Liberation review (in French) of their CD Vice and Virtue.

Here’s a video from 2006.

See Manchester on my mind for this Keith’s reflections on what it means to come from back there.

Kate Fox’s best-seller, Watching the English, is guaranteed to stir academic prejudices, because her style of writing is self-consciously designed to wind us up. David Mills’ editorial (AT 22[2]) is predictably dismissive:

“Since when have the linguistic conventions and social rituals around alcohol consumption offered insight into national character, whatever that is?”

But, for all her anti-academic bravado, Kate Fox did devote the first 22 pages of her book to explaining her aims and methods. This introduction raises some serious issues and deserves to be treated as such, even if the author seems to be indifferent to the possibility. Despite her self-satirizing, sometimes facetious tone, Fox is not just a wacky deviation from the professional norm. She poses a challenge to the guilds of late academia, and to British social anthropology in particular, that we need to meet. Mills’ review tells us more about the author’s personal history on the margins of academia than the contents of her book. So I hope to redress this omission here by summarizing her introduction before indicating briefly why this book should enter into professional discussions of the future of anthropology.

“The object was to identify the commonalities in rules governing English behaviour – the unofficial codes of conduct that cut across class, age, sex, region, sub-cultures and other social boundaries…[B]y looking beyond the ‘ethnographic dazzle’ of superficial differences, I found that Women’s Institute members and bikers, and other groups, all behave in accordance with the same unwritten rules – rules that identify our national identity and character. I would also maintain, with George Orwell, that this identity ‘is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature’. My aim, if you like, was to provide a grammar of English behaviour… ” (Fox 2004:2)

Fox contrasts her own previous tactic of “borrowing the language of self-help psychobabble and expressing the problem as an ongoing battle between my Inner Participant and my Inner Observer” with the usual “tortured self-flagellating disquisition on the ethical and methodological difficulties of participant observation” and concludes that:

“…the ritual chapter agonizing over the role of the participant-observer tends to be mind-numbingly tedious, so I will forgo whatever pre-emptive absolution might be gained by this, and simply say that while participant observation has its limitations, this rather uneasy combination of involvement and detachment is still the best method we have for exploring the complexities of human cultures, so it will have to do.” (Ibid: 3-4)

Eschewing any claim to professional authority, she attributes her competence as an ethnographer to her father’s bizarre child-raising techniques and ‘a rather erratic education at a random sample of schools in America, Ireland and France’ (Ibid: 6-7). In this way, she became a ‘rule-hunter’. Although she has written this book about ‘the rules of Englishness’ for ‘the intelligent layman’,

“My non-academic approach cannot be used as a convenient excuse for woolly thinking, sloppy use of language, or failing to define my terms.” (Ibid: 9)

She goes on, without ever using words like ‘structuralism’ or ‘functionalism’, to define her terms in quite a rigorous way. She cites Robin Fox and G.P. Murdock at length in support of her approach to ‘culture’ as ‘rule-making’. Her line on the threat posed to nations by ‘globalization’ has its adherents in academic anthropology, even if they would be unlikely to express it this way:

“As a fairly typical Guardian-reading left-liberal product of the anti-Thatcher generation, I have no natural sympathy for corporate imperialists, but as a professional observer of sociocultural trends, I am obliged to report that their influence has been exaggerated – or rather misinterpreted. The principal effect of globalization, as far as I can tell, has been an increase in nationalism and tribalism, a proliferation of struggles for independence, devolution and self-determination and a resurgence of concern about ethnicity and cultural identity in almost all parts of the world, including the so-called United Kingdom.” (Ibid: 14)

Fox qualifies this cheery assertion, then gives her considered opinion on class and race, the relationship between being ‘British’ and ‘English’ and the pitfalls of stereotyping, before concluding with a back-handed reference to her father’s socio-biological bent:

“Hmm, yes, Sequencing the English Cultural Genome – that sounds like a big, serious, ambitious and impressively scientific project. The sort of thing that might well take three times longer than the period originally agreed in the publisher’s contract, especially if you allow for all the tea-breaks.” (Ibid: 22)

I hope I have shown that, however irritating Kate Fox’s style may be to some, she is smart and has worked out her argument. I take a very different view from hers on British national identity (e.g. my editorial on the London bombings, AT 21[5], 1-2) and have been known to come up with lines like, ‘I’m not English, I’m from Manchester’. But, in my last ‘Letter from Europe’ (AT 22[2], 18), I suggested that “anthropology deserves to flourish as the broadest possible framework for general education, helping individuals to place themselves more effectively in a connected world”. This requires a rethinking of the discipline’s object, theory and method that should not be restricted to what goes on within the academy. Fox has astutely lined herself up to take a leading position in such a rethink.

1. She has refurbished some of the classical assumptions of an early twentieth-century social anthropology of ‘customs’ and, by insisting on the timeless nature of a homogenous English identity, has made explicit the nationalist premises of the ethnographic approach.

2. She makes no claim to a collective or impersonal authority derived from membership of a professional guild, attributing her competences, if any, to a life-time of idiosyncratic personal engagement.

