When you were small you particularly enjoyed treasure hunts and dressing up. Almost all the time you were playing elaborate games of ‘make believe’ with your younger sister. You lived for much of the time in a fantasy world.
Watching you, I was reminded that humans have been defined as homo ludens, Latin for ‘playful humans’. For while this playful characteristic does not distinguish us from all other species, it has been particularly developed in humans. The enormous consequences you can see all around you in the mania for competitive games, gambling and sports. It also shows itself in behaviour in many parts of our life which we do not normally think of as ‘games’ or ‘sport’.
There are games of skill and those of chance, of single combatants against each other or of teams, involving different artefacts and different rules (balls, cards, dice). Each tends to work in a slightly different way and to appeal to a different part of our psychology.
Humans are strongly motivated by curiosity and by a basic playfulness, a desire to compete, fantasize, imagine, struggle. This playfulness is very marked in children, but continues throughout life. The bundle of characteristics involved, the desire to win, to dominate, to outstrip the opponent, the delight in good performance, the satisfaction in co-ordinated muscular or social movements, the pleasure in the calculation of risk. All sorts of different elements are involved.
A game is a sort of experiment outside time and space. In a game individuals or teams who start almost exactly equal, play according to the same rules, end up with one temporarily vanquishing the other. It creates difference out of uniformity. It is dynamic and progressive, creating variability out of similarity, artificially creating conflict. It divides and separates people who were previously joined and equal. One person has the top hat in ‘Monopoly’, buys up Park Lane and Mayfair and becomes a rapacious landlord for as long as the game lasts, while another person gets the boot and Old Kent Road.
Much of this is opposed to what happens in many civilizations in India, Africa or China where people attempt to control and downplay open competition in social life. Rituals, that is orderly, standardized repetitive behaviour, are dedicated to reducing confrontation and variations. Thus rituals tend to create a temporary phase of equality and closeness in unequal civilizations, they join people and create unity.
We see a games-like process at work in many of the central institutions of a modern society, the Stock Exchange, Houses of Parliament, the Law Courts as well as on the actual games field. All of these take the form of bounded games, worked out in an arena which allows regulated conflict. This helps change to occur without disrupting the wider society.
Within the particular 'field' of the game, during a limited time-span, people can behave in odd and often irresponsible ways. They can wear odd clothes (huge helmets, white trousers), they often hit each other (boxing) or tackle each other (rugby) or throw things at each other (cricket). Or they may shout at each other in an aggressive way across the floor of the House of Commons, or be very rude to each other in a court of law, or run around madly gesticulating as in the Stock Exchange. Yet such behaviour is limited. At the end people should shake hands and become friends again, for it is ‘only a game’.
Tuesday 30 January 2007
5:5 When should we touch each other?
The 'social space' is partly symbolic and invisible and hence dealt with through gestures, postures, language. But it is also partly physical, and hence can be observed in body distances. The range of body distance varies with the degree of intimacy and equality that is thought to exist in the relationship.
At one extreme is 'untouchability', whether literally (as in the caste system) or through keeping one's distance, as when a nobleman finds it distasteful to be close to a commoner. Neither of these two extreme situations are what we commonly associate with Britain, though there are some exceptions.
At the other extreme are what we find in certain tribal and peasant societies. Here there is, within the group, very little social and physical distance. So people will often stand or sit disconcertingly close for a westerner's tastes, while some Africans find westerner’s aloof and stand too far away.
In some societies there seems to be little appreciation of privacy, separateness, the need for a protected zone of intimacy into which no one intrudes. I remember vividly the shock of living in a village in Nepal where the door was open and people dropped in constantly and commented on everything I was doing. They followed us on our trips out of the village when we were trying to create a little personal space, and even going to the toilet out in the fields was an arduous exercise.
It is therefore interesting that many of the English effect a compromise, more or less the same physical distance is maintained for everybody, whether they are intimate or distant from us. Everyone stands under one law, the law of compromise, not too far apart, nor too close. They should be close enough to show engagement and involvement, but not so close as to cause embarrassment and intrusion. And, on the whole, we consider an intrusion into our personal space without an invitation odd and possibly threatening.
The questions of personal space are a delicate compromise, and as times and influences change they become confused. Twenty years ago I would have considered it very strange to kiss female friends or acquaintances on the cheek or to hug men, but now these continental customs have spread widely. I constantly find myself wondering how to behave.
It used to be so easy, a hand-shake at the start and end of a meeting with a friend. Now I often wonder when and how we should kiss or hug. The problem is even greater across cultures. To kiss on the lips in public in Japan is an obscene gesture, even when the couple are married, and even touching another in public until recently was rather indecent. A bow and a name card on first meeting; thereafter just a bow or smile.
Yet even the simple hand-shake is a delicate art. It symbolizes friendship, equality, mutual grasping, in other words involvement and the taking of a calculated risk (of being rejected) by stretching out one's hand. On the other hand, the arm is extended and fends off the other, it is not a drawing together as in the embrace. It is a stiff gesture; let us be friends, but let us also keep our distance and respect our mutual independence. The hand-shake and an older form of rather restrained middle-class Englishness went together well.
Two friends are like magnets. They are mutually attracted, yet if they get too close, there is repulsion to a safer distance. Friendship is thus a balancing act, like a ballet or dance. It is both spontaneous and to be worked at, both natural and artificial. Like happiness it comes unexpectedly and cannot be forced. It is usually the side-effect of other interests.
Humans are very social animals and love to love and be loved. To be able to feel warmth in the company of good friends or mates is an unusual pleasure. It helps to overcome some of the loneliness of our rushed and individualistic lives. We are no longer islands, but part of a continent. We find mirrors for ourselves in others, support and help in difficulties, the pleasure of giving when we have too much. Some of the moments I shall always treasure are when, as true friends, you and I explored the world together, enjoying a new garden, a visit to the Natural History Museum, or discovering the fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers, with a joy which could not have come if we were on our own.
At one extreme is 'untouchability', whether literally (as in the caste system) or through keeping one's distance, as when a nobleman finds it distasteful to be close to a commoner. Neither of these two extreme situations are what we commonly associate with Britain, though there are some exceptions.
At the other extreme are what we find in certain tribal and peasant societies. Here there is, within the group, very little social and physical distance. So people will often stand or sit disconcertingly close for a westerner's tastes, while some Africans find westerner’s aloof and stand too far away.
In some societies there seems to be little appreciation of privacy, separateness, the need for a protected zone of intimacy into which no one intrudes. I remember vividly the shock of living in a village in Nepal where the door was open and people dropped in constantly and commented on everything I was doing. They followed us on our trips out of the village when we were trying to create a little personal space, and even going to the toilet out in the fields was an arduous exercise.
It is therefore interesting that many of the English effect a compromise, more or less the same physical distance is maintained for everybody, whether they are intimate or distant from us. Everyone stands under one law, the law of compromise, not too far apart, nor too close. They should be close enough to show engagement and involvement, but not so close as to cause embarrassment and intrusion. And, on the whole, we consider an intrusion into our personal space without an invitation odd and possibly threatening.
The questions of personal space are a delicate compromise, and as times and influences change they become confused. Twenty years ago I would have considered it very strange to kiss female friends or acquaintances on the cheek or to hug men, but now these continental customs have spread widely. I constantly find myself wondering how to behave.
It used to be so easy, a hand-shake at the start and end of a meeting with a friend. Now I often wonder when and how we should kiss or hug. The problem is even greater across cultures. To kiss on the lips in public in Japan is an obscene gesture, even when the couple are married, and even touching another in public until recently was rather indecent. A bow and a name card on first meeting; thereafter just a bow or smile.
Yet even the simple hand-shake is a delicate art. It symbolizes friendship, equality, mutual grasping, in other words involvement and the taking of a calculated risk (of being rejected) by stretching out one's hand. On the other hand, the arm is extended and fends off the other, it is not a drawing together as in the embrace. It is a stiff gesture; let us be friends, but let us also keep our distance and respect our mutual independence. The hand-shake and an older form of rather restrained middle-class Englishness went together well.
Two friends are like magnets. They are mutually attracted, yet if they get too close, there is repulsion to a safer distance. Friendship is thus a balancing act, like a ballet or dance. It is both spontaneous and to be worked at, both natural and artificial. Like happiness it comes unexpectedly and cannot be forced. It is usually the side-effect of other interests.
Humans are very social animals and love to love and be loved. To be able to feel warmth in the company of good friends or mates is an unusual pleasure. It helps to overcome some of the loneliness of our rushed and individualistic lives. We are no longer islands, but part of a continent. We find mirrors for ourselves in others, support and help in difficulties, the pleasure of giving when we have too much. Some of the moments I shall always treasure are when, as true friends, you and I explored the world together, enjoying a new garden, a visit to the Natural History Museum, or discovering the fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers, with a joy which could not have come if we were on our own.
Sunday 28 January 2007
5:4 What is respect for other people?
Friendship is based on respect and courtesy. Courtesy and politeness mean putting ourselves into the place of the other person, to ‘see ourselves as others see us’. We practice a form of empathy or sympathy which is impossible except between people who believe themselves to be, in essence, close enough or equal enough to have some sense of the other's feelings or predicament.
Yet courtesy and politeness are also distancing mechanisms, for while they establish a certain common closeness, they then keep people at arm’s length. They can be used to emphasize the other's separate needs and wants, their personal social space. This can be a form of honouring of the other's identity. The Chinese philosopher Confucius alluded to the difficulty of the balance when he said, ‘the most difficult people are women and servants. Getting too intimate to them costs you your dignity, while distancing them causes complaints.’
This idea of the social space surrounding an individual is an important one. It is central to our individualistic concepts of who we are. The trampling on the social space of those weaker than ourselves, making another forgo his own time, space or desires to accommodate our own, is one of the chief devices, in most societies, for gaining power. Wasting another's time, as in the many occasions where people are made to hang around for hours, is just as effective as physical abuse. Yet true courtesy is just the opposite of this; it is respecting that social space, keeping our distance while showing concern.
Yet courtesy and politeness are also distancing mechanisms, for while they establish a certain common closeness, they then keep people at arm’s length. They can be used to emphasize the other's separate needs and wants, their personal social space. This can be a form of honouring of the other's identity. The Chinese philosopher Confucius alluded to the difficulty of the balance when he said, ‘the most difficult people are women and servants. Getting too intimate to them costs you your dignity, while distancing them causes complaints.’
This idea of the social space surrounding an individual is an important one. It is central to our individualistic concepts of who we are. The trampling on the social space of those weaker than ourselves, making another forgo his own time, space or desires to accommodate our own, is one of the chief devices, in most societies, for gaining power. Wasting another's time, as in the many occasions where people are made to hang around for hours, is just as effective as physical abuse. Yet true courtesy is just the opposite of this; it is respecting that social space, keeping our distance while showing concern.
5:3 How do friends communicate?
Often the best form of communication with friends is, surprisingly, silence. Friendship is not only about what we do say, but even more importantly about what we do not. True friendship occurs when 'information' is conveyed by absences. The striving is to convey as much as possible indirectly, ‘between the lines’.
The reason why such negative communication is important is that it requires a greater closeness than positive communication. The greater the distance between sender and receiver, the more the need for explicitness and directness. Only when two or more people share an enormous amount can the much more economical negative communication take place.
All speech is an exercise of power because there is a speaker and a listener. So the more blatant and explicit the message, the more difficult it is to exercise discrimination, that is free will, in receiving the message. An explicit order, as in the army, is the worst; it is flatly coercive, binding, demanding obedience.
On the other hand, the kind of indirect, negative, allusive communication which is a peculiar characteristic of friendship allows ideas to flow and feelings not to be bruised. He or she is presented with an opportunity to draw conclusions, "Perhaps you would like to consider..." This approach has several advantages. It avoids infringing the integrity of the other person; acts are apparently entered into with free will, as the contracts of rational actors. Thus we do not say ‘you must do this’, when asking a friend for a favour, but ‘I wonder if you could possibly…’
This strategy is necessary where free and independent individuals are inter-acting. In an advanced, open and balanced society where fear is minimal, cajoling, requesting, persuading is all that can be done. People are not slaves, or even clients. They have to be enticed very gently and indirectly into proper friendship, and they cannot be forced to remain. They can refuse friendship or take their friendship elsewhere.
The reason why such negative communication is important is that it requires a greater closeness than positive communication. The greater the distance between sender and receiver, the more the need for explicitness and directness. Only when two or more people share an enormous amount can the much more economical negative communication take place.
All speech is an exercise of power because there is a speaker and a listener. So the more blatant and explicit the message, the more difficult it is to exercise discrimination, that is free will, in receiving the message. An explicit order, as in the army, is the worst; it is flatly coercive, binding, demanding obedience.
On the other hand, the kind of indirect, negative, allusive communication which is a peculiar characteristic of friendship allows ideas to flow and feelings not to be bruised. He or she is presented with an opportunity to draw conclusions, "Perhaps you would like to consider..." This approach has several advantages. It avoids infringing the integrity of the other person; acts are apparently entered into with free will, as the contracts of rational actors. Thus we do not say ‘you must do this’, when asking a friend for a favour, but ‘I wonder if you could possibly…’
This strategy is necessary where free and independent individuals are inter-acting. In an advanced, open and balanced society where fear is minimal, cajoling, requesting, persuading is all that can be done. People are not slaves, or even clients. They have to be enticed very gently and indirectly into proper friendship, and they cannot be forced to remain. They can refuse friendship or take their friendship elsewhere.
