Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour | 
| Author: Kate Fox
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
List Price: $17.95
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Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 8968
Media: Paperback
Pages: 432
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 4.9 x 1.1
ISBN: 1857885082
Dewey Decimal Number: 390.0941
EAN: 9781857885088
ASIN: 1857885082
Publication Date: May 25, 2008
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Product Description
A bestseller in the UK, Watching the English is a biting, affectionate, insightful and often hilarious look English Society. Putting the English national character under her anthropological microscope, Fox finds a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and bizarre codes of behavior. Through a mixture of anthropological analysis and her own unorthodox experiments-even using herself as a reluctant guinea-pig-Fox discovers what these unwritten codes tell us about Englishness.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
A tribal talent for avoiding fuss February 5, 2006
Joseph Haschka (Glendale, CA USA)
65 out of 65 found this review helpful
"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 was an Englishman in a previous incarnation or, more plausibly, because English values persist in the core, WASP, sub-culture of the country descended from the thirteen, original, Anglo-American colonies.
WATCHING THE ENGLISH is a must-read for anyone who loves England, and is an obligatory duo with Jeremy Paxman's THE ENGLISH: A PORTRAIT OF A PEOPLE.
An amusing and acute book about the English November 10, 2006
Helen Hancox (Essex, England)
53 out of 58 found this review helpful
I started this book 3 days after returning from my first trip to America. Whilst in America I became aware of the huge cultural difference between the friendly people of the USA and traditional Brits amongst whom I've lived almost my whole life - I found much of American behaviour inexplicable and rather rude and personal towards someone they didn't know. I breathed a sigh of relief when returning to England, back amongst normal people who aren't continually nosy and telling you what they think about politics, religion and anything else the whole time.
I wish I'd read this book before I went. Not that I wouldn't have found a lot of American behaviour strange after reading it (I would still have done) but I would have been more aware of my cultural disabilities and how weird I must seem to them.
That's the power of this book - you can dip into almost any page, read a paragraph and say "that's me!" Kate Fox has studied the English for 10 years with remarkable acuity and she is able to identify behaviours that, to us, are entirely normal but are actually just part of our collective odd English behaviour patterns. When a man I had just been introduced to in America said "So, tell me all about yourself" I was left gaping at him in horror; `Watching The English' describes how people in the UK never share personal information unless they know someone particularly well - and in fact most people don't even introduce themselves to start with - my horror was expected and justified as I had never before been called upon to `blow my own trumpet' and it is completely counter to British reserve and our self-effacing nature. Her comments on ignoring other passengers on train journeys, on our national obsession with pets, on queuing, mobile phone use, class distinctions, dislike of fuss and bother and so many other areas rang completely true.
What I particularly liked about the book (and that I am English would of course confirm this) was that she wrote with a lot of humour and throw-away one-liners, she wasn't hugely pro-English or anti-English, she wasn't anti-American (despite them being so ODD!) and was able to illustrate her comments through the vast amount of research that she has done, including interviewing English people and foreigners and carrying out experiments herself (such as bumping into people in the street and seeing if they say `sorry' - the English generally do).
It's a surprisingly long book and not something you'd sit and read in one go. In fact I think it works best as something you dip into and that's how I've read it over a few days - opening it at random, reading a few pages, then flicking on. It's all subdivided into different headings and subheadings and doesn't really need to be read linearly to be understood. I found myself reading out vast tranches of it to anyone in earshot as it was so amusing and accurate. I read the introduction last of all, having read many comments by Amazon reviews that it was rather hard going - I found the introduction fine, but perhaps that was because by then I had enjoyed the book and found that I very much appreciated the author, her self-deprecating humour and her willingness to share her foibles and those of her family.
This book would make an ideal present for any English people out there who want to laugh at themselves (that's all of us), for anyone about to travel to a different culture (to avoid misunderstandings through others' behaviour) and particularly for those living in other countries who want to visit us without putting their foot in it at every conceivable opportunity.
