Watching the English
On sale
11th April 2005
Price: £9.99
Selected:
ebook / ISBN-13: 9781848940505
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.
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Reviews
Kate Fox's brilliant idea is to treat the British as another tribe...where she's particularly astute is in examining the exact pattern of clichés. Any study of the English must cover our class obsession, and Fox deals with the subject thoroughly.
An absolutely brilliant examination of English culture and how foreigners take as complete mystery the things we take for granted.
She has not only compiled a comprehensive list of English qualities, she has examined them in depth and wondered how we came to acquire them. Her book is a delightful read.
I loved the section on mobile-phone etiquette. Shrewd... I liked the chapter on English humour. This is an entertaining, clever book. Do read it and then pass it on.
If you like this kind of anthropology (and I do) there is a wealth of it to enjoy in this book. Her observations are acute... fortunately she doesn't write like an anthropologist but like an English woman - with amusement, not solemnity, able to laugh at herself as well as us.