Kate Fox

Watching the English

WATCHING THE ENGLISH

The Hidden Rules of

English Behaviour

Kate Fox

HODDER & STOUGHTON

Kate Fox, a social anthropologist, is Co-Director of the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford and a Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Research. Following an erratic education in England, America, Ireland and France, she studied anthropology and philosophy at Cambridge.

‘Watching the English . . . will make you laugh out loud (“Oh God. I do that!”) and cringe simultaneously (“Oh God. I do that as well.”). This is a hilarious book which just shows us for what we are . . . beautifully-observed. It is a wonderful read for both the English and those who look at us and wonder why we do what we do. Now they’ll know.’

Birmingham Post

‘Fascinating reading.’

Oxford Times

‘The book captivates at the first page. It’s fun. It’s also embarrassing. “Yes . . . yes,” the reader will constantly exclaim. “I’m always doing that”’.

Manchester Evening News

‘There’s a qualitative difference in the results, the telling detail that adds real weight. Fox brings enough wit and insight to her portrayal of the tribe to raise many a smile of recognition. She has a talent for observation, bringing a sharp and humorous eye and ear to everyday conventions, from the choreography of the English queue to the curious etiquette of weather talk.’

The Tablet

‘It’s a fascinating and insightful book, but what really sets it apart is the informal style aimed squarely at the intelligent layman.’

City Life, Manchester

‘Fascinating . . . Every aspect of English conversation and behaviour is put under the microscope. Watching the English is a thorough study which is interesting and amusing.’

Western Daily Press

‘Enjoyable good fun, with underlying seriousness – a book to dip into at random and relish for its many acute observations.’

Leicester Mercury

Also by Kate Fox

The Racing Tribe: Watching the Horsewatchers

Pubwatching with Desmond Morris

Passport to the Pub:

The Tourist’s Guide to Pub Etiquette

Drinking and Public Disorder

(with Dr Peter Marsh)

WATCHING THE ENGLISH

The Hidden Rules of

English Behaviour

Kate Fox

HODDER & STOUGHTON

Copyright © 2004 by Kate Fox

The right of Kate Fox to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN 978 1 84894 050 5

Book ISBN 978 0 340 81886 2

Hodder and Stoughton Ltd

A division of Hodder Headline

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

To Henry, William, Sarah and Katharine

CONTENTS

Introduction – Anthropology at Home

PART ONE: CONVERSATION CODES

The Weather

Grooming-talk

Humour Rules

Linguistic Class Codes

Emerging Talk-rules: The Mobile Phone

Pub-talk

PART TWO: BEHAVIOUR CODES

Home Rules

Rules of the Road

Work to Rule

Rules of Play

Dress Codes

Food Rules

Rules of Sex

Rites of Passage

Conclusion: Defining Englishness

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

References

INTRODUCTION

ANTHROPOLOGY AT HOME

I

am sitting in a pub near Paddington station, clutching a small brandy. It’s only about half past eleven in the morning – a bit early for drinking, but the alcohol is part reward, part Dutch courage. Reward because I have just spent an exhausting morning accidentally-on-purpose bumping into people and counting the number who said ‘Sorry’; Dutch courage because I am now about to return to the train station and spend a few hours committing a deadly sin: queue jumping.

I really, really do not want to do this. I want to adopt my usual method of getting an unsuspecting research assistant to break sacred social rules while I watch the result from a safe distance. But this time, I have bravely decided that I must be my own guinea pig. I don’t feel brave. I feel scared. My arms are all bruised from the bumping experiments. I want to abandon the whole stupid Englishness project here and now, go home, have a cup of tea and lead a normal life. Above all, I do not want to go and jump queues all afternoon.

Why am I doing this? What exactly is the point of all this ludicrous bumping and jumping (not to mention all the equally daft things I’ll be doing tomorrow)? Good question. Perhaps I’d better explain.

THE ‘GRAMMAR’ OF ENGLISHNESS

We are constantly being told that the English have lost their national identity – that there is no such thing as ‘Englishness’. There has been a spate of books bemoaning this alleged identity crisis, with titles ranging from the plaintive Anyone for England? to the inconsolable England: An Elegy. Having spent much of the past twelve years doing research on various aspects of English culture and social behaviour – in pubs, at racecourses, in shops, in night-clubs, on trains, on street corners – I am convinced that there is such a thing as ‘Englishness’, and that reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated. In the research for this book, I set out to discover the hidden, unspoken rules of English behaviour, and what these rules tell us about our national identity.

The object was to identify the commonalities in rules governing English behaviour – the unofficial codes of conduct that cut across class, age, sex, region, sub-cultures and other social boundaries. For example, Women’s Institute members and leather-clad bikers may seem, on the surface, to have very little in common, but by looking beyond the ‘ethnographic dazzle’1 of superficial differences, I found that Women’s Institute members and bikers, and other groups, all behave in accordance with the same unwritten rules – rules that define our national identity and character. I would also maintain, with George Orwell, that this identity ‘is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature’.

My aim, if you like, was to provide a ‘grammar’ of English behaviour. Native speakers can rarely explain the grammatical rules of their own language. In the same way, those who are most ‘fluent’ in the rituals, customs and traditions of a particular culture generally lack the detachment necessary to explain the ‘grammar’ of these practices in an intelligible manner. This is why we have anthropologists.

Most people obey the unwritten rules of their society instinctively, without being conscious of doing so. For example, you automatically get dressed in the morning without consciously reminding yourself that there is an unspoken rule of etiquette that prohibits going to work in one’s pyjamas. But if you had an anthropologist staying with you and studying you, she would be asking: ‘Why are you changing your clothes?’ ‘What would happen if you went to work in pyjamas?’ ‘What else can’t you wear to work?’ ‘Why is it different on Fridays?’ ‘Does everyone in your company do that?’ ‘Why don’t the senior managers follow the Dress-down Friday custom?’ And on, and on, until you were heartily sick of her. Then she would go and watch and interrogate other people – from different groups within your society – and, hundreds of nosy questions and observations later, she would eventually decipher the ‘grammar’ of clothing and dress in your culture (see Dress Codes, page 267).

PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Anthropologists are trained to use a research method known as ‘participant observation’, which essentially means participating in the life and culture of the people one is studying, to gain a true insider’s perspective on their customs and behaviour, while simultaneously observing them as a detached, objective scientist. Well, that’s the theory. In practice it often feels rather like that children’s game where you try to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time. It is perhaps not surprising that anthropologists are notorious for their frequent bouts of ‘field-blindness’ – becoming so involved and enmeshed in the native culture that they fail to maintain the necessary scientific detachment. The most famous example of such rose-tinted ethnography was of course Margaret Mead, but there was also Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who wrote a book entitled The Harmless People, about a tribe who turned out to have a homicide rate higher than that of Chicago.

There is a great deal of agonizing and hair-splitting among anthropologists over the participant-observation method and the role of the participant observer. In my last book, The Racing Tribe, I made a joke of this, borrowing the language of self-help psychobabble and expressing the problem as an ongoing battle between my Inner Participant and my Inner Observer. I described the bitchy squabbles in which these two Inner voices engaged every time a conflict arose between my roles as honorary member of the tribe and detached scientist. (Given the deadly serious tones in which this subject is normally debated, my irreverence bordered on heresy, so I was surprised and rather unreasonably annoyed to receive a letter from a university lecturer saying that he was using The Racing Tribe to teach the participant-observation method. You try your best to be a maverick iconoclast, and they turn you into a textbook.)

The more usual, or at least currently fashionable, practice is to devote at least a chapter of your book or Ph.D. thesis to a tortured, self-flagellating disquisition on the ethical and methodological difficulties of participant observation. Although the whole point of the participant element is to understand the culture from a ‘native’ perspective, you must spend a good three pages explaining that your unconscious ethnocentric prejudices, and various other cultural barriers, probably make this impossible. It is then customary to question the entire moral basis of the observation element, and, ideally, to express grave reservations about the validity of modern Western ‘science’ as a means of understanding anything at all.

At this point, the uninitiated reader might legitimately wonder why we continue to use a research method which is clearly either morally questionable or unreliable or both. I wondered this myself, until I realized that these doleful recitations of the dangers and evils of participant observation are a form of protective mantra, a ritual chant similar to the rather charming practice of some Native American tribes who, before setting out on a hunt or chopping down a tree, would sing apologetic laments to appease the spirits of the animals they were about to kill or the tree they were about to fell. A less charitable interpretation would see anthropologists’ ritual self-abasements as a disingenuous attempt to deflect criticism by pre-emptive confession of their failings – like the selfish and neglectful lover who says ‘Oh, I’m so selfish and neglectful, I don’t know why you put up with me,’ relying on our belief that such awareness and candid acknowledgement of a fault is almost as virtuous as not having it.

But whatever the motives, conscious or otherwise, the ritual chapter agonizing over the role of the participant observer tends to be mind-numbingly tedious, so I will forgo whatever pre-emptive absolution might be gained by this, and simply say that while participant observation has its limitations, this rather uneasy combination of involvement and detachment is still the best method we have for exploring the complexities of human cultures, so it will have to do.

The Good, the Bad and the Uncomfortable

In my case, the difficulties of the participant element are somewhat reduced, as I have chosen to study the complexities of my own native culture. This is not because I consider the English to be intrinsically more interesting than other cultures, but because I have a rather wimpish aversion to the dirt, dysentery, killer insects, ghastly food and primitive sanitation that characterize the mud-hut ‘tribal’ societies studied by my more intrepid colleagues.

In the macho field of ethnography, my avoidance of discomfort and irrational preference for cultures with indoor plumbing are regarded as quite unacceptably feeble, so I have, until recently, tried to redeem myself a bit by studying the less salubrious aspects of English life: conducting research in violent pubs, seedy nightclubs, run-down betting shops and the like. Yet after years of research on aggression, disorder, violence, crime and other forms of deviance and dysfunction, all of which invariably take place in disagreeable locations and at inconvenient times, I still seemed to have risen no higher in the estimation of mud-hut ethnographers accustomed to much harsher conditions.

So, having failed my trial-by-fieldwork initiation test, I reasoned that I might as well turn my attention to the subject that really interests me, namely: the causes of good behaviour. This is a fascinating field of enquiry, which has been almost entirely neglected by social scientists. With a few notable exceptions,2 social scientists tend to be obsessed with the dysfunctional, rather than the desirable, devoting all their energies to researching the causes of behaviours our society wishes to prevent, rather than those we might wish to encourage.

My Co-Director at the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC), Peter Marsh, had become equally disillusioned and frustrated by the problem-oriented nature of social science, and we resolved to concentrate as much as possible on studying positive aspects of human interaction. With this new focus, we were now no longer obliged to seek out violent pubs, but could spend time in pleasant ones (the latter also had the advantage of being much easier to find, as the vast majority of pubs are congenial and trouble-free). We could observe ordinary, law-abiding people doing their shopping, instead of interviewing security guards and store detectives about the activities of shoplifters and vandals. We went to nightclubs to study flirting rather than fighting. When I noticed some unusually sociable and courteous interaction among the crowds at a racecourse, I immediately began what turned out to be three years of research on the factors influencing the good behaviour of racegoers. We also conducted research on celebration, cyber-dating, summer holidays, embarrassment, corporate hospitality, van drivers, risk taking, the London Marathon, sex, mobile-phone gossip and the relationship between tea-drinking and DIY (this last dealing with burning social issues such as ‘how many cups of tea does it take the average Englishman to put up a shelf?’).

Over the past twelve years, my time has thus been divided roughly equally between studying the problematic aspects of English society and its more appealing, positive elements (along with cross-cultural, comparative research in other parts of the world), so I suppose I can safely claim to have embarked on the specific research for this book with the advantage of a reasonably balanced overview.

My Family and other Lab Rats

My status as a ‘native’ gave me a bit of a head start on the participant element of the participant-observation task, but what about the observation side of things? Could I summon the detachment necessary to stand back and observe my own native culture as an objective scientist? Although in fact I was to spend much of my time studying relatively unfamiliar sub-cultures, these were still ‘my people’, so it seemed reasonable to question my ability to treat them as laboratory rats, albeit with only half of my ethnographer’s split personality (the head-patting observer half, as opposed to the tummy-rubbing participant).

