British Subjects: An Anthropology of Britain

352 Pages·2002·1.6 MB·English

by  Nigel Rapport

British Subjects

British Subjects
An Anthropology of Britain
Edited by
Nigel Rapport
Oxford•New York
First published in 2002 by
Berg
Editorial offices:
150 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JJ, UK
838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-4812, USA
© Nigel Rapport 2002
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form
or by any means without the written permission of Berg.
Berg is an imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
British subjects : an anthropology of Britain / edited by Nigel Rapport.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN1-85973-551-7 (cloth) -- ISBN1-85973-546-0 (pbk.)
1. Anthropology--Great Britain--History. 2. National characteristics,
British. 3. Great Britain--Social life and customs. I. Rapport, Nigel,
1956-
GN17.3.G7 B75 2002
301’.0941--dc21 2001006901
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 1859735517(Cloth)
ISBN 1859735460(Paper)
Typeset by JS Typesetting, Wellingborough, Northants.
Printed in the United Kingdom by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire.
Contents
List of Contributors ix
Part I: Introduction
‘Best of British!’: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Britain
Nigel Rapport 3
Part II: Nationalism, Contestation and the Performance of Tradition
Introduction to Part II
Nigel Rapport 27
1 Subject Positions and ‘Real Royalists’: Monarchy and Vernacular
Civil Religion in Great Britain
Anne Rowbottom 31
2 National Day: Achieving Collective Identity on the Isle of Man
Susan Lewis 49
3 Aesthetics at the Ballet: Looking at ‘National’ Style, Body and
Clothing in the London Dance World
Helena Wulff 67
Part III: Strategies of Modernity: Heritage, Leisure, Dissociation
Introduction to Part III
Nigel Rapport 87
4 On ‘Old Things’: The Fetishization of Past Everyday Life
Sharon Macdonald 89
5 Leisure and Change in a Post-Mining Mining Town
Andrew Dawson 107
6 Dissociation, Social Technology and the Spiritual Domain
Tanya Luhrmann 121
–v–
Contents
Part IV: The Appropriation of Discourse
Introduction to Part IV
Nigel Rapport 141
7 The English Child: Toward a Cultural Politics of Childhood
Identities
Allison James 143
8 Bits and Bytes of Information
Jeanette Edwards 163
9 Culture in a Network: Dykes, Webs and Women in London
and Manchester
Sarah Green 181
Part V: Methodologies and Ethnomethodologies
Introduction to Part V
Nigel Rapport 205
10 Interviews as Ethnography? Disembodied Social Interaction
in Britain
Jenny Hockey 209
11 Entering Secure Psychiatric Settings
Christine Brown 223
12 Cultural Values and Social Organization in Wales: Is Ethnicity
the Locus of Culture?
Carol Trosset and Douglas Caulkins 239
Part VI: The Making (and Unmaking) of Community: Ethnicity,
Religiosity, Locality
Introduction to Part VI
Nigel Rapport 259
13 Armenian and Other Diasporas: Trying to Reconcile the
Irreconcilable
Vered Amit 263
–vi–
Contents
14 Both Independent and Interconnected Voices: Bakhtin among
the Quakers
Peter Collins 281
15 The Body of the Village Community: Between Reverend
Parkington in Wanet and Mr Beebe in A Room with a View
Nigel Rapport 299
Part VII: Epilogue
The ‘Best of British’ – with More to Come...
Anthony P. Cohen 323
Index 331
–vii–

List of Contributors
Vered Amit is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal. She has conducted fieldwork in
London (UK), Quebec and Grand Cayman; currently she is undertaking research
on transnational consultancy. Among her previous publications are Armenians in
London: The management of social boundaries (Manchester University Press 1989)
and (editor) Constructing the Field (Routledge 2000). She is currently editing a
Biographical Dictionary of Anthropology as well as a volume on Realizing
Community (both for Routledge); and she is collaborating on a project with Nigel
Rapport entitled The Trouble with Community (Pluto).
Christine Brown is Robert Baxter NHS Resarch Fellow at the University of Exeter,
Department of Mental Health; she is also a practising psychiatrist and a PhD student
in social anthropology at the University of St Andrews. Her current work is
supported by the National Programme for Forensic Mental Health Research and
Development, and focuses on personality disorders, and the relationship between
psychiatric services and the criminal justice system in Britain.
D. Douglas Caulkins is Earl D. Strong Professor in Social Studies at Grinnell
College, Iowa, where he has taught anthropology since 1970 (having obtained his
PhD from Cornell University). His current research is on social capital in Norway,
and on regional and national identity in the UK, particularly among hi-tech
entrepreneurs. Among his recent publications are ‘Consensus, Clines, and Edges
in Celtic Cultures’, Cross-Cultural Research 35(2), 2001, and (with Elaine S.
Weiner) ‘Enterprise and Resistance in the Celtic Fringe: High Growth, Low Growth
and No Growth Firms’, in R. Byron and J. Hutson (eds) Local Enterprise on the
North Atlantic Margin (Ashgate 1999).
Anthony Cohen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh,
and Provost of the Faculty Group of Law and Social Sciences. He conducted British
fieldwork among the islanders of Whalsay, Shetland, over a seventeen-year period;
currently he is involved in a project exploring forms of Scottish nationalism in
urban working environments. Among his publications are Self Consciousness:
An Alternative Anthropology of Identity (Routledge 1994), Questions of Conscious-
ness (co-edited with N. Rapport) (Routledge 1995), and Signifying Identities:
–ix–
List of Contributors
Anthropological Perspectives on Boundaries and Contested Values (edited)
(Routledge 2000).
Peter Collins is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Durham, having
acquired his PhD from Manchester. His doctoral research was on British Quakers;
he has since examined the case of the American Shakers, and lay and medical
understandings of ‘stress’; he is particularly interested in anthropological applic-
ations of ‘narrative’. He has published widely in journals such as Auto/Biography,
Worship, Architecture and Design and Journal of Contemporary Religion, and
contributed to edited volumes on the topics of celibacy, fieldwork methods, and
identity.
Andrew Dawson is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Hull. He
has conducted extensive fieldwork in Britain, Ireland, Bosnia and Australia, and
has worked principally on the issues of ageing, refugee experiences, post-
modernism and post-industrialism. For his work on the latter he was selected in
1995 as the European Association of Rural Sociologists’ ‘Young Scientist’. His
publications include the books After Writing Culture (co-edited with Allison James
and Jenny Hockey) (Routledge 1997), and Migrants of Identity (co-edited with
Nigel Rapport) (Berg 1998).
Jeanette Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of
Manchester. She has carried out extensive fieldwork in the north-west of England
and has recently held fellowships in the ‘Public Understanding of Science’ from
the ESRC and the Wellcome Trust. Her research interests include kinship and
new reproductive and genetic technologies, and the meaning of parenthood in
contemporary British society. She is the author of Born and Bred: Idioms of Kinship
and New Reproductive Technologies in England (Oxford University Press 2000)
and co-author of Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted
Conception (2nd edn Cambridge University Press 1999).
Sarah Green is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of
Manchester; she has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in London and Manchester,
also in Argolid (southern Greece) and on the Greek–Albanian border (Epirus).
Her key theoretical concerns are with concepts of the person as they manifest
themselves in notions of gender, sexuality, embodiment, place, landscape and
environment, tourism and development, and new information and communication
technologies. Among her publications is Urban Amazons: Lesbian Feminism and
Beyond in the Gender, Sexuality and Identity Battles of London (Macmillan 1997).
Jenny Hockey is Senior Lecturer in the School of Comparative and Applied Social
Science at the University of Hull. Her current research concerns theories of the
–x–