BBN ANG271Anthology2ndEd

Cultural Studies English Speaking Cultures
Anthology of readings for the BBN-ANG 271 course

Compiled by:

Mark Andrews
Rachel Appleby
Vera Benczik
Judit Borbly
Cecilia Gall
Dorottya Holl
Magdolna Kimmel
Ildik Lzr
James Leavey
Uwe Pohl
Phil Saltmarsh

Department of English Language Pedagogy, ELTE-SEAS

2
nd
edition
Budapest, 2011

This volume is published online in accordance with the Hungarian Copyright Law LXXVI/1999
(free publication of required course material for educational purposes in a tertiary educational
institution). It is exclusively available through the password protected ELTE e-learning system for
students enrolled in the BBN-ANG 271 course. When citing the texts, the original sources must
be referred to.

E ktet online kzzttele a LXXVI/1999 szm a szerzi jogrl szl trvny figyelembe
vtelvel trtnik (kurzus elrt tananyagnak oktatsi cl szabad kzzttele felsoktatsi
intzmnyben). A dokumentum kizrlag a jelszval vdett ELTE e-learning rendszerben a BBN-
ANG 271-es kurzusra beiratkozott hallgatk szmra rhet el. A szvegek idzsekor az
eredeti forrsokra kell hivatkozni.

*
*and on the DELP website for students taking their BA final exam in Cultural Studies.
*s a DELP honlapjn a BA zrvizsgra orszgismeretbl kszlk
*
CONTENTS
PREFACE

READINGS

Introduction
Williams, R. (1983). Keywords - A vocabulary of culture and society. London: Flamingo. (Culture: pp.87-93)
Also available at: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~dml3/880williams.htm
Kellner, D. (n.d.) Cultural Studies and Ethics. Encyclopaedia article Available:
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/CSETHIC.htm

UK Geography
O'Driscoll, J. (1995). Britain: The country and its people: an introduction for learners of English Oxford: Oxford
University Press. (pp.31-40)
Appleby, R. (2009). Geography of Ireland (2 pp) unpublished.

UK Devolution
Dewar, D. MP, Secretary of State for Scotland (1998). Devolved Britons: Scotland in the UK. The Spectator
Lecture, 18
th
November 1998.
Morris, J. (2007). The cuckoos are stirring, and our nation may at last achieve serenity. Could this be the
moment when Wales finally liberates itself from the UKs squalid culture of greed and pretension?. The
Guardian August 6, 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/aug/06/comment.politics2

UK Language Varieties
Montgomery, M. & H. Reid-Thomas (1994). Language and Social Life. London: The British Council. (pp.28-36)

UK Identity
Fox, K. (2004). Watching the English. London: Hodder. (Work to rule, pp.176-207)

US American Culture and American Regionalism
Gastil, R.D. (1990). Cultural Regions of America. In L.S. Luedtke. (Ed.), Making America: The Society and
Culture of the United States. Washington, D.C.: United States Information Agency. (pp.121-132)

US Core Values
Althen, G. (2005). American Values and Assumptions. In P. S. Gardner. New Directions (2
nd
ed.). New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press. (Chapter 1, pp.5-13)

US American English
Kvecses, Z. (2000): American English. An Introduction. Peterborough, Can.: Broadview Press.
Chapter 20: The imaginativeness of American English. (pp.289-307)

US A Changing Culture: Capturing some tension points
Singer, A. (2008). Twenty-first century gateways: an introduction. In: A. Singer, S. Hardwick & C, Brettell
(Eds.) Twenty-First Century Gateways: Immigrant Incorporation in Suburban America.
Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. (pp.3-10)

AUS Nature and People
Knightley, P. (2000). Australia - The biography of a nation. London: Jonathan Cappe.
(Chapter 23: The coming of age. pp.332-351)

AUS Social Issues, Language and Arts
Clark, M. (1988). Decision time for this new generation. Australia Now - Bicentennial Edition. Vol.
12, NoA. Canberra: Promotion Australia Publication.
Paul, E. (2006). Little America: Australia, the 51st State. London: Pluto Press. (pp.1-8)

CAN Profiles of a country
Kuffert, L. (2003). A commentary on some aspects of Canadian culture. In: K. G. Pryke & W. C. Soderlund (Eds.)
Profiles of Canada. (3rd ed.). Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press Inc. (pp. 97115)

Intercultural Communication
Fantini, A.E. (2005). About Intercultural Communicative Competence: A Construct. School for International
Training, Brattleboro, Vermont, USA http://www.sit.edu/SITOccasionalPapers/feil_appendix_e.pdf
Moran, P. (2001). Teaching Culture. Perspectives in Practice. Boston: Heinle & Heinle. (Chapter 3, pp 23-32)

PREFACE

The purpose of this anthology is to provide readings for the BBN-ANG 271 Cultural Studies lecture course. The
readings were selected with the intention that they should illustrate and expand upon issues and concepts discussed
in the talks. Thus it is hoped that the readers will achieve a more in-depth understanding of and appreciation for
issues related to English speaking cultures.

To make navigation easy in the pdf document, bookmarks have been inserted to indicate the pages where the
readings belonging to the different topics start. It is advised that the bookmarks panel be made visible in the pdf
reader. (In Adobe Acrobat this can be found under View Navigation Panels Bookmarks)

This anthology provides readings chosen from a very wide spectrum of texts covering the area of English speaking
cultures and cultural studies. To give an overview of the readings, the texts are briefly summarized in the order that
they appear:

Introduction

The first reading is a text to accompany the introductory lecture on cultural studies. The author, Raymond
WILLIAMS (1921-1988), was a British literary critic, cultural historian, cultural and political theorist, novelist,
dramatist, and the creator of the interdisciplinary field known as 'cultural studies' in the 1950s. The extract
comes from Keywords (first published in 1976), a collection of the explanation and interpretation of words
connected to cultural and social history. In the section about Culture Williams gives an overview of how the
meaning of the word changed over the centuries, what the word means in different areas of study, and how
the meaning also influenced the different attitudes people had to culture.


This very short text gives an overview of the development of British Cultural Studies. It lists the important
representatives of the area, the themes they researched and also shows how this field has changed over
the time.

UK Geography
O'Driscoll, J. (1995). Britain: The country and its people: an introduction for learners of English Oxford: Oxford
University Press. (pp.31-40)

This text describes in words and pictures the layout of Britain in terms of mountain ranges and rivers,
climate, land use, environment and pollution, and population density, and then briefly describes specific
areas, and their characteristics: these include reference to the division of London into the City and the West
End, the reputation of the food produce of the south west and south east, how the north west led the
Industrial Revolution, and the engineering centre of the Midlands. The section on Scotland compares
Edinburgh and Glasgow, the countrys two major cities and highlights issues such as religious and class
difference.

Appleby, R. (2009). Geography of Ireland (2 pp) unpublished

The second very short text focuses on Ireland, explaining the greenness and general natural beauty of the
country, and the natural resources of oil and gas. It also refers to the 19
th
century Potato Blight, one of the
main reasons why many Irish emigrated to the U.S.

Moran, P. (2001). Teaching Culture. Perspectives in Practice. Boston: Heinle & Heinle. (Chapter 3, pp 23-32) - a
a definition of culture through the concepts: products, practices, perspectives, communities and persons.

UK Devolution
Lecture, 18
th
November 1998.

The transcript of the lecture delivered by Donald Dewar MP gives an insight into how devolution plays a role
in increasing the responsibility of Scottish people for their own affairs and to strengthening the ties within the
union at the same time. The text looks at and beyond stereotypes associated with Scotland as well as
social, legal and economic issues that all contribute to understanding various facets of devolution. The
author examines different viewpoints concerning Scotlands place in the world and in the UK. He concludes
that the combination of devolution and respect for shared values serves the interest of Scotland and the UK
best.

Morris, J (2007). The cuckoos are stirring, and our nation may at last achieve serenity. Could this be the moment
when Wales finally liberates itself from the UKs squalid culture of greed and pretension?. The Guardian
August 6, 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/aug/06/comment.politics2

In this contribution to the Comment section of the Guardian, the author (a historian and travel writer) shares
her dream of an independent Wales that would not be dominated by the over official British government.
She hopes that a coalition of Welsh parties can bring about a situation similar to Scotland with Wales
enjoying the power of self government. She also calls for the appreciation of values that reflect the true
country: the language, the landscape, arts and freedom.

UK - Language Varieties

This text discusses the different ways in which men and women use language, based largely on an
unwritten social code. The paper first refers to commonly-held stereotypes, which are not necessarily
supported by systematic research. It then goes on to discuss the differences between the speech of men
and women in terms of the typical patterns and strategies that they use, such as, questions, turn-taking and
interrupting, and the different social outcomes that result, depending on context, for example in terms of
politeness and assertiveness. The conclusion states that it is important to factor in both sociological and
linguistic issues, and the paper finally refers to in-depth studies by Deborah Tannen, which look further into
the reasons why men and women speak differently.

UK Identity
Fox, K. (2004). Watching the English. London: Hodder. (Work to rule, pp.176-207)

The search that Kate Fox undertakes for the hidden rules of English behaviour in Watching The English
leads us from the living room to the bedroom, through the kitchen and down the garden path into the pub.
The following extract takes a look at the English in the workplace and highlights their dispassionate
approach to work. The story is full of inconsistencies.
Are the English hard-working or lazy?
Is their reputation for both tradition and innovation justified?
Why does a nation of shopkeepers have a universal distrust of salesmen?
Can advertisements succeed when there are unwritten rules concerning boastfulness?
How do the English manage to conduct any business at all when they are so squeamish about money?
Such contradictions are themselves one of the hallmarks of life in England and Fox scratches the surface to
reveal underlying motivations. Written with wit and self-depreciation, she emphasizes the role of humour
while formulating serious theories from her observations and makes tentative conclusions concerning the
key components of the English character.

US American Culture and American Regionalism

The United States, according to Gastil can be viewed by dividing it into 12 distinct regions, each of which
comprise a singular history, geography, climate, politics, economy, ethnic composition, dialect, accent, etc.
The sum total of these characteristics gives each region its own unique signature. Identifying these regional
variations will enhance awareness and understanding of the diversity and complexity of the United States.

US Core Values
nd
ed.). New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press. (Chapter 1, pp.5-13)

In this chapter, Althen describes the most common basic American values from individualism and
assertiveness to self-reliance and optimism. He gives an overview of the historical, geographical and
religious roots of a dozen basic values that Americans are taught to strive for and illustrates each description
with examples taken from typical everyday behavior and language.

US American English
Chapter 20: The imaginativeness of American English. (pp.289-307).

One of the most appealing features of American English is its imaginativeness. In this chapter, the author
first establishes what the relationship is between the imaginativeness and other characteristic traits of
American English, like its inventiveness, informality, verbal prudery and tall talk. Next, he explores some of
the metaphorical source domains of American English, most importantly sports, the different aspects of
frontier life, the automobile, and lastly, drug culture; this is followed by a list of the most relevant target
domains, like immigration, democracy, America etc. Then the author presents some conceptual
metonymies, which are also typical sources of American imaginativeness. The chapter closes by a
comparison of British and American attitudes to imaginativeness.

US A Changing Culture: Capturing some tension points

This text is a longer excerpt from the introduction to the book of the same title. Here the authors set out the
background and key features of new trends in immigrant settlement patterns that are changing communities
across the United States. Based on their extensive demographic research they describe so-called new
gateways which have been replacing traditional entry points for immigrants to the U.S. Many of the newest,
largest destinations, such as Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Charlotte, are emerging gateways with no previous
history of immigration. Others, so-called re-emerging gateways, for example Seattle or Minneapolis, have
regained their importance as immigrant destinations only over the past ten years or so. The authors
examine the causes and possible consequences of these developments as immigrant population growth
and new suburban settlement patterns combine in these metropolitan areas.

AUS Nature and People
(Chapter 23: The coming of age. pp.332-351.)

As the chapter title suggests, the author here sets out to review the positive changes which occurred in
Australia in the last three decades of the 20
th
century. Australia's success in sport, culture, media or
business is attributed to a long process of reconciliation with the past, a recognition of the values of
multiculturalism and a more self-assured relationship with Britain. Being Australian today is markedly
different to a hundred years ago. Social diversity is more than the mere sum of population policies but the
result of a continuous push for tolerance which, today, has become the norm.

AUS Social Issues, Language and Arts

In the year of the Bicentenary (1988) Professor Manning Clark reviewed the most important question facing
Australia: what is the way forward from here? He looks at the early expectations, Millennial Eden, the
achievements positive and negative, and the weakening ties to Britain.


Erik Paul takes a rather critical look at Australian foreign policy, which, in his view, is increasingly
determined by a desire to please America. From being a nation connected to Britain by an umbilical cord,
Australia today looks to the US as a model of economic and political culture as well as a major partner in
defence. Paul is especially critical of the Howard government's policies which, in his view, further
undermine Australia's independence as a country situated in the Asia-Pacific region.

CAN Profiles of a country
Kuffert, L. (2003). A commentary on some aspects of Canadian culture. In: K. G. Pryke & W. C. Soderlund (Eds.)
Profiles of Canada. (3rd ed.). Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press Inc. (pp. 97115)

As the title of this chapter suggests, it gives an overview or sample of some aspects of Canadian culture and
society. It discusses these along the concepts of tradition, belief, taste, convenience and difference. Finally
a timeline is presented of important events or developments that affected Canadian culture or cultural policy.

Intercultural Communication

In this paper the author outlines the construct of intercultural competence and related terms in a concise and
informative way. He describes the main components of the construct as they are now widely accepted in the
field. The term is also contextualised with regard to foreign language learning, education and training and
shown in a developmental perspective. Finally, the author argues why assessing intercultural competence
deserves more attention in theory and practice and suggests a few tools for doing so.

BBN ANG 271 Cultural Studies Lectures Department of English Language Pedagogy

Introduction Dorottya Holl

Readings:


2
Excerpts from Raymond Williams
Keywords
(1)

CULTURE

Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so
partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but
mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct
intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought.
The fw is cultura, L, from rw colere, L. Colere had a range of meanings: inhabit, cultivate,
protect, honor with worship. Some of these meanings eventually separated, though still with
occasional overlapping, in the derived nouns. Thus 'inhabit developed through colonus, L to
colony. 'Honor with worship developed through cultus, L to cult. Cultura took on the main
meaning of cultivation or tending, including, as in Cicero, cultura animi, though with
subsidiary medieval meanings of honor and worship (cf. in English culture as 'worship in
Caxton (1483)). The French forms of cultura were couture, OF, which has since developed its
own specialized meaning, and later culture, which by eC15 had passed into English. The
primary meaning was then in husbandry, the tending of natural growth.
Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or
animals. The subsidiary coulter -- ploughshare, had travelled by a different linguistic route,
from culter, L -- ploughshare, culter, OE, to the variant English spellings culter, colter, coulter
and as late as eCl7 culture (Webster, Duchess of Malfi, III, ii: 'hot burning cultures). This
provided a further basis for the important next stage of meaning, by metaphor. From eCl6 the
tending of natural growth was extended to process of human development, and this, alongside
the original meaning in husbandry, was the main sense until lC18 and eC19. Thus More: 'to the
culture and profit of their minds; Bacon: 'the culture and manurance of minds (1605); Hobbes:
'a culture of their minds (1651); Johnson: 'she neglected the culture of her understanding
(1759). At various points in this development two crucial changes occurred: first, a degree of
habituation to the metaphor, which made the sense of human tending direct; second, an
extension of particular processes to a general process, which the word could abstractly carry. It
is of course from the latter development that the independent noun culture began its
complicated modern history, but the process of change is so intricate, and the latencies of
meaning are at times so close, that it is not possible to give any definite date. Culture as an
independent noun, an abstract process or the product of such a process, is not important
before 1C18 and is not common before mCl9. But the early stages of this development were not
sudden. There is an interesting use in Milton, in the second (revised) edition of The Readie and
Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660): 'spread much more Knowledg and Civility,
yea, Religion, through all parts of the Land, by communicating the natural heat of Government
and Culture more distributively to all extreme parts, which now lie num and neglected. Here
the metaphorical sense ('natural heat) still appears to be present, and civility (cf.
CIVILIZATION) is still written where in C19 we would normally expect culture. Yet we can
also read 'government and culture in a quite modern sense. Milton, from the tenor of his whole
argument, is writing about a general social process, and this is a definite stage of development.
In C15 England this general process acquired definite class associations though cultivation
and cultivated were more commonly used for this. But there is a letter of 1730 (Bishop of
3
Killala, to Mrs Clayton; cit. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century)which has this clear sense:
'it has not been customary for persons of either birth or culture to breed up their children to
the Church. Akenside (Pleasures of Imagination, 1744) wrote: '... nor purple state nor culture can
bestow. Wordsworth wrote 'where grace of culture hath been utterly unknown (1805), and
Jane Austen (Emma, 1816) 'every advantage of discipline and culture.
It is thus clear that culture was developing in English towards some of its modern senses
before the decisive effects of a new social and intellectual movement. But to follow the
development through this movement, in lC18 and eC19, we have to look also at developments
in other languages and especially in German.
In French, until C18, culture was always accompanied by a grammatical form indicating the
matter being cultivated, as in the English usage already noted. Its occasional use as an
independent noun dates from mC18, rather later than similar occasional uses in English. The
independent noun civilization also emerged in mC18; its relationship to culture has since been
very complicated (cf. CIVILIZATION and discussion below). There was at this point an
important development in German: the word was borrowed from French, spelled first (lC18)
Cultur and from C19 Kultur. Its main use was still as a synonym for civilization: first in the
abstract sense of a general process of becoming 'civilized or 'cultivated; second, in the sense
which had already been established for civilization by the historians of the Enlightenment, in
the popular C18 form of the universal histories, as a description of the secular process of
human development. There was then a decisive change of use in Herder. In his unfinished
Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784--9 1) he wrote of Cultur: 'nothing is more
indeterminate than this word, and nothing more deceptive than its application to all nations
and periods. He attacked the assumption of the universal histories that 'civilization or culture -
- the historical self-development of humanity -- was what we would now call a unilinear
process, leading to the high and dominant point of C18 European culture. Indeed he attacked
what be called European subjugation and domination of the four quarters of the globe, and
wrote:
Men of all the quarters of the globe, who have perished over the ages, you have not lived
solely to manure the earth with your ashes, so that at the end of time your posterity should be
made happy by European culture. The very thought of a superior European culture is a blatant
insult to the majesty of Nature.
It is then necessary, he argued, in a decisive innovation, to speak of 'cultures in the plural: the
specific and variable cultures of different nations and periods, but also the specific and
variable cultures of social and economic groups within a nation. This sense was widely
developed, in the Romantic movement, as an alternative to the orthodox and dominant
'civilization. It was first used to emphasize national and traditional cultures, including the new
concept of folk-culture (cf. FOLK). It was later used to attack what was seen as the
MECHANICAL (q.v.) character of the new civilization then emerging: both for its abstract
rationalism and for the 'inhumanity of current Industrial development. It was used to
distinguish between 'human and 'material development. Politically, as so often in this period,
it veered between radicalism and reaction and very often, in the confusion of major social
change, fused elements of both. (It should also be noted, though it adds to the real
complication, that the same kind of distinction, especially between 'material and 'spiritual
development, was made by von Humboldt and others, until as late as 1900, with a reversal of
the terms, culture being material and civilization spiritual. In general, however, the opposite
distinction was dominant.)
4
On the other hand, from the 1840s in Germany, Kultur was being used in very much the sense
in which civilization had been used in C18 universal histories. The decisive innovation is G. F.
Klemms Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit -- 'General Cultural History of Mankind
(1843-52)-- which traced human development from savagery through domestication to
freedom. Although the American anthropologist Morgan, tracing comparable stages, used
'Ancient Society, with a culmination in Civilization, Klemms sense was sustained, and was
directly followed in English by Tylor in Primitive Culture (1870). It is along this line of reference
that the dominant sense in modern social sciences has to be traced.
The complexity of the modern development of the word, and of its modern usage, can then be
appreciated. We can easily distinguish the sense which depends on a literal continuity of
physical process as now in 'sugar-beet culture or, in the specialized physical application in
bacteriology since the 1880s, 'germ culture. But once we go beyond the physical reference, we
have to recognize three broad active categories of usage. The sources of two of these we have
already discussed: (i) the independent and abstract noun which describes a general process of
intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development, from C18; (ii) the independent noun, whether
used generally or specifically, which indicates a particular way of life, whether of a people, a
period, a group, or humanity in general, from Herder and Klemm. But we have also to
recognize (iii) the independent and abstract noun which describes the works and practices of
intellectual and especially artistic activity. This seems often now the most widespread use:
culture is music, literature, painting and sculpture, theater and film. A Ministry of Culture
refers to these specific activities, sometimes with the addition of philosophy, scholarship,
history. This use, (iii), is in fact relatively late. It is difficult to date precisely because it is in
origin an applied form of sense (i): the idea of a general process of intellectual, spiritual and
aesthetic development was applied and effectively transferred to the works and practices
which represent and sustain it. But it also developed from the earlier sense of process; cf.
'progressive culture of fine arts, Millar, Historical View of the English Government, IV, 314 (1812).
In English (i) and (iii) are still close; at times, for internal reasons, they are indistinguishable as
in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1867); while sense (ii) was decisively introduced into English
by Tylor, Primitive Culture (1870), following Klemm. The decisive development of sense (iii) in
English was in lC19 and eC2O.
Faced by this complex and still active history of the word, it is easy to react by selecting one
'true or 'proper or 'scientific sense and dismissing other senses as loose or confused. There is
evidence of this reaction even in the excellent study by Kroeber and Kluckhohn, Culture: a
Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, where usage in North American anthropology is in
effect taken as a norm. It is clear that, within a discipline, conceptual usage has to be clarified.
But in general it is the range and overlap of meanings that is significant. The complex of senses
indicates a complex argument about the relations between general human development and a
particular way of life, and between both and the works and practices of art and intelligence. It
is especially interesting that in archaeology and in cultural anthropology the reference to culture
or a culture isprimarily to material production, while in history and cultural studies the
reference is primarily to signifying or symbolic systems. This often confuses but even more often
conceals the central question of the relations between 'material and 'symbolic production,
which in some recent argument -- cf. my own Culture -- have always to be related rather than
contrasted. Within this complex argument there are fundamentally opposed as well as
effectively overlapping positions; there are also, understandably, many unresolved questions
and confused answers. But these arguments and questions cannot be resolved by reducing the
complexity of actual usage. This point is relevant also to uses of forms of the word in
5
languages other than English, where there is considerable variation. The anthropological use is
common in the German, Scandinavian and Slavonic language groups, but it is distinctly
subordinate to the senses of art and learning, or of a general process of human development,
in Italian and French. Between languages as within a language, the range and complexity of
sense and reference indicate both difference of intellectual position and some blurring or
overlapping. These variations, of whatever kind, necessarily involve alternative views of the
activities, relationships and processes which this complex word indicates. The complexity, that
is to say, is not finally in the word but in the problems which its variations of use significantly
indicate.
It is necessary to look also at some associated and derived words. Cultivation and cultivated
went through the same metaphorical extension from a physical to a social or educational sense
in C17, and were especially significant words in C18. Coleridge, making a classical eC19
distinction between civilization and culture, wrote (1830): 'the permanent distinction, and
occasional contrast, between cultivation and civilization. The noun in this sense has effectively
disappeared but the adjective is still quite common, especially in relation to manners and
tastes. The important adjective cultural appears to date from the 1870s; it became common by
the 1890s. The word is only available, in its modern sense, when the independent noun, in the
artistic and intellectual or anthropological senses, has become familiar. Hostility to the word
culture in English appears to date from the controversy around Arnolds views. It gathered
force in lC19 and eC20, in association with a comparable hostility to aesthete and AESTHETIC
(q.v.). Its association with class distinction produced the mime-word culchah. There was also
an area of hostility associated with anti-German feeling, during and after the 1914-18 War, in
relation to propaganda about Kultur. The central area of hostility has lasted, and one element
of it has been emphasized by the recent American phrase culture-vulture. It is significant that
virtually all the hostility (with the sole exception of the temporary anti-German association)
has been connected with uses involving claims to superior knowledge (cf. the noun
INTELLECTUAL),refinement (culchah) and distinctions between 'high art (culture) and
popular art and entertainment. It thus records a real social history and a very difficult and
confused phase of social and cultural development. It is interesting that the steadily extending
social and anthropological use of culture and cultural and such formations as sub-culture (the
culture of a distinguishable smaller group) has, except in certain areas (notably popular
entertainment), either bypassed or effectively diminished the hostility and its associated
unease and embarrassment. The recent use of culturalism, to indicate a methodological contrast
with structuralism in social analysis, retains many of the earlier difficulties, and does not
always bypass the hostility.
1
Rev. Ed. (NewYork: Oxford UP, 1983), pp. 87-93

Abbreviations:
fw foreign word
rw root word
C century
eC19 early 19th century
mC19 mid-19th century
lC19 late 19th century

6
Cultural Studies and Ethics
Douglas Kellner, U.C.L.A.
http://gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/CSETHIC.htm
The movement of cultural studies that has been a global phenomenon of great importance over the last
decade was inaugurated by the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in
1963/64 led at the time by Richard Hoggart (1958) and Stuart Hall. During this period, the Centre
developed a variety of critical approaches for the analysis, interpretation, and criticism of cultural
artifacts. Through a set of internal debates, and responding to social struggles and movements of the
1960s and the 1970s, the Birmingham group came to focus on the interplay of representations and
ideologies of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality in cultural texts, including media culture.
They were among the first to study the effects of newspapers, radio, television, film, and other popular
cultural forms on audiences. They also focused on how various audiences interpreted and used media
culture in varied and different ways and contexts, analyzing the factors that made audiences respond in
contrasting ways to media texts.
The now classical period of British cultural studies from the early 1960s to the early 1980s initialled
adopted a Marxian approach to the study of culture, one especially influenced by Althusser and
Gramsci (see, especially Hall 1980a). Although members of the school of British cultural studies Hall
usually omit the Frankfurt school from his narrative, some of the work done by the Birmingham group
replicated certain classical positions of the Frankfurt school, in their social theory and methodological
models for doing cultural studies, as well as in their political perspectives and strategies. Like the
Frankfurt school, British cultural studies observed the integration of the working class and its decline of
revolutionary consciousness, and studied the conditions of this catastrophe for the Marxian project of
revolution. Like the Frankfurt school, British cultural studies concluded that mass culture was playing
an important role in integrating the working class into existing capitalist societies and that a new
consumer and media culture was forming a new mode of capitalist hegemony.
Both traditions focused on the intersections of culture and ideology and saw ideology critique as central
to a critical cultural studies (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1980a and 1980b). Both saw
culture as a mode of ideological reproduction and hegemony, in which cultural forms help to shape the
modes of thought and behavior that induce individuals to adapt to the social conditions of capitalist
societies. Both also see culture as a form of resistance to capitalist society and both the earlier
forerunners of British cultural studies, especially Raymond Williams (1961 and 1962), and the theorists
of the Frankfurt school see high culture as forces of resistance to capitalist modernity. Later, British
cultural studies would valorize resistant moments in media culture and audience interpretations and use
of media artifacts, while the Frankfurt school tended, with some exceptions, to see mass culture as a
homogeneous and potent form of ideological domination -- a difference that would seriously divide the
two traditions.
From the beginning, British cultural studies was highly political in nature and focused on the potentials
for resistance in oppositional subcultures, first, valorizing the potential of working class cultures, then,
youth subcultures to resist the hegemonic forms of capitalist domination. Unlike the classical Frankfurt
school (but similar to Herbert Marcuse), British cultural studies turned to youth cultures as providing
potentially new forms of opposition and social change. Through studies of youth subcultures, British
cultural studies demonstrated how culture came to constitute distinct forms of identity and group
7
membership and appraised the oppositional potential of various youth subcultures (see Jefferson 1976
and Hebdige 1979). Cultural studies came to focus on how subcultural groups resist dominant forms of
culture and identity, creating their own style and identities. Individuals who conform to dominant dress
and fashion codes, behavior, and political ideologies thus produce their identities within mainstream
groups, as members of specific social groupings (such as white, middle-class conservative Americans).
Individuals who identify with subcultures, like punk culture, or black nationalist subcultures, look and
act differently from those in the mainstream, and thus create oppositional identities, defining
themselves against standard models.
As it developed into the 1970s and 1980s, British cultural studies successively appropriated feminism,
critical race theory, gay and lesbian theory, postmodern theory, and other fashionable theoretical
modes. Thus, they turned to examining the ways that cultural texts promoted sexism, racism,
homophobia, and other forms of oppression, or promoted resistance and struggle against these
phenomena. This approach implicitly contained ethical critique of all cultural forms that promoted
oppression and domination while positively valorizing texts and representations that produced a
potentially more just and egalitarian social order.
With a postmodern turn in cultural studies, there was an increasing emphasis on the audience and how
audiences produce meanings and how cultural texts produce both popular pleasures and forms of
resistance (Ang 1985; Fiske 1993). Critics of this phase of cultural studies claim that the project has
been losing its critical edge, has fallen into a postmodern cultural populism (McGuigan 1992), and has
surrendered the political radicalism and critical thrust of the original project (Kellner 1995). Defenders
of the turn toward cultural populism argue that the original more critical model tended to be overly
elitist and excessively critical of popular pleasures, while neglecting the complex ways that cultural
texts can be appropriated and used.
Rather than focusing on ethics per se, British cultural studies and its later variants tend to engage the
politics of representation. Employing Antonio Gramsci's model of hegemony and counterhegemony
(1971 and 1992), it sought to analyze 'hegemonic,' or ruling, social and cultural forces of domination
and to seek 'counterhegemonic' forces of resistance and struggle. The project aimed at social
transformation and attempted to specify forces of domination and resistance in order to aid the process
of political struggle and emancipation from oppression and domination. Their politics of representation
thus entailed a critique of cultural representations that promoted racism, sexism, classism, or any forms
of oppression. Any representations that promoted domination and oppression were thus negatively
valorized, while representations that promoted egalitarianism, social justice, and emancipation were
positively valorized.
In this optic, ethics tends to be subordinated to politics and the moral dimension of culture tends to be
underemphasized or downplayed. Thus, one could argue for a cultural studies that more explicitly
stresses the importance of ethical analysis, scrutinizing cultural texts for the specific ethical norms
portrayed and evaluating the work accordingly. Or one could explore in more detail and depth than is
usually done in cultural studies the moral and philosophical dimensions of cultural texts, the ways that
they carry out moral critiques of society and culture, or embody ethical concerns regarding good and
evil, and moral and immoral behavior or phenomena.
Yet ethical concerns permeated cultural studies from the beginning. Culture is, among other things, a
major transmitter and generator of values and a cultural studies sensitive to the very nature and function
of culture should be aware of the ethical dimension to culture. Thus, concern with ethics, with the
moral aspects of cultural texts, should be a central and fundamental focus of cultural studies, as it was
8
with non-formalist literary studies. While it is unlikely that the texts of media culture have the ethical
depth and complexity of great literary texts, it is clear that ethical concerns are of fundamental
importance to the sort of popular cultural artifacts that have been the domain of cultural studies.
Finally, it should be noted that there are a great heterogeneity and diversity of types of cultural studies
today ranging from a cultural populism that celebrates the pleasures of popular cultural artifacts or
activities such as shopping or sports, to more critical feminist, race-theory based, or post-structuralist
variants. Some works in contemporary cultural studies combine concern with gender, race, class and
ethical values and add new ethical and political substance to the earlier project of cultural studies (see,
for example, hooks (1984, 1992, and 1994) and Jefford (1989 and 1994). Yet on the whole ethical
analysis has not been adequately thematized and developed within the tradition of cultural studies. In
regard of the global wave of cultural studies in recent years that have greatly expanded the field, I
would conclude that the time is now ripe to make ethical analysis and concern with values a
fundmental part of a future cultural studies.
Notes
1. For standard accounts of this phase of British cultural studies, see Hall et al 1980; Hall 1980a and
1980b; Johnson 1986/7; Fiske 1986; O'Conner 1989; Turner 1990; Grossberg 1989; Agger 1992;
McGuigan 1992; and Kellner 1995. For readers which document the positions of British cultural
studies, see the articles collected in Grossberg, Nelson, Triechler 1992 and During 1992.
2. For the classic Frankfurt school model, see Horkheimer and Adorno 1972 [1947]. On British cultural
studies and the Frankfurt school, see Kellner 1997.
3. The turn to the audience was already anticipated in Hall 1980b; but the earlier Birmingham model
balanced focus on text, context, and audience, while later cultural studies would focus primarily on
audience appropriation and use of cultural artifacts.

