British Subjects

An Anthropology of Britain

Nigel Rapport

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781859735466
• eBook ISBN: 9781000180596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The anthropology of Britain is hotly debated. What does it mean to live in Britain and to be 'British', and is an anthropology of Britain even a legitimate undertaking? British Subjects presents a forthright voice in this debate. Key anthropological concerns such as community, rationality, aesthetics, the body, power, work and leisure, nationalism and transnationalism are found reflected in the lives of a wide range of British 'subjects'--from farmers to dancers, children to retired miners, new-agers to entrepreneurs. In disputing traditional claims that anthropology 'at home' and 'of one's own' is misconceived, unnecessary or unperceptive, this book clearly establishes that an anthropology of Britain can set excellent standards of subtle ethnography and complex analysis. Providing a nuanced appreciation of the intricacies of British society, this book shows how the anthropological study of Britain can offer an enlightening paradigm for the study of individual lives.

Part I
Introduction

‘Best of British!’: an Introduction to the Anthropology of Britain

Nigel Rapport

[T]he human condition actually is more or less a constant: always in face of the same mysteries, the same dilemmas, the same temptation to despair, and always armed unexpectedly with the same energy.

John Berger A Telling Eye

Three Tenets

The anthropological study of modern-day Britain was, with the partial exception of the Mass Observation project between the two World Wars (and since), originally the province of geographers (Alwyn Rees, Life in a Welsh Countryside (1951); Bill Williams, The Sociology of an English Village: Gosforth (1956) and A West Country Village: Ashworthy (1963)) and sociologists (Michael Young and Peter Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London (1957); Norman Dennis et al., Coal is our Life (1956)). I will not rehearse here the reasons for this tardiness of disciplinary appreciation, but suffice it to say that this volume attends to a sea-change: the anthropological study of Britain can now call on a host of names, senior and junior in the profession, to swell its list of studies.

By an anthropology of ‘Britain’ I mean Great Britain, not the United Kingdom. That is, I include Wales, England and Scotland but I leave out Northern Ireland, for Northern Ireland (the island of Ireland per se) seems to have been accorded a sociocultural specificity by the armed struggle which has largely characterized the twentieth century’s British–Irish relations both before the partition of 1921 into Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State and since. While an ‘anthropology of Britain’ engenders a certain broad sociocultural accounting, the inclusion of Ireland significantly alters the focus of this writing (narrows it, paradoxically) by seeming to demand that the yet-to-be-resolved ‘troubles’ over the status of Ulster be accorded an ‘imperative status’ and take centre stage (cf. Jenkins et al. 1986, Donnan and McFarlane 1997). Ireland, in short, warrants its own writing.

An Irish specificity is also seen reflected in its anthropology – the subject, until recently, of far more work than Britain (cf. Peace 1989). The first modern-day anthropological studies of Ireland tended to be conducted by Americans (Conrad Arensberg, The Irish Countryman (1937), and he and Solon Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland (1940)). This early North American interest, moreover, has shown little sign of waning, with Ireland retaining its distinctive ‘tropical’ character in that continent’s public imagination (John Messenger, Inis Beag (1969); Elliot Leyton, The One Blood (1975); Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (1979)). This, in turn, stimulated an early and continuing institutional focus in Ireland on anthropology ‘at home’, exemplified best by work based at the island’s largest anthropology department, Queen’s University of Belfast (and now its Centre for Irish Studies).