Friday 26 January 2007
5:2 What is friendship?
The essence of friendship is equality. It must not develop into that inequality of power and gifts which is the essence of patronage. If it does, it will be destroyed. It must also be based on liking, mutual interest and shared feelings and thoughts. To ‘like’ someone is very different from ‘loving’ someone. I have heard people say that they love their parents (or their brothers and sisters), but do not really like them much. This is quite possible and, in the end, both are important. What is certain is that pretended friendship, where there is nothing in common and nothing to share, does not work.
Friendship is not a static thing. It is like a river, only meaningful if it is heading in some direction. It must always be developing, changing and expanding, absorbing new experiences. As someone once put it, ‘The English do not have friends; they have friends about things’. A shared activity or need is behind friendship. There are so many people in the world. Why spend time with just this one? Because one enjoys their company, they are ‘good fun’, amusing, supportive, kind. As we shall see, this often finds its strongest expression in playing games with them.
Friends must not be manipulative and calculating. Friendship abides by a central rule of ethics, namely that ‘we should treat people as ends in themselves and not as a means to an end’. If you feel a friend is ‘using you’, then the friendship ends. Just as true love and beauty cannot be bought or sold, so friendship cannot be purchased. You cannot go to an agency and buy or hire a friend, while you certainly can hire a person’s mind or body for a particular task.
So friendship is about the long-term liking of two equal people for each other. In England this can be between people of the opposite sex or of different ages. Men can be friends with women, adults with children. Even husband and wife can be ‘friends’ as well as companions and sexual partners. This is a very old pattern. The historian Eileen Power described how medieval life is ‘full of married friends’. To a certain extent, the English can even be friends with their pets. As the novelist George Eliot the novelist put it, ‘Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms’. Pets are the only kind of friend we can buy, but even they have to be respected.
We have to work at friendship; it neither comes naturally nor does it remain without constant attention. Friends can be likened to an orchard. They have to be carefully planted, pruned and protected. They cannot, however, be turned into private and exclusive property. You will find throughout your life that one of the most difficult things is to share friends and sometimes to lose them.
Friendship often clashes with other ties, especially to our family and particularly our love partner. Yet when it works, it can be one of the deepest of all relationships. As a little girl you used to listen with me to Handel’s famous aria, based on the biblical story of the lament of King David over his murdered friend Jonathan. Handel’s music captures the depth of their love.
Friendship is not a static thing. It is like a river, only meaningful if it is heading in some direction. It must always be developing, changing and expanding, absorbing new experiences. As someone once put it, ‘The English do not have friends; they have friends about things’. A shared activity or need is behind friendship. There are so many people in the world. Why spend time with just this one? Because one enjoys their company, they are ‘good fun’, amusing, supportive, kind. As we shall see, this often finds its strongest expression in playing games with them.
Friends must not be manipulative and calculating. Friendship abides by a central rule of ethics, namely that ‘we should treat people as ends in themselves and not as a means to an end’. If you feel a friend is ‘using you’, then the friendship ends. Just as true love and beauty cannot be bought or sold, so friendship cannot be purchased. You cannot go to an agency and buy or hire a friend, while you certainly can hire a person’s mind or body for a particular task.
So friendship is about the long-term liking of two equal people for each other. In England this can be between people of the opposite sex or of different ages. Men can be friends with women, adults with children. Even husband and wife can be ‘friends’ as well as companions and sexual partners. This is a very old pattern. The historian Eileen Power described how medieval life is ‘full of married friends’. To a certain extent, the English can even be friends with their pets. As the novelist George Eliot the novelist put it, ‘Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms’. Pets are the only kind of friend we can buy, but even they have to be respected.
We have to work at friendship; it neither comes naturally nor does it remain without constant attention. Friends can be likened to an orchard. They have to be carefully planted, pruned and protected. They cannot, however, be turned into private and exclusive property. You will find throughout your life that one of the most difficult things is to share friends and sometimes to lose them.
Friendship often clashes with other ties, especially to our family and particularly our love partner. Yet when it works, it can be one of the deepest of all relationships. As a little girl you used to listen with me to Handel’s famous aria, based on the biblical story of the lament of King David over his murdered friend Jonathan. Handel’s music captures the depth of their love.
5:1 Is friendship universal?
Many of your thoughts and emotions throughout life will revolve round friends. Why is friendship so important in our life? In most societies, the people we inter-act with are largely a matter of luck; they are family, neighbours, members of the same caste. They are not chosen. They are, furthermore, not our equals. If they are relations, they are senior (parents, older siblings) or junior. Likewise if they are members of another caste or of the opposite sex they are by birth superior or inferior. The idea of meeting many of our equals is out of the question. If friendship of a kind develops it is likely to be lop-sided.
Patronage is lop-sided friendship, that is to say where the two sides maintain their relationship because of their differences. One provides certain assets, the superior may provide political protection, the client flatters or supports him in his schemes. The relationship is general and long-term, not like the specific and limited transaction with a bureaucrat or shop-keeper. It has some warmth and a hope that it will last.
This system of patron-client relations is very widespread in the world. It is the main way of getting things done outside the family. It is particularly prevalent in the countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy and the middle East and in places like South America which were colonized by the Mediterranean powers. It even spreads into the relationship with God or the gods. There are patron saints or gods to whom people pray when they are trying to get benefits in certain branches of Christianity or Buddhism.
Each patron usually has a number of clients. People try to have several patrons in useful places to help them obtain favours and to protect them against other powerful individuals. The patron is often encouraged to take an honorary family position by being made a spiritual relative, a god-mother or god-father.
Having a real friend, on the other hand, whom we must not exploit or use to further our own ends is a curious phenomenon. It tends to be found in societies where there are a lot of roughly equal people and where there is so much movement that we constantly meet potential new friends. It is predominant where most of the important things in life do not come through the manipulation of personal relationships. Almost all we need in life is provided through an impersonal bureaucracy, the relationship between buyer and seller, underpinned by the legal system. Only in such a situation, where we do not have to manipulate contacts in order to survive, can we afford the luxury of disinterested friendship.
What is peculiar about Britain for a long period is that patronage has been relatively unimportant as a way of organizing personal relationships. There have been what we call ‘patrons’ of art or learning, and others who control jobs and other benefits. But if I asked you who your patrons were and who your clients, you would look puzzled, just as many of your predecessors for hundreds of years would have been surprised at such a question.
Just as patron-client relations are weakly developed in the white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant parts of the United States, so they have been relatively weak in England for many centuries. With the exception of some ethnic groups and a few branches of politics, the arts and professions, or in some criminal organizations, the system of patronage is just a pale shadow of the world of the Godfather and mafia.
So if family and patronage do not hold people together in England, and romantic love can only glue us to one other person at a time, what can provide the link between us? The short answer is friendship. This is why so much of your time at school was devoted to the making and unmaking of friends. Throughout your life, much of your happiness and success, or loneliness and failure, will depend on your ability to make ‘friends’, momentary or long-term. So what is this peculiar thing which is described by this Anglo-Saxon word?
Patronage is lop-sided friendship, that is to say where the two sides maintain their relationship because of their differences. One provides certain assets, the superior may provide political protection, the client flatters or supports him in his schemes. The relationship is general and long-term, not like the specific and limited transaction with a bureaucrat or shop-keeper. It has some warmth and a hope that it will last.
This system of patron-client relations is very widespread in the world. It is the main way of getting things done outside the family. It is particularly prevalent in the countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy and the middle East and in places like South America which were colonized by the Mediterranean powers. It even spreads into the relationship with God or the gods. There are patron saints or gods to whom people pray when they are trying to get benefits in certain branches of Christianity or Buddhism.
Each patron usually has a number of clients. People try to have several patrons in useful places to help them obtain favours and to protect them against other powerful individuals. The patron is often encouraged to take an honorary family position by being made a spiritual relative, a god-mother or god-father.
Having a real friend, on the other hand, whom we must not exploit or use to further our own ends is a curious phenomenon. It tends to be found in societies where there are a lot of roughly equal people and where there is so much movement that we constantly meet potential new friends. It is predominant where most of the important things in life do not come through the manipulation of personal relationships. Almost all we need in life is provided through an impersonal bureaucracy, the relationship between buyer and seller, underpinned by the legal system. Only in such a situation, where we do not have to manipulate contacts in order to survive, can we afford the luxury of disinterested friendship.
What is peculiar about Britain for a long period is that patronage has been relatively unimportant as a way of organizing personal relationships. There have been what we call ‘patrons’ of art or learning, and others who control jobs and other benefits. But if I asked you who your patrons were and who your clients, you would look puzzled, just as many of your predecessors for hundreds of years would have been surprised at such a question.
Just as patron-client relations are weakly developed in the white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant parts of the United States, so they have been relatively weak in England for many centuries. With the exception of some ethnic groups and a few branches of politics, the arts and professions, or in some criminal organizations, the system of patronage is just a pale shadow of the world of the Godfather and mafia.
So if family and patronage do not hold people together in England, and romantic love can only glue us to one other person at a time, what can provide the link between us? The short answer is friendship. This is why so much of your time at school was devoted to the making and unmaking of friends. Throughout your life, much of your happiness and success, or loneliness and failure, will depend on your ability to make ‘friends’, momentary or long-term. So what is this peculiar thing which is described by this Anglo-Saxon word?
Tuesday 23 January 2007
4:6 How does love fit with the rest of our life?
It is certainly ironic that as societies become more bureaucratic and ‘rational’, so at the heart of the system there grows an impulsive, irrational emotion which has nothing to do with making money. There is a desire for the totally overwhelming, irrational escape into romantic love.
Romantic love gives meaning in an otherwise dead and cold world. It promises that fusion with another human being which is so conspicuously lacking in the lonely crowds of autonomous individuals. It overcomes separation and gives the endlessly choice-making individual a rest, a categorical imperative which, momentarily at least, resolves all the doubts and indecisions.
The desire, to have, own, possess, fits well with those similarly irrational desires to accumulate, possess and own which are the basic drive in the economic world. In the modern world it is obvious that consumer society has harnessed the romantic passions to sell goods. The marketing of love has raised this emotion to a high cultural pinnacle. Love provides the promise of freedom, of a deeper meaning in life, perhaps even a return to the innocence of the lost paradise of Eden.
Romantic love gives meaning in an otherwise dead and cold world. It promises that fusion with another human being which is so conspicuously lacking in the lonely crowds of autonomous individuals. It overcomes separation and gives the endlessly choice-making individual a rest, a categorical imperative which, momentarily at least, resolves all the doubts and indecisions.
The desire, to have, own, possess, fits well with those similarly irrational desires to accumulate, possess and own which are the basic drive in the economic world. In the modern world it is obvious that consumer society has harnessed the romantic passions to sell goods. The marketing of love has raised this emotion to a high cultural pinnacle. Love provides the promise of freedom, of a deeper meaning in life, perhaps even a return to the innocence of the lost paradise of Eden.
4:5 Is love blind?
Choice, whether in the market of marriage or other goods, is always difficult. The information is always insufficient, the variables too complex. It is bad enough buying a new computer or television, when one often has to trust the salesman and a hunch – but if it goes wrong it is disposable. Choosing a partner for life is infinitely more complex and the guesswork involved is immense.
Some external force of desire is needed to help the individual to choose. Hence passionate 'love' overwhelms, justifies and provides an apparently external and compulsive authority. On the other hand, love within marriage is not necessarily as passionate or 'irrational'. It can be calm, calculating, very like any other 'work'. Yet if a decision is made to sever a relationship, the loss of that mysterious 'love' is often given as the justification.
Love thus seems to be at its most intense when uncertainty and risk are greatest, in that phase when humans have to choose. When they make the most momentous decision of their lives, which will turn a contractual, arbitrary, relationship into the deepest and most binding in life, love steps in as though from outside, blind and compelling. The heart has its reasons, even if the mind is perplexed.
So we might suggest that the pattern of romantic love, both before marriage and within marriage, is the result of a number of forces. The biological urge to mate, based on a deep attraction between males and females is universal. But the way in which cultures encourage, use, or discourage it varies enormously. In the majority of societies, the feelings have not been encouraged, marriage and love are not connected, and marriages have been arranged. This has made it possible to knit people together by family links.
Some external force of desire is needed to help the individual to choose. Hence passionate 'love' overwhelms, justifies and provides an apparently external and compulsive authority. On the other hand, love within marriage is not necessarily as passionate or 'irrational'. It can be calm, calculating, very like any other 'work'. Yet if a decision is made to sever a relationship, the loss of that mysterious 'love' is often given as the justification.
Love thus seems to be at its most intense when uncertainty and risk are greatest, in that phase when humans have to choose. When they make the most momentous decision of their lives, which will turn a contractual, arbitrary, relationship into the deepest and most binding in life, love steps in as though from outside, blind and compelling. The heart has its reasons, even if the mind is perplexed.
