Caracterización de los Procesos Volcánicos

Figure 5.1: Ted and the Thursday Volunteers

To manage Horwood as a nature reserve requires considerable effort on the part of the Wildlife Trust that administers the reserve, its staff and its volunteers. A visitor to the reserve may encounter individual staff members and volunteers, but these individuals are more likely to be found as part of a work party clearing rides of fallen trees, repairing paths, steps, fences and gates, and coppicing areas of woodland; or in a team surveying and monitoring the reserve’s plants and animals. Maintaining the woodland, including the surveying and monitoring of its wildlife, takes up most of the staff and volunteers’ time and efforts.

Visitors who encounter a conservation work party will observe that it is comprised of mostly older men, and only one or two women or younger individuals. However, if they then encounter a team surveying and monitoring the plants and animals of the reserve, they will observe equal numbers of older men and women, but no younger participants, unless they visit at dusk or after dark, when they will observe teams mostly consisting of younger people involved in the task of surveying and monitoring bats.

If interested in wildlife and conservation our hypothetical visitors may have some understanding of who these people are, what they are doing, and why they are doing it, although those who are not familiar with wildlife and nature reserves may have questions about what is going on. They may go on to speculate what compensation there is for working in ankle deep mud in the cold and wet of winter, being bitten by insects in summer, and generally getting scratched and stabbed by thorny plants at any time of the year.

From their initial observations of these work parties and teams, our visitors will have made some observations that begin to distinguish each group as separate entities that differ according to the activities involved, and the age and gender of the participants. In this chapter my analysis will expand on these hypothetical visitors’ initial observations; to explore the similarities and differences between work parties and teams in order to shed some light on what drives individuals to participate.

My research focuses on one work party of staff and volunteers, and two teams of surveying and monitoring volunteers:

o The Thursday Volunteer Work Party – who carry out much of the practical woodland maintenance and management

o The Wildlife Surveying and Monitoring Volunteers

o The Bat Surveying and Monitoring Volunteers

Analysis of my data confirms that these initial observations of visitors are correct. However, my data also demonstrates that many factors are related to participation, and that a participant’s life trajectory plays a considerable part in which activities they volunteer for.

I argue in this chapter that the practical engagement of staff and volunteers with the reserve can be understood using the concept of ‘dwelling’ (Ingold, 1993). Based on this concept I understand people’s participation in the everyday life of the reserve to be a bodily expression of their commitment to it, and the meaning that the reserve woodland and wildlife has for them. To address this relationship between action and meaning I rely extensively on Bourdieu’s (1977; 1990)

concept of habitus.

Habitus is a complex concept that Desmond (2007 p.12) summarises in a way that highlights its relevance to my research. He proposes that habitus is:

the presence of social and organizational structures in individuals’ bodies in the form of durable and generative dispositions that guide their thoughts and behaviors. As embodied history, as internalized and forgotten socialization, one’s habitus is the source of one's practical sense.

The habitus as a source of practical sense is relevant to understanding the everyday life of the reserve, as the reserve is a realm of practical action.

The potential for habitus to change and develop over the life-course is used as a route to understand informants’ involvement, and to explore the relationship between habitus and practical involvement in the reserve. The conceptualisation of stages of habitus offered by Bourdieu (1977), Desmond (2007) and Wacquant (2004; 2005; 2014a; 2014b; 2015) is introduced as an analytical tool. These authors have theorised that habitus develops from general to the specific. For instance, Wacquant (2014a) comments on the possibility of tertiary, quaternary, quinary [sic], etc. stages of habitus, and I will discuss these in relation to the older volunteers later in this chapter. In recognising general and specific forms of habitus, these authors propose that habitus evolves as social actors encounter and experience domestic, educational and employment fields, and acquire dispositions that are appropriate towards engaging in such fields. They identify a general habitus with values, attitudes and dispositions that are acquired often imperceptibly in early childhood within the family, and argue that these may be present throughout life. The dispositions of a secondary habitus are acquired when social actors encounter other fields, such as the academic and/or employment field. By scrutinising the life trajectories of my informants through the cultural fields that they encounter during their progress through life, I identify how the experiences of such fields are reflected in their habitus, and relate to their involvement in the everyday activities of the reserve.

different ways. Each has a unique relationship with the reserve; however, in these relationships patterns of involvement are discernible. The most apparent of these patterns involves informants having: a thirst for knowledge, a desire to be in the outdoors and an interest in the nonhuman world. To aid my analysis of these patterns of involvement, I first define the participants as staff or volunteers and make a distinction, within the volunteer group, between those who are involved in practical conservation activities, wildlife monitoring in general, and those who specifically volunteer to monitor bats. The justification for these categories is discussed in detail in Chapter Three.

In what follows, I first consider the staff, outlining their gender, age, class, education and social background, their life trajectories and the complex relationship between these characteristics and their practical engagement with the reserve. I then use the same format to consider the volunteers.

The Staff

Three employees ran the reserve on a day-to-day basis. Ted managed the reserve but also had other management roles within the Trust. He was employed by the Trust from 2001 to 2011 as reserve manager. Nick was employed full time as reserve manager from 2011 until the present day. This was his sole role. Paul and Phil were employed on a part-time basis and assisted the reserve’s managers in the practical management of the reserve. A fourth staff member of the Trust, Belle was conscripted as an informant as she was actively involved with the reserve through her role as a volunteer coordinator for the organisation with overall responsibility for the Trust’s volunteers.

These staff members were all under the age of thirty-five at the time of my study, and all but one were men. Applying the occupational classification of parents to denote class background Ted, Nick, Phil and Paul's families of origin were middle-class while Belle’s was working-class. Belle, Ted, and Paul were university graduates. Ted continued in postgraduate education and gained a PhD. Nick continued his education at an agricultural college. Phil was the only staff member who did not enter further or higher education, having left school at the age of sixteen.