Gardening Taste: Theoretical Concepts and Framework - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 43

…is rendered remote and mysterious because it is only ever implicitly communicated to
them. By virtue of their upbringing they lack the necessary practical mastery which is
required to recognise it without recognising it, hence they cannot acquire it competently
or authentically (Jenkins 2002, 108-09).
In these ways, the practice of symbolic violence, or the ways access to forms to
educational skills in a culture are governed, act to reproduce class differences from
generation to generation.
This section has outlined the mainframe theoretical concepts which I take up in
subsequent chapters of the topic. In what follows, I discuss a collection of studies
as a means to show why class still matters as a social descriptor and as an analytical
tool.
Class, Difference, Lifestyle and the Everyday
Whether social class still holds credence as a category in contemporary social life
has been the focus of intense debate. Some critics suggest that the present period
is characterised - not by the singular category of class identification - but rather
by, 'changing forms of identification' (Chaney 1996, 95). A consideration of the
processes of social change offers one way to understand why the solidity of social
class has recently undergone challenge from social theorists. Chaney (1996) for
example, argues that contemporary culture is undergoing a shift from ways of life
to lifestyle in which privatised forms of leisure are replacing public, communal
forms of cultural participation. 1 For Chaney lifestyles epitomise the 'privatisation
of communal life' (Chaney 1996, 95). As a consequence, Chaney suggests that the
'language of social description and explanation' (ibid.) are also undergoing change:
traditional assumptions about the solidity of collective phenomena, such as social
classes and communities, and how they affect or shape individual action and identity,
are de-stabilised. As Chaney further illustrates:
This is not because this type of entity has become less 'real' or powerful in processes
of cultural change; they were always metaphorical fictions or analytic devices, but they
seemed more persuasive when the terms of social identity were less malleable (Chaney
1996, 95).
Chaney's argument shows that in the contemporary climate social class can never be
a monolithic concept, capable of describing an agent's sole sense of identity. Nor as
the literature below illustrates, is class still thought of as a collective identity in the
way in which the early culturalists conceived it.
However, some critics emphasise the continued structural salience of class,
stressing both the continuity of class inequality and its continued impact on how
people choose to announce and establish class location. For example, in Walkerdine
et al.'s (2001) twenty year empirical study on young women, they argue, 'it is class
1 One can set the development of gardening as a leisure activity against the backcloth
of Chaney's argument, since gardening - as I show in chapter 2 - signalled a shift from
communal and collective recreation to privatised, home-centred leisure.