culture name u.k
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Culture Name
British
Alternative Name
Formally known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Orientation
Identification. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the
formal name of the sovereign state governed by Parliament in London.The term
"United Kingdom" normally is understood to include Northern Ireland; the term "Great
Britain" refers to the island of Britain and its constituent nations of England, Wales, and
Scotland but does not include Northern Ireland. Any citizen of Great Britain may be
referred to as a Briton.
Location and Geography. The land area of Great Britain is 89,000 square miles
(230,500 square kilometers), with an additional 5,400 square miles (13,986 square
kilometers) in Northern Ireland, giving it one of the highest population densities in the
Western world. Although the country lies mostly at the latitude of Labrador in the
western Atlantic, the climate is tempered by the Gulf Stream and does not have
extremes of summer heat or winter cold. Except for some areas of barren upland and
bog, most of the land is suitable for agriculture and has been grazed or cultivated since
the Bronze Age. The natural vegetation is mixed oak woodland, but most of the terrain
has been cleared for agriculture or for shipbuilding and charcoal for smelting.The
earliest evidence of human settlement is at Boxgrove, Sussex, and the island may have
been continuously occupied for 500,000 years.
Demography. The population is approximately 55 million: 46 million in England, 5
million in Scotland, 2.5 million in Wales, and 1.5 million in Northern Ireland.
The nation's cultural diversity has been increased by migration within the British Isles
and by immigration from Europe and overseas. Until 1920, Ireland was incorporated
within the United Kingdom. Movement across the Irish Sea had existed since the
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eighteenth century, even among Ireland's poorest people. In the nineteenth century,
there was a regular pattern of seasonal migration of farm workers from Ireland to
Britain. Irishmen volunteered for the Royal Navy and British Army regiments in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and saw service in all parts of the empire. A wide
variety of other Irish people spent periods in Britain, which had a more highly developed
economy than Ireland. From 1841 onward, the censuses of Scotland, England, and
Wales have enumerated Irish-born people in every part of the country. Similarly,
Scottish and Welsh people have settled in England. Most British people have ancestries
that are mixtures of the four nationalities of the British Isles.
Before and after World War II, political and religious refugees and displaced persons
from the Baltic countries, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary were offered shelter in
Britain and remained, along with some prisoners of war. Other immigrants of European
ancestry who were born in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South and East Africa,
along with Greek and Turkish Cypriots, also settled in Britain. After the late 1940s,
many of non-European overseas immigrants arrived, predominantly from the colonies,
including people of Indian and African ancestry from the West Indies and Guyana;
people from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; and Chinese from Hong Kong and
Singapore. The 1991 census, the first to include ethnic background, enumerated three
million Britons of non-European birth or ancestry.
Linguistic Affiliation. Regional and cultural relationships are expressed in marked
linguistic differences. Although the language has been modified by a gradual
convergence toward "estuary English" a
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United Kingdom
less formal variety of southeastern speech, and educational and socioeconomic factors,
it is possible to determine people's geographical origins by the way they speak. In some
areas, there are significant differences in speech patterns from one city or county to its
neighbor. These differences are associated with loyalties to one's place of birth or
residence and for many people are important aspects of self-identity; non-English native
languages are little spoken but in recent years have gained significance as cultural and
political symbols. These languages include Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish, and Irish
(commonly referred to as the Celtic languages); there is also the Old Norse language of
the Northern Isles (Orkney and especially Shetland) and the Norman French patois of
the Channel Islands. In Wales, 80 percent of the people speak English as their first or
only language and those who speak Welsh as their first language are bilingual. In
Scotland, Gaelic is not a national symbol because it was never spoken in some parts of
that country. People in the Northern Isles are bilingual in English and an unwritten
creolized form of Old Norse; in the Channel Islands, the Norman French patois is nearly
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extinct; and in Cornwall, there are no natural speakers of Cornish, although the
language has been reconstructed. In Northern Ireland, the Irish language has been
reintroduced as a means of revitalizing Celtic pride among Belfast Catholics.
Symbolism. Symbolic attachment may reinforce localism or take the form of personal
commitments that extend across socioeconomic strata. Support for soccer and rugby
teams became significant during the twentieth century, and teams now command fierce
local loyalties as sport has come to symbolize male pride and self-image in a society
where mining and manufacturing have declined. Forms of personal commitment that
transcend locality include vegetarianism and environmentalism: the first is
predominantly middle class and female, and the second is identified less with gender
and socioeconomic status. On the fringes of society, especially among the young, there
has been a significant growth in new religious movements, which include radical
environmentalist cults, New Age paganism, anarchism, anticapitalist and antinuclear
groups, and adopted Far Eastern and South Asian religions and belief systems,
including martial arts cults. Cults based on popular music and performers engender
personal commitment in culturally patterned ways.
