Ethics and Nationalist Populism at the British Seaside: Negotiating Character 9780367628512, 9780367628574, 9781003111085

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Materializing Culture

ETHICS AND NATIONALIST POPULISM AT THE BRITISH SEASIDE NEGOTIATING CHARACTER Ana Carolina Balthazar

Ethics and Nationalist Populism at the British Seaside

Drawing on ethnographic research at the British seaside, this book offers an original and insightful anthropological contribution to the study of contemporary Britain and nationalism. The volume focuses on people who have retired from different parts of the UK to the seaside town of Margate and nearby areas, exploring their ethical negotiations and relationships with things that ‘have history’. It considers how residents engage daily with objects, houses and places ‘with character’ and how such ordinary engagements underlie nationalist sentiments, their reaction to local art-led urban regeneration projects and the Brexit vote. The Brazilian anthropologist Ana Carolina Balthazar demonstrates that those who have reached a comfortable financial position often look for ways to reconnect with their working-class upbringing and, while doing so, engage with the national past in a very tangible manner. Contributing to social scientific debates on class dynamics and ethics, the book provides a different perspective on nationalist populism, one which moves beyond media stereotypes and arguments made about the ‘left behind’ and ‘longing for empire’ in ‘post-industrial’ Britain. Ana Carolina Balthazar is a postdoctoral researcher at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Materializing Culture Series Editors: Daniel Miller and Paul Gilroy

This provocative series focuses on the social relations involved in material practices. The study of material culture has stimulated a new body of research which brings together areas as diverse as the artwork of record sleeves, shopping, bitter conflicts over ancient monuments, digital fonts, craft skills and the political economy of consumption. This series demonstrates the innovative and critical edge that a material culture perspective may bring to bear upon a wide range of academic concerns. Ethics and Nationalist Populism at the British Seaside Negotiating Character Ana Carolina Balthazar https://www.routledge.com/Materializing-Culture/book-series/BLANTMC

Ethics and Nationalist Populism at the British Seaside Negotiating Character

Ana Carolina Balthazar

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Ana Carolina Balthazar The right of Ana Carolina Balthazar to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-62851-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-62857-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-11108-5 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To my grandmothers, Eliza and Olga.

Contents

Figures Acknowledgements

x xi

Introduction: An ethnographic approach to nationalist populism

1

Character and the ethics of nationalist populism: theoretical engagements 7 Ethics in anthropological debates 7 Class in Britain 10 Is ethnography a methodology? 13 Situating the research 16 The national landscape of de-industrialization and leisure 16 Administrative divisions and local history 18 Deprivation and retirement at the seaside 20 Outline of the book 23 Note 25 1

The logic of character: ‘To put the past back’ Encountering character 27 Character and childhood memories 27 The Proust effect 32 Involuntary memory and the past 33 The ethics of memory 35 Relating through character 37 The different experiences of character 39 The temporality of character 41 Maintaining or ruining character 45 Character, power and class 49 Character and aesthetics 54 Notes 55

26

viii Contents 2

Connections of character: The British seaside

56

Character and the ‘Made in Britain’ 57 Personal memories and the national 57 ‘Made in Britain’ and class 60 Period houses 62 Clare and Peter’s hallway 62 Lynva’s kitchen 64 Julie’s living room 66 Nationalism at home 67 Houses and social hierarchies 67 The nation in practice 70 Class and home ownership 72 Nationalism outside the home 75 Remembrance Day 75 The local History Society 78 A British town 80 Nationalism and class 82 Notes 84 3

Disconnections of character: A town undergoing regeneration

85

Local regeneration and the creative industries 85 The politics of depriving a town 88 A new art gallery in town 90 ‘It’s like a bus shelter’ 90 A discomfort with conceptual art 96 Reopening the local amusement park 97 Retirement, consumption and memory talk 100 Gentrification and the arts at the seaside 103 Character and the consumption of places 105 The limits of creative ‘diversity’ 109 Note 111 4

Intersections of character: The Brexit vote The local rise of nationalist populism 112 A local hotel 112 From the rubbish in the streets to formal politics 116 How nationalist populism operates 119 The ‘legacy of empire’ argument 120 The ‘left behind’ argument 122 Avoiding the ‘post’ paradigm 125

112

Contents

ix

Brexit, time and age 129 British and other nationalities 133 Notes 137 Final considerations: The ethics of an anthropology of nationalist populism

139

A Brazilian writing about the British 139 Character and the ethics of anthropological practice 143 References Index

149 159

Figures

0.1 0.2 1.1 1.2 2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3

Old Town Old Town leading to the Marine Terrace The charity shop’s window Some old objects for sale at the charity shop A castle made of sand with flags on top The Turner Contemporary gallery The Harbour Arm The Turner Contemporary gallery and the Droit House

20 21 29 29 81 91 93 93

Acknowledgements

The research on which this book is based began in 2011, as part of my PhD. This means that the book is the result of nearly a decade of work. First and foremost, I need to thank my research interlocutors for trusting me with so much of their lives. I can never express how grateful I am to you. I hope you know that I have learned so much from you and deeply respect you. I am also very grateful to Daniel Miller and Martin Holbraad who, beyond being my PhD supervisors and intellectual inspiration, have become deeply trusted friends – and man, a Brazilian needs people she trusts to make her way in academia. Jeanette Edwards has also been a beautiful inspiration throughout this journey – what an honour. Together with Cathrine Degnen, Jeanette provided the feminist twist that my work needed. Thank you! I also want to thank UCL Anthropology and PUC-Rio for the amazing training – what a privilege it has been. At PUC-Rio I need to especially thank Everardo Rocha, Tatiana Siciliano, Cláudia Pereira, Angeluccia Habert and José Carlos Rodrigues for always supporting my work. Everardo was the first to show me the beauty of anthropology, and this I shall never forget. The LAARES and NuCEC research teams have offered me a home at UFRJ, and I want to thank José Reginaldo Gonçalves and Federico Neiburg for having me. I am also lucky to have found people I trust in the USA, so thank you Katherine Donahue and Patricia Heck for supporting my work. In recent years ESPM-Rio has kindly welcomed me, for which I have Eduardo França to thank. I am also grateful to Lisa McKenzie, whom I met at a sensitive stage during the writing of this book and who has always been extremely generous in our conversations. As I always say, none of this would make any sense if it was not part of amazing debates, kind exchanges and friendship. So thank you Alice, Jeeva, Hannah, Aleksi, Beata, Kelly, Narges, Julia, David, Charlotte, Kaya, Alex, Renata, Maria Raquel, Stella, Rachel, Roberta, Antonio, Leo, Gustavo, Vivi, André, Marina and William: anthropology only makes sense to me if I am next to you guys. To Kelly and Narges, especially, thank you for being there when things got really difficult. I want to thank Dominic Esler for helping to proofread the manuscript; having you with me on this anxious journey has been fundamental – thank you, my friend. I am deeply grateful to CAPES for my postdoctoral fellowship, without which this book would not exist, and to the Camel Trust for funding my return to Margate in 2019. I am also very grateful to the Routledge team for believing in

xii Acknowledgements this project – thank you. I want to thank my students for showing me that there is always more to learn, and for always being a breath of fresh air. Lastly, I am grateful to Thiago for holding my hand at so many stages of this work – and all my love to the Soveral family, who included me for so many of these nearly ten years. To my amazing friends, thank you for holding me tight! To Marcelo, Wilma, Beto, Edu and Davi, thank you for being my family. To all the ‘Barretos’, I credit part of the audacity of this work to our genes. To my parents and Manu, obrigada por todo e tanto amor.

Introduction An ethnographic approach to nationalist populism

It was March 2015, and I was living in London after having spent 15 months in Margate, a seaside town in the district of Thanet in Southeast England. I am originally from Brazil, where I am now based, but had lived in Margate as part of my ethnographic research in the area. While I was in London I asked one of my research interlocutors, a retired resident of Thanet, to let me know when Nigel Farage was next at the seaside so that I could take the train there and watch his performance in person. Farage was at that time the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), and a candidate for the South Thanet seat in the 2015 general election. UKIP was founded in 1993 and is considered to be a populist and nationalist party (Mann and Fenton 2017). In 2013, UKIP won seven of the eight seats in Thanet’s local council election. The party attracted global attention by winning a surprising number of seats in the European elections of May 2014 on the basis of an anti-EU discourse. In October 2014, UKIP reported that it had over 40,000 members. In March 2015, my interlocutor did as I had asked and told me about the next UKIP event in Thanet. That evening Farage would be joining other UKIP candidates to present their campaign promises. When I arrived it was already evening, and outside the church hall where the event was taking place half a dozen people were campaigning against UKIP. My interlocutor and I entered the building and passed through a small hallway in which attendees were invited to provide their names and contact information. We were soon directed to the church’s community hall, where there were purple posters that read ‘Believe in Britain’ and UKIP membership application forms that used the language of war in their invitation to ‘join the people’s army’. At the back of the hall we poured ourselves tea, then sat in chairs facing the stage that had been set up for the candidates. Churches in England are often hired for nonreligious events, so I was not surprised by the venue. I counted over 100 chairs, although not all were taken. When the presenters started to talk they asked how many of the attendees were affiliated to the party. Most did not raise their hands. The event began with three UKIP candidates for the local council presenting their solutions to the problems in the area. They all argued that they felt they did not belong in the area any more, even though they were locally ‘born and bred’. They complained about local crime, ‘uncivilized behaviour’ and the

2 Introduction lack of people’s pride in the place where they lived which, according to them, manifested itself in the amount of rubbish left in the streets. They did not present many solutions, apart from the fact that they ‘had the courage’ to speak out about what was going on. One of the candidates summarized the matter in three ‘main problems’: the dirty streets, the continuous expansion of housing developments over local greenfield sites and the recent sale of the nearby Manston Airport to an organization that intended to transform it into a housing development. When Farage finally spoke, he introduced himself as a Kent local. As I will discuss in Chapter 1, this sort of reference to ‘being local’ is important to the people in the area, especially those who come from working-class backgrounds. Therefore, Farage ‘scaled up’ his place of origin from Farnborough to Kent in order to be considered a local. He talked about the ‘ups and downs’ of his life and how much he had worked throughout it. Thus, although Farage had attended private school and worked in finance, he told his life story in a way that framed him as a ‘worker’. This story matched the photo of Farage that was published in local papers at the time, in which he appeared holding a pint of ale – an image easily associated with the working-class habit of attending the local pub. Like the other candidates who had spoken before him, Farage referred to the history of Britain and to the sacrifices the country had undergone in wars; sacrifices undergone, according to him, in order to ‘be our own people’. He argued that UKIP wanted that freedom, and that the political opposition no longer thought Britain was good enough. He was the first speaker to explicitly refer to immigration, and to argue that unskilled immigrants were taking British jobs; in Chapter 4 I will discuss how immigrants often appear as the threatening ‘other’ in nationalist populist discourses. According to Farage, there was a need to stop immigration and for Britain to ‘put its own people first’. He also argued that ‘the establishment is against us’, and that ‘our law is being made somewhere else’ (in reference to the country’s commitment to EU rights and obligations), but that opportunities lay in a renewed relationship with the Commonwealth countries (for similar quotes, see BBC News 2015). Meanwhile, public criticism was directed to the fact that this kind of reference to Commonwealth countries was a masked desire to return to exploitative colonial relations (Virdee and McGeever 2017: 4). Lastly, Farage referred to the Manston case: if elected he would stop the sale, resist the expansion of housing developments in local greenfield sites, reopen the airport and, in doing so, create new job opportunities for locals. Farage lost to the Conservative candidate by 6% of the votes. Nevertheless, one year later nationalist populism gained new traction when David Cameron, then Prime Minister, held a national referendum to decide the future of the UK in the EU. Cameron’s intention at the time was to resolve a political conflict within his own party, the Conservatives, but he ended up opening an opportunity for nationalist populism to thrive (Evans 2017b: 219). The Vote Leave campaign was led by the Conservative politicians Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, with significant support from Nigel Farage. Their campaign emphasized some of the arguments that Farage had already presented a year

Introduction 3 earlier at the event I attended. One of the campaign’s main slogans was ‘Take back control’. In June 2016, the majority (52%) of the UK voted for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU (also known as ‘Brexit’). In Thanet, 63,8% of voters chose Brexit (BBC News n.d.). Cameron left office after the result and Theresa May soon became Prime Minister, followed by Boris Johnson when the Conservative Party again won the national election in 2019. Since the 2016 referendum the UK has been in political turmoil. During this time, a frequently asked question has been: ‘What exactly does the referendum result mean?’ In response, two major interpretations of Brexit have emerged from social– scientific debates. On the one hand, the ‘Brexit vote’ and the rise of nationalist populism have been explained as a working-class ‘protest’ against decades of cosmopolitan politics and austerity measures which ignored the poor in postindustrial Britain (see, for example, Goodwin and Heath 2016; Evans 2017). On the other hand, scholars have argued that such discourses were only able to gain traction by relying on old structures of racism that have been masked by nationalist claims, a legacy of empire that speaks not only to the working classes but also to the upper classes (Virdee and McGeever 2017; Dorling and Tomlinson 2019). This was all fuelled by politicians’ ability to use social media to influence voters’ emotions and actions, as will be further discussed in Chapter 4. As I will show throughout the book, both of these explanations for Brexit tie in very well with a particular interpretation of society: the assumption that people now live in a post-modern world in which identities are fluid and there is a continuous sense of insecurity (Giddens 1991a). This interpretation has, since the 1980s–1990s, been explicitly or implicitly present in social–scientific debates. According to it, while the working classes are being stripped of their last resources, the middle classes are engaging in consumption to secure a stable and coherent lifestyle. In other words, while the working classes are left in a very unstable and insecure situation, the middle classes attempt to mask their insecurity through alienated lifestyles. This interpretation proposes that these lifestyles are greatly influenced by narratives shared by the media and advertising, which often help to deflect from ongoing social deprivation and inequality. Among the middle classes in particular there is often an attempt to secure stability through the consumption of sanitized versions of the past (Urry 1995) which speak directly to the legacies of empire and reproduce racism (Tyler 2012). Thus, nationalist populist propaganda seems well suited both to addressing the ‘left-behind’ working classes who are seen as majorly influenced by the media and to speaking to middle- and upper-class racism (Dorling and Tomlinson 2019). As is characteristic of populism, populist discourses in the UK have been able to draw on ‘empty signifiers’ that bring together very different political dissatisfactions (Laclau 2005) and have attracted voters from varied backgrounds (Evans 2017b). So, arguments that Brexit was either a matter of racism or the consequence of economic oppression rely on a framework of ‘post-industrial Britain’ which connects to arguments about the post-modern experience of life and the end of empire (the post-colonial period). Whatever the case may be, these different analytical

4

Introduction

interpretations of contemporary (political) events all seem to agree that Britain is ‘post’ something, which often has to do with an economic or political state of affairs. The working-class ‘left-behinds’ are ‘post-industrial’ and the racist nationalists are ‘post-colonial’, even if they refuse to accept it. In this book I will argue that there is another way to approach these issues, and this is through the perspective of ‘time’ and people’s different experiences of it. In Farage’s speech that evening in Thanet, immigration was not the only ‘problem’ cited by candidates and voters. The issue of immigrants being used as scapegoats to justify political action understandably tends to prompt the anger and disgust of some readers, and may preclude them from paying attention to anything else that is being said. Therefore, I ask the reader to be patient and bear with me. Something else was voiced during the campaign – something that has clearly been pushed aside by analysts who consider it less important. Another problem that UKIP intended to tackle was the constantly growing local housing developments. The construction of such houses, they explained, meant the loss of places such as Manston Airport, which one of the candidates described as a survivor of history. However, because such references to the past are often interpreted by analysts as expressions of the well-known alienated consumption of heritage (and its racist undertones), as mentioned above, they are sidelined in favour of an analytical emphasis on political and economic structures. In this book I argue that the local idiom of ‘character’ is central to understanding what is at stake in nationalist populism in Thanet, and possibly elsewhere. According to retired residents of Thanet, some places and objects had ‘character’. When people defined an object as having character, they meant that the object had a ‘personality’, therefore pointing to some sort of resemblance between things and persons. An object had ‘character’ when it comprised layers of different material remnants and traits from the past, such as signs of being handmade or used, or materials that are no longer produced. Such signs, in turn, provided a sense of the object’s individual and autonomous trajectory or ‘life’. According to my interlocutors, an art deco lamp, a 1920s beaded dress, an Edwardian house or even a whole town had character (Balthazar 2016a, 2016b, 2017, 2019). As my interlocutors emphasized, Manston Airport played a central role during the two World Wars. It was from here that planes often departed for the continent. The airport currently houses a museum of the iconic Royal Air Force fighter planes of World War II. Therefore, Manston indexes the history of the area and is connected to its character. Moreover, such history directly relates to a national interpretation of the past. People’s anxiety about the airport referred to the physical remnants of such a past – something that could not be recovered if lost. They often considered the ‘character’ of things before deciding what should or not be done in the area; that is, the rightness and wrongness of actions. As the reader shall see throughout the book, to my interlocutors the ethical is profoundly entangled with a particular experience of time that challenges taken-for-granted assumptions about ‘post-industrial’ Britain and the temporal undertones of this expression. This book establishes the ethical, rather than the economic or the political, as a fruitful analytical angle for considering voters’

Introduction 5 affiliations to right-wing parties. It explores how daily negotiations about what it means to live a good life come to encourage a commitment to populist political movements. Simply put, this book presents an ethnographic account of how financially secure people, who were born in different parts of the UK and have chosen to retire at the seaside, engage daily with objects, houses and places that have ‘character’. On the one hand, these objects trigger memories – of relatives; upbringings in council estates, mining villages, or countryside farms; and experiences of working-class hardships after the war. Objects and places with character, such as the airport, index the past and completely transform people’s temporal experiences of the local landscape. On the other hand, character is the opposite of the ‘modern’ quality that defines some of the local council initiatives to regenerate ‘deprived’ Margate. From an ethnographic perspective, the negotiations of character are never straightforward, and produce all sorts of connections, disconnections and intersections that the book will unpack. Character here is understood as an ethical concern that informs people’s actions, including who they vote for. Through character, this book investigates what brings people to vote for parties and policies that are often considered to threaten democratic values. In suggesting an analytical emphasis on character, I am by no means trying to deny the danger that populist movements pose to liberal democracy. I am also not disputing the significant increase of racist attacks since the Brexit vote (see Winter 2016), or the fact that immigrants have been used as scapegoats in the racist narratives spread by opportunistic political leaders, or even that this whole situation has distracted the public’s attention from the terrible consequences of austerity politics. Lastly, I am certainly not denying the continuous, serious and violent reproduction of racist structures in the UK and beyond. I am, however, offering an anthropological contribution to the ongoing critical reflection on contemporary Britain. As Ghassan Hage (2012) has argued, drawing on the work of the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, anthropology offers to critical debates a contribution that is influenced by the historical trajectory of the discipline: it tells us ‘that, regardless of what and who we are, we, as individuals and as society, can dwell in the world in a completely different way from the way we dwell in it at any given moment’ (Hage 2012: 289). Hage argues that while the discipline of history helps people to consider their positions in relation to past events, and sociology asks them to consider their actions in relation to broader social forces that impact the decisions of individuals, anthropology offers us the possibility of critically considering being ‘other’ than what we are. I suggest that this ‘other’, which challenges taken-for-granted ideas, might be much ‘closer’ than one would expect. I see some of the phenomena which have been ‘aggregated’ (Laclau 2005) as part of the Brexit vote as an ‘other’ that challenges modern neoliberal capitalist rhythms and conceptions of time. This ‘other’ temporal experience, however, is not properly grasped by the ‘post’ paradigm which is present in social–scientific debates. In order to follow the ethnographic trajectory of this book, I ask the reader to approach it with emotional generosity, provisionally suspending their

6 Introduction taken-for-granted ideas about what is going on at the British seaside and allowing a Brazilian anthropologist to offer a different perspective. (At the end of the book I will also consider the implications of being Brazilian and doing this research.) This means that although I will refer to all of the popular topics that are currently associated with populism in the UK – for example, class, nationalism, heritage, nostalgia and gentrification – I will offer another way of connecting these themes which leads to a different conclusion. That is, by wanting something ‘back’ (as presented in the Brexit Campaign), my interlocutors at the seaside do not mean that they want to go back ‘in time’ to whatever existed before the ‘post’ – to the industrial, colonial or pre-modern periods. Instead, this is an ethical claim to have acknowledged a different form of temporal experience, which they often address through an attention to ‘character’. As I will show, engagements with character challenge ‘clock-ticking’ productive time in multiple ways. I see these temporal experiences as examples of what Hage (2012: 294) considers the ‘ungovernable’, that which exhausts the conventional political imagination that is part of a particular form of governmentality and as such demands a radical politics that comes from nowhere, as it were. It can make of the search for an alter-politics not only a mere possibility but an imperative. Not surprisingly, no one (especially politicians) knew exactly what to do with the Brexit vote when it happened – it was ‘ungovernable’. The fact that claims about character were opportunistically (and clumsily) picked up by politicians should not invalidate the fact that something important was being voiced. Beyond offering the reader an original and insightful perspective on nationalism and local ethics, I believe it is important to acknowledge my ethical responsibility in the research that I have conducted. On the one hand, this ethical responsibility involves the growing and important commitment of anthropology and the social sciences to anti-racism and the reduction of inequality. On the other hand, there is an important historical responsibility, especially being myself born and raised in a country that was colonized (Brazil), to bring anthropological analyses all the way ‘home’; that is, to its birthplace in Europe. Anthropology began as a field of research focused on the study of nonEuropeans and, truth be said, has been greatly influenced by colonial legacies. After the second half of the last century the discipline expanded its interests to also include the research of European and North-American populations. In the book’s final considerations I will tackle how avoiding colonial legacies inevitably means testing the anthropological apparatus in very different kinds of ethnographic contexts, including that of ‘familiar’ Western nationalist populism, and dealing with the consequences (and opportunities!) of this. In writing this book I hope to show that an anthropological perspective may indeed contribute to public debate in a way that is defined neither by colonial legacies nor by the influence of the discipline of sociology (an influence that has been especially intense in the study of Britain). This, however, may be uncomfortable

Introduction 7 for readers who are only used to experiencing the anthropological endeavour at a certain distance. In other words, I realize that to some readers my British interlocutors might feel uncomfortably ‘close’. Revising one’s taken-for-granted values, as anthropology often encourages us to do, is never an easy task. This is especially difficult with regard to activities (such as the vote for Brexit) that have been defined by some as immoral and simply wrong. I take this discomfort – that is, feeling ‘haunted’ (Hage 2012), and that our most treasured values are under threat – to be a necessary part of anthropological exercise. Hopefully, by the end of the book, the reader will understand that temporarily enduring this discomfort, if that is the case, will later allow for new understandings to emerge. My approach will push towards a ‘decolonization of thought’ (Holbraad, Pedersen and Viveiros de Castro 2014), which I will further explain by the end of the book.

