Watching the English
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.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
8mentions
6people
2009–2026years
38% recommend63% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I've no opinion on these books as I've not read 'em. Some hackles raised by them it seems? I dare say it's a political bias one way or the other.
I can't offer much on the "British" as we're diverse countries with not so much in common. But for the one I feel qualified to speak on, England, try Kate Fox's excellent "Watching the English." It's a bit cosy, so don't read it if you want to see us eviscerated, but it's well observed for all that.
- "Watching the English" by Kate Fox [0] was a revelation.
I grew up in the UK, and agreed with every word. Especially the bit about social contact and drinking. When travelling in other cultures, I still find it insanely difficult to start a conversation with a stranger unless we're in some situation that I can think of as a pub (and even then it's not easy). The way that random Americans will spark up conversations anywhere is alarming, but I'm envious.
The drinking culture is weird. It's interesting seeing the German drinking culture here in Berlin as a contrast.
- It's not so much alcohol consumption per se as the culture. In the UK, and in general in much of historically protestant northern Europe, there is a very deeply ingrained culture where Bad Things will happen if you drink; the flip side of that is that if you do drink, it is much more socially acceptable to go out and get in a fight (after all, that's what you do when you're drunk, right?). In many Mediterranean cultures people do not consume significantly less alcohol (normally in the form of wine, of course), but people are generally more relaxed about this, and as a consequence there is less binge drinking and fewer drunken brawls.
Here is a report on this: http://www.sirc.org/publik/drinking7.html, or, for a less technical explanation, see Kate Fox's Watching the English
- After I got Indefinite Leave to Remain (permanent settled status) in the UK, I had to buy a new phone that had NFC, because the new eVisa system required me to scan the chip in my passport to link it to the system. In general, the UK retains its mildly chaotic character - the 'disorderly order' that Kate Fox frequently mentions in her book Watching the English - but the immigration system is very much being tightened up due to political sentiment.
As problematic as it is to need a contractual relationship with a US company to interact with the UK Government, I'm sure that if you spoke with someone in the Government Digital Service who was involved with this, they'd tell you it was the least bad option.
- In Watching the English, Kate Fox gives a thorough explanation of how much she can pin down someone's social class by what they buy at Marks and Spencers (which is a department store that's branched out into groceries). I forget the exact details, but I think it was that doing a full food shop there made you upper-middle class, buying some food items there made you middle-middle class, and buying food items for special occasions there made you lower-middle class. Buying clothes from M&S makes you middle-middle class, and buying homewares makes you lower-middle class. The upper class don't shop at M&S at all, and the working class only buy clothes or homewares from there if they want something special. (I think - it was a while ago that I read it.) And that's just one shop.
Everywhere does social stratification, but nowhere does it like Britain.
- You can't fake your way into the upper class in the UK, because they all know each other already. As for behaviour, dress and speech, the standard books are:
* Noblesse Oblige[0] Mostly about vocabulary, and very outdated (1950s)
* The English Gentleman[1] Only about aristocratic men, and comedic in style
* Class: A View from Middle England (Jilly Cooper) Very 1970s
* Watching the English[2] Not specifically about social class, but class comes up a lot.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_Oblige_(book)
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