I did not worry about this for too long, as friends, family, colleagues, publishers, agents and others kept reminding me that I had, after all, spent over a decade minutely dissecting the behaviour of my fellow natives – with, they said, about as much sentimentality as a white-coated scientist tweezering cells around in a Petri dish. My family also pointed out that my father – Robin Fox, a much more eminent anthropologist – had been training me for this role since I was a baby. Unlike most infants, who spend their early days lying in a pram or cot, staring at the ceiling or at dangling animals on a mobile, I was strapped to a Cochiti Indian cradle-board and propped upright, at strategic observation points around the house, to study the typical behaviour-patterns of an English academic family.

My father also provided me with the perfect role-model of scientific detachment. When my mother told him that she was pregnant with me, their first child, he immediately started trying to persuade her to let him acquire a baby chimp and bring us up together as an experiment – a case-study comparing primate and human development. My mother firmly vetoed the idea, and recounted the incident to me, many years later, as an example of my father’s eccentric and unhelpful approach to parenthood. I failed to grasp the moral of the story, and said: ‘Oh, what a great idea – it would have been fascinating!’ My mother told me, not for the first time, that I was ‘just like your bloody father’. Again missing the point, I took this as a compliment.

TRUST ME, I’M AN ANTHROPOLOGIST

By the time we left England, and I embarked on a rather erratic education at a random sample of schools in America, Ireland and France, my father had manfully shrugged off his disappointment over the chimp experiment, and begun training me as an ethnographer instead. I was only five, but he generously overlooked this slight handicap: I might be somewhat shorter than his other students, but that shouldn’t prevent me grasping the basic principles of ethnographic research methodology. Among the most important of these, I learned, was the search for rules. When we arrived in any unfamiliar culture, I was to look for regularities and consistent patterns in the natives’ behaviour, and try to work out the hidden rules – the conventions or collective understandings – governing these behaviour patterns.

Eventually, this rule-hunting becomes almost an unconscious process – a reflex, or, according to some long-suffering companions, a pathological compulsion. Two years ago, for example, my fiancé Henry took me to visit some friends in Poland. As we were driving in an English car, he relied on me, the passenger, to tell him when it was safe to overtake. Within twenty minutes of crossing the Polish border, I started to say ‘Yes, go now, it’s safe,’ even when there were vehicles coming towards us on a two-lane road.

After he had twice hastily applied the brakes and aborted a planned overtake at the last minute, he clearly began to have doubts about my judgement. ‘What are you doing? That wasn’t safe at all! Didn’t you see that big lorry?’ ‘Oh yes,’ I replied, ‘but the rules are different here in Poland. There’s obviously a tacit understanding that a wide two-lane road is really three lanes, so if you overtake, the driver in front and the one coming towards you will move to the side to give you room.’

Henry asked politely how I could possibly be sure of this, given that I had never been to Poland before and had been in the country less than half an hour. My response, that I had been watching the Polish drivers and that they all clearly followed this rule, was greeted with perhaps understandable scepticism. Adding ‘Trust me, I’m an anthropologist’ probably didn’t help much either, and it was some time before he could be persuaded to test my theory. When he did, the vehicles duly parted like the Red Sea to create a ‘third lane’ for us, and our Polish host later confirmed that there was indeed a sort of unofficial code of etiquette that required this.

My sense of triumph was somewhat diluted, though, by our host’s sister, who pointed out that her countrymen were also noted for their reckless and dangerous driving. Had I been a bit more observant, it seemed, I might have noticed the crosses, with flowers around the base, dotted along the roadsides – tributes placed by bereaved relatives to mark the spots at which people had been killed in road accidents. Henry magnanimously refrained from making any comment about the trustworthiness of anthropologists, but he did ask why I could not be content with merely observing and analysing Polish customs: why did I feel compelled to risk my neck – and, incidentally, his – by joining in?

I explained that this compulsion was partly the result of promptings from my Inner Participant, but insisted that there was also some methodology in my apparent madness. Having observed some regularity or pattern in native behaviour, and tentatively identified the unspoken rule involved, an ethnographer can apply various ‘tests’ to confirm the existence of such a rule. You can tell a representative selection of natives about your observations of their behaviour patterns, and ask them if you have correctly identified the rule, convention or principle behind these patterns. You can break the (hypothetical) rule, and look for signs of disapproval, or indeed active ‘sanctions’. In some cases, such as the Polish third-lane rule, you can ‘test’ the rule by obeying it, and note whether you are ‘rewarded’ for doing so.

BORING BUT IMPORTANT

This book is not written for other social scientists, but rather for that elusive creature publishers used to call ‘the intelligent layman’. My non-academic approach cannot, however, be used as a convenient excuse for woolly thinking, sloppy use of language, or failing to define my terms. This is a book about the ‘rules’ of Englishness, and I cannot simply assert that we all know what we mean by a ‘rule’, without attempting to explain the sense or senses in which I am using the term.

I am using a rather broad interpretation of the concept of a rule, based on four of the definitions allowed by the Oxford English Dictionary, namely:

a principle, regulation or maxim governing individual conduct;

a standard of discrimination or estimation; a criterion, a test, a measure;

an exemplary person or thing; a guiding example;

a fact, or the statement of a fact, which holds generally good; the normal or usual state of things.

Thus, my quest to identify the rules of Englishness is not confined to a search for specific rules of conduct, but will include rules in the wider sense of standards, norms, ideals, guiding principles and ‘facts’ about ‘normal or usual’ English behaviour.

This last is the sense of ‘rule’ we are using when we say: ‘As a rule, the English tend to be X (or prefer Y, or dislike Z).’ When we use the term rule in this way, we do not mean – and this is important – that all English people always or invariably exhibit the characteristic in question, only that it is a quality or behaviour pattern which is common enough, or marked enough, to be noticeable and significant. Indeed, it is a fundamental requirement of a social rule – by whatever definition – that it can be broken. Rules of conduct (or standards, or principles) of this kind are not like scientific or mathematical laws, statements of a necessary state of affairs; they are by definition contingent. If it were, for example, utterly inconceivable and impossible that anyone would ever jump a queue, there would be no need for a rule prohibiting queue jumping.3

When I speak of the unwritten rules of Englishness, therefore, I am clearly not suggesting that such rules are universally obeyed in English society, or that no exceptions or deviations will be found. That would be ludicrous. My claim is only that these rules are ‘normal and usual’ enough to be helpful in understanding and defining our national character.

