Description
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: the rules of weather-speak, the ironic-gnome rule, the reflex-apology rule, the paranoid-pantomime rule, class indicators and class-anxiety tests, the money-talk taboo and many more.
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.