Maybe it’s the world cup, maybe it’s Brexit, but I’ve been
thinking a lot about Englishness recently. Specifically, I’ve been thinking
about how those of us on the political left might reclaim Englishness from the
right. At this point you might be wondering what good a sense of national
identity is to a liberal, internationalist remoaner. In ignoring the problem of
Englishness for so long, we have excluded those for whom a sense of Englishness
is important while also allowing the right to entirely control the narrative of
what Englishness means. And while an excess of patriotic pride can lead to a
whole host of problems, there is nothing inherently wrong with feeling a sense
of belonging to a place, a people or a history, so long as we do not start to
believe that this makes us better than those who do not share these things. I
picked up Kate Fox’s Watching the English
partly because there were no relevant George Orwell books in the library at
work, but it turned out to be a great place to begin my investigation. Fox is a
social anthropologist, and in this book she sets out to uncover the hidden
rules which define English culture. This analytical attempt to define
Englishness as it is, rather than as any nostalgic or political viewpoint would
like it to be, is a necessary starting point in imagining what a progressive,
forward looking Englishness could become.
Fox is an entertaining guide, pitching her writing towards what
she claims ‘used to be called the educated layman’. Her writing is peppered
with personal anecdotes, amusing observations and an undercurrent of the sort
of humour which she sees as our ‘default mode’. There is a touch of Douglas Adams’ biscuit story to her
account of pushing into queues or bumping into strangers for research purposes.
Balancing her light-hearted prose, Fox structures the book like a serious
academic investigation, defining key anthropological ideas in her introduction
before systematically applying the ‘participant-observer’ methodology to
different aspects of English society and identifying patterns and themes along
the way.
As might be expected of the co-director of the Social Issues
Research Centre, this investigation, however lightly written, is underpinned by
thorough research, and the depth of Fox’s knowledge is evident throughout,
although she rarely includes statistics (which would seem dry and out-of-place
in a work of pop-anthropology). However, while Fox makes occasional references
to ‘cross-cultural studies’, and is keen to point out that some of the traits
she identifies are not uniquely English, I did feel in places that the book
lacked enough specific references to other cultures to truly clarify what makes
English culture different. A dog is not just defined by the fact that is a
four-legged domestic animal, but also by the ways in which it differs from a
cat or a horse, and in the same way it would have been nice to have some
examples of how English attitudes differ from the attitudes of the Germans, the
Vietnamese or our neighbours the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish. We are told in
the introduction that, although a certain amount of overlap is to be expected, Fox
is interested in Englishness rather than Britishness, but she never follows
this up by suggesting how these cultures differ.
I particularly wonder about the pervasiveness of Fox’s core
features of Englishness – what she calls our ‘social dis-ease’ – in other parts
of our islands. For Fox, this social dis-ease is central to English identity,
and she sees it as the key to two seemingly irreconcilable sides to our
culture: our reputation for polite reserve and our notoriety as violent,
drunken yobs. While I don’t see myself in the latter stereotype, I definitely
felt a pang of recognition in many of the more ‘awkward’ behaviours – the
potential for embarrassment, the negative politeness, the desire not to make a
scene, the awkwardness of greetings and farewells. Turns out I’m not
socially-awkward, just English. I do wonder whether this feeling might be more
universal than Fox suggests though, in the same way that everyone on the
internet self-identified as introverts a few years ago. Perhaps everyone has
this sense of ‘social dis-ease’ and some cultures and individuals are just
better at hiding it than others.
As you might expect from a book on English culture, social class
features heavily. Fox chooses to include sections on class in every chapter,
rather than devote a chapter to class in its own right, as she theorises that
class norms and an awareness of social class pervades all aspects of our
society. Fox is clear that she is making descriptive, analytical judgements on
the distinctions between classes rather than prescriptive value judgements, but
in parts of the book where she is not addressing social class directly some of
her assumptions seem to be unconsciously based on middle class attitudes and
norms. She also identifies the usage of ‘dinner’ or ‘tea’ to describe the
evening meal as a class indicator, while I had always understand it to be a
north/south geographic divide (and my tendency to switch between them as a
midlands quirk). I was willing to defer to her expert opinion on the matter
(and reassess my uncertainty as a symptom of my mixed class-background), but a recent
YouGov survey seems to support my initial instinct. Perhaps English class
consciousness is so deeply rooted that even when she is attempting to play the
part of the detached observer, Fox cannot quite escape her own biases. I must
also confess to these biases: while reading, I found myself unable to avoid
measuring her descriptors against my own behaviour and being secretly pleased
that I am more likely to say ‘sorry’ than ‘pardon’ if I mishear somebody,
unwittingly providing evidence for Fox’s portrayal of the lower, less
established middle class[1]
unease with their status – their tendency to want to look ‘higher’ than they
are. According to Fox, this tendency is more-or-less absent from the working
classes and the upper-middle to upper classes, and most prominent among the
lower-middles and (to a lesser extent) the middle-middles, who are both keen to
distance themselves definitively from the class below. When introducing us to
the idea that hidden ideological systems govern our thoughts, one of the
lecturers on my degree course emphasised that, once we step outside of these
ideologies and recognise them as constructs, we can never truly step back in.