Often, exceptions and deviations may help to ‘prove’ (in the correct sense of ‘test’) a rule, in that the degree of surprise or outrage provoked by the deviation provides an indication of its importance, and the ‘normality’ of the behaviour it prescribes. Many of the pundits conducting premature post-mortems on Englishness make the fundamental mistake of citing breaches of the traditional rules of Englishness (such as, say, the unsportsmanlike behaviour of a footballer or cricketer) as evidence for their diagnosis of death, while ignoring public reaction to such breaches, which clearly shows that they are regarded as abnormal, unacceptable and un-English.

THE NATURE OF CULTURE

My analysis of Englishness will focus on rules, as I believe this is the most direct route to the establishment of a ‘grammar’ of Englishness. But given the very broad sense in which I am using the term ‘rule’, my search for the rules of Englishness will effectively involve an attempt to understand and define English culture. This is another term that requires definition: by ‘culture’ I mean the sum of a social group’s patterns of behaviour, customs, way of life, ideas, beliefs and values.

I am not implying by this that I see English culture as a homogeneous entity – that I expect to find no variation in behaviour patterns, customs, beliefs, etc. – any more than I am suggesting that the ‘rules of Englishness’ are universally obeyed. As with the rules, I expect to find much variation and diversity within English culture, but hope to discover some sort of common core, a set of underlying basic patterns that might help us to define Englishness.

At the same time, I am conscious of the wider danger of cross-cultural ‘ethnographic dazzle’ – of blindness to the similarities between the English and other cultures. When absorbed in the task of defining a ‘national character’, it is easy to become obsessed with the distinctive features of a particular culture, and to forget that we are all members of the same species.4 Fortunately, several rather more eminent anthropologists have provided us with lists of ‘cross-cultural universals’ – practices, customs and beliefs found in all human societies – which should help me to avoid this hazard. There is some lack of consensus on exactly what practices, etc. should be included in this category (but then, when did academics ever manage to agree on anything?)5 For example, Robin Fox gives us the following:

Laws about property, rules about incest and marriage, customs of taboo and avoidance, methods of settling disputes with a minimum of bloodshed, beliefs about the supernatural and practices relating to it, a system of social status and methods of indicating it, initiation ceremonies for young men, courtship practices involving the adornment of females, systems of symbolic body ornament generally, certain activities set aside for men from which women are excluded, gambling of some kind, a tool- and weapons-making industry, myths and legends, dancing, adultery and various doses of homicide, suicide, homosexuality, schizophrenia, psychoses and neuroses, and various practitioners to take advantage of or cure these, depending on how they are viewed.

George Peter Murdoch provides a much longer and more detailed list of universals,6 in convenient alphabetical order, but less amusingly phrased:

Age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organisation, cooking, cooperative labour, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, division of labour, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics, ethnobiology, etiquette, faith-healing, family, feasting, fire-making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift-giving, government, greetings, hairstyles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin-groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstition, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, modesty concerning natural functions, mourning, music, mythology, numerals, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious rituals, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool making, trade, visiting, weaning and weather control.

While I am not personally familiar with every existing human culture, lists such as these will help to ensure that I focus specifically, for example, on what is unique or distinctive about the English class system, rather than the fact that we have such a system, as all cultures have ‘a system of social status and methods of indicating it’. This may seem a rather obvious point, but it is one that other writers have failed to recognize,7 and many also regularly commit the related error of assuming that certain characteristics of English culture (such as the association of alcohol with violence) are universal features of all human societies.

RULE MAKING

There is one significant omission from the above lists,8 although it is clearly implicit in both and that is ‘rule making’. The human species is addicted to rule making. Every human activity, without exception, including natural biological functions such as eating and sex, is hedged about with complex sets of rules and regulations, dictating precisely when, where, with whom and in what manner the activity may be performed. Animals just do these things; humans make an almighty song and dance about it. This is known as ‘civilization’.

The rules may vary from culture to culture, but there are always rules. Different foods may be prohibited in different societies, but every society has food taboos. We have rules about everything. In the above lists, every practice that does not already contain an explicit or implicit reference to rules could be preceded by the words ‘rules about’ (e.g. rules about gift-giving, rules about hairstyles, rules about dancing, greetings, hospitality, joking, weaning, etc.). My focus on rules is therefore not some strange personal whim, but a recognition of the importance of rules and rule making in the human psyche.

If you think about it, we all use differences in rules as a principal means of distinguishing one culture from another. The first thing we notice when we go on holiday or business abroad is that other cultures have ‘different ways of doing things’, by which we usually mean that they have rules about, say, food, mealtimes, dress, greetings, hygiene, trade, hospitality, joking, status-differentiation, etc., which are different from our own rules about these practices.

GLOBALIZATION AND TRIBALIZATION

Which brings us, inevitably, to the problem of globalization. During the research for this book, I was often asked (by members of the chattering classes) what was the point in my writing about Englishness, or indeed any other national identity, when the inexorable spread of American cultural imperialism would soon make this an issue of purely historical interest? Already, I was told, we are living in a dumbed-down, homogenized McWorld, in which the rich tapestry of diverse and distinctive cultures is being obliterated by the all-consuming consumerism of Nike, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Disney and other multinational capitalist giants.

Really? As a fairly typical Guardian-reading, left-liberal product of the anti-Thatcher generation, I have no natural sympathy for corporate imperialists, but as a professional observer of sociocultural trends, I am obliged to report that their influence has been exaggerated – or rather, misinterpreted. The principal effect of globalization, as far as I can tell, has been an increase in nationalism and tribalism, a proliferation of struggles for independence, devolution and self-determination and a resurgence of concern about ethnicity and cultural identity in almost all parts of the world, including the so-called United Kingdom.

