Watching the English

THE NATURE OF CULTURE

My analysis of Englishness will focus on rules, as I believe this is the most direct route to the establishment of a 'grammar' of Englishness. But given the very broad sense in which I am using the term 'rule', my search for the rules of Englishness will effectively involve an attempt to understand and define English culture. This is another term that requires definition: by 'culture' I mean the sum of a social group's patterns of behaviour, customs, way of life, ideas, beliefs and values.

I am not implying by this that I see English culture as a homogeneous entity - that I expect to find no variation in behaviour patterns, customs, beliefs, etc. - any more than I am suggesting that the 'rules of Englishness' are universally obeyed. As with the rules, I expect to find much variation and diversity within English culture, but hope to discover some sort of common core, a set of underlying basic patterns that might help us to define Englishness.

At the same time, I am conscious of the wider danger of cross-cultural 'ethnographic dazzle' - of blindness to the similarities between the English and other cultures. When absorbed in the task of defining a 'national character', it is easy to become obsessed with the distinctive features of a particular culture, and to forget that we are all members of the same species.4 Fortunately, several rather more eminent anthropologists have provided us with lists of 'cross-cultural universals' - practices, customs and beliefs found in all human societies - which should help me to avoid this hazard. There is some lack of consensus on exactly what practices, etc. should be included in this category (but then, when did academics ever manage to agree on anything?)5 For example, Robin Fox gives us the following:

Laws about property, rules about incest and marriage, customs of taboo and avoidance, methods of settling disputes with a minimum of bloodshed, beliefs about the supernatural and practices relating to it, a system of social status and methods of indicating it, initiation ceremonies for young men, courtship practices involving the adornment of females, systems of symbolic body ornament generally, certain activities set aside for men from which women are excluded, gambling of some kind, a tool- and weapons-making industry, myths and legends, dancing, adultery and various doses of homicide, suicide, homosexuality, schizophrenia, psychoses and neuroses, and various practitioners to take advantage of or cure these, depending on how they are viewed.

George Peter Murdoch provides a much longer and more detailed list of universals,6 in convenient alphabetical order, but less amusingly phrased:

Age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organisation, cooking, cooperative labour, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, division of labour, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics, ethnobiology, etiquette, faith-healing, family, feasting, fire-making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift-giving, government, greetings, hairstyles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin-groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstition, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, modesty concerning natural functions, mourning, music, mythology, numerals, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious rituals, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool making, trade, visiting, weaning and weather control.

While I am not personally familiar with every existing human culture, lists such as these will help to ensure that I focus specifically, for example, on what is unique or distinctive about the English class system, rather than the fact that we have such a system, as all cultures have 'a system of social status and methods of indicating it'. This may seem a rather obvious point, but it is one that other writers have failed to recognize,7 and many also regularly commit the related error of assuming that certain characteristics of English culture (such as the association of alcohol with violence) are universal features of all human societies.