North American interest in Britain has been more scant, and home-grown institutionalized foci likewise. Erving Goffman spent time in exile from America sojourning in the Scottish highlands and islands, other visitors to British-Celtic borderlands have followed (N. Dorian, D. Forsythe, K. Armstrong, C. Davies, J. Nadel-Klein), and latterly there have been strong ethnographic accounts published by North American scholars of such areas (Reg Byron, Sea Change 1985; Susan Parman, Scottish Crofters (1990); Carol Trosset, Welshness Performed 1993; Gwen Neville, The Mother Town: Civic Ritual, Symbol and Experience in the Borders of Scotland (1994)). By and large, however, and with the honourable exception of Michael Banton (The Coloured Quarter: Negro Immigrants in an English City (1955) and The Policeman in the Community (1964), of Ronald Frankenberg (Communities in Britain (1956) and Village on the Border: A social study of religion, politics and football in a North Wales community (1957)), and of Sheila Cunnison (Wages and Work Allocation (1966)), the anthropological study of Britain tended to be undertaken by British anthropologists who had turned their attention to their ‘home’ environments only after they had fulfilled their desires, at least in part, for apprehending more distant climes. And while the latter studies by ‘returnees’ gave rise to some extremely incisive contributions,¹ this remained, notwithstanding, anthropology in Britain conducted in the shadow of a more proper anthropology elsewhere.²

The whys and wherefores of this disciplinary history were comprehensively reviewed by Anthony Cohen in 1983, as part of an initiative to encourage the then Social Science Research Council (UK) to develop a properly anthropological – as distinct from sociological – British expertise (Cohen 1983). Suffice it to say, however, that an uncertainty concerning the legitimacy (even the possibility) of undertaking anthropology in Britain has continued to dog the British institutional scene almost up to the present day. Some outspoken critics (Maurice Bloch, for instance, 1988) have continued to claim that since other disciplines cover British sociocultural milieux in a variety of their aspects (historical, sociological, philosophical, literary, psychological), it should be anthropology’s duty to fill in the gaps of study elsewhere – Madagascar and suchlike. At the least, individuals with an anthropological interest in Britain have had still to prove their mettle – had to blood themselves on exotica – before they could hope to acquire permissions, leaves, grants and audiences for work ‘up the M1’ (Okely 1987). The present volume, again, embodies a sea-change: all of its contributors can call Britain – at least western Europe – their first focus of professional anthropological study, and many have continued to centre their attention upon it. This is a book which makes Britain primary in anthropological terms and does not see the need always to legitimize itself by drawing comparisons between Britain and ‘other cultures’; nor does it feel that its lack of formal ‘exoticism’ requires special pleading.

There were no doubt many moments in the past when the tide could be seen to be turning in this direction. Based in anthropology departments such as Manchester, Edinburgh, Cambridge, UCL, Durham, Oxford and Swansea (latterly, Hull, Keele, Brunel, SOAS, Sussex, Lampeter and St Andrews), there has been, especially since the 1970s, a steady growth in studies which began with participant-observation in a British locale (urban and rural, factory and farm, single- and multi-sited, ‘ethnic’ and ‘white’) and culminated in a monograph on an aspect of British sociocultural life. These have accompanied a number of changes in wider social-scientific and institutional milieux, including the growth of interest in analytical models of ‘Western’ society and culture, in particular of ‘Europe’ (Godard, Llobera and Shore 1994); the growing difficulty of gaining access to traditional, non-Western sites, and the political and moral questionableness of so doing; critique of a merely quantitative sociological appraisal of the West, also of the dichotomization between so-called ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research in this regard; and a burgeoning appreciation of sophisticated studies being undertaken of their own societies and cultures by anthropologists in North America, Scandinavia, and also France (cf. Cohen 1980, 1988).³

A moment which cannot be overlooked, however, in the tide turning to flood (and one also pertaining to Frankenberg’s and Cunnison’s old departmental home, Manchester) concerns the efforts of Anthony Cohen from the early 1970s onwards. Cohen began fieldwork on the island of Whalsay (in Shetland) in 1973 and has maintained a research connection there ever since. His anthropological exegeses began appearing in academic papers in the later 1970s (e.g. 1978a, 1978b), and gave on to two magisterial edited collections in the 1980s. Reviewing the first of these (Belonging 1982) for the journal Man, as it then was (now JRAI), Brendan Quayle suggested he was witnessing a ‘coming-of-age’ of British ethnography (1984: 682); the second volume, meanwhile (Symbolising Boundaries 1986), reflected the growing number of aspiring anthropologists of Britain who could be called upon as contributors, and the increasing breadth of their foci: from ‘rural cultures’ to urban, industrial and migrant. Under Cohen’s stewardship, Manchester University Press also instituted a book series on The Anthropology of Britain, and Cohen’s own magnum opus on Shetland appeared under its rubric in 1987 (Whalsay). Anthony Cohen has since left Manchester for a Chair in Edinburgh, but he provides the epilogue to this volume in the form of a critical review: a reflection upon the progress of this regional anthropological accounting.

