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 eccentricsheep 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.
- ISBN10 0340834455
- ISBN13 9780340834459
- Publish Date 26 April 2004
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 7 November 2009
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Hodder & Stoughton
- Imprint Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
- Format Paperback (UK Trade)
- Pages 432
- Language English