Watching the English

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.

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.