Watching the English

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. T...

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.

凯特·福克斯(Kate Fox)，社会人类学家，牛津大学社会问题研究中心联执主任，英国文化研究学会研究员。在英格兰、美国、爱尔兰、法国等地辗转完成敦育后，赴剑桥大学攻读人类学和哲学。她的工作主要是观察和评估全球社会文化的趋势，特别是针对人类行为的诸多方面，例如饮酒、调情、酒吧行为、暴力、赛马、手机聊天、健康忧虑、嗅觉心理等，一些成果颇受关注和好评。她的父亲罗宾 福克斯(RobinFox)也是一位人类学家。