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Resumo

Horticulture – like many other traditional crafts in Britain – is said to suffer from a 'skills problem'. A recent survey suggests that one of the reasons for this is increased outsourcing of horticultural work from public employers to private contractors. While anthropologists have generally acknowledged the politics of learning, they have had little to say about enskillment in work contexts which have been reconfigured in a way that leaves hardly any room for institutionalized methods of learning. Private gardening contractors are an example of such a work context, and in this article I scrutinize their practices to show the various ways in which enskillment is inhibited. Rather than referring to the concept of 'deskilling' – usually evoked in discussions of skills problems – I employ the notion of an inhibition of enskillment in order to emphasize that every feature that fosters skill also has a 'shadow side' to it which bears a potential to inhibit skill. Implicit in this argument is a critique of neoliberal work practices which shape enskillment as well as the natural environment.

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