Kate Fox, Watching the English

In Watching the English, social anthropologist Kate Fox takes a look at her own tribe with a view to coming up with a "grammar of Englishness." She watches the English, quite literally, observing how they behave when in line at a coffee shop or on a train or while using a cellphone, eavesdropping on their conversations, performing experiments or testing hypotheses on unwitting strangers when she's out in public. Sometimes she'll even outright interview them:

"A researcher with a notebook is a nuisance, of course, but much less scary than a random stranger trying to start a conversation for no apparent reason. If you simply start chatting to English people on trains or buses, they tend to assume you are either drunk, drugged or deranged. Social scientists are not universally liked or appreciated, but we are still marginally more acceptable than alcoholics and escaped lunatics."

Watching the English is absolutely fascinating and sometimes very funny. The author's writing is lively and lucid, but beyond her intentional humor there is humor inherent simply in taking a (relatively) detached look at behavior which most of the time we take for granted. (Just so, comedians like Jerry Seinfeld make us notice the humor in our everyday behavior.)

Fox neatly ties up her findings in the end with a diagram showing the ten English characteristics she's tracked throughout the book: at the core of it all is social dis-ease, but other characteristics include humor (i.e., humour), class consciousness, "Eeyorishness" (that is, a tendency to moan about things), and modesty. In sum, I loved the book, and I love the English, with whom—it seems clear to me now—I have much in common.