reader 2-session 2

A lot of this is good fun, and Kate Fox’s descriptions of some situations seem totally accurate. She is ostensibly offering an anthropologist’s-eye-view of English behaviour and manners, calling it ‘pop-anthropology’ in that self-deprecating way she describes as typically English. She seems to have decided that this means thorough, within the parameters she sets herself, but with entertainment definitely ahead of scientific method: it isn’t always as universal as she is making out.

Introduction  

The Introduction sets the tone. There’s a kind of mock-scientific thoroughness about it – it’s 22 pages long – in which she explains how she will avoid the pitfalls that abound when one is observing one’s own society. But she opens with a description of her in a bar, getting up some Dutch courage before she goes out to break some more English taboos: she’s going to keep it light. 

The other thing she establishes is that she is going to be searching for rules: patterns of behaviour which are more or less universal, whose exceptions are explicable – and which the English usually observe quite unconsciously. Forming orderly queues is the first one she mentions – it comes up as a touchstone quite often in Part 1 – and she’s chosen it because it is the rule that everybody knows marks out our Englishness. It’s also a bit quirky, and she can make jokes about it.

Part 1, Conversation Codes - The Weather.  

Previous observers have got it wrong because ‘they assume that our conversations about the weather are conversations about the weather.’ Really it’s a ‘code, evolved to help us… talk to each other.’  

She describes what she calls ‘English reserve’, an obstacle to opening conversations – I’ll buy that too, up to a point – which a safe, ever-changing topic like the weather can find a way through. There are rules she comes up with for ‘weather-speak’: the Reciprocity Rule, the Context Rule, the Agreement Rule… which show how we have to agree with the conversation opener, or demur only in highly stylised ways. 

 She slips in a section about the Shipping Forecast, and is rather lazy, I feel, in asserting that ‘listen we do, religiously, mesmerised….’ She’s talking about Radio 4 listeners – and while there might, or might not, be ‘millions’ for whom it’s a national treasure, there are more for whom it means nothing.