Theoretical and methodological possibilities for interpretation of taste and consumption in the ornamental plants market
Rev. Sem Aspas, Araraquara, v. 12, n. 00, e023012, 2023. e-ISSN: 2358-4238
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29373/sas.v12i00.18098 6
(HONDAGNEU- SOTELO, 2014) in the United States. There is, therefore, an apparent lack of
interest on the part of Social Sciences to consider ornamental plants as scientifically relevant.
A possible explanation for this fact involves the argument of Norbert Elias (2008; 2016),
that modern science and the Human Sciences, develop on a dualistic belief, which divides
scientific phenomena into natural and non-natural ones. Natural Sciences would be responsible
for studying so-called natural phenomena, while Social Sciences would be responsible for
interpreting the non-natural. Thus, objects linked to the so-called natural, such as plants and
animals, are rarely objects of study in the Social Sciences. For such duality, so-called natural
objects would not have a relevant historical, political, and cultural substrate.
According to Elias (2008), one of the main distinctions between Social Sciences and
Biology and Chemistry is their inability to study human beings in isolation from their
relationships with the context in which they are inserted and with other human beings. This
means that it is not a question of considering ornamental plants as isolated entities in a pre-
human environment, but of measuring them as a product of the social. In this way, we consider
ornamental plants as carriers of a social substrate, which cannot be measured and explained
separately from their meanings and significance attributed to human beings.
Therefore, to study the theme of ornamental plants, we must adopt, in addition to an
exercise of constant epistemological vigilance, techniques of rupture (BOURDIEU,
CHAMBODERON, PASSERON, 1999) to circumvent the spontaneous sociology crystallized
in its scientific measurement. This common-sense essentializes ornamental plants into merely
biological entities. For this common-sense, it would be a construction of a supposed Darwinian
evolutionary process, emptied of any human, social, and cultural influence.
It is necessary to question and confront interpretation schemes for ornamental plants
that seek to empty them of a historically, politically, and culturally situated context, and
consider them as carriers of relevant sociological and anthropological meaning and
significance. Furthermore, as highlighted by Bourdieu, Chamboredon, and Passeron (1999),
this spontaneous sociology creates practical explanations such as images and interpretations
that discourage the search for answers that go beyond appearances.
In other words, some of these images could be classified according to the
nature, biological or mechanical, to which they refer or according to the
implicit philosophies of the social that they suggest: balance, pressure, force,
tension, reflection, root, body, cell, secretion, growth, regulation, gestation,
weakening, etc. Such interpretation schemes, almost always taken from
physical or biological nature, threaten to convey, under the appearance of
metaphor and homonymy, an inadequate philosophy of social life and, above