of working-class women's lives:
That “full sense of a way of life”…from Williams lies at the root of the problem. As a
version of “society” it belongs firmly to the cultural sphere, where, as we shall show, it
invokes both the private and the domestic, but then for historical reasons, it excludes
women as subjects (Jardine and Swindells 1989, 129).
Similarly, Nava (1992: 9) argues that in Williams's autobiographical work on his
own intellectual history in Politics and Letters (1979), there are no references to
the female forms of labour which made his intellectual and academic life possible,
for example, the parenting of his children or to domestic labour in his household. In
these ways, one can see how the humanist element of left-culturalism, as feminists
have claimed (Weedon 1987), tends to figure as an ungendered category, in which
speaking for humankind produces accounts which tend to reproduce men's accounts
of the lived experience of cultural history. It is for these reasons that I now turn to
Skeggs (1997), who manages to blend the valuable tenets of early cultural studies
mentioned above, with a Bourdieusian perspective on class, but whose commitment
to feminist theory provides an ethnographic study of ordinary working-class lives to
produce a classed and gendered account of subjective identity.
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