Watching the English Read online

  My publishers wisely left me to argue with myself over this, rather than putting me under any pressure, and eventually, much to their relief, I sort of talked myself into doing an updated edition.

  Despite fairly extensive new research on many aspects of Englishness, I have undoubtedly missed many details that may have changed here or there in the past decade. I have continued to study the English, but other research interests and work commitments, and some frustrating health problems, have prevented me from revisiting some of the subcultures and some of the minutiae of English life that I covered in the original research. (Although the inconvenient illness has allowed me long periods as a ‘participant observer’ in English hospitals – field-research that would otherwise have required a lot of tiresome bureaucratic hassle over access.)

  So, the updates are not as comprehensive as I would have wished, but there are over a hundred of them (about 150 new pages) scattered throughout this revised edition, so if you read the original book, you should not feel short-changed, at least in terms of the quantity of new material. The quality is for you to judge, of course.

  Someone once said that the purpose of anthropology is to ‘make the strange familiar and the familiar strange’. I have received many hundreds of letters and emails from immigrants and visitors to this country, and from foreigners married to English people, who tell me that the book has demystified this unfamiliar culture for them, helping them to understand the very strange behaviour of their English friends, colleagues, employers, neighbours, lovers and spouses. They write saying things like: ‘Your book saved my marriage! I thought my English husband/wife must be mentally ill, but now I realise he/she is just being English!’

  I also receive a constant flow of letters and emails from English people, telling me that reading this book has made them look afresh at familiar, ‘normal’ English behaviour, and realise just how strange we really are. Comments such as ‘I kept cringing with embarrassment, thinking, Oh, God, I do that! and Oh no, that’s me!’ are a recurring theme from these readers, who take a typically English delight in laughing at themselves. Some of them (like the university applicants mentioned above) have even been inspired to go a bit beyond just laughing, and actually study anthropology.

  So, for all its faults, it seems the book may have done at least some of its anthropological duty. I hope that this updated new edition will continue to make strange things familiar, and vice versa.

  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 railway 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 twenty 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, in people’s homes – 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, subcultures 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. That 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 Casual 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 385).

  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 New York or Detroit.

  There is a great deal of agonising and hair-splitting among anthropologists over the participant-observation method and the role of the participant observer. In a previous 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 r
ather 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 that is clearly either morally questionable or unreliable or both. I wondered this myself, until I realised 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 such a bastard, 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. Or as Oscar Wilde put it: ‘There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has the right to blame us.’

  But whatever the motives, conscious or otherwise, the ritual chapter agonising 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 characterise 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 night-clubs, 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 until fairly recently had been almost entirely neglected by social scientists. With a few notable exceptions, social scientists have tended 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 night-clubs 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. Other largely ‘positive’ research topics have included celebration, cyber-dating, summer holidays, beauty and body-image, social bonding, embarrassment, corporate hospitality, patriotism, cars and drivers, motherhood, menopause, risk-taking, crying, mobile phones, online social media, sex, gossip, the psychology of smell, the meaning of chips 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?’).

  My professional life 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 subcultures, 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. After all, I had the advantage of having lived abroad for most of my ‘formative years’ (from the age of five to sixteen). And friends, colleagues, publishers, agents and others kept reminding me that I had more recently spent at least 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 those dangly-animal mobile things, 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 En
gland, 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 learnt, 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. Some years ago, for example, my fiancé (now husband) 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?’