Watching the English the Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. Kate Fox

Having lived in Britain a few times over the years, this book provided many laughs as it described many behaviors I recognized, as well as some things with which I was unfamiliar. Written with dry wit, it was great fun to relive those sometimes ironic experiences!

Ms. Fox is an anthropologist, and she means it when she says this is an anthropological study. It took me back 40 years, to my undergraduate anthropology classes and abstracts about the Yanomami and the Korowai, which looked liked they'd be fascinating, but were on the dry side, and sometimes on the VERY dry side. Never knew cannibalism could be dull, but it can. This book is on the dry side. There are, for example, roughly 40 pages dissecting the "uniquely English" habit of discussing the weather when meeting strangers at, say, a bus stop or in a ticket queue. I'm an American, and we do the same thing. So did the Kiwis when I was in New Zealand, the Scots when I was in Scotland, and the Austrians I met in Vienna, when they weren't discussing Governor Schwarzenegger. Not really a "uniquely English" habit, then, and really . . . are 40 pages delineating every possible anthropological meaning that the behavior might have really necessary? Flashback to the bowling match in William Foote Whyte's "Street Corner Society," interesting if you're really into that stuff, but otherwise not so much. This book would, I imagine, be a treat for someone "in the field," but it is certainly not a layman's book. You just need to know, going in, that it is not a light, tongue-in-cheek, sort of thing. It's much more a textbook study.

As an American social scientist who has an English partner and has visited the UK multiple times, I found this book engrossing for many reasons. Kate Fox does the miraculous: she makes fascinating reading out of chapters on tea, queue-jumping, arrangements of knick-knacks, incessant talking about the weather, and myriad other English characteristics that so charm, frustrate, and baffle we non-English of the world. Moreover, her writing is hilarious - she has a droll, tongue-in-cheek, utterly English sense of humor that had me laughing through every chapter. The book is incredibly useful, too. I read it after my English partner recommended it to me, saying he had never read anything that captured the English so well. The insights in the book clarified several things to me and greatly reduced the quantity of cultural faux pas on my part. It also gave my partner a great deal of insight into his own personality as well as his interactions with Americans. Plus, it led to many, many fascinating discussions between us about (among other things) the markers of class and attitudes about it, the nature (and point) of politeness, and how it is that societies can make us who we are. The only shortcoming of the book is that I still don't understand Vegemite, but I think that may just be beyond comprehension.

"Really, I don't see why anthropologists feel they have to travel to remote corners of the world and get dysentery and malaria in order to study strange tribal cultures with bizarre beliefs and mysterious customs, when the weirdest, most puzzling tribe of all is right here on our doorstep." - Kate Fox WATCHING THE ENGLISH, by social anthropologist Kate Fox, is an engaging, perceptive, informative, and entertaining treatise on English (as opposed to "British") behavior in all aspects of life. At times, the author's style seems tongue-in-cheek. However, as she herself is English, this is simply a manifestation of her tribe's trait not to be seen as being too earnest and, while the subject is to be taken seriously, not too seriously. In what must have been a prodigious research effort (yielding 416 pages of small type), Fox characterizes English behavior and attitudes as they relate to weather, social small talk, humor, linguistics, pubs, mobile phones, home, queues, transportation, work, play, dress, food, sex, secondary education, marriage, funerals, religion, and recurring "calendrical rites" (e.g. birthdays and holidays). Within these categories, Kate addresses everything from the pets and jam to the furniture that the English favor. And, since class consciousness is irrevocably embedded in the national social fabric, all is explained relative to the various classes: lower- and upper-working, lower-, middle- and upper-middle, and upper. As an example, when it comes to one's automobile: "A scrupulously tidy car indicates an upper-working to middle-middle owner, while a lot of rubbish, apple cores, biscuit crumbs, crumpled bits of paper and general disorder suggests an owner from either the top or the bottom of the social hierarchy. (Further,) the upper and upper-middle classes of both sexes have a high tolerance of dog-related dirt and disorder ... The interiors of their cars are often covered in dog hair, and the upholstery scratched to bits by scrabbling paws." Kate's observations stress the importance of self-effacement, fair-play, moderation, compromise, courtesy, modesty, desire for privacy, polite egalitarianism, irony, ambiguity, and hypocrisy in English behavior. However, to me, the single most important concept to be absorbed from WATCHING THE ENGLISH is that of "negative politeness", which explains the notorious English reserve, and: "... which is concerned with other people's need not to be intruded or imposed upon (as opposed to 'positive politeness', which is concerned with their need for inclusion and social approval). We judge others by ourselves, and assume that everyone shares our obsessive need for privacy - so we mind our own business and politely ignore them." After all, one mustn't "make a fuss". I myself was born in Milwaukee. My paternal grandfather emigrated from central Europe, and his family was German-speaking. Yet, as I read this book, my reaction was: "Wow! That describes me perfectly." Perhaps this is because

I'm English, and having just devoured this book in a day or two I have to say that it is extremely accurate! It made me laugh out loud on the train while reading, which as you'll see from this book is an unusual occurrence for someone from my country... This book describes the amazingly complex and intuitive set of rules by which we English live. It covers our obsessions with privacy, understatement, humour, anti-boastfulness, excessive politeness and all the other motives and societal rules behind the way we act. Non-English readers will cry "What?! Is that really true? Do the English really think and act like that?!" - and I can assure you that we absolutely do... An enlightening, funny, thorough and brilliant portrait of the English.