So we might suggest that the pattern of romantic love, both before marriage and within marriage, is the result of a number of forces. The biological urge to mate, based on a deep attraction between males and females is universal. But the way in which cultures encourage, use, or discourage it varies enormously. In the majority of societies, the feelings have not been encouraged, marriage and love are not connected, and marriages have been arranged. This has made it possible to knit people together by family links.
Saturday 20 January 2007
4:4 What has love got to do with marriage?
One important component of our own marriage pattern was Christianity. The distinctive nature of Christian marriage was early established, the basic features being present by the ninth century. This was a religion that encouraged non-marriage (celibacy), one to one marriage (monogamy), a freedom of choice and a severe sexual code prohibiting sexual relations before and outside marriage.
The ideals of celibacy, the late age at marriage, the battle between biological desire and religious injunctions are clearly a part of the pattern of romantic love. Passion was herded into marriage, sex and marriage were synonymous in a way that is unusual in world civilizations. Biological urges were channelled into art and fantasy. These special features were present in western Europe for many centuries before the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.
In closely-knit, family-based societies any obvious display of emotion between husband and wife would clash with other family relations. Many of us have noticed that we become inhibited if we are with our relatives. When wider family links are strong, marriages are arranged and affection between husband and wife is a secondary force.
The rise of love marriage is linked to the degree of involvement of the small family in wider family ties. We now know that the family system based on a close partnership between the husband and wife was present in England from Anglo-Saxon times onwards. There is little evidence that wider family groupings were important in everyday life among the mass of the population. Romantic love was a system which could both flourish and hold together this individualistic society.
If family groups do not arrange marriages, why marry at all? One reason was that to have sexual relations outside marriage was considered a serious offence in the Christian world. Linked to this is the idea that the ‘passion of romantic love’ binds people together in long-term associations which would otherwise not occur. Rational, profit-seeking, individuals might not settle down into fixed relationships at all were it not for the 'institutionalized irrationality' of romantic love. We might see this as a necessary drive to ensure the nurturing of children by a couple. It encouraged longer-term bonding, rather than just a brief sexual coupling.
The ideals of celibacy, the late age at marriage, the battle between biological desire and religious injunctions are clearly a part of the pattern of romantic love. Passion was herded into marriage, sex and marriage were synonymous in a way that is unusual in world civilizations. Biological urges were channelled into art and fantasy. These special features were present in western Europe for many centuries before the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.
In closely-knit, family-based societies any obvious display of emotion between husband and wife would clash with other family relations. Many of us have noticed that we become inhibited if we are with our relatives. When wider family links are strong, marriages are arranged and affection between husband and wife is a secondary force.
The rise of love marriage is linked to the degree of involvement of the small family in wider family ties. We now know that the family system based on a close partnership between the husband and wife was present in England from Anglo-Saxon times onwards. There is little evidence that wider family groupings were important in everyday life among the mass of the population. Romantic love was a system which could both flourish and hold together this individualistic society.
If family groups do not arrange marriages, why marry at all? One reason was that to have sexual relations outside marriage was considered a serious offence in the Christian world. Linked to this is the idea that the ‘passion of romantic love’ binds people together in long-term associations which would otherwise not occur. Rational, profit-seeking, individuals might not settle down into fixed relationships at all were it not for the 'institutionalized irrationality' of romantic love. We might see this as a necessary drive to ensure the nurturing of children by a couple. It encouraged longer-term bonding, rather than just a brief sexual coupling.
4:3 Why marry at all?
In the past it was very difficult to stay single. The Yanomamo people of Venezuela always know when a man is a bachelor because he is dirty, his hair uncut, badly fed, often sick. Without a wife he is hardly a person. Likewise in many societies unmarried women after the age of twenty are barely conceivable; they are poverty stricken, unprotected, a shame to their family. Basically, in order to obtain the pleasures of life, including the blessing of children, people had to marry. Most people in the past saw no alternative to marriage, even if this often condemned women in particular in many societies to a life of drudgery, perpetual child-bearing and physical and verbal abuse.
England has long been exceptional in tolerating, even encouraging non-marriage. My forbears, four hundred years of Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge University, were not allowed to marry (on pain of losing their Fellowship) but were looked after by servants. Up to a quarter of men and women in the seventeenth and eighteenth century in England never married. Marriage was an option. For the English, on the whole, children’s marriage plans could be embarrassing, annoying, disappointing or heartening. Yet, in the end, it was up to them. It was their life.
Now there is a widespread move away from permanent relationships and marriage, particularly among women. In Japan, India, Europe, America, even China, many young women are reaching their thirties and forties without marrying or having children. They live comfortably, have good jobs and are quite affluent. They realize that marriage, child-bearing and subservience to a man would threaten this, it seems like a form of imprisonment or sacrifice. The question for many women nowadays is not why should one stay single, but why should one marry and have children. Even though most of us dream of that soul-mate who will love us above all the world, unless someone absolutely special comes along we are not prepared to settle for the second-best.
Many marriages of my parents’ generation and above occurred and were maintained under parental and wider social pressures. Better marriage than ostracism and a slight feeling of failure, of being the last ‘unbought tin on the shelf’. But it is different now. It is quite possible that, beautiful though you are, you will not move beyond boyfriends to a life-long partnership. In this you will be one of the wave of new, independent, ambitious women who stand alongside men as equal but somewhat alone in the world. Your motto may well be, ‘who needs a man’?
You may think that this is something new. Yet when we visited an ethnic group in south-western China recently we found a society which for some centuries had given up marriage entirely. The men were away for up to half the year carrying goods down to India. The women were left in charge.
Out of this arose a situation where marriage, if it had earlier existed, totally disappeared. When a boy reached puberty at between thirteen and sixteen he would be encouraged to find a female partner in another house. He would then start a pattern which would continue until old age whereby he went off in the evening to sleep in his partner’s house.
Each courtyard house was planned so that there was a main area where the older woman and the young children, that is all the children born of the women of the family, lived. Along another side were the animals, pigs and cows. The third side had enough bedrooms so that each adult female who was in a relationship with an outside visiting partner could have a room. They were visited at night by these partners, who left at dawn to return to their own female relatives’ house where they ate and worked.
There were no problems of property or inheritance since the land and house belonged to the whole female headed group and all children born within it. If a partnership ended, the children stayed with the women and the biological father was not expected to contribute to the child’s upbringing. There was no marriage ceremony, no word for marriage, no words for relatives through marriage like brother in law or sister in law.
Not very dissimilar are the west Indian and other patterns of mother-centred households found in the Caribbean and many parts of the world. Here the woman stays in a house and brings up the children, living temporarily with a succession of men who beget one or more children and then move on. Some have ascribed this to the weak economic position of unemployed men, others to the legacy of slavery or of an earlier African family system tracing relations through the women. Whatever the reason, the patterns of temporary unions and children who live together, though they do not share the same parents, is increasingly widespread.
England has long been exceptional in tolerating, even encouraging non-marriage. My forbears, four hundred years of Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge University, were not allowed to marry (on pain of losing their Fellowship) but were looked after by servants. Up to a quarter of men and women in the seventeenth and eighteenth century in England never married. Marriage was an option. For the English, on the whole, children’s marriage plans could be embarrassing, annoying, disappointing or heartening. Yet, in the end, it was up to them. It was their life.
Now there is a widespread move away from permanent relationships and marriage, particularly among women. In Japan, India, Europe, America, even China, many young women are reaching their thirties and forties without marrying or having children. They live comfortably, have good jobs and are quite affluent. They realize that marriage, child-bearing and subservience to a man would threaten this, it seems like a form of imprisonment or sacrifice. The question for many women nowadays is not why should one stay single, but why should one marry and have children. Even though most of us dream of that soul-mate who will love us above all the world, unless someone absolutely special comes along we are not prepared to settle for the second-best.
Many marriages of my parents’ generation and above occurred and were maintained under parental and wider social pressures. Better marriage than ostracism and a slight feeling of failure, of being the last ‘unbought tin on the shelf’. But it is different now. It is quite possible that, beautiful though you are, you will not move beyond boyfriends to a life-long partnership. In this you will be one of the wave of new, independent, ambitious women who stand alongside men as equal but somewhat alone in the world. Your motto may well be, ‘who needs a man’?
You may think that this is something new. Yet when we visited an ethnic group in south-western China recently we found a society which for some centuries had given up marriage entirely. The men were away for up to half the year carrying goods down to India. The women were left in charge.
Out of this arose a situation where marriage, if it had earlier existed, totally disappeared. When a boy reached puberty at between thirteen and sixteen he would be encouraged to find a female partner in another house. He would then start a pattern which would continue until old age whereby he went off in the evening to sleep in his partner’s house.
Each courtyard house was planned so that there was a main area where the older woman and the young children, that is all the children born of the women of the family, lived. Along another side were the animals, pigs and cows. The third side had enough bedrooms so that each adult female who was in a relationship with an outside visiting partner could have a room. They were visited at night by these partners, who left at dawn to return to their own female relatives’ house where they ate and worked.
There were no problems of property or inheritance since the land and house belonged to the whole female headed group and all children born within it. If a partnership ended, the children stayed with the women and the biological father was not expected to contribute to the child’s upbringing. There was no marriage ceremony, no word for marriage, no words for relatives through marriage like brother in law or sister in law.
Not very dissimilar are the west Indian and other patterns of mother-centred households found in the Caribbean and many parts of the world. Here the woman stays in a house and brings up the children, living temporarily with a succession of men who beget one or more children and then move on. Some have ascribed this to the weak economic position of unemployed men, others to the legacy of slavery or of an earlier African family system tracing relations through the women. Whatever the reason, the patterns of temporary unions and children who live together, though they do not share the same parents, is increasingly widespread.
4:2 Where did love come from?
Contrast this to the long literary and legal tradition in England. From Anglo-Saxon poetry, through medieval love poetry, to Chaucer, Shakespeare and the great poets and novelists, English literature is awash with love, and its relationship to marriage. It is the single most important theme. This is not just the flirtation of youngsters. It is endless reflection on this strange, irrational, overpowering, feeling that can sweep one human being into a life-long, unbreakable commitment to another. Endless advice, letters and sermons revolve around the theme of how to recognize and react to love, and how, without love, a marriage cannot work.
Nor is this just a literary phenomenon, some idealistic and airy-fairy convention unrelated to real life. We can look at village records, court cases and legal treatises in the past. These show that a boy of fourteen and a girl of twelve could get married without a priest and without the presence of the parents for much of the period up to the sixteenth century. The decision as to when and who a person married was not a family or community one. It was an individual matter. A close emotional partnership with a ‘married friend’, a companionship to provide mutual help and to overcome loneliness was too important a matter to be left to the decision of others.
Of course there were exceptions. At the level of the aristocracy there were often battles between parents and children. No doubt this also happened at a lower level as well. And of course many people routinely look for shared interests, social compatibility and financial potential in their future partner. Yet behind all of this is a system which is concerned about the weighing up of emotion and practical advantages, of choices between various desirable goals.
Nor is this just a literary phenomenon, some idealistic and airy-fairy convention unrelated to real life. We can look at village records, court cases and legal treatises in the past. These show that a boy of fourteen and a girl of twelve could get married without a priest and without the presence of the parents for much of the period up to the sixteenth century. The decision as to when and who a person married was not a family or community one. It was an individual matter. A close emotional partnership with a ‘married friend’, a companionship to provide mutual help and to overcome loneliness was too important a matter to be left to the decision of others.
Of course there were exceptions. At the level of the aristocracy there were often battles between parents and children. No doubt this also happened at a lower level as well. And of course many people routinely look for shared interests, social compatibility and financial potential in their future partner. Yet behind all of this is a system which is concerned about the weighing up of emotion and practical advantages, of choices between various desirable goals.
Monday 15 January 2007
4:1 Are marriage and romantic love connected?
As an English teenager, you will have been bombarded with images of romantic love – at the cinema, in magazines and on television. You will be encouraged to think that the way to happiness lies in finding Mr. Right.
Much of your life will be a quest for love. What is particularly unusual about the world of passionate love which we idealize is not that we feel such emotions, but that we make them a pre-condition for marriage.
Romantic attachments, an overwhelming love and desire for another, can be found in all societies. Often this is between members of the opposite sex and often the feelings are strongest in the period around the arrival of sexual maturity. So ‘love’ is not confined to what we would call ‘love marriage’ societies.
Yet in most societies, as in India, China and much of Africa and the Near East, where marriage and the bearing of children is the basic political, economic and social mechanism for the future, marriage is too important a matter to leave to the individual. Self-centred and irrational emotions should not dictate who should have children with whom.
While teenagers may sing love songs and even, in some societies, have sexual relationships, marriage and child-bearing have to be arranged by older members of the family or professional matchmakers. Elaborate economic exchanges are organized and individuals are exchanged between groups. Marriage is arranged on the basis of relationships between the older generation. Individual feelings have nothing to do with marital strategies. Someone does not choose when or who to marry. This is done by others.