Character and the ethics of nationalist populism: theoretical engagements Ethics in anthropological debates In English, you might use the word ‘character’ to refer to a person in a fictional story or to the particular combination of qualities that makes a person or place distinctive. However, if you say someone ‘is a character’, you probably mean that person is an eccentric. Within anthropological debates the term ‘character’ played a central role in the Culture and Personality School’s studies of ‘national character’ in the twentieth century (Neiburg and Goldman 1998). This body of work problematically considered nations as ‘social and cultural wholes’ – bounded and internally homogeneous. For example, Ruth Benedict, one of the members of the School, was commissioned to help the US government during World War II and wrote an ethnography of the ‘rules and values of Japanese culture’ (1989 [1946]: 6). In this work she focused on the recurrence and typicality of events, producing a normative account of Japanese culture (Gay y Blasco and Wardle 2007). This kind of ethnographic account has been highly criticized for contributing to the essentialization of cultures (Neiburg and Goldman 1998). That is, critics have claimed that cultures are not as clearly defined and homogeneous as such accounts suggest. Adam Reed and Jon Bialecki (2018) have argued that despite the dismissal of the conceptual use of ‘character’ in normative accounts of culture the term continues to be employed in anthropological work, although its meaning is usually taken for granted. Reed and Bialecki encourage anthropologists to become more reflective about the way that they adopt the term in ethnographic writing, without resorting to essentialisms. They examine the ways in which ‘character’ has referred historically to the fixing or stabilization of the self and to notions of morality. Character, therefore, relates directly to an ethical dimension of social life. In line with such issues, this book investigates the ethical dimension of my interlocutors’ valorization of character at the seaside. In other words, it discusses how their explicit references to ‘character’ may be understood as ethical – that

8

Introduction

is, as reflexive evaluations of their actions. While doing so, the book unpacks the ethical dimension of practices and narratives that were later appropriated by UKIP and the Brexit campaign. To consider such phenomena from the perspective of ethics means challenging some of the pervasive legacies within social–scientific theorizations, which have tended to focus on political economy to explain events in the UK. Before what has been called the ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology, studies tended to treat the ethical as a consequence of societal norms, and often as a facet of economic or political structures (Mattingly and Throop 2018). In other words, the ethical was frequently portrayed as a set of rules and duties imposed upon the individual by society. The individual, in turn, had to restrict their own needs and desires. However, since the beginning of the twenty-first-century anthropologists have turned to study the ways that people consciously reflect upon or evaluate their daily practices, and how these entail ethical concerns (Mattingly and Throop 2018). According to Cheryl Mattingly and Jason Throop (2018), this move towards ‘ordinary ethics’ has epistemological consequences for the discipline. Ordinary life ceases to be ‘the residual category of routine and repetition’ (Das 2015: 54) and becomes the very moment when the world is made. As a consequence, the researcher is less concerned with collectivist models than with the very situated ways in which ethical values are negotiated in practice. In parallel, engagement with research interlocutors is seen as an opportunity to revise and transform theoretical premises, an opportunity for the ‘destabilization of concepts’ (Mattingly and Throop 2018). This in turn enables, for example, a different approach to Brexit. Instead of focusing on the political and economic structures that led to this event, I will emphasize how ordinary people make sense of it and how this different approach illuminates values and concerns that remain hidden by overgeneralizations. James Laidlaw’s (2013) work has acquired a prominent position within the debate about ethics in anthropology. Laidlaw criticizes Durkheimian perspectives, arguing that they have equated the social with the moral, both being another ‘level of reality’ that encompasses the individual and constrains autonomous impulses. The consequence is that the subject’s action only deserves attention when it effectively challenges the social structure. Laidlaw defines this as ‘agency’, which is a common topic in anthropological accounts. He argues that the Durkheimian framework leaves no space for ethical considerations such as individual reasoning, decisions, doubts, dilemmas and so on: ‘[H]e has left us with Kant with freedom taken away’ (Laidlaw 2002: 313). Freedom, to Laidlaw, should not be understood as a lack of constraints or as acting in conformity with reason, but as the subject’s capacity to distance themself from the situations in which they are involved and evaluate their own actions in relation to them. As part of his advocacy for a science of freedom, Laidlaw has especially criticized ‘practice theory’ – the frameworks of Pierre Bourdieu and Marshall Sahlins, for example – for reproducing the mechanical tendencies of the Durkheimian framework. In the search for an approach to ethics that makes it possible to address

Introduction 9 freedom, he emphasizes the importance of considering individual consciousness and reflexivity in deciding actions, as well as the way that people continuously attribute responsibility to themselves and others. An anthropology of ethics would therefore be interested in how our interlocutors attempt to answer the Socratic question of ‘how one ought to live’ (Laidlaw 2002: 316). That is, it would require a conceptual framework ‘that does not re-describe the conduct of responsible agents as effects of causal “forces” or the mechanical self-reproduction of “objective structures”’ (2013: 10), or even one that avoids focusing on the capacity of the subject to challenge social structures. In that sense, morality would have to do with a sense of obligation and duty, this being just one of the possible outcomes of ethical practice (Laidlaw 2002). Laidlaw’s work (2013) and other recent studies of ethics have been greatly influenced by Foucauldian ideas of self-formation. Michel Foucault (1997) emphasized that moral virtues emerge as a result of daily practices of self-cultivation: ‘an insistence on the necessity of developing a virtuous character as the basis for moral action in everyday political and social life’ (Mattingly and Throop 2018: 481). This focus on the lived experience of the ethical also speaks to phenomenological traditions. I find the ethical approach fruitful as it allows for an investigation of people’s practices without reducing them to political determinism or to a facet of broader structures. Beyond that, the ethical allows for a consideration of the subject that does not lose track of people’s broader responsibilities. Lastly, while describing how our interlocutors step back from their actions and evaluate them, this framework also offers the researcher and the reader an opportunity to perform an ethical move. In other words, while reading about other people’s ethics we are invited to evaluate our own, and anthropology itself therefore becomes an ethical practice (Laidlaw 2013). I see this ethical consideration of other forms of life to be in line with Hage’s (2012) understanding of the particularity of anthropological contributions, as mentioned above. In this book I focus on emic notions of character and the ways in which they forge the ethics of my interlocutors. In Thanet, this idiom was frequently used by my retired interlocutors to address the distinctive characteristics of physical things. An object or place had character when it ‘had history’, as someone once explained to me. For example, Manston Airport indexes the past, especially its connection to British wars, and moulds the character of the seaside. I argue that efforts to maintain character should be seen as an ethical project, as they entail evaluations and decisions about the lives people ought to live and the actions they should or should not perform. In doing so, I will also consider how my interlocutors’ ethical practices are profoundly influenced by aesthetics and its role in triggering a ‘feeling’ of the past. The valorization of character activates connections between people, place and the past –including a British past. Nevertheless, it is important to note that this does not entail essentialisms. While considering character, people address multiple relations between these three dimensions. In this book the reader will not find an objective definition of what it means to be British, as the Culture and

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Introduction

Personality school attempted to do. Instead, this book offers a journey through the multiple events during which the character of things and places was negotiated, and investigates how character delivered a particular (although not unique) experience of the nation and Thanet. Thomas Yarrow (2018) has discussed how the term ‘character’ is pervasively used by conservation professionals working for Historic Scotland, a national heritage agency. If character is often understood to relate to ‘fixing or stabilization’ (Reed and Bialecki 2018: 161), Yarrow argues that a concern for character points to a ‘specific logic of change’ (2018: 336) that differentiates between the kinds of interventions or transformations that are acceptable and those that are not: ‘It is on this logic that a building or monument can be understood to undergo change, even of a radical kind, while becoming more essentially what it already is’ (ibid.: 338). Although my interlocutors in Margate were not the heritage professionals researched by Yarrow, they showed the same concern for physical detail, the ‘narrative’ of buildings and objects, and the ‘readability’ of things. This shaped their ethical evaluations of what should happen with regard to their country, the local area and themselves. Despite the effervescence of ‘ordinary ethics’ in anthropological debates, the pivotal studies have been mainly conducted outside the UK, in places like India, Papua New Guinea, the US, France, South Africa and Russia (for an overview, please see Laidlaw 2013: 26). In parallel, the ‘anthropology of Britain’ has been largely shaped by interdisciplinary debates with sociology and social geography, contributing to an emphasis on the analysis of social class. These trends seem to result from long-lasting epistemological divides within the social sciences. That is, historically there has existed a ‘derision within British social anthropology for most of the twentieth century towards the anthropological study of Britain’ (Degnen and Tyler 2017a: 24). Through an ethnographic approach to character, this book brings together the anthropology of ethics and interdisciplinary debates on class in the UK. At the end of the book I will also consider the implications of this analytical move for anthropology’s colonial legacy.

Class in Britain According to Fiona Devine and Mike Savage (2005), influenced by Bourdieu (1977, 1984), some social–scientific discussions of class have moved from a focus on class-consciousness to an emphasis on identity. While the idea of classconsciousness presupposes the recognition of one’s position within the social structure, identities are socially and relationally negotiated. In other words, social differences (and identifications) emerge while one attempts to move through the social ‘field’ (Devine and Savage 2005: 14). Devine and Savage argue that one of the main contributions of Bourdieu’s work has been a dynamic and processual perspective on class which considers both structure and individual agency. Social change is the result of marginalized classes claiming participation in fields from which they were previously excluded.

Introduction 11 The notion of ‘field’ is central here, as it relates to traditional definitions of social structure while at the same time being more fluid. The field only continues to exist if people reproduce it through their ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1977, 1984). According to Bourdieu, the habitus – mental and bodily modes of perception – is produced through the objective conditions within which people are raised and educated. For example, someone who was raised in a working-class context would carry forward a working-class habitus. According to Devine and Savage’s (2005) reading of Bourdieu, when a habitus from one field is confronted with a different field, change occurs; for example, when a working-class habitus enters a middle-class environment. Therefore, an encounter between individuals with different habitus is always an opportunity for identity claims and class negotiation. The consequence is a dynamic social-class theory in which people are not seen as trapped by the economic and social structure but as constantly in action and transforming themselves. Also drawing on Bourdieu, Beverley Skeggs (2005) argues that different classes have different levels of access to identity construction. Skeggs proceeds to give the example of rap music. Rap was initially an expression of black workingclass masculinity, before being appropriated by young white men as ‘cool’ while those who created that lifestyle have been increasingly criminalized. While white middle-class men can choose, change or create their style, black men are fixed and marginalized. The consequence is that the construction of the self is a resource only available to the middle classes, especially the white middle classes. Furthermore, Skeggs played an important role in the sociological debates of the 1990s by criticizing the abandonment by academics of the use of class as a relevant analytical topic. She claims that this is part of the middle class’s avoidance of accepting responsibility for its own power, and another way of silencing those populations who face structural inequalities. Consequently, theories that proclaim self-construction can be seen as reinforcing the researcher’s middle-classness more than anything else. These also encourage notions about the autonomous self-regulated subject found in various neoliberal narratives (see Walkerdine 2003). Therefore, an awareness of class should make the analyst wary of paradigms that claim individual ‘freedom’ (cf. Laidlaw 2013). Bourdieu’s work has strongly influenced analyses of class in Britain since the 1980s–1990s. It has also been used to discuss emic engagements with character. For example, Michaela Benson and Emma Jackson (2013) investigate how place and classed subjectivities intersect within the middle-class population in rural and mostly white areas of West Horsley and Effingham in England. Of their interlocutors, it is mostly those who are older and retired who are committed to a discourse about the ‘character’ of old and historic buildings: ‘if you try to do too much you’re going to start changing the nature and character of the village really aren’t you?’ (2013: 11). According to Benson and Jackson (2013), representations of place influence how people engage with the surrounding environment. That is, Benson and Jackson offer an interpretation that is attuned to ideas about the alienated consumption of heritage that I have already mentioned (see also Urry 1995). In

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other words, within a fluid reality people are continuously trying to materialize their idealized images of place, often influenced by the media and advertising. According to this interpretation, through claims about character people try to maintain towns in accordance with their image of the countryside as a white, middle-class space. Such discourses and actions avoid unwelcome change, suburbanization in particular (Benson and Jackson 2013). Elsewhere Jackson and Benson (2014) have argued that, due to the instability of middle-class boundaries, the middle classes often dis-identify with neighbouring areas to delimitate a safe, middle-class haven. This is a process of spatially mapping social difference and distinction which involves the recollection of a Victorian middle-class past to distance themselves from those in the working classes (Jackson and Benson 2014). However, as I will argue throughout the book, there is a very clear methodological strategy at play in some of the applications of Bourdieu’s work. Benson and Jackson (2013), for example, define a specific segment of society that they want to better understand – a segment that plays a central role in the reproduction of capitalist values – and then move on to interviewing individuals or following their practices. They conclude that such practices work to reinforce their class position within the broader structure, which is exactly the class categorization with which the researchers began (see also Jackson and Benson 2014). Therefore, even though Bourdieu attempted to deliver a more dynamic social class theory, the outcomes of such analyses often depict people’s ethics as ‘the residual category of routine and repetition’ (Das 2015: 54). This connects to Laidlaw’s criticism of Bourdieu for creating a framework that reduces subjects’ actions to the mechanical reproduction of structures. Although we need to be careful about the resonance that exists between Laidlaw’s call for freedom and the neoliberal notion of the self-regulated subject (Walkerdine 2003), there is an opportunity here for an ethical approach to character. On the one hand, while engaging with anthropological debates about ethics, this book shows the limits of theoretical conceptions of individual ‘freedom’ suggested by current theorizations about the ethical (Laidlaw 2013). Some anthropologists have already problematized the idea of ‘freedom’ because of its particularly Western associations (see, for example, Keane 2015). I will contribute to this debate by demonstrating the limits of ‘freedom’ within the West. In order to do so, the book unpacks the role of objects with regard to the production of ethical subjects; that is, how the very materiality of things with character inspires people to decide what should (or should not) be done. This attention to my interlocutors’ understanding of character will deliver a more nuanced and careful analysis of the ‘material determinism’ that Laidlaw (2013) associates with Bourdieu (1977, 1984). While this expression has often been used to refer to Marxist theoretical traditions that overemphasize the way that economic structures materially determine who people are, in this book we see different ways in which materiality can contribute to the formation of ethical subjects. On the other hand, if my interlocutors are not completely free, neither are they determined by political or economic structures. The analysis presented in this book has theoretical consequences for interdisciplinary debates on class struggle.

Introduction 13 An acknowledgement of character through the perspective of ethics allows for the re-evaluation of certain Bourdieusian arguments about class and social mobility which have profoundly influenced social-scientific debates in and about the UK. Although my interlocutors have been affected by major structural transformations, they decide how to respond to such transformations in ways that respect the values with which they were brought up and which preserve the character of things. In other words, if they have been forced to change by broader events, they continuously consider how to do so while respecting the past. Character provides them with a logic for how to change. It is this ethical principle that also informs their decisions about who to vote for. That is, they refer to character in order to orientate their responses to the macro-transformations in their country. While doing so they are neither free nor determined by such structures, but are negotiating their own characterful life – and their behaviour has political consequences. By exploring the efforts of retired seaside residents to maintain the ‘character’ of things, this book offers an ethnographic approach to nationalist populism from the perspective of ethics.

