Histories and Context - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 34

This section has focused on thinkers who have argued both for the cultural
validity of ordinary culture and for the importance of the inclusion of ordinariness
in cultural analysis. The following section defines what 'ordinariness' means for this
topic at both micro and macro levels.
Ordinariness, Identity and Everyday Life
Gronow and Warde note in their introduction to Ordinary Consumption that,
'the sociology of consumption has concentrated unduly on the more spectacular
visual aspects of consumer behaviour' (1999, 3-4). By contrast, this topic is about
ordinariness. Firstly, it is about ordinary micro-entities which are fastened to practices
of everyday living: it is about gardening which is seen as profoundly mundane; it
is about the home as a setting - often seen as everybody's everyday 'base', the
fundamental grounding of ordinary living; it is about television and magazines -
ordinary media forms embedded within everyday life; it is about lifestyle media
programmes, characterised by their 'lack of anything special, their very triviality,
their ordinariness' (Bonner 2003, 2), programmes which use everyday life as a
primary resource 'not just as topics but as guides to style, appearance and behaviour'
(Bonner 2003, 32); it is about ordinary places - thought of as too unremarkable
for anyone to consider or write about; it is about ordinary, unknown people - the
subjects of this study - whose voices have never before been officially recorded; and
it is about giving both history and place to the ordinary practices and life-worlds of
unremarkable people in humdrum settings.
And secondly, these micro-entities are set against macro-changes, experienced
as a wider cultural shift in which everyday life and processes of 'ordinari-ization'
(Brunsdon et al. 2001, 53) which became increasingly significant in the 1990s.
Chaney (2002) argues that this shift can be understood as a result of two processes:
what he terms 'radical democratisation' and 'cultural fragmentation' (Chaney 2002,
5). In relation to the first, Chaney holds that public discourse has become increasingly
dominated by forms of populism. In relation to public media discourse for example,
news and current affairs programmes have been subject to increased tabloidization
(Turner 1999); and as I explore in depth in chapter 5, television has changed
historically to become more 'ordinary': it simply contains more ordinary people
and its concerns embrace the quotidian (Bonner 2003; Taylor 2002). In relation to
the latter, Chaney argues that traditional forms of cultural authority are becoming
'increasingly dissipated and discredited'; in this way, 'cultural fragmentation' has led
to a 'broader process of informalisation' (Chaney 2002, 5). This is culturally manifest
in forms of televisual discourse where forms of civic knowledge, hitherto imparted by
legislators, are being replaced in the contemporary climate by interpreters conveying
forms of consumer knowledge. As a result, as I argue in chapter 5, expertise has been
levelled down and democratised and is increasingly represented in more ordinary
forms. In these ways, ordinariness and everyday life are central to both the micro-
and the macro-concerns of this study.
Ordinariness is a term which is always in need of qualification. Felski's (2000)
discussion of ordinariness and everyday life however, provides a detailed definition