I remember my shock when, even after knowing all this in theory, I went into a friend’s house in a Nepalese village and asked him what he was doing the next day. He said he was getting married. I congratulated him, but commented that he had not mentioned this the day before. He replied that this was because his parents had only told him that morning that it had been arranged. I asked him whether his bride was pretty and nice. He said he had no idea as he had never met her.
Much of your life will be a quest for love. What is particularly unusual about the world of passionate love which we idealize is not that we feel such emotions, but that we make them a pre-condition for marriage.
Romantic attachments, an overwhelming love and desire for another, can be found in all societies. Often this is between members of the opposite sex and often the feelings are strongest in the period around the arrival of sexual maturity. So ‘love’ is not confined to what we would call ‘love marriage’ societies.
Yet in most societies, as in India, China and much of Africa and the Near East, where marriage and the bearing of children is the basic political, economic and social mechanism for the future, marriage is too important a matter to leave to the individual. Self-centred and irrational emotions should not dictate who should have children with whom.
While teenagers may sing love songs and even, in some societies, have sexual relationships, marriage and child-bearing have to be arranged by older members of the family or professional matchmakers. Elaborate economic exchanges are organized and individuals are exchanged between groups. Marriage is arranged on the basis of relationships between the older generation. Individual feelings have nothing to do with marital strategies. Someone does not choose when or who to marry. This is done by others.
I remember my shock when, even after knowing all this in theory, I went into a friend’s house in a Nepalese village and asked him what he was doing the next day. He said he was getting married. I congratulated him, but commented that he had not mentioned this the day before. He replied that this was because his parents had only told him that morning that it had been arranged. I asked him whether his bride was pretty and nice. He said he had no idea as he had never met her.
3.7 Is the family disintegrating or disappearing?
Organizing life around the ties created through blood and marriage is extremely efficient. In the majority of societies the whole of political life is based on family groups, the members of whom support each other in their feuds and vendettas. Many of the tribal societies such as the Yanomamo of the Amazon forest, or the Nuer of the Sudan are examples of this, but it is also the case in many parts of China or India in the past. The State is relatively unimportant. Marriage is arranged as a political alliance. Likewise, all property flows through the family, most jobs are found through family contacts, who you work with is organized on the basis of family relationships. The impersonal world of money, businesses, market exchanges just exists on the margins.
All of religion revolves around the family. People venerate their ancestors, conduct rituals with their family, need children to help send them to a happy after-life. Furthermore, most of social life is family based. Only family are really to be trusted, they are one’s closest friends, comrades, partners in leisure and work. The family welcomes the new members, who then pass into sexual maturity, get married and are looked after in old age and finally buried.
This is very far from our world, where the family can remain quite important, but mostly at the level of the individual. It is important for our emotions, for our first fifteen years of nurturing and perhaps in our old age. It often gives some satisfaction and pattern in the rest of life. Yet our political allegiances, our religious beliefs, our jobs, our friendships and those we trust are largely separated off. The family is only one element in all of this.
This is such a relatively unusual situation, and so obviously fits with a highly mobile industrial and capitalist society, that many people used to think that it was a recent phenomenon. They believed that it must be the result of the way society had been broken apart by the industrial and urban revolutions of the nineteenth century.
Yet historians have now shown that what we might call the individualistic and flexible family system which you experience goes back hundreds of years. This can be seen in the various ways we use to calculate who we are related to, the terminology, the inheritance systems and in evidence about who lived with whom and what their rights were. For a thousand years in England the family has not provided the foundation for the rest of society. Throughout that period it has contained that inner tension between desiring to be close and dependent, and the desire to be free and adult.
This is very different from the situation in the majority of societies both in the past and the present. The contrast is described in the words of an old North American Pomo Indian of California. ‘What is a man? A man is nothing. Without his family he is of less importance than that bug crossing the trail… A man must be with his family to amount to anything with us. If he had nobody else to help him, the first trouble he got into he would be killed by his enemies… No woman would marry him… He would be poorer than a new-born child, he would be poorer than a worm… In the White way of doing things the family is not so important. The police and soldiers take care of protecting you, the courts give you justice, the post office carries messages for you, the school teaches you. Everything is taken care of, even your children, if you die; but with us the family must do all of that.’
In the modern west, our relations with our family change over our lifetime. Parents start as authority figures who are also the source of all good things. They then become objects of antagonism and perhaps derision. Hopefully they end up as loved grandparents to our children. Likewise children start as exhausting delights, turn into rebellious monsters, and again, with luck, the loved parents of our grand children.
What is certain is that in the western system parents cannot demand their children’s unconditional love and obedience. Nor can children demand that their parents show them endless love and support. Love comes from self-sacrifice and tolerance. It comes from not expecting too much, not reliving in our children our failures and insufficiencies. And on the children’s part it depends on an understanding of aging and the loneliness this brings. Only thus can we avoid the danger pointed out by the old Pomo Indian.
‘With us the family was everything. Now it is nothing. We are getting like the White people and it is bad for the old people. We had no old people’s home like you. The old people were important. They were wise. Your old people must be fools.’
All of religion revolves around the family. People venerate their ancestors, conduct rituals with their family, need children to help send them to a happy after-life. Furthermore, most of social life is family based. Only family are really to be trusted, they are one’s closest friends, comrades, partners in leisure and work. The family welcomes the new members, who then pass into sexual maturity, get married and are looked after in old age and finally buried.
This is very far from our world, where the family can remain quite important, but mostly at the level of the individual. It is important for our emotions, for our first fifteen years of nurturing and perhaps in our old age. It often gives some satisfaction and pattern in the rest of life. Yet our political allegiances, our religious beliefs, our jobs, our friendships and those we trust are largely separated off. The family is only one element in all of this.
This is such a relatively unusual situation, and so obviously fits with a highly mobile industrial and capitalist society, that many people used to think that it was a recent phenomenon. They believed that it must be the result of the way society had been broken apart by the industrial and urban revolutions of the nineteenth century.
Yet historians have now shown that what we might call the individualistic and flexible family system which you experience goes back hundreds of years. This can be seen in the various ways we use to calculate who we are related to, the terminology, the inheritance systems and in evidence about who lived with whom and what their rights were. For a thousand years in England the family has not provided the foundation for the rest of society. Throughout that period it has contained that inner tension between desiring to be close and dependent, and the desire to be free and adult.
This is very different from the situation in the majority of societies both in the past and the present. The contrast is described in the words of an old North American Pomo Indian of California. ‘What is a man? A man is nothing. Without his family he is of less importance than that bug crossing the trail… A man must be with his family to amount to anything with us. If he had nobody else to help him, the first trouble he got into he would be killed by his enemies… No woman would marry him… He would be poorer than a new-born child, he would be poorer than a worm… In the White way of doing things the family is not so important. The police and soldiers take care of protecting you, the courts give you justice, the post office carries messages for you, the school teaches you. Everything is taken care of, even your children, if you die; but with us the family must do all of that.’
In the modern west, our relations with our family change over our lifetime. Parents start as authority figures who are also the source of all good things. They then become objects of antagonism and perhaps derision. Hopefully they end up as loved grandparents to our children. Likewise children start as exhausting delights, turn into rebellious monsters, and again, with luck, the loved parents of our grand children.
What is certain is that in the western system parents cannot demand their children’s unconditional love and obedience. Nor can children demand that their parents show them endless love and support. Love comes from self-sacrifice and tolerance. It comes from not expecting too much, not reliving in our children our failures and insufficiencies. And on the children’s part it depends on an understanding of aging and the loneliness this brings. Only thus can we avoid the danger pointed out by the old Pomo Indian.
‘With us the family was everything. Now it is nothing. We are getting like the White people and it is bad for the old people. We had no old people’s home like you. The old people were important. They were wise. Your old people must be fools.’
Saturday 13 January 2007
3:6 Should we be able to marry our pets?
Until recently the definition of a Christian marriage was roughly ‘the voluntary union, for life, of one man to one woman’. This began to collapse about a hundred years ago when it became possible, at least outside the Catholic Church, to have a full divorce from someone and then legally marry another person. This change undermined ‘for life’, though that is still preserved in the ‘until death us do part’ phrase in the wedding service. Furthermore, same sex marriages of a man to a man or a woman to a woman, are becoming widely accepted. So what is left of marriage?
As anthropologists analysed marriage in different societies, they soon realized that the western Christian concept did not work well outside a particular area of the world. An obvious weakness was that marriage elsewhere was sometimes between one man and several women, or one woman and several men. Furthermore, marriage was often not for life or even for a long time at all, for it was very easy to divorce and re-marry.
Some surprising types of ‘marriage’ emerged. People were found to be marrying someone of the same sex or even dead people, as in the Nuer case. They were marrying someone (a high status person who gave them a position in society) and then never seeing him again, but living and having children by someone else. People even ‘married’ parts of another person, a friend’s arm or little finger, a rock or a tree, as a way of establishing property and other rights.
So the definition of marriage became longer and longer to try and encompass all these variations until it finally became just too complicated. It was better to look at marriage as a bundle of rights and obligations people establish in each other; as sexual partners, as bearers of children, as co-workers in the home, as earners of money outside the home.
Once these rights are considered as distinct, it is easy to see how they might be held as a clump by one person, or by different people. Among the Yoruba of Nigeria, a woman was traditionally parcelled out between various people. Her sexuality, the children she bears and partial rights to her domestic services belong to her husband and his wider family. Some of her domestic services in certain circumstances belong to the family group she was born into. Her economic power and resources belong to her. The famous trading women of west African markets reflect this division since they keep their own earnings.
If we look at marriage in this way, we can see that same-sex marriage makes sense. Recently I read of a case in India where a young man married his ancient grand-mother so that he could look after her more easily. Some people might even think it would be a cunning strategy to ensure the happiness of their loved cat or dog, and evade inheritance tax, if they married the little creature.
As anthropologists analysed marriage in different societies, they soon realized that the western Christian concept did not work well outside a particular area of the world. An obvious weakness was that marriage elsewhere was sometimes between one man and several women, or one woman and several men. Furthermore, marriage was often not for life or even for a long time at all, for it was very easy to divorce and re-marry.
Some surprising types of ‘marriage’ emerged. People were found to be marrying someone of the same sex or even dead people, as in the Nuer case. They were marrying someone (a high status person who gave them a position in society) and then never seeing him again, but living and having children by someone else. People even ‘married’ parts of another person, a friend’s arm or little finger, a rock or a tree, as a way of establishing property and other rights.
So the definition of marriage became longer and longer to try and encompass all these variations until it finally became just too complicated. It was better to look at marriage as a bundle of rights and obligations people establish in each other; as sexual partners, as bearers of children, as co-workers in the home, as earners of money outside the home.
Once these rights are considered as distinct, it is easy to see how they might be held as a clump by one person, or by different people. Among the Yoruba of Nigeria, a woman was traditionally parcelled out between various people. Her sexuality, the children she bears and partial rights to her domestic services belong to her husband and his wider family. Some of her domestic services in certain circumstances belong to the family group she was born into. Her economic power and resources belong to her. The famous trading women of west African markets reflect this division since they keep their own earnings.
If we look at marriage in this way, we can see that same-sex marriage makes sense. Recently I read of a case in India where a young man married his ancient grand-mother so that he could look after her more easily. Some people might even think it would be a cunning strategy to ensure the happiness of their loved cat or dog, and evade inheritance tax, if they married the little creature.
3:5 What is a mother?
Until recently it all seemed quite simple. A man and woman had sex, a child was conceived and later born. The parents were the biological parents. If they were married to each other or lived in some legal relationship of that kind, they were also one’s social parents.
Now, however, with test tube babies, artificial insemination, surrogate mothers and soon, possibly, cloning, it is getting very complicated. What is my relationship to the stranger who has donated the sperm from which I was conceived, to a woman who nurtured the foetus in her womb for a payment and handed it over to another, to the family which paid for and adopted me?
In this relatively simple case there are just four people involved, each of whom can claim to be a ‘father’ and a ‘mother’ in a certain sense. But the cases can get more complicated and the law is having great difficulty in sorting out all the rights and obligations. Likewise, with little formal guidance, individuals are having to adapt and invent new relationships, categories and terminologies to deal with this.
In facing these apparently new problems we can take some comfort from the fact that even before artificial insemination, humans had developed some ingenious ways of dealing with similar patterns. A classic example was found in North Africa.
Among the Nuer people it is essential to have children. Blood-relatedness flows only through the male line. So what happens if there are no sons in the family? A rich daughter will be provided with the wealth to pay for a ‘marriage’ to another woman. The new ‘bride’ will be impregnated by another man. By paying for the bride, the rich daughter has become a social father to any children that are born. So a child when asked who is his or her ‘father’, may point to a woman. In other words, biological and social fatherhood are split and one can have a ‘female’ father, or a ‘male’ mother.
Another variant is ‘ghost’ marriage, where a dead male’s ghost is married off to a woman after his death. She has children (by another biological partner) to this ‘ghost’, whose family have paid for the bride. So the line is continued even though the father is dead at the time of conception. This gives models for what is now happening with frozen semen.