References:
Ang, Ien (1985) Watching Dallas. New York: Metheun.
Agger, Ben (1992) Cultural Studies. London: Falmer Press.
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1980a) On Ideology London: Hutchinson.
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1980b) Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson.
During, Simon (1993) ed. The Cultural Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge.
Fiske, John 1986, "British Cultural Studies and Television." Channels of Discourse, edited by R. C.
Allen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: 254-289.
Fiske, John (1993) Power Plays. Power Works. New York and London: Verso.
Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks New York: International Publishers.
Gramsci, Antonio (1992) Prison Notebooks. Volume 1. New York: Columbia University Press.
Grossberg, Lawrence (1989) "The Formations of Cultural Studies: An American in Birmingham,"
Strategies, 22: 114-149.
Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary and Paula Treichler (1992) Cultural Studies. New York:Routledge.
Hall, Stuart, et al (1980) Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson.
Hall, Stuart (1980a) "Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some problematics and problems," in Hall et al,
1980, 15-47.
9
Hall, Stuart (1980b) "Encoding/Decoding," in Hall et al, 1980, 128-138.
Hebdige, Dick Subculture. The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.
Hoggart, Richard (1958) The Uses of Literacy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hooks, Bell (1984) Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press.
Hooks, Bell (1990) Yearning. Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press.
Hooks, Bell (1992) Black Looks. Race and Representation. Toronto: Between the Lines.
Horkheimer, Max and T.W. Adorno (1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Seabury.
Jefferson, Tony (ed.) (1976) Reistance through Rituals. London: Hutchinson.
Jeffords, Susan (1989) The Remasculinization of America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Jeffords, Susan (1994) Hard Bodies. New Brunswick, N.Y.: Rutgers University Press.
Johnson, Richard (1986/87) "What is Cultural Studies Anyway?" Social Text 16: 38-80.
Kellner, Douglas (1995) Media Culture. Cultural Studies, Identity, and Politics Between the Modern
and the Postmodern. London and New York: Routledge.
Kellner, Douglas (1997) "Critical Theory and British Cultural Studies: The Missed Articulation," in
Cultural Methodologies, edited by Jim McGuigan, Sage: 12-41.
McGuigan, Jim (1992) Cultural Populism. London and New York: Routledge.
O'Connor, Alan (1989) "The Problem of American Cultural Studies," Critical Studies in Mass
Communication (December), 405-413.
Turner, Graeme (1990) British Cultural Studies: An Introduction. New York: Unwin Hyman.
Williams, Raymond (1961) The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus.
Williams, Raymond (1962) Communications. London: Penquin.



UK Geography Rachel Appleby

Readings:

O'Driscoll, J. (1995). Britain: The country and its people: an introduction for learners of English Oxford:
Oxford University Press. (pp.31-40)

Reading:
O'Driscoll, J. (1995). Britain: The country and its people: an introduction for
learners of English (pp 3140). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Geography
It has been claimed that the British love of compromise is the result
of the country's physical geography. This may or may not be true, but
it is certainly true that the land and climate in Britain have a notable
lack of extremes. Britain has mountains, but none of them are very
high; it also has flat land, but you cannot travel far^without encoun-
tering hills; it has no really big rivers; it doesn' t usually get very cold
in the winter or very hot in the summer; it has no active volcanoes,
and an earth tremor which does no more than rattle teacups in a few
houses is reported in the national news media.
The
British landscape
0 100 200 300 km
I . I 1 1
Land height in metres above sea level
More than 500
200 - 500
Less than 200
32 3 Geography
Climate
The climate of Britain is more or less the same as that of the north-
western part of the European mainland. The popular belief that it
rains all the time in Britain is simply not true. The image of a wet,
foggy land was created two thousand years ago by the invading
Romans and has been perpetuated in modern times by Hollywood.
* In fact, London gets no more rain in a year than most other major
European cities, and less than some (> How wet is Britain?).
The amount of rain that falls on a town in Britain depends on
where it is. Generally speaking, the further west you go, the more
rain you get. The mild winters mean that snow is a regular feature of
the higher areas only. Occasionally, a whole winter goes by in lower-
lying parts without any snow at all. The winters are in general a bit
colder in the east of the country than they are in the west, while in
summer, the south is slightly warmer and sunnier than the north.
Why has Britain's climate got such a bad reputation? Perhaps it is
for the same reason that British people always seem to be talking about
the weather. This is its changeability. There is a saying that Britain
doesn' t have a climate, it only has weather. It may not rain very much
altogether, but you can never be sure of a dry day; there can be cool
(even cold) days in July and some quite warm days in January.
The lack of extremes is the reason why, on the few occasions when
it gets genuinely hot or freezing cold, me country seems to be totally
unprepared for it. A bit of snow and a few days of frost and die trains
stop working and the roads are blocked; if the thermometer goes
above 8oF (27C) (t> How hot or cold is Britain?), people behave as if
they were in the Sahara and the temperature makes front-page head-
lines. These things happen so rarely that it is not worth organizing
life to be ready for them.
Ho w we t i s Bri t ai n?
Annual t ot al rainfall (approximate) in some European cities
I
1
Land and settlement
Britain has neither towering mountain ranges, nor impressively large
rivers, plains or forests. But this does not mean that its landscape is
boring. What it lacks in grandeur it makes up for in variety. The
scenery changes noticeably over quite short distances. It has often
been remarked that a journey of 100 miles (1 60 kilometres) can, as
a result, seem twice as far. Overall, the south and east of the country
is comparatively low-Iying. consisting of either fiat plains or gently
rolling hills. Mountainous areas are found only in the north and
west, although these regions also have fiat areas (l>TheBritishlandscape).
Human infiuence has been extensive. The forests that once covered
the land have largely disappeared. Britain has a greater proportion
of grassland than any other country in Europe except the Republic of
Ireland. One distinctive human infiuence, especially common in
southern England, is the enclosure of fields with hedgerows. This
feature increases the impression of variety. Although many hedgerows
have disappeared in the second half of the twentieth century (farmers
have dug them up to increase the size of their fields and became more
efficient), there are still enough of them to support a great variet}"of
bird-life.
~ How hot or cold is Britain?
Annualtemperature range (from hottest month to coldest month) insome
European cities
oc
30
25
20
15
10
5
O
-5
-10
J>..i'O ~~.Io IlIfiJl("tJ b<:- ~~.f ~J'c, ~~'1><::- ~<::- ol$'~ ;y.l$''>.'1><l.ec,"" ;<;:-e<::-c, cp..i-
" . ~~ ~ O~ ':.Q< " . q;p ~ ~ ,>'" ~ J>..o'"
" s:-c; V ~ oc.; <Q "
~~ CI~' s'C
?ple inBritain are happier usingthe Fahrenheit scale of measurement (F).
" a temperature 'in the upper twenties' means that it is freezing and one
seventies' will not killyou- it is just pleasantly warm.
Land and settlement
33
~ The vanishing coastline
Britain is an island under constant
attack from the surrounding sea.
Every year, little bits of the east coast
vanish into the North Sea. Some-
times the land slips away slowly. But
at other times it slips away very sud-
denly. In 1993 adramatic example
of this process occurred near the
town ofScarborough in Yorkshire.
The Holbeck Hotel, built on a
clifftop overlooking the sea, had
been the best hotel in town for 11o
years. But on the morning of 4 June,
guests awoke to find cracks in the
walls and the doors stuck. When
they looked out of the window,
instead of seeing fifteen metres of
hotel garden, they saw nothing -
except the sea. There was no time to
collect their belongings. They had to
leave the hotel immediately. During
the day various rooms of the hotel
started leaning at odd angles and
then slipped down the cliff. The
Holbeck Hotel's role in the tourism
industry was over. However, by
'dying' so dramatically, it provided
one last great sight for tourists. Hun-
dreds of them watched the action
throughout the day.
,L.
TheHolbeckHotelfallingintothesea
34 3 Geography
~,
Much of the land is used for human habitation. This is not just
because Britain is densely populated (1)TheBritishIs1es: wherepeoplelive).
Partly because of their desire for privacy and their love of the country-
side (see chapter 5), the English and the Welsh don 't like living in
blocks of flats in city centres and the proportion of people who do so
is lower than in other European countries. As a result, cities in
England and Wales have, wherever possible, been built outwards
ra ther than upwards (although this is not so much the case in Scottish
cities). For example, Greater London has about three times the popu-
lation of greater Athens but it occupies ten times the area ofland.
However, because most people (abaut 75%) live in towns or cities
rather than in villages or in the countryside, this habit ofbuilding
outwards does not mean that you see buildings wherever you go in
Britain. There are areas of completely open countryside everywhere
and some of the mountainous areas rem ain virtually untouched.
The environment and pollution
It was in Britain that the word 'smog' was first used (to describe a
mixture of smoke and fog). As the world's first industrialized
country, its cities were the first to suffer this atmospheric condition.
In the nineteenth century London's 'pea-soupers' (thick smogs)
became famaus through descriptions of them in the works of Charles
Dickens and in the Sherlock Holmes stories. The situation in London
reached its worst point in 1952. At the end of that year a particularly
bad smog, which lasted for several days, was estimated to have caused
between 4,000 and 8,000 deaths.
Water pollution was also a problem. In the nineteenth century it
was once suggested that the Houses ofParliament should be wrapped
in enormous wet sheets to protect those inside from the awful smell
of the RiverThames. Until the 19605, the first thing that happened
to people who fell into the Thames was that they were rushed to
. hospital to have their stomachs pumped aut!
Then, during the 1960s and 1970s, laws were passed which
. forbade the heating of homes with open coal fires in cityareas and
which stopped much of the pollution from factories. At one time, a
scene of fog in a Hollywood film was ali that was necessary to
symbolize London. This image is now aut of date, and by the end of
the 1970S it was said to be possible to catch fish in the Thames
outside Parliament.
However, as in the rest of western Europe, the great increase in
the use of the motor car in the last quarter of the twentieth century
caused an increase in a new kind of air pallution. This problem has
become so serious that the television weather forecast now regularly
issues warnings of 'poor air quality'. On some occasions it is bad
enough to prompt official advice that certain people (such as asthma
sufferers) should not even leave their houses, and that nobody should
take any vigorous exercise, such as jogging, out of doors.
The environment and pallution 35
1'0
36 3 Geography
London
d"
London (the largest city in Europe) dominates Britain. It is home for
the headquarters of aUgovernment departments, Parliament, the
major legal institutions and the monarch. It is the country's business
and banking centre and the centre ofits transport network. It contains
the headquarters of the national television networks and of alI the
national newspapers. It is about seven times larger than any other
city in the country. About a fifth of the total population of the DK
lives in the Greater London area.
The original waUed city ofLondon was quite smaU. (It is known
coUoquially today as 'the square mile'.) It did not contain Parliarnent
or the royal court, since this would have interfered with the auto-
nomy of the merchants, and traders who lived and worked there. It
was in Westminster, another 'cy' outside London's walls, that these
national institutions met. Today, both 'cities' are just two areas of
central London. The square mile is home to the country's main finan-
cial organizations, the territory of the stereotypical English .city
gent'. During the daytime, nearly a million people work there, but
less than 8,000 people actuaUy live there.
Two other weU-known areas ofLndon are the West End and the
East End. The former is known for its many theatres, cinemas and
expensive shops. The latter is known as the poorer residential area of
central London. It is the home of the Cockney (see chapter 4) and in
the twentieth century large numbers of immigrants settled there.
There are many other parts of central London which have their
own distinctive characters, and central London itselfmakes up only
a very small part of Greater London. In common with many other
European cities, the popUlation illithe central area has decreased in
the second half of the twentieth century. The majority of'Londoners'
live in its suburbs, millions ofthem travelling into the centre each
, day to work. Thesesuburbs cover a vast area ofland.
Like many large cities, London is in some ways untypical of the
rest of the country in that it is so cosmopolitan. Although aUof
Britain's cities have some degree of cultural and racial variety, the
variety is by far the greatest in London. Asurvey caITied out in the
1980s found that 137 different languages were spoken in the homes
of just one district. "
In recent years it has been claimed that London is in decline. It is
losing its place as one of the world's biggest financial centres and, in
comparison with many other western European cities, it looks rather
dirty and neglected. Nevertheless, its popularity as a tourist des tina-
tion is still growing. And it is not only tourist~ who like visiting
London - the readei-s of Business Traveller magazine often vote it their
favourite city in the world in which to do business. This popularity
is probably the result of its combination of apparently infinite cul-
tural variety and a long history which has left many visible signs of
its richness and drama.
1,
i
I
'i
.f
jn',
ll'
,
,
j
ri
J
Southern England
The area surrounding the outer suburbs of London has thereputation
ofbeing 'commuter land'. This is the most densely populated area
in the UK which does not include a large city, and hlillions of its
inhabitants travel into London to work every day.
Further out from London the region has more of its own distinctive
character. The county of Kent, which you pass through when travel-
ling from Dover or the Channel tunnel to London, is known as 'the
garden ofEngland' because of the many kinds offruit and vegetables
grown there. The Downs, a series ofhills in a horseshoe shape to the
south of London, are used for sheep farming (though not as intens-
ively as they used to be). The southern side of the Downs reaches the
sea in many places and forms the white cliffs of the south coast. Many
retired people live along this coast. Employment in the south-east of
England ismainly in trade, the provision of services and light manufac-
turing. There is little heavy industry. It has therefore not suffered the
slow economic decline of many other parts of England.
The region known as 'the West Country' has an attractive image of
rural beauty in British people's ininds - notice the use of the word
'country' in its name. There is some indus try and one large city
(Bristol was once Britain's most important port after London), but
farming is more widespread than it is in most other regions. Some
parts of the west country are well-known fot their dairy produce,
such as Devonshire cream, and fruit. The south-west peninsula, with
its rocky coast, numerous small bays (once noted for smuggling
activities) and wild moorlands such as Exmoor and Dartmoor,is the
mst popular holiday area in Britain. The winters are so mild in some
low-Iying parts that it is even possible to grow palm trees, and the
. turist industry has coined the phrase 'the English Riviera'.
East Anglia, to the north-east of London, is also comparatively
hItal. It is the only region in Britain where there are large expanses
t'i(oftinifoimly fiat land. this fiatness, together with the comparatively
; dry climate, has made it the main area in the country for the growing
pfwheat and other arable crops. Part of this region, the area known
s the Feils, has been reclaimed from the sea, and much ofit still has
very watery, misty feel to it. The Norfolk Broads, for example, are
iss-crossed by hundreds of waterways but thereare no towns here,
this is a popular area for boating holidays.
e Midlands
mingham is Britain's second largest city. During the Industrial
'olution (see chapter 2), Birmingham, and thesurrounding area
he West Midlands (sometimes known as the Black Country)
-elopedinto the country's major engineering centre. Despite the
!ine ofheavy indus try in modem times, factories in this area still
\vert iron and steel imo a vast variety of goods.
...
"
,
Southern England 37
Fannland in southeast England
land's End, the extreme southwest point
of England
38 3 Geography
.. The north-south divide
There are many aspects oflife in
Britain which illustrate the so-called
'north-south divide', This is a well-
known fact of British life, although
there is no actual geographical
boundary. Basically, the south has
almost always been more prosper-
ous than the north, with lower rates
of unemployment and more expens-
ive houses, This is especially true of
the south-eastern area surrounding
London. This area is often referred
to as the 'Home Counties'. The word
'home' in this context highlights the
importance attached to London and
its domination of public life.
An 'industrial town in northern England
"
;1
1;
,"
"
~
There are other industrial areas in the MidIands, notably the towns
between the Black Country and Manchester known as The Potteries
(famaus for producing china such as that made at the factories of
Wedgewood, Spode and Minton) , and several towns in the East
Midlands, such as Derby, Leicester and Nottingham. On the east
coast, Grimsby, although a comparatively smalI town, is one of
Britain's most important fishing ports.
Although the midIands do not have many positive associations in
the minds of British people, tourism has flourished in 'Shakespeare
country' (centred on Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's
birthplace), and Nottingham has successfuIIy capitalized on the
legend of Robin Hood (see chapter 2).
Northern England
The Pennine mountains run up the middle of northern England like
a spine. On either side, the large deposits of coal (used to provide
power) and iron ore (used to make machinery) enabled these area~
to lead the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. On the
western side, the Manchester area (connected to the port of Liverpool
by canal) became, in the nineteenth century, the world's leading
producer of cotton goods; on the eastern side, towns such as Bradford
and Leeds became the world's leading producers of waallen goods.
Many other towns sprang up on both sides of the Pennines at this
time, as a result of the growth of certain auxiliary industries and of
coal mining. Further south, Sheffield became a centre for the produc-
tion of steel goods. Further north, around Newcastle, shipbuilding
was the major indus try.
In the minds of British people the proto type of the naisy, dirty
factory that symbolizes the lndustrial Revolution is found in the indus-
trial north. But the achievements ofthese new industrial towns also
induced a feeling of civic pride in their inhabitants and an energetic
realism, epitomized by the clichd saying 'where there's muek there's
brass'(wherever there is dirt, there is money to be made).
The decline in heavy indus try in Europe in the second half of the
twentieth century hit the industrial north of England hard. For a
long time, the region as a whole has had a level of unemployment
significantly above the national average. -
The towns on either side of the Pennines are flanked by steep slopes
on which it is difficult to build and are surrounded by land most
of which is unsuitable for any agritulture other than sheep
farming. Therefore, the pattem of settlement in the northof
England is often different from that in the south. Open and
uninhabited countryside is never far away from its cities and
towns. The typicaIly industrial and the very rural interlock. The
wild, windswept moors which are the setting for Emily Bronte's
famaus novel WutheringHeightsseem a world away from the smoke
and grime of urban life - in fact, they are just up the road (abaut
[5 kilometres) from Bradford!
,..
","
Scotland
Further away from the main industrial areas, the north of England
is sparsely populated. In the narth,western corner of the country is
the Lake District. The Romantic poets of the nineteenth century.
Wardsworth, Coleridge and Southey (the 'Lake Poets') ,lived here
and wrote about its beauty. It is the favourite destination of people
who enjoy walking holidays and the whole area is classified as a
National Park (the largest in England) .
Scotland
Scotland has three fairly clearly-marked regions. Just north of the
border with England are the southern uplands, an area of small
towns, quite far apart from each other, whose economy depends to
a large extent on sheep farming. Further narth, there is the central
plain. Finally, there are the highlands, consisting of mountains and
deep valleys and including numerous small islands off the west coast.
This area of spectacular natural beauty occupies the same land area as
southern England but fewer than amilli on people live there. Tourism
is important in the local economy, and so is the production of whisky.
It is in the central plain and the strip of east coast extending narth-
wards from it that more than 80% of the population ofScotland lives.
In recent times, this region has had many of the same difficulties as
the industrial north of England, although the North Sea oil industry
has helped to keep unemployment down.
Scotland 's two majar cities have very different reputations.
Glasgow is the third largest city in Britain. It is associated with heavy
industry and some of the warst housing conditions in Britain (the
district called the Gorbals, although now rebuilt, was famous in this
respect). However, this image is one-sided. Glasgow has astrong
artistic heritage. Ahundred years ago the work of the Glasgow
School (led by Mackintosh) put the city at the forefront of
European design and architecture. In 199, it was the European City
of Culture. Over the centuries, Glasgow has received many immig-
rants from Ireland and in some ways it reflects the divisions in the
community that exist in Northern Ireland (see chapter 4). For
example, of its two rival football teams, one is Catholic (Celtic) and
the other is Protestant (Rangers).
Edinburgh, which is halfthe size of Glasgow, has a comparatively
middle-class image (although class differences between the two
cities are not really very great). It is the capital of Scotland and is
associated with scholarship, the law and administration. This reputa-
tion, together with its many fine historic buildings, and also perhaps
its topography (there is a rock in the middIe of the city on which
stands the castle) has led to its being called' the Athens of the north'.
The annual Edinburgh Festival of the arts is internationally famous
(see chapter 22).
39
"
4 3 Geography
Part of Snowdonia National Park
Wales
As in Scotland, most people in Wales live in one small part of it. In
the Welsh case, it is the south-east of the country that is most heavily
populated. Coal has been mined in many parts ofBritain, but just as
British people would locate the prototype factory of the industrial
revolution in the north ofEngland, so they would locate its prototype
coal mine in south Wales. Despite its industry. no really large cities
have grown up in this area (Cardiff, the capital of Wales, has a popula-
tion of about a quarter of a million) . It is the only part of Britain with
a high proportion of industrial villages.Coal mining in south Wales
has now ceased and, as elsewhere, the transition to other forms of
employment has been slow and painful.
Most of the rest of Wales is mountainous. Because of this , com-
munication between south and north is very difficult. As a result, each
part of Wales has closer contact with its neighbouring part ofEngland
than it does with other parts of Wales: the north with Liverpool. and
mid-Wales with the English west midlands. The area around Mount
Snowdon in the north-west of the country is very beauful and is the
largest National Park in Britain.
Northern lreland
With the exception of Belfast, which is famous for the manufacture
oflinen (and which is still a shipbuilding city), this region is, like
the rest ofIreland, largely agricultural. It has several areas of spectacu-
lar natural beauty. One ofthese is the Giant's Causeway on its north .
coast. so-called because the rocks in the area form what look like
enormous stepping stones.
Geography of Ireland
Ireland is sometimes known as the "Emerald Isle" because of
its green scenery. It is an island in NW Europe in the N
Atlantic Ocean. The main geographical features of Ireland
include low central plains surrounded by a ring of coastal
mountains. The highest peak is Carrauntoohil (Corrdn Tuathail
in Irish), which is 1,041m (3,414 ft) above sea level. The
western coastline is rugged, with many islands, peninsulas,
headlands and bays.
Politically, the island consists of the state of the Republic of
Ireland and the United Kingdom constituent country Northern
Ireland. Located west of the island of Great Britain, it has a
total area of 84,412 km
2
(32,591 sq m). It is separated from Britain
by the Irish Sea, and from mainland Europe by the Celtic Sea.
Mountain ranges
Ireland consists of a mostly flat low-lying area in the midlands, ringed by mountain ranges.
The highest peak is Carrauntoohil, 1,041 m (3,414 ft) high, in the Macgillycuddy's Reeks, a
range of glacier-carved sandstone mountains in County Kerry, in the southwest of the
island. The mountains are not high - only three peaks are over 1,000 m (3,281 ft) and
another 457 exceed 500 m (1,640 ft).
Rivers and lakes
The main river in Ireland is the River Shannon, 386 km (240 miles), the longest river in
either Ireland or Great Britain, which separates the boggy midlands of Ireland from the
West of Ireland.. Other major rivers include the River Liffey, (Dublin) and the River Lee.
Lough Neagh, in Ulster, is the biggest lake in the British Isles. Legend has it that a giant,
Fionn mac Cumhail, was fighting with another in Scotland, and enraged, scooped out a
lump of earth, which he threw. It fell into the Irish Sea, creating the Isle of Man, while the
hole filled up with water to become Lough Neagh.
Climate
Ireland's climate is temperate, though significantly warmer than almost all other locations at
similar latitude, such as Poland (on the continent) or Newfoundland (on the opposite edge of
the Atlantic), due to the warming influence of the North Atlantic drift which continues the
Gulf Stream north east. The prevailing wind blows from the southwest, breaking on the high
mountains of the west coast. Rainfall is therefore a particularly prominent part of western
Irish life, where they get almost twice as much annual rainfall as Dublin on the east
(1400 mm vs. 762 mm).
January and February are the coldest months of the year, and mean daily air temperatures
fall between 4 and 7 C during these months. July and August are the warmest, with a range
of 14 to 16 C. The sunniest months are May and June, with an average of five to seven
hours' sunshine per day.
Outline Map of Ireland
Bogs (deposits of dead plant material)
Ireland has 12,000 km
2
(4,633 miles
2
) of bogland, essentially a product of human activity -
dead plants - aided by the moist Irish climate, and producing peat.
Since the 17th century, peat has been cut for fuel for domestic heating and cooking and it is
called /wr/when so used. The process accelerated as commercial exploitation of bogs grew.
In the 1940s, machines for cutting turf were introduced and larger-scale exploitation became
possible. In addition to domestic uses, commercially extracted turf is used in a number of
industries, especially electricity generation. In recent years, the high level of bog being
destroyed by cutting has raised environmental concerns. Plans are now in place in both the
Republic and Northern Ireland to conserve most of the remaining bogs on the island.
Oil, natural gas and minerals
Offshore exploration for natural gas began in 1970, with drillings for oil taking place in the
'70s and '80s. However, due to the low price since then of oil, the relatively small size of
finds, and the sheer difficulty in operating off the west coast of Ireland, activity decreased.
Gas from these fields is pumped ashore and used for both domestic and industrial purposes.
The Helvick oil field, estimated to contain over 28 million barrels (4,500,000 m
3
) of oil, is
another recent discovery. Ireland is the largest European producer of zinc with three
operating zinc-lead mines.
In May 2007 it was again reported that there may be billions ofbarrels(2.1xl0
, 0
m
3
)of
petroleum, and 50 trillion cubic feet (1,400 km
3
) of natural gas in Irish waters - worth
trillions of Euro, if true. The minimum 'guaranteed' amount of oil in the Irish Atlantic
waters is 10 billion barrels (1.6*10
y
m
3
), worth over 450 billion. There are also areas of
petroleum and natural gas on shore, for example the Lough Allen basin. Already some fields
are being exploited. Given the current high costs of both gas and oil, Ireland is now being
considered as a potential new source of energy supplies.
Political geography
Ireland is divided into four provinces and 32 counties. Six of the nine Ulster counties form
Northern Ireland and the other 26 form the Republic of Ireland. From an administrative
viewpoint, 20 of the counties in the Republic are units of local government. The other six
have more than one local authority area, producing a total of 34 county-level authorities.
Did you know?! The Great Irish Potato Famine of the 1840's is now recognized as the
worst human disaster of 19th century Europe. In 1841 the population of Ireland was 8.5
million people. By 1850, at least one million died in terrible conditions. Another million
emigrated as refugees. Ireland's 1845 Potato Blight is often credited with launching a wave
of Irish immigration to America. The fungus which decimated potato crops created a
devastating famine. Starvation plagued Ireland, and within five years, a million Irish were
dead while half a million had arrived in America to start a new life.
Further literary reading - books about / set in areas of specific geographical relevance:
Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Swift, Graham: Water land Theroux, Paul: The Kingdom by the Sea


UK Devolution Mark Andrews

Readings:

Lecture, 18
th
November 1998.
Morris, J. (2007). The cuckoos are stirring, and our nation may at last achieve serenity. Could this be the
moment when Wales finally liberates itself from the UKs squalid culture of greed and pretension?.
The Guardian August 6, 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/aug/06/comment.politics2

2
Reading 1:
The Spectator Lecture, Wednesday 18 November 1998
The Rt Hon Donald Dewar MP, Secretary of State for Scotland
'Devolved Britons: Scotland in the UK'
l congratulate The Spectator'. The timing of this lecture is impeccable. The Scotland Bill completed its Parliamentary passage last
night. Now it's all systems go.

On these occasions, there is nothing wrong with a little bit of vulgarity. Perhaps I can bother you with some statistics:
191 hours and 43 minutes on the floor of the House; 2025 amendments; around a million words.
The proceedings are just the thing to give Aunt Agatha for Christmas.
The Scotland Act
Much remains to be put in place before the Parliament meets on 6 May next year. But we are on the home run. It is a good
moment to absorb - and savour - the fact: we will have a Scottish Parliament again.
And it is a necessary fact.
When we came to power, keeping the status quo was not an option. We had our manifesto commitment to meet, but this reflected
something more fundamental.
It was the settled will of the Scottish people that there should be a change to the existing arrangements. They had voted
consistently and in dominant numbers over more than two decades for parties committed to change. All the evidence supported
the one conclusion: no change would have short-changed the Scottish people.
We took care to test the firmness of that will. Our judgement was vindicated. Our proposals were overwhelmingly backed in the
referendum held in September last year.
This is by way of pre-amble. But it is worth reminding ourselves as we debate the implications of change that no change had
implications too.
Could we really have gone on denying the clear wish of the Scottish people for greater responsibility for their own affairs? Could
we really have perpetuated a settlement with which the Scots were patently ill-at ease?
Not to have conceded the right to more self-government in Scotland would have been an abrogation of democratic responsibility.

Change and despondency
But the fact of change has been greeted by some in Scotland, but more particularly in England, with despondency.
This goes beyond concern about the details of the settlement as enshrined in the Scotland Bill. It is despondency at the passing of
the old order. Does devolution mean, we are asked, the end of the UK as we know it?
Perhaps as we knew it. But it is certainly not the end of the UK. I want to use tonight's lecture to show why despondency is
misplaced, why devolution will not end, but strengthen, the UK.
Let's first examine the despondency. I hesitate to call it a thesis, but there is a line of thought which pops up now and again, not
infrequently in the Spectator itself, occasionally in other journals.
It has a tinge of late night melancholia. It goes something like this.
The Scots are parochial and anti-English.
Devolution is parochialism writ large and driven by anti-English sentiment.
Deep in this slough of despondent thought, the authors come to a doleful conclusion. The Scots will jump from the UK before they
are pushed. Or an even more doleful conclusion - the push should come before the jump.

Through the ages there has always been a Scot prepared to take a gloomy view of Scotland. I am conscious that every speech
should be decorated with quotations from great philosophers. I therefore offer P G Wodehouse's thought that 'it is never difficult to
distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine'.

The response to despondency
These people have to be answered, because of who they are and where they write. Andrew Neill in the Spectator, John Lloyd in
the New Statesman, Michael Gove in the Times. AN tell the same sad story. To quote Andrew Neill:
'Those of us who are proud to be Scottish and British have become strangers in our own land.'
He complains that:
The foul-mouthed, anti-English rant of an Edinburgh heroin crackhead in Trainspotting has been made into Scotland's Gettysburg
Address by fashionable bletherers,'
3
No case ever knowingly understated.
But I recognise that there is unease. And that concerns me because it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy,
If it becomes received wisdom in England that the Scots have given up on the English, that will encourage the English to give up
on the Scots. We will drift towards a mind set which will suit nobody but those who actually hanker after separation.
It concerns me because it misrepresents what devolution is about,
We have created a logical and a stable division of political power. To proclaim this as the end of the UK is to write off the future
with scant regard for the reality of devolution. It is to lose that sense of tolerance which makes our political system work.
It is wrong because it takes a highly selective view of the Scots and of Scotland

Scotland is not parochial
Of course there is parochialism in Scotland. In odd corners of every nation there are those for whom the next street is a foreign
country. Of course there is anti-English sentiment. That undoubtedly has its ugly side. There have been unpleasant incidents.
But an incident is not a trend. The unacceptable prejudices of a minority do not reflect the opinions of the vast majority.
There are Scottish football followers who enthusiastically support whatever team is playing against England, But let's keep a
sense of proportion. You do not judge a nation by the actions of its more excitable football fans.
I remember sitting in a bar in Blackpool watching Manchester United playing Bayern Munich in the first round of the European
Cup - a happy escape from the Labour Party Conference. Around me were English football fans cheering on the Germans. The
explanation? They were Arsenal supporters.
The idea that Scotland as a whole is parochial, that devolution is somehow driven by parochialism, simply does not wash. It does
not stand up on any understanding of Scotland's past or Scotland's present.