History and Ethnic Relations
Emergence of the Nation. The United Kingdom was formed by Acts of Unionbetween England and Wales (1536) and England, Wales, and Scotland (1707), uniting
the three nations under a single monarchy and legislative council (Parliament in
London). After 1169, the island of Ireland came under British influence, and it became a
colonial dependency in 1690. The British and Irish parliaments were united in 1801. A
separatist movement led to the dissolution of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland in
1920; twenty-six of Ireland's thirty-two counties became the independent Irish Free
State (later the Republic of Ireland), with six of the nine counties of Ulster remaining
within the United Kingdom. The present-day nation also includes the Channel Islands
off the coast of France and the Isle of Man between Britain and Ireland, which are
substantially self-governing. Northern Ireland and Scotland have separate legal and
educational systems and issue their own currency; Wales is fully incorporated within the
English legal, educational, and banking systems. Recent referendums in Scotland and
Wales have resulted in the establishment of a Scottish Parliament which is still under
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the general jurisdiction of London but has limited local taxraising powers, and the
Welsh Assembly, which does not have tax-raising powers.
The native tribes in the central and eastern parts of England were conquered by the
Romans in 55 B.C.E. , and permanent Roman settlements were established in
43 B.C.E. and continued for four hundred years.The numbers of Romans were never
great, but the indigenous upper classes became Romanized and spoke Latin.The
principal Roman towns had baths, temples, amphitheaters, and forums and some of the
roads designed to connect Roman towns are still in use. With the departure of the
Romans, the British Isles were invaded by a succession of warlike peoples from the
European mainland, including the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; there were also persistent
Danish raids. All migrations influenced the native Britons, as can be seen in the English
language, which is an amalgam of the languages spoken by the waves of colonists.This
turbulence ended with the Norman Conquest in 1066. A new line of kings attempted to
extend control into the farthest reaches of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and struggles
for supremacy between rival chieftains and princes culminated in the Magna Carta of
1215, which eventually led to the establishment of Parliament and representative
democracy. A period of consensus and stability followed the accession to the throne of
the Tudor king Henry VII in 1495. His successor, Henry VIII, broke with the Catholic
church in Rome and declared himself the head of the Church of England.The
dissolution of the monasteries and the confiscation of the property of the Roman
Catholic church occurred during the Reformation, leading to challenges to the monarchy
by rivals who supported Catholicism. Instability, civil unrest, and competition with
other European powers over claims to overseas territory continued for much of the
seventeenth century.
Commerce and manufacturing (principally the domestic woolen and Newfoundland and
Boston salt-fish trades) developed rapidly, and the authority of Parliament over the
monarchy was consolidated by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Capitalism
existed before the Industrial Revolution, but its development was hampered by
technologies limited to water power and a lack of surplus labor. During the period of the
Enclosures (17401789),
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A castle overlooks the water in Scotland. Castles dot the countryside in all parts of the
United Kingdom.
landlords cleared the peasantry from the rural landscape to create fields enclosed by
hedgerows and fences and began to derive profit from new, scientific methods of
intensive agricultural production rather than relying the meager tithes and rents paid by
peasant smallholders. This displaced large numbers of rural people, who were forced to
emigrate to the overseas colonies or migrate to the new sites of industrial production.
The impetus for the Industrial Revolution came from trade with the expanding colonies
by a growing middle class of entrepreneurs and investors whose wealth was not derived
from land but from commerce; those entrepreneurs reinvested their wealth in new
forms of manufacturing and trade rather than in ways that imitated the consumption
patterns of the landed gentry. The Industrial Revolution began at the end of the
seventeenth century, specifically in the machine-driven manufacturing processes made
possible by the steam engine, which was first used in 1698 to draw water from an
underground tin mine, and then was adapted to drive power looms in textile mills.
Overseas colonization and wars with other European powers stimulated the further
development of mining and metallurgy, precision machine tools, navigational
instruments, cartography, and managerial and logistical organization, which were
exploited for commercial gain by private entrepreneurs. By 1815, Britain had the world's
largest and most powerful navy, and within twenty years steam railways and steam-
powered ships designed by British engineers were carrying passengers and cargo for
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profit, allowing British shipping companies to dominate world trade. By midcentury, the
country was the world's leading power in business and finance, engineering, science,
and medicine.
