Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English
Behaviour
by Kate Fox
In WATCHING
THE ENGLISH anthropologist Kate Fox takes a revealing look at the quirks,
habits and foibles of the English people. She puts the English national
character under her anthropological microscope, and finds a strange and
fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and byzantine
codes of behaviour.
The rules
of weather-speak. The ironic-gnome rule. The reflex apology rule. The
paranoid-pantomime rule. Class indicators and class anxiety tests. The
money-talk taboo and many more . . .
Through a
mixture of anthropological analysis and her own unorthodox experiments (using
herself as a reluctant guinea-pig), Kate Fox discovers what these unwritten
behaviour codes tell us about Englishness.
Review
The awkward squad
Kate Fox tells how awkwardness and hypocrisy rule a
nation in Watching the English. Catherine Bennett isn't so sure
Catherine
Bennett
Catherine
Bennett
Sat 24 Jul
2004 01.34 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jul/24/highereducation.news1
It was
quite a consolation to finish Kate Fox's analysis of Englishness in the
departure lounge of Heraklion airport, where, in what resembled some mass
audition for Wifeswap, a few hundred English people were unselfconsciously squabbling
and cursing and barging into one another. For Fox says we are not like that at
all. "Social dis-ease", she decides, is the "central core of
Englishness". She holds this congenital awkwardness responsible for
everything from our "obsession with privacy" to our celebrated
courtesy, famous reserve and infinite capacity for embarrassment. "We do
everything in moderation," she believes.
Fox's
curiosity about English behaviour, which she attempts to reduce, in this
prodigously long investigation, into key constituent parts, is matched only by
her regret that we are not a more free and easy nationality. You gather that
Fox and her fiancé Henry (both prominent figures in her research findings)
prefer the dashing and riotous to the stilted and cautious behaviour which, her
report claims, continues to dominate English social proceedings. For instance,
we say "sorry" when someone else bumps into us, and take too much
notice of queueing while pretending not to. But then, as well as being almost
deranged with embarrassment, we are also "hypocrites". We are, in
fact, "the most repressed and inhibited people on earth". Which must
make us even more repressed and inhibited than the Japanese royal family and
the monks of Mount Athos.
Since Fox
is a leading social anthropologist, we must believe her when she tells us that
our rites of passage also leave a good deal to be desired. It "seems a
shame", she says, "that there is no special ritual to mark the
completion of secondary education". Maybe we're too mean to pay for them.
Contemplating the cautious attitudes of young English people towards work and
money, Fox professes herself "disappointed" to find them planning for
the future and "not much cheered" to discover an early aversion to
being in debt. This is not, you take it, Fox's recommended approach to being
young, English and affluent. Where will it end, she frets, this "worrying
trend" of "risk aversion and obsession with safety"? I don't
know. Hull? Somewhere in the opposite direction from that other English trend
of remortgaging and devil-may-care credit-card spending?
If Fox's
casual flourishes - "but, hey ...", girlish hyperbole, and reliance
on the word "umpteen" - are unlikely to do much for her academic
reputation, the chicklittish attempts to ingratiate suggest that it is not
Bronislaw Malinowksi she wants to be, but the next Peter York (who did, at
least, introduce us to the Sloane Ranger). Fox, on the other hand, is happy to
expose the working-class habit of saying things like "nuffink" and "serviette"
along with other mannerisms more succinctly summarised in Betjeman's "How
to Get on in Society": "Phone for the fishknives Norman ... "
Still, one day her exhaustive observations on these "hidden" rules
may prove invaluable to visitors from another planet. They may not know that
"M&S is a sort of department store", or realise that "some
working class people ... still believe in starting the day with a 'cooked
breakfast' ... this feast may often be eaten in a 'caff' rather than at home ..."
Fox has
worked so hard to be charming and fun that she seems to lack the energy, or
invention, that would be required to reconcile her theory of an inhibited and
"dis-eased" nation with the evidence of increasingly unbuttoned,
culturally diverse and unpredictable forms of Englishness. Or Europeanness. A
good many of Fox's selected "English" traits - love of privacy,
clubs, DIY and talking about the weather - seem remarkably similar to the
French or German love of privacy, clubs, DIY and talking about the weather.
But, as the author often reminds us, it's her book, and what interests her are
"the causes of good behaviour". So what are these causes? "To be
honest, I don't know why the English are the way we are - and nor, if they are
being honest, does anyone else." Fanks for nuffink, as working-class
people sometimes say, on finishing a generous but far from nutritious feast of
"social anthropology".
Watching the English by Kate Fox, book review:
Simplified views of a vibrant race
Yasmin
Alibhai-Brown
Thursday 24
April 2014 16:30
I read this
book when it was first published in 2004. It was amusing, chatty, bursting with
flavour and zesty as an energy drink, but, as a study, neither illuminating nor
convincing. Fox is a leading anthropologist who seems to have decided that her
subject is just too dreary and needs to lighten up. She metaphorically burnt
her blue stockings, donned cocktail dresses and heels and wrote a populist,
skittish tract. She has not sobered up in the new, updated edition.
The English
are, for the first time ever, searching for and shaping a meaningful cultural
and political identity. They are apprehensive about devolution, the European
Union and globalisation. Fox agrees but then breezily concludes it's just a
"wobble". Really? Significant opinion shifts, Ukip, the English
Defence League are no more than that? These momentous times deserved a more
considered account.
The author
is observant, particularly about what she calls "the grammar of
behaviour", like, for example, English "onedownship", the false
modesty not found among the more direct Germans, Indians or Americans, and the
nation's unique sense of irony. But these remain endearing unexamined
curiosities. Jeremy Paxman's portrait of the English was witty and deep, so too
Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island. Fox's book is not deep.
Much
patronising guff is aimed at outsiders: M&S is "a sort of department
store" we are told and "pleased to meet you", still used in the
higher social classes, is best avoided. Talk about the weather is fine, but
foreigners must not criticise the Royals or ask people what they do. They must
understand that "... the bar counter is the only area in which mainstream
rules on talking to strangers may be broken ...[but] such conversations are
conducted in accordance with strict and quite complex rules". I can
imagine a Goodness Gracious Me sketch of social climbing Indians following this
useful advice.
Englanders
in the book are pre-war caricatures – repressed, ultra-cautious, risk-averse,
hypocrites.
Some folk
may still be buttoned up, but most are free, adventurous and culturally
voracious. England is where the swinging Sixties broke out, where the
Paralympics started, where Marx lived for 30 years, where curry is the national
dish, where gambling and drunkenness are rife, where we have more mixed-race
relationships than anywhere in the western world, where the Jeremy Kyle show is
on every day, where you find edgy fashion and music and hyper-sexuality too.
For all her
vaunted research, Fox missed or left out these characteristics. Like she cares.
The original Watching the English was a bestseller, as she informs us several
times. Grayson Perry and Jennifer Saunders loved it. Professors did too –
hilarious, they said, and brilliant. Her cup runneth over. Smart lady.
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