Now, however, with test tube babies, artificial insemination, surrogate mothers and soon, possibly, cloning, it is getting very complicated. What is my relationship to the stranger who has donated the sperm from which I was conceived, to a woman who nurtured the foetus in her womb for a payment and handed it over to another, to the family which paid for and adopted me?
In this relatively simple case there are just four people involved, each of whom can claim to be a ‘father’ and a ‘mother’ in a certain sense. But the cases can get more complicated and the law is having great difficulty in sorting out all the rights and obligations. Likewise, with little formal guidance, individuals are having to adapt and invent new relationships, categories and terminologies to deal with this.
In facing these apparently new problems we can take some comfort from the fact that even before artificial insemination, humans had developed some ingenious ways of dealing with similar patterns. A classic example was found in North Africa.
Among the Nuer people it is essential to have children. Blood-relatedness flows only through the male line. So what happens if there are no sons in the family? A rich daughter will be provided with the wealth to pay for a ‘marriage’ to another woman. The new ‘bride’ will be impregnated by another man. By paying for the bride, the rich daughter has become a social father to any children that are born. So a child when asked who is his or her ‘father’, may point to a woman. In other words, biological and social fatherhood are split and one can have a ‘female’ father, or a ‘male’ mother.
Another variant is ‘ghost’ marriage, where a dead male’s ghost is married off to a woman after his death. She has children (by another biological partner) to this ‘ghost’, whose family have paid for the bride. So the line is continued even though the father is dead at the time of conception. This gives models for what is now happening with frozen semen.
Thursday 11 January 2007
3:4 What should we call family members?
Our way of referring to or addressing our relatives does not help us to remember more distant relations. The system forms linguistic rings like the layers of an onion. In the innermost ring is our close family. We call people mother (mummy), father (daddy), brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. They are our close relatives and we think of them as special. We cannot marry or have sex with them.
Then there are various other categories. Our parent’s sisters we call aunts, their brothers are uncles. Our aunts and uncles’ children we call cousins and our siblings (brothers and sisters) children we call nephews and nieces. There are elaborations like ‘first, second, third’ cousins – referring back up the generations, or ‘once or twice removed’, which refers to the level of generation.
To this system we have to add a few terms to fit in the non-blood relations created by marriage. A relationship created through marriage is called a relation in law, in other words an ‘in-law’. So our sister’s husband is our brother-in-law, our husband’s mother is our mother-in-law. If a marriage has occurred and then been disturbed by a re-marriage or divorce, we use the word ‘step’. I married your mother’s mother and so I am your step-grandfather. I am not related to you by blood, but through a step relationship. The wicked step-mother, who married a man after a child’s biological mother had died, is famous in fairy stories and legends because it is such a difficult relationship.
All of this, even if only half familiar, may seem natural to you, but it is in fact unusual. Normally the terms by which you refer to and address relatives are much more precise and elaborate, describing each separate relative by a special word. This helps people to know exactly whom they are trying to address when they have hundreds of relatives living nearby.
In a Nepalese village your father’s oldest brother is called ‘biggest father’, his younger brother ‘younger father’. Your mother’s brother is called by a special term. This mother’s brother is the most important relative of the senior generation apart from your parents. Your cousins are individually called by terms which sharply differentiate those whom you can marry, and those you cannot because they are thought of as close blood relatives.
Our systems of descent and the names we give our relatives have worked quite well since they were introduced by the Anglo-Saxons in the sixth century. However, in the last two generations there have been several major changes which have put great strains on this system..
Then there are various other categories. Our parent’s sisters we call aunts, their brothers are uncles. Our aunts and uncles’ children we call cousins and our siblings (brothers and sisters) children we call nephews and nieces. There are elaborations like ‘first, second, third’ cousins – referring back up the generations, or ‘once or twice removed’, which refers to the level of generation.
To this system we have to add a few terms to fit in the non-blood relations created by marriage. A relationship created through marriage is called a relation in law, in other words an ‘in-law’. So our sister’s husband is our brother-in-law, our husband’s mother is our mother-in-law. If a marriage has occurred and then been disturbed by a re-marriage or divorce, we use the word ‘step’. I married your mother’s mother and so I am your step-grandfather. I am not related to you by blood, but through a step relationship. The wicked step-mother, who married a man after a child’s biological mother had died, is famous in fairy stories and legends because it is such a difficult relationship.
All of this, even if only half familiar, may seem natural to you, but it is in fact unusual. Normally the terms by which you refer to and address relatives are much more precise and elaborate, describing each separate relative by a special word. This helps people to know exactly whom they are trying to address when they have hundreds of relatives living nearby.
In a Nepalese village your father’s oldest brother is called ‘biggest father’, his younger brother ‘younger father’. Your mother’s brother is called by a special term. This mother’s brother is the most important relative of the senior generation apart from your parents. Your cousins are individually called by terms which sharply differentiate those whom you can marry, and those you cannot because they are thought of as close blood relatives.
Our systems of descent and the names we give our relatives have worked quite well since they were introduced by the Anglo-Saxons in the sixth century. However, in the last two generations there have been several major changes which have put great strains on this system..
3:3 How do families work?
Very few of us understand how our family works. Yet if we have some wider knowledge of this, it will put the conflicts and tensions I have discussed so far into context. It may make it easier to sort out the tangles if you realize that most of the difficulties do not have anything to do with our own particular personalities, but are generated by what turns out to be the particularly odd family system in which we live in modern individualistic societies.
In most human societies, it is believed that blood relationship can only be traced through the male line. In a few societies it is believed only to flow through the female line, and in a very few, including western Europe and the United States, it is believed to flow through both males and females.
If you had belonged to a society where people were convinced that you were only related through females, for example the Trobriand islanders of the Pacific, your father would not be a relative, just a person who lived with your mother. When a woman became pregnant, this was believed to be the result of the action of a ghost or spirit.
The belief that you are only related through males or through females, makes it easy to form into large, exclusive clans, like the Chinese or people in India. But if you trace your links through both of your parents you will find that there is no distinct family group. The ‘Bee’ clan does not exist. You just have a network of relations, cousins, nephews and nieces, uncles and aunts.
This is the flexible and rather hazy system in which you live. Without research, you will find it impossible to draw a diagram of your relatives going back more than a couple of generations and which includes more than about fifty people with all their names and relationships to you. Yet in many other societies, people can name hundreds of relations and tell you of ancestors of some five generations or more back.
In most human societies, it is believed that blood relationship can only be traced through the male line. In a few societies it is believed only to flow through the female line, and in a very few, including western Europe and the United States, it is believed to flow through both males and females.
If you had belonged to a society where people were convinced that you were only related through females, for example the Trobriand islanders of the Pacific, your father would not be a relative, just a person who lived with your mother. When a woman became pregnant, this was believed to be the result of the action of a ghost or spirit.
The belief that you are only related through males or through females, makes it easy to form into large, exclusive clans, like the Chinese or people in India. But if you trace your links through both of your parents you will find that there is no distinct family group. The ‘Bee’ clan does not exist. You just have a network of relations, cousins, nephews and nieces, uncles and aunts.
This is the flexible and rather hazy system in which you live. Without research, you will find it impossible to draw a diagram of your relatives going back more than a couple of generations and which includes more than about fifty people with all their names and relationships to you. Yet in many other societies, people can name hundreds of relations and tell you of ancestors of some five generations or more back.
Tuesday 9 January 2007
3:2 Why is there often tension between parents and children?
This tension colours all our lives. It has led to the development of various techniques to make things easier. Long ago, much to the surprise of Italian and French visitors, it was noticed that many of the English sent their children off very young (from the age of seven onwards) to be brought up in another household. If they were rich, they were pages or ladies in waiting, if poor, servants or apprentices. The English said they did this because unrelated strangers or friends could exercise good discipline in a way which parents found very difficult.
Later this developed into the sort of education which I had, boarding schools from the age of eight to eighteen with parents abroad in India whom I hardly saw. My grand-parents with whom I lived disciplined me. Meanwhile my parents were like grand-parents who could show an uncomplicated and high level of affection.
The other way of proceeding, used in most societies, is effectively to keep a member of the family as a ‘child’ until his parents die. Thus in parts of Ireland in the nineteenth century a grown man in his fifties might be referred to as ‘the boy’ in the presence of his parents. Such a system has the advantage that there is no doubt about where authority lies. A father is like a king. On the other hand, it makes it difficult for people to break free into becoming fully responsible adults and mature citizens. Often the only way to achieve this is to go right away, as many Irish, people in India, Chinese or other migrants have done when they have experienced the separateness (and loneliness), of ‘escaping’ from their families.
These clashes and tensions vary with the times. A rise in the cost of housing can mean that instead of leaving home and setting up separately, children are forced to stay in their parent’s houses in their twenties or thirties. Or again, the rising costs of old age provision in a separate home means that children have to bring their elderly parents to live with them, or move into their parent’s home.
Both these situations can cause exhausting tensions. For they produce a direct clash between the fundamental ideal of the individualistic and egalitarian relations of modern society, and the need for some kind of hierarchy and discipline within an organization. They can ferment a deadly struggle between love for parents or children and self-love and self esteem. Old age is a country that cannot be understood until it is reached.
Later this developed into the sort of education which I had, boarding schools from the age of eight to eighteen with parents abroad in India whom I hardly saw. My grand-parents with whom I lived disciplined me. Meanwhile my parents were like grand-parents who could show an uncomplicated and high level of affection.
The other way of proceeding, used in most societies, is effectively to keep a member of the family as a ‘child’ until his parents die. Thus in parts of Ireland in the nineteenth century a grown man in his fifties might be referred to as ‘the boy’ in the presence of his parents. Such a system has the advantage that there is no doubt about where authority lies. A father is like a king. On the other hand, it makes it difficult for people to break free into becoming fully responsible adults and mature citizens. Often the only way to achieve this is to go right away, as many Irish, people in India, Chinese or other migrants have done when they have experienced the separateness (and loneliness), of ‘escaping’ from their families.
These clashes and tensions vary with the times. A rise in the cost of housing can mean that instead of leaving home and setting up separately, children are forced to stay in their parent’s houses in their twenties or thirties. Or again, the rising costs of old age provision in a separate home means that children have to bring their elderly parents to live with them, or move into their parent’s home.
Both these situations can cause exhausting tensions. For they produce a direct clash between the fundamental ideal of the individualistic and egalitarian relations of modern society, and the need for some kind of hierarchy and discipline within an organization. They can ferment a deadly struggle between love for parents or children and self-love and self esteem. Old age is a country that cannot be understood until it is reached.
3:1 Why are our families often such a pain?
You will not have found the last five years easy. You will have argued with your parents, quarrelled with your sister, felt despair, anger, self-loathing, insecurity. You will have felt both intense love and possibly hate for those who brought you up. You may well be beginning to see the point of Oscar Wilde’s remark that ‘Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.’ On the other hand, your parents may have sympathy with Lillian Carter, the mother of the American President Jimmy Carter, who commented ‘I love all my children, but some of them I don’t like.’ Why is there this ambivalence on both sides?
There are particular strains in our family system. As soon as a baby is born it is implicitly being encouraged to be a separate and self-sufficient individual. It is usually put in a separate bed or cot away from its parents, fed regularly but not always on demand, left to cry unless it is a serious matter. It is encouraged to stand, in more ways than one, on its own two feet. The final outcome is known to be a day when he or she will leave home. In the past people went early on as a servant or apprentice, today to school, university, a job in another town.
From that time, and in anticipation well before, he or she will become a separate economic, religious, political and social entity. He or she will emerge finally as a fully ‘grown up’ person who will make all the major decisions over their own life; get a job, marry, travel, buy things on their own.
This is unusual. In almost all societies, as soon as children are born they are encouraged to be part of a group. They will be expected to be deferential and obedient to their parents and older relatives for life. Important decisions will be taken by relatives. An individual is not a separate entity.
Each way of imagining the family has advantages and disadvantages. The western system gives individual freedom. Yet this freedom can be a great weight. It often leads to a potentially damaging struggle between the generations as the child grows up.
A child has to grow separate from his or her parents and other relatives including siblings, but this must be done neither too fast nor too slowly. Parents (alongside schools) must nurture, protect, advise, teach and discipline their children. However, without too much pressure and in the knowledge that the aim of all this is ultimately to turn out a free and separate being. Parents must not smother, spoil or swamp their children with a love that makes them over-dependent. Yet they must also give them security and support. It’s a hard balancing act.
Likewise the child needs to learn to operate freely, but also to accept that in any structured group, including the small family, there are ultimately situations where a decision cannot be shared. If it comes to a final battle of wills, either the child has to accept the authority of the parents, or leave. It is a painful process in which both sides are likely to feel hurt and at times let down. The novelist Anthony Powell caught the sadness by inverting the usual comment when he wrote ‘Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don’t fulfil the promise of their early years.’
There are particular strains in our family system. As soon as a baby is born it is implicitly being encouraged to be a separate and self-sufficient individual. It is usually put in a separate bed or cot away from its parents, fed regularly but not always on demand, left to cry unless it is a serious matter. It is encouraged to stand, in more ways than one, on its own two feet. The final outcome is known to be a day when he or she will leave home. In the past people went early on as a servant or apprentice, today to school, university, a job in another town.