OK, perhaps not an effect – correlation is not causation, as every scientist knows – but at the very least, one must acknowledge that the association of these movements with the rise of globalization is a striking coincidence. Just because people everywhere want to wear Nike trainers and drink Coke does not necessarily mean that they are any less fiercely concerned about their cultural identity – indeed, many are prepared to fight and die for their nation, religion, territory, culture or whatever aspect of ‘tribal’ identity is perceived to be at stake.

The economic influence of American corporate giants may indeed be overwhelming, and even pernicious, but their cultural impact is perhaps less significant than either they or their enemies would like to believe. Given our deeply ingrained tribal instincts, and increasing evidence of fragmentation of nations into smaller and smaller cultural units, it does not make sense to talk of a world of six billion people becoming a vast monoculture. The spread of globalization is undoubtedly bringing changes to the cultures it reaches, but these cultures were not static in the first place, and change does not necessarily mean the abolition of traditional values. Indeed, new global media such as the Internet have been an effective means of promoting traditional cultures – as well as the global sub-culture of anti-globalization activists.

Within Britain, despite obvious American cultural influences, there is far more evidence of increasing tribalization than of any reduction in cultural diversity. The fervour, and power, of Scottish and Welsh nationalists does not seem to be much affected by their taste for American soft drinks, junk food or films. Ethnic minorities in Britain are if anything increasingly keen to maintain their distinctive cultural identities, and the English are becoming ever more fretful about their own cultural ‘identity crisis’. In England, regionalism is endemic, and escalating (Cornish ‘nationalists’ are increasingly vociferous, and there has been some half-joking speculation that Yorkshire will be the next to demand devolution), and there is considerable resistance to the idea of being part of Europe, let alone part of any global monoculture.

So, I see no reason to be put off my attempt to understand Englishness by global warnings about the imminent extinction of this or any other culture.

CLASS AND RACE

When this book was in the planning stages, almost everyone I talked to about it asked whether I would have a chapter on class. My feeling all along was that a separate chapter would be inappropriate: class pervades all aspects of English life and culture, and will therefore permeate all the areas covered in this book.

Although England is a highly class-conscious culture, the real-life ways in which the English think about social class – and determine a person’s position in the class structure – bear little relation either to simplistic three-tier (upper, middle, working) models, or to the rather abstract alphabetical systems (A, B, C1, C2, D, E), based entirely on occupation, favoured by market research experts. A schoolteacher and an estate agent would both technically be ‘middle class’. They might even both live in a terraced house, drive a Volvo, drink in the same pub and earn roughly the same annual income. But we judge social class in much more subtle and complex ways: precisely how you arrange, furnish and decorate your terraced house; not just the make of car you drive, but whether you wash it yourself on Sundays, take it to a car wash or rely on the English climate to sluice off the worst of the dirt for you. Similar fine distinctions are applied to exactly what, where, when, how and with whom you eat and drink; the words you use and how you pronounce them; where and how you shop; the clothes you wear; the pets you keep; how you spend your free time; the chat-up lines you use and so on.

Every English person (whether we admit it or not) is aware of and highly sensitive to all of the delicate divisions and calibrations involved in such judgements. I will not therefore attempt to provide a crude ‘taxonomy’ of English classes and their characteristics, but will instead try to convey the subtleties of English thinking about class through the perspectives of the different themes mentioned above. It is impossible to talk about class without reference to homes, gardens, cars, clothes, pets, food, drink, sex, talk, hobbies, etc., and impossible to explore the rules of any of these aspects of English life without constantly bumping into big class dividers, or tripping over the smaller, less obvious ones. I will, therefore, deal with class demarcations as and when I lurch into them or stumble across them.

At the same time, I will try to avoid being ‘dazzled’ by class differences, remembering Orwell’s point that such differences ‘fade away the moment any two Britons are confronted by a European’ and that ‘even the distinction between rich and poor dwindles somewhat when one regards the nation from the outside’. As a self-appointed ‘outsider’ – a professional alien, if you like – my task in defining Englishness is to search for underlying commonalities, not to exclaim over surface differences.

Race is a rather more difficult issue, and again was raised by all the friends and colleagues with whom I discussed this book. Having noted that I was conveniently avoiding the issues of Scottish, Welsh and Irish national identities by confining my research to ‘the English’ rather than ‘the British’ or ‘the UK’, they invariably went on to ask whether or not Asians, Afro-Caribbeans and other ethnic minorities would be included in my definition of Englishness.

There are several answers to this question. The first is that ethnic minorities are included, by definition, in any attempt to define Englishness. The extent to which immigrant populations adapt to, adopt and in turn influence the culture and customs of their host country, particularly over several generations, is a complex issue. Research tends to focus on the adaptation and adoption elements (usually lumped together as ‘acculturation’) at the expense of the equally interesting and important issue of influence. This is odd: we acknowledge that short-term tourists can have a profound influence on their host cultures – indeed, the study of the social processes involved has become a fashionable discipline in itself – but for some reason our academics seem less interested in the processes by which resident immigrant minority cultures can shape the behaviour patterns, customs, ideas, beliefs and values of the countries in which they settle. Although ethnic minorities constitute only about six per cent of the population of this country, their influence on many aspects of English culture has been, and is, considerable. Any ‘snapshot’ of English behaviour as it is now, such as I am attempting here, will inevitably be coloured by this influence. Although very few of the Asians, Africans and Caribbeans living in England would define themselves as English (most call themselves British, which has come to be regarded as a more inclusive term), they have clearly contributed to the ‘grammar’ of Englishness.

My second answer to the race question concerns the more well-trodden area of ‘acculturation’. Here we come down to the level of the group and the individual, rather than the minority culture as a whole. To put it simply – perhaps too simply – some ethnic-minority groups and individuals are more ‘English’ than others. By this I mean that some, whether through choice or circumstance or both, have adopted more of the host culture’s customs, values and behaviour patterns than others. (This becomes a somewhat more complex issue in the second, third and subsequent generations, as the host culture in question will have been influenced, at least to some degree, by their own forebears.)

Once you start to put it in these terms, the issue is really no longer one of race. When I say that some ethnic-minority groups and individuals are more ‘English’ than others, I am clearly not talking about the colour of their skin or their country of origin: I am talking about the degree of ‘Englishness’ they exhibit in their behaviour, manner and customs. I could, and do, make the same comment about white ‘Anglo-Saxon’ groups and individuals.