Apparently English class consciousness is so strong that attempting to dissect
it only serves to make it stronger.
Focussing on a universal grammar of English culture, Fox does not
really address English politics, and while it was interesting to see her lay
out a grammar of Englishness, the book has little to say on how Englishness can
be reclaimed from the nationalists. In fact, English nationalism is not
mentioned at all and while Fox is happy to address a number of anti-social
behaviours, the only reference to racism is in the context of how, in the
‘orderly disorder’ of Fresher’s Week or New Year’s Eve, ‘telling bawdy jokes is
fine, but racist ones are inappropriate.’ It is tempting to imagine that overt
racism and nationalism have become more prevalent since the book was published
in 2004, but where I grew up not only were openly racist jokes fairly common,
but so were far-right political candidates and pro-Combat 18 graffiti. Perhaps
a playful examination of a culture is not the right place to examine truly
serious socio-political issues. Neither does Fox really address the plague of
nostalgia. While she identifies that, from washing machines to restaurants to
politicians, we generally don’t expect things to be very good or work
particularly well, she does not comment on the related fact that many of us
believe things were better in the past. Depending on your political bent, that
past might be the height of British Imperialism, or it might be the post-war
Labour Government with its radical social policies. It might be the Thatcher
years or the cultural explosion of the Beatles and the Stones. For many of us,
perhaps perversely, Britain’s golden age comes in WW2, with all of us coming
together through food shortages and bombs to show the Nazis what for. One thing
is certain, the country is going to the dogs. The politics/music/people of
tomorrow are bound to be worse than those of the past. I used to think this was
a universal trait, rather than a particularly English one, but recent research shows
that our island neighbours do not share this view. In Scotland, Wales and
Northern Ireland, more people believed that their country’s best years were
ahead of them.
One useful concept Fox does have, however comes right at the
beginning of the book when she is defining her terms. Englishness, as described
here is a cultural category rather than an ethnic one. To some extent this
argument seems facile – ethnicity itself is a culturally constructed concept
rather than one that has a real basis in science. But the way we talk about
culture and the way we talk about ethnicity differs significantly. Culture is
system of behaviours and attitudes – something we acquire, while ethnicity is
bestowed upon us by accident of birth or perception. By thinking of Englishness
not as an ethnic categorisation but as a set of cultural norms one can acquire
or adopt, we can neutralise nativist attempts to define English identity as one
that can only come from some sort of imagined pure bloodline, but this view
risks encouraging those arbiters of Englishness to judge immigrants (and by
extension, those who have been here for their whole lives, but who ‘look
foreign’) by the degree to which the adhere to a particular pattern of English
behaviour. This is all part of the knotty problem that humans naturally look
for a sense of group identity, but that all group identities (national,
sub-cultural, religious, sports team-related) are, by their very nature,
exclusionary and divisive.
I have a few things to add here, but none of them really go very
far in solving this problem. Firstly, in any culture, no individual will
perfectly embody all of the attitudes, values and behaviours associated with
it. Whether your ancestors arrived with Hengest and Horsa, on the Windrush, or
last Thursday on a flight from Krakow, there will be elements of English
culture that you display, and elements you that you do not. Throughout her
book, Fox refers to the underlying rules of English as a ‘grammar’, and I think
this is a useful comparison. Linguists describe the rules of a language as it
is used by its speakers, they do not prescribe how it should be used – if the
language changes, the linguists will record this change and look for causes,
but they will not tell the people who are using the new rules that they are
‘doing it wrong’. This brings me rather nicely to my second point. All cultures
change over time. As people come from different places, bringing their own
cultures with them, it will inevitably have an impact on the culture that is
already there. But becoming the sort of country that tightly controls our
borders, that tries to police a prescribed view of Englishness, would also have
an impact, and, I believe, would tend to exaggerate some of our less desirable
qualities. Finally, we should not confuse culture with citizenship, and we
should not confuse citizenship with a right to reside in a country. As new
people arrive, they will naturally adapt to their new cultural environment (and
remember, it is perfectly possible to belong to more than one culture), just as
their new environment will be changed in some way by their presence. A
progressive version of Englishness would welcome these people into our land and
into our culture as part of a new chapter in what it means to be English.
[1]
Although my own class background is probably more complicated than that – I could
write a whole blog post trying to work it out. For now I’ll just say that I’m
describing myself as ‘lower-middle’, not because I think that is better than
being ‘working’ but because, despite having always lived in working-class
areas, to describe myself as ‘working-class’ would be to claim a cultural
identity that I don’t really have.