Is ethnography a methodology? Since this book speaks to theories developed in other disciplines, it is useful to clarify how ethnography has been understood in this research project. I understand ethnography as a kind of qualitative research of social practices that involves long-term participant observation. The ethnographer departs from the empirical encounter with people and things in order to draw more general theorizations. In comparison to other research practices, an ethnographic approach allows the researcher to observe the difference between what the people being studied say and what they actually do. That is, it enables the mapping of the conscious and unconscious connections and disconnections that people produce every day. People’s actions and ideas are often contradictory, and part of the ethnographer’s task is to manage contradiction. The ethnographer is also attentive to the ways in which objects and things furnish, reproduce or even challenge social practices. Although ethnography was first employed by European anthropologists engaging with geographically distant societies, it is now broadly used in the social sciences to investigate very different kinds of activities. Historically, one of the main objectives of the ethnographic encounter has been to develop an understanding of social practices from the perspective of the people who experience them. The ethnographic move is the researcher’s attempt to distance themself from their preconceptions in order to get closer to ‘other’ understandings and forms of life. Therefore, ethnography involves explicit or implicit comparisons between different ways of understanding and acting in the world (Gay y Blasco and Wardle 2007). It is also about contextualization. As Paloma Gay y Blasco and Huon Wardle (2007) have argued, an ethnographic text provides context and detail on lived experiences in order to make people’s actions intelligible to very different audiences. This strategy departs from the premise that social life is relational and, therefore, that things have no meaning

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Introduction

in themselves. Meanings are influenced by the particular situations in which they are encountered. This in turn engenders a challenge: each ethnographer needs to find the right balance between descriptions of very particular moments and their connections to general theorizations. If ethnography departs from the particular, it still intends to speak to the history of anthropological debates and concepts. This means abstracting more general relational logics and patterns from the individual cases that the ethnographer encounters while doing fieldwork. In order to grasp the complexity of what is at stake when people in Margate and nearby areas engage with character, this book draws on long-term ethnographic research. I lived in Thanet for 15 months between 2012 and 2013, and until today have continued to visit and engage with my interlocutors. Although I do not necessarily agree with their political arguments, some have become personal friends of mine. This continual contact with my interlocutors over the past eight years has enabled me to gain a good understanding of their ambitions, values, anxieties and practices. Whereas the initial immersion gave me a ‘feeling’ for people and a grasp of how they tend to think, this long-term contact has allowed me to revise my arguments and check my assumptions with my interlocutors. Moreover, during this long period I have been able to observe the changes that the local area has gone through, as well as the broader historical and political transformations. The right balance between local perspectives and anthropological theory is not encountered as ‘data’ during fieldwork, but is rather a careful strategy developed by the anthropologist after fieldwork while writing the ethnography. Such a strategy is also inevitably influenced by the current debates within the discipline of anthropology and beyond. Therefore, ethnography is as much the product of writing strategies as of empirical encounters: ‘Beyond a work of description or personal interpretation, an ethnography is a concerted attempt to convince readers of certain claims using the evidence of fieldwork. Ethnography is argument’ (Gay y Blasco and Wardle 2007: 98). As a consequence, this book also builds on anthropological scholarship that considers ethnographic writing to be ‘creative’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986). That is, ethnography is not only a methodology – a system of methods used in a particular area of study – but also a generative writing exercise. Therefore, my understanding of ethnography is different from authors who frame it as ‘description’ (cf. Ingold 2014). An ethnographic approach is particularly useful for allowing the researcher to follow unforeseen emic connections. Although ethnographic argument draws on research findings from participant observation, ethnography is not synonymous with participant observation. An ethnographic approach to practice, as developed here, is not only about the participant observation of previously classified subjects, but an attempt to move away from a priori analytical segmentations in order to approach interlocutors’ own categorizations of the world. My fieldwork has therefore worked to ‘re-calibrate’ and ‘re-validate’ theory regarding ethics and nationalist populism in England, as in anthropological analyses of ‘ordinary ethics’ (Mattingly and Throop 2018). Tim Edensor (2002) has written extensively on ordinary nationalism. That is, he explores how the national is continuously produced through daily practice

Introduction 15 (I will discuss this further in Chapter 2). Instead of employing an ethnographic perspective, Edensor draws on examples of daily life from different places across the UK to illustrate his Bourdieusian theoretical perspective of ‘national habitus’. Similar to Edensor and Bourdieu, I also discuss how national narratives become entangled with the material world that people inhabit. However, my ethnographic approach to character also draws attention to the individual and their reflective potential. While doing so, I problematize certain interpretations of Bourdieu’s work. That is, instead of attempting to fit my interlocutors into a Bourdieusian theoretical structure, as Edensor does, I discuss aspects of their practices that have the potential to destabilize Bourdieusian premises about class dynamics and social mobility. Michael Skey (2011), in turn, is concerned with the way nationalism appears and is reproduced beyond moments of political crisis; that is, how nationalism is present in ordinary events. Through a series of interviews and group discussions, he investigates how thinking in nationalist terms becomes naturalized in British people’s everyday conversations on topics such as football, national rituals, migration, multiculturalism and international mobility. While Skey focuses on nationalist frameworks that appear on a discursive level, in my ethnography I investigate the ways in which nationalism emerges through people’s engagement with objects that have character. Through such objects, nationalism is materially present in my interlocutors’ routines. While I also discuss what people say, I do more than that by showing that national discourses are not projected onto a common material world but completely transform people’s engagement with it. In doing so, this book offers a perspective that tries to avoid categorical thinking. That is, while discussing the way that national identities are constructed in Corsica, Matei Candea (2010a) differentiates between identity as a social ‘category’ (Barth 1969) and identity as a set of ‘attachments and connections’ (Edwards and Strathern 2000). Identities as categories emerge in relation and opposition to other categories. Following this perspective, social research is about how these categories are lived and embodied by individuals. In contrast, according to Candea the ‘anthropology of belonging’ (in reference to the work of Marilyn Strathern and Jeanette Edwards) focuses on how people connect (or identify) with other people and how an identity emerges from this connection, rendering conceptual or categorical ‘boundaries’ less important: ‘People belong to places, to stories, and to other people (who by the same token belong to them) before they belong to a category’ (Candea 2010a: 124). This book unpacks the ‘attachments and connections’ produced through my interlocutors’ attention to ‘character’. Such connections often generated ‘intersections’ (Tyler and Degnen 2017b) between taken-for-granted class and national categorizations. This shows the value of an ethnographic perspective, which offers the researcher (and the reader) an opportunity to encounter new and different ways of thinking and acting in the world. Pre-established and fixed categorizations merely work to reinforce their own (theoretical) logic, which may be completely different from the values of people at the seaside.

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Introduction

Therefore, the claims I make throughout the book are not based on the statistical validity of the sample of people with whom I engaged, but on how my interlocutors’ practices challenge taken-for-granted theorizations and ideas, and in doing so allow for the critical revision of theory. My engagement with Margate is necessarily a partial one (Strathern 2004). Therefore, I do not intend to ‘solve’ or exhaust Margate. Margate and the rest of the seaside is much more plural than my research, even though I will provide glimpses of such plurality and diversity within the book. During the time I lived in Margate I became intimately connected with five couples and around 20 other individuals, all of them white. In order to protect their privacy I have changed their names and omitted other information that could help to identify them. In addition, while I lived in the area I engaged with dozens of other people through different activities around town. After returning continuously to Margate for eight years I have lost track of how many people I know in the area. It is unlikely that I can catch a bus or go for a walk without bumping into someone I know. My intention here is to share the different stages of my growing relationship with this seaside area. Most people I know in Margate have not been professionally involved in politics or activism; quite often it was the opposite. They often evaluated daily situations in relation to ‘character’. That is, they lived their lives treasuring character. As I will show in the book, character was much more complex than an alienated attempt to salvage a middle-class haven, and when it came to political debates character was explicitly or implicitly at the centre of their discussions. This book treats formal politics as a facet of character and its ethical undertones. The structure of the book reflects this argument by unpacking some of the multiple intricacies of character before discussing its political impact. It is only by following all of the practices, efforts and details involved in the valorization of character that we begin to grasp what is at stake when people commit to right-wing politics. In doing so, I use the current political situation in the UK to argue for the wider importance of ethnographic research to the uncovering of ethical concerns that remain obscured by public debates, political agendas and dominant narratives.

Situating the research The national landscape of de-industrialization and leisure Since the 1970s the UK has undergone a large-scale economic restructuring that has resulted in the transformation of its landscape (Johnston 2000). These changes involved the national decline of the manufacturing industry and the proliferation of service industries, which have given preference to a different kind of labour force. The de-industrialization of the country left a large section of the skilled and semi-skilled manual labour force either without employment or in temporary and insecure jobs. In parallel, a new economy based on the provision of services (often the finance industry) enabled a young generation with university education to greatly improve their living standards. Since the 1980s financial elites have gradually challenged the previous dominance of managerial elites (Savage

Introduction 17 and Williams 2008, in Mann and Fenton 2017: 11). According to Ron Johnston (2000), the geography of the country reflects a polarization between the deprived populations left in a void by the de-industrialization of the country and a service class with high salaries. That is, the death of numerous traditional industrial complexes left whole areas of the country abandoned.1 All of these changes are directly linked to the neoliberal policy agenda advanced by the UK’s central government since Margaret Thatcher served as Prime Minister in the late 1970s and 1980s. This has involved the reduction of state interference in market transactions, the decrease of post-war welfare programmes, and the transformation of labour relations through the diminishment of industry, trade unions and working-class identity (Jones 2011). According to many scholars, since the 1970s the term ‘working class’ has been stripped of its important political significance through an emphasis on the middle class. ‘We’re all middle class now’, New Labour declared in 1998 (Edwards, Evans and Smith 2012). New Labour referred to an alignment between the Labour Party agenda and middle-class interests, whereas historically the party had represented the interests of the working classes. This political and economic rearrangement of the country has profoundly affected the ways in which certain areas are perceived. One example is St Ann’s, a council estate in Nottingham, where de-industrialization has resulted in a combination of unemployment, precarious part-time work and welfare support (McKenzie 2013). In parallel, inspired by the neoliberal narrative of self-making (Walkerdine 2003), outsiders have stigmatized people from St Ann’s as feckless. That is, people who faced structural economic problems were soon blamed for their own poverty by political leaders and general audiences. As a consequence, the residents of St Ann’s, who felt proud of ‘being St Ann’s’, have experienced the prejudice of outsiders. This has often encouraged them to stay within the estate, excluded from the rest of the city (Mckenzie 2013). This example shows that economically and politically marginalized groups are often relegated to less desirable places, which contributes to the spatialization of class struggle (Shields 1991; Sibley 1995). At the same time, in an attempt to generate jobs and development, many of the marginalized areas around the UK are being transformed into leisure destinations. The aim is to attract new and young financial elites as well as an older population who have attained a better financial position due to private pensions and investments (Crouch 2000). According to David Crouch, never before has leisure been commercialized to such an extent. Previously, people tended to make leisure instead of buying it. This ‘new geography of leisure’ (ibid.) commercializes places by transforming them into shopping centres, theme parks or new heritage sites for tourism. This involves ‘theming’ places – designing and advertising a place as a marketable concept – the consequence of which is the gentrification of villages and small towns. The problem with such strategies is that they blur the difference between public and private interests (Smith 2002). Urban planning ceases to be a strategy for dealing with social inequality and becomes another resource for capital production. By gentrifying an area, the government is not

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Introduction

solving local social inequality but rather attracting wealthier classes through business strategies and improving the area while pushing away poorer populations. Through this logic, scholars argue that places are consumed as commodities that in turn serve only to colonize the lower classes and other excluded groups (Urry 1995; Kearns and Philo 1993). This book’s journey through character begins with events that took place in the seaside town of Margate and nearby areas. We can understand Margate’s current situation with reference to the above description of the spatialization of class struggle. Like St Ann’s (Mckenzie 2013) and other ‘deprived’ areas of the UK (Johnston 2000), Margate has a reputation that precedes it: it has been an object of stigmatization. In order to improve Margate’s economic situation, local and regional government and individual entrepreneurs have invested in its tourist and leisure industries, as elsewhere in the country (see Crouch 2000). The next section explores local history. Administrative divisions and local history Margate is a coastal town in the county of Kent in England. England is divided into counties for the purposes of administrative, geographical and political demarcation. Kent is in Southeast England, bordering Greater London to the northwest, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the southwest, while its east coast faces France. In the past the county was popularly known as the ‘Garden of England’ due to its abundance of green fields and farmlands. Its proximity to London makes it part of the commuter belt; that is, many people who live in the area commute daily to work in London. This proximity has also often meant that it has benefited from the thriving economy of the capital, in contrast to northern areas of the UK (see also Centre for Cities 2015). Below central government, Kent County Council (KCC) is the local authority that governs Kent. The county is divided into 12 regional districts, each governed by a locally elected council. Margate is part of the district of Thanet, an area measuring 103 square kilometres in the extreme northeast of Kent. While KCC is responsible for planning and providing the largest and most expensive services, such as education, social services, public transport and policing, Thanet District Council is responsible for local planning and building, the organization of local events and fairs, and tourism. Thanet District Council’s headquarters are located in Margate. Most of Thanet falls within the ‘Isle of Thanet’, a geographical area that used to be separated from the rest of the country by the Wantsum Channel, which silted up in the late Middle Ages. My interlocutors would often refer to this physical separation to explain the particularity of Thanet, previously disconnected from the rest of England and ‘insular’. Even the local newspaper – the Isle of Thanet Gazette – invokes this history in its name. Locals also often describe Thanet as ‘Planet Thanet’, referring to their sense of detachment. The three main towns in Thanet are Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate. Broadstairs has a population of about 25,000 (Business Intelligence, Research &

Introduction 19 Evaluation 2012) and covers an area of 1,136 square hectares. The town’s landscape is composed of small farms and residences, most constructed during the last century. It is popularly known for its annual Dickens Festival – held every June in celebration of the author, who frequently visited the area – and the Folk Week music festival every August. For the past century the town has been a holiday destination for the British wealthy classes. The town centre comprises one main street and around half a dozen small streets occupied by small and local businesses. My interlocutors often observed that Broadstairs continues to be a ‘village’, with a local butcher and bakery, family businesses and quaint architecture. Ramsgate covers an area of 987 square hectares, with a population of about 40,000 (Business Intelligence, Research & Evaluation 2012). The town is home to Ramsgate Port and one of the largest marinas in England. It has a maritime history, having played important roles in international wars due to its strategic location (see Ramsgate Town Council n.a.). The town has strong fishing and farming communities and, like Margate and Broadstairs, a tourist industry. One of my interlocutors, the owner of a hotel in Margate, described the differences between the three towns with reference to the character of each: Thanet is like an island, and the three main towns have three different characters. Margate is the fun seaside town, the ‘kiss me quick’ culture, while Broadstairs is more sedate. In Broadstairs it is all about the Folk Week, Dickens Festival, upper classes, family businesses and a strong sense of community. And Ramsgate has a marine culture, since it’s a port. When people started to have money to go abroad, first the rich and then the poor, they stopped coming to Margate and everything started to decline. The town of Margate covers an area of 1,423 square hectares, with a population of about 50,000 (Business Intelligence, Research & Evaluation 2012). It sits between Broadstairs and Westgate-on-Sea, a small seaside town with a population of around 7,000 (Business Intelligence, Research & Evaluation 2012). Margate is a semi-urbanized environment, with undulating hills mostly covered by private houses and public squares, and intersected by a public bus system that connects the whole area of Thanet. Nevertheless, it is easy to reach the green fields and farmlands that surround Margate by boarding a bus travelling towards the other nearby towns. The centre of Margate is filled with Georgian and Victorian buildings. ‘Old Town’, as residents call the oldest part of the town centre, covers an area of four parallel streets with boutique shops, restaurants, coffee shops and bars. The High Street begins at one of Old Town’s corners, leading up the hill and towards a more stigmatized area of Margate. Between 2012 and 2013 one could find cheap chain stores, fast food outlets, small local restaurants and charity shops on the High Street. Due to the precarious economic situation in the area during recent decades, local businesses and shops change quite often (Figure 0.1). The top of the High Street is intersected by Queen Street, where the Thanet District Council headquarters and the local post office, library and job centre

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Introduction

Figure 0.1 Old Town

are located. In the opposite (southwest) direction, Queen Street leads to Marine Terrace, a 500-metre stretch of coastline that meets Margate’s train station (Figure 0.2). Despite the changing stores, Marine Terrace is filled with pubs, fish and chip shops and arcades. Outside the centre of town, the streets become less and less dense and more residential. Margate is 104 kilometres from London, to which it is connected by rail. This means that travellers can easily reach the capital by train in under two hours. However, even before the construction of the railway the town was already a tourist destination. Margate was initially a fishing village, and in the eighteenth century it became a popular destination among the wealthy classes, who travelled to the seaside in order to benefit from the fresh air and recover from diseases (Lees and McKiernan 2012). With the improvement of the rail service during the twentieth century the town became popular among the working classes, who came to take a rest from their industrial work routines. Deprivation and retirement at the seaside After the expansion of international tourism in the 1950s, most English seaside towns suffered an economic crash. Since that time they have become the ‘dumping grounds for groups such as care leavers, people with substance abuse problems, those with mental health issues and ex-offenders, for whom placing authorities

Introduction 21

Figure 0.2 Old Town leading to the Marine Terrace

can easily find low-cost accommodation’ (The Centre for Social Justice 2013: 6). Twenty-six of the 37 principal seaside towns in England have a greater overall level of deprivation than the English average (Department for Communities and Local Government 2008). In three-quarters of these indicators – for example, employment rate and average earnings – seaside areas score lower than the country average. In comparison to the other eight seaside areas that, together with Thanet, account for 60% of the seaside population, Thanet was defined as the most economically disadvantaged in terms of income, employment, education and skills. In this sense, Margate seems to be part of a larger pattern (with some exceptions) of seaside towns in England that lack employment opportunities. The official recognition that Margate was facing a crisis came from a report produced by the central government (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister 2004). This report defined Margate as a ‘pocket of deprivation’ within the ‘less deprived’ southeast. The research established which areas of the country were in most need of development by investigating ‘multiple deprivation’ through an ‘area perspective’ – aggregating the distinct dimensions of deprivation suffered by individuals in an area. However, the report ‘[entailed] no conclusions on the causes of deprivation’ (2004: 13, italics in original). The understanding of local and regional authorities was that in order to remove Margate from a crisis situation it was imperative to improve the town’s economy

22

Introduction

(for more details on other local strategies, see Thanet District Council n.d.a). The strategy adopted was intended to improve Margate’s tourist industry by targeting new international visitors. The idea seems to have been that by improving the economy more jobs would become available, and this would in turn contribute to a better quality of life and a reduction of levels of deprivation (see also Myerscough 1988). In official documents this economic strategy was often defined as a ‘regeneration’ process (see Thanet District Council n.d.b). The regeneration initiated an influx of creative industries and professionals to the area, and these transformations will be further explored in Chapter 3. Nevertheless, despite the situation of economic deprivation and regeneration, Margate and the nearby areas continued to figure in the memory of many people in the UK as the fun seaside environment they remembered from their childhood. In the UK the seaside is a common retirement destination for older people. This migratory trend has shaped the demographics of the country, and a greater percentage of the older generations is found in coastal and rural areas of Britain: in England and Wales 20% of the population of coastal communities were aged 65 or over, compared with 16% in the two countries overall (Office for National Statistics 2014, based on the 2011 Census). In Margate and Broadstairs the proportions are even higher: 22% of Margate’s population, and 25% of Broadstairs’, were aged 65 or over. Although Broadstairs is a separate town, the proximity between the two means that people often move between them. Part of the retired population who contributed to this research resided in Broadstairs, Ramsgate and other small towns in Thanet, but spent a lot of time in Margate. This quantitative data reflects a social pattern that I have observed among my retired interlocutors in Margate. Most have moved to live in the area after retirement. The choice of destination had to do with the fact that an elderly parent needed help or the opportunity to purchase an affordable and better period house. Furthermore, the relaxed, fun atmosphere of the seaside also attracted people who were concluding their professional lives. Most of the retired people with whom I engaged had initially left their home towns in different areas of the UK – including Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland – to attend university or seek better job opportunities in different parts of England. Thus, most of the people retiring in Thanet had previously lived in London or other parts of Southeast England. During my research I slowly became more acquainted with white retired people who shared a working-class upbringing. By this I mean that they had memories of growing up, or spending part of their lives, on council estates (council housing) or in rural areas. Their families had faced some level of financial difficulty, but they had benefited from state-funded education and other forms of state support. When state-funded education and house mortgages became more widely available to the lower classes after World War II (see, for example, Hey 2003), my interlocutors slowly made their way towards better-paid careers and private home ownership. Moreover, with the country’s economic move towards the service industry in the 1970s–1980s, most of my interlocutors joined the ‘service class’ (Goldthorpe 1980), often in the public education sector. Many of those who had retired in Margate and the nearby areas were school teachers.

Introduction 23 After a life in the service sector, my interlocutors enjoyed a comfortable financial position in their retirement. Since they were now on pensions, and therefore did not have to commit to fixed working hours, they had a great amount of spare time. As a consequence, most of their daily activities were greatly marked by consumption. Beyond this, my interlocutors also dedicated a great deal of their spare time to voluntary work – for example, volunteering at a local charity shop. Others decided to join a ‘society’. ‘Society’ is an emic term used to describe an organization of people who share similar interests. Usually a society focuses on specific themes of interest, such as the Women’s Institute or the Decorative and Fine Arts Society. I was often surprised by the extent to which these societies were strictly organized, with scheduled meetings, agendas, charity objectives and so on. The great majority of my retired interlocutors participated in at least one of these organizations. Moreover, they also dedicated much of their spare time to the refurbishment and conservation of their houses. All of these different activities involved an attention to character, which was at the centre of negotiations at the local charity shop or during the decoration of their homes. This book, then, presents a journey through my interlocutors’ engagement with character.