So true! November 17, 2005
T. Edwards (Bristol , UK)
47 out of 49 found this review helpful
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.
This Explains Everything! September 2, 2005
K. Boynton (Los Angleles, CA)
18 out of 18 found this review helpful
I picked up this book at Heathrow airport on my way out of London after living there for 6 months. I had been confused by the manner of some of the English I met there, and after reading this book, it all begins to make sense!
Kate Fox writes a fantastically detailed examination of English social stucture, that explains the perception of the English as "Cold" or "Unfriendly". She does it with sharp-witted and humorous writing that has a useful social-anthropological edge that gives substance to her claims. There are several hilarious (and still useful) sections on the english use of Irony, the rules of Quing
A Must-Read for any anglophile or traveler to the UK; buy it, read it, love it, you'll be glad you did! Cheers
The dis-ease of the English is not the whole story September 18, 2005
Shalom Freedman (Jerusalem,Israel)
18 out of 22 found this review helpful
Kate Fox observes and analyzes the English. She comes up with a list of characteristics which describe their behavior. The first and primary one is social dis-ease. By this she means 'all our chronic inhibitions and handicaps." It is discomfort and awkwardness in the whole realm of social interaction. "Embarassment, insularity, awkwardness, perverse obliqueness, emotional constipation, fear of intimacy and general inability to engage in a normal and straightforward fashion with other human beings."
She sees the famous English ' reserve' and its opposite 'English hooliganism' as signs of the same basic disorder.
To this dis- ease she says the English reflexively respond. The first response is with Humor. English understated and ironic often self- deprecatory humor is the great reflexive action to awkwardness. The English play it and themselves down.
Another reflexive action is ' moderation' or ' the avoidance of extremes of any kind'." Our moderate industriousness and moderate hedonism" and "our ambivelence,apathy, woolliness, middlingness, fenc- sitting etc."She says the English do everything in moderation except being moderate.
A third reflex is 'hypocrisy'But she sees this not as a negative but as expression of the English desire to be fair, and not insulting. And she shows how English speech is filled with phrases 'sorrys ' of various kinds which aim at not intruding and hurting.
Other basic English characteristics are what she calls ' empiricism' that is a preference for the concrete, the sensually realistic , rather than for wooly theorizing. And along with this there is the English 'eeyorness' by which she means ineffectual complaining, 'moaning' non- stop in a not - very serious way. This relates too to a typical English pessimism, or skepticism. She also speaks about how strongly class- conscious the English are in their speech and manner. And how for them the values of fair play, courtesy and modesty are central.
I must admit that her analysis taught me quite a bit about the English. I recently had to spend a month in England in not very pleasant circumstances in a hospital. I found the great share of the people there extremely polite and considerate. I was however a bit puzzled by their capacity at preserving a distance, and their clear avoidance of any kinds of strong emotional expression. For instance I wanted to thank one nurse who had been especially kind to my wife and myself. But I saw that any 'emotional thanks' was out of place, and that she took the manner in a much lighter way.
Again I learned by this book , but it is not seem to me the whole story.
One of the things which most strikes me about the English does not necessarily have to do with their way of acting in everyday life situations now. Shakespeare is English and so is Wordsworth, and so is Newton and Faraday and Darwin. And the list of very great English is very long indeed. And in my own field of Literature certainly the English have created one of the great literatures of mankind.
So my question is not simply how the English manage in everyday life, and how their character is expressed there. As I see it the English are of Mankind 's ' great peoples' ' great creator peoples'.
Now in England I had the feeling that the society as a whole has a very high level of competence, and technical skill. That's one thing, and England's tremendous place in the Scientific and Technological Revolutions of the past five centuries is clear. But how does this relate to the soul of a Wordsworth or a Milton or so many others, the English genius.
But perhaps I am unfairly asking that the author have written a book different from the excellent and informative one that she did write.
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