Britain and Brexit : imagining an essentialist sense of “Britishness” and navigating amongst “the British”
Abstract
In his analysis of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet control, Georges Devereux argued that social movements exist not because members exhibit attitudinal uniformity but because in the “same” collective act individuals serendipitously find a socially acceptable expression for their worldviews. Any number of individual meanings and motivations come to be “accidentally” actualised alike. Devereux’s insights are pertinent regarding the elective decision in Britain to leave the EU, and more broadly for a social-anthropological approach to stereotypes of “Britishness.” There are certain customary discourses by which social life in Britain is “ego-syntonically” conducted, whose competency represents both a sign of belonging and means to navigate everyday interactions. Six discourses of Britishness of this kind might be identified: class; ethnicity; nationality; islandness; privacy; and football. But one is careful to distinguish between such discourses of Britishness — how it is stereotypically, formulaically, to be “British”; how it is publicly, customarily, to express and take part in “Britishness” — and the diversity of individual identities that inhabit and animate those discourses. Equally, one is careful to distinguish between the kinds of violence or violation that the expression of individual worldviews by way of stereotypic collective discourses might embody: “democratic violence” as against “nihilistic violence.”
Citation
Rapport , N 2020 , ' Britain and Brexit : imagining an essentialist sense of “Britishness” and navigating amongst “the British” ' , Anthropology Southern Africa , vol. 43 , no. 2 , pp. 94-106 . https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2020.1740604
Publication
Anthropology Southern Africa
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2332-3256Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2020 Anthropology Southern Africa. This work has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies or with permission. Permission for further reuse of this content should be sought from the publisher or the rights holder. This is the author created accepted manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2020.1740604
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