The present volume is not, then, the first compendium of studies of British anthropology (and besides Cohen’s early edited volumes should also be mentioned Frankenberg’s festschrift to his Manchester supervisor, Max Gluckman, Custom and Conflict in British Society (1982)), nor is it likely to be the last; a number of more recent collaborations have viewed Britain through the prisms of specific defining problematics such as ethnicity (Werbner and Anwar 1991) or new reproductive technologies (Edwards et al. 1993). I have, however, wanted to imbue this collection with a particular distinctive ethos. As mentioned, all the contributors have elected anthropology in Britain as their primary area of long-term field research and major study. They are, if you will, the descendants of those who first practised this kind of primacy (Banton, Cunnison, Cohen et al.), and those (Max Gluckman, Jimmy Littlejohn, Raymond Firth, Rosemary Harris, Joe Loudon) who first advocated participant-observation fieldwork being carried out in Britain in the same way as in areas of (British) anthropology’s more traditional concern (Africa, New Guinea, South America), and advocated doctorates and jobs in British university departments being accorded these researchers as a result of their work. In inviting people to contribute, furthermore, I have asked that they consider instilling into their accounts three tenets in particular:

1. ‘that anthropology in Britain is central to disciplinary concerns’;
2. ‘that anthropology in Britain might include and entail anything that concerns the discipline of anthropology: all human potentiality is there’;
3. ‘that anthropology in Britain, conducted by those whose mother-tongue is English (or Gallic, or Hindi, etc., where appropriate) or who are at least thoroughly bilingual, sets standards of excellence in terms of subtle ethnography and complex analysis that others might seek to match. Far from an anomaly, an anthropology “at home” in Britain might be seen to be paradigmatic’.

An anthropology ‘at home’ has come to be advocated on grounds of both ethics and expediency (cf. Jackson 1986). When Audrey Richards began taking students from Cambridge to ‘practise’ their fieldwork skills (before they undertook the pukka thing abroad) in the Essex village of Elmdon where she kept a holiday cottage (cf. Richards and Robin 1975; Strathern 1981), it was for similar reasons that many experienced fieldworkers turned to British settings later in their career: to hone their skills and interests by way of a milieu which was considered compassable, comparatively cheap, seemingly easy to access – simply ‘there’. Latterly, the moral questions which have accompanied anthropology’s literary turn and reflexive mood (concerning the proprieties of imposing one’s study on others in order to draw conclusions, enunciate narratives and gain esteem of one’s own (cf. Rapport 1994)) have led to calls possibly to study ‘one’s own’ alone. Only in a home milieu can one be assured that hegemonic discourses have at least an equal chance of being suffered and commanded alike.

In this book, I have wanted to give an anthropology (‘at home’) in Britain a rather different grounding: in meritoriousness and significance.⁴ Anthropology in Britain has the potential, I contend, of providing some of the best that the discipline can offer because an anthropologist thoroughly at home in linguistic denotation, and familiar with behavioural form, is more able to appreciate the connotative: to pick up on those niceties of interaction and ambivalences and ambiguities of exchange, where the most intricate (and interesting) aspects of sociocultural worlds are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Nationalism, Contestation and the Performance of Tradition
• Part III: Strategies of Modernity: Heritage, Leisure, Dissociation
• Part IV: The Appropriation of Discourse
• Part V: Methodologies and Ethnomethodologies
• Part VI: The Making (and Unmaking) of Community: Ethnicity, Religiosity, Locality
• Part VII: Epilogue
• Index