Café Ethnography : the uses of tables and chairs

The tabletop as a sequential phenomenon
Café Ethnography:
fig 3. A tabletop at the Flaming Cup with glasses ready to be cleared and soup and
bread newly arrived (there is cutlery still wrapped in paper napkins behind the
vertical card in the middle of the table)
Whilst doing his ethnographic work in the Flaming Cup, and at several other cafes
and bars, Eric took numerous photographs as traces of tabletop activities to assist in
documenting and remembering how artefacts were organised on the table (see Fig.s:
3,4,5,6). Eric's photographing of tabletops was part of the reflexive organisation of his
work as an ethnographer. It is not worth dwelling on this issue for very long except to
note that it was his work to produce accounts of the activities of members at and on
tabletops, often by reference to photographs such as the ones included in this article,
and it is not usually the work of people in cafes to produce lengthy descriptions of
what happened at a café table during any particular informal interaction.
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