Outline of the book Given that this is a book about nationalist populism, Chapter 1 probably starts at a rather unexpected place: a local charity shop. This chapter explores my interlocutors’ encounters with objects that have character at a shop in Margate from mid-2012 onwards. The chapter begins by describing some of the different people who met at this shop and how they engaged with character. It emphasizes the value of character for a financially stable retired group of people who had recently come to live in the area. The chapter discusses the physical aspects of things with character, which my interlocutors often acknowledged, and the different kinds of narratives and sensory stimuli that such objects triggered. It also considers the difference between objects that have character and modern goods which, according to my interlocutors, ‘have not lived’. It then investigates the particular temporal experiences involved in engagements with character and how these engagements reflect ethical principles and a logic of change that people apply at other times to different aspects of their lives. Within such experiences there is a close relationship between aesthetics and ethics. There is also in this chapter a consideration of how character may relate to conceptions of ‘the local’ and disputes over places, both often informed by class struggle. Beyond that, the temporal experience of character strongly contrasts with ideas about the ‘emptiness of time’ (Giddens 1991a) which have had a significant influence on social–scientific debates (especially some accounts of Brexit). If objects with character index the past, there are multiple versions of that past that they can index. Chapter 2 focuses specifically on how character leads to the recollection and commemoration of the national. Through character people not only remember the past, but physically connect to, reproduce and transform it. The national past, then, has physical properties, and is indexed by the multiple

24

Introduction

objects, in people’s homes and around town, which my interlocutors must continuously decide whether to protect or change. These engagements with the past completely transform my interlocutors’ experience of daily life, which is always understood in relation to the past, and especially a British past. Thus, Chapter 2 considers how continuous engagements with character enable a dynamic relationship with the national. That is, nationalism is continuously constructed and transformed by people’s daily practices. The engagement with character also inspires my retired interlocutors to connect national history and working-class memories. The ethnography shows that this connection is not the consequence of right-wing propaganda, as often suggested by scholars, but the result of the very way in which my interlocutors’ ethics operate. Chapter 3 will show that my interlocutors are not the only people who treasure character and/or the past. Once the precarious economic situation of this seaside area was acknowledged, the local and regional governments drew on particular narratives about the past to promote Margate as an international visual-arts tourist destination. The goal was the economic regeneration of the area, which has also contributed to its gentrification, as is often the case. The book unpacks the particular notions of ‘culture’, ‘diversity’ and ‘creativity’ involved in this regeneration project, as described in the council’s official plans for the area, and the future-driven temporality embedded in such discourses. Although my retired interlocutors supported some of these regeneration strategies, they were also uncomfortable about changes that might ruin their engagements with the character of the area, and I will describe situations in which they felt that this had happened. As a consequence, there was a disconnection between some of my interlocutors’ interests and the strategies implemented by the local government. This chapter compares the similarities and differences between two different ways of experiencing the past, and explores how the government’s diversity initiatives, which are intended for ‘all’, may in fact work to obscure older people’s interests. In other words, while these engagements with character, heritage and the past may all seem very similar from the outside, this chapter unpacks the profound differences in peoples’ experiences of the local landscape which greatly contribute to their political attitudes. Moreover, while investment in the preservation of period houses and locations has often been perceived by anthropologists, sociologists and social geographers to be associated with middle-class attempts to reproduce class distinction through the materialization of a sanitized version of the past, I argue that such an interpretation is misleading. That is, it fails to address the way that the character of such places may connect to working-class stories and values to produce a very particular ‘feeling’ of the past, as my interlocutors often emphasized. The fourth chapter considers how all of these engagements and negotiations of character reach formal politics. It returns to the opening ethnographic anecdote about Farage and UKIP and analyzes it further. It also presents other situations that connect to this event, and investigates how they all ultimately led to the Brexit vote. UKIP and Brexit discourses allowed my interlocutors to voice and practise their commitment to character. This chapter then considers theoretical

Introduction 25 and critical analyses of nationalist populism and its connection to racism. It argues that frameworks which overemphasize the ‘post’ (-industrial, -modern, -colonial) preclude an understanding of the temporal experiences which have been central to my interlocutors’ decisions about who to vote for. As a consequence, among my interlocutors the past does not only relate to a bygone era, but to things, people and sensory experiences that are all around in the present – and which they acknowledged through their attention to character. When voting, they do not want to ‘go back’ in time, but are instead trying to voice their concerns for a temporal experience that seems under threat in contemporary Britain. Particularly interesting, nevertheless, is the way that an ethnographic engagement with character also reveals the intersections that exist between taken-for-granted national distinctions and varied experiences of reality, exposing rifts in homogenizing nationalist discourses. While Chapters 1 to 4 consider the characteristics and theoretical implications of my interlocutors’ ethical evaluations, the Final considerations investigate how this ethnographic account may contribute to a re-evaluation of certain anthropological and social–scientific ethical premises. Here I also discuss the way in which the fact that I am Brazilian has influenced my research. The ethnography of character offers public debate a different perspective on right-wing movements, one in which people are portrayed neither as victims nor demons, but as ethical human beings trying to negotiate values that are central to their lives. The Final considerations also discuss whether taking the different ethical agendas of other people seriously is the same as moral relativism.

Note 1 The section ‘Situating the Research’ was initially written as part of my PhD thesis in anthropology (Balthazar 2016a). Although this book draws on some of the arguments that were incipiently present in the thesis, the research has greatly evolved and transformed in the past years.

1

The logic of character ‘To put the past back’

On one afternoon in the winter of 2012, two ladies entered one of the local charity shops in Margate. In England, it is unusual to walk down a high street without encountering a charity shop. There are around 10,000 charity shops in the UK (Charity Retail Association n.d.). These are establishments that resell donated products in order to raise money to help a wide variety of charitable enterprises, such as organizations that focus on disabilities or illnesses. The shop in question was a meeting point for many of the people who resided in or visited Margate, and that was what had attracted my attention to it. I started volunteering at the shop in July 2012 as a way to get to know the people in the area and invite them to take part in my research. One of the ladies who entered the shop that day looked around 60 years old; she had short grey hair and was casually dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. As soon as she entered the shop, she asked for teddy bears. Responding to the request, I quickly grabbed a toy that I had seen earlier that day – the cutest teddy in my opinion. But when she was presented with this fluffy brown bear with a bare nose and soft fur, she was disappointed: ‘Oh no. I don’t like that one. It’s modern, it has no character. I like this one’. The one she was referring to was an old, used toy. Its fur was worn out and the eyes, made of glass, looked in different directions. It was a dingy yellow and had a hard filling and moveable arms and legs. I had seen that bear earlier on and was shocked that the shop managers had chosen to place such a terrifying item in the window. The customer, however, had a very different opinion of it. She explained that she had a collection of teddies in her bedroom, and that they all had different names. ‘One is my age, and I have had it since I was little. When I give a name to this one, I will come and let you know’, she said, while I remained surprised by her choice. This was one of the first times that the valorization of character caught my attention. It showed me the way in which my interlocutors treasured objects that indexed the past. The glass eyes, the particular kind of fur and the rigid structure of the teddy bear, all characteristics of toys produced in the last century, together with the fact that it had been used, conferred character upon it. That is, objects that had character held a metonymic connection with the past. The customer attributed a personality to her teddies, to the point of giving them names. The fact that she had had one of her toys since she was little meant that she had been invested in the practice of collecting character for a long time.

The logic of character 27 Moreover, an attention to character also helped the customer to differentiate between things that she approved of, and preferred, and those that she did not approve of, which she called ‘modern’. In other words, this simple and potentially trivial engagement with a teddy bear shows how an attention to character establishes a hierarchy between objects, one being superior to the other. This chapter follows the concerns, values and distinctions that were produced and negotiated through my interlocutors’ attention to the character of objects. Some of these old objects were fashionable enough to be considered ‘vintage’ or ‘retro’, while others were ordinary old bric-a-brac. The chapter begins by describing a couple of ethnographic encounters with character in order to explore how these experiences challenge ‘clock-ticking’ normative accounts of time. To help me to unpack the specificity of such events, I will draw on different philosophical and psychoanalytical arguments regarding the experience of time in capitalist societies. The chapter will then turn to discuss other engagements with character and explore how the various people who visited or worked at the charity shop engaged with old objects. Next, it will consider how character also influences people outside the charity shop, in their homes and around town. I will also examine how character appears as an emic idiom in other ethnographic research conducted in England, often relating to debates about class. Within these different contexts, many people have been drawn by the way that the physical characteristics of certain objects have helped them to recollect or re-imagine the past, and they have invested time and effort in maintaining such characteristics. Nevertheless, while engaging with character, different aspects of the past were voiced by my interlocutors. Here I argue that such engagements with character produce a particular experience of time. This experience strongly contrasts with ideas about the modern and post-modern ‘emptying of time’ (Giddens 1991a), which directly or indirectly have come to influence debates on nationalist populism. Therefore, an attention to the activities taking place in the charity shop should enable the reader to begin to understand how apparently trivial encounters with certain objects greatly transform my interlocutors’ feeling of time, which will later be reflected in their political views.

Encountering character Character and childhood memories Some months after the episode with the teddy bear, I was walking with Lynva and Clare around Margate’s Old Town. Lynva is Welsh and retired. Before her retirement she worked as a career advisor at one of the local schools. She had moved to Margate 20 years before I arrived, due to job opportunities for her husband. Clare is a retired Irish school teacher who had spent most of her life in South London and had recently moved to the seaside with her husband, who was also a teacher. While passing the window of one of the local shops, Lynva exclaimed: ‘Look at those lamps! If they were put nicely, they could look amazing in a kitchen.

28 The logic of character And look at this radio; just like mine’. She continued to look through the glass, and added: ‘I love this shop. I want to offer to work some days of the week here. I don’t mind giving up some hours’. When I asked Lynva and Clare what was so special about these objects, it was Clare who explained that they had character, which meant that they ‘had history’. The fact that such objects ‘had history’ drew Lynva to want work in that shop, surrounded by character, although she never did. A similar feeling had inspired her months earlier to volunteer together with Clare and me at another charity shop, and that was how we met. According to visitors, the shop where we volunteered ‘wasn’t like the others’. Customers often complimented the staff for displaying things in such a nice way, and for having a range of unique and different products. Since the intense national proliferation of charity shops in England in the 1990s (see Horne 2000; Crewe, Gregson and Brooks 2002), some of these shops have moved from marginal areas to high streets and wealthier neighbourhoods in order to transform their image, which was initially associated with poverty (Crewe and Gregson 2003). Our shop was in Old Town, the part of Margate targeted by the council’s regeneration project. Like most shops in Old Town, this one was located on the ground floor of a period building with a bay window facing the street. It was a large store, with four irregular rooms. Instead of the grey carpeted floors and metal rails commonly found in other charity shops, this one had old brown wooden tiles on the floor, white patina wooden rails and glass shelves. Some items were part of the decoration and not for sale; for example, huge old trunks, white patina mirrors, racks, fabric dummies, and some tables and chairs. These items helped to produce a nice ambience. There were also wooden hangers for clothing and satin hangers for underwear. Clothes were arranged by type (skirts, trousers, dresses and so on) and gender instead of by size, as in other charity shops (Figure 1.1). The front room displayed men’s and women’s clothes, and some bric-a-brac. The volunteers spent most of their time in the second room, where the till was. This was a much smaller room, probably a quarter of the size of the front room, and was dominated by a huge white patina bookcase full of old objects. It looked like something from someone’s living room, displaying books, old photos, old toys and some accessories. Next to the bookcase, and in front of the till, was a closet hiding a tiny kitchen where volunteers could make themselves a cup of tea (Figure 1.2). Through a tiny, low and narrow corridor one entered the next room: the haberdashery room. This resembled someone’s sewing room, with patterns from the last century and needles separated into old leather bags. There were collections of ribbons and fabrics piled on the shelves, and large numbers of buttons were displayed on top of a low table. Some old magazines could also be found here and there. Finally, from the stairs in the haberdashery room one could reach the basement, where customers could find extra items for sale. The staff was composed of the managers, who were paid to supervise the shop but not regularly based there, and the volunteers, who spent the most time there and were responsible for sales and maintenance. The volunteers could be divided

The logic of character 29

Figure 1.1 The charity shop’s window

Figure 1.2 Some old objects for sale at the charity shop

30 The logic of character into two general types. Some were younger people around the age of 18, who aimed to get experience before entering the job market, while the others were older volunteers who were usually above the age of 40 and retired or unemployed. Since the population of the area was comparatively older than the rest of the country, we also received a lot of older customers. During my time in the shop I saw all sort of things being sold: dresses from the 1920s and 1950s, old tweed jackets, fancy shoes, leather bags, old postcards, old children’s games, 1970s tableware, old sewing machines, old fabrics and so on. Not only were old objects available, but also things produced recently, such as branded goods, fashionable clothes and other items that were almost new. ‘It’s like Aladdin’s cave!’ a customer once exclaimed. We all had our favourite kinds of things to look for. Clare was passionate about coats. She was interested in other things too, but old, vintage coats were what really caught her attention. Although we were not there to buy but to work, we could not help but look at the things that attracted us and sometimes purchase something or other. After watching Clare buy a couple of coats, we discussed her little obsession with them. She then recounted a story about when she had still been in her teens in Northern Ireland and had achieved the best grade at school. As a reward, her father took her out to buy a coat. Clare told me that they had gone to multiple shops, and had nearly given up because she could not find one that satisfied her. On the way home, she finally found it: a blue coat with golden buttons. Smiling, she said that her father was impressed by how persistent she had been in knowing exactly what she wanted. Clare and her father had had troubled episodes throughout her life, so that moment was a special one to remember. Lynva’s experience of the charity shop was not very different (see also Balthazar 2016b). Instead of coats, she had a passion for pottery: Do you see this here? I know that when they have these small errors on the bottom it means that they are handmade, and this number here says how many were produced, and this name is the maker. If I see something I usually go to the library and look up the maker, and then I’ll probably be able to tell when it’s from. And maybe I know because I am now old and know about a lot of makers. Lynva grew up in a Welsh coal-mining village. Her father died young, from emphysema, after serving in World War II. Her mother had ‘to do wonders’ to raise their seven children. Lynva too enjoyed these opportunities to recall her past: My father came back from the war, and after working in the pits for two years he fell sick with emphysema. So he was always sick, never working, and died when I was 17. So, to earn some money my mum sold rugs with the Irish, and she cleaned people’s houses. She was also an amazing cook and could do amazing things with two tuna tins and a couple of potatoes. We never starved. We had our breakfast at home, lunch at school and dinner at home, but there weren’t sweets or cakes around. But I had a very happy childhood.

The logic of character 31 The payment usually came on Friday, so on Thursdays people usually ran out of food and you would run from one house to another in the village and people would share whatever they had. There was a huge sense of community. I loved being there, playing with my friends. I only realized the situation when I went to grammar school and had three friends, both parents of each of whom had nice professions.1 It broke my heart when I couldn’t do my O Levels at 15 and had to leave school to work and bring some money home. And then to see my 15-year-old brother go down the pit. When she was 18, Lynva decided to leave the Valleys (a group of industrialized valleys in the mountains of Wales) and move to Cardiff, the Welsh capital, to find a job and train as a secretary. Throughout her life she moved between different areas of the UK many times. In her very early 20s, Lynva married a plumber who was born in South London, and they had two children together. The objects that they found in the shop often reminded Lynva and Clare of their pasts, and inspired them to tell me and other customers about their life stories. This was similar to the lady who bought the teddy bear, who found during that visit to the shop an opportunity to tell me about the collection that she had kept since her childhood. I think I only really understood what my interlocutors were talking about when I experienced something similar myself. Because I was only temporarily living in England when I began my research in Margate, I did not bring or buy many possessions. Nevertheless, because my research focused on the sale of so many objects, I could not help but buy a couple of them. One day, while going through my purchases, I suddenly caught myself surrounded by multiple items from the 1970s. I had a piece of fabric, a small plastic dish and some furnishings from that period. All that I had bought at the seaside came from the 1970s, especially items in a particular range of colours (from brown to orange) and with floral patterns. Observing myself surrounded by these, I concluded that I had some sort of affection for the period that I had not previously known about. I then started to consider what could have generated such an affection. I could not map any kind of fashion trends that would have encouraged this taste. I did not see it in magazines, and my friends and family were not particularly fond of it. Still unsure about the origin of my affection, I went on with my life, until one afternoon, while walking around Margate’s Old Town, I remembered – out of nowhere – my grandmother’s kitchen. I immediately called my father in Brazil and asked him about his mother’s kitchen. Together we slowly retrieved our memories of it, and discussed how the small items that I had bought exhibited the same kind of aesthetics as that kitchen. While talking to my father on the phone I slowly remembered each element of my deceased grandmother’s flat in Rio de Janeiro: the orange cupboards, the kitchen table covered with flower tiles, the fabric that she hung on the wall. I was profoundly surprised by how, through the objects I had chosen to buy, I was trying to reconstruct a past experience of which I had not been consciously aware. Struck by these memories, I needed to share them with someone I thought

32 The logic of character would understand what I meant. I visited the second-hand store where I had bought one of these items from the 1970s and explained what had happened to me. The owner looked at me and smiled: ‘You see that lamp covered in shells? I look at it and I see my dad. He used to have a shell shop here in Margate, and I remember spending a great part of my childhood sitting below the counter’. As objects with character, these things that ‘have history’ can trigger profoundly affective stories and memories of the past. The Proust effect The kinds of situations in which sensory stimulus evokes the memory of one’s childhood have become widely discussed through the writings of Marcel Proust (1992 [1913]). In In Search of Lost Time, Proust describes different moments when smells, tastes, textures and noises enable him not only to remember the past, but to physically feel it. The novel was inspired by Proust’s own experiences and memories. He demonstrated that memories were not only flashbacks in the form of images, as different senses play an important role in remembering and one’s whole body is involved in the process. Cretien van Campen (2014: 2) calls this the ‘Proust effect’: Not only do images appear, but sooner or later also sounds, smells, tastes, and the movements I made, the feeling of being touched by other people, sometimes even the details of the colour of a collar that someone was wearing or that tiny, irreverent wisp of the eyebrow lying horizontal above someone’s eyes. Not only do I remember being there, but I also feel being there, even with a sense of contracting muscle fibres. In one of the most well-known passages of In Search of Lost Time, the protagonist is tasting a madeleine cake with tea and is ‘taken back’ to a childhood situation with his aunt. These kinds of ‘sensory memory’ (Campen 2014) generate an interesting entanglement between past and present, since the past is felt in the present: For Proust, the act of remembering is the act of reliving experiences from the past. Marcel relives the past with the body, the knowledge, and the emotions he has in the present and uses them to construct a new emotion, which contains characteristics of both youthful and adult emotions. (Campen 2014: 17) The 1970s objects had caused my own ‘madeleine moment’, and I was suddenly ‘back’ in my childhood, walking around my grandmother’s flat in Rio de Janeiro. Slowly the memories returned, and I could even remember the challenge that I faced as a child to climb the couple of steps in her living room. I also remembered looking back and seeing the toy I was pulling, which had previously belonged to my father. I had no recollection of these events before arriving in Margate. That is, beyond feeling the past, sensory memory also allows the individual to discover

The logic of character 33 novel aspects of their past. Campen (2014: 11) argues that Proust’s books may be read as a study of the power of human memory: Marcel has developed a memory technique for ‘winning back’ lost time. He observes that his senses allow him to ‘rediscover’ time that had been lost, in a process in which the past engages in a symbiotic relationship with the present and reveals new insights into his life. Therefore, these events that trigger memory are part of a creative process that allows for new discoveries to occur. These recollections provide access to forgotten situations, and offer people who may be troubled by their pasts an opportunity to gain insight into their own lives. When offered a modern teddy bear, our customer explained that she was more interested in the ones that connected to her childhood. In parallel, through old objects Clare had a chance to revive her experience with her father, while I re-encountered my grandmother, from whom I had been separated due to family problems. Lynva found in the charity shop a place where she could recall and discuss her family’s hardships. Thus, sensory memory has often been used in therapeutic and psychoanalytical processes (Campen 2014). The interesting thing about the charity shop was that people had the opportunity to collectively share and enjoy such experiences. In other words, madeleine moments are often unexpected and spontaneous, and memories gradually unfold before the person can clearly identify from where they have come and to what they connect. Following Henri Bergson, Proust defined them as ‘involuntary memories’. In contrast to voluntary memories, which are goal-directed and governed by the will of the individual, involuntary memories cannot be controlled and are independent of personal will (Campen 2014: 16). These recollections often take place when one is absent-minded and experiencing a sort of ‘drifting off’ state. Like dreams, one needs to be half-asleep and half-awake. Nevertheless, great effort is needed to produce the re-occurrence of such moments, which also depend on sensory stimulus; thus Proust wrote a sevenvolume novel trying to recreate the experience of ‘drifting off’ in writing. Similar to Proust, my interlocutors in Margate were also invested in recreating the feeling of the past. Although the occurrence of madeleine moments cannot be controlled, people devoted a great amount of time and effort to maintaining the sensory stimulus necessary for these recollections to emerge. Character, and its metonymic connection to the past, seems to play a central role in the stimulation of these experiences. This book describes a number of different situations in which people engaged with the maintenance of character. This engagement required patience, time and dedication, and sometimes the effort was rewarded by a moment of clarification about one’s past. Involuntary memory and the past I do not intend to plunge too deeply into the philosophical depths of these issues. What is important to note, nevertheless, is that Proust’s conception of involuntary

34

The logic of character

memory has allowed for the problematization of simplistic conceptions of linear time – that is, the past as something that precedes the present. Central to the madeleine phenomenon is a resemblance between two sensations: the flavour of the madeleine in the present and its flavour in the past. That is, the resemblance refers to a quality that is shared by the two moments (Deleuze 2000: 59). In turn, this shared flavour revives Combray, the town in which the protagonist of Proust’s novel spent his childhood and first tasted the cake. This flavour has enveloped Combray, and when the protagonist tastes the madeleine again Combray rises up before him. Gilles Deleuze (2000) has attempted to further unpack Proust’s differentiation between voluntary and involuntary memory. He begins with the first: Voluntary memory proceeds from an actual present to a present that ‘has been’, to something that was present and is no longer. The past of voluntary memory is therefore doubly relative: relative to the present that it has been, but also to the present with regard to which it is now past. That is, this memory does not apprehend the past directly; it recompenses it with different presents. (Deleuze 2000: 57) In other words, in voluntary memory the quality of what was experienced in Combray is delivered not only with reference to that original experience, but also in reference to the ‘now’. That is, Combray is viewed from an angle only possible in the present moment. With voluntary memory we access the past in our minds, instead of through the senses, by memorizing or knowing rather than feeling. Within involuntary memory, however, the quality of what was experienced in Combray is experienced again, exactly as it was and not in terms of the present. Therefore, the past experience is lived in itself: If there is a resemblance between Bergson’s conceptions and Proust’s, it is on this level … of memory. That we do not proceed from an actual present to the past, that we do not recompose the past with various presents, but that we place ourselves, directly, in the past itself. That this past does not represent something that has been, but simply something that is and that coexists with itself as present. (Deleuze 2000: 58) This distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory is fundamental to understanding what was at stake in my interlocutors’ practices. These were not about trying to go back in time, which would be the result of interpreting the event through the notion of voluntary memory. Instead, my interlocutors were invested in reproducing practices that encouraged the emergence of involuntary memory and revived experiences of their childhoods. This relived feeling, described by Proust as a great joy, fundamentally depends on the sensory qualities of certain objects.

