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Originally posted by Raptor Eye:
There's a difference between identity and folk culture.

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I wonder whether the attitude of the English is different because the government and capital city is based there. Perhaps it has been easier for English people to see themselves as British first, which is why any English identity is weak. They've embraced the Scottish, Welsh and Irish folk cultures as their own, while the individual countries have held firmly to anything that distinguished them from the others.

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
The identity if England is in largely Scottish and Irish folk songs.

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Originally posted by betjemaniac:
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Or have I misunderstood?

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Originally posted by deano:
I think that a national culture is just another way of saying "national stereotype".

Fish and Chips, Roast Beef, Morris Dancing and so on are stereotypes just as much as the sausage-eating Germans or the cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

Why do we need such a culture anyway? If there is an English culture it is that of absorbing other cultural influences and making them our own!

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
Then give us a positive list of English cultural identity

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:

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Originally posted by betjemaniac:
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Or have I misunderstood?

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Add a few English songs that most people know, and maybe a national costume.

If you disagree with my list, then show it's incorrect with concrete examples.

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Originally posted by betjemaniac:
Is it in fact that our folk culture is the mainstream from which the fringes, for want of a better term, differ: ie watching competitive team sport, boxing day football, etc? So, we do have a folk culture, but it is now the template for "normal" and thus not recognised as "folk."

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Originally posted by Wood
It's interesting because I had almost this exact conversation a few weeks ago with a sweet-natured liberal American guy who bemoaned the fact that (he felt) White America had no real culture of its own worth keeping, while the ethnic minorities had proud traditions and identities. I told him that he was wrong, and that while yeah, his people shouldn't feel guilty for who they were, because they were who they were, and that there was a culture... he just wasn't seeing it. I talked about baseball, and things like that. He didn't buy it. He thought his own culture was dead. I felt pity for him.

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Some years ago, we had a group of Americans visiting our church. They found "Have I got news for you?" very strange as they seemed to treat politics as something very serious, and certainly couldn't be cynical or sarcastic about it.

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Originally posted by Enoch:

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Originally posted by Wood
It's interesting because I had almost this exact conversation a few weeks ago with a sweet-natured liberal American guy who bemoaned the fact that (he felt) White America had no real culture of its own worth keeping, while the ethnic minorities had proud traditions and identities. I told him that he was wrong, and that while yeah, his people shouldn't feel guilty for who they were, because they were who they were, and that there was a culture... he just wasn't seeing it. I talked about baseball, and things like that. He didn't buy it. He thought his own culture was dead. I felt pity for him.

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From here, the USA is a very foreign place, in many ways, despite deceptively speaking a dialect of English, more foreign, culturally more alien, than adjoining countries in Europe. So QED.

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Originally posted by Stetson:

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Some years ago, we had a group of Americans visiting our church. They found "Have I got news for you?" very strange as they seemed to treat politics as something very serious, and certainly couldn't be cynical or sarcastic about it.

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I'm assuming these particular Americans never watched Saturday Night Live or Southpark?

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Originally posted by Spawn:
English folk traditions - richest in the world

Carnival - everything from village carnivals to Notting Hill
Fairs and Fayres and Galas
Music - incredible range of English folk music, choral traditions, pop and rock, orchestras and brass band music.
Food - astonishing range of local and regional cuisines - pasties, cheeses, stews, dumplings, cobblers, cream teas, unrivalled puddings, breakfasts, clotted cream, ice creams, bacons, hams and sausages, chicken tikka masala.
Dance - Morris and maypoles to ballroom.
Rural - competition of livestock, vegetable growing, jams and preserves, tug of war, ploughing competitions, fox hunting.
Sports including all those we invented such as - oh wait just about every major sport.

The list starts to get boastful at this point because I haven't even touched upon the fact that we are a nation loving hobbies and crafts, literature, drama, art etc.

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• The co-op movement
• Scousers never buy the Sun - Hillsborough is just as much a cultural earthquake as the tollpuddle matyrs
• The role of tea
• The whole literary tradition
• Poll tax riots - the is historically a repeating theme specifically on poll tax but the luddite riots, the Captain Swing riots, the Jarrow marches, all these strike me as part of a heritage of dispute, fighting shy of revolution. The civil war scarred the country so much no one was willing to risk it again.
• Hundreds of folk songs, John Barleycorn springs to mind, or Tam Lin - but there is a thriving modern folk tradition too, urban protest songs from the likes of Billy Bragg, the music of the Unthanks etc etc
• Avon ladies & Anne Summers
• Regional food culture like staffordshire oatcakes, Yorkshire parkin, cumberland sausage
• Random vestigial historical rights protected with fierce pride, the right to collect fallen wood on this intake, the right to graze your horse on that common, the right to harangue passers-by on hyde park corner
• Traveller communities
• Sheffield Steel
• Noggin the Nog & Bagpuss
• Ladybird books, Penguin books
• The CofE in public life
• Brass bands
• Rare breed plant and animal rearing
• Chelsea flower show
• Pantomime