Scotland: an open economy
Scotland is a small place on the edge of the European continent. It has never been a credible strategy for the Scots to turn
inwards, to ignore the wider world. That was never going to be the route to prosperity, to a vigorous cultural live, to a vigorous
society.
Take the economy. Scotland is a trading nation. That has been the case for long enough. What brought the Dutch influence to the
towns of the East Neuk of Fife? Trade. What supplied the cotton mills of Lanarkshire and absorbed their product? Trade, What
were the ships on the Clyde built for? Not to sail up the canal to Edinburgh, but for trade.
We nave not lost this trading outlook. In manufactured goods alone, Scottish exports exceeded 20 billion last year. And this
excludes the exports to our largest single market - the rest of the UK.
This international perspective is reflected in other ways, Scotland has been a favoured destination for inward investment for many
years.
Inward investors come because of the supply of skilled labour, the scientific and engineering base, the quality of life, access to UK
and European markets, because Scotland is a good place to do business.

Inward investors have brought jobs and prosperity to Scotland. The Scottish economy has absorbed the benefits of this
international exposure, the technological developments, the introduction of new products and processes, the alternative
management practices.
Scotland is an open economy. We are export oriented. We are open to new ideas and best practice from across the globe. We
play our part in the global economy.

Cultural identity
What about cultural identity? Two vignettes. Look back to the Scottish Enlightenment of the late 18
th
Century. The coming
together of talents can be seen on the walls of Edinburgh University's courtroom. Clearly the University Authorities wanted an
equivalent of a team photograph. They sent for the local man to paint portraits of the luminaries of the day.
The result is magnificent: in a room by Robert Adam hang portraits by Sir Henry Raeburn - William Robertson, the historian;
Adam Ferguson, the philosopher, who pioneered sociology (some would argue it was a great mistake); Playfair; and Carstares.
To these can be added Hume, Scott and Adam Smith.
Look today to the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe. Together they are a tremendous Scottish success story. Both draw much of their
strength from Scottish support and their vitality from Scottish performers and the Scottish cultural repertoire. But both reach out to
an international culture and international audiences - and both succeed.

Scots: outward-looking
To think of Scottish people as inward looking is equally misplaced-Europe is scattered with the bones of Scottish soldiers and
merchants who found an outlet for their energies in foreign lands.
4
Not all examples are Marshals of France, great captains of industry or merchant princes. Can I now drag in my current favourite
fact?
I have recently come across Hugh Thomas' excellent book on the history of the slave trade. One of his notable characters is a
Scot from Glasgow, Richard Oswald, who conducted his trade in slaves from Bence Island off Sierra Leone. The island was
fortified with guns, protected by a square enclosure and, most unlikely of all, 'a good understanding with the natives'.
In 1760, for the entertainment of waiting captains enjoying shore leave, he built a golf course on the island served by African
caddies dressed in kilts especially woven in Glasgow. There's imagination for you.
Seriously, however, Scotland provided far more than its fair share of explorers, missionaries, administrators and entrepreneurs
who pushed out the bounds of the British Empire.
The Scottish Diaspora is huge. Many had little choice but to leave. Others followed the scent of opportunity. It accounts, t
suppose, for the composition of the current Cabinet.
Scotland is not a place turned in on itself. You see it in the assimilation in Scotland of migrants - Jews, Poles, Italians, Asians -
not, to be sure, without tension and some unpleasant incident, but certainly without the bitterness which has marred the
intermingling of other peoples.
Devolution does not mean a parochial Scotland. It does not mean a return to the kailyard. Inwardness is not the Scottish
experience of the past. It is not the Scotland that I know. It will not be the future.

Devolution and Scotland's relationships with the rest of the UK
Scotland has always had this international perspective. But the great periods: the Enlightenment of the late 18
th
Century, the great
entrepreneurial explosion of late Victorian times, the cultural renaissance of the twentieth century, so important to Scotland's
sense of identity, have all occurred within and benefited from and enriched the United Kingdom. They are arguments not for
separation but part of the case for a strong Scotland within a strong United Kingdom. And to recognise that is not to belittle or
undermine what is Scottish.
Devolution does not, will not, separate Scotland from the rest of the United Kingdom. There is a common heritage, economic
links, shared experiences, challenges and opportunities. I believe that we are stronger together, weaker apart.

The Colley thesis and its extrapolation
To convince you of that I need to challenge a view of the UK which has now gained a certain fashionable following. That is the
view that the UK is held together solely by external factors, that there is no internal cohesion. It is a view which owes a good deal
to the influential thesis set out by Linda Colley in Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837.
In brief, Colley argues that Britain was forged in response to contact, and frequently conflict, with the external world. This is
essentially a history of a Union driven by negatives: for the Scots a fear of exclusion from English trade and the need to make
common cause in an aggressive external trade and colonial policy; and for the English a means of shutting the back door against
France and securing the Protestant succession;
This thesis is persuasive as a description of some of the forces which bound Great Britain together in the early 19
th
Century. But it
is less persuasive when thrown forward from 1837 to 1998.
That extrapolation is fashionable among some who have read her book, and many more who have just heard of it. It runs like this,
The importance of these external forces to the sense of Britishness persisted into the twentieth century, first through the growth of
Empire, but then supplemented and ultimately supplanted through the threat posed by an expansive Germany and ultimately the
Cold War.
But the Empire was dismantled, the threats were seen off. And Britain, famously, was left looking for a role. The relationship with
Europe changed from one of conflict to one of co-operation through the European Community and Union. So, runs the argument,
the glue which first held Britain together having weakened, the case for continuing links is fatally wounded.

The counter-argument
Whatever originally forged Britain, we have had close on 300 years of living together as a union. That has engendered a
community of interest. If that interest was not apparent in 1707, it is certainly apparent now. Whatever the old logic to the union,
there is a new, robust logic now.
The argument is double layered.

The costs of unravelling the UK
One layer is the simple, hard practical fact that unravelling 300 years of union would be a complex, costly, awkward business. It
would not just be a matter of turmoil in the economy. Every aspect of national life -everything that has functioned well at a UK
level - would have to be unravelled and reinvented in Scotland, everything from Customs and Excise to the Intervention Board for
Agricultural Produce, from the Benefits Agency to the Foreign Office, from National Insurance to the National Debt. And ail these
extra overheads would have to be carried on a far smaller financial base in Scotland. The cost of government would escalate
alarmingly.
5
That is a real dead-weight on the argument for separation. Those promoting an exit from Britain have to convince us that the
uncertain gain would be worth the undoubted costs.
But I do not need to defend the Union on that basis alone. For separation runs against the grain of our community of interests.
The simple fact is that there is much in the Union which works to the advantage of all in it.
In my view, and contrary to the extrapolated Coiley thesis, there are deep and firm foundations on which the Union is built. As the
factors identified by Coiley fell away, other - positive - interests took their place.

Shared interests
We have shared interests in the world. Look at security. What conceivable external threat is there which Scotland and England
would not face together? Where, in any of the hot spots of the world from Iraq to the Congo, is there an interest which is English
or Scottish, but not British?
Look at world trade. Where in the complex jungle of world trade negotiations do the interests of Scottish business part from those
of English business? The export focus may vary from sector to sector, but the fundamentals are the same - the common interest
in an open world trading system.
Think about the bodies through which British interests are projected into the international arena. Is there really a crying need for a
separate Scottish seat in the United Nations, a separate delegation to the World Trade Organisation?
Those who advocate the break-up of Britain also want Scotland to leave NATO, is there a country in NATO which wants to get
out? No. In fact, there is a queue to get in. Whatever your defence policy, nuclear or not, NATO guarantees collective security and
withdrawal inevitably represents a form of isolation
The argument is about fracturing the ability of these small islands to exert their influence on the world with cohesion, with
confidence and with power.

Scotland and Europe
It is sometimes claimed that the Scots are more pro-European than the English. Perhaps the Scots are more comfortable with the
idea of closer European ties having preserved their identity successfully through union with a bigger neighbour.
Perhaps it was something which reflected a Scottish antipathy to a virulent Euro-scepticism which claimed, but was not, and must
not be, representative of the UK.
Either way, English and Scots share together an interest in seeing an EU which works to preserve peace and build prosperity for
all in Europe. And they share a need for the strongest possible articulation of that interest, through a single and united UK voice.

Shared economy
What about business and industry? The English and Scottish economies are inextricably linked. Indeed, in some respects they
are one economy. Companies build their operations - and create jobs - on that basic assumption.
Exports from Scotland to the rest of the UK were worth more in 1995 than exports to the rest of the world put together. The
biggest export market for Scottish food and drink, chemicals, financial services, engineering products is emphatically the rest of
the UK. Well over 350,000 jobs in Scotland are related, directly and indirectly, to that trade.
Business naturally thinks of the UK as a single market. That single market has made us all more prosperous. It makes no sense
to think of unravelling what we have achieved when the real challenge lies in projecting our joint enterprise into the larger
European space.
It makes even less sense on the eve of the launch of the single European currency. How can anyone argue for separate interest
rates within the UK in the same breath as a giving a commitment to joining EMU which wil! see a single interest rate set for half of
Europe? What is the point of a separate Scottish pound, if for safety's sake it has to shadow its English counterpart?
The shared interests of Scots and English go beyond our place in the world and our economic ties. Underpinning both are our
shared values.

Shared values
We have grown to democracy together. We have built the welfare state together. We have nurtured and protected the rule of law
together These things might find different institutional expression, for example through the separate Scottish legal system or the
different management arrangements for the NHS in Scotland. But the core values are common and reflect an indivisible
commitment to tolerance, to a sense of justice, to fairness.
In short, we occupy a shared space. Shared space on these islands. But shared space too in the way we live, in the way we work,
in the way we structure our society.
We have our own identities within that shared space. Indeed, the sense of identity is not cut off even at the Scottish or English
level, but can be found too at regional and local levels. But, while retaining pride in those identities, the people of these islands
live and move within that space as if it were one.
This is the most important point of all. There is a line on the map which defines the border between Scotland and England. But
England for the Scots, or Scotland for the English, is not abroad. It is part of the whole, through which there is a constant flow of
6
people, to study, to do business, to visit, to holiday, to marry, to work, to live.
Devolution does not challenge that conjunction of interests. Far from it. Devolution builds on the foundations laid by that
conjunction of interests. It is not about unravelling ties. It is about better governance within the space we share. It is about giving
Scottish institutions, the Scottish difference, the chance to develop, to contribute to the whole country.

Towards a modern and flexible constitution
It would be absurd to think that the UK is so fragile that any change to the constitutional settlement is bound to result in the
fracturing of the whole It would be even more absurd to believe that the UK can saunter on into the future with precisely the same
set of arrangements that have served it in the past,
Though it might have been denied too often in the past couple of decades, those who know their British constitution know that it
has always found the ability to adapt when the case for change is pressing. Indeed, that has been its very strength. Through
devolution, we release the latent energy which comes with managing - and taking responsibility - for our own domestic affairs.

The Scottish Parliament must be seen as part of a wider democratic renewal in the UK. The agenda is large because it has been
too long ignored.
It includes devolution for Wales and Northern Ireland as well as Scotland. It includes incorporation of the European Convention on
Human Rights and freedom of information. It includes reform of the House of Lords and a new system of voting for the European
Parliament elections.
Better governance is about protecting and enhancing the legal and democratic rights of the individual. But it is also about finding
the right level for decision-making.
No one would argue that arrangements for emptying the bins should be a matter for Westminster, or foreign policy a matter for
local councils. We need to find the right level for decisions on the whole range of issues which lie in between.
There has been a long history of devolution of administrative control of Scottish affairs to Scotland. That started over 100 years
ago and has continued steadily since. It is consistent, sensible - and democratically necessary -to follow that with political
devolution.
This Government has been prepared to distribute power - power to individuals as well as political power. That is what is required
to maintain the democratic credentials of this country. We are overseeing the biggest distribution of power since women got the
vote in 1918. We have a radical agenda and we are making it work.
The logic of separatism is outdated. Why separate out our foreign policies when our interests are common? Why separate out our
defence policies when are interests are common? Why break up our tax system or the welfare state when they reflect our
common commitment to a decent life for all our people? Why break up our economy when it has melded over 300 years into a
common whole?
Breaking these things up will not enrich us. It wiil diminish us in the world and impoverish us, as individuals and as nations.

Implications for England
The Scottish Parliament is the solution to a constitutional anomaly which has been debated long and hard over 30 years and
more. It redefines Scotland's role within a modern United Kingdom, It has naturally stimulated debate in England about how
England is governed. Why not? But it is dangerous to jump straight from Scottish solutions to English conclusions.
Just because there is a Parliament in Scotland does not make it inevitable and obvious that there should be a Parliament in
England. Just because the Scots have got the degree of self-government they have long been asking for does not mean that the
cross of St George need be opposed to the Saltire.
Clearly the debate should not stop when the doors of the Scottish Parliament open. What we have done in Scotland may be a
catalyst for further change. But there is a need for proper consideration. What is right for Scotland is not necessarily right for
England. Scottish circumstances are different to English circumstances. There is already innovation in recognising the regional
diversity here in England: there are ideas to be assessed, options to be explored. There is time to get it right.

Conclusion
In devolution, we have a settlement which builds on the strengths of the UK. It puts what is best managed in Scotland to be
managed in Scotland. It leaves what is best done at the UK level at the UK level. It recognises our community of interest. It
recognises our rights and responsibilities within that community. By getting the balance right, we strengthen our shared
commitment to the UK, we reinforce the union.
Devolution is a tribute to the maturity and flexibility of the Union and its ability to adapt to meet the needs of its constituent parts.
The whole country, all of us, can take credit for that. Devolution will work, not because of clever drafting, but because there will be
the good will to make it work. The good will is there because we have a shared outlook on the world. And the roots of that run
deep.
7
Reading 2:
The cuckoos are stirring, and our nation may at last achieve serenity
Could this be the moment when Wales finally liberates itself from the UK's squalid culture of
greed and pretension?
Jan Morris (The Guardian Monday August 6, 2007)
This is the week of the Welsh National Eisteddfod, when Welsh-speaking patriots flock from all over
Wales to the field of the great festival. Happily this year it has coincided with a sensational event in Welsh
political history, the emergence of a dramatically new coalition government in the Welsh assembly at
Cardiff- which is to say, for an incorrigible romantic like me, a potent step on the road to Abercuawg.
Abercuawg, "where the cuckoos sing", was an imaginary place, a perfect place of lost delight
conceived in the Welsh middle ages. The week of the famous festival, celebrating notions of an ideal
Wales, seems a proper moment to consider whether its cuckoos are singing again.
I must declare my own interest. I am an old-school Welsh Euro-Utopian. I stand for a simple
independent Wales embodied within a confederal Europe, and honouring above ail its own customs,
traditions and interests. This is my own Abercuawg, envisaging Wales totally bi-lingual and
miraculously liberated from the United Kingdom's squalid public culture of greed, gameshow, tabloid
celebrity and national pretension.
Set against this fanciful aspiration, then, at this seminal Welsh moment, while the flags fly over the
festival field at Yr Wyddgrug (aka, alas, Mold), I measure the progress of our quasi-independent people
towards satisfaction.
I live in the rural far north-west of the country, and for me and my neighbours the affairs of Cardiff
Bay, where our assembly resides, seem not just physically, but temperamentally remote. It has felt to us
essentially an urban institution, a south Walian institution (itself a definition that implies many aspects of
prejudice, distrust, envy, resentment and plain dislike); and since during its first years it was headed by a
Labour administration - inevitably subservient to the party in London - it did not even seem particularly
Welsh.
Actually, despite its limited powers, it achieved a good deal for Wales. In education, in social affairs, in
matters of health, it tempered authority to meet particularly Welsh needs. Occasionally it even seemed
to defy the dictats of Westminster, and succeed in political initiatives of its own. It was a new
institution anyway, it was groping and experimenting, and in its pernickety way it did establish the
assembly as an irrevocable factor in Welsh life.
The trouble was, it was a bore. When we won devolution back in 1997, it seemed to us that Wales was on
the way to becoming a true modern nation, proud and young and eager, throwing off the tiresome shackles
of Britishness, and making of itself something at once brilliantly new and loyally old. Alas, the sweet
cuckoos of Abercuawg were not yet singing again: all we heard was the ticking of a cuckoo clock, tinny
upon a bureaucratic wall.
For what the national assembly sadly failed to give us was any sense of charisma. It lacked stimulations,
high-flown ideas, visions, music, humour, and it was short on the originals who abound in Wales as
they always have, and who will have been well represented this week among both the performers and
the audiences of the Eisteddfod - "those musicians that shall play to you", as Shakespeare's Glendower
told Hotspur, tongue only half in cheek, "hang in the air a thousand leagues from hence, and straight they
shall be here..."
Contrary to English conceptions, high spirits are endemic among the Welsh. When you think of Wales
you may think of dirge-like chapel hymns, or rain-sodden mountains, but try a pub in the southern
valleys on a Saturday night, or hear the crowd sing at a rugby international, listen to a children's choir at
the Eisteddfod, read the English lyrics of Dylan Thomas (died 1953) or the Welsh lyrics of Dafydd ap
8
Gwilym (born c 1320), and you will discover that at the deepest level a sense of festivity infuses most
aspects of the Welsh character.
There has been little trace of it in the rhetoric of Cardiff Bay, and all too often it is stifled too by the mass
of English-style officialdom that orders our affairs. And if the native merriment is deadened by
unimaginative authority, the national attitudes themselves are being whittled away, year by year, by the
uncontrolled influx of new householders from the other side of Offa's Dyke.
We had thought, we and my kind, that a more independent Wales would be a more truly Welsh Wales,
and it is true that the assembly has tried to ensure that the Welsh language is taught to all
schoolchildren, and is legally binding in most situations. But it has done very little - perhaps lacks the
intellectual or the artistic capacity - to restore to Welshness a proper frisson of style. A national
assembly that might have given us a sense of liberty and excitement has only seemed to reinforce the
present British norm of lovelessly intrusive over-government.
But now, please God, things may change! Do you hear a rustle of wings? Are the Abercuawg cuckoos
stirring? The two essential forces in the Welsh body politic are those who believe the country to be
essentially a part of the United Kingdom, and those who believe it to be altogether a nation of its own.
They have been represented for generations by the Labour party, rooted in the industrial communities,
and Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, and until their historic agreement last month to form a
governing coalition, they have been apparently irreconcilable in their views.
In fact their separate policies have had much in common - both are centre- left, and both now claim to
honour the native individuality of Wales and its language. Soon they will be jointly governing the
country. If they can reconcile their separate ambitions, together they may perhaps guide it into an
honourable parliamentary compromise, putting it on a constitutional par with Scotland, revivifying its
personality, and giving its restless people serenity at last.
But to achieve this, to my mind, they need to ennoble their politics with something transcendental. A
dream -that's what they need! The Welsh national assembly, democratically plodding and squabbling its
way towards semi-fruition, has until now lacked the fire and fun of a march towards fulfilment. Nearly
all of us in Wales love the place, in our different ways; but for the moment the grand lyrical idea of
Cymru, the comradeship and the beauty that is the real strength of all our patriotisms, is still left to
languish among the poets.
And it is the poets and their kind, the singers and the songwriters, not worthy politicians or still less sl i nky
spin-folk, who can restore it to a proper place in our affairs. The dream is there to be exploited, after all,
the dream of an ideal free and friendly little country on the western fringe of Europe. Today Abercuawg
once more hopefully expects its revival, waiting for the cuckoo's call: or as the African poet Abioseh
Nicol once expressed it (with a slight shift of fauna), waiting for happiness, fulfilment, "and a small bird
singing on a mango tree".


UK Language Varieties Rachel Appleby

Reading:


more questions, while men talk more, swear more and use imperative forms to
get t.hings done. Women use more linguistic forms associated with politeness.
Underlying this felt sense of difference, and the growing body of evidence to
support it, is a recurrent concern with power. Studies of language and gender
have returned repeatedly to the question of how the language used by men and
women reinforces their respective positions in society. Women are maintained
in a subordinate position, it has been argued, because they find themselves
adopting powerless patterns of speech; and, conversely, men maintain their
dominance by the use of verbal strategies associated with power. For example,
the propensity of men to interrupt women more than women interrupt men may
be seen in these terms.
However, an equally important theme that has emerged more recently is the
focus on differences between men's and women's speech as the outcome of what
are in effect two different sub-cultures with contrasting orientations towards
relationships. In effect, women and men, it is claimed, grow up within different
social worlds, as a result of which women are inclined to see relationships in
terms of intimacy, connection and disclosure whereas men are inclined to see
them in terms of hierarchy, status and independence. These sub-cultural differ-
ences are enacted in contrasting communicative styles. Coates (1988) in a study
of an all-female group of speakers notes particular tendencies which she feels
are characteristic of women's style of speech with each other; and include
gradual topic development, frequent - and well-placed - minimal responses,
s.upportive overlaps between one speaker and another, and many markers of
sympathetic circularity such as 'I mean', 'sort of', 'kind of'. The combination of
such features amounts to a distinctive style of co-operative talk in which the
joint working out of a group point of view takes precedence over individual
assertions. This communicative style is not only characteristic of women in
interaction with each other but - Coates believes - is in implicit contrast with
men's communicative style which is likely to be more adversarial and competi-
tive.
If the contrasting sub-cultures of men and women give rise to contrasting com-
municative styles, then these very differences provide ample grounds for misun-
derstanding between men and women.
The American linguist, Deborah Tannen, argues that men and women end up
talking at cross purposes (You Just Don't Understand, 1992). Women, she
believes, tend to speak and hear a language of connection and intimacy,
whereas men speak and hear a language of status and independence. For
example, men find that seeking advice (especially from men) is potentially
demeaning; women may be less inhibited about doing so. Women, she suggests,
talk about troubles to share them; men talk about troubles to solve them.
Tannen's work sidesteps the problem of.how to interpret specific linguistic fea-
tures, such as tag questions, by addressing directly the issue of function and
purpose in interaction, irrespective .of the features through which such func-
tions are realiied. But whilst gender differences in the functions of language in
interaction offer. perhaps the richest area of investigation. to date, it is not easy
-
'
BBN ANG 271 Cul tural Studi es Lectures Department of English Language Pedagogy
UK - Identity Phil Saltmarsh
Reading: Fox,K. (2004). Watching The English, (pp. 176-207). London. Hodder.
W O R K T O R UL E
T
o identify and analyse the behaviour codes of the English at work
is a huge, complex and difficult task - so daunting that most other
recent books on the English either simply ignore the subject of work
altogether, or gloss over it with a few brief mentions. At least, I'm
assuming that this aspect of English life and culture is neglected because
it is too "difficult, as it seems to me that it cannot be regarded as either
irrelevant or uninteresting. Perhaps I am being supremely arrogant in
even attempting to tackle this subject. My direct personal experience
of the English world of work and business is somewhat unorthodox,
as almost all of my own working life has been spent in a tiny, strug-
gling, independent research organisation, the Social Issues Research
Centre (SIRC), run by two very un-businesslike social scientists (myself
and my Co-Director Dr Peter Marsh, a social psychologist). But while
SIRC itself may not be a typical workplace, the work we do has taken
us into a varied and reasonably representative sample of working envi-
ronments across the country (and in other countries as well, providing
at least some basis for cross-cultural comparison).
During the research for this book, almost all of the foreigners I
spoke to were somewhat perplexed and confused by English attitudes
to work and behaviour at work; they all seemed to feel that there
was a 'problem', but they found it hard to pin down or express exactly
what the problem was. To some extent, the differing opinions I
encountered reflected my informants' own cultural backgrounds
those from Mediterranean, Latin American, Caribbean and some
African cultures tended to see the English as rather rigid adherents
of the Protestant work ethic, while many Indians, Pakistanis, Japanese
and northern Europeans saw us as lazy, feckless and irresponsible
(the Asians and Japanese usually tried to put this politely, although
176
WO RK TO R U L E
their meaning was clear enough; the Germans, Swedes and Swiss were
more blunt).
But some of the contradictions seemed inherently English: the same
people often expressed admiration fot our inventiveness and innovation
while deploring our stuffy, pig-headed traditionalism. Americans,
supposedly our closest cultural relations, seemed if anything to be the
most mystified and disoriented (not to mention irritated) by the anom-
alies and oddities of English work-culture. This may be partly because
they have higher expectations of compatibility and mutual under-
standing, and are therefore more surprised and unsettled when they find
themselves dealing with an 'alien' culture, but even English observers
find English attitudes to work confusing. In a textbook entitled British
Cultural Identities, the authors claim on one page that 'the dominant
British view is that work is a treadmill from which people dream of
escaping' and on the next that 'The work ethic is very strong in the
UK'. Quite apart from their apparent uncertainty as to which country
or countries they are talking about, this contradiction indicates that
there are a number of elusive and entangled inconsistencies in English
work-culture, which are 'indigenous' and quite independent of the
cultural perspective from which they are viewed. I will now try to iden-
tify and untangle them.
THE MUDDLE RULES
The French writer Philippe Daudy remarked that 'Continentals are
always disconcerted by the English attitude to work. They appear
neither to view it as a heavy burden imposed by fate, nor to embrace
it as a sacred obligation.' In other words, our attitude to work does
not conform to either the Catholic-fatalist or the Protestant-work-
ethic model, one or the other of which characterizes the work-cultures
of most other European countries. Our position is sort of somewhere
in between these two extremes - a typically English exercise in
compromise and moderation. Or a typically English muddle,
depending on your point of view. But it is not an incomprehensible
muddle, it is a rule-governed muddle, the guiding principles of which
are as follows:
177
WATCH I NG THE ENGL I SH
We are serious about work, but not too serious.
We believe that work is a duty, but we wouldn' t go so far as to
call it a ' sacred' duty, and we also believe it is a bit of a fag and
a nuisance, imposed by practical necessity, though, rather than
by some mystical ' fate' .
We constantly moan and complain about work, but we also take
a kind of stoical pride in ' getting on with it' and ' doing our best' .
We indignantly disapprove of those who avoid work - from the
minor royals at the t op of the social scale to the alleged ' dole-
scroungers' at the bot t om but this reflects our strict, almost
religious belief in ' fairness' , rather than a belief in the sanctity
of work itself (such people are seen as ' getting away with' idle-
ness, while the rest of us, who would equally like to be idle, have
to work, which is just not fair).
We often maintain that we would rather not work, but our
personal and social identity is in fact very much bound up with
work (either the mere fact of being 'in work' , bringing home a
wage, or, for those with more intrinsically interesting or presti-
gious jobs, the rewards and status attached to the work).
We find the whole subject of money distasteful, and there ate still
vestiges of a deep-seated prejudice against ' t rade' or ' business' ,
which can make ' doing business' a rather awkward business.
We also have vestigial traces of a ' cul t ure of amat euri sm' ,
involving an instinctive mistrust of ' professionalism' and busi-
nesslike efficiency, which again can be a handicap when trying
to run professional, efficient businesses.
Finally, we carry into the workplace all the familiar English rules
of humour, embar r assment , inhibition, privacy, modesty,
moani ng, courtesy, fairness, etc. most of which are also incom-
patible with productive and effective work.
But despite all this, we seem to muddle through somefiow, and
some of our work is not bad, considering.
It is from these principles that many of the specific rules governing
behaviour at work are formed or derived.
178
WO R K T O R U L E
HUMOUR RULES
Spend a day in any English workplace, from a street-market to a
merchant bank, and you will notice that one of the most striking features
of English working life is the undercurrent of humour. I do not mean
that all English workers and businessmen spend their time telling
raucous, thigh-slapping jokes, nor that we are ' good-humoured' in the
sense of happy or cheerful: I am talking about the more subtle forms
of humour - wit, irony, understatement, banter, teasing, pomposity-
pricking - which are an integral part of almost all English social inter-
action.
Actually, I lied in that first sentence: if you are English, you could
easily spend a day among English workers and business people without
noticing the omnipresent humour - in fact you probably do this every
day. Even now that I've prompted you to be conscious of it, the humour
in your workplace interactions will be so familiar, so normal , so
ingrained that you may find it hard to ' stand back' far enough to see
it. Foreigners, on the other hand, tend to notice it straight away - or
rather, to notice something, not always immediately identifiable as
humour, which they find baffling. In my discussions with immigrants
and other foreign informants, I found that the English sense of humour,
in various guises, was one of the most common causes of misunder-
standing and confusion in their dealings with the English at work. All
of the unwritten rules of English humour contributed in some measure
to this confusion, but the biggest stumbling blocks appeared to be the
Importance of Not Being Earnest rule and the rules of irony.
The Importance of Not Being Earnest Rule
Our acute sensitivity to the distinction between seriousness and solem-
nity, between sincerity and earnestness, is not always fully understood
or appreciated by foreign visitors, whose cultures tend to allow rather
more blurring of these boundaries than is permitted among the English.
In most other cultures, taking oneself too seriously may be a fault, but
it is not a sin - a bit of self-important pomposity or over-zealous
earnestness is tolerated, perhaps even expected, in discussion of impor-
tant work or business matters. In the English workplace, however, the
hand-on-heart gusher and the pompous pontificator are mercilessly
179
WATCHI NG THE ENGL I SH
ridiculed - if not to their faces, then certainly behind their backs. There
are such people, of course, and the higher their status, the less likely
they are to be made aware of their errors, but the English in general
tend to be subconsciously sensitive to these taboos, and usually avoid
overstepping the invisible lines.
The Importance of Not Being Earnest rule is implicit in our whole
attitude to work. T he first ' guiding principle' I mentioned was that we
take work seriously, but not too seriously. If your work is interesting,
you are allowed to be interested in it - even to the point of being 'a bit
of a workahol i c' ; but if you are t oo much of a workahol i c, or
overzealous about an intrinsically uninteresting job, you will be regarded
as ' sad' and pathetic and it will be suggested that you should 'get a
life'. It is not done to be t oo keen.
Training in Not Being Earnest st art s early: among English school-
children, there is an unwritten rule forbidding excessive enthusiasm
for academic work. In some schools, working hard for exams is
permitted, but one must moan about it a lot, and certainly never
admit to enjoying it. Even at the most academically-minded establish-
ments, the over-earnest 'swot* or teacher' s pet - currently known as
a ' geek' , ' nerd' , ' suck' or ' boffin' - will be unpopul ar and subject to
ridicule. Pupils who actively enjoy studying, or find a part i cul ar
subject fascinating, or take pri de in their academic prowess, will care-
fully conceal their eagerness under a mask of feigned boredom and
cynical det achment .
The English are often accused of being anti-intellectual, and while
there may be a grain of t rut h in this, I am inclined to think that it is
a slight misinterpretation: what looks like anti-intellectualism is often
in fact a combination of anti-earnestness and anti-boastfulness. We
don' t mind people being ' brai ny' or clever, as long as they don' t make
a big song-and-dance about it, don' t preach or pontificate at us, don' t
show off and don' t take themselves t oo seriously. If someone
1
shows
signs of any of these tendencies (all unfortunately rather common
among intellectuals), the English respond with our cynical national
catchphrase ' Oh, come off it!'
Our instinctive avoidance of earnestness results in a way of
conducting business or work-related discussions that the uninitiated
foreigner finds quite di st urbi ng: a sort of offhand, dispassionate,
1 8 0
WORK TO RU LE
detached manner - always giving the impression, as one of my most
perceptive foreign informants put it, 'of being rather underwhelmed by
the whole thing, including themselves and the product they were
supposed to be trying to sell me' . This impassive, undemonstrative
demeanour seems to be normal practice across all trades and profes-
sions, from jobbing builders to high-price barristers. It is not done to
get too excited about one' s products or services - one must not be seen
to care t oo much, however desperate one may in fact be to close a deal:
this would he undignified. This dispassionate approach works perfectly
well with English customers and clients, as there is nothing the English
detest more than an over-zealous salesman, and excessive keenness will
only make us cringe and back off. But our unexcitable manner can be
a problem when dealing with foreigners, who expect us to show at least
a modicum of enthusiasm for our work, particularly when we are trying
to persuade others of its value or benefits.
Irony and Understatement Rules
T he English predilection for irony, particularly our use of the under-
statement, only makes matters worse. Not only do we fail to exhibit
the required degree of enthusiasm for our work or products, but we
then compound the error by making remarks such as 'Well, it's not bad,
considering' or 'You could do a lot worse,' when trying to convince
someone that our loft conversions or legal acumen or whatever are
really the best that money can buy. Then we have a tendency to say
'Well, I expect we'll manage somehow,' when we mean 'Yes, certainly,
no trouble' and ' T hat would be quite helpful,' when we mean 'For
Christ' s sake, that should have been done yesterday!'; and ' We seem to
have a bit of a problem, ' when there has been a complete and utter
disaster. (Another typically English response to, say, a catastrophic
meeting where a million-pound deal has fallen through, would be ' T hat
all went rather well, don' t you think?')
It takes foreign colleagues and clients a while to realise that when
the English say ' Oh really! How interesting!' they might well mean 'I
don' t believe a word of it, you lying toad' . Or they might not. They
might just mean ' I' m bored and not really listening but trying to be
polite' . Or they might be genuinely surprised and truly interested. You'll
never know. T here is no way of telling: even the English themselves,
181
who have a pretty good ' sixth sense' for detecting irony, cannot always
be entirely sure. And this is the problem with the English irony-habit:
we do sometimes say what we mean, but our constant use of irony is
a bit like crying wolf - when there really is a wolf, when we do mean
what we say, our audience is not surprisingly somewhat sceptical, or, if
foreign, completely bewildered. The English are accustomed to this
perpetual state of uncertainty, and as Priestley says, this hazy atmos-
phere in which 'very rarely is everything clear-cut' is certainly favourable
to humour. In the world of work and business, however, even one of
my most staunchly English informants admitted that ' a bit more clarity
might be helpful,' although, he added, 'we seem to muddle through
well enough.'
An Indian immigrant, who has been valiantly trying to do business
with the English for many years, told me that it took him a while to get
to grips with English irony because although irony is universal ' the
English do not do irony the way Indians do it. We do it in a very heavy-
handed way, with lots of winks and raised eyebrows and exaggerated
tones to let you know we are being ironic. We might say "Oh yes, do
you think so?" when we don' t believe someone, but we will do it with
all the signals blazing. In fact, most other nations do this - give lots of
clues, I mean - in my experience. Only the English do irony with a
completely straight face. I do realise that is how it should be done, Kate,
and yes it is much more amusing Indian irony is not funny at all, really,
with all those big neon signs saying "irony" but you know the English
can be a bit too bloody subtle for their own good sometimes' .
Most English workers, however, far from being concerned about the
difficulties it poses for foreigners, are immensely proud of our sense of
humour. In a survey conducted by a social psychologist friend of mine,
Peter Collett, experienced Euro-hopping British businessmen perceived
the business climate in this count ry to be more light-hearted and
humorous than in any other country in Europe, except Ireland' (it was
not entirely clear whether we felt the Irish had a better sense of humour,
or just t hat we found them funnier). Only the Spanish even came close
to matching us, and the poor Germans got the lowest humour-score of
all, reflecting the popular stereotype in this country that Germans have
absolutely no sense of humour - or perhaps that we find them diffi-
cult to laugh at, which is not quite the same thing.
182
WOR K TO RU LE
THE MODESTY RULE - AND T HE ' BUMPEX' SCHOOL
OF ADVERTI SI NG
A further potential impediment to the successful conduct of business
is the English modesty rule. While the English are no more naturally
modest or self-effacing than other cultures - if anything, we are inclined
to be rather arrogant - we do put a high value on these qualities, and
have a number of unwritten rules prescribing at least the appearance
of modesty. Perhaps the modesty rules act as a counter-balance to our
natural arrogance, just as our courtesy rules protect us from our aggres-
sive tendencies? Whatever their source, the English rules forbidding
boastfulness and prescribing a modest, unassuming manner can often
be at odds with modern business practices.
During my research on the world of horseracing, I was once asked,
as the official anthropologist of the racing ' t ri be' , to talk to a group of
racecourse owners and managers about how they might generate more
business. I suggested that they could perhaps do more to publicize the
unique social attractions of racing - the sunny 'social micro-climate'
of racecourses. With a look of horror, one of the racecourse managers
protested, 'But that would be boasting!' Trying to keep a straight face,
I said, ' No, I think nowadays i t s called "market i ng", ' but the modesty
rule proved stronger than any of my arguments, and he and a number
of his colleagues remained unpersuadable.
T hat is an extreme example, and most English business people would
now laugh at this old-fashioned at t i t ude, but there are still traces of
this mindset in the majority of English businesses. While most of us
would not go to the extreme of rejecting any kind of marketing effort
as ' boasting' , there is a near-universal distaste for the ' hard sell', for
' pushiness' , for the sort of brash, in-your-face approach to advertising
and marketing that the English invariably describe, in contemptuous
tones, as ' American' . As usual, this stereotype reveals more about the
English than it does about the maligned Americans: we like to think
that our approach to selling things is more subtle, more understated,
more ironic - and certainly less overtly boastful.
And so it is. As I have said before, we do not have a monopoly on
these qualities, but they tend to be more pervasive here than in other
cultures, and we take them to greater extremes, particularly in our
183
approach to advertising. There was recently, for example, a series of
television advertisements for Marmite
41
in which people were shown
reacting with utter revulsion - to the point of gagging - to even the
faintest trace of a Marmitey taste or smell. It is well known that
Marmite is something one either loves or hates, but an advertising
campaign focusing exclusively on the disgust some people feel for your
product strikes many foreigners as somewhat perverse. 'You couldn't
get away with that anywhere else,' said an American informant. 'I
mean, yes, I get it. People eithet love Marmite or find it disgusting,
and as you're never going to convert the ones who find it disgusting.
you might as well make a joke out of it. But an ad with the message
"some people eat this stuff but a lot of people can't even bear the smell
of it"? Only in England!'
The humorist George Mikes claimed in 1960 that 'All advertisements
-particularly television advertisements - are utterly and hopelessly un-
English. They are too outspoken, too definite, too boastful.' He
suggested that instead of 'slavishly imitating the American style of
breathless superlatives' the English should evolve their own style of
advertising, recommending, 'Try your luck on Bumpex Fruit Juice. Most
people detest it. You may he an exception.' as a suitably un-boastful
English way of trying to sell a product.
This was clearly intended as a bit of comic exaggeration, a caricature
of a stereotype, and yet, forty years on, the avoidance of breathless
superlatives is now the norm in English advertising, and the makers of
Marmite have produced a highly successful advertisement with precisely
the same message as Mikes' fictitious Bumpex brand. The resemblance
is uncanny; the ad agency might have, taken their brief directly from
Mikes' book. This suggests to me that his main point, that advertising
itself is essentially un-English, and would have to be radically re-invented
to comply with English rules of modesty and reserve, is also much more
than just an amusing exaggeration. He was quite right, and spookily
prophetic. Advertising, and by extension all forms of marketing and
selling, is almost by definition boastful - and therefore fundamentally at
odds with one of the guiding principles of English culture.
41. A salty, dark brown spread made from the yeast by-products of the beer-brewing
process.
184
WORK TO RU LE
For once, however, our self-imposed constraints have had a positive
effect: advertising does not fit our system of values, so, rather than
abandon our unwritten rules, we have twisted and changed the rules of
advertising, and developed a form of advertising that allows us to
comply with the modesty rule. The witty, innovative advertising for
which the English are, I am told by people in the trade, internationally
renowned and much admired, is really just our way of trying to preserve
our modesty.
We English can blow our own trumpet if we have to; we can put on
displays of heartfelt, gushing enthusiasm for our products or services,
but the anti-boasting and anti-earnestness rules mean that many of us
find this unseemly and acutely embarrassing, and we tend therefote to
be somewhat unconvincing. And this problem is not just a feature of
the higher echelons of English work - I found that workers at the bottom
of the social scale are no less squeamish or cynical about trumpet-
blowing than the educated middle- and upper-middle classes.
THE POLITE PROCRASTINATION RULE
Although the rules governing initial workplace encounters allow us to
sidestep the problems normally posed by the no-name rule and the
handshake dilemma, that's pretty much where rhe reassuring formality
ends and the potential for embarrassment begins.
For a start, as soon as the initial introductions are completed, there
is always an awkward period - usually lasting around five to ten minutes,
but it can take up to twenty - in which all or some of the parties feel
that it would be rude ro start 'talking business' straight away, and
everyone tries to pretend that this is really just a friendly social gath-
ering. We procrastinate politely with the usual weather-speak, enquiries
about journeys, the obligatory wryly humorous traffic-moan, courteous
comments on the host's excellent directions and rueful jokes about one's
own poor navigation skills, interminable fussing over tea and coffee -
including the usual full complement of pleases and thank-yous, appre-
ciative murmurs from the visitors and humorously self-deprecating
apologies from the host, and so on, and on.
I always find it hard to keep a straight face during this 'polite
procrastination' ritual, because I am reminded of images from wildlife
185
WATCH1 NG THE ENGL I SH
documentaries in which we see bitds and other creatures engaging in
' displacement activity' t urni ng aside and nervously pecking at the
ground or grooming themselves when they are in the middle of a
confrontation over territory or mating rights or something. In tense,
hostile situations, animals often perform these meaningless ' displace-
ment' routines, as a kind of coping mechanism. It is much the same
with the English in business meetings: the whole process of doing busi-
ness makes us uncomfortable and embarrassed, so we distract ourselves
and attempt to delay things by performing a lot of irrelevant little rituals.
And woe betide anyone who dares to cut short our therapeutic
peeking and fussing. A visiting Canadian businessman complained: 'I
wish someone had warned me about this earlier. I had a meeting the
other day and they' d all been dithering and talking about the weather
and making jokes about the M25 for what seemed like half an hour,
so I suggested maybe we could get started on the contract and they all
looked at me like I'd farted or something! Like, how could I be so crass?'
Another told me he had worked in Japan, and been invited to partici-
pate in tea ceremonies ' but there you are either having a tea ceremony
or you are doing business, they don' t try to pretend the business meeting
is really a tea patty, like you do here' .
THE MONEY-TALK TABOO
'But why?' asked another mystified foreigner an Iranian immigrant
with whom 1 was discussing the ' polite procrastination' rituals. 'You
are right, this is exactly how they behave. It takes forever. It drives me
crazy. But why do they do this? What is the matter with them? Why
are they so reluctant to get down to business?'
Good question - to which I' m afraid there is no rational answer. T he
English find ' doing business' awkward and embarrassing at least partly
because of a deep-seated but utterly irrational distaste for money-talk
of any kind. At some stage, business-talk inevitably involves money-
talk. We are comfortable enough, allowing for our usual social inhibi-
tions, with most of the other aspects of business discussions. As long
as boasting or earnestness are not required, we'll talk reasonably happily
about the details of the product or project, and pragmatic issues such
as objectives, what needs to be done, how, where, by whom and so on.
186
WORK TO RU LE
But when it comes to what we call ' the sordid subject of money' , we
tend to become tongue-tied and uncomfortable. Some cover their embar-
rassment by joking, some by adopting a blustering, forthright, even
aggressive manner; some become flustered and hurried, others may be
over-polite and apologetic, or prickly and defensive. You will not often
see an English person entirely at ease when obliged to engage in money-
talk. Some may appear brash and bullish, but this is often as much a
symptom of dis-ease as the nervous joking or apologetic manner.
A frustrated American immigrant told me that she had 'finally figured
out that it is best to do all the financial negotiating in letters or emails.
T he English just can' t talk about money face to face, you have to do it
in writing. In writing they' re fine - they don' t have to look you in the
eye and they don' t have to say all those dirty words out loud' . As soon
as she said this, I realised that this is exactly how I have always managed
to get round the problem myself. I am typically, squeamishly English
about money, and when negotiating fees for consultancy work or trying
to get research funding I will always try to put all those dirty words -
money, cost, price, fees, payment, etc. - in writing rather than say them
face to face or even on the telephone. (To be honest, I don' t even like
writing them, and usually try to cajole my long-suffering co-director
into doing all the negotiating for me - with the feeble excuse that I am
useless at maths.)
Being English, I had always rather taken it for granted that this avoid-
ance of money-talk was normal, that everyone found it easier to discuss
the t aboo subject in writing, but my well-travelled informants were
adamant that this is a peculiarly English problem. 'I never get this
anywhere else in Europe,' said one. 'Everywhere else you can be up-front
about money They' re not ashamed or embarrassed about it; you just talk
normally, they don' t try to skirt round it or feel they have to apologise
or make a joke out of it - that' s it, with the English you always get that
sort of nervous laughter, someone always tries to make a joke out of it.'
T he joking is of course anot her coping mechanism, our favourite
way of dealing with anything we find frightening or uncomfortable or
embarrassing. Even high-powered City bankers and brokers - people
who have to talk about money all day long - are affected by the money-
talk taboo. One merchant banker told me that some types of dealing
and negotiating are OK because ' it' s not teal money' , but that when
187
W A T C H I N G T H E E N G L I S H
negotiating over his own fees he suffers from the same squeamish embar-
rassment as everyone else. Ot her City financiers echoed this, and
explained that, like everyone else, money-men cope with embarrass-
ment about money-talk by joking. When things go wrong, one of them
told me, 'you'll say, "So, are we still on your Christmas-card list?' "
To be honest, I am somewhat puzzled by the money-talk taboo,
despite my own instinctive adherence to it. Introspection does not really
help me to figure out the origins of the English squeamishness about
money-talk at work. Our distaste for money-talk in everyday social life
is well established: you never ask what someone earns, or disclose your
own income; you never ask what price someone paid for anything, nor
do you announce the cost of any of your own possessions. In social
contexts, there is a sort of ' internal logic' to the money-talk taboo, in
that it can be explained, to some extent, with reference to other basic
'rules of Englishness' to do with modesty, privacy, polite egalitarianism
and other forms of hypocrisy. But to extend the money-talk taboo to
the world of work and business seems, to put it mildly, perverse. Surely
this should be an exception to the rule - the one arena in which, for
obvious practical reasons, we set aside or suspend our prissy distaste
and ' talk turkey' like everyone else? But then, that would be expecting
the English to behave rationally
While I'm being ruthlessly honest, I have to admit that saying there is
an ' internal logic' to the money-talk taboo is a bit of a cop out. Yes, the
taboo is clearly related, in a ' grammatical' sort of way, to the rules of
privacy, modesty and polite egalitarianism, but this is how anthropolo-
gists always try to explain the more outlandishly irrational beliefs or
grotesque practices of the tribes and societies they study A belief or prac-
tice may seem irrational (or in some cases downright stupid or cruel),
but, we argue, it makes sense in relation to other elements of the cultural
system of beliefs and practices and values of the tribe or community in
question. Using this tlever little trick, we can find an ' internal logic' for
all sorts of daft and apparently unintelligible notions and customs, from
witchcraft and rain-dances to female circumcision. And yes, it does help
to make them more intelligible, and it is important to understand why
people do these things. But it doesn' t make them any less daft.
Not that I'm putting the English money-talk taboo on a pat with female
circumcision: I'm just saying that sometimes anthropologists should come
188
WO R K T O R U L E
clean and acknowledge that a particular native belief or practice is pretty
bloody weird, and perhaps not entirely in the natives' own best interest.
At least in this case I can' t be accused of being ethnocentric or colonial
or parronising (anthropological equivalents of blasphemy, for which one
can be excommunicated) as the daft taboo I am denigrating is an unwritten
rule of my own native culture, and one that I blindly and slavishly obey.
Variations and the Yorkshire Inversion
T he money-talk taboo is a distinctively English behaviour code, bur it is
not universally observed. There are significant variations: southerners are
generally more uncomfortable with money-talk than northerners, and
the middle- and upper-classes tend to be more squeamish about it than
the working classes. Indeed middle-class and upper-class children are often
brought up to regard talking about money as 'vulgar* or 'common*.
In the world of business, observance of the taboo increases with
seniority: whatever their individual class or regional origins, higher-ranking
people in English companies are more likely to be squeamish about money-
talk. Those from working-class and/or northern backgrounds may start
out with little or no ' natural' embarrassment about money-talk, but as
they rise through the ranks they learn to be awkward and uncomfortable,
to make apologetic jokes, to procrastinate and avoid the issue.
There arc, however, pockets of stronger resistance to the money-talk
taboo, particularly in Yorkshire, a county that prides itself on being
forthright, blunt and plain-spoken, especially on matters that mincing,
hesitant southerners find embarrassing, such as money. To illustrate this
no-nonsense, no-frills at t i t ude, Yorkshiremen describe a st andard
conversation between a Yorkshire travelling salesman and a Yorkshire
shopkeeper as follows:
Salesman, entering shop: 'Owt?'
Shopkeeper: ' Nowt . '
4 2
Salesman leaves.
This is a caricature, of course - most Yorkshire people are probably no
more blunt than any other northerners - but it is a caricature with
42. For those who do not speak Yorkshire: ' Owt ?' means 'Anything?' and' Nowt '
means ' Not hi ng' .
189
which a great many people from this area identify, and some actively
do their best to live up to it. Far from beating about the bush, dithering
and euphemising about money in the usual English manner, the proud-
to-be-Yorkshire businessman will take a perverse pleasure in blatantly
flouting the money-talk taboo - saying, directly and without jokes or
preamble: ' Right, and what' s all that going to cosr me, then?'
But this is not an exception that invalidates or even questions the
rule. It is a deliberate, dramat i c inversion of the rule - something that
can only occur where a rule is well established and understood. It is
the flip side of the same coin, not a different and separate coin. Blunt
Yorkshiremen know that they are turning the rules upside-down: they
do it on purpose, they make jokes about it, they take pride in their
maverick, iconoclastic status within English culture. In most other
cultures, their directness about money would pass without notice: it
would simply be normal behaviour. In England, it is remarked upon,
joked about , recognized as an aberration.
Class and the Vestigial Trade-prejudice Rule
Without attempting to defend or justify the money-talk t aboo, I can
see that there might be historical explanations for this peculiar prac-
tice, as well as the rather circular ' grammat i cal ' ones. 1 mentioned earlier
that we still suffer from vestigial traces of a prejudice against ' t rade' ,
left over from the days when the aristocracy and landed gentry - and
indeed anyone wishing to call himself a gentleman - lived off the rents
from their land and estates, and did not engage in anything so vulgar
as the making and selling of goods. Trade was low-class, and those who
made their fortune by commerce were always quick to purchase a
country estate and attempt to conceal all evidence of their former unde-
sirable ' connections' . In other words, the upper-class prejudice against
trade was in fact shared by the lower social ranks, including those who
were themselves engaged in trade.
Every English school pupil' s essay on Jane Austen notes that while
she pokes gentle fun at the snobbish prejudices against trade of her time,
she does not seriously question them - but schoolchildren are not told
that residual, subconscious traces of the same snobberies are still implicit
in English attitudes towards work and behaviour in the workplace. These
prejudices are strongest among the upper classes, the upper-middle
1 9 0
WORK TO RU L E
professional classes (that' s ' professional' in the old sense, meaning those
belonging to one of the traditionally respectable professions, such as