3. This leaves her free to indulge in irony, humour and self-deprecation, thereby allowing for a more egalitarian and humane relationship with her readers (sales 200,000 so far and rising) than most academic anthropologists can manage.

I hope that the guild she so enjoys baiting will engage with her on these grounds.

I read about A Foreign Sound at the same time in Le Monde (1) and the New York Times (2). The CD is Caetano Veloso’s homage to the formative influence on him of American popular music (3). The 23 tracks, sung in English, are mostly standards, but also by the likes of Dylan and Nirvana.

When I bought the CD, I found that his notes were as interesting as the quotes he gave to the two journalists:

So the world began with a Big Bang. Not only the strangest creatures in the remotest galaxy appear speaking English in the movies, the Universe itself started uttering a typically short English expression….A character in O Cinema Falado (The Talkies), a feature film that I directed in 1986: “The English language is an important subject for those who want to dominate music because it is the language of domination. My master wants to dominate dominion itself. I’ll teach music to him.” (3)

He cites Jacques Morelenbaum:

Americans think ‘Feelings’ is a real American song; they also think the Wright brothers invented the airplane.” (3)

The song is thought, according to Caetano Veloso,

…to represent the quintessence of an American kitsch hit. But it was copied from a French song of Loulou Gast’s written in Brazil by Morris Albert, a Brazilian who passed for an American. A punk group called The Offspring made an ironic version of this. I chose to take it seriously with a string orchestra, without mockery but in full awareness of this history. (1)

[The album opens with The Carioca]. This piece was taken from a musical comedy, ‘Flying down to Rio’, starring Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers. The film was obviously not shot in Rio and I am sure none of the participants ever came to Rio. The song started out with a tropical rhythm contrived by Hollywood to sound Brazilian to American ears. In reworking this piece, I invited some young percussionists from Bahia who added rhythms formed by mixing samba with Jamaican and Cuban styles. American writers and composers created the finest corpus of popular songs in the twentieth century. But American culture’s historical importance in the world and in our lives can support other commentaries. (1)

Clearly, Caetano Veloso is no lover of rock music. He quotes Frank Sinatra as saying

Rock ‘n’ roll… is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons… it manages to be the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the earth…brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious… (3)

Yet he can also admit:

At first I found rock ’n’ roll regressive. I much preferred American songs and jazz music. I began to love rock in 1966. This lack of respect for conventional beauty, this raw way of expressing ideas and feelings changed the face of the earth and the way we listen to the old songs.” (1)

The album’s title comes from Dylan’s ‘It’s alright, ma (I’m only bleeding)’: So don’t fear if you hear/ A foreign sound to your ear. It’s all a question of being open to influences from everywhere while remaining proud of the identity one has forged, a common enough theme in Brazil.

I don’t have a simplistic vision of imperialism. Tropicália [the movement he founded in the sixties when in exile] aimed to take account of the complexity of things. But, against the logic of winners and losers, dear to American puritans, my preference is to present original human experience. (1)

You cannot just be syncretic easily. It's dangerous. It's exciting, too, but being both syncretic and eclectic can be very dangerous because creating, performing, composing, these things demand focus and concentration, and also truth in perspective. If one thinks that he can mix anything with anything, he's in danger of getting lost. But nowadays you can't really avoid facing it. Even if you just concentrate yourself in a national, closed stylistic world, you're just responding to the necessity of recognizing mixtures and the dialogues of styles and cultures. It is the era of comparison, that you can put things side by side and suggest surprising comparisons that will change your way of thinking and feeling. (2)

Even if in the future, if we as Brazilians do nothing and we just go on being poor and unorganized and dominated and corrupt, and we slowly disappear in history — even if this dream is only a glimpse in the ocean of history, till now it is alive, and we live the intensity of this ambitious dream. (2)

This is just one more record of mine, and it's just as Brazilian as all the others. Every little track is filled with layers of histories and emotions. (2)

I visited Brazil in 2000. I was impressed by the size and variety of the place and by the people’s interest in exotic novelties; but even more by its insularity. Brazil amplifies the stature of all its different places and people by being itself, one in the many. I was reminded of nowhere so much as the USA. There is a sort of insouciance and self-sufficiency that comes perhaps from taking the language of a minor European appendage and turning it into a continental culture. I found something there that gives me hope for our world – a society so diverse and so much itself. I dream of a new universal that can only be realized through cultural particulars, as in great fiction. America was once its symbol for me, now it is Brazil.

I have my Realplayer internet radio permanently tuned to a bossa nova station; but this CD brought back the intellectual excitement of that visit. And the Veloso website has an ad for IBM featuring Linux…

1. Stéphane Davet Caetano Veloso croise les deux Amériques, Le Monde, 17.4.2004, translated by KH.

2. Jon Pareles MUSIC; Exile on 57^th Street, New York Times, 11.4.2004

3. Caetano Veloso A Foreign Sound, Universal CD, April 2004.

Thanks to Sophie Chevalier for the trip to Brazil and for the idea of writing this piece.