2 Who are you?

Who are you?

Dear Lily,

Who are you? Where did you come from? What has made you what you are?

You may be surprised by these questions and reply that I know perfectly well who you are. ‘I am Lily Bee; I am a girl who was born in Australia but my parents are English and I now live in England and think of myself as British.’

It all seems very simple, but let us investigate a little further.

I used to write pretend letters to myself at school as follows:

Alan
Macfarlane,
Field Head,
Hawkshead,
Lancashire,
England,
Europe,
The World
The Universe

From this you can see already that I thought of myself as many people crammed into one. A named person, a member of the Macfarlane family, an inhabitant of a house, of a village, a county, a country, a region, a world, a universe. Let’s look at who you are by following this same movement from the individual to the world level.

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.

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.

What race 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.

Are you British?

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.

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.

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.

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.

How can you survive?

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.