The logic of character 35 Inspired by Proust, Deleuze offers a non-chronological theoretical framework that avoids the totalization and homogenization of everyday practices and different kinds of temporal experience (Hodges 2008). This framework runs against the notion of time as a succession of instants, and allows for the contemporary co-existence of past and present: The past would never be constituted if it did not coexist with the present whose past it is. The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which coexist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass. (Deleuze 1991 [1966]: 59, in Hodges 2008: 411) In other words, it is only by comparing the ‘now’ with a ‘past’ that one may experience the passing of time. The constitution of past and present is forged through the varied practices of remembering (Hodges 2008: 411). At the charity shop, character marked the passing of time through the patina of old objects, the different styles and materials characteristic of past decades, the marks of repair left in each piece by previous owners and so on. The practices of remembering at the charity shop enabled a temporal experience marked not only by voluntary but also involuntary memories, delivering the past as something felt in the present. Although people’s recollections sometimes referred to historical moments, such events were physically experienced through character, the different qualities of which allowed my interlocutors to retrieve memories. Such events made the past both present and highly personal. The ethics of memory Proust’s novel portrays an ethical attitude towards time, drawing attention to the importance of retrieving something that has been lost – a particular temporal experience. In one important passage, the author considers his attitude towards the teasing of his grandmother by his aunt. Proust shows that in remembering the past he not only recollects what has happened but also has the opportunity to re-evaluate these events and his own actions.2 When referring to the character of things my interlocutors were also invested in an ethical project, which they often explained as ‘putting the past back’. Through this expression they acknowledged the effort they made to maintain the character-conferring properties of old objects, which were then able to trigger sensations and feelings of the past, generating a particular temporal experience. Throughout the book I will continue to investigate multiple situations in which my retired interlocutors were invested in ‘putting the past back’. Let us now, however, consider what these experiences may engender. Proust’s effort of recollection enables the subject to experience a continuity between past and present, which contributes to one’s own sense of stability (Kehl 2009). This was exactly what I observed at the charity shop, as each old coat that Clare bought enabled her to connect to her upbringing and to the ways in which her

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relationship with her father helped to forge who she would come to be. The experience of continuity between past and present described by Proust can also be seen in Bergson’s notion of ‘la durée’ (Deleuze 2000; Kehl 2009). Experiencing ‘la durée’, however, demands that the individual engage in free associations with no rational intended outcomes (Kehl 2009). Again, this relates to our experiences at the charity shop: sometimes we would spend many boring hours without anything happening. This rhythm sharply contrasts with the temporal experiences encouraged by contemporary neoliberal capitalism, which constantly urges the individual to effectively allocate time in order to increase productivity (Kehl 2009). Both Proust and Bergson advocated for the importance of the recollection of (lost) time, as did my retired interlocutors in Margate and the surrounding areas. They showed an ethical awareness of the value of this kind of temporal experience, which was triggered by the properties of certain objects. In the case of my interlocutors, their freedom from oppressive working hours, and the presence of many other retired citizens in the same area, meant that they had found an opportunity to become invested in this kind of practice – an opportunity not shared by people who were committed to busy work schedules. Because I was pursuing ethnographic research, I could also allow myself to engage in these ‘drifting off’ events with no clear or guaranteed outcome: It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die. (Proust 1992 [1913]: 60) The events at the charity shop offered spontaneous and uncontrolled ways to recover memories about where people came from; and, in the process, they allowed people to figure out who they had become. Sometimes, as the reader will observe throughout the book, the past brought joyful feelings, while at other moments the feeling was ‘heavy’. Particularly for people who had to commit to normative definitions of time (e.g. strict working hours), the experience of character was not necessarily easy, and could give a sense of ‘stagnant’ time. Through the lens of capitalism such events tend to be framed as ‘out of time’ – delayed and behind (Kehl 2009) – and it is not surprising that Margate has historically been associated with decay. Free from market constraints, each of my interlocutors found their own ways to mediate between past and present. Too much character could be ‘heavy’, making them feel stagnant; too little character felt shallow and empty. Character was also connected to relatives, and my interlocutors referred to the ‘warm’ feeling generated by objects and buildings that reminded them of their childhoods. Maria Rita Kehl (2009) argues that offering time to patients is central to the clinical work of psychoanalysis. This extra time, she explains, is not any time,

The logic of character 37 but a particular temporal experience that protects the patient from the demands of the capitalist world in order for them to allow themselves to daydream and rescue forgotten memories which will help to overcome traumatic experiences. After all, one of Sigmund Freud’s major contributions to science was to acknowledge the central relevance of memory retrieval to solving a patient’s physical symptoms.3 It is not within the scope of this book to evaluate the psychological efficacy of the kinds of practices in which my interlocutors were invested. Nevertheless, the relevance of such temporal experiences to psychoanalysis should help the reader to understand that my interlocutors were not irrationally trying to turn back the clock when they spoke about the past. They were, however, challenging normative modern-capitalist conceptions of time. Beyond this, the kind of temporal experience provided by the character of certain objects is particularly useful for stimulating creativity (see Kehl 2009 and also Deleuze 2000 on Proust). Unsurprisingly, as we will see in Chapter 3, many artists have moved to places like Margate in order to find ‘the time’ to create.

Relating through character These experiences at the shop were not solitary ones. What made these events profoundly powerful was not only the opportunity to use objects to retrieve longlost memories, but also the fact that people found in the shop a place where they could discuss and share such memories. For example, on one Sunday afternoon I was in the shop with Clare, and Lynva had not yet arrived. As Clare and I had no customers at that time, we walked around the shop looking at the different products on sale. It was then that she spotted a colourful dress with a psychedelic pattern, and started to tell me how she used to have one like it (Balthazar 2019).4 While we were talking about her memories, a customer came into the shop. She was more or less Clare’s age, and when she heard our conversation she commented that she had also had dresses like that in the 1970s. Suddenly Clare and the customer started to discuss all the different dresses they remembered, how short some of them were and the high-heeled boots they used to wear with them. The customer then told us that in the 1970s she had worked for C&A (an international Dutch chain of fashion retail clothing stores) in central London, which was why she had had such interesting clothes. In turn, Clare recounted her own memories of growing up in Northern Ireland. The customer told us that she had been an assiduous attendee of festivals at that time, and that she had seen the Beatles and many other important bands. Clare was surprised, and said that she should write a book about it as she had experienced it all. The customer explained that she had continued to go to festivals when her children were young, but that after a while she and her husband had given it up. She then embarked upon a brief description of how much had changed since she had had kids – who she had been and who she had become. Triggered by an object in the shop, the past became the theme of the conversation. Suddenly, volunteers and customers who had previously not known each other began to share parts of their lives and find commonalities. Within the shop

38 The logic of character an individual’s past very easily resonated with the pasts of others, producing a collective narrative. Although their individual pasts contained differences – one had attended festivals while the other had not – the volunteer and the customer still remembered the period, the clothes and the music. Despite their different lives – one came from Northern Ireland and the other from London – they could still share the past. While constructing a shared past, they were also relating to each other. When the customer decided to go home after more than half an hour of conversation, she stepped out of the shop and exclaimed, ‘Oh, that was nice’. Clare replied: ‘Do come back’. Objects with character need not be ‘grand’. They are often mundane and ordinary artefacts that relate to people’s daily lives and enable the recreation of a domestic experience. Sharon Macdonald (2002) has discussed how this experience of remembrance is very common in museums of everyday objects around Britain. These museums, she argues, help to reconstruct a ‘place’ and a sense of belonging. Therefore, the objects sold in the shop played a similar role, helping to reconstruct a (lost) place. People were not necessarily looking for a particular object when they entered the charity shop. The discovery of character often inspired them in different and unexpected ways. Character allowed for ‘involuntary memories’ to emerge (Proust 1992 [1913]). Such objects held a ‘bundle of indexes’ (Keane 2006) for my interlocutors to consider. By indexing the past they enabled the retrieval of memories, while people who did not previously know each other found commonalities and built relations. The object was the very medium through which a relationship was constructed – making it indispensable. Furthermore, the particularity of the object forged a connection between customer and volunteer in a specific way: through the past and shared memories. Therefore, discourses about the past were integral to their bonding. The past helped them to feel connected and, as the customer said, to feel good about it – ‘that was nice’. Here I propose that my interlocutors were doing something similar to what Walter Benjamin called ‘storytelling’: the sharing of one’s stories, or ‘experience that is passed from one mouth to the next’ (2019: 93). According to Benjamin, the value of storytelling is that it finds its material in a person’s own experience, and therefore their memories. To Benjamin, these stories are very different from news from afar, for example, as they are not abstract generalizations but grounded in the personal. Through the act of recounting these memories the story is experienced by the audience, turning it into a collective experience (Benjamin 2019). That is, during this process the story is not only heard but felt. The entire ambience of the charity shop helped to produce this sensation. Once again, the process described by Benjamin, like that of Proust, demands a kind of ‘daydreaming’ that has fallen out of use in neoliberal capitalist routine: The more naturally the storyteller avoids all psychological shading, the greater will be the story’s claim to space in the listener’s memory, and the more thoroughly a story is integrated into the listener’s experience, the more likely he will be to recount it and pass it on sooner or later. This process of

The logic of character 39 assimilation, which takes place deep inside us, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming ever rarer. If sleep is the height of physical relaxation, then boredom is that of mental relaxation … The more self-forgetful the listener, the deeper what is heard is inscribed in him. When he is caught up in the rhythm of his work, he listens to the stories in such a way that the art of telling them descends on him of its own accord. (Benjamin 2019: 103-4) I could clearly see this happening at the shop when the customer began to describe how adventurous she had once been and the kinds of challenges imposed by motherhood. She was opening up about aspects of her life to people she had never seen before. Benjamin (2019) helps us to understand that these conversations, which are often called ‘nostalgic’, are not about the desire to go back in time. Instead, they are powerful instruments for the constitution of the subject in the present. Like Freud, Benjamin acknowledged the importance of practices that allow people to engage with their memories: Memory is the most important epic faculty of all. Only thanks to a capacious memory can the epic assimilate the course of events on the one hand and make its peace with their transience and with the power of death on the other. (Benjamin 2019: 112) This, Benjamin argued, does not mean the mechanical reproduction of tradition, as the experience of reminiscence does not necessarily reproduce authority and power. It focuses instead on the sharing of the experiences of previous generations in order that future generations do not gratuitously accept novelty. According to Benjamin, the diminishment of this kind of experience in contemporary society has turned this heritage into dead weight.

The different experiences of character Although many people in Margate treasured the past, not all of them did so in the same way. Taylor and Catherine, for example, often showed an interest in objects for slightly different reasons (Balthazar 2016b). Taylor is a Scottish vintage trader who, at the time of my fieldwork, lived in France with her French husband and children. She had then just turned 40, and often came to England to sell her stock at vintage fairs. Occasionally she spent a few days in Broadstairs, the seaside town next to Margate, with Catherine, a friend in the vintage business. Catherine is English, and was in her 60s during my fieldwork. She was born and grew up in London, but retired to Broadstairs in the 2000s. Catherine was not only a trader; before joining the vintage market she was a costume designer for TV dramas and movies. In order to qualify for her profession she attended art school, where she learned about different materials and fashion history. Before that, Catherine had been privately educated, and had therefore had a very different life to some of my other interlocutors. That is, she had never

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experienced any sort of financial constraint or economic insecurity, something that many of the unemployed and retired volunteers at the shop had faced at some stage of their lives. Taylor, on the other hand, grew up on a council estate in Scotland and attended state schools. After university she started to work in the tourism industry. At one event that she organized she met her future husband, and moved to France to live with him. He was then the main provider for the family and financially supported Taylor’s vintage business. Whenever Taylor was in town, Catherine took her to interesting local places. According to Catherine, one of the places to visit was the charity shop where I worked. She was, therefore, a frequent customer, and often brought other new customers. Like the lady who entered the shop in search of a teddy bear with character, Taylor and Catherine always encountered treasures, as Taylor explained: I like it when I can find beauty that isn’t obvious. It’s like when I’m hunting for treasure in a vintage market, and among all that rubbish finding something beautiful. Perfect things are boring, because there isn’t the thrill of finding beauty. More than once, Taylor used vintage dresses to talk about the women of different historical periods: ‘What I really love is to think about the woman who wore that, touched it’. Holding up a gold, beaded dress from the 1920s, she exclaimed: ‘Do you see this dress? It’s a 1920s [dress]. It’s like a 92-year-old woman standing in front of us. Isn’t it amazing how she has no wrinkles?’ Sometimes Taylor collapsed the difference between the woman and the dress, and started to refer to the dresses as if they were women: ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ Here, character encouraged the imagination of other people’s lives. Like Taylor, Catherine also enjoyed thinking about the people who used to possess these goods: Catherine: You see, all those dresses are from the same person. ACB: How do you know that? Catherine: Well I see that she maintained her taste through the fashion of each time. There is a feel to her … My God, she didn’t know how to eat, she spilt food on all her dresses [she said referring to the stains on the dresses]. Probably a rich people’s thing, she had so many dresses that she didn’t have to bother about ruining one. Just spilt something on it and put it back in the wardrobe … There is something girlish about this 1930s dress, so she must had been young by then. I think she would have been twenty by then. On that occasion Catherine had encountered a whole rail of dresses that she suspected had belonged to the same person, and this was confirmed by the sales team. I had already seen the dresses but had not really bothered with them, in the same way that I had been horrified by the other customer’s choice of teddy bear. Catherine, however, was in absolute awe. One specific dress left her in shock:

The logic of character 41 This is so rare. You see, this way of closing the dress is old couture, it alternates hooks and pop-ups. Before the 40s and 50s the zippers were too heavy and were used as decoration, and they used that [hooks and pop-ups]. After that the zippers became smaller and got put into clothes. And now they use zippers because it’s flatter. Some couture still uses hooks and pop-ups, because some fabrics are still too fragile to put zippers on. And this rayon is a synthetic fabric that people like you and me wouldn’t like to wear nowadays – we would prefer natural fabric. But at that time they had to put metal in the clothes to give them their noise [the noise that the fabric makes when in movement]. But then the clothes deteriorated easily. So when the rayon came out, rich people loved it because they could have the noise without having the metal to ruin the clothes. That is, by examining all the different details of the dress, such as the hooks, fabric, pattern, cut, stains and style, Catherine could infer its history. By reading the details she could ‘feel’ the past and the person who had owned it. This was not a memory from her childhood, as had happened to Clare, but she could nevertheless experience the past just as Proust described. The material garment and its physical properties, combined with my interlocutor’s knowledge of fashion history, inspired Catherine to imagine and to a certain extent physically experience the woman behind the dress. This does not mean that everyone around Margate treasured character. For example, to many of the people who worked at or visited the shop and who faced financial difficulties (due to unemployment or low-paid work), old objects were simply a reminder of the new things they could not afford. In other words, they bought second-hand things because they were cheap, not because of their characterful qualities. Therefore, not everyone preferred ‘character’ over ‘modern’. However, all those who did enjoy character paid special attention to the way that objects indexed the past, either through personal stories or imagination. Although there were multiple ways in which my interlocutors could engage with character, all of the meanings attributed to objects were motivated by their physical characteristics: Taylor and Catherine ‘read’ the material to ‘feel’ the woman behind the dress, while Lynva discovered the story of a porcelain vase by paying attention to the marks on its bottom. It was the very materiality of these objects that triggered my interlocutors’ memories and imaginations, reminding them of forgotten aspects of their lives.

