Kate Fox's analysis of English culture: Does it jibe with your experience?

Cafe Society
1

I just finished reading Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by social anthropologist Kate Fox.

My predominant feeling: I’m so glad that I’m not English.

The chapter on how to order drinks in a pub describes a social atmosphere so complicated and fraught with landmines that I am determined to avoid ever entering an English pub.

The recurring theme of Fox’s analysis is that the social behaviour of the English centers on a national “social dis-ease” that makes the English so fearful of embarrassment that they desperately cling to rigid, unwritten rules of social behaviour (characterised by extreme privacy and shyness) punctuated by ritualistic deviations fueled largely by alcohol.

The English, according to Fox, are desperately afraid of embarrassment and thus find it extremely difficult to engage with strangers, unless given certain excuses, in the form of intoxication related to certain social occasions (holidays, etc.). Not only do they cling to privacy, but they also have made anything approaching earnestness into a faux pas.

The English are also famous for their dry, sarcastic sense of humour, which they use in all occasions to combat their two enemies: earnestness and fear of embarrassment. However, much of the humour is formulaic and unoriginal. (Fox uses the term “irony” to cover this form of humour, but in my view, most of what she describes is not ironic at all, just deadpan sarcasm.)

Fox, being English herself, describes all this with a certain degree of enthusiasm and pride in her national character. Having always been a bit of an anglophile myself, the book made me feel strangely patriotic about being an American.

So, I’m wondering what other people think about Fox’s analysis of English society. I wonder if the overall impression might be slightly exaggerated. I don’t think Fox herself means to exaggerate her findings, but that might just be an unintended side effect of reading such an extensive social analysis all at once.

What say ye?

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No clue - but I shared this with some of my Brit friends and look forward to hearing what they say.

As a person who lived in the UK for a year, I can see some of the truth to the observations, but not to the point where I end up feeling glad I am not British. Every culture has its foibles, some worse than others…

3

Without reading it, it’s impossible to say. But I wouldn’t say that I spend all my time in hideous fear of embarrassment, or avoiding earnestness.

4

We read this a while back. It utterly fascinates me.
I’ve asked about the eating-peas-on-the-back-of-the-fork thing, and several people have corroborated it. I would never have believed it, and it would never occur to me to ask about it. I haven’t witnessed it, myself, but I’ve never eaten peas when I was in the UK.
But I now understand about people breaking off pieces of bread and buttering them separately, something that has always gone unexplained to me before.

5

Here is something else sort of in this vein, an account by a Brit who has spent a great deal of time in the US and finds Americans to be more polite. His examples are bit small, though, so I can’t tell whether he’s exaggerating his overall point.

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It’s only fraught with landmines if you don’t know what you’re doing. We’re used to it - we know the rules and it’s second nature to us. I once had to calm down an Israeli tourist at the Eagle & Child (Tolkein’s local pub) because he joined one end of a line of people at the bar. What he didn’t realise, and wasn’t to know, is that the way you get served is horizontally - the barman scans the bar and attempts to serve people in arrival order - something that doesn’t always work and one finds pretty women and aggressive men getting served first - whereas the tourist joined one end of the bar and expected to be served per his position in the “queue”.

I have not read the book, alas, but I read excerpts from it when it first came out, and it struck me as pop-science aimed at English people in a “goodness I never realised that about myself. Isn’t that funny!” manner, rather than as a guide aimed at outsiders. It struck me as quite amusing, but obviously exaggerating our foibles to be entertaining. But as I say, I haven’t read all of it.

7

Well, that’s a given, really. It’s also a point that Fox makes repeatedly. However, given the choice, I would rather not exist in that kind of atmosphere. I like a more straightforward approach without so many implicit restrictions on behavior.

After all, it’s a service establishment. Why should you have to “know what you’re doing”? They’re selling; I’m buying. It shouldn’t require secret knowledge.

That wasn’t the only thing. According to Fox, it’s frowned upon to speak to the servers in an attempt to get their attention (unless you have achieved the status of “regular” – who are allowed to make certain formulaic jokes about the deplorable level of service). Nor is it acceptable to raise your finger or wave in order to indicate that you’re waiting to be served. You’re supposed to use only your eyebrows and perhaps hold some folded bills in a certain way in your hand to indicate that you wanted a place in the invisible queue.

Fox said another interesting thing about the drink-ordering ritual in a pub. Apparently, the bar is the only place in a pub where it’s acceptable to speak with strangers out of the blue. So, if, for example, there were table service, English people would have no opportunity to interact outside of their own little established group.

