by Kate Fox
My second answer to the race question concerns the more well-trodden area of ‘acculturation’. Here we come down to the level of the group and the individual, rather than the minority culture as a whole. To put it simply – perhaps too simply – some ethnic-minority groups and individuals are more ‘English’ than others. By this I mean that some, whether through choice or circumstance or both, have adopted more of the host culture’s customs, values and behaviour patterns than others. (This becomes a somewhat more complex issue in the second, third and subsequent generations, as the host culture in question will have been influenced, at least to some degree, by their own forebears.)
Once you start to put it in these terms, the issue is really no longer one of race. When I say that some ethnic-minority groups and individuals are more ‘English’ than others, I am clearly not talking about the colour of their skin or their country of origin: I am talking about the degree of ‘Englishness’ they exhibit in their behaviour, manner and customs. I could, and do, make the same comment about white ‘Anglo-Saxon’ groups and individuals.
We all do, in fact. We describe a social group, a person, or even, say, just one of that person’s reactions or characteristic mannerisms, as ‘very English’ or ‘typically English’. We understand what someone means when they say, ‘In some ways I’m very English, but in other ways I’m not,’ or ‘You’re more English about that than I am.’ We have a concept of ‘degrees’ of Englishness. I am not introducing anything new or startling here: our everyday use of these terms demonstrates that we all already have a clear grasp of the subtleties of ‘partial’ Englishness, or even ‘piecemeal’ or ‘cherry-picking’ Englishness. We recognise that we can all, at least to some extent, ‘choose’ our degree of Englishness. All I am saying is that these concepts can be applied equally to ethnic minorities.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that Englishness is rather more a matter of choice for the ethnic minorities in this country than it is for the rest of us. For those of us without the benefit of early first-hand influence of another culture, some aspects of Englishness can be so deeply ingrained that we find it almost impossible to shake them off, even when it is clearly in our interests to do so (such as, in my case, when trying to conduct field experiments involving queue-jumping). Immigrants have the advantage of being able to pick and choose more freely, often adopting the more desirable English quirks and habits while carefully steering clear of the more ludicrous ones.
I have some personal experience of such cultural cherry-picking. My family emigrated to America when I was five, and we lived there for six years, during which entire time I steadfastly refused to adopt any trace of an American accent, on the grounds that it was aesthetically unpleasing (‘Sounds horrid’ was how I put it at the time – dreadful little prig that I was), although I happily adapted to most other aspects of the culture. As an adolescent, I lived for four years in rural France. I attended the local state school and became indistinguishable in my speech, behaviour and manners from any other Briançonnaise teenager. Except that I knew this was a matter of choice, and could judiciously shed those elements of Frenchness that annoyed my mother when I got home from school in the evening – or, indeed, deliberately exaggerate them to provoke her (some teenage behaviours are universal) – and discard those that proved socially unfavourable on our return to England.
Immigrants can, of course, choose to ‘go native’, and some in this country become ‘more English than the English’. Among my own friends, the two I would most readily describe as ‘very English’ are a first-generation Indian immigrant and a first-generation Polish refugee. In both cases, their degree of Englishness was initially a conscious choice, and although it has since become second nature, they can still stand back and analyse their behaviour – and explain the rules they have learnt to obey – in a way that most native English find difficult, as we tend to take these things for granted.
My sister had much the same experience when she married a Lebanese man and emigrated to Lebanon (from America), where she lived for about fifteen years. She became very quickly, to her Bek’aa Valley family and neighbours, a fully ‘acculturated’ Lebanese village housewife, but can switch back to Englishness (or Americanness, or indeed her teenage Frenchness) as easily as she changes languages – and often does both in mid-sentence. Her children are American-Arab, with a few hints of Englishness, and equally adept at switching language, manners and mores when it suits them.
Many of those who pontificate about acculturation are inclined to underestimate this element of choice. Such processes are often described in terms suggesting that the ‘dominant’ culture is simply imposed on unwitting, passive minorities, rather than focusing on the extent to which individuals quite consciously, deliberately, cleverly and even mockingly pick and choose among the behaviours and customs of their host culture. I accept that some degree of acculturation or conformity to English ways is often ‘demanded’ or effectively ‘enforced’ (although this would surely be true of any host culture, unless one enters it as a conquering invader or passing tourist), and the rights and wrongs of specific demands can and should be debated. But my point is that compliance with such demands is still a conscious process, and not, as some accounts of acculturation imply, a form of brainwashing.