The temporality of character Anthony Giddens (1991a: 18) has argued that one of the main characteristics of modernity is the ‘emptying of time’. He claims that we are living in a ‘definite episode of historical transition’ (Giddens 1991a: 6), one in which the modes of social life that emerged in Europe from around the seventeenth century onwards became profoundly different from previous traditional social orders. In explaining the ‘emptying of time’, Giddens argues that in pre-modern agrarian states the

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reckoning of time linked time and space. That is, people referred to socio-spatial markers to tell the time of day (Giddens 1991a: 17). In contrast, in modernity the invention of the mechanical clock has worked to separate time from space. The main objective of this form of time measurement has been control over workers’ productivity (see also Munn 1992). Therefore, according to Giddens, in modernity there has been an emergence of uniform modes of measuring time that has resulted in a worldwide standardization of calendars. If this is the case, it would also have had an impact on how we perceive space, allowing for a separation between ‘place’ and ‘space’. Representations of geographical positions have since become independent of the particularities of contexts of experience. Similar to Giddens, my interlocutors recognized that there are aspects of contemporary life that are ‘empty’. During the time that I volunteered at the charity shop I saw all sorts of goods being sold, including things that were recently produced and, consequently, classified by my interlocutors as ‘modern’. Among these ‘modern’ things there were often reproductions of period garments. Once, in a discussion with Taylor about the difference between a Topshop dress that looked as if it was from the 1920s and an original dress from the 1920s, she pointed out that: ‘Modern things don’t have an appeal for me, they are empty, they haven’t lived and I feel nothing with them’. Topshop is a contemporary British multinational fashion retailer, and in consequence my interlocutors considered it to be ‘modern’. Although brands such as Topshop often sold ‘period style’ clothing, according to Taylor an original 1920s dress related to the history of that time and the habits of the person who used to wear it. A dress from the 1920s would present the particular stiches, fabric and labels of the time. The beads would have been sewn in a particular manner, and the clasps made of different materials (as Catherine described above with regard to another dress). Despite looking as if it was from the 1920s, the modern Topshop dress was neither a remnant of nor metonym for that past. It is nevertheless worth saying that although as a vintage dealer Taylor preferred the old, in practice she still enjoyed ‘modern’. Treasuring character did not mean the refusal of ‘modern’, only that my interlocutors were invested in carefully balancing the two. For example, as many of my interlocutors were in their 60s, they worried that if they wore too many clothes from the previous century they would only look dated and old-fashioned. Therefore, with regard to the clothes that they bought for themselves, they carefully balanced different items. Catherine, for example, often wore black trousers and cashmere cardigans with vintage scarfs and jewellery that she had collected. Taylor, in turn, because she was nearly 20 years younger, felt that she could wear an entire vintage look without appearing old-fashioned. Thus, according to my interlocutors, and contrary to Giddens’ argument (1991a), not everything was modern or empty; certain things had character. Objects with character ‘had history’, as Clare often pointed out. As my interlocutors explained, the value of objects with character (including but not limited to vintage dresses) lay in the way they indexed the past. As a consequence, in Margate the past was often treated as physical things: marks, stiches, patterns,

The logic of character 43 colours, etc. My interlocutors did not seem to have experienced the complete ‘emptying of time’ described by Giddens. In line with arguments put forward by Bruno Latour (1993), not all practices in Margate were modern. According to the anthropologist Olivia Harris (1996), Giddens adopts a ‘modernist’ approach to time that envisages a difference between a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. Investigating the varied ways that time has been understood in the social sciences, Harris differentiates between three strands of analysis. Firstly, there is the modernist perspective, which focuses on ideas of rupture. Secondly, there are structuralist frames of analysis, which minimize the significance of particular temporal experiences in favour of collectively shared temporal narratives and social rules. As an example of structuralist approaches to time, Harris cites Durkheimian frameworks. Lastly, according to Harris, since the 1980s there has been a focus on fluidity and the subject’s agency.5 In line with the last strand, Nancy Munn (1992) has argued that anthropology has often taken the definition of time for granted, and should instead consider how people’s conceptions of time are constructed in practice. She has drawn attention to the way that Actors are not only ‘in’ this time (space-time), but they are constructing it and their own time … in the particular kinds of relations they form between themselves (and their purposes) and the temporal reference points (which are also spatial forms). (Munn 1992: 104) In other words, actors’ experiences of time cannot be reduced to Durkheim’s notion of collective representations or to the uncertainty described by Giddens. People do not passively assimilate broader temporal notions imposed on them by ‘society’, but are instead involved in actively constructing temporal experiences. If there exist collective notions of time and uncertainty, social actors are those who create these shared experiences. When doing so, actors refer to both conceptual and spatial forms. Thus, Munn emphasizes the processual aspect of socio–cultural time and the agency of the actor in its creation. Munn’s approach to time connects to anthropological arguments about the relevance of ‘ordinary ethics’, as presented in the introduction to this book. In the same way that authors discussing ordinary ethics avoid encompassing Durkheimian frameworks, Munn avoids conceptions of time that ignore how agents continuously produce and transform temporal experience. She addresses how social practice delivers particular appropriations and transformations of ‘time’. If we pay attention to the way that my interlocutors experienced time, we realize that the experience of ‘character’ does not fit well with the ‘rupture’ (pre-modern versus modern/late modernity) argued by Giddens. My interlocutors’ attention to character was about not dissociating time from the physical aspects of the surrounding environment. Objects retrieved memories or inspired imagined scenarios that enabled my interlocutors to feel and experience the past and place in the present, as is also supported by Deleuze’s (2000) claims regarding the Proust effect. As a

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consequence, in places such as the charity shop my interlocutors were surrounded by temporal indexes that offered a particular experience of time. Time was materially present. Whenever my interlocutors mentioned the character of objects they signalled the importance of considering the physical temporal aspects of things. If, in the situations described by Giddens, time is accessed through calendars and clocks that contribute to an abstraction of temporality from space, character in turn delivers time as something physical, something that can be felt: the marks, stiches and stains, and all the involuntary memories that they retrieve. In other words, my interlocutors were not ‘in’ an abstract modern (or post-modern) time, but continuously ‘constructing time’ (Munn 1992). They continuously acted to celebrate and maintain character, and in doing so they made the past physically present. The practices at the charity shop worked to continuously activate the connections between people, materiality and the past, in a way that avoided the ‘emptying of time’. Discussing these two different ways of experiencing time is important, because they encourage the construction of different kinds of subjects – even though the same person can and often does engage with these different practices. According to Giddens (1991b), a specific kind of subject has emerged in modern societies, one that is committed to self-therapy and life-planning. That is, because modernity is marked by flux and the abstraction of time, identities are fluid and time is subjectively experienced. Within this context, self-therapy emerges as an important practice for the modern subject (Giddens 1991b). Self-observation and present-awareness, integral aspects of therapy, are the conditions necessary for an individual to effectively plan ahead and construct a life trajectory that speaks to their inner wishes. Giddens observes that therapists commonly suggest the practice of writing a journal in order to reflect on one’s own experiences and opportunities for self-improvement. Through the journal the narrative of the self is made explicit. This kind of therapy encourages the subject to ‘take charge’ of their own life and involves a particular ethical evaluation of the past: one should break away from it, because giving up the security of the past and the stability of established patterns is fundamental for self-improvement. Here the ‘future’ is anticipated and central to individual ‘life-planning’: Reconstruction of the past goes along with anticipation of the likely life trajectory of the future. Self-therapy presumes … a ‘dialogue with time’ – a process of self-questioning about how the individual handles the time of her lifespan … Time which ‘carries us along’ implies a conception of fate like that found in many traditional cultures, where people are the prisoners of events and precontracted settings rather than able to subject their lives to the sway of their own self-understanding. (Giddens 1991b: 73–74) The kind of temporal experience described by Giddens, and its consequences for self-formation (Foucault 1997), are very different from the kinds of narratives and

The logic of character 45 feelings that were inspired by character. As described by Giddens, in self-therapy there is a focus on being conscious of one’s actions. Moreover, words and the subject play a central role in the process: the experience is internally referential. Complete control of one’s own life is fundamental, and there is no space to ‘drift around’: A teenager who ‘drifts around’, who refuses to think about a possible future career, and ‘gives no thought to the future’, rejects this orientation, but does so specifically in opposition to an increasingly dominant temporal outlook. (Giddens 1991b: 88) Within the practices at the charity shop, ‘drifting off’ and allowing oneself to surrender to the ambience and feel the past were central. The past was not a linear narrative written in a journal – even though Proust attempted to grasp this feeling through writing – but an experience that triggered different senses. This process was not controlled by the individual, but quite the opposite: objects surprised people and activated unexpected involuntary memories. The agency of these encounters with character did not lie in the subject, but was rather the result of an encounter between subjects and objects. The contrast between life-planning and the temporal experience of character does not mean that my retired interlocutors have never participated in the events described by Giddens (1991b). They probably had done, as these practices are different but not necessarily exclusive of one another. Although ‘life-planning’ better suits the clock-ticking time of capitalism, my interlocutors have found in their retirement at the seaside an opportunity to enjoy character. Therefore, the physical separation between work-life (in London and other cosmopolitan cities) and retirement-life (at the seaside) has enabled them to manage this difference. Nevertheless, this ‘movement’ between different temporal experiences should not be defined as ‘fluid’ (contra Giddens 1991a). The term ‘fluid’ does not allow us to consider the physical (material) dimensions of the different practices and the quality of their difference. My retired interlocutors put great effort into finding the right balance between ‘modern’ and ‘character’, as this was no simple task. The next section considers how they evaluated this balance.

Maintaining or ruining character Although character was important to different people, there was no clear consensus about how to properly maintain it. One incident that took place at the charity shop was quite telling. I was there with Lynva and Clare when one of my vintage trader acquaintances, whom I will call Patricia, came in. Patricia, whom I met through Catherine, is English, and at that time was in her 50s. She was not from the area but had visited it before, although this was her first time at the shop. At first she was surprised that it was a charity shop, due to its careful decoration. As I have already mentioned, the appealing ambience often surprised customers. She soon started looking around, and very quickly found a gold-coloured

46 The logic of character bracelet covered with many small and colourful flowers made of some sort of plastic. The tag said it was from the 1950s, as identified by the shop managers (who were not based there), but Patricia was an experienced trader of vintage jewellery and confirmed this information. She said that she loved it because it was very different from what she usually found. Nevertheless, she was quite disappointed that whoever had made it had left a space between the flowers and the edge of the metal. Patricia and I then engaged in a discussion about what to do with the piece: Patricia: My clients would scrutinize something like that. They will not like a gap like that. I must think if there is something I can do about it so I can still make a profit on it. I could put some beads here. ACB: Would you transform it? Patricia: Well, you need to be very careful and sensitive about the piece, so you don’t change the character of it. ACB: Do you always change the objects you buy? Patricia: Sometimes I do, sometimes I ask somebody else. It was then that the volunteers in the shop entered the conversation: Clare: I wouldn’t change it. Lynva: I would just clean it. Patricia: No, I wouldn’t clean it. ACB: When is it from? Patricia: From the 1950s. ACB: How do you know that? Patricia: Because of the clasp and the colours and the kind of pieces used. Patricia then decided to buy the piece, and some months later I learned that she had heated some of the plastic flowers and gently moved them, covering the gap. She considered the bracelet to have character, something she needed to be careful not to ruin. While Patricia considered changing the piece, Clare advised against it. Conversely, Lynva recommended cleaning it, but Patricia was against doing so because that could have ruined the bracelet’s character. Despite their different opinions about what to do next, they were all concerned about preserving its character. After all, as we know, preserving character meant maintaining the metonymic connections to the past that triggered people’s memories and imaginations. The reference to character inspired a discussion about the physical characteristics of things that were central to maintaining their integrity; that is, the elements that could not be changed without risking the object becoming something else. Possibly inspired by the multiple British TV shows in which antiques are appraised,6 my interlocutors similarly cared about how to engage with character. The attention to character meant that whatever was done to the object needed to take the past into consideration. In contrast to life-planning exercises that

The logic of character 47 anticipated the future, practices that were intended to maintain character were past-oriented. Nevertheless, there was no clear consensus about which actions would maintain or ruin character. Different people presented different understandings of what they considered to preserve or destroy character. Rather than suggesting the mechanical reproduction of a specific behaviour, or pointing to a particular physical characteristic, character seemed to inspire a respect for the past that informed actions in different ways. My interlocutors’ attitude was similar to the ways in which heritage professionals in Scotland discussed character (Yarrow 2018). Although the latter were talking about buildings instead of objects, character was similarly difficult to ‘pinpoint’. To Yarrow, this is more a logic of how to change than an avoidance of transformation, and it is this conception of a ‘logic’ of transformation that has inspired the name of this chapter. In order to decide what should or should not be changed in their projects, heritage professionals demonstrated some very clear and formal criteria for assessing character: they investigated the intrinsic character of the building (in terms of its physical characteristics), how it connected to the broader context of the history of the country and how it could be associated with specific people and events (Yarrow 2018: 334). Although my interlocutors in Margate never formalized their method in the same way, they performed similar evaluations. They often encountered a remnant of the past in the charity shop and related it to British history and the people of whom it reminded them. Particularly interesting was the way that ‘much of the work of character assessment is about what to take away’ (Reed and Bialecki, 2018: 162). In the event described above, this was manifested in Patricia’s decision to change the piece in order to better emphasize its character. One of Yarrow’s aims is to discuss the ways in which – despite discussions of character in anthropology tending to focus on the quality of human subjects – character also appears ethnographically as a quality of buildings. In other words, he is interested in how such a notion approximates subjects and objects, dissolving the difference between the two. In recent decades there has been a theoretical movement towards acknowledging the relevance of the materiality of objects within the social sciences (Keane 2006). That is, different theoretical approaches have contributed to the dissolution of the opposition between subjects and objects. Daniel Miller (1987), for example, envisages a dialectic process in which objects and subjects forge each other. Alfred Gell (1998) has also contributed to this debate by acknowledging that objects have agency. Latour (2005), in turn, proposes an understanding of objects and subjects as extensions of each other, dissolving any duality between the two: ‘The subject is not simply constituted through its opposition to and encompassment of the object; rather, it is amplified by merging with the object’ (Keane 2006: 200, italics in original). Thus, in the same way that objects acquire subject-like qualities, subjects acquire object-like qualities. My interlocutors’ discussions of character seem to resonate with this new theoretical approach towards objects. That is, the investigation of character allowed

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me to map situations where my interlocutors felt the ‘agency’ of objects. This became even more powerful when people were not only discussing bracelets and clothes, but started to refer to the character of houses and buildings. A good example was Catherine’s strategy for decorating her flat. After retiring, Catherine started trading vintage items and moved to live at the seaside, where she had spent family holidays during her childhood. During the period of my research, Catherine lived in an early nineteenth-century building. This was a detached, three-storey house that had been divided into flats and had a large garden. Catherine and her husband lived in a two-bedroom flat, and, while discussing its decoration, she explained that mixing old and modern designs was not an easy task, as she could not risk removing the ‘heart and soul’ of the building as her neighbours had done: Catherine: I thought they were ripping out the heart and soul of the flat. Originally the whole house had wood floors; later on they put some carpet in it. When I took the carpet off, I tried to put the heart and soul back by putting down wood floors, because the wood below the carpet was ruined. I can’t say that I put the heart and soul back, but I tried. But they [the neighbours] took the wood floors away, together with the carpet … I even wanted to get oldlooking radiators and Victorian holders for the doors, and large old doors. I wanted to put the design of the flat back to what it originally was. I wanted to put the past back into place. ACB: Doesn’t it sound unreal to say that you were putting the past back, since these are not the original pieces? Catherine: No, because you can recreate the past. ACB: But isn’t it weird to say that you can recreate the past, since the past is supposed to be something that is already gone? Catherine: No, because you can create the feeling of it. This dialogue shows that character was important not only at the charity shop, but tended to influence my interlocutors’ various engagements with the material world around them. In this conversation Catherine reinforced her understanding that the old details gave character to the house. Things such as the old wood tiles gave the house a personality, and removing them was like removing its ‘heart and soul’. In this sense, Catherine always tried to be loyal to the character of the house and ‘put the past back into place’. This meant that she did not simply refurbish her flat freely, according to her individual taste, but also paid respect to the character of the building. The process of decorating the flat was not only about projecting the personalities of her and her husband onto it, but also about respecting the character that was already there and, whenever necessary, ‘putting it back’. In this sense, she had had to compromise with a certain kind of ‘agency’ contained within the house and expressed through its character. By respecting such character, she could recreate and feel the past. Moreover, she also used her ability to do this well to express a sense of superiority over her neighbours, who according to her had ruined the character of their

The logic of character 49 flat. That is, her engagement with character encouraged an ethical judgement of people’s attitudes: what should or should not be done. On the one hand, the awareness of character involved a responsibility towards other people, in the sense that jeopardizing character could mean jeopardizing the ‘heart and soul’ of a place that was shared with other people (i.e. an early nineteenth-century building). On the other hand, she spoke as if her actions involved a responsibility towards the building itself – it was as if the building was a person who could be let down by her. Since people treasured character in varied ways, it often became a source of dispute. People disagreed about how to better maintain character, and while doing so also compared and judged each other’s actions. By referring to character, they evaluated the world around them and how people behaved within it. Therefore, even if an attention to character meant refusing the ‘emptying of time’ (Giddens 1991a), different people nevertheless demonstrated varied understandings of which version of the past should be preserved, and in what manner. Such disputes could be seen to relate to class struggle, which is the subject of the next section. Further on in the book I will also consider the relationship between character and the different ways of interpreting the past, and how this relates to colonial legacies.

Character, power and class References to character also appear, implicitly or explicitly, in other ethnographies of Britain (such as Strathern 1981; Cohen 1982; Edwards 1998; Macdonald 2002; Degnen 2012). That is, ethnographic research has demonstrated that people in various areas of the UK refer to the way that time has shaped objects and places, which in turn has influenced the personalities of those who live in these places. From here onwards in the book I begin to demonstrate that attention to character influences not only people’s engagements with objects at the charity shop and in their homes, but also during very different kinds of events and situations throughout their lives. Up to now, I have analyzed the temporal aspects of engaging with character at the charity shop, and the feelings and subjects that character helps to create. However, before we continue to investigate the connections, disconnections and intersections of character in the remaining chapters, it is important that the reader realizes that such references to the history in and of things may also be linked to power disputes and class struggle. As Munn has argued, ‘[c]ontrol over time is not just a strategy of interaction; it is also a medium of hierarchic power and governance’ (1992: 109). The ethnographies that consider character in the UK focus mainly on the character of places, rather than objects – even though objects play a central role in contributing to the character of places. References to character relate to power dynamics. For example, Jeanette Edwards (2000) has discussed how, to her working-class interlocutors in Northern England, the landscape of the town of Bacup and its past as a mill town were experienced as a shared hardship, which in turn shaped a particular Bacup character. In other words, like the teddy bears at the charity shop, places also have a particular personality, which is physically shaped

50 The logic of character by the passing of time. This personality of place also moulds the local people. Disputes about the nature of this local personality and history (the character of place and people) were often manifested in native idioms of authenticity such as ‘true Bacupian’ or ‘Bacup born and bred’. Elsewhere, Edwards (1998) has described how working-class people ‘born and bred’ in Alltown, also in Northern England, used their knowledge of the area to claim proprietorship of it. For example, local working-class men Henry and George deceived a newcomer who had just bought a house in the neighbourhood by telling him a false story about the house: Henry and George had a joke at the expense of the newcomer who, in this story, is portrayed as the unworldly one, in spite of his supposedly worldly credentials. There is also, however, a proud acknowledgement, in Henry’s narrative, that the pursuit of a ‘bit of history’ is an understandable activity, and that Henry and George, as local people and members of the Natural History Society, are well placed to provide this history. (Edwards 1998: 148) Through this event, Edwards argues, Henry and George simultaneously reinforce their connection with the area and the newcomer’s disconnection, despite his owning a house there. In other words, in the same way that Patricia and Lynva disputed how to best maintain the character of the bracelet, Henry and George assumed to better know the character of the area. Such knowledge of the town’s past is a source of power. That is, in spite of their financial limitations, Henry and George create a different kind of proprietorship over the town. This proprietorship is often expressed through the language of ‘belonging’: people belong to the place, and the place belongs to them. Such a sense of belonging works either to empower or limit those who claim authority over the character of things. According to Marilyn Strathern (1984), this English folk discourse contrasts fixed strata (the locals) and the mobile individual (the outsider). Moreover, such ‘localism’ relates to class disputes. That is, this kind of opposition (local versus outsider) may set up a particular relationship between ‘possession’ and ‘dispossession’ (i.e. rights over property) that relativizes a sense of professional occupation. Through this logic, professional occupation is not the only factor in determining one’s power and access within social hierarchies. For the landless workers whom Strathern has studied, locals (those who belong in and have rights over a place) are not those who have the means to buy houses or land in the area, but those who were ‘born and bred’ there and know the local history. In other words, character relates to disputes about authority over and rights to places and things. Identifying this common pattern of practices across England does not imply an essentialist definition of people. As Strathern (1984) argues, the ‘local’ is always situationally and contextually defined: ‘Thus in one context a socially relevant distinction may divide those who own their houses from those who do not; in another those who depend on local employment from those who travel to work’