There was also an interesting section about business meetings in which non-English people found it extremely frustrating about how long the English would put off talking about fixing prices in a deal because of the social discomfort with discussing money. Endless rounds of chit-chat about the weather and making tea. And finally, when it could no longer be avoided someone would always make the same kind of joke along the lines of “and now I suppose we have to address that sordid subject of money.”

From my perspective, as wearying as money details are, hearing the same hoary joke about money would be even more tiresome.

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It takes a little practice if you haven’t been brought up to it, but mushy peas make it easier. If you are also having mashed potatoes, you can use them to glue the peas onto the back of the fork. :slight_smile:
I don’t think the thing about dread of social embarrassment is true of many of the Brits I’ve known, but the “irony”/deadpan humor bit seems more accurate.

9

It doesn’t require “secret knowledge”. If you stand at the bar, you’re going to get served at some point.

That seems way to specific to me. Nothing wrong with trying to attract attention to yourself in some way. There might well be if you were too over-the-top or demanding with it, but that’s pretty much a given. I’ve never gone into a pub and worried about my eyebrows, for goodness sake.

Eh, i’d say there’s certainly some reservation of that kind. Especially on the tube, which is practically a study in socially demanded insularity. But of course you can speak to strangers in a pub beyond the bar. How do you think people pull?

Honestly, going by what’s been said of it so far, it sounds a bit like an overreaction. There’s probably a bit of truth to some of it, but it really looks like it’s been blown out of proportion. I think your initial analysis is spot on, though with a greater amount of hyperbole. But hey, perhaps she just moves in different circles. I’ve never heard of the peas thing, for example.

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I’d be interested in reading it and seeing what I think, but of course I can’t tell now. I have heard several people say that Britain is just such a small, crowded place that people have had to develop a formal, reserved culture in order to keep from constantly stepping on each others’ toes. But now it seems to me that things are loosening up enormously, so I’d be interested to see writing on how that plays out.

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Every social situation has unwritten rules. American bars will have them too. It’s not like British pubs are tense places full of people telling each other off for infringing tiny rules, like petty hall monitors.

There’s no need to shout at the barperson, anyway. You stand at the bar, they come and serve you. At busy times, if everyone was shouting and waving their money then it’d be really noisy and aggressive and people would get served in the same order anyway.

12

So how do you do it in the US? I work in a bar over here and people do try and wave and yell sometimes, its just annoying. If you’re there you’ll get served. If you’re worried about getting passed over then just catch a member of staff’s eye or something. It does sound ridiculous if you write it out but there’s tonnes of ways to attract someone’s attention.

The joke stuff is simply because if you’re around someone long enough you get to know them. I defy anyone who works in a busy pub/bar to say that they’re interested in 90% of what customers have to say apart from their order.

So you stand at the bar then get served. I’m not sure what’s complicated about that?

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Oh, and you don’t speak to strangers on the tube because there are far too many of them. Do New Yorkers spend their entire tube journey saying ‘hi, how are you’ to their fellow travellers? I doubt it. Even making the effort to make eye contact with everyone and give a friendly nod would mean you spent your entire time doing that, which would be incredibly dull.

14

You don’t really think this is unique to British pubs, do you? To pick the easiest example, how many American restaurants have instructions about how to tip?

And I don’t spend much time in bars, so maybe I’m just clueless here, but how does the British custom of serving people at the bar differ from the US custom of serving people at the bar? What’s being described for a UK pub doesn’t sound any different from what happens at an American bar.

15

I guess you’re right, but isn’t the notion of tipping the barman a piece of secret knowledge that a foreign tourist to the US wouldn’t know?

16

From my (very limited) experience of bars in the U.S. and in England, I’m not sure that customer and bartender behaviour is all that different, really. I suspect that Kate Fox is exaggerating for comic effect.

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Her online Passport to the Pub is the original version of her observations on pub etiquette.

In that instance, her points are broadly true, provided you make allowances for them being generalisations and her tone deliberately light.

18

Wait - isn’t this how bars everywhere work? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a normal queue in a bar environment.

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Having spent (a lot of) time in Israel and (a little) time in Britain, I would guess that the Israeli tourist in jjimm’s anecdote was probably frustrated because queuing is such British behavior and he didn’t realize that this was one place (probably the only place) it’s not the standard. jjimm’s description of how to get a drink in the UK sounds pretty much like you’d do it in the US, too. Or Israel, actually, although it might involve more shouting.

It’s certainly not because Israelis are so devoted to order that they stand in queues all the time and can’t imagine any other way. (One American guy once told me that the most important thing he learned from his time in Israel was that he never had to stand in line ever again.)

20

New Yorkers cheerfully butt in on the conversations of strangers, in the subway or anywhere else. They’re not trying to be rude, most of the time they’re trying to be helpful. I never minded when that happened to me, different places have different mores.