English culture

[annwfyn]

Last night I went home, and as is often the way of things managed to take a debate from LJ into my front room, discovered that pierot is like a particularly focussed rottweiler in debate, and also that we disagreed on both what 'culture' is, and also the extent to which England has a culture.

Now, to me, there is such a thing as English culture. And it's not just 'we're all multi-cultural, have people living here from around the world, and so our strength is our lack of culture' which is something I've heard said before and disagree with violently. I've lived in Nepal for a while. I've travelled to a lot of places. Every time I go away I come home more convinced than ever that there is such a thing as 'English culture', and 'British culture'.

I've got a list of things I think of as being culturally English. A lot of them are also seen in other cultures, but I think that's because we've always been so evangelical about our culture - what makes English culture hard to spot is that we've exported it very enthusiastically, and so it looks like 'the norm' a lot of the time, simply because it's so widespread.

I'm also really curious about what I've left out, so I appeal to you, oh clever readers of my LJ, to tell me what you think of as part of English culture. Scottish or Welsh or Irish culture is also totally acceptable to post in comments. Any Americans or Australians watching are welcome to comment with their views on either their own culture, or mine. I'd be quite curious about what a non-Brit might think of as very specifically 'English'.

If anyone wants to talk about 'what is culture' I'd be really interested in listening to that as well.

To me, English culture is a mixture of the old and the new. I think of traditional dishes like fish & chips, or toad-in-the-hole, or bubble & squeak as being part of English culture, but I also think of the Birmingham created curries, like the chicken tikka masala (which never existed in India!) as being very English.

Having been to folk festivals, it's pretty clear to me we've got a fairly strong tradition in terms of music and dance. And I understand morris dancing might not be a culture to be proud of, but it is culturally English. And, sadly, it counts as living culture as well. As a kid, I used to do maypole dancing at school, but I'm informed that has now died out. A google search suggests this isn't quite true, but it's certainly less common than it used to be.

There's a lot of children's literature which I think of as really really English - not just Harry Potter - the Worst Witch, Diana Wynne Jones - all of those are very English stories. I also think of the English as a nation of poisoners, purely based on Agatha Christie. Surely slipping arsenic in someone's tea has to be an expression of our English culture?

The Church of England, and the Anglican communion in general, strike me as very English. The Church of England is, after all, a peculiar beast - not quite Catholic, but not really a proper Protestant church either (as has been pointed out to me on occasion by various more Protestant types). It is a weird fusion of theology, mostly because it was created as nationalized Catholicism (Henry VIII actually disapproved strongly of Protestantism at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries). I also never realized how thoroughly the Book of Common Prayer and the King James bible had infiltrated my brain until I went to a wedding which didn't use it. I was utterly confused at the expected pattern of words just not happening. I'd also argue that a lot of our hymns are peculiarly English and because the CofE primary school is so much the norm in this country, they tend to be burnt into most English brains. I think, anyway.

A huge number of Christmas traditions are British traditions. Quite a lot were invented by Charles Dickens, as far as I can tell. Christmas cards and crackers are both originally English (and Victorian) traditions.

This website has a list of English customs and festivals, which are all quite peculiar, but are celebrated.

What else counts as 'English' and part of English culture?

Clothing or jewellery, or specifically English symbols would be appreciated, as a part of the debate last night was as to whether it is possible to appropriate British culture, but just establishing that English culture exists is what I'm trying to poke right now.

Comments

[adze.livejournal.com]

I think there is an English culture, but it's something that's so all-pervasive in our lives, that it's difficult to define - as you say above, it's the norm, so we don't notice it so much.

From my point of view, if there are things that are thought of as 'English', then there's an English culture. To my mind, there is that, but I don't really have the time to describe what it is right now, unfortunately.

[lilitufire.livejournal.com]

Food is picked up on a lot here - I still cook roast beef and Yorkshire pudding once a week, and Bisto etc. is the main thing I import. That's seen as charmingly exotic by a variety of nationalities here!

Scones and jam :)

Tea :)

Marmite is always good for a laugh.

The whole sorry! thing and queueing thing is very cultural.

Oddly, the Japanese can be quite similar to the Brits in these sorts of ways (and as xenophobic as some Brits can be, if not more so). I put in down to both countries being island nations, in part (both with a declining influence, too).

[reindeerflotila.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons I love visiting Japan is the Small Island Syndrome similarity!