The Industrial Revolution created a new social order as entrepreneurship and factory
production resulted in new forms of wealth and work that were added to the agrarian
social order dominated by aristocratic landowners. The 1832 Reform Act ended the
political privileges of landed wealth by extending the vote to middle-class male heads of
household. The country would be governed by the beliefs, values, and aspirations of the
middle class rather than by those of the landed aristocracy. One dimension of this new
social order was urbanization: as dispersed cottage industries such as weaving were
replaced by mills in central locations, nearby housing was needed for the workers; that
housing frequently was built by the mill owner and rented to the workers.The
populations of Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham doubled or tripled
between 1801 and 1841, and many major towns and cities grew up around mines, mills,
smelting works, ports and railway junctions.
Work in the "dark, satanic mills" brought new levels of exploitation and hardship. Rapid
industrialization caused overcrowding and disease; cholera epidemics between the
1830s and 1860s provoked public unrest and forced the government to improve public
health. Another consequence of Victorian working conditions was the rise of trade
unionism. A socially stratified and politically divided society, that was preoccupied with
distinctions of social class and the rival ideologies of laissez-faire capitalism and state
socialism soon crystallized.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, the United Kingdom was one of the world's
wealthiest and most influential nations. Machine tools, locomotives, and steamships
built in Scotland and the industrial Midlands were exported worldwide; textile products
from Lancashire, Staffordshire china and pottery, Welsh anthracite coal, and finished
steel products from Sheffield, dominated world markets for a century. British mining,
manufacturing, transportation technology; legal, banking and parliamentary systems;
and scientific discoveries and advances were exported worldwide.The nation's wealth
was further underwritten by its position as the chief European colonial power, with
captive markets and extensive sources of cheap labor and raw materials in Australasia,
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Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The country's position as a world power was reduced in
the second half of the twentieth century by two world wars and the gradual decline of its
advantages in manufacturing and business, the loss of the empire, and expensive
experiments with state socialism. By the late 1970s, the nation was in debt to the
International Monetary Fund. The discovery of oil in the North Sea in the 1970s saved
the country from bankruptcy and stimulated economic recovery.Tax revenues from the
oil industry provided the means to restructure the economy away from an obsolescent
manufacturing base and toward a base dominated by service and knowledge-based
industries.
National Identity. The United Kingdom is made up of four interdependent nations
with many common institutions. While differences in everyday modes of sociality and
consumer behavior are not great from one part of the nation to another, some aspects of
culture are symbolic of national or local difference on the level of everyday practice or
on special occasions. Support for the monarchy, political parties, and soccer teams are
the most obvious expressions of contemporary localism; religious adherence and ethnic
differentiation are also significant. Support for the monarchy and the Conservative Party
is highest in England, especially in the south, while in Scotland and Wales it is
substantially lower. In Scotland and Wales, there are minority nationalist parties.The
Scottish National Party's political program is dominated by economic issues,
particularly tax revenues from North Sea oil.The political agenda of Plaid Cymru, the
Welsh nationalist party, is mainly concerned with linguistic and cultural matters. In
both Scotland and Wales, the Labour Party is dominant, drawing strength from its
critique of the class privilege traditionally associated with London and southeastern
England. The dominance of the Labour Party in much of Wales and Scotland provides
conditions for patronage-style politics.
Ethnic Relations. A high degree of spatial integration is generally held to be
indicative of social integration, assimilation, and acculturation, while spatial segregation
is indicative of social pluralism. Non-European immigration in Britain has not moved
toward a pattern of sharply-defined urban ethnic ghettoes. Nevertheless, many non-
European immigrants continue to be subject to discriminatory practices in employment
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and in other spheres, even if systematic marginalization cannot be inferred from their
spatial distribution within the towns and cities of the nation.
Urbanism, Architecture, and theUse of Space
Rights to land development were in effect nationalized in 1947 by an act of Parliament
that removed the right of the owner of a piece of property to change its use and
transferred that power to the state. By the end of the twentieth century, 80 percent of
the land area was reserved for agricultural use but was responsible for less than 5
percent of the gross national product and less than 2 percent of employment, yet the
land-use planning system has continued to grow in size and power. Speculating in land
is big business, and the amount of land available for housing is so restricted that any
house within commuting range of a job will command a high price.