We all do, in fact. We describe a social group, a person, or even, say, just one of that person’s reactions or characteristic mannerisms, as ‘very English’ or ‘typically English’. We understand what someone means when they say, ‘In some ways I’m very English, but in other ways I’m not,’ or ‘You’re more English about that than I am’. We have a concept of ‘degrees’ of Englishness. I am not introducing anything new or startling here: our everyday use of these terms demonstrates that we all already have a clear grasp of the subtleties of ‘partial’ Englishness, or even ‘piecemeal’ or ‘cherry-picking’ Englishness. We recognize that we can all, at least to some extent, ‘choose’ our degree of Englishness. All I am saying is that these concepts can be applied equally to ethnic minorities.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that Englishness is rather more a matter of choice for the ethnic minorities in this country than it is for the rest of us. For those of us without the benefit of early, first-hand influence of another culture, some aspects of Englishness can be so deeply ingrained that we find it almost impossible to shake them off, even when it is clearly in our interests to do so (such as, in my case, when trying to conduct field experiments involving queue jumping). Immigrants have the advantage of being able to pick and choose more freely, often adopting the more desirable English quirks and habits while carefully steering clear of the more ludicrous ones.

I have some personal experience of such cultural cherry-picking. My family emigrated to America when I was five, and we lived there for six years, during which entire time I steadfastly refused to adopt any trace of an American accent, on the grounds that it was aesthetically unpleasing (‘sounds horrid’ was how I put it at the time – dreadful little prig that I was), although I happily adapted to most other aspects of the culture. As an adolescent, I lived for four years in rural France. I attended the local state school and became indistinguishable in my speech, behaviour and manners from any other Briançonnaise teenager. Except that I knew this was a matter of choice, and could judiciously shed those elements of Frenchness that annoyed my mother when I got home from school in the evening – or indeed deliberately exaggerate them to provoke her (some teenage behaviours are universal) – and discard those that proved socially unfavourable on our return to England.

Immigrants can, of course, choose to ‘go native’, and some in this country become ‘more English than the English’. Among my own friends, the two I would most readily describe as ‘very English’ are a first-generation Indian immigrant and a first-generation Polish refugee. In both cases, their degree of Englishness was initially a conscious choice, and although it has since become second nature, they can still stand back and analyse their behaviour – and explain the rules they have learnt to obey – in a way that most native English find difficult, as we tend to take these things for granted.

My sister had much the same experience when she married a Lebanese man and emigrated to Lebanon (from America) about eight years ago. She became very quickly, to her Bek’aa Valley family and neighbours, a fully ‘acculturated’ Lebanese village housewife, but can switch back to Englishness (or Americanness, or indeed her teenage Frenchness) as easily as she changes languages – and often does both in mid-sentence. Her children are American-Arab, with a few hints of Englishness, and equally adept at switching language, manners and mores when it suits them.

Many of those who pontificate about ‘acculturation’ are inclined to underestimate this element of choice. Such processes are often described in terms suggesting that the ‘dominant’ culture is simply imposed on unwitting, passive minorities, rather than focusing on the extent to which individuals quite consciously, deliberately, cleverly and even mockingly pick and choose among the behaviours and customs of their host culture. I accept that some degree of acculturation or conformity to English ways is often ‘demanded’ or effectively ‘enforced’ (although this would surely be true of any host culture, unless one enters it as a conquering invader or passing tourist), and the rights and wrongs of specific demands can and should be debated. But my point is that compliance with such demands is still a conscious process, and not, as some accounts of acculturation imply, a form of brainwashing.

My only way of understanding this process is to assume that every immigrant to this country is at least as bright and clever as I was when we emigrated to France, just as capable of exercising free will and maintaining a sense of their own cultural identity while complying with the demands, however irrational or unfair, of the local culture. I could crank up or tone down my Frenchness, by subtle degrees, in an entirely calculated manner. My sister can choose and calibrate her Arabness, and my immigrant friends can do the same with their Englishness, sometimes for practical social purposes, including the avoidance of exclusion, but also purely for amusement. Perhaps the earnest researchers studying acculturation just don’t want to see that their ‘subjects’ have got the whole thing sussed, understand our culture better than we do, and are, much of the time, privately laughing at us.

It should be obvious from all of this (but I’ll say it anyway) that when I speak of Englishness I am not putting a value on it, not holding it up above any other ‘-ness’. When I say that some immigrants are more English than others, I am not (unlike Norman Tebbit with his infamous ‘Cricket Test’) implying that these individuals are in any way superior, or that their rights or status as citizens should be any different from those who are less English. And when I say that anyone can – given enough time and effort – ‘learn’ or ‘adopt’ Englishness, I am not suggesting that they ought to do so.

The degree to which immigrants and ethnic minorities should be expected to adapt to fit in with English culture is a matter for debate. Where immigrants from former British colonies are concerned, perhaps the degree of acculturation demanded should match that which we achieved as uninvited residents in their cultures. Of all peoples, the English are surely historically the least qualified to preach about the importance of adapting to host-culture manners and mores. Our own track-record on this is abysmal. Wherever we settle in any numbers, we not only create pockets of utterly insular Englishness, but also often attempt to impose our cultural norms and habits on the local population.

But this book is intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive. I am interested in understanding Englishness as it is, warts and all. It is not the anthropologist’s job to moralize and pontificate about how the tribe she is studying ought to treat its neighbours or its members. I may have my opinions on such matters, but they are not relevant to my attempt to discover the rules of Englishness. I may sometimes state these opinions anyway (it’s my book, so I can do what I like), but I will try to distinguish clearly between opinion and observation.

BRITISHNESS AND ENGLISHNESS

While I’m at it, this is a suitable place to apologize to any Scottish or Welsh people who (a) still regard themselves as British and (b) are wondering why I am writing about Englishness rather than Britishness. (I am referring here to real, born-and-bred Scots and Welsh, by the way, not English people – like me – who like to boast of their drop of Welsh or Scottish ‘blood’ when it suits them.)