Two people nearly bump into each other
"Sorry!" *embarassed eyes flick to the floor/away*
"Sumimasen" *rapid nervous bow*

[sea-cucumber.livejournal.com]

The ways in which I identify with British culture are mostly religious, musical, historical or food related. English (or indeed Scottish etc.) culture I see as just a 'regional variation' of British culture. Another thing (although it might depend where you are from I suppose), is 'county-level' culture as well...

Religious - the CofE springs to mind but more ancient traditions do too, both pagan religions and celtic christianity

Music - Folk music definitely, but also more modern things like the Beatles, Iron Maiden etc.

History - I think this is the main thing that divides 'British' and the more localised variants such as 'English', 'Scottish' etc. - I think all the component parts of Britain have a long and fascinating history that has shaped their culture.

Food - Yorkshire pudding (actually a LOT of good food comes from Yorkshire it seems, there's Wensleydale cheese or perhaps even fish and chips), Cheddar cheese, haggis, even something like scrumpy, you think of the places they come from ...

[twicedead.livejournal.com]

Having come from Foreign Parts; there are definitely cultural differences between me and Jo - Christmas is the best example.

I do believe that Britain has a cultuire and there is an English sub-culture in there. But as they have been spread so widely people do not realise that's what's there. I know Jo goes into Apocalyptic Death Rage^TM when it is suggested otherwise.

Oh, and...

[twicedead.livejournal.com]

... i know you're into Folk music, have you heard Johnny Flynn? He's very good modern folk.

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

Definitely agreed on the idea of folk festivals being a macrocosm of traditional English culture, to wit: eccentric facial hair, real ale, innuendo, wide-brimmed hats and a deep-rooted obsession with clapping on the off-beat.

I'd also add a tendency towards moral outrage and interpreting any given situation in the worst possible light. That's a bit less prevalent at folk festivals, though.

[taimatsu]

I think appropriating English culture is tricky, as it has historically been exported by English people to other places anyway in the process of colonialism - you can't blame cultures which were to an extent forced to adopt English language and customs for still retaining some of them. And there's the question of whether you can appropriate something that relates to a 'majority' group which tends to have more power, rather than a 'minority' or oppressed group with less.

Afternoon tea (finger sandwiches, bone china) is rather English. Plenty of local delicacies too - pork pies, cream teas.

I think a lot of 'English cultural' things are rather old-fashioned, and people struggle to see good things in modern English life to identify with without heading for the screaming white-supremacist/barmy-nationalist camps. Modern English culture could be said by some to be about ASBOs, hoodies, CCTV, political scandal, curtain-twitching, reality TV... you get the idea.

(I am deliberately referring to English everything here as I do not want to comment on Scottish, Welsh or Irish culture and would not want to lump them in with the English.)

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I think I agree with you re: power differentials and previous aggressive export of British culture. I think what I was trying to prove was that there was such a thing as English culture, and therefore statements like 'well, we only appropriate other people's culture because we have none of our own' (which neither jez nor Ginnie said, but which I have heard) are nonsensical.

[ksirafai.livejournal.com]

Mmm; I think that (before I drifted off - it doesn't seem very fair to have a triangular debate, which will undoubtedly just confuse everyone involved...) the point I was aiming for can be roughly summarised by saying that English culture is something that has spread so far and so thinly across America, western Europe and the Commonwealth that the markers we associate with it have become far less defining/important/relevant to our identities - we are as much children of the American TV series as we are of the English political system (which, I note, is something which I think of as vastly more of a cultural signifier than any musical, edible or wearable part of England...), and as much part of the Eurovision Song Contest as fish and chips.

Over all, it appears that the easiest way to separate out 'bleed' from 'appropriation' (I quote-mark them because they're terms that have no definition outside of the personal/social, I think) is that stronger/more dominant cultures bleed into weaker/more marginal, and weaker/marginal cultures are appropriated by more dominant - at least, that's what it appears.

The thing that interests me about cultural normalising/averaging isn't the Right and Wrong of whether or not we should take these on - it is instead the monolithic monoculture which will result from the world being made the same. When Macdonalds' sign shone in Moscow, was that an appropriation, a bleed or a sign of globalisation?

Appropriation seems to be something which is created by fear and jealousy. Those social markers and cultural signifiers that are 'protected' are so done because the people who 'own' them believe that their worlds, their lives are being reduced by others taking these icons away from them. We who, as children of the Great English Diaspora, are lucky enough to be part of the internet-woven, TV-welded Overculture, are greedy for new treats and ideas and look for concepts which we can discover, discuss and make our own.