The countryside is increasingly seen as an aesthetic and recreational resource for people
who live in the towns and cities. However, this image of the countryside is very
expensive to maintain. The population is crowded together in towns on tiny plots of
land, while much of the open land is underpopulated and underused. Many people in
small
Cottages in Walthamstow Village, London, England. Housing in or near the cities is in
very high demand.
urban houses have high mortgages because of the cost of land.
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Food and Economy
Basic Economy. The United Kingdom has one of the largest economies in the world,
with a Gross National Product estimate in 1999 at $1.29 trillion (U.S.). Finance,
manufacturing, and trade form the base of the economy.The pound sterling is the
currency, and it is still being debated whether the nation will join with the its European
Union partners and adopt the Euro.
Commercial Activities. Banking and finance, including insurance, are mainstays of
the economy.
Major Industries. The United Kingdom is one of the most industrialized nations on
earth and has a strong manufacturing base. Major products include machine tools,aircraft and ships, motor vehicles, electronics, chemicals, coal, petroleum, textiles, and
food processing.
Trade. One of the leading trading powers in the world, the United Kingdom exported
$271 billion (U.S.) and imported $306 billion (U.S.) worth of goods in 1998. Chief
exports include manufactured goods, food, chemicals, and fuels. Manufactured goods,
machinery, fuel, and food products are imported. Primary trading partners are the
European Union and the United States.
Division of Labor. Although the nation produces almost two-thirds of its food needs,
in 1998, agriculture accounted for less than 2 percent of the workforce sector. Services
account for 73 percent, and industry another 25.3 percent.
Social Stratification
Classes andCastes. The idea of social class is much more powerful than that of
ethnicity. People frequently characterize themselves as working class or middle class.Although few admit to being upper class, in principle there are three classes, with the
highest one reserved for the aristocratic inheritors of old, landed wealth.The term
"social class" has complex meanings with social, economic, and political dimensions.
People who describe themselves as working class perceive themselves to have
respectable but unprivileged origins, and typically are born into a family supported by
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wages from industrial or agricultural labor paid in cash at the end of the week. In these
families neither parent has a college degree and the housing that the family occupies is
rented. There is a strong association between the idea of being working class and
supportive of the
Wide open grounds surround Belfast's Northern Ireland Parliament Building for
security reasons.
trade union movement and the Labour Party; the identification thus is with a set of
corporate or collective economic, social, and political interests and aspirations. A self-
described middle-class person has a social background and political attitudes that
suggest parents with white-collar jobs whose salaries are paid monthly by check and
who are likely to have professional or advanced education, to live in an owner-occupied
suburban house, and to have made strategic choices about their children's education.
They are likely to use their education and social skills for upward economic mobility and
to support the Conservative Party, which stresses self-sufficiency and individualism.
These differences have never been as clear-cut as the rhetoric of the main political
parties and professional critics of the social order have asserted. The concept of class has
recently fallen out of favor with politicians and sociologists as the nation's social and
economic structure has changed dramatically with deindustrialization and the growth of
social mobility and the knowledge economy.
Political Life
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Government. The United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy. The monarch is chief
of state and the prime minister is head of government.The Cabinet of Ministers is
appointed by the prime minister and are responsible to Parliament. Parliament is
composed of the House of Lords (hereditary), the House of Commons (elected), and the
sovereign.
Leadership and Political Officials. The monarch reigns, but does not rule the
nation per se, acting only with the approval of Parliament.The prime minister holds the
executive power and is traditionally the leader of the majority party in Parliament.The
primary parties are the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, and the Liberal
Democrats.
Social Problems andControl. Each of the countries within the United Kingdom has
its own judicial system and courts.
Military Activity. The United Kingdom has a strong military, with an army, the
Royal Navy, and the Royal Air Force.The nation is an active participant in the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Social Welfare and Change Programs
The National Insurance, in operation since 1948, provides medical, unemployment,
maternity, and retirement benefits, among others. Employers and employees contribute
to this fund. The National
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City Hall in Cardiff, Wales.
Assistance Board provides financial assistance to the poor.