From that time, and in anticipation well before, he or she will become a separate economic, religious, political and social entity. He or she will emerge finally as a fully ‘grown up’ person who will make all the major decisions over their own life; get a job, marry, travel, buy things on their own.
This is unusual. In almost all societies, as soon as children are born they are encouraged to be part of a group. They will be expected to be deferential and obedient to their parents and older relatives for life. Important decisions will be taken by relatives. An individual is not a separate entity.
Each way of imagining the family has advantages and disadvantages. The western system gives individual freedom. Yet this freedom can be a great weight. It often leads to a potentially damaging struggle between the generations as the child grows up.
A child has to grow separate from his or her parents and other relatives including siblings, but this must be done neither too fast nor too slowly. Parents (alongside schools) must nurture, protect, advise, teach and discipline their children. However, without too much pressure and in the knowledge that the aim of all this is ultimately to turn out a free and separate being. Parents must not smother, spoil or swamp their children with a love that makes them over-dependent. Yet they must also give them security and support. It’s a hard balancing act.
Likewise the child needs to learn to operate freely, but also to accept that in any structured group, including the small family, there are ultimately situations where a decision cannot be shared. If it comes to a final battle of wills, either the child has to accept the authority of the parents, or leave. It is a painful process in which both sides are likely to feel hurt and at times let down. The novelist Anthony Powell caught the sadness by inverting the usual comment when he wrote ‘Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don’t fulfil the promise of their early years.’
Sunday 7 January 2007
2:7 How can you survive the rush of global change?
In all this onrush of technologies and shifting politics you have to live with a double knowledge. On the one hand it is important that you distance yourself from your own history and culture sufficiently to be able to realize that the old racist, gendered, nationalist, stereotypes are largely based on misunderstanding. You are a world citizen and you share your beginnings with everyone else on the planet.
Yet while we are battered by all our new knowledge and have the sense that we are pawns in a huge world game, we should not resign ourselves to being shifted around the board. We may easily become cynical. We may come to believe that there is no such thing as truth, that impartiality is a fiction, that reality does not exist, that all observation is deeply biased, that all theories are based on political prejudice.
All these doubts are half right. We have to be wary of those who tell us that they have found the truth, the right way, the over-arching purpose. Yet without a belief that truth, rightness and purpose can be found, or at least pursued, much of our life becomes pointless.
After all is said and done, you remain the unique, never-anticipated, utterly amazing and extraordinary Lily to whom I am writing these Letters. There has never been anyone like you on earth before, nor will there ever be again. That this is true of every other person on the planet does not diminish the wonder.
So, through knowledge of how much around you is just an invention and creation, you should be in a better position to enjoy the world. In particular you can unmask the ignorance which lies behind so much savagery and prejudice. You can interpret and may even change the world if you realize how much of it is not ‘natural’, that is given and unalterable, but ‘cultural’, that is invented and imagined into existence by humans.
When you read the rest of these Letters, please remember that what I shall be explaining is how our particular, English, world was invented. This English world is not intrinsically better than any other invention or path through history. I explain it to you because it is our world. Many people in other places have been born into equally valid but very different circumstances. They will read this account with surprise and not necessarily envy us in every respect.
Yet while we are battered by all our new knowledge and have the sense that we are pawns in a huge world game, we should not resign ourselves to being shifted around the board. We may easily become cynical. We may come to believe that there is no such thing as truth, that impartiality is a fiction, that reality does not exist, that all observation is deeply biased, that all theories are based on political prejudice.
All these doubts are half right. We have to be wary of those who tell us that they have found the truth, the right way, the over-arching purpose. Yet without a belief that truth, rightness and purpose can be found, or at least pursued, much of our life becomes pointless.
After all is said and done, you remain the unique, never-anticipated, utterly amazing and extraordinary Lily to whom I am writing these Letters. There has never been anyone like you on earth before, nor will there ever be again. That this is true of every other person on the planet does not diminish the wonder.
So, through knowledge of how much around you is just an invention and creation, you should be in a better position to enjoy the world. In particular you can unmask the ignorance which lies behind so much savagery and prejudice. You can interpret and may even change the world if you realize how much of it is not ‘natural’, that is given and unalterable, but ‘cultural’, that is invented and imagined into existence by humans.
When you read the rest of these Letters, please remember that what I shall be explaining is how our particular, English, world was invented. This English world is not intrinsically better than any other invention or path through history. I explain it to you because it is our world. Many people in other places have been born into equally valid but very different circumstances. They will read this account with surprise and not necessarily envy us in every respect.
2.6 Is the world a village?
Any lingering feeling that you may have about being part of a separate culture will soon vanish if you think about the increasing pace of what has been called globalization.
Of course globalization is an ancient phenomenon. Ever since humans moved out of Africa about a hundred thousand years ago, there have been strong contacts between different parts of the world. Every day we are learning more about the strength of these exchanges and how humans have wandered and spread their languages, genes and cultures. Certainly since Alexander the Great penetrated down into India, or when huge numbers of goods and ideas travelled back and forth along the Silk Road between China and the West, worlds have met.
A further, even firmer, integration of the world was achieved by the Portuguese and Spanish in their sea borne Empires of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was fully completed by the British in their Empire upon which ‘the sun never set’. From the eighteenth century at the latest, humans lived in a truly global world.
Yet we do feel that we are more closely united in the late twentieth century as a result of electronic communications. The development of television, the Internet and the mobile phone, building on the earlier integration achieved by the land line telephone, the telegraph and radio, weave us all together ever more tightly. When our English banking is handled in India, our goods come mainly from the Far East, and our television images from America, it is difficult to retain a sense of great separateness. No man (or woman) is an island now.
So you are growing up in an extraordinary world where fashions, diseases or financial turbulence, spread from country to country in a few hours. The flow of money on the world market in one day is larger than the value of the whole American economy.
You can weave virtual networks of friends through the internet and learn to manage in cyber-space. You may one day be able to reach Australia or China as quickly as we now reach Edinburgh or Dublin. The ‘law’ whereby computer power doubles every eighteen months is altering everything. You will live in a world of genetic manipulation, nano-technology (microscopic machines) and cyber-reality which it is impossible to imagine.
Of course globalization is an ancient phenomenon. Ever since humans moved out of Africa about a hundred thousand years ago, there have been strong contacts between different parts of the world. Every day we are learning more about the strength of these exchanges and how humans have wandered and spread their languages, genes and cultures. Certainly since Alexander the Great penetrated down into India, or when huge numbers of goods and ideas travelled back and forth along the Silk Road between China and the West, worlds have met.
A further, even firmer, integration of the world was achieved by the Portuguese and Spanish in their sea borne Empires of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was fully completed by the British in their Empire upon which ‘the sun never set’. From the eighteenth century at the latest, humans lived in a truly global world.
Yet we do feel that we are more closely united in the late twentieth century as a result of electronic communications. The development of television, the Internet and the mobile phone, building on the earlier integration achieved by the land line telephone, the telegraph and radio, weave us all together ever more tightly. When our English banking is handled in India, our goods come mainly from the Far East, and our television images from America, it is difficult to retain a sense of great separateness. No man (or woman) is an island now.
So you are growing up in an extraordinary world where fashions, diseases or financial turbulence, spread from country to country in a few hours. The flow of money on the world market in one day is larger than the value of the whole American economy.
You can weave virtual networks of friends through the internet and learn to manage in cyber-space. You may one day be able to reach Australia or China as quickly as we now reach Edinburgh or Dublin. The ‘law’ whereby computer power doubles every eighteen months is altering everything. You will live in a world of genetic manipulation, nano-technology (microscopic machines) and cyber-reality which it is impossible to imagine.
2.5 How do you invent your life?
Since nations are invented and there is no actual thing out there which is essentially English, it is worth thinking about how we construct these categories and come to accept them. Nations are built by using political symbols to make us believe in their unity; national flags, anthems, myths of origin and heroes or saints. They are also the result of playing with history.
The art of creating a nation is the art of forgetting, that is to say forgetting the many things that divide us and concentrating on those that unite. The wounds in many parts of the world such as the Balkans or Ireland will only be healed when people learn to forget, or at least put on one side, past bitterness and memories. This is not just a negative process of amnesia. There is also a positive building up of unifying symbols, what is known as the invention of tradition.
Humans are very good at accepting common traditions, shared histories and ways of doing things, which after a very short time appear to have been there for ever. This is universal. For example, the famous horse-race in Siena called the Palio, which many people think has been continuously held for 600 years was, in fact, abandoned centuries ago and has been invented, or re-invented, recently.
Or many people think that the Indian curry restaurant is an old tradition, brought to this country. In fact, there were no curry restaurants of the kind we now go to in England until they were invented in the 1950’s. They were invented in England and later exported to India itself. Even curry itself is a moderately recent invention; it could only have developed after Europeans began to import its mainly south American ingredients (potatoes, tomatoes, chillies) to India from the sixteenth century. Likewise, in India, tea has been commercially grown since the 1840’s, but it was only drunk seriously by Indians from the 1920’s.
In England there are new ‘traditions’ being invented all the time. In Cambridge, for example, the very ‘traditional’ festival of Nine Lessons in King’s College, which has become an icon of Englishness when it is beamed all over the world on Christmas Eve, was invented in the early twentieth century. Admittedly it has bits and pieces of older words and music in it, but the form and structure is twentieth century.
In fact, almost always if you look at some royal ceremonial such as a coronation service or wedding, most of it has been invented or heavily adapted for the present purpose. The same is true abroad. The tradition of clapping after a lecture or performance was unknown in Japan in 1870. The first recorded clap was made by a missionary in the speech hall at Keio university. Thereafter the Japanese learnt to clap and thought of it as the normal way to behave.
Very much of what we think of as old and unchangeable and ‘natural’ in our own culture was a deliberate invention of only a few years ago. Even in the family or school we see this. We invent traditions about Christmas celebrations in one year and then the next year feel as if we had always done them. And it is not just actions. Few people who go on tours round Cambridge realize that almost all the buildings they see are quite recent, less than two hundred years old. The city feels ancient, but it is constantly evolving and being re-invented.
The art of creating a nation is the art of forgetting, that is to say forgetting the many things that divide us and concentrating on those that unite. The wounds in many parts of the world such as the Balkans or Ireland will only be healed when people learn to forget, or at least put on one side, past bitterness and memories. This is not just a negative process of amnesia. There is also a positive building up of unifying symbols, what is known as the invention of tradition.
Humans are very good at accepting common traditions, shared histories and ways of doing things, which after a very short time appear to have been there for ever. This is universal. For example, the famous horse-race in Siena called the Palio, which many people think has been continuously held for 600 years was, in fact, abandoned centuries ago and has been invented, or re-invented, recently.
Or many people think that the Indian curry restaurant is an old tradition, brought to this country. In fact, there were no curry restaurants of the kind we now go to in England until they were invented in the 1950’s. They were invented in England and later exported to India itself. Even curry itself is a moderately recent invention; it could only have developed after Europeans began to import its mainly south American ingredients (potatoes, tomatoes, chillies) to India from the sixteenth century. Likewise, in India, tea has been commercially grown since the 1840’s, but it was only drunk seriously by Indians from the 1920’s.
In England there are new ‘traditions’ being invented all the time. In Cambridge, for example, the very ‘traditional’ festival of Nine Lessons in King’s College, which has become an icon of Englishness when it is beamed all over the world on Christmas Eve, was invented in the early twentieth century. Admittedly it has bits and pieces of older words and music in it, but the form and structure is twentieth century.
In fact, almost always if you look at some royal ceremonial such as a coronation service or wedding, most of it has been invented or heavily adapted for the present purpose. The same is true abroad. The tradition of clapping after a lecture or performance was unknown in Japan in 1870. The first recorded clap was made by a missionary in the speech hall at Keio university. Thereafter the Japanese learnt to clap and thought of it as the normal way to behave.
Very much of what we think of as old and unchangeable and ‘natural’ in our own culture was a deliberate invention of only a few years ago. Even in the family or school we see this. We invent traditions about Christmas celebrations in one year and then the next year feel as if we had always done them. And it is not just actions. Few people who go on tours round Cambridge realize that almost all the buildings they see are quite recent, less than two hundred years old. The city feels ancient, but it is constantly evolving and being re-invented.
Friday 5 January 2007
2.4 Where do you come from?
We also invent our origins. We easily slip into the idea that the things around us were discovered, or at least basically adapted, by our own society. Yet if you think for a moment you will find that almost everything was invented in other civilizations.
The anthropologist Ralph Linton described the average American as follows. He ‘awakens in a bed built on a pattern which originated in the Near East…. He throws back covers made from cotton, domesticated in India, or linen, domesticated in the Near East… He takes off his pyjamas, a garment invented in India, and washes with soap invented by the ancient Gauls…Before going out for breakfast he glances through the window, made of glass invented in Egypt, and if it is raining puts on overshoes made of rubber discovered by the Central American Indians and takes an umbrella, invented in south-eastern Asia… On his way to breakfast he stops to buy a paper, paying for it with coins, an ancient Lydian invention…His plate is of steel, an alloy first made in southern India, his fork a medieval Italian invention, and his spoon a derivative of a Roman original.’