Appropriation and bleed are going to happen because of the global communication network which has been made available to much of the world. We (as humanity, not we-as-white or we-as-English or we-as-Dominant) can only be asked to consider what is reasonable behaviour as visitors to others' houses (countries, cultures, concepts, conversations) - we can not and should not be banned from visiting them in the first place. How else can we learn enough to communicate effectively? But by so doing, we risk blurring and blending all cultures into a monoculture... and is that a bad thing?

I'm looking at Asimov and Transmetropolitan about this immediately, because they're my most recent sources. SF writers talk about the future (a future, many futures) in which culture has changed; we grow into our own future, and in that, I want to have the right to be as English as I want - and also as European, as western, as first-world, as global, as eastern and as Australian and as Gujarati - as I choose. Everyone has something to teach me. My only responsibility is to be respectful of my teachers.

[lilitufire.livejournal.com]

That kind of comment gives me The Rage, and does snide remarks about British grub. Good local British food is fantastic.

[twicedead.livejournal.com]

My mother, despite having been married to an Englishman, still believes that english food is awful because she ran into a bad patch of it in the 1970s. She hasn't updated her view at all.

[suave-steve.livejournal.com]

Cricket. It is a microcosm of English Cultural markers in the way it has been played for the last 150 years.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I have a theory about English culture, expounded here: http://davywavy.livejournal.com/338956.html

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Leaping away from the main point of your post, you reminded me of Flanders & Swann!!!!

I now understand the true essence of Englishness. I didn't need to post this at all! I just had to listen to 'At The Drop Of A Hat'.

[elethiomel.livejournal.com]

I have a few thoughts, largely about our culture as represented by language:

Finding the humour in everything, especially adversity ('we've been bombed by a better class of bast*rd than you' being a perfect example).

Self deprecation and understatement (people who say they 'didn't do very well at University' because they only got a 2:2 from Oxford)

Sarcasm, irony and innuendo.

A general refusal to discuss money (I make this point largely in contrast to other cultures I've experienced in which asking how much something cost or how much someone earns seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do).

And finally, not related to language, the pub and everything it entails - other cultures may have their watering holes and bars, but nobody else quite has the Pub.

[lawrencegillies.livejournal.com]

The book that I recommended ays pretty much exactly these things.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

The Rolling Stones, the Sex Pistols, Arctic Monkeys, The Killers, the Beatles, Glastonbury, Donnington, Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, cooked breakfast, boiled egg for breakfast, tea breaks, "just one lump", toad in the hole, roast beef, fish and chips, Sandwich Spread, jumpers, Brixton hip-hop, Top Gear, Red Dwarf, Doctor Who, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, cricket, snooker, croquet, sandwiches, forty-seven varieties of crisp, rugby, determinedly wearing t-shirts and summer dresses at the slightest hint of sun, punting, Oxford /Cambridge Blues, picnics, Last of the Summer Wine, Darling Buds of May, "After you! No, no, after you! No, I insist..." David Bowie...

(Some of those are British, not English)

Of course we have a unique culture. In fact, we have bloody dozens of them.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Oh, and cultural appropriation - watched any Anime nominally set in Britain recently?

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I don't watch anime! It's my own brand of utter snobbishness.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

The Japanese and Koreans have a tendancy to grab Western, particularly British, cultural memes and icons and do them really badly and/or strangely. It's hilarious and often very fun.

[lawrencegillies.livejournal.com]

May I recommend a book called "Watching the English" by Kate Fox for an Anthropologist's take on England and Englishness?

[troubleinchina.livejournal.com]

I'm with you in the whole "I lived away and am thus really aware of my Canadian-ness". (Well, except you're aware of your British-ness, but you get what I mean.)

A lot of it was sense of humour. When I was in Scotland, a lot of the humour did not appeal to me. It's not that my humour is better, just different.

There's a different cultural attitude towards history.

Scotland, at least, had class issues that are different than the class issues here in Canada. It would be hard to explain them in an LJ comment, but it all felt different and weird. Plus, British newspapers would say things casually that I'd only hear someone whisper in Canada.

Something silly, but the British take tea breaks. We take coffee breaks.

The whole pub culture in Scotland. I only visited England, so I'm not as clear on it, but Scotland has a pub culture that is not recreated here.

[melsner.livejournal.com]

I think "culture" is hard to see when you're standing in the middle of it. Your own is kind of invisible to you. It's like a flea trying to describe the dog they live on. To anyone on the outside, it's obvious.

Theatre.

Pubs. That's a huge one, really. It's a social hub and a different attitude to drinking.

Architecture / city layouts.

Transportation. Trains. The Tube. Walking or bicycling more than the US does. Even driving on the left hand side is something "English" to most of us.

The Monarchy. Duh?