the law, medicine, the church or the military) and the intelligentsia or
chattering classes.
These classes have a particularly ingrained distaste for the ' bourgeois
businessman' , but the stigmatisation of anyone involved in ' sales' is
widespread. Even the makes of car associated with either wealthy busi-
nessmen (Mercedes) or sales representatives (Mondeo) are sneered at
by the socially insecure of all classes - and remember the near-universal
conrempt for another breed of salesman, the estate agent.
These examples indicate that the English prejudice against trade, as
well as being eroded (though not eradicated) has shifted slightly since
Austen's time, in that the making of goods has become significantly
more acceptable than the selling of them. Although of course the two
are often inextricably connected, it seems to be the pushy, undignified,
money-focused selling of things that we find most distasteful, and most
untrustworthy. There is an unwritten rule a truth universally acknowl-
edged, even to the effect that anyone selling anything is not to be
trusted. Distrust of salesmen is clearly not a uniquely English trait, but
our suspicion and scepticism, and above all our contemptuous distaste,
seem to be more acute and more deep-seated than other cultures' . T he
English are less litigious than the Americans when we feel cheated or
dissatisfied with what we are sold (our tendency is still to complain
indignantly to each other, rather than tackling the source of our discon-
tent) but our more marked mistrust and dislike of salesmen means that
we tend to be considerably less gullible in the first place.
In other cultures, salesmen may not be trusted, but they are somehow
socially accepted in a way that they are not among the English. In other
parts of the world, selling things is regarded as a legitimate way of
earning a living, and successful businessmen who have made their
fortune by doing so arc accorded a degree of respect. In England, money
will buy you a lot of things, including access to power and influence,
but it will not buy you any respect - quite the opposite, in fact: there
seems to be almost as much of a t aboo on making money as there is
on talking about it. When the English describe someone as ' rich' or
' wealthy' , we almost always do so with a slight sneer, and those who
can be so described will rarely use these terms of themselves: they will
191
admit, reluctantly, to being ' quite well off, I suppose' . We may well be,
as Orwell said, the most class-ridden country under the sun, but I think
it is safe to say that in no other country is social class so completely
independent of material wealth. And social acceptability in the wider
sense is if anything inversely related to financial prosperity there may
be some surface sycophancy, but 'fat cats' are objects of contempt and
derision, if not to their faces, then certainly behind their backs. If you
do have the misfortune to be financially successful, it is bad manners
to draw attention to the fact. You must play down your success, and
appear ashamed of your wealth.
It has been said that the main difference between the English system
of social status based on class (that is, birth) and the American ' meri-
tocracy' is that under the latter, because the rich and powerful believe
that they deserve their wealth and power, they are more complacent,
while under the former they tend to have a greater sense of social respon-
sibility, more compassion towards those less privileged than themselves.
I'm grossly oversimplifying the arguments - whole books have been
written on this - but it may be that the English embarrassment about
money and lack of respect for business success have something to do
with this tradition.
Having said that, it is clear that much of all this English squeam-
ishness about money is sheer hypocrisy. T he English are no less natu-
rally ambitious, greedy, selfish or avaricious than any other nation -
we just have more and stricter rules requiring us to hide, deny and
repress these tendencies. Our modesty rules and rules of polite egali-
tarianism - which I believe are the ' grammatical laws' or ' cultural DNA'
behind the money-talk taboo and the prejudice against business success
are a veneer, an exercise in collective self-delusion. T he modesty we
display is generally false, and our apparent reluctance to emphasize
status differences conceals an acute consciousness of these differences.
But hey, at least we value these virtuous qualities, and obey the rules
despite their often deleterious effect on our business dealings.
THE MODERATION RULE
T he phrase ' work hard, play hard' became popular in England in the
1980s, and you will still quite often hear people use it to describe their
1 9 2
WOR K TO RU LE
exciting lifestyle and their dynamic approach to work and leisure. They
are almost always lying. T he English, on the whole, do not ' work hard
and play hard' : we do both, and most other things, in moderation. Of
course, ' work moderately, play moderately' does not have quite the same
ring to it, but I' m afraid it is a far more accurate description of typical
English work and leisure habits. We work fairly diligently, and have a
modest amount of fun in our free time,
I will not be thanked for this rather dull portrait, so I should make
it clear that it is not just an impression or subjective judgement: these
are the findings not only of SIRC's own quite extensive research on
work habits and attitudes, but also of every other study I could find
on this subject. Nor are these rather staid, conventional, conservative
habits confined to the middle-aged or middle-class. Contrary to popular
opinion, the ' youth of today' are not feckless, irresponsible, thrill-
seeking hedonists. If anything, both our own research and other surveys
and studies have found that the young of all classes are more sensible,
industrious, moderate and cautious than their parents' generation. I
find this rather worrying, as it suggests that, unless our younger gener-
ation grows out of these middle-aged attitudes as they get older (which
seems somewhat unlikely), the English will as a nation become even
more ploddingly moderate than we are now.
If you think I'm exaggerating either the extent or the dangers of
English youthful moderation, a few examples from the SIRC research
might help to convince you:
Safe, Sensible, Bourgeois Aspirations
In our survey, when asked where they would like to be in ten years time,
nearly three quarters (72 per cent) of young people chose the safe,
sensible opt i ons of being ' settled down' or ' successful at work' ,
compared with just 38 per cent of the older generation. Only 20 per
cent of 16-24 year olds chose the more adventurous option of 'travel-
ling the world/living abroad' , compared with 28 per cent of 45-54 year
olds. T he older age group was also twice as likely as the youngsters to
want to be ' footloose and fancy-free'. In focus groups and informal
interviews, when we asked about their aspirations in life, almost all
young working people wanted to be 'financially secure and stable' .
Home ownership was a long-term goal.
193
Future Stability More important Than Fun
Gosh, what a dull lot, 1 thought, when these results first came in. In
the hope of finding some more imaginative and rebellious attitudes, I
turned to the questions on 'fun'. I was disappointed to find that on the
issue of 'having fun now vs thinking about the future', where one might
expect the younger generation to be at least a bit less mature and respon-
sible, the views of young people and their elders were more or less iden-
tical. Only 14 per cent of 16-24 year olds felt that 'at my age it's more
important to have fun than to think too much about the future' - and
about the same minority of 45-54s were also carefree fun-lovers.
Our focus-group and interview findings indicated that young working
people's only major 'fun* indulgence is going out to pubs and clubs on
Friday and Saturday nights, or perhaps a clothes-shopping spree. Many
of our focus-group participants tried to make all this sound as 'wild'
as possible, one proudly announcing that 'I spend most of my money
abusing my body, really - going out to pubs and clubs, smoking' but
essentially it boiled down to a quite tame routine of weekend drinking,
dancing and shopping.
industrious, Diligent and Cautious with Money
I was not much cheered by the next lot of findings, which showed that
young people also seem to be more industrious than their parenrs' gener-
ation: 70 per cenr of 16-24s believe that 'getting ahead in life is down
to hard work and dedication'. Only 53 per cent of the older generation
share this diligent attitude, with 41 per cent adopting the more laid-
back view that success is a matter of luck, contacts or 'the right breaks'.
Not only that, but we found that young people are just as likely as
their elders to be careful and responsible with money - in fact, the
16-24s put a larger proporrion of their income into savings than the
45-54s. Our survey showed that young people are significantly less likely
to get themselves into debt than the older group: only 44 per cent owe
money on credit cards and store cards, compared with 66 per cent of
their parents' generation.
The Dangers of Excessive Moderation
1 felt like saying, 'Oh for heaven's sake, lighten up! Live a little! Rebel
a bit! Whatever happened to "Turn on, rune in, drop out"?' All right,
194
WORK TO RU LE
I did and still do, realize that many people will find these results re-
assuring. Even some of my colleagues felt that I was making rarher an
unnecessary fuss. 'Surely it is a good thing that most young people arc
being diligent, prudent and responsible?' they said. 'Why do you find
this so depressing?'
My concern is that these largely commendable tendencies are also
symptoms of a wider and more worrying trend: our findings indicated
that young people are increasingly affected by the culture of fear, and
the risk-aversion and obsession wirh safety that have become defining
features of contemporary sociery. This trend, described by one sociol-
ogist as a 'cultural climate of pervasive anxiety', is associated with the
stunted aspirations, cautiousness, conformism and lack of adventurous
spirit that were evidenr among many of the young people in our survey
and focus groups.
There has always, of course, been a significant degree of exaggera-
tion and even invention in the standard laments and outcries about 'the
youth of today', their fecklessness and irresponsibility. So perhaps our
findings merely showed what has always been the case: that young
people are rather more conventional and responsible than they are
cracked up to be. Well, yes. And in their adherence to the moderation
rule, the young people we studied wete to some extent just 'being
English'. Whether I like it or not, we are a deeply conservative, moderate
people. But what worried me was that these young people were more
conservative, moderate and conformisr rhan their parents' generation,
that there seemed to be a trend towards even greater excesses of moder-
ation (if one can say such a thing). And although I am in many ways
very English, I can only take so much moderation. Moderation is all
very well, but only in moderation.
THE FAIR-PLAY RULE
But to be fair, there were plenty of more positive findings in our research
on English workers as well, not least to do with fairness. Although I
often use the terms interchangeably, 1 have chosen the term 'fair-play
rule' rather than 'fairness rule' for rhe title of this section, as 1 feel that
'fair play' conveys a wider and somewhat less rigidly egalitarian concept
that more accurately reflects the English values I am trying to describe.
195
'Fair play' , with its sporting overtones, suggests that everyone should
be given an equal chance, that no-one should have an unfair advantage
or handicap, and that people should conduct themselves honourably,
observe the rules and not cheat or shirk their responsibilities. At the
same time, 'fair play' allows for differences in ability and accepts that
there will be winners and losers - while maintaining that playing well
and fairly is more i mport ant than winning. Some would claim that this
last element is archaic and no longer applied, but my research has
convinced me that it is still a rule in the sense of an ideal standard to
which the English aspire, even if it is not often achieved.
In some respects, the fair-play rule serves us well in the world of
work and business. "While we undoubtedly have our share of rogues and
cheats, and the rest of us are by no means saints, the English are gener-
ally still regarded, with some justification, as relatively fair and straight
in their conduct of business and there is certainly less blatant toler-
ance of bribery, corruption and cheating here than in most other coun-
tries. When we hear of such incidents, most of us do not shrug in a
knowing, worldly manner, as if to say 'Well, yes, what do you expect?'
We are shocked, outraged, righteously indignant. This may be partly
because the English take great pleasure in being shocked and outraged,
and righteous indignation is one of our favourite national pastimes, but
the feelings expressed are nonetheless genuine.
When asked to compare English working and business practices with
those of other cultures, all of my foreign and immigrant informants
commented on the English sense of fair play, and specifically on our
respect for the law and our relative freedom from rhe corruption they
felt was endemic and tacitly accepted (albeit in varying degrees) in other
parts of the world. Many felt that we were not sufficiently aware or
appreciative of this fact. 'You just take it for granted, ' a Polish immi-
grant complained. 'You assume that people will play fair, and you are
shocked and upset when they do not. In other countries there" is not
that assumpt i on. '
So, we may be a bit dull and excessively moderate, but perhaps,
wi t hout wishing to come over all patriotic, this fair-play ideal is some-
thing we could still take a bit of pride in.
196
WORK TO RU LE
MOANING RULES
T he rather less admirable English habit of constant moaning is another
distinguishing feature of our workplace behaviour, and of our attitude
to work. T he principal rule in this context is that work is, almost by
definition, something to be moaned about. There is a connection here
with the Import ance of Not Being Earnest rule, in that if you do not
indulge in the customary convivial moaning about work, there is a
danger that you will be seen as too keen and earnest, and labelled a
' sad geek' , a sycophantic ' suck' or a self-important ' pompous git' .
The Monday-morning Moan
English work-moaning is a highly predictable, regular, choreographed
ritual. On Monday morni ngs, for example, in every workplace in
England, from factories and shops to offices and boardrooms, someone
will be conducting a Monday-morni ng moan. I can guarantee it. It is
universally understood that everyone hates Mondays; that we all had
trouble dragging ourselves out of bed; that we really could have done
with an ext ra day to get over the weekend; that the traffic/tube/
trains/buses just seem to be getting worse and worse; that we have far
too much to do this week, as per bloody usual; that we are already tired
and our back/head/feet are hurting, and the week's only just started,
for God' s sake; and, look, now the photocopier is on the blink again,
just for a change, huh, typical!
There are endless variations on this Monday-morni ng-moan, and no
t wo such moans are ever exactly alike - but, like the infinitely variable
snow flake,
43
they are all nonetheless remarkably similar. Most of them
start and sometimes end with a bit of weather-speak: ' Bloody cold,' or
' Raining again,' we grumble, as we shed our coats and scarves on arrival,
which sets the tone and triggers another complaint, either about the
w
r
eather or the traffic, trains, etc. At the end of the first morning-moan
ritual, someone may close the proceedings with ''And it's still raining,'
or ' Well,' stoical sigh, ' at least it's stopped raining.' This is the cue for
everyone to shift from their habitual moan-position and start reluc-
tantly getting on with the day's work, muttering ' Right, well, s'pose
43. Although I've always wondered: how do we know that no two snowflakes are
identical? I mean, has someone actually checked them all?
197
we'd better make a start,' or 'Back to the grind, then,' or, if in a posi-
tion of authority, 'All right, c' mon, you lot, let's get some work done. '
T hen we all work, moderately diligently, until the next moaning
opportunity, usually the first tea- or coffee-break, when the Monday
litany of complaint is revived with a new set of moans: ' God, is it only
eleven o' clock? I' m so tired.' 'Well, it's been a long week,' 'Eleven
already? I've got so much to do and I've barely made a dent in it.' ' T hat
bloody coffee machine' s eaten my 50p again! Typical!' And so on.
Followed by yet more congenial moaning over lunch, at subsequent
breaks, and at the end of the day, either on leaving work, or over after-
work drinks in a local pub or bar.
The Time-moan and the Meeting-moan
T here arc variations in out workplace moans, but even these are largely
predictable. Everyone moans about time, for example, but junior and
low-grade employees are more likely to complain that it passes t oo
slowly, that they have another seven sodding hours of this shift to get
through, that they are bored and fed up and can' t wait to get home,
while more senior people usually whine that time just seems to fly past,
that they never have enough of it to get through their ridiculous work-
load, and now there' s another bloody meeting they have to go to.
All white-collar executives and managers - right up to t op board-
room level - always moan about meetings. To admi t to enjoying meet-
ings, or finding them useful, would be the secular equivalent of
blasphemy. Meetings are by definition pointless, boring, tedious and
awful. A bestselling t rai ni ng video on how to conduct meetings (or
at least make them marginally less awful) was called Meetings, Bloody
Meetings - because that is how they are always referred t o. English
workers struggle to get to the rung on the corporat e ladder where
they are senior enough to be asked to attend meetings, then spend
the rest of their career moani ng about all the meetings they have to
at t end,
We all hat e meetings, or at least loudly proclaim that we hate them.
But we have to have a lot of them, because of the fair-play, modera-
tion, compromi se and polite-egalitarianism rules, which combine to
ensure that few individuals can make decisions on their own: a host
of ot hers must always be consulted, and a consensus must be reached.
198
WORK TO RU LE
So we hold endless meetings, everyone is consulted, we discuss every-
thing, and eventually we reach a consensus. Sometimes we even make
a decision.
T hen we go and have a good moan about it all.
The Mock-moaning Rule and the 'Typical!' Rule
All this talk of moaning may be maki ng the English sound rather sad
and depressing, but that is not the case. T he curious thing about all of
these moan sessions is that the tone is actually quite cheerful, good-
natured, and, above all, humorous. In fact, this is probably one of the
most important 'rules of moaning' : you must moan in a relatively good-
humoured, light-hearted manner. However genuinely grumpy you may
be feeling, this must be disguised as mock-grumpiness. T he difference
is subtle, and may not be immediately obvious to the naked ear of an
outsidet, but the English all have a sixth sense for it, and can distin-
guish acceptable mock-moaning from real, serious compl ai ni ng at
twenty paces.
Serious moaning may take place in other contexts, such as heart-to-
heart conversations with one' s closest friends, but it is regarded as
unseemly and inappropriate in collective workplace moaning-rituals.
Here, if you become too obviously bitter or upset about your griev-
ances, you will be labelled a ' moaner' , and nobody likes a ' moaner' -
' moaners' have no place in ritual moani ng sessions. Ritual moaning in
the workplace is a form of social bonding, an opport uni t y to establish
and reinforce common values by sharing a few gripes and groans about
mutual annoyances and irritations. In all English moani ng rituals, there
is a tacit understanding that nothing can or will be done about the
problems we are moaning about. We complain to each other, rather
than tackling the real source of our discontent, and we neither expect
nor want to find a solution to our problems - we just want to enjoy
moaning about them. Our ritual moani ng is purely therapeutic, not
strategic or purposeful: the moan is an end in itself.
Genuine grievances may be raised in these sessions, about pay,
working conditions, tyrannical bosses or other problems, but even these
moans must be delivered with humorous grimaces, shrugs, eye-rolling,
mock-exasperated eyebrow-lifts and exaggerated stoical sighs - not with
tear-filled eyes, trembling lips or serious scowls. This is sociable light
199
entertainment, not heavy kitchen-sink drama. T he appropriate tone is
encapsulated in the English moan-ritual catchphrase ' Typical!' which
you will hear many times a day, every day, in every workplace in the
country. ' T ypical!' is also used in moaning rituals in many other
contexts, such as on delayed trains or buses, in traffic jams, or indeed
whenever anything goes wrong. Along with ' nice' , ' typical' is one of
the most useful and versatile words in the English vocabulary - a generic,
all-purpose term of disapproval, it can be applied to any problem,
annoyance, mishap or disaster, from the most insignificant irritation to
adverse events of nat i onal or even i nt ernat i onal i mpor t ance.
Eavesdropping in a pub during a turbulent political period in 2003, I
overheard the tail end of someone' s ritual moan: 'And now on top of
it all there' s all these terrorist threats and we're going to be at war with
Iraq. Typical!'
T here is somet hi ng quintessentially English about ' T ypi cal !' It
manages simultaneously to convey huffy indignation and a sense of
passive, resigned acceptance, an acknowledgement that things will
invariably go wrong, that life is full of little frustrations and difficul-
ties {and wars and terrorists), and that one must simply put up with
it. In a way, ' Typical!' is a manifestation of what used to be called the
English 'stiff upper lip' : it is a complaint, but a complaint that also
expresses a very English kind of grudging forbearance and restraint -
a sort of grumpy, cynical stoicism.
THE AFTER-WORK DRINKS RULES
I was talking with my social-scientist sister recently about after-work
drinks, and she started to tell me about a recent study she had seen on
stress in English workplaces. ' Don' t tell me,' 1 interrupted. ' It showed
that employees who go to the pub for after-work drinks with their
colleagues suffer less stress than those who don' t, right?' 'Yes, of course
it did,' she replied. T mean, duh, we knew that!' And pretty much any
English worker familiar wirh the after-work drinks ritual could have
told you the same thing - and would no doubt add that social scien-
tists have a habit of stating the bloody obvious. But it is nonetheless
nice, I think, to have our instinctive ' knowledge' of such matters prop-
erly measured and confirmed by objective research. Being a social scien-
2 0 0
WORK TO RU LE
tist is a pretty thankless job, though, particularly among the ever-cynical
English, who generally dismiss all of our findings as either obvious
(when they accord with ' common knowledge' ) or rubbish (when they
challenge some tenet of popular wisdom) or mumbo-j umbo (when it
is not clear which sin has been committed, as the findings are couched
in incomprehensible academic jargon). At the risk of falling into one
or all of these categories, I will try to explain how the hidden rules of
the after-work drinks ritual make it such an effective antidote to the
stresses of the workplace.
First, there are some universal rules about alcohol and about drinking-
places. In all cultures, alcohol is used as a symbolic punctuation-mark
to define, facilitate and enhance the transition from one social state
or context to another. T he transitional rituals in which alcohol plays a
vital role range from major life-cycle ' rites of passage' such as birth,
coming-of-age, marriage and death to far less momentous passages, such
as the daily transition from work-time to play-time or home-time. In
our culture, and a number of others, alcohol is a suitable symbolic vehicle
for the work-to-play transition because it is associated exclusively with
play - with recreation, fun, festivity, spontaneity and relaxation and
regarded as antithetical to work
44
.
There are also universal ' laws' about the social and symbolic func-
tions of drinking-places. I mentioned these at the beginning of the
chapter on pub-talk, but it is worth reminding ourselves here that all
drinking-places, in all cultures, have their own ' social micro-climate' .
They are 'liminal zones' in which there is a degree of ' cultural remis-
sion' - a temporary relaxation or suspension of normal social controls
and restraints. They are also egalitarian environments, or at least places
in which status distinctions are based on different criteria from those
operating in the outside world. And, perhaps most i mport ant , both
drinking and drinking-places are universally associated with social
bonding.
So, the English after-work dri nks ritual functions as an effective
44. This is not universally the case: in many cultures, specifically those with a
more healthy, 'integrated' attitude to drinking, alcohol is equally used to mark the
transition from home/play to work. In France and Spain, for example, working
men will often stop at a bar or cafe on their way to work for a 'fortifying' glass
of wine, calvados or brandy
2 0 1
de-srressor partly because, by these universal ' laws' , the hierarchies and
pressures of the workplace are soluble in alcohol, particularly alcohol
consumed in rhe sociable, egalitarian environment of the pub. T he funny
thing is that the after-work drinks ritual in the local pub has much the
same stress-reduction effect even if one is drinking only Coke or fruit
juice. T he symbolic power of the pub itself is often enough to induce
an immediate sense of relaxation and conviviality, even without the
social lubricant of alcohol.
T he specific, self-imposed rules of the English after-work drinks
ritual are mainly designed to reinforce this effect. For example, discus-
sion of work-related matters is permitted - indeed, after-work drinks
sessions are often vvhere the most i mport ant decisions get made but
both the anti-earnestness rules and the rules of polite egalitarianism
are much more rigorously applied than they are in the workplace.
T he anti-earnestness rules srate that you can talk with colleagues or
work-mates about an i mport ant project or problem in the pub, but
pompous, self-important or boring speeches are not allowed. You may,
if you are senior enough, get away with these in workplace meetings
(although you will not be popul ar), but in the pub, if you become too
long-winded, too serious or t oo ' up yourself, you will be summarily
told to ' come off it' .
T he polite-egalitarianism rules prescribe, not exactly a dissolution
of workplace hierarchies, but a much more jocular, irreverent attitude
to distinctions of rank. After-work drinks sessions are often conducted
by small groups of colleagues of roughly the same status, but where a
mixing of ranks does occur, any deference that might be shown in the
workplace is replaced in the pub by ironic mock -deference. Managers
who go for after-work drinks with their ' t eam' may be addressed as
' Boss' , but in a jokey, slightly insolent way, as in ' Oi , Boss, it's your
round!' We do not suddenly all become equals in rhe pub, but we have
a license to poke fun at workplace hierarchies, to show that we do not
take them t oo seriously.
T he rules of after-work drinks, and of pub-talk generally, are deeply
ingrained in the English psyche. If you ever find that a business discus-
sion or interview you are conducting with an English person is some-
what stilted, over-formal or heavy going, ask the person to 'just talk as
though we were in the pub, ' or 'tell me about it as you would if we
202
WORK TO RU LE
were in the pub.' Everyone will know exactly what you mean: pub-talk
is relaxed, informal, friendly talk, not trying ro impress, not taking
things t oo seriously. Of course, if you can actually take the person to
the nearest pub, so much the better, but I have found that even just
' invoking' the social micro-climate of the pub in this way can reduce
tensions and inhibitions.
O FFI CE- PARTY RU LES
T he same principles apply, in intensified form, to office parties (I'm
using this, as most people do, as a generic term, covering all parties
given by a firm or company for its employees, whether white- or blue-
collar) - particularly the annual Christmas party, an established ritual,
now invariably associated with ' drunken debauchery' and various other
forms of misbehaviour. I have done a couple of studies on this, as part
of SIRC's wider research on social and cultural aspects of drinking, and
I always know when the run-up to Christmas has officially started, as
this is when I start getting phone calls from journalists asking ' Why do
people always misbehave at the office Christmas party?' T he answer is
that we misbehave because misbehaviour is what office Chri st mas
parties are all about: misbehaviour is written in to the unwritten rules
governing these events; misbehaviour is expected, it is customary.
By ' misbehaviour' , however, I do not mean anything particularly
depraved or wicked - just a higher degree of disinhibition than is
normally permitted among the English. In my SIRC surveys, 90 per cent
of respondents admitted to some form of ' misbehaviour* at office
Christmas parties, but simple over-indulgence was rhe most common
' sin' , with nearly 70 per cent confessing to eating and drinking too
much. We also found that flirting, ' snogging' , telling rude jokes and
' maki ng a fool of yourself ate standard features of the office Christmas
part y
Among the under-thirties, 50 per cent see the office Christmas parry
as a prime flirting and ' snogging' opportunity, and nearly 60 per cent
confessed to making fools of themselves. T hirty- and forty-somethings
were only slightly more restrained, with 40 per cent maki ng fools of
themselves at Christmas parties, often by ' saying things they would
never normally say' . Although this festive ' blabbing' can sometimes
203
cause embarrassment, it can also have positive effects: 37 per cent had
made friends with a former enemy or rival, or ' made up' after a quarrel,
at a Christmas party, and 13 per cent had plucked up the courage to
tell someone they fancied them.
But even the most outlandish office-party' misbehaviours tend to be
more silly than sinful. In my more casual interviews with English workers,
when I asked general questions about ' what people get up to at the office
Christmas party' , my informants often mentioned the custom of photo-
copying one' s bottom (or sometimes breasts) on the office photocopier.
I'm not sure how often this actually occurs, but the fact that it has become
one of the national standing jokes about office parties gives you an idea
of how these events are regarded, the expectations and unwritten rules
involved and how the English behave under conditions of ' cultural
remission' .
I will have much more to say about different kinds of ' cultural remis-
sion' , 'legitimized deviance' and ' time-out behaviour' in later chapters,
but we should remind ourselves here that these are not just fancy
academic ways of saying ' letting your hair down' . They do not mean
letting rip and doing exactly as you please, but refer quite specifically
to temporary, conventionalized deviations from convention, in which
only certain rules may be broken, and then only in certain, rule-governed
ways.
English workers like to talk about their annual office parties as
though they were wild Roman orgies, but this is largely titillation or
wishful thinking. T he reality, for most of us, is t hat our debauchery
consists mainly of earing and drinking rather too much singing and
dancing in a more flamboyant manner than we are accustomed to;
wearing skirts cut a bit t oo high and tops cut a bit too low; indulging
in a little flirtation and maybe an illicit kiss or fumble; speaking to our
colleagues with rather less restraint than usual, and to our bosses with
rather less deference - and perhaps, if we are feeling really wanton and
dissolute, photocopying our bot t oms.
T here are except i ons and minor variations, but these are t he
permitted limits in most English companies. Some young English
workers learn these rules ' t he hard way', by overstepping the invisible
boundaries, going that little bit t oo far, and finding that their antics
are frowned upon and their careers suffer as a result. But most of us
204
WORK TO RU LE
instinctively obey the rules, including the one that allows a significant
degree of exaggeration in our accounts of what happened at the office
Christmas party.
WORK RULES AND ENGLI SHNESS
Looking at the guiding principles identified at the beginning of this
chapter, and trying to figure out what they tell us about Englishness, I
am immediately struck by all the ambivalence and contradictions in
English attitudes to work. T he ' muddle rules' seem to be full of ' burs' .
We are serious bur not serious, dutiful but grudging, moaning but
stoical, inventive but also stuffily set in our ways. I would not go so far
as to say that we have a ' love/hate' relationship with work. T hat would
be too passionate and extreme and un-English. It is more a sort of
' quite like/rather dislike' relationship a somewhat uneasy compro-
mise, rather than an angst-ridden conflict.
There is something quintessentially English, it seems to me, about
all this middling, muddling and fence-sitting, English work-culture is a
mess of cont radi ct i ons, but our cont radi ct i ons lack the sense of
dramatic tension and struggle that the word normally implies: they are
generally half-resolved, by means of a peculiarly English sort of grumpy,
vague, unsatisfactory compromise. We can neither embrace work with
wholehearted Protestant t eal , nor treat it with Latin-Mediterranean
insouciant fatalism. So we sit awkwardly on the fence, somewhere in
the middle ground, and grumble about it all - quietly.
The concept of compromise seems to be deeply embedded in the
English psyche. Even on the rare occasions when we are roused to
passionate dispute, we usually end up with a compromise. T he English
Civil War was fought between support ers of the monarchy and
supporters of Parliament - and what did we end up with? Well, er,
both. A compromise. We are not keen on dramatic change, revolutions,
sudden uprisings and upheavals. A truly English protest march would
see us all chanting; ' What do we want? GRADUAL CHANGE! When
do we want it? IN DUE COURSE!'
When in doubt , which would seem to be much of t he t i me, we
turn to our favourite, al l -purpose coping mechanism: humour. I think
that the workplace humour rules have added a new di mensi on to our
205
understanding of English humour and its role in our cultural codes.
We already knew that the English put a high value on humour, but we
had only seen this 'in operation' in purely social contexts, where there
is perhaps less need for clarity, certainty and efficiency than in the work-
place. We can only calculate the value of humour now that we have
seen what the English are prepared to sacrifice in its honour - things
like clarity, certainty and efficiency.
T he workplace humour and modesty rules have also helped us to get
'inside' another stereotype, that of English anti-intellectualism, which
we stuck under our microscope and broke down into its component
parts - namely prohibitions on earnestness and boastfulness. Having got
anti-intellectualism in my Petri dish, I've now poked away at it a bit
more and tweezered out another component, which looks awfully like
' empiricism' , particularly the anti-theory, anti-dogma, anti-abstraction
elements of the English empiricist tradition, our stolid preference for the
factual, concrete and common-sense, and deep mistrust of obscurantist,
' Continental' theorising and rhetoric. There is something fundamentally
empiricist about the English ' Oh, come off it!' response. In fact, there is
something essentially empiricist about most aspects of the English sense
of humour. I've got a feeling we' ll be coming back to this.
T he modesty rule seems to be yet another consistently recurring
theme - and, as with humour, the workplace provides a useful and
revealing ' test' of the strength of this rule. We found that when the
requirements of advertising and marketing are at odds with the English
modesty rule, the rule wins, and advertising must he re-inventcd to
comply with the prohibition on boasting.
T he polite-procrastination rule highlights another familiar trait, the
one I have taken to calling the English 'social dis-ease', as a shorthand
way of referring to our chronic inhibitions, our perverse obliqueness, our
congenital inability to engage in a direct and straightforward fashion with
other human beings. The money-talk taboo, a symptom of this ciis-ease,
brings us back to the usual-suspect themes of class-consciousness,
modesty and hypocrisy - all increasingly strong candidates for defining-
characteristic status, along with our penchant for excessive moderation.
I have a hunch that fair play will also turn out to be a fundamental
law of Englishness. Like humour and 'social dis-ease' , the fair-play ideal
seems to pervade and influence much of our behaviour, although it is
206
WORK TO RU LE
often manifested as polite egalitarianism, suggesting that hypocrisy is
an equally powerful element.
More familiar themes recur in the workplace moaning rules, but with
some new twists. We find that even our constant Eeyorish moaning is
subject to the ubiquitous humour rules, particularly the injunction
against earnestness. And the ' Typical!' rule reveals what may be a
modern variant of the 'stiff upper lip' a distinctively English quality,
which for the moment I am calling ' grumpy stoicism' .
Finally, the after-work-drinks and office-party rules bring us back
again to the theme of English social dis-ease, in particular to our need
for ' props' and facilitators such as alcohol and special settings with
special rules to help us overcome our many social inhibitions. More
of these in the next chapter.
207


