Café Ethnography : the uses of tables and chairs

Café Ethnography:
The observable differences between cafés become accountable matters to café
socialites through the scenic details of cafés; background noise, seating arrangements
around tables, crockery and a loose articulation of many other 'foolish things'. We
have foregrounded the craft production of our study café's ambience and banal work
of table clearing to contrast this unfinished ordinary business with the top-down
imposition or bottom-up rise of a Western ideology or prevailing spirit of the times. It
is just the kind of queueing, reading door-signs, table-setting, table clearing,
chattering and sharing that make it a gathering place for its suburban neighbourhood.
As Hetherington puts it with reference to eighteenth century tea tables:
'This space the we call the tea table inscribes a set of possible relations. Those relations are
not homogeneous in themselves. Rather, like a strand in a piece of cloth, they form a spatial
assemblage through which agency is distributed. Agency is not the property of subjects.
Rather, it might better be described as a space for action by subjects and objects.' (p210)
(Hetherington 1996)
We are thus not arguing that the small things of life, like coffee cups, need
'celebrating', though we would argue that they are often overlooked in the attempt to
ground (or even 'embed') social order in suitably big objects, like coffee houses or 'the
public sphere' or 'globalism' or even 'context'. Our argument is that places are
massively ordered, or as Sacks put it (Sacks 1984) there is 'order at all points'. It is a
heterogeneous order, a finely grained and lived accomplishment which is spatially
distributed and distributive of space (Crabtree 2000; Latour 1997). Places like the
Flaming Cup should be visited by researchers with an interest in informality and
social order, to sample the ambience, its fine home-baking and to learn from
vernacular experts how informality and an open-ness to others is done.
spaces which are made releveant and displayed by and for participants. For a similar clarification of
ethnomethodology's relationship to Habermas's theory of communicative action, see (Bogen 1989)
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