We have only reached breakfast and through the day the assemblage of world cultures continues. Nevertheless, at the end, ‘As he absorbs the accounts of foreign troubles he will, if he is a good conservative citizen, thank a Hebrew deity in an Indo-European language that he is 100 percent American.’
So we are all composites of history, built up from our past. England is a particularly obvious example of this because, being part of a small island near a great Continent, and being a trading and imperial nation, it has sucked in almost all of its culture from abroad. There is scarcely anything, in music, painting, architecture, science and knowledge, up to the eighteenth century at least, which was not largely the result of borrowings.
A particularly obvious instance is the effect of the Imperial phase on British life and above all the influence of India. In many ways a Martian might well look at England today as just an extension of India. It is not merely that more people are involved in making curries in England than in any other form of manufacture. Nor that much of the wealth which built parts of England, including many of its great houses, gardens, art collections and libraries, came from India. It is something more.
Many phrases and ideas have Indian roots: veranda, gymkhana, pyjama, kedgeree, bungalow and polo. Many items of furniture, food, architecture, botany flow from India and the Himalayas. And it is not just India. If we look at the underlying patterns of consumption in Britain they form a mirror image of Empire. We can see this in food and taste.
If we move down the west coast of Britain, wherever there is a great port, there sugar poured in from the West Indies and where it did so it sweetened the tooth of the British. So in Glasgow and much of Scotland there is a love for sugary foods, particularly sugar mixed with flour and baked into cakes and biscuits. I always used to feel proud as a boy when I met lorries bearing the name ‘Macfarlane Lang, biscuit makers’, but I never asked myself why the Scots should be so famous for their sugary short-breads.
Further south, sugar came into the Lancashire ports and found its way to Kendal where the almost pure sugar lumps known as Kendal Mint Cake are manufactured. Bristol became a great West Indian port and Bristol sweet sherry was developed. It happened all over Britain, with what we ate, drank or wore. Many other things including garden plants and those great staples, rubber, tea, coffee and cotton became part of the ‘British’ way.
The same would be true if we went to any part of the world, where many of the characteristically ‘local’ things were imported from elsewhere. Much of modern India is of British origin, just as Britain is of Indian origin. Much of modern Japan was imported from China, just as much of present China was ‘made in Japan’. Australia, just like north America, is a basket of foreign imports. We borrow, imitate, trade and steal and then conveniently forget.
The anthropologist Ralph Linton described the average American as follows. He ‘awakens in a bed built on a pattern which originated in the Near East…. He throws back covers made from cotton, domesticated in India, or linen, domesticated in the Near East… He takes off his pyjamas, a garment invented in India, and washes with soap invented by the ancient Gauls…Before going out for breakfast he glances through the window, made of glass invented in Egypt, and if it is raining puts on overshoes made of rubber discovered by the Central American Indians and takes an umbrella, invented in south-eastern Asia… On his way to breakfast he stops to buy a paper, paying for it with coins, an ancient Lydian invention…His plate is of steel, an alloy first made in southern India, his fork a medieval Italian invention, and his spoon a derivative of a Roman original.’
We have only reached breakfast and through the day the assemblage of world cultures continues. Nevertheless, at the end, ‘As he absorbs the accounts of foreign troubles he will, if he is a good conservative citizen, thank a Hebrew deity in an Indo-European language that he is 100 percent American.’
So we are all composites of history, built up from our past. England is a particularly obvious example of this because, being part of a small island near a great Continent, and being a trading and imperial nation, it has sucked in almost all of its culture from abroad. There is scarcely anything, in music, painting, architecture, science and knowledge, up to the eighteenth century at least, which was not largely the result of borrowings.
A particularly obvious instance is the effect of the Imperial phase on British life and above all the influence of India. In many ways a Martian might well look at England today as just an extension of India. It is not merely that more people are involved in making curries in England than in any other form of manufacture. Nor that much of the wealth which built parts of England, including many of its great houses, gardens, art collections and libraries, came from India. It is something more.
Many phrases and ideas have Indian roots: veranda, gymkhana, pyjama, kedgeree, bungalow and polo. Many items of furniture, food, architecture, botany flow from India and the Himalayas. And it is not just India. If we look at the underlying patterns of consumption in Britain they form a mirror image of Empire. We can see this in food and taste.
If we move down the west coast of Britain, wherever there is a great port, there sugar poured in from the West Indies and where it did so it sweetened the tooth of the British. So in Glasgow and much of Scotland there is a love for sugary foods, particularly sugar mixed with flour and baked into cakes and biscuits. I always used to feel proud as a boy when I met lorries bearing the name ‘Macfarlane Lang, biscuit makers’, but I never asked myself why the Scots should be so famous for their sugary short-breads.
Further south, sugar came into the Lancashire ports and found its way to Kendal where the almost pure sugar lumps known as Kendal Mint Cake are manufactured. Bristol became a great West Indian port and Bristol sweet sherry was developed. It happened all over Britain, with what we ate, drank or wore. Many other things including garden plants and those great staples, rubber, tea, coffee and cotton became part of the ‘British’ way.
The same would be true if we went to any part of the world, where many of the characteristically ‘local’ things were imported from elsewhere. Much of modern India is of British origin, just as Britain is of Indian origin. Much of modern Japan was imported from China, just as much of present China was ‘made in Japan’. Australia, just like north America, is a basket of foreign imports. We borrow, imitate, trade and steal and then conveniently forget.
2.4 What is race and what are you?
You say that you are an English girl, but what does that mean? You may think that it means that if you went back through your ancestors you would find only Angles and Saxons. But in fact your great-grandfather’s family was probably Viking (Danish) and a number of your ancestors were Celts (Scots and Irish). A DNA test on you would probably reveal all sorts of traces of inter-breeding. We are discovering how mixed up our ancestry is.
Yet even before DNA testing, anyone who understood English history would know what a particularly mixed or mongrel race the ‘English’ are, with Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Norwegians, French, Dutch mixtures up to the seventeenth century, and since then all sorts of peoples from the Empire and post-Empire. So the idea of being ‘English’ is just a constructed identity. It defines you against others, the French or Germans or even Scots, for example. Yet it really means very little.
*
You might not only say that you are ‘English’, but also British, that is to say that on your passport and in your own feeling of yourself your nationality is British. Behind this is the idea of the nation, that is a bounded political, linguistic, cultural and territorial unit. You might assume that your idea of belonging to a nation-state is common, indeed universal, and has long been the situation of most people on earth. This can be questioned.
Many people now argue that the nation-state is really an invention of the last two hundred years in most of the world. There were no nations in India or Africa, or in the Near or Far East in 1800. There were states and Empires, but if you asked people ‘What nation do you belong to?’ they would not have understood your question. If you had changed the question to ‘What is your people?’ or ‘What do you call yourself?’, you would have got surprising answers. Even in France, Italy, Germany or Spain, people did not think of themselves as French, Italians, Germans or Spanish, but rather Bretons, Gascons, Lombards, Basques, Andalusians and so on.
Most of the inhabitants of France only began to think of themselves as primarily French after about 1870, and the same was true in all the countries of continental Europe. The change occurred even later in the rest of the world such as Eastern Europe or the Middle East. In many parts of the world it is only just happening. When I went to the Himalayas in the late 1960’s the people I worked with in the central hills referred to the Kathmandu Valley alone as ‘Nepal’. They thought they lived outside Nepal, in their own village and group and region, though on the map it was all ‘Nepal’.
Nations are invented or imagined communities, where people who do not know each other and often have little in common come to think of themselves as ‘the British’ or ‘the French’. Some say this is the result of the spread of printing and hence of newspapers and books in the national language. They also argue that the spread of an economic system which binds people together through a common currency and set of money exchanges is behind the change. Others see it as the result of factories and cities, or of new educational systems. Whatever the cause, it is true that nation-states have only dominated the world during the last two hundred years.
Yet, by chance, you happen to live in a somewhat older nation. Because we live on a small island which early adopted a common language, law, economy and set of political institutions, the English have been becoming a nation from as early as King Alfred in the eighth century. If you had asked someone what nation he belonged to five hundred years ago he might well have said ‘England’. Then the English became British when the King of Scotland also became the King of England in 1603 and Scots and English people settled in Ireland from the seventeenth century. Now they are becoming English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish again.
We fight wars and discriminate against outsiders and immigrants as if there were such things as nations, but they are just lines on a map. Nations are constructed and deconstructed. There is nothing natural or given about them. They are imagined, invented, concepts and there is no British nation, English nation, except in our imagination. Some even say that they are short-lived fictions and that the age of the nation-state will soon be over as we merge in a global world. And not before time according to many of those who have suffered the vicious effects of nationalism like the refugee Albert Einstein who wrote that ‘Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.’
Certainly what it means to be ‘English’ and ‘British’, as you will find, will fluctuate over your lifetime and your feelings of national identity will alter enormously. As it shifts back and forth, is aroused by war cries or lulled by talk of European integration, it is good to remember what a constructed thing it is. The same is true of those who live in most of the nations of the world, whether in Cyprus, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Vietnam or elsewhere. The pulse of national identity slows and quickens, and the very meaning of ‘being’ of a certain nation changes deeply as the world changes around a group of people.
Yet even before DNA testing, anyone who understood English history would know what a particularly mixed or mongrel race the ‘English’ are, with Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Norwegians, French, Dutch mixtures up to the seventeenth century, and since then all sorts of peoples from the Empire and post-Empire. So the idea of being ‘English’ is just a constructed identity. It defines you against others, the French or Germans or even Scots, for example. Yet it really means very little.
*
You might not only say that you are ‘English’, but also British, that is to say that on your passport and in your own feeling of yourself your nationality is British. Behind this is the idea of the nation, that is a bounded political, linguistic, cultural and territorial unit. You might assume that your idea of belonging to a nation-state is common, indeed universal, and has long been the situation of most people on earth. This can be questioned.
Many people now argue that the nation-state is really an invention of the last two hundred years in most of the world. There were no nations in India or Africa, or in the Near or Far East in 1800. There were states and Empires, but if you asked people ‘What nation do you belong to?’ they would not have understood your question. If you had changed the question to ‘What is your people?’ or ‘What do you call yourself?’, you would have got surprising answers. Even in France, Italy, Germany or Spain, people did not think of themselves as French, Italians, Germans or Spanish, but rather Bretons, Gascons, Lombards, Basques, Andalusians and so on.
Most of the inhabitants of France only began to think of themselves as primarily French after about 1870, and the same was true in all the countries of continental Europe. The change occurred even later in the rest of the world such as Eastern Europe or the Middle East. In many parts of the world it is only just happening. When I went to the Himalayas in the late 1960’s the people I worked with in the central hills referred to the Kathmandu Valley alone as ‘Nepal’. They thought they lived outside Nepal, in their own village and group and region, though on the map it was all ‘Nepal’.
Nations are invented or imagined communities, where people who do not know each other and often have little in common come to think of themselves as ‘the British’ or ‘the French’. Some say this is the result of the spread of printing and hence of newspapers and books in the national language. They also argue that the spread of an economic system which binds people together through a common currency and set of money exchanges is behind the change. Others see it as the result of factories and cities, or of new educational systems. Whatever the cause, it is true that nation-states have only dominated the world during the last two hundred years.
Yet, by chance, you happen to live in a somewhat older nation. Because we live on a small island which early adopted a common language, law, economy and set of political institutions, the English have been becoming a nation from as early as King Alfred in the eighth century. If you had asked someone what nation he belonged to five hundred years ago he might well have said ‘England’. Then the English became British when the King of Scotland also became the King of England in 1603 and Scots and English people settled in Ireland from the seventeenth century. Now they are becoming English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish again.
We fight wars and discriminate against outsiders and immigrants as if there were such things as nations, but they are just lines on a map. Nations are constructed and deconstructed. There is nothing natural or given about them. They are imagined, invented, concepts and there is no British nation, English nation, except in our imagination. Some even say that they are short-lived fictions and that the age of the nation-state will soon be over as we merge in a global world. And not before time according to many of those who have suffered the vicious effects of nationalism like the refugee Albert Einstein who wrote that ‘Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.’
Certainly what it means to be ‘English’ and ‘British’, as you will find, will fluctuate over your lifetime and your feelings of national identity will alter enormously. As it shifts back and forth, is aroused by war cries or lulled by talk of European integration, it is good to remember what a constructed thing it is. The same is true of those who live in most of the nations of the world, whether in Cyprus, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Vietnam or elsewhere. The pulse of national identity slows and quickens, and the very meaning of ‘being’ of a certain nation changes deeply as the world changes around a group of people.
What is race and what are you?
You say that you are an English girl, but what does that mean? You may think that it means that if you went back through your ancestors you would find only Angles and Saxons. But in fact your great-grandfather’s family was probably Viking (Danish) and a number of your ancestors were Celts (Scots and Irish). A DNA test on you would probably reveal all sorts of traces of inter-breeding. We are discovering how mixed up our ancestry is.
