There's a new number of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography out this month and it's a special issue on 'seldom told tales from the field'.  These are of course our sociological cousins having a natter about the complications of ethnographic fieldwork: anthropologists like to keep it a mysterious rite of passage. 

There's a lot of grist in this issue for those who like their ethnography with added sex and violence, but as I have classier tastes I went straight for Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo's Cultivating Questions for a Sociology of Gardens.  It turns out that while our Durkheim-clutching friends across the hall can sort themselves out to frankly discuss ethnography, what they apparently can't do is cope with the idea that someone might want to study gardening.  Hondagneu-Sotelo, as a full professor (not just in the American sense) at USC, is far from the hapless research initiate that, say, a PhD student looking at tradition in Britain might be, so I don't think we've got an effect here of "oh, look at that ninny flailing about".  So, come on sociologists, dig for victory or geography will leave you in the dust! 

More seriously, Hondagneu-Sotelo does throw about some reasons for why this might be, principally that sociology's niche is typically conceptualised as studying power relations and modernity so gardening is considered 'frivolous and banal' (506) within this.  Fortunately she fights gardening's corner, mustering a lit review of broad scholarship which has already had me library-ordering in Kenneth Helphand's Defiant Gardens.  She also turns to her own research, and research conducted with Hernan Ramirez, to show that gardens are indeed deeply socially, politically, and economically embedded. 

Good stuff! 

When I worked on a market garden in the East Riding, my boss was part of a small network of local organic producers.  They'd get together to go over planting, so that rather than everyone growing say, beans, and then fighting each other to sell them, they'd all grow different things.  This co-op of sorts gave everyone a market for their produce. 

But they also had to agree to buy from each other.  When my boss needed corn to sell to her customers, she would call her friend the corn grower.  It would have made economic sense to contact a wholesaler and get corn for the cheapest price, but it made better sense for her to work within the network.

In 'Contacts and Contracts', in the latest Ethnography, sociologist Darren Thiel spots these sort of non-economic networks on a central London construction site.  The construction firm (managed by white, I assume middle-class, people from Kent) employ a bunch of subcontractors to get the work done, and these subcontractors employ their own workers who tend to be from the same ethnic group and locality.  So we have the Irish labourers, the Seychelles plasterers, and the North London painters, amongst others.

Thiel has some lovely ethnography here looking at why these 'birds of a feather flock together' and why they keep on flocking (in the free world).  They tend to recruit from within relationship networks ("I've got a mate who can paint"), and there are network-specific codes of care which work to maintain loyalty.  The boss who "sorts out" a worker in hard times can count on loyalty; the worker caught stealing from others will be drummed out of the network.  And all these networks are kept attached to the building firm by plenty of boozy perks.

That these networks are not economically rational is partly a reminder of just how much our supposedly rational political-economic system really isn't.  One of Thiel's case studies, a capable worker who repeatedly declines higher-paying higher-status employment from the firm itself in order to stay within his network, might also point to an over-use of the concept of networking as a means of getting to the top, whereas they might just be means of being human in an economic system which wants to be resolutely not. 

There is another great example of people exploiting a structure in order to make their lives easier within it in the same volume.  Charles Kirke, an anthropologist with 30 years experience in the British Army, draws on his background to take a look at squaddie rule-breaking in 'Orders is orders ... aren't they?'.  The supplies which disappear ... the officer symbolically punished ... rules bent or played within.  Kirke draws on Goffman to analyse different types of rule-breaking, which is nice, despite the oddness of fitting rule-breaking into theoretical rules. 

One particular ethnographic vignette concerns 'buckshees' ('backsheesh' - there's a fascinating wee colonial throwback appearing in army slang), or unrecorded equipment.  The equipment is hoarded and used in an informal swapping network which bypasses labyrinthine official processes to get squads everything they need.  It's a fascinating study in how the most rule-oriented institutions are as much driven by organic interaction as they are by bureaucracy. 

There's nowt queer as folk ... or as crafty. 

And of course, 'tis A Beautiful Thing to see two British fieldsites in Ethnography.