US American Culture and American Regionalism James Leavey

Reading:



US Core Values Ildik Lzr

Reading:

nd
ed.). New York,
NY: Cambridge University Press. (Chapter 1, pp.5-13)


US American English Magdolna Kimmel

Reading:

Chapter 20: The imaginativeness of American English. (pp.289-307)

CHAPTER TWENTY 289
,
.
chapter20
Theimaginativeness ofAmericanEnglish
I
n the previous chapter we have looked at the many ways in which American
English displays inventiveness. In discussing the innovative character of this
variety of English we have come across several examples of imaginativeness as
weil. Indeed, imaginativeness can be regarded as another form of invenriveness -
inventiveness where new words and phrases are created not simply with the help
of a word-formation process but also with the help of such imaginative processes
of linguistic creativity as metaphor and metonymy. By imaginativeness, then,
we mean the process in which metaphor or metonymy also participate in the
invenrion or creation of new words or phrases.
The nature of imaginativeness
This imaginativeness is just as frequently commenred on as the invenriveness
of American English. Mencken (1963), among others, often talks about the
"pungent," "bold," "muscular," "vigorous," "racy," "picruresque" character of
American English. Others frequently memion "colorfulness" and "expressive-
ness" (e.g., Svejcer, 1978). These features usually manifest themselves in
metaphorical and metonymicallanguage. Baugh and Cable (1983) also note
the American talem for being invemive in an imaginaciveway:
He [the American] is perhaps at his best when inventing simple
homely words like applebutter, sidewalk, and lightning rod, spelling
bee and crazy quilt, law-down, and know-nothing, or when srriking
off a terse metaphor like log rolling, wirepulling, to have an ax to
grind, to be on thefence. (p. 365)
Theyalso tell us that this property of American English began to show as early
as colonial times:
The American early manifested the gin, which he cominues to show,
of the imaginative, slighcly humorous phrase. To it we owe to bark up
the wrong tree, toftce the music, fly off the handle, go on the warpath,
bury the hatchet, come aut at the little end of the horn, saw wood, and
many more, with the breath of the coumry and somecimes of the
frontier abour them. In this way, the American began her contribu-
60ns to the English language (p. 365)
\'Ve will see in this chapter that, in addition to the colonists, others have also
played a part in turning Americ.."lnEnglish into a highly imaginative variety of
English. At this point, 1 simply wish to note that the [eature of imaginativeness
goes back a long way in the history of American English. Furthermore, we
should also keep in mind, as Baugh and Cable observe, that the process is still
going on at the present time. It is not the case that American English was imag-
inative for some time at its beginnings and then its imaginativeness went away.
A tunher point worth emphasizing on the basis of the passage above is that the
imaginative aspect of lunerican English is frequently linked with humor.
Many of the expressions quo ted in the passages above (like saw wood, bark up
the wrong tree), as weH as many of the others we willlook at below, ret1ect the.
humorous nature of American metaphors. Finally, as the passage above
reminds us, imaginativeness otten derives from the experiences of Americans
in the coumry and the fromier.We will also deal wi th this issue in more detail
in this chapter.
But imaginativeness is not related to invemiveness alone. 1have touched on
the imaginative aspects of American English in several eadier chapters.
Wherever it was necessary to mention or call on such figures of speech as
metaphor or metonymy as part of the explanation of a particulat phenomenon,
the notion of imaginativeness was raised. In the sections to follow 1will take up
the most important phenomena with which imaginativeness is connected. 1will
look at these in some detail from the perspective of the imaginative character of
American English.
Why items are borrowed from American English
In the chapter on vocabulary differences, we looked at several reasons why items
are borrowed from American English by British English. Among these reasons
is metaphor. Gramley and Patzold (1992), for cxample, talk about how "the
vivid and expressive nature of a number of [American] words and phrases is
held to have helped them expand" (p. 359). Svejcer (1978) maintains that
"words and set phrases which have a distinct expressive-stylistic coloring" are
used for stylistically neutral ones (p. 158). Among the examples he provides we
tlnd the American word to steamroLleror steamroLLfor Common English suppress,
cru.;"h, defiat, override, or overpower, boost for pubLicize; fooLproof tor simpLe; up-
imd-coming tOr proming; brainwashing for indoctrination. These American
English words show a more imaginative character than their Common English
counterparts. To steamroLLer,boost, fooLproof up-and-coming, and brainwashing
290 AM ERI CAN ENGLI SH
Common E:
rejection
summary
account
quarrd
test
mike
even chance
rdic
are vivid, picturesque words that evoke a forcefuI image. In this respect, they
resemble Mencken's famous example of rubberneck. It is informative to look at
the list of examples provided by Svejcer (pp. 158-159):
AE:
brush-off
fill-in
rundown
run-m
try-aut
tie-up
toss-up
hangover
cookcur
firebug
sparkplug
skyrocket
rabble-rouser
grill
race
plcmc
arsonist
msplre
nse
demagogue
cross-examme
dection campaign
In his discussion of the same issue, Strevens (1972:61-62) provides a similar
list: to blow ones top ("to fly into a rage"), to case a joint ("to spy aut the land
before a robbery"), to give the once-over ("to inspect something"), to hijack ("to
take over a plane, ship or train or motor vehicle by force"), to moonlight ("ro
work clandestinely at a second job"), blue movie ("pornographic or erotic
film"), cliffhanger ("suspenseful happening"), handout ("free gift"), hard-boiled
("experienced, unemotional"), in the doghouse ("temporarily unpopular"), and
so on. Commenting on the list, Strevens (1972) notes:
There are two reasons for having given a number of examples of
these expressions. The first is to illustrate the knd of vivid, affective
use of language which American English has produced for around
two centuries, and which has provided a constant flow of linguistic
exports to Britain. (p. 62)
But, we can ask, why do the more imaginative - the metaphorical- American
words appeal to the British? This is a more general issue and is not limited to
Americans and British alone. There seem to be a number of things involved.
First, the American words are easier to form images oE We can have an image
of grill, steamroller, race, and so forth, in a way in which we cannot in the case
CHAPTER TWENTY 291
Generally speaking, ir may be said thar when an American word
expresses an idea in a way rhar appeals to rhe English as firring or
effecrive, the word is ulrimately adopred in England. Mr. Emest
Weekley, in his Adjectives - and Other Words, says: "Ir is difficulr now
to imagine how we gor on so long without the word stunt, how we
expresscdthe characrerisricsso convenienclysummed up in dope-fiend
or high-brow,or any orher possibleway of describing that mixrure of
the cheap pathetic and the ludicrous which is nowuniversaIlylabelled
sob-stuff."(pp. 388-89)
of cross-examine, defeat, and election campaign. They cvoke an image that the
Common English words do not, and, as a resulr, are easier to understand.
Second, they aIso appear to be simpier. They are simpier in the sense that they
come from concrete, physical domains of cxperience - domains of experience
that most people can relate to. Most of us have experienced what fire is and how
it can affect things (in the case of grill); most of us have experienced what it is
like when a heavy object moves over a softer surf ace (in the case of steamroller);
and most of us have experienccd the activity of mnning a race in some form (in
the case of race). Third, the meaning may also became richer. This happens, for
cxample, in the case of such words as fOolproof or !parkplug. The word fOolproof
implies that something is so simple that even a fool cannot mishandle or misun-
derstand it; that is, the meaning of simple is enriched by the aspecr of imensity. In
the case of sparkplug, as in John sparkplugged the operations or John is the spark-
plug of the team, the word additionalIy implies that John activates others in such
a way that when they seem to Iose enthusiasm or want to give up, he can reacrivate
them just as a sparkplug could, and that if John loses heart, the operations or the
whole team are in trouble, just as a car would be whose sparkplug has broken
down. These, and several others, are impIications that the word impire does not
have at alI. Given these reasons, the American words may be felt to be more effec-
tive by the British. Or, in the words of Baugh and Cable (1983) again:
Ir has also been observed that it is the clarity or explicirness of some expressions
that may help them get ima British EngIish (Svejcer, 1978). We have discussed
the notions of clarity and explicirness in the chapter on direcrness. Metaphor
may aIso make a word or expression's meaning more transparent. The meaning
of fill-in is more transparent than that of summary because it is based on the
concrete physical experience of filling up a comainer. The same applies to strike
oil because striking oil is a subcase of being successful, and to baby-buggy
because of the similarity of shape and function between a horse-drawn buggy
and the one in which babi es travel (as opposed to British EngIish pram, which
does not evoke any kind of similarity).
292 AMERICAN ENGLISH
CHAPTER TWENTY 293
~.'
.
Informality
Imaginativeness also has to do with informality. I have suggested that speakers
of American English often use highly informal and metaphoricallanguage in
domains where it would not be felt to be quite appropriate by speakers of
British English. This idea was based, among other things, on the reported
experiences of a British journalist working in the U.S. He observed that
American governmem officials (and we may reasonably suspect that not only
them) use fierce, aggressive, masculine, or "macho" language in connection
with their generaIly rather timid work. Some of the examples memioned are
Well clean his dock (from boxing) and He hit it out of the park (from baseball).
In general, it can be suggested that in the 0.5. talk about politics is largely
couched in an informal and metaphorical language that is taken from
American sports. (Some American presidents are famous or even notorious for
their heavy use of sports language for politics. One example is former presidem
Nixon.) I will substamiate this claim further in a later section in the chapter.
It was noted above that in some cases metaphor can help people express their
meanings more directly and explicitly. In other cases, however, the opposite
effect can be achieved with the help of imaginative language; namely, a taboo
topic may be talked about through the use of metaphor and metonymy. In the
discussion of verbal prudery in a previous chapter, I memioned such examples as
restroomand washroom for toilet, which is a taboo topie. Both of these examples
employ metonymy. Metonymy in these two examples involves a process in
which a part of a larger situation is used to stand for another part of the situa-
tion. When we use a public toilet, we often interrupt whatever we do. For
example, we take a break from work and this means that we do not have to work
for the few minutes we are in the room that comains the toilet. This is a kind of
rest from work. Resting plus the room where resting occurs can then be used to
refer to the public facility where the accivities of urinating and defecating take
place. A similar explanation holds for washroom, except that, in this case, another
activity, washing the hands or the body, is used to mark the place where the
taboo activities occur.
But why was the expression going to bed, in the sense of "go to sleep,"
abandoned by Americans? When we go to sleep, we actually go imo our bed.
So going into our bed is a part of the larger situation, and, given the explanation
above, speakers should legitimately be able to use it to talk aboUt going to sleep.
Yet, as was noted in chapter fifteen, the expression was avoided and replaced by
the now archaic word retire. Why? The reason is that going to bed is a part of
Verbal prudery
Some major metaphorical domains in American English
",
two situations: going to sleep and having sex with someone. Going to bed is a
part ofhaving sex in the sense that we think of sexual activity as primarily OCCUf-
ring in bed. Thus, going to bed also evokes the situation ofhaving sex. Because
of this, Americans avoided the expression to go to bed for "to go to sleep." They
did so, because it evoked, for them, a siruation that was itself a raboo domain.
Tall talk
As was nored in chaprer eighreen, talI talk ohen employs metaphor, or in
Mencken's words (1963: 149), "fanrastic simile and metaphor." Tali ralk, for
Mencken, also included "ingeniously conrrived epirhers," "wild hyperbole," "a
bombastic display of oratory," linguistic devices that alI have something or
orher to do with metaphor.
A special kind of talI talk, in which the less dignifled is made to appear
more dignified, can also be based on a special kind of metaphor. We noted how
longer words are frequently used to impress people. In the case of expressions
of rhe type a great dining experience for a great dinner and timepiece for watch,
we have alonger expression that is used to enhance the status or imporrance
of what we are talking about. A special kind of metaphor is ar work here. A
more favorable impression of the thing in question can be made because the
presence of more word form is understood as carrying more imporrance by the
hearer. There seems to be a correlation berween word form and the conrenr of
words to the effect thar "more form creates more contenr" (for a detailed discus-
sion of this phenomenon, see Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). This is how bombast
and pomposity ohen work.
Inventiveness
In the discussion of invenriveness, it was menrioned that metaphor and metonymy
play an imporranr role in the creation of new words, in that the new meanings
of words are ohen based on metaphoric or metonymic transfer of meaning. We
have called this phenomenon the "shihing of meaning." We have also pointed
out that many American compounds employ metaphorical transfers. In addition,
there can be shihing based on the grammatical category of words; nouns may
become verbs and verbs nouns. We will see in a later section that these gram-
matical shihs are ohen based on metonymy.
So far, we have seen a large number of individual examples of metaphor that
were alI created by Americans. Some that were menrioned or briefly discussed
294 AME RI CAN ENGLIS H
include bruJh-ojf,fill-in, rundown, run-in, try-out, tie-up, tOJS-Up, h{mgover, cook-
vut, firebug, sparkplug, Jkyrocket, rabble-rouser, grill, mce. However, individual
metaphors can be commonly found to co-occur, that is, ro duster around a cer-
tain cOI1Cept.When a number of metaphors reflect a single concept or domain
as regards both their origin (such as sports) and their target (such as politics), we
will say that we are dealing with a "conceptual mctaphor." Thus, the notion of
conccptual metaphor is opposcd ro "linguistic mctaphor" (Lakoff and Johnson,
1980). Linguistic metaphors may occur in isolation or in systems. Whcn they
cluster around agiven source concept, wc have a conceptual metaphor.
So far in this chapter we have primarily dealt with metaphors that were
isolated or individuallinguistic metaphors. There was only one exception: the
conceptual metaphor that had politics or life as its target of application and
sports as its origin. In this case, for example, politics is understood and talked
about by making use of the conceptual domain of spons. Following the termi-
nology of cognitive linguistics (see, for example, Lakoff and Johnson, 1980),1
will call the target of the application of linguistic cxpressions (e.g., politics) the
"target domain" and the origin of the linguistic expressions (e.g., spons) the
"source domain."
Given the notion of conceptual metaphor, we can now ask if there are any
characteristically American conceptual metaphors. In other words, the question
is whether there are any source domains in terms of which Americans typically
understand their experiences. One such domain, 1would suggest, is sports.
, .
CHAPTER TWENTY 295
"Sport" as metaphor
The language of American sports may be viewed as a special variety of American
English, in addition to that of the railroad, auromobile, drug culture, and many
others. When this language is used to understand other domains, like politics,
the way Americans comprehend spons. is imposed on these other domains as
weil. Of ali the special varieties of American English that have played any role
in the development of a special American English vocabulary, the domain of
sports contributed a great deal, maybe the most.
Politics as sport
Spom, as has been pointed out above, is a major source domain for politics in
the United States. In addition to the examples already discussed, we find many
more. Politicians can sometimes employ hardball tactics; they may have a game
pum; they may play it Silft or play for time; a politician can be a good team player,
a presidential candidate has a running mate; the election campaign may be a cfose
race; senators and congressmen can qUilrterback an operation; they can have a
Busint:ss as sport/gamt:
s<:LTe( eomultation call ed d huddl/'; a politician may be a ji'omrUl111crand a
h({Il:vwt'ght or a lightweight, ;lS(he case may be; and some of them ohen play
f,atdba/l in (heir poiiticai activitics.
Bur the American cxperience of sporrs is not limited ro the comprehension of
politics. It also extends to the world of business. That is, business may be the
target domain with sports being the source domain, as thc foUowing examples
illustrate: some businessmen may pby for high stak/'s; they are also often advised
to quit zuhile they arI' ahead; rhey sometimes plunge rzr;ht into an inv/'stment; if
they are successful, they can make a killing or at least break (v/'n.
Love and sex as sport
Love and sex are also the target of sports metaphors. An American given to
seducing women can be said to play thefiAd; a suecessttd attempt at seduction
is scoring; when he starts his "operations," he makes apass ftt or makes a play for
somebody; initial success in a relationship is expressed as getting to first basI';
and, after a rejection by an llnwilling partner, Americans may marry somebody
on the rebound.
Life as sport
Given that Americans understand all these different aspects of life in terms of
sports, it is not surprising that their llnderstanding oflife in general also derives
in part from the domain of spons. Some of them do, while others don't !ike to
participate in what they call the rat mce; especially YOllngpeople may drop out
of mainsrream sociery; it is an American slogan that life is not a spectator game
and that life is hard, play it tough; they can also encourage eaeh other with the
words when the going gels tough, the tough get going.
Many of the following expressions Gramley and Patzold (1992:363-64)
menti on in their discussion of the language of the favorite American and
British pastimes, baseball and cricket, respectively, can apply ro variolls aspects
of life. They point out that some of the expressions are shared by baseball and
cricket, due ro the common origin of the two sports. Most of them, however,
arc specific to either baseball or cricket.
Many of the expressions used in cricket and baseball have extended mean-
ings, which arc based on metaphor. I begin by giving a list of expressions
shared by baseball and crieket (first the baseball or cricket expression, then its
extended metaphor-based mean ing is given in double quotation marks):
296 AME RIC A N ENGLIS H
, ,
batting order
to tIeid
to take the tieid
"order to do things"
"to enter a competition"
"to begin campaign"
The expressions thar areused for cricket only include:
sticky wicket
something is not cricket
to hit something for six
to queer someone's pitch
to be caught out
a hat trick (also soccer)
to have had a good innings
"difficulr situation"
"unfair"
"to score a big success"
"to spoil somebody's plans"
"to be trappedifound out"
"something very weH done"
"to have had a long life"
The expressions that are used for baseball only include:
to play hard ball
to touch base
not to get to tIrst base
to pinch hit for somebody
to strike out
to have a strikel
two strikes against somebody
to play in the big leagues
a double play
a rain check
a grand slam
a blooper
a doubleheader
batting average
out of the ball park
out in left tIeld
off base
"to be serious about something"
"to keep in contact"
"not to be successful"
"to stand in for somebody"
"to fail"
"to have a disadvantage"
"to work/be with powerful people"
"two successes in one move"
"postponement"
"smashing success/victory"
"a mistake or a failure"
"a combined event with lots to offer"
"a persons performance"
"phenomenal feat"
"remote, out of touch, unrealistic"
"wrong"
Clearly, sporrs and sport terminologies are commonly used metaphorically in
an efforr tO comprehend various abstract ideas. What is especially interesting
about the expressions above is that many of them have tOdo with the notions of
success and failure. This applies to both the cricket and the baseball expressions.
This suggests that the concepts of success and failure in life in general are
understood in terms of the more specific successes and failures associated with
various sporrs activities. In other words, sporr is a general metaphor for life.
CHAPTER TWENTY 297
The Scots-Irish brought wi th them a rich oral culture: aphorisms,
proverbs, superstitions, and an ability to tUm a striking phrase -
mad as a mec!taxe, dead as a hammer, so drunk he couldn't hit the wall
The following c:xpressiom have to do wich aspects of success:
BE: hit something for six, a hat trick
AE: a double play, a grand sbm, batting average, out of the ball park
The ones below are related to failure:
BE: to queer someone's pitch, to be caught out
AE: not get to first base, a blooper, off base
In alI these cases, the notions of success and failute in general are comprehended
through the more specific success and failure experienced in sports. We will come
back to this issue in the next chapter.
In addition to sports, there are other special varieties of American English
that serve as source domains for the metaphorical understanding of some aspects
of American culture and society.
The frontier
The frontier provides a major source of metaphors for American life. Life on the
frontier was hard and different. As we saw in chapter three, the plants, animals,
physical objects, landscape, activities, people were ali different, and hence they
had to be named. But the spirit on the frontier was also different; it was new,
dangerous, and exciting. This new spirit found expression in many metaphorical
expressions created on the frontier. Bryson (1990: 164) describes this in these
words: "Setders moving west not only had to find new expressions to describe
features of their new outsized continent - mej'a, butte, bluff, and so on - but
also outsized words that reflected their zestful, virile, wildcat-wrassling, hell-
for-Ieather approach to life," Many colorful expressions were created; some of
them were not metaphorical, like hornswoggle and rambunctious, but many of
them were. These include to move like greased lightning, to kick the bucket, to be
in cahoots with somebody, and to root hog or die.
We noted in chapter rwo that it was mainly the Scors-Irish (like the famous
Davy Crockett) who moved inIand and became the pioneers. These people were
weil suited to the task before them. They were tough, and also rough, and they
were linguistically inventive and imaginative. Their inventiveness came from
the rich oral culture that they inherited:
Gambling
with a handful of beans. It was the frontietsmen who first spo ke of
someone with an il.yeto grind, or someone who sat on thefinee when
he should perhaps go the whole hog. (McCrum, et al., 1986: 157)
Nlany aspects of frontier life have contributed metaphorical expressions to
American English, expressions that are commonly used to the present day. I
present some examples below.
Cowboys
The cowboys' activities gave rise to a number of metaphorical expressions.
When an American today says that someone can't even hold down a job, he or
she is using an idiom that goes back to how cowboys tried to hold down a cow
for branding. A tenderfOot was originally a calf and later became a "beginner,
novice, an inexperienced person."
lndians
Several American metaphors derive from aspects of [ndian culture with which
the settlers carne into contact. Some of the best known ones include go on a scalp
hunt, smoke apeacepipe, put on the warpaint, play possum, bury the hatehet, go on
the warpath. These and other idioms, now viewed as inappropriate, have found
their way into many languages outside American English.
Many aspects of American life are comprehended through the frontier activity
of gambling. Some of the metaphorical idioms that gambling produced in
American English include !'ll call your bluff, pass the buck, square deal, poker
fizce, big deal, the cards weren't stacked against you, play a wild card, and the chips
are down.
Backwoodsmen
Other colorful metaphors derive from the activities of the backwoodsmen.
When an American loses control over his anger, he can be said to fly off the han-
die. The frontier bully put a chip on his shoulder, where the expression chip on
oneSshoulder today means "an inclination to fight or quanel." Backwoodsmen
hun ted for racoons or opossums, and when a 'coon or 'possum hound was on
a false scent, it was barking up the wrong tree. Hence the metaphor bark up the
wrong tree, meaning "to be mistaken."
CHAPTER TWENTY 299
To assert that phrases originating with miners ... were important to
the development of American English is not to say that farmer's
terms (slop bucket/swill pail, whiffletree, hay doodle/stack/cock,
roasting ears, leadhorse) were not. A test of the ability to express
metaphorical concepts in other contexts might, however, tend to
favor the other group.
Mining
Mining expressions were also adopted as metaphors for aspects of American
life. The following is a selection of these metaphors:
strike oil ("get rich"), pan aut ("tum aut weIl, succeed"), hit pay dirt
("discover a source of wealth"), peter out, strike it rich, stake a claim
to, diggings (or digs), big strike, lucky strike.
Many of these examples have to do wi th the concept of success; that is, they
indicate that someone is successful in some activity.
Farming
The backwoodsmen, the cowboys, and the miners were soon followed by
farmers on the frontier. Interestingly, the imagery and vocabulary of farming
did not have an important impact on other domains; that is, it was not used
to the same degree as the others as a metaphorical source domain by Americans.
DiIlard (1976:xix) observes in this connection:
In other words, Dillard suggests that the vocabulary of farming was a less
important source domain of American metaphors than that of (gold) mining
and oil driIling.
Railroad
In chapter three we talked about the significance of the railroad in the disap-
pearance of the frontier and the West. It also functioned as a source domain for
the understanding of several American concepts. Some examples include to rail-
road ("to coerce"), to sidetrack ("to divert fiom the main issue"), streamlining,
jerk water town, and whistle stop tour.
CHAPTER TWENTY 301
..
Additional source domains
There are many domains or concepts that developed after the frontier was
closed. These more recent domains provide additional source domains tor
comprehending aspects of American culture. We mention two of these.
Automobile
As was noted in chapter three, American culture is frequently referred to as a "car,
or wheel, cultUre" due to the importance of the auromobile in American life. For
example, the metaphorical expression jpin one'swheels indicates a lack of progress
in an endeavor and mileage means "the benefit one gets from something," as in
1got a lot ofmileage out of this. Interestingly, several current slang idioms that
have to do with sexuality also take the automobile as their source domain. The
idiom to checkones oil means "to have sexual intercourse" and when someone
has his motor running, he is "sexually aroused."
Drug culture
Drug culture provides another contemporary source domain for Americans.
The expressions of drug culture that are made use of in other domains have pri~
marily to do with either "loss of control" or "very pleasant experience." Thus,
we find metaphors such as spaced out, mind-blowing, out of this world, freak out;
zonk out from drug culture being used in an extendedor more general sense.
Some target domains
So far in this section we have looked at particular source domains that are
uniquely or at least characteristically American domains for the understanding
of various areas of American cultUre and society (the target domains). The
expressions generated by these source domains (like the frontier) may have
been borrowed by other cultures, but they seem to originate from the United
States. Below we will consider some characteristically American target
domains and see how they are metaphorically comprehended. The first of
these is immigration.
Immigration
The role of immigration was discussed in chapter two. This is a crucial aspect
of American society. This is also an aspect that has generated a great deal of
controversy. The main issue has been for a long time: Should America allow
Democracy
more or rewer immigrants into the United Stares? A corollary of this issue is
the American attitude to immigratioIl. We can get a sense of this if wc look at
the major conceptual metaphor for immigration. The meuphor is "immigra-
rion is a Hood." In other words, mu ch of the understanding of this aspect of
A.merican hisrory derives from how the concept of Hood is comprehended.
Some of the terms used include flow, influx, tzde,wave, de/uge, and, of course,
fiood.All these disasters can then drown or swamp the people who are already
in the United States. Given this negative consequence of the metaphotical
image, it becames natural to apply sieves for immigrants. These are just some
of the examples that are used to talk about the process of immigration in terms
of the "Hood" metaphor (examples taken from Frick, 1990). They seem to
reveal an unfriendly attitude roward immigrants - especially if they come in
large numbers and from certain ethnic groups (seeFrick, 1990).
The United States has always been regarded as the best example, or even the
example, of a democratic society. In conceptualizing American democracy and
the liberry that Americans enjoy, authars use a variety of conceptual metaphors.
For example, Stevenson (1987: 10) uses a "house" metaphor for American democ-
racy, with a family, Americans, living in the house. Debates about problems in
American society are viewed as family fights inside the house. However, as is fit-
ting for a democratic society, the fights are going on in the house with aLI the
windows open. Stevenson states that "SpecitIc laws require that the windows be
kept open" (p. 10). Moreover, the application of the metaphor continues, "The
press, too, does not deal kindly with the ftmiLy fight, and is known for its aggres-
siveness" (p. 10). This metaphor gives us a positive evaluation of democracy in
America. However, not alI evaluations of American democracy are necessarily
positive. Perhaps the best known foreign commentator, Alexis de Tocqueville
(1835/1987), makes us see American democracy in a less favorable light.
Tocqueville uses the common metaphor "society as a person," and given that
metaphor he portrays American democracy as a "highly defective person" that
cannot control its passions, that is often irrational, whose activities are unre-
strained, and so on (Kvecses, 1994).
America
The concept of America itself has undergone a number of interpretations.
Maybe the best known of these is the notion that "America is a melting pot."
The idea of melting the various nationalities and races together goes back to
the beginning of the history of the United States. The term me/ting pot was
CHAPTER TWENTY 303
J.pplied to America by Isncl Zangvvill as rhe ride of a play produced in 1908.
Ir is an interesring question how precisely this meraphor has been employed
through the cenruries: Who were included in the melting pot?; ,vho were
. excluded?; how much melting or assimilation took place?; was rhere a domi-
Danr elemenr in the pot to which the others assimilated?; which parts of the
United Stares carne closest to the ideal of complete "melting"?; and so forth.
The opposite of the notion of the melting pot is the view that America is
a "mosaic." This view emphasizes the idea that America is a collection of sep-
arate ethnic groups. The idea of America as a nation of various ethnic groups
fitting together in a mosaic, rather than "melted together," arose in the wake
of renewed inrerest in ethniciry in the 1960s. A currently more popular
metaphor is America as "tossed salad."
Some conceptual metonymies
American imaginativeness manifests itself in the creation of new words with the
help of metonymic processes as weIl. Metonymies can be given as "stand for"
relationships berween rwo enrities. Thus, in a metonymy, one enriry or thing is
said to stand for another emiry or rhing; We have seen some individuallinguistic
examples of metonymy, for instance, in the chapter on verbal prudery.
However, just like metaphors, metonymies can also be systematic, that. is, they
can occur in systems (see Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Kvecses and Radden,
1998). One of the favorite American metonymic processes is the one in which
a part of alonger expression is used to stand for the whole expression. Here are
some examples for the "part of an expression for the whole expression"
metonymy in American English:
Oanish
shocks
wallets
Ridgemont High
the States
for
for
for
for
for
Oanish pastry
shock absorbers
wallet-sized photos
Ridgemom High School
the United States
Some productive metonymic systems
In a study of nouns that became verbs in English, Clark and Clark (1979) dis-
tinguished among eight rypes. The three most productive rypes account for the
majoriry of their more than one thousand examples. Most of their examples were
drawn from American English. The three rypes are what Clark and Clark call
"locatum verbs," "Iocation verbs," and "agent verbs." We can reinterpret their
findings in such a way that the groups of verbs that they identifY as locatum
ground the planes, bench the players, doormat the boots, shelve the
books, blacklist the director, sick-list the patient, front-page the
scanda!, headline the story, floor the opponent, sidewalk the merchan-
dise, the boat landed, fie!d the candidates, jail the prisoner, house
the people, kenne! the dog, closet the clothes, silo the com, garage
the car, film the action, photograph the children, bed the child,
porch the newspaper, mothball the sweaters, foornote her colleagues,
sun oneself, floor the acce!erator
.
verbs, location verbs, and agent verbs are in fact productive conceptUal
metonymies. Many of the verbs be!ow are not conventionalized in the lexicon
of English, but most of them would be understood by native speakers.
Locatum verbs: N -V
In the case of 10catUm verbs, a no un indi cating an object that moves toward
another object becomes a verb. Here are some examples:
blanket the bed, sheet the furniture, newspaper the shelves, walipaper
the wall, litter the highway, parquet the floor, butter the bread, tenant
the building, sweater the child, initial the memo, straitjacket the
patient, beard the actor, lemon the tea, gas the car, cream the cofiee,
Christmas-gili each other, rotten-egg the speaker, billboard the high-
way, tUnne! the mountain
In all of these examples, the noun-object moves toward another object. This
can be reinterpreted as the metonymy "the object of motion stands for the
motion itself." Thus the blanket, the sheet, the newspaper, the wallpaper, and
so on stands for the motion of the blanket, the shea, the newspaper, the wall-
paper, and so on.
Location verbs: N-V
In the case of location verbs, a noun indicating the destination of motion
becomes a verb. Examples of this process include:
Here again, the no un indicating destination is used to stand for the motion
itse!f. The appropriate conceptUal metonymy seems to be "the destination of a
moving object stands for the motion directed to that destination."
304 AME RIC AN ENGLIS H
British and American attitudes to imaginativeness
.' ' .
Agent verbs: N-V
With agent verbs, a noun indicating a rypical agent (or doer) becomes a verb.
Here are some examples:
burcher the cow, jockey the horse, referee the game, aurhor the
book, to housewife, mother someone, father someone, unde
someone, bully the children, chairman the department, don't
Bogart that joint, houseguest wi th the Joneses, quarterback for the
Giants, tourist through the East Co ast, watchdog the house, out-
fox his followers, chicken out of a fight, hare down the road, cat it
up the waterpipe
In this case, the noun indicating an agent becomes a verb indicating a char-
acteristic activiry or properry of that agent. We can account for examples of
this kind with the following conceptual meronymy: "the agent stands for a
characteristic activiry or properry of that agent."
The general point that 1 wish to make here is that one important aspect of
imaginativeness in American English is meronymy. There are distinct rypes of
metonymic processes, and some of these contribure significantly to the imagi-
native character of American English.
There might be an interesting difference between the British and American atti-
tude to imaginative aspects of language. While it seems that many Americans
are attracted to colorfuI, vivid figurative speech and writing, some Brirons are
less enthusiastic about it. The British linguist Strevens (1972:60) writes:
Americans onen express pride in the vividness and vitaliry of their
speech and writing, and contrast it with what they regard as the staid
and conservative usages of British English. The British, for their
part, tend to regard much American writing and speech as brash,
highly~coloured, even vulgar.
In this and previous chapters, we have seen that vivid, picturesque idioms per-
vade many areas of language use in America. Imaginativeness has always been
a hallmark of American English. This imaginative inventiveness may be
looked upon as being a good or a bad thing. There is controversy about the
issue both inside and outside the United States. The issue may also have ro do
CHAPTER TWENTY 305
30
Try to check how pervasive the "frontier metaphor" is in American
Englisho Collect as many examples as you can and try to determine which
aspects of American culture and life they are used to understando
. .
with prescriptivism in the use of language. Srrevens (1972) telIs us that the
British follow established usage more so than Americans, and that this creates
differing opinions about imaginativeness in the two countries:
.0. to the speaker brought up to regard deparrure from established
usage as something rare and probably undesirable, vivid new expres-
sions convey a quality which he may not value highly, except in
works of literatureo
On the other hand, the situation must be more complicatedo At the beginning
of this chapter, we saw that the re must be a suftlciently large number of Britons
who do like and hence adopt the imaginative language use of Americans. One of
the major reasons the British take over Americanisms is the highly imaginative -
primarily metaphorical- character of American English (which is, of course, not
to say that British English is not metaphorical; alllalf'gl.lages and dialects are).
If this view expressed above by Strevens is b)T.and large correct, it also
means that the British see a wider gap between the ordinary, everyday and the
literary use of language and that the realm of the imaginative, for them, is in
"high" literatureo In contrast, Americans have long been characterized by tall
talk and grandiloquence - ways of speaking that give imaginativeness a central
place in the realm of ordinary language useo But this comparison between the
British and Americans is of course exrremely tentative, since we lack empirical
sociolinguistic studies that would enable us to draw more serious conclusionso
study questions and activities
1.
You have seen that many American slang expressions are metaphorical.
(You probably believed so far that only high literature is pervaded by
metaphoro) What could possibly be the explanation for this?
2.
Read a few longer arricles in American newpapers and magazines about
American politicso Find the examples that come from the domain of
sporrsoWhat do these sporrs metaphors tell you about American politics?
Can you imagine politicallife without them?
306 AMERI CAN ENG LI SH
CHAPTER TWENTY 307
. .
4.
America has been conceprualized by a set of successive metaphorical
source domains, one of them being the "me!ting pot" metaphor. Find
other, older and newer, metaphors for America and analyze them. What
changes in attirude do they reflect?
5.
The following conversation demonstrates how misunderstanding can
occur from the American love of imaginative language. (The conversation
is raken from Andrew F. Murphy, Cultural Encounters in the USA.)
Mahmoud: (To a passing conductor) Excuse me. Is this Amtrak
schedule correct? Will we arrive in Chicago at three-thirty?
Conductor: You got it. (The conductor walks away.)
Mahmoud: (To a woman sitting beside him) I got what?
Passenger: You've got the correct information. It's a short way of
saying "you're correct."
Mahmoud: I see. I srudied English in Iran, bur some of the idio ms
and pronunciation are srill difficult for me.
Passenger: ls this your first trip to the Windy City?
Mahmoud: I beg your pardon?
Passenger: Chicago. I think they call it that because there's so much
wind.
Mahmoud: Yes, ir's my first trip. I'm touring the counrry by train.
The V.S. countryside is beauriful.
Passenger: It certainly is, especially in my neck of the woods. I'm
from Alabama. Do you alI plan to trave! down that way?
Mahmoud: I'm traveling alone.
(Murphy, 1991:22)
Find the cases where misunderstanding occurs. Oiscuss what these cases
have to do with the use of imaginative language.


US A Changing Culture: Capturing some tension points Uwe Pohl

Reading:


3
Twenty-First -CenturyGateways
AnIntroduction
AUDREYSINGER
S
traddling two centuries, the ten-year period between 1995 and 2005
carne to mean dramatically different circumstances for immigrants
residing in the United States. Immigrants arriving in the late 1990s were
drawn to a soaring economy bolstered by growth in "new economy" jobs,
especially in the information technology sector. This in tum spurred popu-
lati on growth in many urban and suburban communities. Attracted by the
demand for workers in construction, manufacturing, and service sectors,
immigrants began to locate in areas with little or no history of immigra-
tion. Although older industrial areas-the Detroits, Pittsburghs, and Cleve-
lands of this country-have suffered job and population loss, metropolitan
areas such as Phoenix, Washington, and Austin saw their new economy
sectors boom, and their immigrant population along wi th them.
Thus, as the twentieth century carne to a close, the United States experi-
enced an extraordinary transformation of its population. More immi-
grants, legal and illegal combined, arrived during the decade of the 1990s
than in any other decade on record. By 2000 the number of immigrants liv-
ing in the United States was estimated to be 31 million.
In large part because of the strong economy of the 1990s, immigrants,
legal and illegal, were, if not welcomed, at least tolerated in their new
homes. This scenario abruptly changed, however, as the nati on crossed
over into the twenty-first century. The technology bubble burst, followed
by a mild recession, resulting in a rise in unemployment from the historic
lows of the late 1990s. Although employment levels are back up, other
global and domestic events of the first years of the twenty-first century
have fundamentally changed public attitudes toward immigrants.
First carne the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Because the attacks
were undertaken by foreign nationals from various Middie Eastern coun-
tries, immigrants are now, more than ever, considered a security risk. Since
March 2003 the United States has been engaged in a war in Iraq wi th no
end in sight. Finally, the public's approval of the Bush administration is at a
low point.! The uncertainty of the war, uneasiness over the economy, and
the public's loss of confidence in the federal government have produced an
insecure populace.
As the public deals wi th this diffuse set of fears, immigrants have been
simultaneously cast under a more watchful eye. As this book goes to press,
a national debate over reforming immigration policy, currently stalled in
Congress-and stoked by talk radio and national anti-immigrant groups-
has raised anxieties over the levels of unauthorized migration and the eco-
nomic and social consequences of continued immigration.2
The result of these changing processes is that many new local areas of
immigrant settlement are grappling with the fiscai costs of new streams of
immigrants and the social costs of integrating them. Immigration debates-
in recent decades limited to certain states such as California and New
York-have spread along with the residential redistribution of immigrants.
Local officials in many new settlement areas, in Georgia, North Carolina,
Virginia and elsewhere, are under pressure to "do something" about immi-
gration. In the absence of federal reform, state and local governments are
facing an overwhelming sense of loss of control, and many are proposing
(and sometimes passing) laws and ordinances that are designed to control
immigrants. Often these policies are in the guise of local law enforcement,
housing regulations, or employment policies. While most of the proposals
and new policies are directed at undocumented immigrants, the public
debates surrounding them are socially divisive and contribute to an unwel-
come environment for all immigrants. Not all of the new local proposals
are punitive, of course; some areas have longer-term goals of integrating
immigrants and their children into communities. The backlash is the most
intense, however, in many of the areas with the freshest and fastest-paced
immigration.
4 AUDREY SINGER
The story of the United States, as it has been told many times over, is a
story of immigration. That story typically begins on Ellis Island or the
ports of California, wi th arriving immigrants heading immediately to eth-
nic enclaves in cities such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, or San
INTRODUCTlON 5
...
Francisco-to the Little Italys, Chinatowns, or Lower East Sides. There
they set up businesses, build churches or synagogues, and send their chil-
dren to the local public schools. The neighborhoods quickly become desti-
nation points for future waves of family and friends, as the newcomers
relay their good fortune to friends and family in their home country. Even-
tuaIly, following the American Dream, the first generation moves up and
out to the suburbs, leaving room for the next wave.
HistoricaIly, these neighborhoods were primarily European in origin.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, newer waves of immigrants from
Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia would locate in many of the same
neighborhoods once occupied by the Slavs, Germans, Italians, and others in
a process of ethnic succession. In more established immigrant cities, foreign-
born newcomers simply settled in existing neighborhoods on the wane,
trans forming classic European enclaves such as Chicago's Bavarian Little
Village into La Villita, a Mexican barrio, and New York's Lower East Side
shtetl into the renamed Dominican and Puerto Rican Loisida neighborhood.
These areas-called in turn ghettos, barrios, or enclaves-have both
negative and positive connotations. On the negative side, they are often
viewed today as isolated areas with low-quality ho using and services that
restrict the incorporation of immigrants into the mainstream. They are
seen as a defensive ethnic survival strategy and a destination of last resort
for people with limited means. On the positive side, they offer new arrivals
support, familiarity, and linguistic and cultural ease into a new society.
Enclave neighborhoods represent both stability (that is, a constant presence
that "institutionalizes" the immigrant experience) and {lux as continuous
waves of newcomers enter the neighborhood and use its services and struc-
tures at the same time that others are moving out to better opportunities
elsewhere.
This story of ethnic enclaves in the heart of major gateway cities has
been fundamentally altered with the restructuring of the D.S. economy, the
decentralization of cities, and the growth of the suburbs as major employ-
ment centers. As industrial cities in the Northeast and Midwest began to
lose population at mid-century, the Iure of the suburbs enticed upwardly
mobile, largely white families to relocate.3 Thus, cities such as Buffalo,
Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh have suffered continuous population
and economic decline since 1950.4 Other metropolitan areas with strong
economic performance have grown during the same period, including the
Sun Belt cities of Dallas, Fort Worth, Phoenix, Austin, and Charlotte. A
third set of cities once in decline were revived during the 1980s and 1990s,
due to strong metropolitan-wide economic growth. This group includes
Boston, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, as weil as Atlanta, Min-
neapolis, and Portland, Oregon.5
Therefore the economic fortunes of metropolitan areas are tied to popu-
lati on growth, and by the end of the century, local economies that were
more diverse and included knowledge-based industries tended to attract
the most migrants, both those who moved from within the United States
and those who carne from abroad.6 Economic growth in certain sectors,
and decline in others, has had an imp act on where immigrants have
located. Thus, while older industrial areas have suffered population loss
related to the decline in manufacturing jobs (and no new jobs to replace
them), metro areas like Phoenix and Austin saw their "new economy" sec-
tors grow, and their immigrant populations along with it.
The patterns of economic growth of the 1990s are partly responsible for
the shift in settlement patterns of immigrants. Another source of growth
and change in the foreign-born population in recent decades is refugee
resettlement. Since 1980, when the U.S. refugee resettlement program
began, the leading refugee destinations have shifted away from traditional
immigrant gateways to new areas. Although New York, Los Angeles, and
Chicago still accommodate the most refugees among metropolitan areas,
Seattle, San Jose, Washington, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Atlanta, Sacramento,
and Portland resettled large numbers, fundamentally shifting their posi-
tions as immigrant gateways.7
6 AUDREY SINGER
TheRiseof NewImmigrant Gateways
As of March 2005 an estimated 35.7 million immigrants (legal and unau-
thorized) were living in the United States.8 Map 1-1 shows the states wi th
the highest immigrant shares and the most recent foreign-born growth
across states for 2005. Most of the states wi th the highest proportion of
immigrants also have the largest absolute numbers of immigrants. Califor-
nia has close to 10 million immigrants, the greatest number among ali
states, and it also has the highest percentage of immigrants, at 27 percent.
New York, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey follow, each with weil over 1.5
million, and topped by New York with almost 4 million. Although Nevada
ranks high on the proportion of its population that is foreign-born (17 per-
cent), it is home to fewer than a half-million immigrants. Among states with
a high percentage of immigrants arriving since 2000, the re is a decidedly
southeastern puli: Georgia and North Carolina each have weil over a half-
million immigrant residents, more than 30 percent of whom arrived
between 2000 and 2005. In many southeastern states, agricultural jobs, as
INTRODUCTlON 7
'.
Map1-1. TheForeign-BornPopulationinthe UnitedStates,2005
Percent loreign-born
1.1-4.5
United States = 12.4
4.6-12.4
- 12.5-15.9
_16.0-27.2
Percent olloreign-born
who entered after 2000
~ 30 or above
Source: U.S. CensusBureau, 2005 American Community Survey.
weil as those in construction and meat and poultry processing and packing
plants, attract immigrants, who are changing the face of rural communities.9
State trends are revealing and have relevance for policymaking; how-
ever, immigration is chiefly an urban phenomenon. In 2005 nearly 96 per-
cent of ali immigrants lived in a city or suburb within a metropolitan area.
In that year 37 percent of America's immigrants were living in metropoli-
tan New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago alone. However, these
same four metro areas housed nearly ha If of ali immigrants (46 percent) as
recently as the 1990s.
As a consequence of historicaI patterns of immigrant settlement in a lim-
ited number of cities, social science immigration research has overwhelm-
ingly been concerned wi th the economic and social impact of immigrants
either at the national level or within the major cities of settlement. Thus,
there is a large body of research on New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles,
8 AUDREY SINGER
yet comparatively little is known about places like metropolitan Atlanta,
Dallas, Fort Worth, and Las Vegas, all of which quintupled their foreign-
born populations during the past twenty years.l0 As Roger Waldinger
states, historically the study of cities was largely the study of immigrants;
however, he notes, "how the particular characteristics of the immigrant-
receiving areas imp inge on the newcomers is a question immigration
researchers rarely raise."l1
A new wave of research has begun to focus on the patterns and related
process es of immigrants in new destination areas. 12Many of these studies
tend to focus on recent dramatic change in rural areas or small towns,
however, or on a specific immigrant origin group.13 Moreover, comparative
metropolitan studies are in short supply.14Several important works based
on older census data describe trends during the 1980s, when the focus was
still on just a limited list of cities and suburbs. These studies include
Richard Alba and John Logan's explorations of metropolitan immigrant
settlement in New York and Los Angeles and Waldinger and colleagues'
comparative examination of immigrants in five cities.15 Other in-depth
studies of the suburbanization of immigrants tend to focus on a single
place, such as John Horton's study of Monterey Park, a suburb of Los
Angeles wi th a majority Chinese population, or Sarah Mahler's study of
Salvadorans on suburban Long Island.16
This book contributes to this body of research by focusing on a new
class of immigrant gateways that have changed-startlingly so-because of
very recent immigration. These gateways have only recently emerged or re-
emerged as major immigrant destinations. Many have seen their immigrant
population triple or quadruple in size in recent decades. We name these
metropolitan areas the twenty-first-century gateways. They are likely to be
viewed as second-tier, since the size of their immigrant population is
smaller than well-established gateways such as New York, Chicago, and
Los Angeles. In the chapters that follow, we focus on ni ne new immigrant
gateways: Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Dallas, Minneapolis-St. Paul,
Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, and Washington, D.C. Each of these places
was nearly entirely native-born in 1970. Now, these nine metropolitan
areas, along with 11 others, have emerged as some of the fastest-growing
immigrant destinations among large metropolitan areas (map 1-2).
Our identification of twenty-first-century gateways for this book is
based on a historicai typology of urban immigrant settlement in the United
StatesY Based on trends in the size and growth of the immigrant popula-
tion over the course of the twentieth century, this typology includes six
immigrant gateway types.18
INTRODUCTION 9
Map1-2. Immigrant GatewayMetropolitan Areas
... Twenty-first-centurygatewaysdiscussed in book
.&. Other twenty-tirst-centurygateways
Established and tormer gateways
Source: Author.
-Former gateways, such as Buffalo and Pittsburgh, attracted consider-
able numbers of immigrants in the early 1900s but no longer do.
-Continuous gateways, such as New York and Chicago, are long-
established destinations for immigrants and continue to receive large num-
bers of the foreign-born.
-Post- World War II gateways, such as Houston, Los Angeles, and
Miami, began attracting immigrants in large numbers only during the past
fifty years or less.
Together, the continuous and the post-World War II gateways will be
referred to as established immigrant gateways here (map 1-2).
-Emerging gateways are those places that have had rapidly growing
immigrant populations during the past twenty-five years alone. Atlanta,
Dallas-Fort Worth, and Washington are prime examples.
-Re-emerging gateways, such as Minneapolis-Sr. Paul and Seattle,
began the twentieth century wi th astrong attraction for immigrants,
wan ed as destinations during the middie of the century, but are now re-
emerging as immigrant gateways.
gateways notes 2008.09.08.
Notes
1. Megan Thee, "The PolIs," New York Times, July 10,2007.
2. Comprehensive immigration reform is stalled in Congress as ofthis writing in autumn of 2007. An overhaul
of the way U.S. immigration laws function, including increasing border and interior enforcement, a legalization
program, a temporary worker program, and visa reforms, was vigorously debated before being defeated.
3. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford University Press,
1985); Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth 1820-2000 (New York: Vintage
Books,2004).
4. Jennifer S. Vey, Restoring Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing America 's Older Industrial Cities
(Brookings, 2007); Myron Orfield, American Metropolitics:The New Suburban Reality (Brookings, 2007).
5. Jordan Rappaport, "US. Urban Decline and Growth, 1950 to 2000," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank
ofKansas City (Third Quarter, 2003).
6. William H. Frey, "Metro America in the New Century: Metropolitan and Central City Demographic Shifts
since 2000," Brookings Institution, 2005.
7. Refugee resettlement trends do not necessarily mirror other immigrant streams. With the exception of
Washington, each ofthese metro areas placed higher in rank for refugee resettlement than for total foreign-born
stock, indicating that refugees played a significant role in increased immigration. As discussed in several of the
chapters that follow, the arrival of relatively large numbers of refugees in metropolitan areas with a small
foreign-born population may prove challenging for both refugee newcomers and their new places of residence.
See Audrey Singer and Jill H. Wilson, "From There to Here: Refugee Resettlement in Metropolitan America"
(Brookings, 2006).
8. Demographer Jeffrey Passel has published the most widely respected and cited estimates of immigrant legal
status. He notes that in March 2005, the US. foreignborn population fell into the following four categories: 35
percent naturalized U.S. citizens, 32 percent permanent legal status, 30 percent unauthorized to be in the United
States, and 3 percent temporary legal residents. See Jeffrey S. Passel, The Size and Characteristics of the
UnauthorizedMigrantPopulationin the Us. (Washington:PewHispanicCenter,2006).
9. WilliamKandel and John Cromartie, New Patterns of Hispanic Settlement inRural America (US. Department
of Agriculture, 2004); William Kandel and Emilio Parrado, "lndustrial Transformation and Hispanic Migration
to the American South: The Case of the Poultry Industry," in Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places: AGeography of
Regional and Cultural Diversity, edited by Daniel D. Arreola (University of Texas Press, 2004); Heather A.
Smith and Owen 1. Furuseth, eds., Latinos in the New South: Transformations of Place (Burlington, VI.: Ashgate
Publishing, 2006); and Greg Anrig Jr. and Tova Andrea Wang, eds., Immigration 's New Frontiers: Experiences
from the Emerging Gateway States (New York: Century Foundation, 2006).
10. Conditions in more traditional immigrant gateways are well represented, including the classic work of
William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1927), along with more contemporary works such as Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, eds.,
Ethnic Los Angeles (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1996); Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick, City
on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (University of California Press, 1993); Roger Waldinger, Strangers
at the Gates: Newlmmigrants in Urban America (University of California Press, 2001); Nancy Foner, From Ellis
Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration (Yale University Press and New York: Russell
Sage Foundation, 2000); Silvia Pedraza and Rubn G. Rumbaut, eds., Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race,
and Ethnicityin America (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1996).
ll. Roger Waldinger, "Immigration and Urban Change," Annual Review ofSociology 15 (1989): 211-32.
12. Elzbieta M. Gozdziak and Susan F. Martin, eds., Beyond the Gateway:lmmigrants in a Changing America
(Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005); Victor Zfiga and Rubn Hernndez-Len, eds., New Destinations:
Mexican 1mmigration in the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005); Smith and Furuseth,
Latinos in the New South; Anrig and Wang, Immigration 's New Frontiers:Experiences from the Emerging
Gateway States.
gateways notes 2008.09.08.
13. See, for example,Katharine M. Donato, Melissa Stainback,and Carl L. Bankston Ill, "The Economic
Incorporation of Mexican Immigrants in Southern Louisiana: A Tale of Two Cities," in New Destinations of
Mexican Jmmigration in the United States, edited by Zfiga and Hernndez-Len, pp. 76-99; and Rubn
Hernndez-Lenand Victor Zfiga, "MakingCarpet by the Mile: The Emergenceof a MexicanImmigrant
Community in an Industrial Region of the U.S. Historic South," Social Science Quarterly 81, no. 1 (2002): 49-
66.
14. For international comparisons, see Takeyuki Tsuda, ed., Local Citizenship inRecent Countries of
Jmmigration (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006); Jeffi-eyReitz, ed., Host Societies and the Reception of
Jmmigrants (University of California, Center for Comparative Immigration Research, 2003); Blair Ruble,
Creating Diversity Capital: Transnational Migrants in Montreal, Washington, and Kyiv(Washington: Woodrow
Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
15. Richard D. Alba and others, "Strangers Next Door: Immigrant Groups and Suburbs in Los Angeles and New
York,"inA NationDivided:Diversity,Jnequality, andCommunityinAmericanSociety, editedby Phyllis Moen,
Henry Walker, and Donna Dempster-McClain (Cornell University Press, 1999); and Richard D. Alba and others,
"Immigrant Groups in the Suburbs: A Reexamination of Suburbanization and Spatial Assimilation," American
Socialogicai Review 64 (1999): 446-60; Waldinger, Strangers at the Gates.
16. Sarah J. Mahler, Salvadorans in Suburbia: Symbiosis and Conjlict (Boston: Allyn & Bacon: 1996); John
Horton, The Politics of Diversity: Jmmigration, Resistance, and Change in Monterey Park, California (Temple
University Press, 1995).
17. In general, gateways are detined as metropolitan areas with Census 2000 populations over one million. The
typology includes six immigrant gateway types (see Audrey Singer, The Rise of New Jmmigrant Gateways
[Brookings, 2004]): Farmer gateways have a higher proportion of population foreign-born between 1900 and
1930 than the national average, followed by be10w-average foreign-born percentages in every decade through
2000. Continuous gateways have above-average foreign-born percentages for every decade, 1900-2000. Post-
World War 11gateways have 10wforeign-born percentages unti1 after 1950, followed by higher-than-national-
average foreign-born percentages in every decade through 2000. Emerging gateways have very low foreign-born
percentages untill970, followed by higher proportions fiom 1980 onward. Re-emerging gateways have foreign-
born percentages exceeding the national average fiom 1900 to 1930, followed by below average percentages
unti! 1980, after which they experienced rapid increases. Preemerging gateways have very low foreign-born
population percentages for most of the twentieth century, with rapid growth after 1990. In addition, continuous,
post-World War II, emerging, and re-emerging gateways must meet the following criteria: foreign-born
populations greater than 200,000, and either foreign-born percentages higher than the 2000 national average
(11.1 percent) or foreign-born growth rates higher than the 1990-2000 national average (57.4 percent), or both.
18. Since the original immigrant gateways analysis was conducted, metropolitan area detinitions were
overhauled by the Oftice of Management and Budget. Under the new classitication system, adopted in 2003,
many metropolitan areas have undergone changes in territory and population. The most common changes
involved the addition of new counties to an existing metropolitan area, and the combination of two or more
metro areas to form a new, larger metropolis, such as Dallas-Fort Worth. Other metropolitan areas were split,
such as Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina. See William H. Frey and others, "Tracking Metropolitan America
into the Twenty-First Century: A Field Guide to the New Metropolitan and Micropolitan Detinitions,"
Brookings, 2004. Many of the forty-tive metropolitan areas included in Singer, "The Rise of New Immigrant
Gateways," have a new metropolitan detinition. For the comparative metropolitan analyses in this chapter,
thenewdetinitionswereusedfor atotal ofthirty-sevenmetropolitanareas.


AUS Nature and People Cecilia Gall, Dorottya Holl

Reading:

(Chapter 23: The coming of age. pp.332-351)


AUS Social Issues, Language and Arts Cecilia Gall, Dorottya Holl

Readings:


1
After 200 years, what sort of a place is Australia and what sort of people are Australians? Manning Clark,
emeritus professor of history and a visiting fellow in the department of history at the Australian National
University in Canberra, gives his views.

Decision time for this new generation
*

On May 13, 1787, the First Fleet sailed from Portsmouth to Botany Bay to establish a colony for the
punishment and reformation of British convicts. The Governor of that colony, Captain Arthur Phillip, did not
receive any letter from London until June 3, 1790.
Two hundred years later, human beings in Australia have only to dial a number to begin a conversation
instantly with human beings in any other part of the world. This is possibly the greatest revolution that has
occurred during the first 200 years of the occupation of Australia by Europeans.
Isolation from the main centres of European culture in London, Paris, Rome, Moscow and New York was
one of the main causes of the inferiority complex from which Australians suffered for the first 150 years of white
settlement in the ancient continent. The electric telegraph, the telephone, overseas cables, wireless telegraphy,
the aeroplane and television ended the isolation.
The other cause of the Australian inferiority complex was material backwardness. In the early years of
British occupation of the country, Australia was cast in the role of producer of wool for British manufacturers.
Australia was to be a sheep-walk some went so far as to prophesy that it would be a sheep- walk forever.
Then, briefly, Australia became a goldmine a quarry for exploitation by other people.
Material backwardness aggravated the inferiority complex caused by isolation. The Australians, rather like
the Russians and the Americans in the middle of the 19th century, thought of Europe as the land of holy
wonders. Europe was the centre of the circle of civilisation and Australia on the perimeter.
Australia was a colony which became a province of British civilisation. In things of the mind and the spirit, Au-
stralians were borrowers. They were also often grovellers. At all their public ceremonies, they borrowed words
and music from the culture of the Old World. In all their shrines to honour the heroes of the wars in which
Australians fought they placed words originally written thousands of miles away across the sea ''Their name
liveth forever more" or "Lest we forget".
Australians of previous generations hungered for approval from abroad. They were both braggarts about
themselves and their achievements and grovellers before higher civilisation. They were Australian by birth but
British in their culture. Spiritually they were exiles. So long as they remained British in loyalty and sentiment they
seemed condemned to remain second-rate Europeans living far away from their spiritual home. There were
advantages in being British. The British Navy, it was believed, provided protection against invasion. Australia's
small population could not possibly provide the naval and military forces needed to deter an invader. .
The British also bought Australian produce and provided the capital required for the development of the
country. British institutions, it was believed, ensured a higher standard of material well-being, a higher degree of
liberty, of tolerance, and of law and order than any other society.
Then there was sentiment: the British Isles were the mother country of 98 per cent of Australians.
Security, material well-being and sentiment were the links binding Australians to Britain. That was why, from the
time the British in Australia first began to talk about what Australia was and what it was going to be, they spoke
of it as being British.
As long ago as 1823, William Charles Wentworth, Australias first great native son since the coming of the
British, wrote of Australia as a New Britannia. Sir Henry Parkes, known to some as the Father of Federation,
spoke in 1890 of "the crimson thread of kinship which runs through us all. In the 20th century, Sir Robert
Menzies, Australia's longest-serving prime minister, told Australians many times: "I'm dyed-in-the-wool British,"
Men and women who held that view about Australia also tended to believe that there was no need to
make any radical change in the ownership and distribution of wealth.
Australians, they believed, had created a society in which it was possible for anyone to fulfill the
Australian dream; any person of ability and industry could rise from the bottom to the top: in Australia there was
genuine equality of opportunity. Stanley Bruce, the conservative Prime Minister from 1923 to 1929, was fond of
telling people that one member of his Cabinet had begun his working life selling newspapers.
Not everyone shared this view of Australia as an outpost of British civilisation in the south-west Pacific,
or believed that Australian society did not need to be changed. As early as 1819 some were talking of "the land,
boys, we live in"; some were asserting that Australia belonged to Australians, and not to the British.
By the last quarter of the 19th century, some took their stand behind the slogan "Australia for the

*
This article was published in: Australia Now - Bicentennial Edition. Vol. 12, No.4.Canberra: Promotion Australia Publication
1988.
2
Australians". At the same time, members of the early Labor movement were talking of their hopes to enter the
parliaments of the colonies "to make and unmake social conditions".
Australians, they believed, could banish from "under their skies" all the Old World errors and lies.
Australians could build a better society "in the land that belongs to you".
But there was a difficulty. Australians boasted that they had dispensed with the social conventions of
the Old World, but they showed no sign of ever developing a revolutionary consciousness. No radical group
ever grew into a mass movement in Australia.
Every time the Australian voters were asked to decide between the conservatives and the radicals in a
crucial election, they chose the conservatives. They did it in 1917, 1931, 1949 and 1975. There is no sign they
would not do it again.
The Australian Labor Party has learned that the only way to avoid a long period in the political
wilderness is to be pragmatic and to eschew ideology, for that way electoral madness lies, and it knows it.
The truth of the matter is, a society of immigrants and their descendants, a society in which the working classes
have embraced the petty bourgeois values of house and land ownership, and in which there is a huge affluent
middle class, is strongly bound to the defence of the existing social order. That explains the central paradox
about Australia: it has the appearance of being radical; it has the reality of being conservative.
Yet at the same time the argument for the British connection has become irrelevant. The aeroplane has
superseded the battleship. The dependence-on-the-British-Navy argument went to the bottom of the sea when
the Japanese air force sank two British battleships off the east coast of Malaya in December 1941.
Britain has also ceased to be Australia's best trading partner. Japan has taken this place. The population
of Australia is no longer 98 per cent Anglo-Celtic stock.
Immigration from Europe after World War II dealt a mortal blow to the giant of British philistinism in
Australia. In the 19th century the Evangelicals in the Church of England, the Jansenists in the Catholic Church,
the Presbyterians and the Methodists imposed their morality and Australians became a society of "creedless
puritans" a society with a morality but little, if any, faith.
The horrors of World War I, all the blood spilling and abominations of the Somme, Pozieres, Ypres and
Passchendaele, the Depression, the holocaust of the Jews in World War II, the political purges in the Soviet
Union, and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945 weakened still further what survived
of "humanity's belief in a benevolent God and in their own capacity for better things.
Australia, like all other societies created or influenced by modem industry, entered into a post-Christian
and post-Enlightenment era in its history.
The restraints imposed by the Judaic-Christian morality have been abandoned. Men and women walk
naked together on certain beaches.
Four-letter words are now permissible on stage, screen, radio, television and the printed page. A society
of people consumed by doubt about everything seems close to accepting the nihilistic doctrine that everything is
allowable.
Of all the dreams entertained by Europeans for the role of Australia the great south land of the Holy
Spirit, the land of a millennial Eden all that seems to remain is the dream of a country where the greedy
make "uncommonly large profits".
Australia has entered a phase in its history when no one seems to have anything to say. The
conservatives have lost their British mythology. The radicals have lost their faith in being able to change human
nature or create a different society.
The price of social change in Australia now is bloodstains on the wattle. But that is one other sacred
convention in Australia: blood must never stain the wattle.
Besides, experiments in social engineering in other countries seem to show that too high a price has to
be paid for human harmony. Australians have so far shown a willingness to sacrifice their lives in foreign wars,
but not for the sake of building a better or a different society in Australia.
Despite the bleakness of a society of human beings apparently revelling in the greed and titillation
culture provided for their diversion in the kingdom of nothingness, there are grounds for optimism.
This generation has a chance to make its own history, a chance to start almost afresh after so many of
the restraints on human thought and behaviour have been swept into the dustbin of human history. This
generation has had the blinkers inherited from the past removed from its eyes.
The Australians of this generation have a chance to make a wise decision about their future because
they now know the truth about themselves. They at last have a chance to know the field of the possible.
The life deniers belong to the past. The question now is whether the life affirmers have anything to say,
and whether they can persuade Australians to accept their vision.


Canada Profiles of a country Vera Benczik

Reading:

Kuffert, L. (2003). A commentary on some aspects of Canadian culture. In: K. G. Pryke & W. C.
Soderlund (Eds.) Profiles of Canada. (3rd ed.). Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press Inc.
(pp. 97115)

