CULTURE, STYLE AND SOCIAL PROFILE

1. CULTURE, STYLE AND SOCIAL PROFILE

2. CULTURE, STYLE AND SOCIAL PROFILE Introduction Like any other society, the British like to create an agreeable picture of themselves. The majority like to think the important national values such as - tolerance - decency - moderation - consensus - compromise.

3. CULTURE CULTURES FOR COMMUNITY

4. They are uncomfortable with the terms which polarize, such as - ideology - liberation - bourgeois - capitalist - collectivist They like modesty and understatement, and they prefer practical common sense to pure logic.

5. Community and the individual In spite of having been a centralized state for longer than most European countries, British society is deeply individualistic in a way which is inseparable from ideas of liberty and localism. A sociologist said that British individualism was built into ‘custom and practice’, into local work places and community organizations. There is a feeling that it is the ordinary people, standing up for their rights in spiteof government, who safeguard freedom, in contrast with France, where in theory it is the state which upholds liberty.

6. Ralf Dahrendorf says, “There is a fundamental liberty in Britain not easily found elsewhere.” The traditions continue. Unlike in many other countries, local government clings both to local identity and style. The local response illustrates the longstanding characteristic of the British. They have a strong civic sense and participate in public affairs as their birthright. It is at the local level that British democracy is most meaningful. The impulse to organize oneself and one’s neighbors in some cause is a strong British tradition

7. About seven million Britons are involved in some kind of voluntary activity, ranging from urban community action groups of the political left, to local preservation societies, associated with more traditionally-minded people. • Choirs, local dramatic groups, shelters for homeless people, the provision of the lifeboat service around Britain’s shores, and many other things besides, depend upon the voluntary impulse.

8. Urban sub-cultures Rebellion and dissent belong on city streets. Among those who rejected the English cottage culture in favor of a popular urban culture, some remained deeply dissatisfied with their place in society. Like the rural dream of the majority, some of these sub-cultures are based on nostalgia for a lost world. Example: an imagined traditional working-class culture for the Skinheads, or an idealized Africa for Rastafarians.

9. The single greatest influence for all these rebel sub-cultures has been ‘Afro-Caribbean’. Afro-Caribbean immigrants, and more particularly their children, have felt excluded from mainstream British society. As they were largely confined to depressed urban areas, many whites associated Afro-Caribbean youths with violence and disorder. The rich and lively expression of Afro-Caribbean identity is what the Carnival is really about, yet the media tends to record the event in terms of violence or good humor of the occasion.

10. At a spiritual level many Afro-Caribbean, like those still in the Caribbean, dreamed of a golden age in Africa before the slave traders came. Their text was the Bible, which has traditionally been used by a dominant white culture to tame them. They reinterpreted it according to their own experience of racial suffering, viewing Britain as part of the Biblical ‘Babylon’, the land of slavery, Africa, especially Ethiopia, as the ‘Promised Land’.

11. Most important for its cultural impact, has been the black music which came into Britain mainly through the Rastafarian movement. Two particular types: ska and reggae, evolved in Caribbean and United States, but were developed in Britain during the 1970s. ‘Break-dance’ music came from the United States as did ‘Hip-Hop’. Indeed, it is through music that the black and white cultures have fused.

12. As a movement, the Skinheads are now in decline. A broader movement, a reaction to the glamour of the pop star world of the 1960s is that of the Punks. It is like the Skinheads, but they are passive and politically apathetic. Their appeal to the young is the ability to outrage middle-aged opinion, particularly among guardians of social values, like the police and other civil authorities. They use foul language, dressing in torn clothes, wearing Union Jacks, swastikas, mutilating their bodies with safety pins, wearing chains and even articles suggestive of urban waste like black plastic dustbin liner shirts.

13. Punk used black music, particularly reggae, to inspire its own Punk sound. Unlike Skinheads, many Punks openly identified with Black Britain (after 20 years, they in decline, too). While the rock star culture of the 1960s proclaimed a ‘classless’ society, Punks, Skinheads and Rastafarians, each in their own way, were insisting that they inhabited a ‘world divided’, as they saw it, by class and race. Joining a gang is a means of finding status, and of defying the conventional world in which they have been defined as ‘failures’.

14. ‘Heavy metal’ is the music of failure, and the fact that it is widely despised by those who enjoy pop, reggae or soul is its appeal. The followers of this kind of music have the manner of victims, and some wear gothic script and grinning skulls, suggestive of morbid interests. The capital of heavy metal is Birmingham, one of Britain’s least love cities. Such cults arise and disappear over periods of a decade or two.

15. There are still other youth cults which arose in the 1980s: ‘ragga’ and ‘gothic’. Ragga is essentially American inspired, as their clothing: baseball caps, tracksuit trousers and chunky trainers indicate. Gothic is a home-grown British style—a mixture of 1970s Punk and 1960s Hippie. Typically ‘Goths’ wear their hair very long and dyed black, and dress in cheap, loose and black clothes, sometimes embroidered in black and frequently torn. Both boys and girls wear make-up, looking pale with mascara around the eyes. They tend to be non-violent, and seem nostalgic for the youth culture and music of the 1960s.