The answer is that I am researching and writing about Englishness rather than Britishness:

partly out of sheer laziness;

partly because England is a nation, and might reasonably be expected to have some sort of coherent and distinctive national culture or character, whereas Britain is a purely political construct, composed of several nations with their own distinctive cultures;

partly because although there may be a great deal of overlap between these cultures, they are clearly not identical and should not be treated as such by being lumped together under ‘Britishness’;

and finally because ‘Britishness’ seems to me to be a rather meaningless term: when people use it, they nearly always really mean ‘Englishness’ – they do not mean that someone is being frightfully Welsh or Scottish.

I only have the time and energy to try to understand one of these cultures, and I have chosen my own, the English.

I realise that one can, if one is being picky, pick all sorts of holes in these arguments – not least that a ‘nation’ is surely itself a pretty artificial construct – and Cornish ‘nationalists’ and even fervent regionalists from other parts of England (Yorkshire and Norfolk spring to mind) will no doubt insist that they too have their own separate identity and should not be bundled together with the rest of the English.

The trouble is that virtually all nations have a number of regions, each of which invariably regards itself as different from, and superior to, all the others. This applies in France, Italy, the US, Russia, Mexico, Spain, Scotland, Australia – and more or less anywhere else you care to mention. People from St Petersburg talk about Muscovites as though they were members of a different species; East-coast and Mid-western Americans might as well be from different planets, ditto Tuscans and Neapolitans, Northern and Southern Mexicans, etc.; even cities such as Melbourne and Sydney see themselves as having radically different characters – and let’s not start on Edinburgh and Glasgow. Regionalism is hardly a peculiarly English phenomenon. In all of these cases, however, the people of these admittedly highly individual regions and towns nevertheless have enough in common to make them recognizably Italian, American, Russian, Scottish, etc. I am interested in those commonalities.

STEREOTYPES AND CULTURAL GENOMICS

‘Well, I hope you’re going to get beyond the usual stereotypes’ was another common response when I told people I was doing research for a book on Englishness. This comment seemed to reflect an assumption that a stereotype is almost by definition ‘not true’, that the truth lies somewhere else – wherever ‘beyond’ might be. I find this rather strange, as I would naturally assume that, although not necessarily ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but’, stereotypes about English national character probably contain at least a grain or two of truth. They do not, after all, just come out of thin air, but must have germinated and grown from something.

So my standard reply was to say that, no, I was not going to get beyond the stereotypes, I was going to try to get inside them. I would not specifically seek them out, but would keep an open mind; and if my research showed that certain English behaviour patterns corresponded to a given stereotype, I would put that stereotype in my Petri-dish, stick it under my microscope, dissect it, tease it apart, subject its component bits to various tests, unravel its DNA and, er, generally poke away and puzzle over it until I found those grains (or genes) of truth.

OK, there are probably some mixed metaphors in there, not to mention a somewhat hazy notion of what proper scientists actually do in their labs, but you get the idea. Most things look rather different when you put them under a microscope, and sure enough, I found that stereotypes such as English ‘reserve’, ‘politeness’, ‘weather-talk’, ‘hooliganism’, ‘hypocrisy’, ‘privacy’, ‘anti-intellectualism’, ‘queuing’, ‘compromise’, ‘fair play’, ‘humour’, ‘class-consciousness’, ‘eccentricity’ and so on were not quite what they seemed – and they all had complex layers of rules and codes that were not visible to the naked eye. Without getting too carried away by these lab-analogies, I suppose another way of describing my Englishness project would be as an attempt to sequence (or map, I’m never sure which is which) the English cultural genome – to identify the cultural ‘codes’ that make us who we are.

Hmm, yes, Sequencing the English Cultural Genome – that sounds like a big, serious, ambitious and impressively scientific project. The sort of thing that might well take three times longer than the period originally agreed in the publisher’s contract, especially if you allow for all the tea-breaks.

1. A term coined by my father, the anthropologist Robin Fox, meaning blindness to underlying similarities between human groups and cultures because one is dazzled by the more highly visible surface differences.

2. Such as the social psychologist Michael Argyle, who studied happiness, and the anthropologist Lionel Tiger, who has written books on optimism and pleasure, and teaches a course entitled ‘The Anthropology of Fun and Games’.

3. We do, in fact, have some rules prohibiting behaviours which, while not inconceivable, are unlikely or even unnatural – see Robin Fox’s work on the incest taboo, for example – cases where a factual ‘it isn’t done’ becomes formalized as a proscriptive ‘thou shalt not do it’ (despite the claims of philosophers who hold that it is logically impossible to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’), but these tend to be universal rules, rather than the culture-specific rules that concern us here.

4. Although I was recently given a rather charming book, published in 1931, entitled ‘The English: Are They Human?’ The question is rhetorical, as one might expect. The author (G.J. Renier) ‘came to the conclusion that the world is inhabited by two species of human beings: mankind and the English.’

5. There is also considerable disagreement on whether or not such ‘universals’ should be regarded as hard-wired characteristics of human nature, but I’ll wimp out of that debate as well, on the grounds that it is not directly relevant to our discussion of Englishness. My own view, for what it’s worth, is that the whole nature/nurture debate is a rather pointless exercise, in which we engage because, as Levi Strauss has shown, the human mind likes to think in terms of binary oppositions (black/white, left/right, male/female, them/us, nature/culture, etc.). Why we do this is open to question, but this binary thinking pervades all human institutions and practices, including the dinner-party debates of the academic and chattering classes.

6. To be fair, Fox was providing examples of human universals, while Murdoch was attempting a comprehensive list.

7. Not Hegel, who captured the essence of the issue when he said that ‘The spirit of the nation is . . . the universal spirit in a particular form.’ (Assuming I have correctly understood his meaning – Hegel is not always as clear as one might wish.)

8. Actually, there are two: the second is ‘use of mood- or consciousness-altering substances’, a practice found in all known human cultures, the peculiarly English version of which will be covered elsewhere in this book.

PART ONE

CONVERSATION CODES

THE WEATHER

A

ny discussion of English conversation, like any English conversation, must begin with The Weather. And in this spirit of observing traditional protocol, I shall, like every other writer on Englishness, quote Dr Johnson’s famous comment that ‘When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather’, and point out that this observation is as accurate now as it was over two hundred years ago.

