- •Kate Fox
- •Watching the English
- •Watching the english
- •Contents
- •Introduction – Anthropology at Home
- •Introductionanthropology at home
- •The ‘grammar’ of englishness
- •Participant observation and its discontents
- •The Good, the Bad and the Uncomfortable
- •My Family and other Lab Rats
- •Trust me, I’m an anthropologist
- •Boring but important
- •The nature of culture
- •Rule making
- •Globalization and tribalization
- •Class and race
- •Britishness and englishness
- •Stereotypes and cultural genomics
- •Part one conversation codes the weather
- •The rules of english weather-speak The Reciprocity Rule
- •The Context Rule
- •The Agreement Rule
- •Exceptions to the Agreement Rule
- •The Weather Hierarchy Rule
- •Snow and the Moderation Rule
- •The Weather-as-family Rule
- •The Shipping Forecast Ritual
- •Weather-speak rules and englishness
- •Grooming-talk
- •Humour rules
- •The importance of not being earnest rule
- •The ‘Oh, Come Off It!’ Rule
- •Irony rules
- •The Understatement Rule
- •The Self-deprecation Rule
- •Humour and comedy
- •Humour and class
- •Humour rules and englishness
- •Linguistic class codes
- •The vowels vs consonants rule
- •Terminology rules – u and non-u revisited
- •The Seven Deadly Sins
- •Serviette
- •‘Smart’ and ‘Common’ Rules
- •Class-denial Rules
- •Linguistic class codes and englishness
- •Emerging talk-rules: the mobile phone
- •Pub-talk
- •The rules of english pub-talk The Sociability Rule
- •The Invisible-queue Rule
- •The Pantomime Rule
- •Pub-talk rules and englishness
- •Part two behaviour codes home rules
- •The moat-and-drawbridge rule
- •Nestbuilding rules
- •The Territorial-marking Rule
- •Class rules
- •Matching and Newness Rules
- •The Brag-wall Rule
- •The Satellite-dish Rule
- •The Eccentricity Clause
- •House-talk rules
- •The ‘Nightmare’ Rule
- •Money-talk Rules
- •Improvement-talk Rules
- •Class Variations in House-talk Rules
- •The Awful Estate-agent Rule
- •Garden rules
- •‘Your Own Front Garden, You May Not Enjoy’
- •The Front-garden Social-availability Rule (and ‘Sponge’ Methodology)
- •The Counter-culture Garden-sofa Exception
- •The Back-garden Formula
- •The nspcg Rule
- •Class Rules
- •Class Indicators and the Eccentricity Clause
- •The Ironic-gnome Rule
- •Home rules and englishness
- •Rules of the road
- •Public transport rules
- •The Denial Rule
- •Exceptions to the Denial Rule
- •The Politeness Exception
- •The Information Exception
- •The Moan Exception
- •The Mobile-phone Ostrich Exception
- •Courtesy rules
- •‘Negative-politeness’ Rules
- •Bumping Experiments and the Reflex-apology Rule
- •Rules of Ps and Qs
- •Taxi Exceptions to the Denial Rule – the Role of Mirrors
- •Queuing rules
- •The Indirectness Rule
- •The Paranoid Pantomime Rule
- •Body-language and Muttering Rules
- •The Unseen Choreographer Rule
- •The Fair-play Rule
- •The Drama of Queuing
- •A Very English Tribute
- •Car rules
- •The Status-indifference Rule
- •Class Rules The ‘Mondeo Test’
- •The ‘Mercedes-Test’
- •Car-care and Decoration Rules
- •The Mobile Castle Rule
- •The Ostrich Rule
- •Road-rage and the ‘Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used To Be’ Rule
- •Courtesy Rules
- •Fair-play Rules
- •Road rules and englishness
- •Work to rule
- •The muddle rules
- •Humour rules
- •The Importance of Not Being Earnest Rule
- •Irony and Understatement Rules
- •The modesty rule – and the ‘bumpex’ school of advertising
- •The polite procrastination rule
- •The money-talk taboo
- •Variations and the Yorkshire Inversion
- •Class and the Vestigial Trade-prejudice Rule
- •The moderation rule
- •Safe, Sensible, Bourgeois Aspirations
- •Future Stability More Important Than Fun
- •Industrious, Diligent and Cautious with Money
- •The Dangers of Excessive Moderation
- •The fair-play rule
- •Moaning rules
- •The Monday-morning Moan
- •Dress codes and englishness
- •Food rules
- •The ambivalence rule
- •Anti-earnestness and obscenity rules
- •Tv-dinner rules
- •The novelty rule
- •Moaning and complaining rules
- •The Silent Complaint
- •The Apologetic Complaint
- •The Loud, Aggressive, Obnoxious Complaint
- •The ‘Typical!’ Rule Revisited
- •Culinary class codes
- •The Health-correctness Indicator
- •Timing and Linguistic Indicators Dinner/Tea/Supper Rules