The logic of character 51 (Strathern 1984, 47). The ‘local’ is similar to character, which is also difficult to pinpoint. Edwards (1998) describes another incident that took place in Alltown. The town centre had been refurbished using ‘Victorian detail’, which was intended, according to the town planner, to build a connection with other nearby Victorian buildings. Nevertheless, many of the locals criticized the change, arguing that Yorkshire stones should have been used instead and that the refurbishment had resulted in a ‘cold’ place. In Edwards’ ethnography, locals claimed proprietorship in opposition to the town planner who, according to them, did not know enough about the area. As Edwards explains: Belonging entails a claim on, and a connection to, these things and, therefore, a say in any changes to them, especially changes engineered from the outside (by those who do not belong). The town itself, its artefacts, its buildings and its ‘landscape’, are seen to belong to the locality. From this perspective, the gardens were altered by people who did not belong to Alltown, and with no reference to those who did. (1998: 161) In Edwards’ ethnographic research, discourses about the past are mobilized in order to influence control over the town and its politics. Again, Edwards’ interlocutors disputed the correct refurbishment strategy in a similar manner to the disagreement between the vintage dealer and the retired volunteer about the best way of altering a 1950s bracelet. Here I am intentionally highlighting the links between ‘trivial’ encounters at the charity shop and more ‘serious’ events regarding urban planning. This helps us to envisage two important points: on the one hand, that class disputes may come to be intertwined with everyday negotiations about how best to engage with goods; on the other hand, and more importantly, that disputes at the level of urban planning are not only connected to matters of power, but may also relate to temporal experiences and ‘sensory memories’ (Campen 2014) that help to forge particular subjects. Simply put, the whole town was a kind of ‘Proustian madeleine’. Expressions of belonging to (and proprietorship of) place are also present in Strathern’s (1981) ethnography of Elmdon, in North-west Essex in England. These are manifested through native concepts of the ‘villager’ and the ‘outsider’. Meanwhile, among Anthony Cohen’s (1982) interlocutors in rural Britain, local identity is manifested through the expression ‘being Whalsa’ (short for Whalsay, one of Scotland’s Shetland Islands). Catherine Degnen (2005), in turn, describes how her interlocutors select narratives about the past to generate a sense of relatedness in Dodworth, a former coal-mining village in the north of England. According to Degnen, ‘Old Dodworthers’ know not only about the history of the local people, but also the history of the town, and how the two are entangled. Therefore, relatedness is constructed through claims about the past. In the context of the charity shop, some of the volunteers seemed to express this sort of proprietorship towards the vintage dealers. On one occasion I was

52 The logic of character at the shop with Clare and Lynva when a couple of vintage dealers came in to browse. Lynva said hello, then called Clare, and together they quickly went into the back room. While I was talking to the dealers in the front room I could barely hear their whispers, but I soon realized they were talking about a tie clip that they had found and thought was valuable. They did not want the dealers to see it. When a couple of other customers entered the shop – women working in local commerce but not in trading – they soon joined the conversation in the back room. Once the dealers left and I was alone, I was also allowed to enter the conversation. Volunteers were often uncomfortable with the vintage dealers who appeared in the shop, and I would often witness a ‘competition’ for things. Lynva, for example, frequently distinguished between people whom she considered to deserve access to objects with character – other ‘local people’ – and those who did not deserve such things because they would charge high prices while selling the objects to outsiders – vintage traders like Catherine. Bourdieu (1984) has become widely known for illuminating the ways in which goods relate to class struggle. As mentioned in the Introduction, his work has acquired a prominent position with regard to social–scientific research conducted in the UK. Bourdieu initiated important arguments about the ways in which people’s social origins and education influence their aesthetic dispositions, i.e. their taste. That is, social hierarchy is not only reproduced through labour division, but also through apparently ‘naïve’ goods and people’s tastes in them. According to Bourdieu, people of working-class origins, such as Lynva, were historically forced to endure conditions of economic necessity that would have shaped their taste. Bourdieu envisaged a tragic outcome for the working classes. That is, the internalization of material conditions (of precarity) as natural taste encourages working-class people to continuously choose what they are forced to endure: ‘It must never be forgotten that the working-class “aesthetic” is a dominated “aesthetic” which is constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics’ (Bourdieu 1984: 33). If this argument is correct, people who are raised in working-class contexts tend to remain dominated by ordinary interests and urgencies. In other words, they prioritize the function and quantity of goods in order to maximize resources and pleasure, while also saving labour (their main asset). Any kind of excess of gratuitous consumption is seen as a pretentious attempt to distinguish oneself. The consequence of this framework is that individuals of working-class origins only have two options: they can either attempt to individually improve their social class and move upwards, or remain loyal to the collectivity and try to fight social hierarchies. Although many of my retired interlocutors at the shop had recently moved to the seaside, and were therefore not ‘born and bred’ in the area, by working for a charity shop, and being committed to the local customers and these objects, they considered themselves different to dealers. As in other ethnographies of England (Edwards 2000; Tyler 2015), it is often not the identity of newcomers that matters, but their ability to build friendly connections to the area and show reciprocity towards the people and place where they live. In contrast, newcomers who

The logic of character 53 exploited the area for their own individual benefit were perceived badly. A central aspect of this behaviour was the lack of responsibility it implied towards other people, the past, places and things. A Bourdieusian perspective (1984) would consider my interlocutors’ actions in terms of their capacity to resist middle-class domination. Lynva and Clare would be defending some sort of working-class ethos, while the vintage dealers assumed a middle-class position. Catherine would neatly relate to a ‘middle-class habitus’ (Bourdieu 1984), since she had been born and educated in a wealthier environment. The next step would be to consider whether such events are effective, or simply irrelevant, with regard to the capacity to challenge or resist broader political or economic structures. As a consequence, Bourdieu’s theory of practice would tend to render the events at the charity shop as a facet of such structures (Laidlaw 2013). Beyond that, Bourdieu’s framework describes social practice as ‘inscribed in the current of time’, ‘with its rhythm, its orientation, its irreversibility’ (1977: 9). In doing so, he hoped to introduce time into the de-temporalized models and schemas of social sciences. However, his definition of time does not allow me to properly account for the temporal experiences inspired by character, or how they challenged conceptions of the ‘irreversibility’ of time by making the past present. It also does not allow me to investigate my interlocutors’ particular understandings of ‘change’ – all the different ways they sacrifice or insist upon the physical characteristics of the past (which I will continue to explore in the remaining chapters). Most importantly, by approaching the engagement with character from a Bourdieusian perspective, my interlocutors’ investment in ‘self-formation’ (Foucault 1997) becomes a facet of broader political structures. Therefore, as mentioned in the Introduction, instead of interpreting negotiations of character only from the perspective of class dynamics, in this book I want to emphasize their ethical dimensions, which better allow me to account for their temporal implications. That is, beyond their capacity to challenge or resist broader political or economic structures, such practices still played an important role in the self-formation of subjects. What we see at the charity shop is not only class struggle, in which people mobilize narratives about the past to claim proprietorship of things, but also practices that allow them to physically feel and relive the past while sharing their experiences and building relationships. In doing so, they engage with their past and evaluate present and future in terms of that past. This is a temporal experience that, as I have shown above, differs greatly from the one inhabited by Giddens’ modern subjects (1991b), who continuously try to anticipate the future through life-planning. This focus on ethics allows us to consider how, independent of their impact on broader structures, such events at the charity shop are profoundly effective with regard to bringing my interlocutors to terms with their pasts. That is, the creative strategies and tools that they have mobilized to mediate the ‘now’ and the ‘what has been’ construct a particular ‘temporality’ (Munn 1992). The maintenance of character can then be seen as an ethical project, one that draws on experiences of the past triggered by particular things and orientates people’s ‘good’ actions.

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Character and aesthetics I hope to have gradually shown in this chapter that what might seem like trivial discussions at the charity shop – for example, regarding an individual’s affection for teddy bears – may relate to ethical principles. That is, such events can be considered as insightful examples of the way that people in Margate reflectively evaluated the world around them. This also involves considering how such practices acted to produce ethical subjects. We have seen how the kind of subjectivity encouraged by an attention to character directly related to a specific kind of temporal experience. An ethnographic approach to character shows that people were profoundly reflective and evaluative of their daily lives: they appraised everything from teddy bears to the floors of their homes, as well as other people’s actions. In doing so, they did not passively and unconsciously inherit family or class values that they then mechanically reproduced, but instead found their own individual or shared ways of being loyal to their past. They frequently and explicitly discussed the past, and through engaging with old objects they rehearsed the memories, narratives and practices that they wanted to maintain or relinquish. An attention to character demonstrates the ways in which people from working-class backgrounds acted to maintain objects and practices that they considered ethically superior and which connected to their upbringings. That is, ‘we are seeing character as … evaluations that individuate at the same moment that they re-instantiate larger typifications’ (Reed and Bialecki 2018: 165). Although my interlocutors did not endure the tragic outcome expected by Bourdieu (1984), we also need to be wary of claiming that they experienced ‘freedom’ (Laidlaw 2013) in relation to the material environment. While drawing attention to character, most people turned to the very physical form of objects to evaluate their actions. They were not the sole masters of events. Of particular importance within their ethical considerations were the physical characteristics of things. These physical dispositions triggered the kind of experiences that they valued. My interlocutors continuously turned to objects’ characteristics in order to decide what to do next and how to differentiate between people and actions. As a consequence, through the language of character we can see an affinity between ethics and aesthetics (see also Faubion 2018). That is, proper behaviour was intimately connected with the maintenance of certain physical forms. The ‘good’ – that which is ethically superior – had physical characteristics, even though people continuously disagreed about the right manner in which to preserve such characteristics. At the charity shop, my interlocutors experienced involuntary memories, imagined or relived past situations of their lives, and built connections to other people through such events. An old object almost became another person on such occasions, making its own contributions to experiences and conversations. The physical and metonymic characteristics of these objects activated people’s senses and were fundamental for them to feel the past. Situations such as these blurred the difference between subjects and objects (see also Balthazar 2016b), all of which acted as agents upon the events.

The logic of character 55 This awareness of what character did for my interlocutors and its efficacy will be fundamental to the consideration of their political actions. I will describe the ways in which they acted politically to maintain character, as in the case of Manston Airport (cited in the Introduction), not only as a matter of power and proprietorship, but mainly as an attempt to protect the physical elements (the aesthetics) that enabled them to continue to feel the past. However, before we reach the political we will first continue to explore some of the outcomes of character. The next chapter considers how national narratives enter into experiences of character, transforming both people and the national.

Notes 1 Grammar schools are state secondary schools that select their pupils according to an examination taken at the age of 11, which is known as the ‘11-plus’. Students who rank best are then selected to go to the local grammar school, while the remaining students attend the local comprehensive schools. 2 I was inspired to consider the ‘ethics of memory’ by a homonymous course offered by Ravit Reichman at Brown University: https://www.edx.org/course/the-ethics-of-memory 3 This relation between ethics, memory and psychoanalysis was also brought to my attention by Ravit Reichman’s course The Ethics of Memory at Brown University. 4 This ethnographic description of Clare and the customer at the charity shop first appeared in a chapter called ‘From Houses and Grandparents to Brexit’ (Balthazar 2019), which was published in Cycles of Hatred and Rage, edited by Katherine Donahue and Patricia Heck. 5 Harris (1996) calls this third perspective on time ‘post-modern’. I will avoid using this term here, as the prefix ‘post’ entails in itself a temporality of rupture which intrinsically connects to the ‘modern’ paradigm, as Giddens (1991a) himself has acknowledged. What I am trying to show in this book is precisely that my interlocutors’ temporal experiences do not reproduce a ‘rupture’ between past and present – which the term ‘post’ encourages us to assume – and that analytical references to ‘post’ are not useful. Simply put, the term ‘post-modern’ does not help to account for the plurality of temporal experiences that Munn (1992), for example, has explored. I will discuss this further in Chapter 4. 6 In the UK there are many popular TV shows, such as the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow, which challenge spectators to identify the history and value of old objects.

2

Connections of character The British seaside

The previous chapter discussed the way that people who visited one of the local charity shops in Margate often referred to the ‘character’ of things. Through the notion of character they addressed the way that objects can index the past. These physical connections with the past encouraged my interlocutors to remember personal stories or imagine the stories of others. I argued that these references to character involve an ethical approach to time that promotes a particular temporal experience, one that causes the past to be experienced in the present. This experience, therefore, challenges normative ideas about time. This chapter moves on to consider how character often, although not necessarily always, connects with the national. That is, while encountering character my retired interlocutors often referred to national history. The objective here is not to deliver a bounded and fixed definition of the nation, but to show the particular ways in which my interlocutors related to it. The reader will be able to observe that claims about the connection between Manston Airport and British history, which were mentioned in the Introduction, directly relate to the way in which my interlocutors perceived the whole local area, including the most intimate aspects of their lives. More specifically, the next sections consider how an attention to character allows the national to emerge in events at the charity shop and other local shops, in people’s homes and during other public events around town. Particularly interesting is the way that the national is experienced in relation to family memories and class. Within the broader argument of the book, this chapter demonstrates that national thinking was profoundly engrained and embodied in my interlocutors’ daily routines, transforming the national into something deeply personal. The chapter will analyze many different ethnographic cases with the intention of unpacking the multiple aspects of the connections between the national and the personal. In time, before we dive into this ethnographic immersion, it might be worth reminding the reader that, depending on the reader’s personal engagements with formal politics, this chapter might demand for some emotional generosity. Nationalism has often been associated with racism, and as a non-British person myself, I understand that some readers might have been personally injured by this connection, transforming this chapter on nationalism into a difficult one to read.

Connections of character 57 This connection between nationalism and racism will be carefully discussed in Chapter 4 and in the Final considerations, where I also hope to show the advantages of the ethnographic immersion that I offer here. However, before we enter into these broader political discussions, as explained in the Introduction, it is part of the strategy of this book to first offer the reader the opportunity to understand how the national is personally experienced and directly connected to family memories and daily routines at the seaside. This is important so, by the time I discuss formal politics in Chapter 4, the reader has a more sophisticated understanding of what is at stake for some voters.

Character and the ‘Made in Britain’ Personal memories and the national When visitors came to the charity shop, which I described in Chapter 1, Lynva and Clare always encouraged them to also visit a neighbouring shop owned by a 75-year-old English trader whom I will call Lucy. This shop, as the volunteers saw it, had character. Lucy had decorated it to look like the history of her life. Even from outside the window one could see mannequins wearing beautiful 1950s dresses. Old china, magazines and radios were beautifully displayed beside vintage, second-hand clothes. Bunting and Union Jack flags decorated the ceiling, while old posters and pictures hung on the walls. In the centre of the shop was a long table covered with old jewellery, shoes and bags. It was interesting to find soft pieces of lace and old buttons in their original packaging, along with busts wearing scarves around their heads in the style of the 1950s. To the right of the table was a rail with all sorts of clothes in different colours, including dresses, fur coats and lingerie. To the left, more bric-a-brac and jewellery-filled glass cabinets decorated the area around a charming counter. The ambience completely matched the historical architecture of the building. This shop was situated in Old Town, an area of cobbled lanes among Georgian and Victorian buildings. Lucy comes from a family that worked in retail. She was born in Kent, had lived in London and France, and had recently moved to Margate. During the time that her family lived in London, she and all of her sisters had worked in a cafe. She told me that they had had to save a lot of money to buy anything. ‘Trading’ entered their lives when Lucy’s mother became friends with a trader, with whom she made a deal: when she got tired of an object and wanted something new, they would exchange things. ‘I remember that I used to like this painting that was in the living room, and one day it was gone; she had exchanged it for something else’, explained Lucy. The shop in Margate, Lucy told me, was her swan song – her final performance. After a lifetime of trading this was likely to be her last shop, and she had made it special. She sold second-hand items that had not belonged to her, but that nevertheless brought forth special memories. All of the 1950s scarves around the shop reminded her of the way that her mother used to dress at the time. ‘Look, that’s her’, she told me while pointing to one of the mannequins. The flags were

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a memory of the war. Those were very hard times, she explained, but there had also been some ‘good’ aspects to them, as people had helped each other in the face of such tragedy. Alongside the general items there were also personal ones, such as photographs of her previous house hanging on the wall. Lucy’s daughter also helped in the shop, which Lucy had named after her own mother. Within the shop, Lucy combined the historical architecture of the building with the old objects on display to create her own staged interpretation of the past. In the same way that Proust (1992 [1913]) wrote a novel to recount his memories (discussed in the previous chapter), Lucy created a shop that enacted her life trajectory – the swan song. Through the particular arrangement of things in the shop, she presented to visitors her life, her family memories and – through the Union Jack flags and Lucy’s references to the war, for example – the history of the country. British history became entangled with her personal trajectory. The shop was, therefore, simultaneously a testimony to Lucy’s individual life and an assemblage of the remnants of a shared history. That arrangement of things also triggered the individual memories of other people, such as Clare and Lynva, who also shared the recollection of those times. Since they enjoyed the way that Lucy had re-enacted the past, they often recommended her shop to visitors. It was her ability to put things together and stage the past that made her shop popular. Around Margate one could easily see other shops in which national flags, old soldier uniforms and tea parties helped to reproduce shared past experiences. Through these experiences the national became something different from the political propositions of parties: it was connected to emotions, memory and highly personal stories. In other words, national sentiments were present beyond formal politics, and effectively connected Lucy, Lynva, Clare and other locals. It was in places like this, and the charity shop in which I volunteered, that people found objects that were ‘Made in Britain’. These were often the most treasured objects with character. They were usually items that had been produced in the UK before the de-industrialization of the country in the 1960s and 1970s, and had labels that read ‘Made in the United Kingdom’, ‘Made in England’, ‘Made in Scotland’, ‘Made in Great Britain’ and so on. Despite the different countries involved in the production of these items, to my interlocutors they were all ‘Made in Britain’, an expression that they often used. Similar to the way in which Lucy used the objects in her shop to tell me about her memories of the war, Lynva also frequently referred to national history, although in a slightly different manner (Balthazar 2016b): I don’t pay much for mass-produced goods that cost so little to produce. Handmade is worth more. When things used to be made in Britain, they were nicely done. It was a place with maybe 12 craftsmen. Now in China it is all mass-produced and bad quality. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, Lynva is a Welsh resident of the area, and retired. She was born and raised in a mining village in Wales. She explained

Connections of character 59 that this preference for objects ‘Made in Britain’ informed all of her consumption practices. Britain, in this sense, became a sort of reference point that informed her preference for things. This preference established a distinction between things that were worth paying more for and things that were not. According to her statement, the distinction was found in the mode of production: while some objects had been produced in a factory, others had been handmade by experts (despite the fact that Britain had undergone an industrial revolution long before that). I do not think that Lynva was referring to everything that was produced in China, but specifically to the mass-production industry with which it has become internationally associated in recent decades. It is important to note, nevertheless, that this statement is still dangerous, as it may work to promote prejudice about China, its culture and its values. That is, although Lynva was talking about different modes of production, this kind of generalization about a country can contribute to claims about the inferiority of a certain culture and people. Her statement generated different standards of quality: ‘bad’ was associated with China, and ‘good’ with Britain. In Banal Nationalism (1995), Michael Billig criticizes social scientists for frequently presenting national movements as isolated moments of political crisis. According to Billig, framing nationalism as a temporary event helps to obscure the ways in which the rhetoric of nationhood is continuously and ‘banally’ reproduced. Billig uses the concept of ‘banal nationalism’ to address the unconscious habits through which the nations of the West and the rhetoric of nationhood are sustained; for example, through flags in front of important buildings or the language used in sports competitions. Billig is mainly interested in the ‘national ideology’ that stems from politics, the state and politicians, the media, scholars and sports language in the USA. In line with Billig’s arguments, the cases of Lucy and Lynva show how national sentiments emerged in people’s everyday engagements with objects in Margate. Moreover, such sentiments were intimately connected to ethical evaluations of better forms of production and superior goods. That is, during apparently trivial visits to the charity shop my interlocutors rehearsed and shared their own accounts of Britain. Through the events and consumption practices at the charity shop, and at other second-hand shops around town, they had an opportunity to experiment with national history and appropriate it in a way that made sense to their lives (see also Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). As Skey (2011) has observed, nationalism is not a ‘thing’, a given, but rather the practices that recreate the world as a multitude of nations. Skey has shown how everyday talk may be imbued with ‘national thinking’, i.e. deixis, formulations and metaphors that take for granted the idea that the nation is an actually existing entity. While discussing the British production of goods, Lynva was engaging with a national perspective of the world. The fact that she did so while visiting the charity shop helped to naturalize this national perspective, which became an ordinary spontaneous practice. However, in contrast to Billig’s research, the reproduction of a national perspective in Margate was not an unconscious process. For example, for Lynva the national was directly connected to the ‘twelve craftsmen’ and to some of the