Yet even before DNA testing, anyone who understood English history would know what a particularly mixed or mongrel race the ‘English’ are, with Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Norwegians, French, Dutch mixtures up to the seventeenth century, and since then all sorts of peoples from the Empire and post-Empire. So the idea of being ‘English’ is just a constructed identity. It defines you against others, the French or Germans or even Scots, for example. Yet it really means very little.
*
You might not only say that you are ‘English’, but also British, that is to say that on your passport and in your own feeling of yourself your nationality is British. Behind this is the idea of the nation, that is a bounded political, linguistic, cultural and territorial unit. You might assume that your idea of belonging to a nation-state is common, indeed universal, and has long been the situation of most people on earth. This can be questioned.
Many people now argue that the nation-state is really an invention of the last two hundred years in most of the world. There were no nations in India or Africa, or in the Near or Far East in 1800. There were states and Empires, but if you asked people ‘What nation do you belong to?’ they would not have understood your question. If you had changed the question to ‘What is your people?’ or ‘What do you call yourself?’, you would have got surprising answers. Even in France, Italy, Germany or Spain, people did not think of themselves as French, Italians, Germans or Spanish, but rather Bretons, Gascons, Lombards, Basques, Andalusians and so on.
Most of the inhabitants of France only began to think of themselves as primarily French after about 1870, and the same was true in all the countries of continental Europe. The change occurred even later in the rest of the world such as Eastern Europe or the Middle East. In many parts of the world it is only just happening. When I went to the Himalayas in the late 1960’s the people I worked with in the central hills referred to the Kathmandu Valley alone as ‘Nepal’. They thought they lived outside Nepal, in their own village and group and region, though on the map it was all ‘Nepal’.
Nations are invented or imagined communities, where people who do not know each other and often have little in common come to think of themselves as ‘the British’ or ‘the French’. Some say this is the result of the spread of printing and hence of newspapers and books in the national language. They also argue that the spread of an economic system which binds people together through a common currency and set of money exchanges is behind the change. Others see it as the result of factories and cities, or of new educational systems. Whatever the cause, it is true that nation-states have only dominated the world during the last two hundred years.
Yet, by chance, you happen to live in a somewhat older nation. Because we live on a small island which early adopted a common language, law, economy and set of political institutions, the English have been becoming a nation from as early as King Alfred in the eighth century. If you had asked someone what nation he belonged to five hundred years ago he might well have said ‘England’. Then the English became British when the King of Scotland also became the King of England in 1603 and Scots and English people settled in Ireland from the seventeenth century. Now they are becoming English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish again.
We fight wars and discriminate against outsiders and immigrants as if there were such things as nations, but they are just lines on a map. Nations are constructed and deconstructed. There is nothing natural or given about them. They are imagined, invented, concepts and there is no British nation, English nation, except in our imagination. Some even say that they are short-lived fictions and that the age of the nation-state will soon be over as we merge in a global world. And not before time according to many of those who have suffered the vicious effects of nationalism like the refugee Albert Einstein who wrote that ‘Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.’
Certainly what it means to be ‘English’ and ‘British’, as you will find, will fluctuate over your lifetime and your feelings of national identity will alter enormously. As it shifts back and forth, is aroused by war cries or lulled by talk of European integration, it is good to remember what a constructed thing it is. The same is true of those who live in most of the nations of the world, whether in Cyprus, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Vietnam or elsewhere. The pulse of national identity slows and quickens, and the very meaning of ‘being’ of a certain nation changes deeply as the world changes around a group of people.
Yet even before DNA testing, anyone who understood English history would know what a particularly mixed or mongrel race the ‘English’ are, with Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Norwegians, French, Dutch mixtures up to the seventeenth century, and since then all sorts of peoples from the Empire and post-Empire. So the idea of being ‘English’ is just a constructed identity. It defines you against others, the French or Germans or even Scots, for example. Yet it really means very little.
*
You might not only say that you are ‘English’, but also British, that is to say that on your passport and in your own feeling of yourself your nationality is British. Behind this is the idea of the nation, that is a bounded political, linguistic, cultural and territorial unit. You might assume that your idea of belonging to a nation-state is common, indeed universal, and has long been the situation of most people on earth. This can be questioned.
Many people now argue that the nation-state is really an invention of the last two hundred years in most of the world. There were no nations in India or Africa, or in the Near or Far East in 1800. There were states and Empires, but if you asked people ‘What nation do you belong to?’ they would not have understood your question. If you had changed the question to ‘What is your people?’ or ‘What do you call yourself?’, you would have got surprising answers. Even in France, Italy, Germany or Spain, people did not think of themselves as French, Italians, Germans or Spanish, but rather Bretons, Gascons, Lombards, Basques, Andalusians and so on.
Most of the inhabitants of France only began to think of themselves as primarily French after about 1870, and the same was true in all the countries of continental Europe. The change occurred even later in the rest of the world such as Eastern Europe or the Middle East. In many parts of the world it is only just happening. When I went to the Himalayas in the late 1960’s the people I worked with in the central hills referred to the Kathmandu Valley alone as ‘Nepal’. They thought they lived outside Nepal, in their own village and group and region, though on the map it was all ‘Nepal’.
Nations are invented or imagined communities, where people who do not know each other and often have little in common come to think of themselves as ‘the British’ or ‘the French’. Some say this is the result of the spread of printing and hence of newspapers and books in the national language. They also argue that the spread of an economic system which binds people together through a common currency and set of money exchanges is behind the change. Others see it as the result of factories and cities, or of new educational systems. Whatever the cause, it is true that nation-states have only dominated the world during the last two hundred years.
Yet, by chance, you happen to live in a somewhat older nation. Because we live on a small island which early adopted a common language, law, economy and set of political institutions, the English have been becoming a nation from as early as King Alfred in the eighth century. If you had asked someone what nation he belonged to five hundred years ago he might well have said ‘England’. Then the English became British when the King of Scotland also became the King of England in 1603 and Scots and English people settled in Ireland from the seventeenth century. Now they are becoming English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish again.
We fight wars and discriminate against outsiders and immigrants as if there were such things as nations, but they are just lines on a map. Nations are constructed and deconstructed. There is nothing natural or given about them. They are imagined, invented, concepts and there is no British nation, English nation, except in our imagination. Some even say that they are short-lived fictions and that the age of the nation-state will soon be over as we merge in a global world. And not before time according to many of those who have suffered the vicious effects of nationalism like the refugee Albert Einstein who wrote that ‘Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.’
Certainly what it means to be ‘English’ and ‘British’, as you will find, will fluctuate over your lifetime and your feelings of national identity will alter enormously. As it shifts back and forth, is aroused by war cries or lulled by talk of European integration, it is good to remember what a constructed thing it is. The same is true of those who live in most of the nations of the world, whether in Cyprus, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Vietnam or elsewhere. The pulse of national identity slows and quickens, and the very meaning of ‘being’ of a certain nation changes deeply as the world changes around a group of people.
Wednesday 3 January 2007
2:2 Are you a woman?
You describe yourself as a ‘girl’ or ‘woman’. You probably mean that you are not a man, that you have certain physical characteristics (breasts, womb) which give you certain potentials (nursing and child-bearing) which are different from those of a man. This is all true. Yet as well as the physical differences you have characteristics which you have absorbed, largely unconsciously, from the day you were born, which we may call ‘gender’. This is what the feminist Simone de Beauvoir was referring to when she wrote that ‘One is not born a woman, one becomes one.’
You may let your hair grow longer than most men, wear make-up or perfume, carry a hand-bag , prefer particular colours, wear certain clothes, read girl’s magazines, play only some games (hockey rather than football for example), think of specific careers (media, education) rather than others (the army, stock exchange). Yet the selection of all these as feminine ways and goals is a matter of chance and teaching. There is nothing ‘natural’ or genetic about them.
In some societies it is men who grow their hair long, while women shave their heads; it is men who wear perfume or make-up, wear dresses (I was teased at school for wearing a ‘skirt’, i.e. a kilt), who sit around gossiping while the women do all the hard physical labour. Nowadays ideas of the female gender are changing very fast, and women are becoming soldiers in the front line, taking on many of the roles and attributes of men.
In particular if you add ‘English’ to ‘woman’, you become even more unusual. An English woman is the heir to a Christian society, living in a certain country and fitting in with its laws and customs. Most of your ‘womanhood’ is a construct of a particular history.
For example, ‘being’ a woman in England today entitles you to equality before the law, control over your own body, the right to own property, the right to vote, the right to choose your own marriage partner, equal respect and an equal chance of going to heaven, if you believe in such a place. Yet ‘being’ a woman in almost all civilizations in history has automatically denied a woman all these things from birth.
You can speak a language which has fewer gender differences built into it than most other languages. For instance all nouns in languages such as French or Italian have to have their gender specified, while in traditional Japanese the superiority of men and inferiority of women was built into the language.
So you are not just a woman, but a very particular and historically unusual kind of woman, who has been constructed by millions of random decisions and accidents over thousands of years. You are not an artificial robot, but you are certainly the product of huge random variations. This pressure occurs in every inter-action you have with every living person, in every moment you spend reading, watching television, in every sentence you speak and every thought you have.
You may let your hair grow longer than most men, wear make-up or perfume, carry a hand-bag , prefer particular colours, wear certain clothes, read girl’s magazines, play only some games (hockey rather than football for example), think of specific careers (media, education) rather than others (the army, stock exchange). Yet the selection of all these as feminine ways and goals is a matter of chance and teaching. There is nothing ‘natural’ or genetic about them.
In some societies it is men who grow their hair long, while women shave their heads; it is men who wear perfume or make-up, wear dresses (I was teased at school for wearing a ‘skirt’, i.e. a kilt), who sit around gossiping while the women do all the hard physical labour. Nowadays ideas of the female gender are changing very fast, and women are becoming soldiers in the front line, taking on many of the roles and attributes of men.
In particular if you add ‘English’ to ‘woman’, you become even more unusual. An English woman is the heir to a Christian society, living in a certain country and fitting in with its laws and customs. Most of your ‘womanhood’ is a construct of a particular history.
For example, ‘being’ a woman in England today entitles you to equality before the law, control over your own body, the right to own property, the right to vote, the right to choose your own marriage partner, equal respect and an equal chance of going to heaven, if you believe in such a place. Yet ‘being’ a woman in almost all civilizations in history has automatically denied a woman all these things from birth.
You can speak a language which has fewer gender differences built into it than most other languages. For instance all nouns in languages such as French or Italian have to have their gender specified, while in traditional Japanese the superiority of men and inferiority of women was built into the language.
So you are not just a woman, but a very particular and historically unusual kind of woman, who has been constructed by millions of random decisions and accidents over thousands of years. You are not an artificial robot, but you are certainly the product of huge random variations. This pressure occurs in every inter-action you have with every living person, in every moment you spend reading, watching television, in every sentence you speak and every thought you have.
2:1 Are you a separate person?
You take it for granted that you are ‘Lily’ and that Lily is a person who is different and distinct from other people. You have a very strong concept of yourself as an individual. You probably assume that this is how all people think of themselves. Yet while it is true that most people have some sense of their separateness, being English you belong to perhaps the most individualistic society in history. So your concepts of your separateness and individuality are especially strong.
In most societies the family comes first, and the individual is submerged within that group. This means that it is really impossible to think of yourself without thinking of others. There is little meaning to the word ‘I’ or ‘me’. This is shown in the very restricted use of such a word in some languages. You would in many societies only have a meaning in relation to others. Your identity comes from being a daughter in relation to parents, a mother in relation to children, a wife in relation to a husband, a serf or servant in relation to a lord, a living person in relation to the ancestors.
This is why in a Nepalese village where I have spent a lot of time you would not be called or addressed as Lily, but as ‘eldest daughter’, or, when you had your first child, as ‘mother of so and so’. In many other societies your name would change many times in your life. Imagine being called Lily until you were ten, then Jane for a few years, then Alice and so on, with your second name also changing frequently.
You, on the other hand, feel free and float around as a complete person with all kinds of inner powers and potentials. You may be a daughter or a mother, but these are not the things that make you who you are. You are Lily, and the other things are just aspects of yourself. The first basic assumption that you have, of your strong individual identity, with special and personal feelings, rights and freedoms, is very unusual.
In most societies the family comes first, and the individual is submerged within that group. This means that it is really impossible to think of yourself without thinking of others. There is little meaning to the word ‘I’ or ‘me’. This is shown in the very restricted use of such a word in some languages. You would in many societies only have a meaning in relation to others. Your identity comes from being a daughter in relation to parents, a mother in relation to children, a wife in relation to a husband, a serf or servant in relation to a lord, a living person in relation to the ancestors.
This is why in a Nepalese village where I have spent a lot of time you would not be called or addressed as Lily, but as ‘eldest daughter’, or, when you had your first child, as ‘mother of so and so’. In many other societies your name would change many times in your life. Imagine being called Lily until you were ten, then Jane for a few years, then Alice and so on, with your second name also changing frequently.
You, on the other hand, feel free and float around as a complete person with all kinds of inner powers and potentials. You may be a daughter or a mother, but these are not the things that make you who you are. You are Lily, and the other things are just aspects of yourself. The first basic assumption that you have, of your strong individual identity, with special and personal feelings, rights and freedoms, is very unusual.
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