This, however, is the point at which most commentators either stop, or try, and fail, to come up with a convincing explanation for the English ‘obsession’ with the weather. They fail because their premise is mistaken: they assume that our conversations about the weather are conversations about the weather. In other words, they assume that we talk about the weather because we have a keen (indeed pathological) interest in the subject. Most of them then try to figure out what it is about the English weather that is so fascinating.

Bill Bryson, for example, concludes that the English weather is not at all fascinating, and presumably that our obsession with it is therefore inexplicable: ‘To an outsider, the most striking thing about the English weather is that there is not very much of it. All those phenomena that elsewhere give nature an edge of excitement, unpredictability and danger – tornadoes, monsoons, raging blizzards, run-for-your-life hailstorms – are almost wholly unknown in the British Isles.’

Jeremy Paxman, in an uncharacteristic and surely unconscious display of patriotism, takes umbrage at Bryson’s dismissive comments, and argues that the English weather is intrinsically fascinating:

Bryson misses the point. The English fixation with the weather is nothing to do with histrionics – like the English countryside, it is, for the most part, dramatically undramatic. The interest is less in the phenomena themselves, but in uncertainty . . . one of the few things you can say about England with absolute certainty is that it has a lot of weather. It may not include tropical cyclones but life at the edge of an ocean and the edge of a continent means you can never be entirely sure what you’re going to get.

My research has convinced me that both Bryson and Paxman are missing the point, which is that our conversations about the weather are not really about the weather at all: English weather-speak is a form of code, evolved to help us overcome our natural reserve and actually talk to each other. Everyone knows, for example, that ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’, ‘Ooh, isn’t it cold?’, ‘Still raining, eh?’ and other variations on the theme are not requests for meteorological data: they are ritual greetings, conversation-starters or default ‘fillers’. In other words, English weather-speak is a form of ‘grooming talk’ – the human equivalent of what is known as ‘social grooming’ among our primate cousins, where they spend hours grooming each other’s fur, even when they are perfectly clean, as a means of social bonding.

THE RULES OF ENGLISH WEATHER-SPEAK

The Reciprocity Rule

Jeremy Paxman cannot understand why a ‘middle-aged blonde’ he encounters outside the Met Office in Bracknell says ‘Ooh, isn’t it cold?’, and he puts this irrational behaviour down to a distinctively English ‘capacity for infinite surprise at the weather’. In fact, ‘Ooh, isn’t it cold?’ – like ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ and all the others – is English code for ‘I’d like to talk to you – will you talk to me?’, or, if you like, simply another way of saying ‘hello’. The hapless female was just trying to strike up a conversation with Mr Paxman. Not necessarily a long conversation – just a mutual acknowledgement, an exchange of greetings. Under the rules of weather-speak, all he was required to say was ‘Mm, yes, isn’t it?’ or some other equally meaningless ritual response, which is code for ‘Yes, I’ll talk to you/greet you’. By failing to respond at all, Paxman committed a minor breach of etiquette, effectively conveying the rather discourteous message ‘No, I will not exchange greetings with you’. (This was not a serious transgression, however, as the rules of privacy and reserve override those of sociability: talking to strangers is never compulsory.)

We used to have another option, at least for some social situations, but the ‘How do you do?’ greeting (to which the apparently ludicrous correct response is to repeat the question back ‘How do you do?’) is now regarded by many as somewhat archaic, and is no longer the universal standard greeting. The ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ exchange must, however, be understood in the same light, and not taken literally: ‘How do you do?’ is not a real question about health or well-being, and ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ is not a real question about the weather.

Comments about the weather are phrased as questions (or with an interrogative intonation) because they require a response – but the reciprocity is the point, not the content. Any interrogative remark on the weather will do to initiate the process, and any mumbled confirmation (or even near-repetition, as in ‘Yes, isn’t it?’) will do as a response. English weather-speak rituals often sound rather like a kind of catechism, or the exchanges between priest and congregation in a church: ‘Lord, have mercy upon us’, ‘Christ, have mercy upon us’; ‘Cold, isn’t it?’, ‘Yes, isn’t it?’, and so on.

It is not always quite that obvious, but all English weather conversations have a distinctive structure, an unmistakable rhythmic pattern, which to an anthropologist marks them out instantly as ‘ritual’. There is a clear sense that these are ‘choreographed’ exchanges, conducted according to unwritten but tacitly accepted rules.

The Context Rule

A principal rule concerns the contexts in which weather-speak can be used. Other writers have claimed that the English talk about the weather all the time, that it is a national obsession or fixation, but this is sloppy observation: in fact, there are three quite specific contexts in which weather-speak is prescribed. Weather-speak can be used:

as a simple greeting

as an ice-breaker leading to conversation on other matters

as a ‘default’, ‘filler’ or ‘displacement’ subject, when conversation on other matters falters, and there is an awkward or uncomfortable lull.

Admittedly, this rule does allow for rather a lot of weather-speak – hence the impression that we talk of little else. A typical English conversation may well start with a weather-speak greeting, progress to a bit more weather-speak ice-breaking, and then ‘default’ to weather-speak at regular intervals. It is easy to see why many foreigners, and even many English commentators, have assumed that we must be obsessed with the subject.

I am not claiming that we have no interest in the weather itself. The choice of weather as a code to perform these vital social functions is not entirely arbitrary, and in this sense, Jeremy Paxman is right: the changeable and unpredictable nature of the English weather makes it a particularly suitable facilitator of social interaction. If the weather were not so variable, we might have to find another medium for our social messages.

But in assuming that weather-speak indicates a burning interest in the weather, Paxman and others are making the same kind of mistake as early anthropologists who assumed that certain animals or plants were chosen as tribal ‘totems’ because the people in question had a special interest in or reverence for that particular animal or plant. In fact, as Lévi-Strauss eventually explained, totems are symbols used to define social structures and relationships. The fact that one clan has as its totem the black cockatoo is not because of any deep significance attached to black cockatoos per se, but to define and delineate their relationship with another clan, whose totem is the white cockatoo. Now, the choice of

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 1365