My only way of understanding this process is to assume that every immigrant to this country is at least as bright and clever as I was when we immigrated to France, just as capable of exercising free will and maintaining a sense of their own cultural identity while complying with the demands, however irrational or unfair, of the local culture. I could crank up or tone down my Frenchness, by subtle degrees, in an entirely calculated manner. My sister can choose and calibrate her Arabness, and my immigrant friends can do the same with their Englishness, sometimes for practical social purposes, including the avoidance of exclusion, but also purely for amusement. Perhaps the earnest researchers studying acculturation just don’t want to see that their ‘subjects’ have got the whole thing sussed, understand our culture better than we do, and are, much of the time, privately laughing at us.
It should be obvious from all of this (but I’ll say it anyway) that when I speak of Englishness I am not putting a value on it, not holding it up above any other ‘-ness’. When I say that some immigrants are more English than others, I am not (unlike Norman Tebbit with his infamous ‘Cricket Test’) implying that these individuals are in any way superior, or that their rights or status as citizens should be any different from those who are less English. And when I say that anyone can – given enough time and effort – ‘learn’ or ‘adopt’ Englishness, I am not suggesting that they ought to do so.
The degree to which immigrants and ethnic minorities should be expected to adapt to fit in with English culture is a matter for debate. Where immigrants from former British colonies are concerned, perhaps the degree of acculturation demanded should match that which we achieved as uninvited residents in their cultures. Of all peoples, the English are surely historically the least qualified to preach about the importance of adapting to host-culture manners and mores. Our own track-record on this is abysmal. Wherever we settle in any numbers, we not only create pockets of utterly insular Englishness, but also often attempt to impose our cultural norms and habits on the local population.
But this book is intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive. I am interested in understanding Englishness as it is, warts and all. It is not the anthropologist’s job to moralise and pontificate about how the tribe she is studying ought to treat its neighbours or its members. I may have my opinions on such matters, but they are not relevant to my attempt to discover the rules of Englishness. I may sometimes state these opinions anyway (it’s my book, so I can do what I like), but I will try to distinguish clearly between opinion and observation.
BRITISHNESS AND ENGLISHNESS
While I’m at it, this is a suitable place to apologise to any Scottish or Welsh (or even Northern Irish)12 people who (a) still regard themselves as B
ritish and (b) are wondering why I am writing about Englishness rather than Britishness. (I am referring here to real, born-and-bred Scots, Welsh and Irish by the way, not English people – like me – who like to boast of their drop of Welsh, Scottish or Irish ‘blood’ when it suits them.)
The answer is that I am researching and writing about Englishness rather than Britishness:
•partly out of sheer laziness
•partly because England is a nation, and might reasonably be expected to have some sort of coherent and distinctive national culture or character, whereas Britain is a purely political construct, composed of several nations with their own distinctive cultures
•partly because although there may be a great deal of overlap between these cultures, they are clearly not identical and should not be treated as such by being lumped together under ‘Britishness’
•and finally because ‘Britishness’ seems to me to be a rather meaningless term: when people use it, they nearly always really mean ‘Englishness’ – they do not mean that someone is being frightfully Welsh or Scottish.13
I only have the time and energy to try to understand one of these cultures, and I have chosen my own, the English.
I realise that one can, if one is being picky, pick all sorts of holes in these arguments – not least that a ‘nation’ is surely itself a pretty artificial construct – and Cornish nationalists and even fervent regionalists from other parts of England (Scousers, Geordies, Yorkshiremen, etc., etc.) will no doubt insist that they, too, have their own separate identity and should not be bundled together with the rest of the English.
The trouble is that virtually all nations have a number of regions, each of which invariably regards itself as different from, and superior to, all the others. This applies in France, Italy, the US, Russia, Mexico, Spain, Scotland, Australia – and more or less anywhere else you care to mention. People from St Petersburg talk about Muscovites as though they were members of a different species; east-coast and Midwestern Americans might as well be from different planets, ditto Tuscans and Neapolitans, Northern and Southern Mexicans, etc.; even cities such as Melbourne and Sydney see themselves as having radically different characters – and let’s not start on Edinburgh and Glasgow. Regionalism is hardly a peculiarly English phenomenon. In all of these cases, however, the people of these admittedly highly individual regions and cities nevertheless have enough in common to make them recognisably Italian, American, Russian, Scottish, etc. I am interested in those commonalities.
STEREOTYPES AND CULTURAL GENOMICS
‘Well, I hope you’re going to get beyond the usual stereotypes’ was another common response when I told people I was doing research for a book on Englishness. This comment seemed to reflect an assumption that a stereotype is almost by definition ‘not true’, that the truth lies somewhere else – wherever ‘beyond’ might be. I find this rather strange, as I would naturally assume that, although they are unlikely to be ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but’, stereotypes about English national character might possibly contain at least a grain or two of truth. They do not, after all, just come out of thin air, but must have germinated and grown from something. Most national-character stereotypes are widely accepted or even enthusiastically ‘endorsed’ among ordinary citizens of the nations in question, which does not make them ‘true’, but at the very least tells us something about a culture’s self-image, and therefore about its beliefs and values.