- •Lunch/Dinner Rules
- •Breakfast Rules – and Tea Beliefs
- •Table Manners and ‘Material Culture’ Indicators Table Manners
- •‘Material Culture’ Indicators
- •The Knife-holding Rule
- •Forks and the Pea-eating Rules
- •The ‘Small/Slow Is Beautiful’ Principle
- •Napkin Rings and Other Horrors
- •Port-passing Rules
- •The meaning of chips
- •Chips, Patriotism and English Empiricism
- •Chip-sharing Rules and Sociability
- •Food rules and englishness
- •Rules of sex
Nestbuilding rules
Which brings me to the English mania for ‘home improvements’, or ‘DIY’. When Pevsner described ‘the proverbial Englishman’ as ‘busy in house and garden and garage with his own hands’, he hit the proverbial nail on the head. Never mind football, this is the real national obsession. We are a nation of nestbuilders. Almost the entire population is involved in DIY, at least to some degree. In a survey conducted by some of my colleagues about fifteen years ago, only two per cent of English males and 12 per cent of females said that they never did any DIY.
We updated this research much more recently, when SIRC was commissioned by the tea company who make PG Tips to do a study on home-improvers. (This was not quite as daft an idea as it sounds: we found that any DIY task requires the consumption of vast quantities of tea.) In terms of numbers, we found that nothing much had changed, except that the proportion of women involved in DIY is probably now even higher. And if anything, the English were found to be even more obsessed with their nestbuilding.27
I was not directly involved in the SIRC DIY study, but it was conducted in a manner of which I approve – not by ticking boxes on a telephone questionnaire survey, but by actually going out and spending time in the temples of the DIY faith (Homebase, DoItAll, B&Q, etc.), talking at length to DIYers about their motives, fears, stresses and joys. My colleague Peter Marsh, a devout DIYer himself, reasoned that some special temptation would be needed to persuade these fervent nestbuilders to interrupt their Sunday-morning pilgrimage to talk to our researchers. His ingenious solution was tea and doughnuts – a familiar, established part of the DIY ritual – offered free from the back of a van parked strategically in the DIY-store car parks.
It worked a treat. Stopping For Tea is such an integral element of the DIY routine that nestbuilders who would never have allowed a conventional researcher with a clipboard to intrude on their twig-gathering were more than happy to gather round the SIRC van, gulping mugs of tea, munching doughnuts, and telling our researchers all about their home-improvement plans, hopes, worries and disasters.
The Territorial-marking Rule
The most common motive for DIYing among our car-park sample of typical nestbuilders was that of ‘putting a personal stamp on the place’. This is clearly understood as an unwritten rule of home ownership, and a central element of the moving-in ritual, often involving the destruction of any evidence of the previous owner’s territorial marking. ‘You’ve got to rip something out when you move in,’ one young man explained. ‘It’s all part of the move, isn’t it?’
He was right. Watch almost any residential street in England over a period of time, and you will notice that shortly after a For Sale sign comes down, a skip appears, to be filled with often perfectly serviceable bits of ripped-out kitchen or bathroom, along with ripped-out carpets, cupboards, fireplace-surrounds, shelves, tiles, banisters, doors and even walls and ceilings.
This is a ‘rule’ in a stronger sense than an observable regularity of behaviour: this kind of obsessive territorial marking is, for the majority of English people, an obligation, something we feel compelled, duty-bound to do: ‘You’ve got to rip something out . . .’
This can be a problem for those who move into brand-new ‘starter homes’ or other new houses, where it would clearly be ludicrous to start ripping out virgin bathrooms and untouched kitchens. Yet we found the DIY temples full of such people, eager to add whatever ‘personal touches’ they can to mark their bland new territory. Even if you can’t rip anything out, you’ve got to do something: a house that has not been tinkered with barely qualifies as a home.