Watching The English, 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."




This isn't the kind of book I normally read, but it was one that JJ picked up a year or so ago to read for her cross cultural studies class, and then when I went to America it got bought for me for Christmas, so with recommendations and a spare copy, it was pretty inevitable that I would end up getting through it. It's been a slog though - I started this before any of these reviews, it was the first book I began reading (pre-Christmas 2012) and I only just finished it.

That's not because it's boring, or a bad book, quite the opposite. It's more that I found other things to read, and it's certainly not the kind of book I find it hard to put down. At any one time I may have two or three non-fiction books and a couple of fiction books on the go. I'll read a book in a day and then move back onto whatever I was reading beforehand. This book was always one that kept getting abandoned in favour of something else.

Whenever I did read it though, it was fascinating. Whilst it overstays its welcome a little (especially since Fox is trying to define the rules of Englishness, which inevitably means a lot of finding similarities, and thus repetition) for the first two thirds it's an incredible run through of what makes people English - something which had me chuckling throughout, and frequently reading sections aloud to anyone who would listen. Usually JJ, who never seemed that impressed - possibly because she had already read it once.

It's a book that will probably resonate as much with the English as with any foreigner who wishes to understand them. Unlike Bryson, who is always more interesting when writing about other places, Fox manages to locate those things which are common currency in every English persons life - their privacy issues, their dislike of communication, their love of humour. Much of it can seem oversimplified, or a reach, but there's no doubting that it's often revelatory - whole sections revealed character traits (flaws?) that I had never realised I had but which it turns out JJ had been dealing with for months. Not just from me, but from the entire country, all of whom are engaged in an unwitting cultural pantomime of one-downmanship and keep-away.

It's the kind of book that is perfect to dip in and out of, which is conveniently what I have been doing. Whilst I can't imagine reading it all in one would be too pleasent (it's not always as fun or interesting a read as at its best, especially when it focuses on the anthropology of other classes, or anything that wasn't specific to my Englishness) it's certainly something that will make you think. In fact, it's been enough to cause arguments about anthropology in my family, something I never ever thought would happen.

Also Try:
Jeremy Paxman, The English
Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There, Shakespeare
Paul Cornell, Captain Britain and MI13