So my standard reply was to say that I would try to get inside the stereotypes. I would not specifically seek them out, but would keep an open mind; and if my research showed that certain English behaviour patterns corresponded to a given stereotype, I would put that stereotype in my Petri dish, stick it under my microscope, dissect it, tease it apart, subject its component bits to various tests, unravel its DNA and, er, generally poke away and puzzle over it until I found those grains (or genes) of truth.
OK, there are probably some mixed metaphors in there, not to mention a somewhat hazy notion of what proper scientists actually do in their labs, but you get the idea. Most things look rather different when you put them under a microscope and, sure enough, I found that stereotypes such as English ‘reserve’, ‘politeness’, ‘modesty’, ‘weather-talk’, ‘hooliganism’, ‘hypocrisy’, ‘privacy’, ‘anti-intellectualism’, ‘queuing’, ‘compromise’, ‘fair play’, ‘humour’, ‘class-consciousness’, ‘eccentricity’, ‘tolerance’ and so on were not quite what they seemed. They all had complex layers of rules and codes that were not visible to the naked eye, and not one of them turned out to be a straightforward, unqualified ‘truth’. Some of them nonetheless ended up on my list of ‘defining characteristics’, but redefined with many caveats and qualifications.
A few personality psychologists have wasted a lot of time ‘proving’ that national-character stereotypes are ‘untrue’ on the grounds that they do not correlate with aggregate scores on five personality factors. The supposedly ‘reserved’ English, for example, score high on ‘extra-version’ in personality questionnaires. While it is clear that so-called ‘English reserve’ is far more complex, contingent and contextual than the crude stereotype would suggest (as is its equally famous opposite, ‘English hooliganism’, a rowdy, ‘extravert’ stereotype that these researchers conveniently ignore), it is also part of a cultural ‘grammar’ of rules, norms, customs and behaviour codes that has nothing to do with individual personality traits. In real-life social situations, most people unconsciously obey the rules and norms of their culture, whatever their individual personalities. The term ‘national character’ is a metaphor, which should not be taken literally. A culture is not a person writ large, and cannot be understood or defined by adding up individual personality scores. But, then, ‘When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’, and it is perhaps no accident that the main proponent of this aggregate-personality argument is a psychologist who designs personality questionnaires.
Without getting too carried away by my equally metaphorical DNA analogies, I suppose another way of describing my Englishness project would be as an attempt to sequence (or map, I’m never sure which is which) the English cultural genome – to identify the cultural ‘codes’ that make us who we are.
Hmm, yes, Sequencing the English Cultural Genome – that sounds like a big, serious, ambitious and impressively scientific project. The sort of thing that might well take three times longer than the period originally agreed in the publisher’s contract, especially if you allow for all the tea-breaks.
Joking aside, I should probably explain the semi-scientific approach to understanding our national character that I actually used. It involved three stages:
•First, I used a variety of research methods (including observation studies, participant observation, interviews, discussion groups, national surveys, field experiments, etc., over the course of about two decades) to try to identify distinctive patterns or regularities in English behaviour.
•Then I tried to detect the unwritten social rules governing those behaviour patterns and, where possible, to ‘test’ or ‘verify’ these rules, mainly using field experiments, discussions and interviews.
•And, finally, I tried to figure out what these rules can tell us about Englishness.
The chapters in this book describe the behaviour patterns and unwritten rules relating to different aspects of English life (and in some cases how I discovered them). The brief sections at the end of each chapter are not summaries. This is not a textbook, and I would not insult your intelligence by summarising what you have only just read. These sections are where I examine each of the rules I have identified in that chapter, and try to tease out any ‘defining characteristics of Englishness’ these rules might reveal.
As I puzzled this out, methodically, rule by rule, chapter by chapter, many of the same characteristics – the same collective values, outlooks and unconscious reflexes – emerged again and again from the unwritten rules governing each aspect of En
glish life and behaviour. So by the end I could see clearly which were the ‘defining characteristics’ I was seeking.
I have deliberately included this whole puzzling-out process in the book, as this seemed a more honest, transparent way of doing things – a bit like a maths exam at school, where the teacher says you have to show the ‘workings out’, rather than just putting down the final answer. So at the end of the book, if you think I’ve got the final answers to my ‘What is Englishness?’ question wrong, at least you can go back to the ‘workings out’ and see exactly where I made my mistakes.
1. A term coined by my father, the anthropologist Robin Fox, meaning blindness to underlying similarities between human groups and cultures because one is dazzled by the more highly visible surface differences.