BBC. You even watch TV differently than us. As a kid, I'd watch BBC shows and feel like I was getting a cultural experience... And yes, that included Doctor Who...

English horse riding.

Bad teeth are definitely a cultural thing... *ducks*

Seriously though. I've talked to English people who refer to things that happened hundreds of years ago as "recent events." Your father pointed out an old Roman road like I'd point out a freeway turn off.

[kissmedeadly.livejournal.com]

I was informed by my European and Indian colleagues on my counselling course that we don't move our faces enough :)
Not so much stiff upper lip as stiff everything, apparently!

[tooth-fairy.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that i have any well defined thoughts on the matter. You saying about Jez's debating skills rang a bell in the back of my mind though and back I tripped to Uni for a minute :)

[ulaidhan.livejournal.com]

I remember hearing an American stand-up talking about the difference between performing on either side of the Pond.

There, he'd get a screaming, whooping expression of enthusiastic delight for introducing himself. Every joke that was liked at all would be met with more whoops and whistles. Part-way through jokes, he'd get whoops and calls of support, as if to let him know that the audience hadn't crept out of the theatre in the past twenty seconds since they'd last been noisy.

Here... when he started out twenty-odd years ago, there'd be an occasional chuckle, perhaps a ripple of applause to accompany laughter if he said something really funny. But at the end - if and only if he'd earned it with a really good performance - there'd be rousing applause.

Certainly, one of the biggest differences is in the desire to demonstrate emotion in public. I remember hearing coverage of one of the seemingly-infinite political rallies during the presidential selection process prior to the last US election. Mitt Romney - a front-runner managing to turn himself into a no-hoper - was talking solemnly to a group of core supporters after his latest disappointment, when a big, butch, deep-voiced American male bellowed out "we LOVE you, Mitt!" in the middle of one of Romney's sentences.

Can you imagine that happening over here - or if it did, it not being treated as a rather embarassing joke? Though it's increasingly being submerged - British audiences now whoop and whistle, even in the middle of a performance - there's still a tendency for English / British people to default to a much, much lower of emotional display than most other cultures I've encountered.

The exceptions would be those that spent a long time under Soviet occupation, and had only recently regained their independence. :P

[wyldcard.livejournal.com]

Beer.

[lady-o-lavender.livejournal.com]

I consider punk culture to be British. When you put your post the other day about cultural appropriation I thought that it would be possible to argue that other cultures e.g. Asian culture such as teenagers living in Hong Kong and Tokyo had appropriated British punk culture. I would consider this as appropriation too, because if you think about it the Union Jack was so much part of the original punk culture but it's definitely a way of life, fashion, culture that has been adopted elsewhere in the world since and seems to be enjoying a global rival.

[lady-o-lavender.livejournal.com]

sorry meant to type "rEVival"!

[pmp.livejournal.com]

I think there´s more than one culture based in this country that can claim to be English, and this is why a lot of people get confused.

On the one hand, we have a spectacular history of traditions which can be traced back at least 1000 years! Those were and still are, part of our society. On top of that you have the new cultural claims, mostly as a result of our colonial days where we stamped our mark on the world. Things like a tikka masala, our general air of superiority and surprisingly large influence on the world stage.

Ultimately though, the one thing I think of as being truely English is politeness, I don´t think any other country manages to have such a tight grasp on "doing the right thing" without actually agreeing on what that right thing is.

[eladriell.livejournal.com]

Oh what fun, i like the use of exported instead of imposed in there too. Still its a tricky one, such a hash of half-remembered damn near tribal customs from several distinct groups fusing over time, over wars and invasions into the now. I'd like to list curtain-twitching, sneering and smugness myself, but I'm biased.

Seriously though, yes there are particular customs, cultural behaviours etc that make up large portions of your country, but are you after the all-pervading or the local? theres certainly an English, then a Yorkshire culture, and that can be further broken down by territories, then by communities.

Thats the thing, in all these isles there exist communities, thats what we build ourselves around. "English" culture, nowadays, is a sum total, a culmination of the commonest factors. What one person accepts as relevant to this will be different one valley over.

Aye there's stereotypically "English" pastimes/activities/behaviours/actions/reactions.
But how many of them are set by outsiders? I could easily identify certain behaviours as tpically English, but would an Englishwoman see them the same way? Brixton ghetto's dont accept Morris Dancing as an example because its simply not a part of their lives. Being English has, recently, also been seen as something slightly shameful. I suppose its like being an american and realising how much of the world sees your culture and it's past actions.

These are my own and others opinions, and i know ita all a bit garbled, but theres some relevant questions in there.

bleh, back to bed.