Watching the English Read online

  ‘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.2

  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 that 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 society’s or social group’s patterns of behaviour, customs, way of life, ideas, beliefs and values. And this is essentially what we mean when we talk about ‘national character’. Those who insist that there is no such thing often seem to fail to grasp that the term is a metaphor, a colloquial way of talking about ‘culture’. Most would accept that there is such a thing as ‘culture’ and that there are differences between cultures.

  I am not implying by this that I see English culture as a homogeneous or immutable 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.

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bsp; George Peter Murdock 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 recognise,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 it. 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 ‘civilisation’.

  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.

  GLOBALISATION AND TRIBALISATION

  Which brings us, inevitably, to the problem of globalisation. During the research for this book, I was often asked (by members of the academic/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, homogenised 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, lefty-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 globalisation, 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 globalisation 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 seven billion people becoming a vast monoculture. The spread of globalisation 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 subculture of anti-globalisation activists.

  Within Britain, despite obvious American cultural influences, there is far more evidence of increasing tribalisation 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 even the English are becoming a bit more fretful (in our rather understated, moderate way) about our own cultural ‘identity crisis’. In England, regionalism is endemic – 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 opinion pollsters and market-research experts.9 A schoolteacher and an estate agent would both technically be ‘middle class’. They might even both live in a terraced house, drive the same make of car, 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 weather 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; where and how you shop; the clothes you wear; the pets you keep; how you spend your free time; and, especially, the words you use and how you pronounce them.

  Every English person (wh
ether 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,10 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’ or ‘assimilation’) 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 10 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 term11 – they have clearly contributed to the ‘grammar’ of Englishness.