16. At the end of the 1980s the fashionable subculture was ‘Acid House’, which attracted thousands of adolescents who had not previously belonged to a cult. Unlike Punks and Skinheads, Acid House promised fun and all night dancing. It came ready-made with its own music, another variation on black music from America (‘house music’), and a special drug, ‘ecstacy’, which created a powerful sense of wellbeing. Their existence only took very short for the police repeatedly broke their parties.

17. Such sub-cultures follow a cycle. Many perhaps most, adopt one for fun, conforming to the requirements of conventional society during working hours, and playing a rebellion in their leisure time. In the end, those become accepted and colorful part of urban cultures. Each new culture also blends with existing ones in a kaleidoscope of style. Meanwhile, the fashion designers commercialize the look and sell it in the clothes shops.

18. The culture of sports Britain was the first country to organize sports as a national activity: football, rugby football and cricket. The initial purpose behind organized sports was to provide an outlet for youthful energies at public schools. It was generally believed to have character-building qualities for future leaders. Football clubs quickly sprang up in towns and cities all over Britain, and it was rapidly taken into working class culture. In recent years, commercial companies found this profitable. example, Cornhill Insurance began to sponsor English ‘tast’ cricket in 1980 at a cost of £4.5 million.

19. More seriously, however, the decline in spectators forced club managers to make their sporting events less occasions for local supports and more displays of spectacular skill. Football clubs started buying and selling players. Meanwhile the clubs have desperately tried to remain profitable. In 1982 only 12 out of 92 football league clubs in Britain made a profit from spectators. Even though football has become such a spectator sport, in the mid 1980s, 1.6 million British were playing it as a recreation, more than ever before. It remains a true national game.

20. Even public school system established football, rugby and cricket as national games. Hunting, shooting, rowing and horse racing are ‘gentleman class’ sports, but because of the expense involved, they remained primarily upper-class pastimes. Despite the areas of exclusivity, sport remains one of the areas in which members of ethnic minorities have demonstrated their ability in a white-dominated society, particularly in athletics, cricket and soccer. However, no black has yet been invited to captain an English cricket or football team.

21. The Arts As has been seen, there is much in Britain’s culture to cause unease. But curiously enough, the British find discussion of their national artistic life faintly embarrassing. This inferiority complex owed much to the rise of the Modern Movement which was so strongly rooted in continental Europe, particularly in France and Germany. Yet Britain today has much to be proud of, though its artistic achievements are frequently better appreciated, and known abroad than at home.

22. As in fashion, so also in art, the British seem to enjoy breaking the rules of the current Modernist style, and this perhaps is what gives it such originality. As one art critic wrote in 1998, “British artists, who are currently enjoying the highest international standing, have been singularly unaffected by the much vaunted internationalism of the Modern Movement. English art is perhaps beginning to escape from insularity and provincialism through a rediscovery of its Englishness.

23. There are areas of the arts in which Britain more confidently excels. British theatre is among the liveliest and most innovative in the world. Theatre is a powerful instrument of education as well as art and culture. Another significant feature of British theatre is the way in which actors have taken drama to young people, even into primary schools. This has broken down some of the traditional barriers between formal stage drama and the community.

25. There is much fine architectural work, in spite of the controversy between Modernist and Post-Modernist at the end of the 1980s. Anti-Modernism has been a prevalent theme in British culture this century. The popular culture of the urban working class, expressed for example, in cinemas, dance-halls and football stadiums, has been a poor relation.

26. Britain has a far weaker modernist culture than exists in France and Germany, because the British feel less certain about the relationship between architecture, art, design, craft and manufacture. Modernist architects had no intention of defending the poor of many cheap modern buildings. Many architects watched with dismay as important sites were developed in Post-modernist decorative, which carefully but dishonestly disguised modern offices behind ‘tasteful’ mock-Classical facades.

27. Since 1960s Britain has achieved a special position in music. While Britain’s operatic, dance and classical music performances compare well with top international standards, it is in the field of popular music that Britain has achieved a particular pre-eminence. In the beginning of the 1990s, British pop music seemed to be rediscovering the spirit of the 1960s. The new music marks a departure from the unrelaxed mood of the 1980s, and a declaration of freedom.

29. Culture for the Community On the South bank of the Thames, opposite Whitehall, stands the capital of Britain’s cultural life, with three concert halls, the National Theatre (containing 3 theatres), the National Film Theatre and the Hayward Art gallery. A fairly recent addition is the lively Museum of the Moving Image. The South Bank enjoys both the strengths and weaknesses of its position a a national cultural centre.

30. All over the country there are millions of people engaged in amateur music, art and theatre. For example, for more than 200 years, the Royal Academy in London has held an annual Summer Exhibition, for which many painter or sculptor may enter their work. Virtually, every town and suburb has some form of amateur music group, a choir, an orchestra or even neighbours who form a string quartet. All over the country there are amateur choral groups, ranging from the local village church choir through to highly selective and internationally known choir, like Bach Choir.