a commentary on some
aspects of Canadian culture
Zen kuflert
Ask some friends or relatives to give you their impression of what
the term culture means and you will probably receive a wide range
of answers that in turn raise even more questions. In contempo-
rary North American society, culture most often gets interpreted
as the arts-live music, theatre, dance, handicrafts, films, books,
and broadcasts that usually have a serious tone or prompt us to
think about lifes complexities. Fine, but where does that leave board
games, television comedies, raves, or romance novels? We can be
more inclusive by saying that culture means entertainment-activi-
ties people pursue in their leisure time or ways they try to make
their lives seem less monotonous. That certainly sounds fairer,
but does something have to emerge from a concert hall, a writers
word processor, or a TV studio to be considered culture? Though
Canadians often complain modestly of having little culture to offer
the world, they are immersed in it. Culture is a dynamic way of
interpreting and interacting with the people, things, and ideas suwound-
ing a society and, of course, representing the way that society
experiences them. Culture is made and remade, like a vast city (al-
ways under construction) in which artists and others renovate the
buildings and avenues already there, as well as creating entirely
new ones. Canadians have the same opportunities as any other
national group to watch their culture change, or even participate
in making change happen.
Though it may be complex, a nations culture is not assembled
entirely at random. As the pioneering sociologist Max Weber once
97
suggested, the development of a nations social structure is prob-
ably most profoundly affected by its history. He noted that what has
happened in the past always shapes the present and the future,
like a bizarre game of dice in which each throw slightly increases
the chances that the same number will come up again.2 We can
also use this image to think about how culture changes. It is often
easier for a society to evolve gradually than to make radical breaks
in such deeply embedded features as its value system, religious
sensibility, or preferred pastimes. In this way, the dice are always
somewhat loaded in favour of the way things are. So, although a
snapshot of what Canadas cultural life looks like right now might
be instructive, in order to have a deeper understanding of its cur-
rent culture, we should try to understand how that culture has
changed in the past.
there have been some sig-
nificant gradual shifts or developments in what we can loosely call
Canadian cultural life. The Canadiens of New France, Britains
maritime colonists, Loyalists in Upper Canada, newcomers to the
prairie frontiers, aspiring writers and teachers, or the people of
todays multicultural Canadian cities and sometimes rather ho-
mogeneous small towns have adapted to the world around them.4
Telling the story of how Canadians have represented their experi-
ences arid ideals in songs, books, artwork, or attitude is important,
and these topics are covered in more detail elsewhere in this book.
However, it is equally important to think about some of the forces
or influences that have both maintained Canadian culture and al-
lowed it to change. Five of these are, in no particular order: tradition,
belief, taste, convenience, and difference. Because cultures develop
and change in response to such historical forces, we must keep
the historical context in mind.
From the colonial period onward,
TRADI TI ON
European colonists and immigrants to the land that is now called
Canada came initially (during the seventeenth century) from France
and, starting in the second half of the eighteenth century, from the
British Isles. They brought their own ways of living, working, wor-
shipping, and passing idle hours, but they also altered these to suit
their new surroundings. In New France, for example, the powerful
98 PROFILES OF CANADA
Catholic tradition woven into the colonys life affected leisure time
pursuits as communities formed around local parish churches. The
need for survival competed with the sense of civilization surround-
ing the church as the hard work of building permanent settlements
in a harsh climate often brought community members together to
construct houses or harvest crops. Sunday was a day for rest and
socializing. Church attendance was necessary if one wished to
maintain a respectable social life, to be successful in business, or
even to have a chance of marrying off ones children within the
community. The parish church was therefore a focal point every
week, but activity also shifted to the home, where a shared meal
allowed adults to gossip, and traditional games would divert the chil-
dren. These activities-work, recreation, and the daily routine-all
reinforced a sense of mission among colonists, especially colonial
leaders, who considered themselves Europeans bringing a civilized
tradition to an untamed land. This tradition certainly shaped colo-
nial attitudes toward Native peoples, with whom trade and other
types of daily interaction were necessary for survival. Sometimes
adopting Native ways of travelling or hunting, but more often dis-
missing Indigenous peoples social norms and practices as primitive,
colonists chose a cultural path that favoured the transplantation of
European ideals.
Among competing European groups, traditional rivalries also
affected the colonial experience. The French and British each al-
lied with different Native groups to carry on military action in North
America, but after the fall of New France in the early 1760s, Brit-
ain was the strongest colonial power in North America. The French
influence remained in the language and religious practices of the
majority in Quebec. After the American Revolution, many people
loyal to Britain fled a newly independent federation of former colo-
nies called the United States of America to live in British territory.
They went primarily to Nova Scotia and to the areas that would
become Ontario and Quebec.
Britain thereby stood as the most powerful cultural influence
on colonial and post-Confederation Canada in the nineteenth cen-
tury, and English-speaking Canadians measured their cultural
progress according to British norms. Building facilities to house
artistic, dramatic, and musical events became a sure way of dis-
playing how successfully a civilized tradition had been maintained.
a cornmenta y on some aspects of Canadian culture 99
This did little but cause friction in places like Montreal, where an
anglophone minoritys dominance reinforced significant language-
based cultural divisions. During the nineteenth century, political
and educational systems that followed British models were adapted
to suit Canadian conditions. For example, Canada has a House of
Commons and an appointed Senate because the British parliamen-
tary tradition endured, and the first universities patterned their
curricula after Oxford and Cambridge because those institutions
had long been viewed as pinnacles of higher learning. The tradi-
tion of doing things the British way extended into the twentieth
century, despite the immense influence of the United States. Some
Canadians believed t hat Canada could be a new seat for a
reinvigorated British Empire. When the Canadian government
wanted to set up an agency to regulate the new medium of radio, it
turned to the British Broadcasting Corporation as a model, not the
commercially driven system operating in the United States. By
the 1930s, however, the sheer volume of American films, radio pro-
grams, and magazines spilling across the border had tipped the
Canadian cultural balance away from the British connection.
The traditions of other nations have also affected Canadian
cultural development. Sojourning labourers from Italy, for example,
came to Canada before and after the turn of the last century to
work hard and save money, hoping to return home wealthy. The
network of services that sprang up to meet their particular needs
and tastes (food, shelter, banking, transport, entertainment) re-
flected Canadas potential for diversity. These networks were also
necessary because the employers were often not willing to do more
than provide a paycheque for workers who did not speak Engl i ~h. ~
Nonetheless, those who stayed on to settle in Canada became pio-
neers of one of t he many vital communities identifiable as
non-British or non-French. Especially in the larger cities, we now
see a number of national traditions affecting the cultural lives of
Canadians. People from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Carib-
bean have joined the descendants of Europeans in staging concerts
or plays in languages other than English or French, opening res-
taurants that serve traditional meals, and even operating radio and
television stations that offer non-North American perspectives on
news events. The maintenance of tradition has, perhaps surpris-
ingly, been a way of adapting to new circumstances. It has certainly
provided some of the foundation stones upon which contemporary
Canadian culture has been built.
BELI EF
In any society, a set of relatively common beliefs usually functions
to explain the natural world and advise people how they should con-
duct themselves in social situations. As Canada developed from
colony to independent nation, cultural activities were governed for
a long time by the teachings of Christianity, more particularly the
sort of Christianity practised in Western Europe. For a long while
in Canada, the Church was often considered the only bastion of
culture in many settlements. Religion continues, although to a
lesser degree, to shape the way that Canadians live and express
themselves. During the nineteenth century, however, the outward
signs of belief played quite a visible role in Canadian culture. Church
membership remained the key to social respectability, and at least
a basic acquaintance with biblical stories or references would have
been expected of anyone. In both English and French Canada, be-
coming a member of the clergy was one of the few professional
opportunities available to young men who had not come from wealthy
families. The army of priests and ministers needed to serve the
religious needs of a growing nation meant that the inhabitants of
even the smallest parish were likely to have had access to some-
one with a classical education-a link to the great traditions of
Greece, Rome, and Contemporary Europe. Some of the most elabo-
rate architecture, art, and music were created for religious purposes,
and Lords Day laws decreed that no business would be conducted
on Sundays. Above all, leisure time activities connected to belief
carried a stamp of social approval. Some of the more evangelical
Protestant denominations held camp meetings-rural gatherings
with plenty of preaching-attended by large crowds. By heading out-
doors t o camp and attend sermons, these people could combine
leisure and religion. In fact, they probably would not have consid-
ered leisure and religion to be in conflict.8
During the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pe-
riod, the dominance of religion seemed to be in danger as cities
became larger and scholars were calling the biblical version of truth
into question. While church memberships did not decline rapidly,
a commenta y on some aspects of Canadian culture 10 1
there were more activities in the cities and larger towns to com-
pete with chur ch at t endance. However, organizations with a
foundation in religous belief or with a charitable aim, like the Young
Mens Christian Association (YMCA) or the Womens Christian Tem-
perance Union (WCTU) were able to grow because they allowed people
to associate with one another to do more than pray. Belonging to
such organizations and participating in their activities became
pastimes, and showed that a religious sensibility could definitely
survive in a world that seemed less r e ~e r e n t . ~ By the 1930s, reli-
gous broadcasters had adapted to some new circumstances, making
their way onto the ainvaves and ensuring a place for the Christian
perspective among the wildly popular comedians and singers. One
broadcaster, William Aberhart, even gained political advantage from
his explicitly Christian stance when he was elected premier of Al-
berta in 1935, thanks in large part to the popularity of his religious
radio program.
As the century wore on, religion took its place as one of many
factors affecting the cultural scene. Canadians heroes tended to
be figures from the sports world or movie stars rather t han reli-
gious figures, although evangelists like the Reverend Billy Graham,
who found a wide audience on television, continue to draw the pub-
lic. In general, Canadians continued to attend church or considered
themselves to be believers, but engaging in the alluring world of
popular culture also became more acceptable. Most mainstream
Christian denominations wanted to keep their members, especially
youth members, by remaining relevant to a changing world outside
the church. Except for the most strictly observant or fundamen-
talist households today, most Canadians lead relatively secular lives
at work or at leisure. Religion is not as much of a defining factor as
it once was-that is, people are probably less likely to identify them-
selves as Presbyterians t han as Toronto Blue Jays fans. Belief,
however, still casts a long shadow. Canadians continue to strive to
answer spiritual questions. New age philosophies and practices
like meditation or tarot card reading attract numerous converts
and have spawned their own subcultures, which may not challenge
traditional religious belief directly but offer attractive alternatives
for those seeking spiritual direction. In essence, belief has become
an individual quest rather than a communal one. People still come
together to affirm their beliefs, but the range of creeds available
means that there are not the same pressures to belong to a rela-
tively narrow range of denominations. Finally, the immigration of
those whose religious background is not Christian has moved Ca-
nadi an cul t ur e f ur t her from i t s earlier i ncar nat i ons as one
identified almost exclusively with Christianity.
TASTE
When people think of taste, they often think of its extremes. For
instance, the latest professional wrestling extravaganza on pay-per-
view TV or an elaborately staged opera production are different from
each other in several respects. Even the fact that most of u s would
see those activities as representing opposite ends of a taste scale
demonstrates that Canadians, like many other national groups,
need to categorize cultural activities. Dividing pastimes and cul-
tural expressions into categories like escapist versus educa-
tional, or junk versus uplifting is one of the features of our
culture that reflects the modern drive for progress. That is, we want
to see ourselves improving all the time, and moving from what are
perceived as common tastes toward more sophisticated ones is an
indication of improvement.
Though we may not think about it often, there remains a sharp
division between mass or low culture (Hollywood movies, most tel-
evision programming, and best-selling novels) and so-called high
culture (independent films, TV documentaries, books for serious
readers). However, this was not always the case. Before the advent
of the 500-channel universe, and certainly before broadcasting or
motion pictures, taste in entertainment was not always so neatly
subdivided, because there were fewer choices. Going to the theatre
to see a play, for example, was not a n activity restricted only to the
wealthy or those who made a point of supporting live theatre. For
example, productions of Shakespeares plays had cheap seats, and
some audiences shout ed to hear their favourite scenes acted
again. On the other hand, in the nineteenth century, the local
pub was largely a place for the lower classes, mainly because of the
moral implications attached to the excessive drinking that went
on there.
The apparent differences between high and low culture have
generated a significant amount of activity in the cultural field. Es-
a comrnenta y on some aspects of Canadian culture 103
pecially during the latter half of the twentieth century, Canadians
(and the politicians that represent them) favoured improving edu-
cational services and building facilities to house arts, sport, and
community club activities. To oppose such initiatives would seem
like opposing progress. Also, increased activity in the field of high
culture adds to the prestige of a town or city, not to mention its
employment base. Conversely, low culture tends to be produced
somewhere else (usually in the United States), and while it might
generate the same sort of local economic benefits, towns and cities
do not generally boast about the number of multiplex movie thea-
tres they have. Because low culture is usually produced for profit
and not to test the boundaries of expression or answer the most
profound questions, there has been a n element of guilt attached to
it. Where Canadians place themselves on the taste scale is there-
fore quite important. Though millions of Canadians consume low
culture regularly, many others dont want to admit that they spend
time seeking the cheap thrills associated with soap operas or Top
40 music. We dont want to cross taste boundaries downward, be-
cause to do so would also imply a downward social slide. Likewise,
trying to move upward in ones tastes has been problematic, too,
especially when moving upward means criticizing what is known
as popular culture. The desire to improve may be noble and we may
be quite satisfied with ourselves for harbouring such a desire, but
living in a liberal-democratic society compels us to remain silent
about the cultural choices that others make.
The issue of taste has also affected Canadian culture in a more
formal or structural way. Thanks to developments during the past
fifty years or so, Canada currently has a minister in the federal
Cabinet responsible for Canadian heritage. l2 Much of that persons
time is spent overseeing government initiatives designed to com-
memorate great Canadians, promote Canadian artistic talent, and
show the world that the nation has a cultural past, present, and
future. Through such mechanisms as the Canadian content regu-
lations governing radio (a certain percentage of material broadcast
must be Canadian in origin) or generous tax credits given to film-
makers who produce films set and filmed in Canada, the state has
made its presence felt. The r ush to undertake this t ask is cer-
tainly related to national pride and the need to represent Canada
on the international stage, but it also grew out of a perception that
tastes have been declining thanks to a n inexhaustible supply of
low culture. The federal governments efforts in the cultural field
have tended to encourage anything seen as edifying and/ or na-
tion-building.13 Taste has made culture a political issue in t hat
attempting to improve the tastes of Canadians has been seen as
anti-democratic, and failure to do anything has been seen as aban-
doning the field to the lowest forms of culture.
CONVENI ENCE
Recently, a new radio station began broadcasting in my city. Occa-
sionally, the station would advertise itself with short spots featuring
listeners phoning in to say how thrilled they were with the sta-
tions sel ect i on of musi c. One woman called to leave a
complimentary message, and added that she was just a customer
or consumer expressing her thanks. Do we consume culture? It
would seem so, as tastes are often shaped by convenience in much
the same way as our shopping habits are affected by the appear-
ance of a new mall nearby. As the twentieth century wore on, culture
became more of a consumable item in most Western societies, and
Canada was no exception to this general trend. Today, supplying
Canadians with entertainment is a lucrative business, no longer
the domain of theatre companies operating on shoestring budgets.
People still have choices, and can choose not to watch television or
go to the movies, but to do so would be to retreat from a part of our
culture that exerts a strong influence. Where once there was a
more identifiably popular culture-arising from the habits and com-
mon beliefs of t he people in a town or district-we now have
something that is called popular culture, but takes its cues from
what studios and publishing companies think the public will pay to
read, see, or hear.
When making choices about their cultural surroundings, peo-
ple respond to novelty and convenience. Early motion pictures were
so novel that their convenience (best exemplified by their eventual
spread to small towns) was virtually guaranteed. By the 1920s, a
pattern was well on its way to being established. When radio was
new, it was a hobby for the dedicated listener. Then it became con-
venient as sets could be mass-produced, and almost everyone tuned
in. People from different places could converse about the same
a commenta y on some aspects of Canadian culture 105
shows. Likewise, television was new, then convenient; the Internet
was new (but inconspicuous for years), then convenient. With these
cultural vehicles so easy to access, observers have long been fore-
casting the death of smaller-scale entertainment and leisure, and
some of their predictions have come true. One of the first casual-
ties was the travelling variety (or vaudeville) show, which lost too
many patrons to the movies and radio to survive. Live theatre and
live music remain, but their share of the entertainment pie has
been significantly reduced.
Self-interest goes hand in hand with convenience, and is t hus
an active player in the development of a nations culture. Conven-
iently scheduled broadcasts and screenings help people to consume
when they can, and allow suppliers and distributors to sell advertis-
ing more efficiently because audience research has shown that
certain demographic groups will tune in to particular programs or
go to see particular movies. This trend toward narrowcasting-for
instance, trying to address the interests of dedicated golf fans by
covering their sport exclusively-has changed the face of televi-
sion. As we crowd more and more into our daily schedules, people
are often less willing to take chances on an unknown quantity such
as an avant-garde play or art exhibit because they feel a need to
maximize the value of their leisure time. Many tend to frequent,
buy, or consume entertainment that is branded, for example, a
movie that features a performer like Arnold Schwarzenegger, who
is known for making films of a certain type. What does all of this
mean to Canadian culture? I t means that more of Canadians lei-
sure time is spent surrounded by a convenient culture, crafted as
much to suit the intended consumer as it is to express the artists
talent. Like any important historical process, this took some time.
The culture of convenience is certainly not restricted to forms
of entertainment or the media that carry them, but shapes the
actual physical spaces in which Canadians live and work. Cana-
dian cities have suburbanized since World War 11, because workers
wanted to own their own detached houses, and they preferred newly
built ones. l 4 The exodus to suburban housing developments meant
that the downtown areas of cities like Edmonton lost a great deal of
the vitality they once possessed. Automobile culture grew up around
the need to travel longer distances to work or play. As a result of the
more convenient car, ridership on public transport declined. The
suburbs have become home to shopping malls and box stores sell-
ing case-lots of goods that save the purchaser a few trips outside
the house each week. Fewer trips out translate into less frequent
contact with neighbours. There have been some positive develop-
ments emerging from this fragmentation of the city. Artists and
academics, both groups who tend to be rather vocal, have moved to
the cheaper real estate downtown, and taken up the causes of their
neighbours. Also, the urban culture informing hip-hop music is
possible at least partially because the economics of housing dictate
that most hip-hop artists live (or at least grow up) in areas desig-
nated as disadvantaged or inner city neighbourhoods. All of these
are cultural phenomena as much as economic ones.
DI FFERENCE
For many Canadians, the idea of what defines Canada is linked
with real or imagined cultural differences between Canadians and
other national groups, or even differences among Canadians them-
selves. Probably the most striking feature of the Canadian identity
is its continual redefinition, using supposedly fmed points of refer-
ence outside Canada. Historically, France and Britain provided such
points of reference for early Canadians, as colonials attempted to
measure up to the standards of living and conduct set in their re-
spective mother countries. Today, the most prominent of these
points of reference is American culture, which is itself changing
rapidly. It has almost become a truism, but Canadians can reveal
much about their own culture by describing what it is not.
In a world that is most familiar with American films and con-
sumer goods, we seem to rely upon the myth of America in order to
construct the myth of Canada. The two nations economies are in-
tegrated to an unprecedented degree, and this is considered to be
one of the sources of Canadas prosperity during the past decade.
Cultural integration, however, tends to be regarded with more cau-
tion, and many Canadians remain unwilling to have their country
characterized as a variation on the American theme. Accordingly,
a certain amount of energy goes into asserting differences between
the two neighbouring nations. For example, polls that show Cana-
dian opinion diverging from American opinion on topics ranging
from gun control to health care tend to be offered as evidence of a
a comrnenta y on some aspects of Canadian culture 107
continent divided along the forty-ninth parallel. Books purporting
to be guides to Canadian culture or Canadiana can usually find a
publisher. Film and television productions frequently use locations
or situations that are considered somehow distinctively Canadian.
The film Hi ghway 61 called attention to Canadas peculiarities by
showing how alien the United States seems to a small-town barber
enlisted to take a trip down to New Orleans. The Canadian Broad-
casting Corporations North of 60 series was set in a remote northern
settlement in which White and Native societies are trying to coex-
ist. Perhaps one of the most telling points about difference as an
important factor in Canadian culture has to do with the way in
which both of those productions were made. Like many cultural
endeavours in Canada, they were aided directly or indirectly by gov-
ernment programs designed to help Canadian creations flourish-a
clear contrast with the overwhelmingly privately financed nature
of American productions.
Within Canada, regional differences affect culture. For exam-
ple, Quebec began as distinct from the rest of Canada thanks to the
combination of its French linguistic tradition and the influence of
the Catholic Church. Acceptance of and rebellion against these
influences have led Quebec down a different path, gradually alter-
ing aspects of culture from food and drink to attitudes toward sexual
behaviour. Until the 1960s, Quebec held a reputation as something
of a stifling theocracy, but it is now recognized, thanks especially to
the city of Montreal, as one of the more liberal and cosmopolitan
places on the continent. However, it remains within the larger
Canadian and North American orbits in that Quebecois worry about
the influence of American culture on their children. The Quebec
music scene also fostered the career of Celine Dion, whose music
now reflects the mainstream taste. Arguably another region of its
own, the province of Newfoundland and Labrador also possesses
characteristics that set it apart. Because the province spent a larger
proportion of its history as a colony, because of its geographical iso-
lation and particular economy, it features a discernible culture,
parts of which (an accent, a musical style, a literature) identify it to
the rest of the world. Regional differences are also accentuated by
the oldest North American cultures. The prairie provinces are home
to significant First Nations populations that have been able only
recently to reassert some of their traditions and embark on the
road to self-determination. Comparatively, the Aboriginal presence
in Southern Ontario is a less powerful one, owing to the relatively
small size of the Aboriginal population there and, as a result, Abo-
riginal issues do not make the news as often.
A more powerful force in places like Southern Ontario, the Lower
Mainland of British Columbia, Montreal, and indeed most of Cana-
das major urban areas, is the great variety of peoples from all over
the world who have come to live in Canada. Aside from the celebra-
tions of their former homelands most evident in summer festivals,
this diversity has meant that Canadians-especially younger Ca-
nadians-now expect to have access to a wider swath of cultural
influences than ever before. It might not be the sort of formalized
display of diversity that Ottawa has favoured, but in most Canadian
cities, one can go out to eat a n Ethiopian meal, or fish and chips.
The expectation of daily contact with other cultures, whether for
work, school, or leisure, has done much to inoculate young Canadi-
ans against t he sort of nativism or ethnic hatred t hat earlier
generations considered part of life. Neighbourhoods in which one
ethnic group predominates still exist, but they no longer so com-
pletely define the horizons of that groups experience in Canada.
Another current of difference running through Canadian cul-
t ur e today has to do with difference from t he establishment.
Awareness and protest are a way of life for some Canadians, who
work to inform others of local and global issues affecting all of us.
This trend has some of its historical roots in protest movements
like those against the economic inequalities underlined by the
Great Depression of the 1930s. However, those movements pro-
claimed the rage of many disadvantaged people eager to gain their
fair share. In the 1960s, protest against the war in Vietnam was
one of t he first obvious focal poi nt s for t he formation of a
counterculture, the adoption of a different lifestyle by people who could
have more easily stayed silent and taken their place in an affluent
society. Participants did not seek approval from political or economic
authorities, but rather sought to show how those authorities were
aiding injustice. Though Canadas expression of 1960s anxiety
was not as loud as its American counterpart, it demonstrated that
taking a position that did not defer to the powerful was possible.
Todays equivalent may be found in the movement that protests
globalization of the economy. However, sometimes difference from
a commenta y on some aspects of Canadian culture 1019
the establishment is more about ones own lifestyle t han such
weighty issues. The early 1990s featured (in Canada as much as
anywhere) a vogue for grunge music and fashion. The music and
the look suggested poverty, introspection, and sadness-hardly the
trademarks of a prosperous period. Hip-hop culture has colonized
territory well beyond its roots in the African American community.
Proud and often clever poets, hip-hop artists do not overtly call for
profound changes to the political or economic order, but express a
deep awareness of some of the inequalities, especially racism, that
underlie it. Along with other movements, trends and activities (us-
ing mari j uana, disco, complaining about taxes) have gripped
Canadians to lesser or greater degrees, and these subcultures and
countercultures have added vitality to what would be an otherwise
straightforward and safe supply/ demand-style mass culture.
CONCLUSI ON
The five forces mentioned above are certainly not the only ones
affecting culture. However, they are interconnected in such a com-
plex way that their combined influence can be said to account for a
great deal. A look at the threads that bind all five shows that one
can grab on to culture almost anywhere and find a way to account
for continuities and changes.
Tradition often lays the groundwork for culture, because it re-
lies upon established patterns that people can recognize and perhaps
alter over time. For example, working six days a week was once
common, but now five days per week is the standard. This tradition
was based on the idea that there should be at least one day of rest-
in Christian countries, Sunday. Belief was certainly instrumental
in choosing the day of rest in that case, and it was also belief that
made school prayers part of each childs educational day until re-
cently. The desire motivating many educators-to develop, train,
or improve the person being educated-respects the idea that tra-
ditions must be carried on and mirrors t he Christian ideal of
salvation through knowledge of God.
Distinguishing worthwhile traditions from fads, or right from
wrong, is also one of the critical elements in the development of
taste. Taste is often associated with social class and status, but it
also shows us how a society organizes its cultural surroundings. In
Canada, the class system is not rigid, and most people can exhibit
a wide range of tastes without fear of alienating friends and family.
However, what we do with our leisure time marks us. The learned
judge can go to a monster truck rally, or the factory worker can
attend avant-garde poetry readings, but they will probably have to
explain their choices to their curious peers. The tradition of asso-
ciating certain taste levels with certain levels of education or social
status is a long-established one. Taste also affected the way that
religious denominations conducted their affairs. Anglicans and
Catholics tended to be more formal, and even on the settlement
frontier, they would try to maintain some degree of opulence in
their worship services in order to maintain the power of ritual. Most
evangelical denominations considered salvation extremely impor-
tant, and would consider any location appropriate for worship.
However, most still believed that clergy must be well trained, lead-
ing to the establishment of colleges largely for that purpose.
Often, our cultural choices are affected by how convenient it is
to enjoy any of the options open to us. Co n u e ~ ~ e n c e pushes the sub-
urban residents shopping cart through the air-conditioned mall with
ample free parking, and the range of choices available there surely
shape tastes. With so many neatly packaged alternatives available,
religious adherence can be crowded out of the picture-in the case
of some families, this represents the death of a long-standing tra-
dition.
Some Canadians oppose consumerism and relish the difference
they perceive between their lives and the lives of those in the ma-
jority. Within Canada, regional variations in economic activity,
language, or political orientation complicate and enrich the cul-
tural scene. Differences from American culture are often presented
in terms of taste, with the imported stuff assigned the lowest grades.
This sort of faith in Canada as a distinct society on the continent is
almost enforced by the Heritage ministry, which seeks to make
Canadianism convenient on the way to making it a tradition. Cul-
tural change is so unpredictable that it just might work.
TIME LINE
Because cultural influences and changes are complex and often
take some time to bear fruit, it is impossible to assert that a na-
a commentary on some aspects of Canadian culture I I I
tions culture changed rapidly and point to a specific moment as
proof. Nonetheless, the following list of dates or periods indicates
some of the more important events or developments that affected
Canadian culture or cultural policy.
c. 16 10-1759 New France stands as the most prominent colonial and
1763
1 83 7- 1 867
1896- 19 10
1920
1949-1951
1950
1952
1957
1958
1970s and
1980s
cultural presence in the territory that would become
Canada.
The Seven Years War ends and British domination of
colonial life and culture begins.
Canada inches toward becoming a Dominion ( an
autonomous part of the British Empire) with Confed-
eration achieved in 1867.
The first wave of immigrants from European nations
(not only the British Isles) hits Canada.
The first commercial radio broadcasting station in
Canada begins operating (XWA Montreal, later called
CFCF).
The Massey Commission investigates the availability
and quality of cultural and educational opportunities
in Canada.
Canadas first shopping mall (Park Royal) opens in West
Vancouver.
Television broadcasts begin in Canada, even though
border-dwellers had already been able to receive
American signals for a few years.
The Canada Council is formed to oversee and fund cul-
tural and educational pursuits in Canada.
Canadian content regulations are enacted, which man-
date that 45 per cent of television time must be devoted
to programming produced in Canada. This percentage
was increased to 60 per cent. In 1968 similar content
regulations are enacted to govern radio programming.
Multiculturalism becomes government policy in 197 1,
and immigrants from Asia and Africa start to arrive in
greater numbers, often driven from their home coun-
tries by wars or repressive regimes.
NOTES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10
On the futility of defining culture, see A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn,
Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York: Vantage,
1952).
Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe: The Free
Press, 1949).
For thousands of years, Aboriginal peoples developed and maintained
their own cultures, which were affected greatly by contact with
European newcomers. Native culture is covered with much greater
expertise elsewhere in this book, and does not form part of our
discussion here.
On the state of Canadian culture in the shrinking world of the 199Os,
see Joyce Zemans, Where Is Here? Canadian Culture in a Globalized
World, the Tenth Annual Robarts Lecture, York University, March
13, 1996 amw.robarts.yorku.ca/pdf/ rl-zemans.pdf>.
On life in New France, see Dale Miquelon, New France, 1701-1 744: A
S u ~ p ~ e ~ e n t to Europe (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987); Cornelius
Jaenen, The RoZe of the Church in New France (Ottawa: Canadian
Historical Association, 1985).
On schooling, see Paul Axelrod, The Promise of Schooling: Education in
Canada, 1800-1 91 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). On
social structure and family life, see C.M. Blackstock, All the Journey
Through (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). On government,
see Douglas Verney, Three Civilizations, Two Cultures, One State:
Canadas Political Traditions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986).
On broadcasting, see Mary Vipond, Listening in: The First Decade of
Canadi an Broadcasting, 1922-1 932 (Montreal: McGill-Queens
University Press, 1992).
See John Zucchi, Italians in Toronto: Development of a National Identity,
1875-1 935 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1988).
On religion, see Terrence Murphy and Roberto Perin, eds., A Concise
History of Christianity in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press,
1996).
Scholars debate this question, and two works to consult are: Michael
Gauvreau, The Evangelical Centu y: College and Creed in English Canada
from the Great Revival to the Great Depression ( ~ont r eal and Kingston:
McGill-Queens University Press, 199 1) and Ramsay Cook, The
Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late-Victorian English Canada (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1985).
For a look at one denominations attempts to become relevant, see
Pierre Berton, The C o ~ ~ o ~ a ~ l e Pew (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart,
1965).
a commentaru on some asgects of Canadian culture I I3
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
On high and low culture, see Paul Rutherford, Made in America: The
Problem of Ma s s Culture in Canada, in The Beaver Bites Back?: American
Popular Culture in Canada, edited by David H. Flaherty and Frank E.
Manning (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press,
1993); Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural
Hierarchy in America (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press,
1988).
Go to <wvvtY.pch.gc.ca> to get a sense of this ministrys scope.
See Paul Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992) on the lengths to which
t he federal government goes to st udy and correct t he problem of
underdeveloped tastes.
On t he process of suburbanization, see Doug Owram, Born at the
Right Time: A Histo y of the Baby Boom Generation (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1996).
On t he changes i n Quebec during and after t he 1960s, see Paul-
Andre Linteau et al., Quebec since 1930, translated by Robert Chodos
and Ellen Garmaise (Toronto: Lorimer, 199 1).
Owram, Born at the Right Time.
SELECTED READINGS
Cameron, Elspeth, ed. 1997. Canadian Culture: An Introductory Reader
Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press.
Corse, Sarah M. 1997. Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Culture in
Canada and the United States. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Flaherty, David H., and Frank E. Manning, eds. 1993. The Beaver Bites
Back? American Popular Culture in Canada. Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queens University Press.
Fr i esen, Ger al d. 2000. Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History,
Communication, and Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Grace, Sherrill E. 2002. Canada and the Idea of North. Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queens University Press.
Nicks, Joan, and Jeanette Sloniowski, eds. 2002. Slippe y Pastimes: Reading
the Popular in Canadian Culture. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University
Pr ess.
Pevere, Geoff, and Greig Dymond. 1996. Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop
Culture Odyssey. Scarborough: Prentice Hall Canada.
Thomas, David M. , ed. 2000. Canada and the United States: Dfferences That
Count, 2nd ed. Peterborough: Broadview Press.
11.4 PROFILES OF CANADA
Tippett, Maria. 1990. Making Culture: English-Canadian Institutions and the
Arts Before the Massey Commission. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.
Van Luven, Lyniie, and Priscilla L. Walton, eds. 1999. Pop Can: Popular
CuZture in Canada. Scarborough: Prentice Hall Allyn and Bacon Canada.
a c ~ mme n t u ~ on some aspects o~Canad~an ~ l ~ r e 1 15


Intercultural Communication Ildik Lzr, Uwe Pohl

Reading:


About Intercultural Communicative Competence:
A Construct

Alvino E. Fantini, Ph.D.
School for International Training, Brattleboro, Vermont, USA

About Intercultural Communicative Competence
Contact with other languages and cultures provides an excellent opportunity to foster the development of
intercultural communicative competence (ICC, or intercultural competence, for short). Once intercultural
contact has begun, ICC development generally evolves as an on-going and lengthy process, occasionally
with periods of regression or stagnation, but more commonly with positive results and no end point.
Different individuals bring differing goals and motivations to the intercultural experience that result in
varying levels of competence. Some wish to achieve native-like behavior in the host culture; others may be
content simply to gain acceptance; and for still others, mere survival may be adequate.

Generally, the more deeply one enters into a second language-culture (LC2), or "linguaculture", the greater
the effects on one's native linguaculture (LC1). As a result, individuals often modify their initial
perspectives of the world (or "worldview"). A willingness to truly engage in the new culture during a cross-
cultural sojourn, promotes both transcendence and transformation of one's original mode of perceiving,
knowing, and expressing about the world and interacting within it. Developing intercultural competencies
aids this process.

But what exactly is intercultural competence? Although this term is in wide use today, there is no clear
consensus about what it is. Some researchers stress global knowledge, others emphasize sensitivity, and
still others point to certain skills. The characterization of ICC presented below, based on a survey of the
literature, suggests that it is more complex that any one of these views.

A Brief Definition
One definition of ICC is that it is the complex of abilities needed to perform effectively and appropriately
when interacting with others who are linguistically and culturally different from oneself. Whereas
effective usually reflects ones own view of ones performance in the LC2 (i.e., an etic or outsiders
view of the host culture); appropriate relates to how ones performance is perceived by ones hosts (i.e.,
an emic or insiders view). These perceptions often differ, yet they are instructive when compared and
contrasted because they arise from differing cultural approaches to the same situation.

The Components of ICC
As a complex phenomenon, ICC encompasses multiple components. These include:
a variety of traits and characteristics
three areas or domains
four dimensions
proficiency in the host language
varying levels of attainment throughout a longitudinal and developmental process.

Traits and Characteristics It is useful to distinguish traits (i.e., innate personal qualities) from acquired
characteristics developed later in life that are related to ones cultural and situational context a sort of
nature vs. nurture distinction. This distinction is particularly important in training and educational
programs because it poses the question: which abilities form part of an individuals intrinsic personality and
______________________________________________________________________________________
Alvino E. Fantini, Brattleboro, VT, USA 1995; 2000, 2001, 2003, Revised 10.15.2005
1
which can be developed or modified through training and educational efforts? Commonly cited traits and/or
characteristics of ICC include: flexibility, humor, patience, openness, interest, curiosity, empathy, tolerance
for ambiguity, and suspending judgment, among others.

Three Areas or Domains ICC involves ability in three areas or domains (which, curiously, are just as
important in ones own native LC1 as well). These are:
the ability to establish and maintain relationships
the ability to communicate with minimal loss or distortion
the ability to collaborate in order to accomplish something of mutual interest or need.

Four Dimensions ICC also has four dimensions:
knowledge
(positive) attitudes/affect
skills, and
awareness.
Of these, awareness is central and especially critical to cross-cultural development. It is enhanced through
reflection and introspection in which both the individuals LC1 and the LC2 are contrasted and compared.
Awareness differs from knowledge in that it is always about the self vis--vis all else in the world (other
things, other people, other thoughts, etc.) and ultimately helps to clarify what is deepest and most relevant
to ones identity. Awareness is furthered through developments in knowledge, positive attitudes, and skills,
and in turn also furthers their development.

Proficiency in the Host Language The ability to communicate in the host language greatly enhances ICC
development in both quantitative and qualitative ways. Grappling with another language confronts how one
perceives, conceptualizes, and expresses oneself; and, in the process, fosters the development of alternative
communication strategies on someone else's terms. This humbling and challenging process often facilitates
transcending and transforming how one understands the world. Lack of a second language even at a
minimal level constrains one to continue to think about the world and act within it, only in one's native
system, and deprives the individual of one of the most valuable aspects of the intercultural experience.

Developmental Levels ICC normally evolves over a lengthy and continuing process, occasionally with
moments of stagnation and even regression. Much of what happens depends on the strength of ones
individual motivation (instrumental vs. integrative) vis--vis the host culture. For this reason, establishing
benchmarks can help to monitor and measure ones progress. Several levels (related to FEIL programs) are
posited that help mark one's journey along the way. These are:
Level I: Educational Traveler e.g., participants in short-term exchange programs (1-2 months)
Level II: Sojourner participants engaged in extended cultural immersion, e.g., internships of
longer duration, including service programs (3-9 months)
Level III: Professional appropriate for individuals working in intercultural or multicultural
contexts; e.g., staff employed in international institutions or organizations like FEIL and its MOs
Level IV: Intercultural/Multicultural Specialist appropriate for trainers and educators engaged in
training, educating, consulting, or advising multinational students

Other levels may be added or substituted as useful, as well as other terms such as: basic, intermediate,
advanced, native-like.

Assessing Intercultural Competence
Because ICC is a fairly recent notion, the term is sometimes used with varying meanings; or, it may be
referred to by other labels such as: global competence, international competence, multicultural competence,
and so forth. The term and definition used here, however, purposely employ the words competence and
performance. In one view, competence is abstract and cannot be witnessed directly; consequently, it
must be inferred by observing how one performs. Hence, competence and performance are interrelated
one being abstract and the other observable. In this view, then, one infers competence by observing and
monitoring performance, rather than by talking about it only in abstraction.

2
Moreover, the criteria on which intercultural competence is sometimes identified, monitored, and assessed,
are not always clear or consistent. To increase clarity and consistency, a pilot assessment tool was
developed. It is known as the Assessment of Intercultural Competence (AIC), presented in a YOGA
format, an acronym that stands for "Your Objectives, Guidelines, and Assessment." The form is designed
for use as a guide before, during, and after an intercultural sojourn by helping to track multiple aspects of
one's developing intercultural competence. It helps in three ways: 1) first, to establish and then critically
examine intercultural objectives, 2) to serve as a guide during the intercultural sojourn, and 3) to provide a
tool for assessment at various stages of the process as well as at the end. As such, this assessment approach
is normative, formative, as well as summative.

Background and Rationale
Foreign language and intercultural training and education programs normally prescribe some manner of
assessing participant performance/competence in a variety of academic and professional areas. However,
educators often overlook or undervalue this area of intercultural competence. Valuing and evaluating ICC
development is consistent with recent trends in higher education to address the competencies necessary for
our global age that go beyond academic and professional ones. The AIC form helps to do just that by
shifting the focus from teaching to learning, from input to outcome, and from evaluation to development.
Moreover, it engages learners as partners in the teaching-learning process, it stresses outcomes, and it is
consistent with co-constructive educational thinking.

The AIC Form evolved in various stages over a number of years. First, a Task Force at the School for
International Training collected empirical observations. These were then checked against a review of the
intercultural literature. And, finally, the items were crosschecked against various other approaches to ICC
assessment and piloted.

To date, the AIC form has been used primarily as a tool to enhance the educational process. Additional
piloting in field situations, however, will continue to strengthen the instruments validity, allow users to
consider their own individual profiles, and permit establishment of group norms as more results are
compiled from significant numbers of participants. This approach is used to learn first what we consider
important outcomes, before finalizing and validating the instruments statistical reliability. The instrument
will eventually reflect widely agreed-upon outcomes rather than one that tests only part of ICC or leads
down a different path (the "tail wagging the dog" syndrome). Eventually, the accumulated data may result
establishing norms for ICC attainment by participants in future programs.

Finally, a few additional thoughts about the construct of this tool: Although this form is about assessing
developmental levels of ICC, its completion is based on both observations and performance. It is not about
what participants think they might do in a given situation, but what is actually done and observed by the
participants themselves and by others. This corresponds to the differences between professed intentions
(what one thinks or says one might do in a given situation) and expressed behaviors (what one actually
does). Abstract notions about competence are substantiated by observed behaviors.

Secondly, it is unlikely that most sojourners will attain native-like behaviors, nor might they desire to do
so. (This is especially true of adults; less so of younger individuals). The intercultural experience allows but
does not demand native-like competence, recognizing that individual choices are both complex and
personal. Nonetheless, it will help each person to clarify how far he or she is willing to go and why, and the
consequences of their decisions. Often, the result is a clarification of those values most central to each
person and their own identity. Yet, it would seem that a minimal expectation for all who embark on an
intercultural sojourn must be understanding and tolerance of the host culture (and that, at the very least,
allows the participant to stay), whereas not everyone may also develop similar levels of respect and
appreciation.

For More Information
For more information about ICC, consult these websites:
http://www.pucp.edu.pe/cmp/docs/nafta_hs.pdf
www.sit.edu/publications (see SIT Occasional Papers Series, Inaugural Issue, pps 25-42)
www.wiche.edu (click on publications and see Working Paper No. 11, Globalization and . . .
3

BBN ANG271Anthology2ndEd

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

BBN ANG271Anthology2ndEd

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Cultural Studies English Speaking Cultures

Anthology of readings for the BBN-ANG 271 course

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen