Watching the English - Softcover

Kate Fox

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340752122 ISBN 13: 9780340752128

Publisher: Hodder And Stoughton, 2004

Synopsis

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. Her minute observation of the way we talk, dress, eat, drink, work, play, shop, drive, flirt, fight, queue - and moan about it all - exposes the hidden rules that we all unconsciously obey. The rules of weather-speak. The Importance of Not Being Earnest rule. The ironic-gnome rule. The reflex apology rule. The paranoid-pantomime rule. Class indicators and class anxiety tests. The money-talk taboo. Humour rules. Pub etiquette. Table manners. The rules of bogside reading. The dangers of excessive moderation. The eccentric-sheep rule. The English 'social dis-ease'. 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.

About this title

About the Author

Kate Fox, a social anthropologist, is co-Director of the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford, where she has worked on a number of projects with Desmond Morris and Peter North. Her work has included research, publications and broadcasts on many aspects of human behaviour including social aspects of drinking, flirting, body image, pub behaviour, gossip and violence. She is also a respected international consultant on the prevention and management of violence. She is frequently in the media as a commentator on numerous aspects of social anthropology.

Review

In an insightful and engrossing book, Fox explains the puzzling behavior of her fellow Englishmen in an informal way that puts other social anthropologists to shame. While she uses some academic lingo, Watching the English is far from being a dry read or a clinical observation of a certain group of people... Despite being more than 400 pages long, Watching the English reads easily, but is still jam-packed with information and tidbits about the English, and non-English readers are bound to at least once exclaim, 'What?! The English really do that?' (Camille Tuutti-Winkler, Examiner.com)

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder And Stoughton
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0340752122
• ISBN 13: 9780340752128
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 432