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Originally posted by Wood:

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Originally posted by Stetson:

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Some years ago, we had a group of Americans visiting our church. They found "Have I got news for you?" very strange as they seemed to treat politics as something very serious, and certainly couldn't be cynical or sarcastic about it.

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I'm assuming these particular Americans never watched Saturday Night Live or Southpark?

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The clue there is that they're visiting a church, I think.

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Avon ladies & Anne Summers

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Originally posted by Wood:

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Originally posted by Spawn:
English folk traditions - richest in the world

Carnival - everything from village carnivals to Notting Hill
Fairs and Fayres and Galas
Music - incredible range of English folk music, choral traditions, pop and rock, orchestras and brass band music.
Food - astonishing range of local and regional cuisines - pasties, cheeses, stews, dumplings, cobblers, cream teas, unrivalled puddings, breakfasts, clotted cream, ice creams, bacons, hams and sausages, chicken tikka masala.
Dance - Morris and maypoles to ballroom.
Rural - competition of livestock, vegetable growing, jams and preserves, tug of war, ploughing competitions, fox hunting.
Sports including all those we invented such as - oh wait just about every major sport.

The list starts to get boastful at this point because I haven't even touched upon the fact that we are a nation loving hobbies and crafts, literature, drama, art etc.

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The problem is that few of these things, many of which are wonderful, are really "folk" anymore. There are a lot of middle class pursuits here.

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Originally posted by Doublethink:
Given this is a thread on English folk culture, how is that relevant ?

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Originally posted by Chocoholic:
Did no one else get taught English country dancing at school?

Not that I can remember seeing it since, although Morris and maypole seem similar styles.

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Originally posted by balaam:
Is there an English culture as such? Because the folk cultures of Yorkshire, East Anglia and Cornwall seem to me to be as diverse as Scotland, Ireland and the Black Country. In short, there is no single English culture but a mixture of several different cultures that combine to create something that is undefinable, but still English.

Other counties are even more diverse. The culture of Massachusetts and Arizona are vastly different to each other, but still American.

Culture does not have to be uniform.

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Originally posted by Ariel:
Not in my corner of the world they're not. I couldn't describe any of them as being especially "middle-class" - they're just part of the calendar of the seasons that people at all levels participate in, with the exception of fox-hunting and morris dancing.

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Originally posted by Heavenly Anarchist:

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Originally posted by Chocoholic:
Did no one else get taught English country dancing at school?

Not that I can remember seeing it since, although Morris and maypole seem similar styles.

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I did it every week after junior school in the 70s, not a posh school either, we lived on a council estate. We also did it occasionally in PE.

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Originally posted by Jengie Jon:
First of all it is not the English who get to define what is "English Culture". In the British Isles English culture is the dominant culture and that means it is seen as normative. Minority cultures such as Scots, Irish and Welsh tend to be defined as how they are different from English Culture. "Culture" works by the relationship to "the other". What a culture is dominant those within a culture often do not have access to "the other" and are therefore culturally blind until those with access to "the other" start pointing it out.

So unfortunately the stereotypes by the Americans and such are better guesses at English Culture than are those of most English. The culture is the common sense ways things are done. This talk of culture that relates it to folk events is perhaps an artefact of English Culture, that we associate culture with those things, but it really does not define it.

For instance, I would say having churches keep a register of the weddings that occur in them is very much English culture. The Scots do not, the French do not and I suspect many other nationalities do not.

Jengie

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Originally posted by Albertus:
I'd agree with Jengie that it's very difficult to identify, from within a culture, what makes that culture distinctive, because for people who live them cultures are just 'what is'. The exception is I suppose where you are consciously a minority or marginalised culture.
Oh, and Zulu is certainly Welsh- the 24th aren't singing Greensleeves when the Zulus attack, are they! AIUI Stanley Baker made the film because he wanted to make a 'Welsh western'.

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Originally posted by Jengie Jon:
... For instance, I would say having churches keep a register of the weddings that occur in them is very much English culture. The Scots do not, the French do not and I suspect many other nationalities do not. ...

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