31. Stanraer, Scotland, its amateur drama and opera groups put on a major opera and a play each year, plus a pantomime and one or two minor productions. Stranraer takes place on the south-west tip of Scotland, is geographically far from the mainstream of national life, but such activities suggest real community participation.

32. In many market towns and cities all over Britain, roughly 200 cultural festivals are held each year. The choice of what music or drama to perform may not always be very adventurous, nor the quality very high, but these festivals provide a lively form in which local people can celebrate not only their own local arts and culture, but also invite visiting performers of national standing. People do these things for fun, because they can express their self actualization through cultural performance.

33. STYLE

34. STYLE Nostalgia and Modernity Tradition and creativity are in conflict. Much of Britain, in creeping Neo-Classical revival, its love of the country-cottage look, the old-fashioned dress style of the upper class , says much about the way the British perceive themselves. During the 1980s British nostalgia grew more than ever. 41 heritage centres were established. The people visited those places considered as ‘historic houses’.

35. The styles of Post-Modern and Neo-Classical were associated in people’s minds with private development in the way that high-rise cheap concrete buildings were thought of as the architecture of the welfare state. However nostalgic the British may be, foreign modern influences have been immensely important in shaping popular culture since 1945. as a result of the US pr3esence during and after the war, Britain was invaded by American culture-symbolized by chewing gum, jazz, flashy cars and mass production.

36. Dress Codes Being so traditionally minded, the British are less fashion-conscious than other Europeans. The majority dress conservatively rather than fashionably. Most people do not imitate top society. Nevertheless, the 1980s was a decade when wealth and power were strongly expressed an echo of the dominant political ideas of the Thatcher decade.

37. The old upper class will continue to dress as it always has, but there may be a swing in the 1990s back to a more classless informal look more in keeping with Britain’s greater integration into Europe. This does not mean that the British are merely going to adopt ‘Eurostyle’. As noted, Britain has a strongly individualistic culture. The British may be among the least smartly dressed people in Europe, but they wear what they want when they want. There is as great tolerance of personal appearance as anywhere in Europe.

38. The Rural Ideal Many cultures are reflecting age, gender, class, ethnicity and social outlook. There is a divide between the cultures of the controlling majority and those of the protesting minority, people who feel comparatively weak. One of the most striking aspects of popular mainstream culture in Britain is the love of the countryside.

39. As a nation, the British have made a mental retreat from the urban environment. They have a deep nostalgia for an idealized world of neat hedgerows, cottages and great country houses, surrounded by parkland, that clever eighteenth century style of gardening that looked ‘natural’. This sense of nostalgia and traditionalism is also expressed in appearances, especially in the home environment.

41. SOCIAL PROFILE

42. SOCIAL PROFILE Introduction In general, the population of the Great Britain is stable. It was predicted that until 2025 the number of people will not more than 57 million. As already noted, the population is unevenly distributed across the land, and there has been an insistent drift to the south and south east since the 1980s.

43. Since the middle of the century fertility has fluctuated, rapidly increasing and decreasing (up to 30 per cent variation) in a single decade. This has serious implications for health and education services, and for employment. Overall, the ‘baby boom’ that followed the end of WW II, followed by an overall decline in births (to slightly under replenishment level) during the 1970s, is leading to major changes in balance between age groups.

44. The higher birth rate of the 1960s exacerbated unemployment levels in 1980s, since there were 30% more young people leaving school than a decade previously. In the period 1971—81 the number of infants (0—4 age group) fell by 34% (to become 17.7% of the total population). Primary school enrolment in 1986 was 26% lower than in 1971.

45. The British population is already one of the oldest in Europe, and it is slowly getting older. In 1990 the median age in Britain was 36 but it will rise to 41 by 2020. at the end of the 1990s the number of pensioners will begin to rise rapidly, and the workforce will shrink. One result that by 2020 there will be twice as many people aged 85 or over as in 1990. A disproportionate number of the old, incidentally, choose to retire to the south coast and East Anglia, creating regional imbalances

46. In the 1980s there were too many school leavers, but in the 1990s there will be too few to fill the job vacancies created by retirement. This could have important implications for some of the presently unemployed, for the fuller employment if women and for deferring retirement until a later age, a logical step for those who wish to continue working in view of the better health most enjoy today.

47. Britain is also changing ethnically. There used to be an assumption that the British were nearly all Anglo-Saxon, in spite of the substantial immigration of people from continental Europe during the first half of the century. Since black people from the Caribbean were recruited to fill the job vacancies during the 1950s over two million Afro-Caribbean and Asian people have come to live and work in Britain, becoming 5.7% of Britain’s population by 1990.

48.  Family The nuclear family is the basic unit of society, it is usually pictured as a married couple with two children, and perhaps their grandmother, or ‘granny’, in the background. In fact, it is expected that by the year 2000 only half the children born in Britain will grow up in a conventional family with parents already married after they have grown up.

49. Social attitude and behavior are undoubtedly changing. The number of people living alone has risen significantly, from one in ten in 1951 to one in four thirty years later. By the end of this century it is expected to rise to one in three. In the same period the proportion of households containing 5 or more people has dropped from one in five to fewer than one in ten.