Gender Roles and Statuses
The Relative Status of Women and Men. In the 1970s, there were national
debates on the changing role of women in society and their women's employment
prospects. By the 1980s, the debate had shifted to the implications of the increasing
participation of women as the economy was restructured and the balance changed from
manufacturing to service occupations. In the 1990s, national debates concentrated on
the relationship between work, family life, consumption levels, and the socialization and
education of the next generation. Approximately half of British women work; of these,
half are part-time workers. Nevertheless, a significant gender divide persists in regard to
suitable occupations for men and women, access to occupations by women and men, pay
levels for similar kinds of work, and the allocation of domestic tasks. Although the ideal
of gender equality is widely shared, social behavior lags behind the ideal. For example,
75 percent of couples say that the preparation of the evening meal should be shared
equally, but only one-third of these couples live up to that ideal.
Marriage, Family, and Kinship
Marriage. Premarital sex and unmarried cohabitation are widely accepted even if they
are not liked by defenders of traditional family values. Single motherhood caused by
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unstable cohabiting relationships or marital breakdown is perceived as a major problem
because of its impact on the welfare budget rather than as a moral question.
Nonetheless, family relationships remain close. Roughly 70 percent of adults live within
an hour's journey of their parents or grown-up children, and nearly half see their
mothers, fathers, adult children, and best friends at least once a week. While newspaper
and television reports claim that the nuclear family is in decline because of increased
rates of unmarried cohabitation and divorce, personal commitment to kinship ties has
not changed much. Seventy percent of adults think that people should keep in touch
with close family members; 55 percent think that they should keep in touch with
relatives such as uncles, aunts, and cousins; 60 percent say that they would rather spend
time with relatives than with friends; and nearly 80 percent think relatives are more
important than friends.T
hese attitudes vary with age and genderpeople over ageforty-five tend to be more family-centered than are younger people.
Kin Groups. Family life is changing, and there are tensions between kinship ties and
some contemporary social values. However, the great majority of people perceive
themselves to be part of multigenerational families and regard these relationships as
very important.
Etiquette
The United Kingdom is a crowded country. People cope with this situation by being
reserved and diffident in public, politely ignoring strangers, quietly minding their own
business, and marking out and defending their private spaces, homes, and gardens.
They expect others to do the same.
Religion
Religious Beliefs. Since the 1950s, church adherence has fallen dramatically, and the
British are generally uninterested in formal religious practice. Sixty percent of adults do
not believe in God, and one-third have no religious affiliation.Thirty-six percent of the
population identifies with the official, state-sanctioned Church of England; 10 percent
with the Roman Catholic Church; 4 percent with Presbyterianism; 4 percent with
Baptism and Methodism; 3 percent with other Protestant denominations, and 3 percent
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with other religions. Four percent describe themselves as Christians, and 35 percent say
that they have no religion. Geographically, the Church of England is represented as the
Church of England, the Church of Scotland, the Church of Ireland, and the Church in
Wales, but Anglicanism is the predominant church mainly in England. In Wales, there
was a strong nonconformist presence of Methodist and Baptist chapels whose
importance in local life has declined considerably since 1950; in Scotland and Northern
Ireland, Presbyterianism is strongly represented; and Roman Catholicism is significant
in Northern Ireland, the Western Isles of Scotland, parts of Lancashire and Sussex, and
cities where large numbers of nineteenth century Irish Catholic immigrants settled.
Only in Northern Ireland is religion strongly identified with political aspirations.
Medicine andHealth Care
The National Health Service, which was set up by an act of Parliament in 1947, gave
every resident access to free medical care. A system was created that operated local
public hospitals throughout the country and directly employed doctors, nurses, and
other health workers. Family doctors, specialists, and dentists also received payment
from the government for treating patients, although any doctor or patient can practice
privately or pay for private medical care. There have been continuing debates on the
level of care the service should provide and how it should be funded.The system was
intended to provide unlimited medical care to any patient, and the government
undertook to pay the full cost. In some ways, the service has been a victim of its own
success. Free medical care and successful efforts to promote better health, diet, and
working conditions have meant that people live much longer.The care of the frail
elderly has consumed an increasing amount of resources; as have advances in treating
diseases. Governments' attempts to control the costs of health care inevitably result in
the covert rationing of resources, which conflicts with the principle of the citizen's right
to high-quality free care when it is needed.
Secular Celebrations
The Celebration of the Birthday of the Queen is held on the second Saturday in June.
Other legal holidays include New Year's Day, Good Friday, Late Summer Holiday (the
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last Monday in August or the first in September), Christmas Day, and Boxing Day (26
December). Scotland and Northern Ireland, celebrate several of their own holidays.
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