The native in the garden: Floral politics and cultural entrepreneurs

Citation: Kerry Dobransky, Gary Fine (2006) The native in the garden: Floral politics and cultural entrepreneurs. Sociological Forum (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.1007/s11206-006-9040-4
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1007/s11206-006-9040-4
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1007/s11206-006-9040-4
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): The native in the garden: Floral politics and cultural entrepreneurs
Tagged: cultural entrepreneurship (RSS), state flowers (RSS), United States (RSS), native plants (RSS)

Summary

This article is a excellent, if somewhat whimsical, look at the political argument around the selection (and changes in particular) of official state flowers in the United States. The paper is written by ethnographers and makes extensive use of archival information in the form of state law registries and newspapers and other public information the time periods around switches and arguments. The paper also includes data from a series of the interviews that the authors do with lawmakers and people involved in the debates.

The sociological framing is in terms of cultural entrepreneurs and people trying to use official symbols as ways of making statements, from positions of authority, in favor of qualities associated with belonging in a statement. A key aspect of many of the debates in Dobransky and Fine is concept of "nativeness" which figures in the title of the article as well. Many of the debates around whether a plant was appropriate centered on issues of whether a plant was native. Of course, understanding what it exactly to means to be native, or naturally belonging to a place or to a political entity, is a question that Dobransky and Fine attempt to get at in their exploration.

After surveying both the conceptual and phenomena-based field (as it were), Dobransky and Fine focus on two more lengthy explorations in the form of a series of debates in New Hampshire over the Lilac, Alabama over the goldenrod and the camellia, and in Indiana over a series of changes between a number of different flowers that included the tulip tree, the zinnia, and the peony.

The results are a sort of microcosm of cultural entrepreneurship in politics. The major theory is under-emphasized but the context is extraordinary rich in political sociological detail.

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

The paper is not yet widely cited, nor particularly well known, but it is rich in detail that may be of interest to anyone interested in the sociology of politics -- or in the politics and sociology of horticulture.