60 Connections of character objects in the shop. She often used these objects to tell me about her father, who had been injured after World War II. Lucy, similarly, pointed to the national flag and told me about the generosity that emerged among families in England during the war. Therefore, my interlocutors continuously and consciously referred to the nation. References to the national might be immediately associated with racism, as in the UK nationalism has often worked to essentialize and disqualify ‘other’ cultures and people (Gilroy 1987). In Chapter 4 and the Conclusion I will deal more carefully with these issues. The intention of this chapter, however, is to immerse the reader in these ‘appropriations’ of the national by ordinary people (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008), in order to understand precisely what they do for my interlocutors before we can consider the dangerous aspects of nationalism. ‘Made in Britain’ and class Among the memories triggered by ‘Made in Britain’ emerged references to the experience of class. That is, an unexpected encounter with a ‘Made in Britain’ object in the shop enabled Lynva to voice her moral appreciation for a class of producers (the twelve craftsmen mentioned above). In other words, ‘Made in Britain’ products led her to discuss her personal connection to Britain and the country’s working classes. Lynva’s effort to take care of ‘Made in Britain’ objects inevitably related to her memories and to people who, like her father, had made sacrifices for the country (as mentioned in the previous chapter, her father served in the war and died of emphysema). Celebrating the twelve craftsmen and their class of producers was also, directly or indirectly, about celebrating her family’s history of working in the mining industry. Each time she found another of these objects she would tell me stories about the past. Unlike ‘modern’ things, which are likely to have been produced in China, assembled somewhere else, and labelled with a rather arbitrary place of origin, ‘Made in Britain’ related to the history of the country and to the classes that produced such objects. It was then that I understood something that seemed to be quite fundamental about what Lynva was saying. Her criticism was not so much about China and its people (even if such claims could problematically encourage that sort of prejudice), but more about the kind of production system that segments the phases of production to the extent that consumers lose track of an object’s trajectory and history. What also encouraged me to think this was the fact that Lynva and others were very critical of things made of plastic, the material that became so popular during the second half of the twentieth century for its low cost and convenience. As we will see in the next chapter, concrete was also an issue for my interlocutors. These two materials are well-known for their temporal resistance. Therefore, among my interlocutors there was a dislike of materials and forms of production that were not embedded in and marked by the passing of time. Because it hardly deteriorates, plastic did not gain the patina that would confer its ‘character’. To Lynva, the marks on an object were particularly important not only because they marked the passing of time, but also because they marked the existence of its

Connections of character 61 producer – the worker. It was at the charity shop, surrounded by these objects, that Lynva told me about the way that Margaret Thatcher’s government had destroyed her family and community in Wales (see Jones 2011). It was the story of these workers, and the marks that they had left behind, that Lynva was talking about. Her family had made great sacrifices by going down into the British mining pits. Pointing to ‘Made in Britain’ objects, and the marks of time upon them, was a way of preserving the memory of these workers. Nevertheless, what was interesting was that Lynva did not engage with debates about class struggle and the kind of oppression that she and her family had experienced through discussions about political economy. In other words, she did not talk about class using abstract terms such as ‘structure’ and ‘political institutions’. Instead, she did so by referring to the physical marks that people had left upon things, and how these related to the pain that her family had endured. She continuously showed me the ways in which such marks were all around us, except in things made of plastic. Lynva’s comments, together with those of other people at the charity shop, ‘animated’ the physical world around us. The continuous references to character encouraged a habit of frequently looking for the physical marks of history on the landscape. This process of remembering (and sometimes imagining) involved the act of selecting pasts, and character allowed for multiple pasts to be voiced while others were forgotten. Nevertheless, it still made the past pervasively present. When she referred to the national, Lynva was not necessarily pointing to an abstract bygone era, that which preceded the ‘post-industrial’. Instead, she was often pointing to the physical marks that were all around us at the seaside, and beyond. These marks enabled people to feel the past. Feeling was central here, since the power of objects that had character – that is, objects that indexed the past – was precisely to act as a sensory stimulus that triggered involuntary memories and emotions, generating a very particular temporal experience, as discussed in the previous chapter. These events resonate with Maurice Halbwachs’ (1980) ideas about collective memory. For Halbwachs, one of the first sociologists to theorize about memory, a person can only remember as part of a group. That is, one’s memory is mixed with that of others, and is a kind of ‘social thought’. Furthermore, memory is directly influenced by practice, which acts to filter what should be remembered from what should be forgotten. Halbwachs argued that memory must be materialized in places for it to be maintained. Nevertheless, he made a distinction between memory and history, the latter being the abstract product of historians and scholarly criteria, and sitting above and outside of those who lived through it. In line with Halbwachs, Pierre Nora (1995) differentiated between memory as affective, specific and rooted in the concrete, and history as universal and analytical. According to Nora (1995), national history is intended as the ‘legitimate’ memory, as it is the selection of memories and the past by the state. The development of historiography, the discipline responsible for defining the ‘univocal’ and ‘unifying’ collective memory, was closely linked to the affirmation of a national consciousness. Positivistic conceptions of history were later problematized by historians and oppressed groups (Wachtel 1986).

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Through the practices described above, people are collectively inspired to remember, and while doing so they also build social relations. As I have discussed, these memories also trigger national thinking. This national past, therefore, is often experienced as affective, personal and directly related to one’s own experience, instead of as an abstract and universalizing sense of time. Thus, the distinction that Halbwachs and Nora make between memory and history ceases to make sense with regard to the practices that I observed at the seaside. According to Marianne Debouzy (1986), mining communities in Britain have a long tradition of recounting their history in a way that is thoroughly entangled with national events. Highly personal stories and memories of kinship have become intertwined with collective narratives about Britain, and all of this has materialized in objects that have character. This profound entanglement between national history, class and personal stories did not only occur within the shops, but in many different ways at the seaside. Every time that the character of a place or an object was encountered, it allowed for the recollection of national narratives. Although not everyone who treasured character necessarily related it to national thinking, this was one of my interlocutors’ ways of engaging with things that ‘had history’. The following sections discuss other situations during which this personal experience of the national occurred.

Period houses Clare and Peter’s hallway One house that I have visited multiple times in recent years belongs to Clare, who volunteered at the charity shop with Lynva and me. As I mentioned before, Clare was born in Northern Ireland but came to London when she was 22 to become a school teacher. Six years before the beginning of my research she and her husband Peter had decided to retire, choosing to move to Thanet, where Peter had been born and spent his childhood. Peter’s father, who was ill at the time and soon passed away, had also lived in the area, and the couple took care of him during the last years of his life. Clare explained to me that they had initially intended to buy a bungalow. However, once she began to look at houses, she was a little disappointed by the fact that they were ‘modern’ and recently built, with square rooms that all looked the same and had no character. One day, while driving around the area with Peter, Clare felt something different about the sight of a carved, green, wooden door with a stained-glass window, which belonged to a semi-detached Edwardian house. After finding what they wanted, it did not take them long to sell their house in South London. With the profit from the sale, they paid off the mortgage in London and bought the Edwardian house. The whole house had a lot of character, in which Clare and her husband took great pride. The entrance hallway was narrow, with a dark carved staircase facing the green door, and covered with wallpaper hung by the previous owners: some sort of white palm leaf against a pale green background. The couple left their keys and

Connections of character 63 accessories in an old dark wooden chest beside the door. On the wall were objects and pictures that included sketches, old and recent, of the beaches in the area. Beside these images was a collection of clocks owned by Peter’s deceased father and some of the medals he had been awarded during World War II. Peter’s father had been a prisoner of war in Japan for some years, and this experience had had a psychological impact on him. He had worked as an electrical clerk, and often spent his time at home developing photographs. As we looked at the medals, Peter explained that his father had enjoyed being alone. Although the couple often said that they were very happy with their house, they still thought that it required some changes. Despite the fact that several of their friends recommended against it, they decided to change the wallpaper. Clare went to Laura Ashley, a Welsh textile design company that was founded in 1953 and had become an international retail chain, and bought some wallpaper decorated with yellow roses against a white background. Peter was not completely happy with this, but agreed to put it up. In other parts of the house they faced similar issues: it was a constant challenge to find the right balance between ‘modern’ and ‘character’. As previously discussed, this balance was not only a matter of style, but had a profound influence on how people felt and on the memories that they were able to recover. Clare and Peter were also constantly working on their back room; according to them, the previous owners had done it all wrong. They decided to sand the wood panels covering the bottom part of the walls, since the wood was not ‘really old’, but only from the 1980s, and paint them dark pink. Like the hallway, they were also decorating the upper parts of walls with Laura Ashley wallpaper. The couple restored the old brick fireplace, which Clare considered to be the original, and repainted the radiators. They furnished the room with a steel candelabra, classic pleated lampshades and a set of old wooden Ercol chairs which were given to them by their neighbours. According to Clare and Peter, Ercol was ‘from the time when things were still nicely done’. Ercol was ‘Made in Britain’. Similar to Lynva, they also treasured a particular form of production that related to British history. Moreover, they made an effort to convert things to their original state. That is, they even found and bought original Ercol cushions online, as the chairs had been given to them without these. This was a long process: they hired someone to collect the cushions from another county and a second person to restore them, while Peter repaired the bands that held the cushions on the chairs. Clare noted that while Peter wanted to sand the wooden chairs, she preferred to leave them with the marks of their use, since these were part of the chairs’ history: ‘Where it came from’, she said. When I asked if buying second-hand cushions would have been cheaper, she said, ‘The fabric was unique, you wouldn’t be able to buy it. We could’ve got something cheaper but we wanted the original’. As Yarrow (2018) has observed with regard to heritage practices in Scotland, the maintenance of character involves a complex negotiation of how to respect the ‘integrity’ of things. On the one hand, as one of his interlocutors explained, this involves considering ‘how true something is to what it was constructed as’

64 Connections of character (Yarrow 2018: 338). On the other hand, character is also the result of features acquired over time. Above, we see a husband and wife involved in the same kind of negotiation. A living room with character was the result of a careful combination of original characteristics – such as the fabric – and the marks of usage left on the armchairs. Each of these details added another layer of particularity to the house, making it unique. In the process of ‘putting the character back’ into the house, as they often called it, husband and wife had very clear roles. Peter researched what he wanted to use in the refurbishment online, and Clare went to the shops to buy it. Here, modern technologies helped to produce character. For example, the internet and eBay helped my interlocutors to buy original cushions for the Ercol chairs. The internet helped them to research old objects. This preference for the old not only guided my interlocutors in their choice of cushions, but was often a concern when they chose anything for the house. The character of the house, its temporal aspect, therefore influenced how my interlocutors engaged with it. However, not everything worked out as initially planned. Although the back room was their greatest project, it still took a long time to finish, due to Peter’s hip problem. After a long life of playing sports, his hip bones had deteriorated, causing him to limp and feel pain. As a consequence, during most of the time that I resided in the area their plans for the room had to be postponed. In order to produce a house that had character, they had committed to a level of physical effort that often clashed with the limitations of their health and age. Like most people, my interlocutors had to cope with everyday tasks such as shopping at the supermarket and ironing. Therefore, whenever they considered it necessary, they committed to new technologies, cleaning facilities and recently produced objects. Within their homes they were forced to negotiate and mediate between the character of their houses and the demands of living in contemporary England. That is, the extent to which they should insist upon or relinquish the past was a constant discussion between husbands and wives, and something that, as the reader will continue to observe below, carefully materialized in each decision they made about the refurbishment of their homes. The following sections will explore other aspects of people’s homes, before I further unpack how such practices connect to national sentiments. Lynva’s kitchen Similar to the way in which the jewellery dealer Patricia and the charity shop volunteers had different opinions about how to better maintain the character of the bracelet (see Chapter 1), husbands and wives had different ideas about how to mediate between past and present within their homes. Lynva, for example, mentioned her discussions with her husband regarding her tendency to accumulate things: In my old house I used to have this cupboard with all my china in it. It was beautiful, people complimented me for it. But then we moved and I got rid of

Connections of character 65 it – I just wanted to clean up a little. It was beautiful, but it was also heavy. But mind you, I’m starting to do it again, I have many new glass pieces. My husband keeps asking me what I’m going to do with them. I’m terrible with charity shops. Lynva explained to me that during different moments of her life she had felt the need to have different kinds of houses. She told me that her current house was much more modern than the previous one: ACB: Do you have a cleaner style now? Lynva: Clean but not clinical, yes. That is, Lynva wished for a sort of ‘fresh’ and ‘light’ house, but one that was nevertheless unlike the sterile environment of a clinic. She told me that the kitchen in particular was very important to her: When a woman is choosing a house, the first thing that she will look at and change is the kitchen, because that’s really where the family will spend their time together. She will think about the refurbishment that needs to be done there. The soft blue shades of the walls, together with the large windows looking into the garden and a skylight, allowed a great amount of light to enter Lynva’s house, which I have visited multiple times over the past eight years. The kitchen’s decoration showed a careful balance between modern furniture from IKEA and old pieces. Character had been added to the kitchen with some ‘bits and bobs’, such as a radio from the last century or her mother’s old brandy bottle, which was on top of the fridge. We often saw similar empty bottles for sale at the charity shop, and Lynva would always tell us about her mother, for whom she showed a profound respect. Her mother could ‘do wonders’ in the kitchen, despite the food shortages they had faced during Lynva’s childhood. Similarly, Lynva took great pride in her creative use of resources when cooking a meal. In the constant mediation between old things with character and modern objects at the seaside there was no clear consistency or rigidity. People positioned themselves differently in relation to the various situations and material environments that they encountered. Sometimes character added personality to the home. At other times, however, objects with character felt ‘heavy’ and needed to be ‘cleaned up’, which was probably an unconscious reference to the memories that character tended to trigger and which also sometimes felt ‘heavy’, as discussed in Chapter 1. Therefore, what we see in these different homes is a careful negotiation of how to live while maintaining a connection to the past. This connection was metonymic, rather than simply being a matter of style. This was the value of objects that had character, as they indexed the past, triggering people’s memories and producing feelings. In arranging such objects in their homes, people

66 Connections of character were also arranging sensory stimuli and the involuntary memories that they might trigger. When Lynva told me about how her husband had often complained about the way she kept old things, she also mentioned his desire to move house once again: ‘I think he wants a new project, he wants a house where he can do it all again’. According to Lynva, not just any house would have fulfilled her husband’s wish. When he dreamed about the opportunity to once again feel productive, he was especially interested in buying an old cottage: that is, a small, old-fashioned house. Meanwhile, Lynva wanted them to stay where they were and use their spare time in retirement to invite their friends and family for gatherings. Therefore, when they discussed their homes they were also negotiating their individual interests and how to live as a couple. The character of the house often entered these discussions as an element in relation to which my interlocutors had to compromise. Julie’s living room Like Clare and Peter, Julie also fell in love with a specific feature of her house: an Edwardian fireplace with the original tiles. Julie comes from a family of traders, which started, she explained, with her father, who had restored antiques. Later Julie and her mother began to trade on Portobello Road, a well-known vintage market in London. She had gone for the first time when she was 15 years old, and at first she helped more than worked, although she soon had a full-time job in the business. She is originally from South London, and for a while worked for a trader who dealt with very expensive things, a job that was first offered to her mother but passed to Julie after the other declined to take it. She has worked in Portobello since 1959. Julie mentioned that hardly anything is vintage nowadays on Portobello Road, which the proper vintage traders are complaining about and may result in the end of this trading hub. It is important for the reader to observe that although Julie and Catherine (mentioned in the previous chapter) were both vintage dealers, they had had very different lives. For Julie, trading was a life-long professional job, while for Catherine it was an activity mainly conducted after retirement, before which she had worked in the fashion industry. Julie described her search for a house as a difficult enterprise, because she had only found places ‘with no soul’ before discovering her current home. Just like Clare and Peter, she also faced the challenges of an old house: ‘My stepfather said it wasn’t a good idea, since there was so much work to be done on it, but I just loved it’. This meant not only that she needed help to refurbish the house, but that she was often confined to some parts of it while others were being remodelled. The comfort of a modern house was sacrificed in the name of a house ‘with soul’. When I visited her cottage I could see what she meant. The outside refurbishment was finally complete, the doors and windows having been painted dark blue and the walls white, but now the bedrooms needed to be transformed. It was a two-storey house, with two bedrooms on the second floor. One immediately spotted the fireplace in the centre of the living room, in front of a set of sofas. I made only a brief visit, but what caught my attention straight away were her

Connections of character 67 father’s sketches of period garments next to the fireplace. As she had previously explained, she came from a family of traders. Visiting people’s homes was a strategy that allowed me to observe the unconscious or unsaid details of the ways in which they carefully mediated between character and modern. It was only by observing Clare and Peter’s and Julie’s efforts to combine objects that belonged to their parents with their recently purchased houses that I could understand the kinds of connections and disconnections that they were creating in their lives. That is, both Peter and Julie were interested in period houses and invested a lot of time in finding ‘the right one’. In Clare and Peter’s case, it was the stained-glass entrance door that attracted the couple’s attention. In Julie’s case, it was the Edwardian fireplace. In both cases, these features soon became the backdrop for each family’s routine. As a consequence, my interlocutors’ personal memories became entangled with the historical pasts of their houses, as if they already belonged together. Julie’s house helped to tell the story of her family, for example, through the sketches found near the fireplace, in a very similar manner to the way in which Lucy enacted her life inside her shop. In Margate and nearby areas, therefore, shops and houses were spaces within which people negotiated and materialized their own interpretations of personal and national pasts (for similar interpretations of the role of the house in self-construction, see Miller 2001). The next section expands upon how the personal and the national become entangled through people’s homes.

Nationalism at home Houses and social hierarchies Influenced by feminist scholarship, Janet Carsten (2004) has argued that mid-century anthropologists tended to assume that kinship was a minor aspect of social life in Western societies, separate from political and economic life and reduced to the intimate domain of the household. Carsten has criticized the analytical reinforcement of boundaries between ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’ and questioned the separation between ‘public’ and ‘private’ domains of life in Western societies (see also Edwards 2000). Particularly relevant to my analysis here is Carsten’s argument about the ways in which the house plays a central role in the naturalization of hierarchy (Carsten 2004: 50). As Carsten has contended: Houses are involved in the encoding and internalisation of hierarchical principles that shape relations between those of different generation, age, or gender. And these valorisations have a significance beyond the intimate and everyday sphere of what happens in houses. They may be implicated in the way wider social distinctions in the polity or the state appear natural, given, and largely inescapable. (Carsten 2004: 37) Carsten’s argument helps me to illuminate the kinds of hierarchies that my interlocutors were reproducing in their homes. A national narrative entered

68 Connections of character the discussions of family memories and professional trajectories described above. The houses were usually dated (1890s, 1900s, 1930s, etc.) and named (Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, etc.) according to periods of British national history, and my interlocutors often referred to these (see also Balthazar 2017). Therefore, national categorizations framed the way in which people understood and engaged with their homes. For example, Peter struggled to preserve the character of his Edwardian house, while Lynva constantly referred to the British way of producing things. We can see that national categorizations entered the most intimate moments of my interlocutors’ lives – conversations between married couples. While adopting national categorizations, my interlocutors allowed Britain to become part of their personal pasts, presents and futures. Through the house, the nation was naturalized. This was apparent not only in the way that they talked, but also in the aspects of the things with which they chose to furnish their homes. In these British homes, (national) time had textures, noises, smells and tastes (for example, when Lynva reproduced one of her mother’s recipes). That is, the physical characteristics of houses were remnants of other (national) periods of time, and enabled their inhabitants to feel the past. Therefore, different eras had an impact on my interlocutors’ routines, either through a Victorian fireplace or an art deco façade that came to furnish their homes and add ‘heaviness’ or ‘warmth’ to their mood. As Edensor (2002: 140) has argued, the national ‘is processed through the realms of affect and sensuality as much as through cognitive processes of meaning construction and transmission’. Here I am following anthropological perspectives that understand the house not so much as the expression of the family’s settled and previously defined identity, but as the very process whereby people negotiate who they are (see also Clarke 2001; Garvey 2001; Miller 2001). In other words, dwelling is a process that is never concluded, and a technique for self-formation (Foucault 1997). While arranging national categorizations, physical indexes and temporal experiences inside the house, my interlocutors were also forging themselves as British. Inside their homes they had to negotiate their current routines with the material remnants of bygone eras. In this sense, while refurbishing their houses my interlocutors engaged in an evaluation of another (past) form of domesticity. By changing certain features and maintaining others, they negotiated how to insist upon or relinquish that past. The very materiality of the house enabled a combination of family memories and national frameworks. Again, in the same way that Proust wrote a novel in order to address how his memories fitted into his routine and aspirations for the future, my interlocutors enacted such arrangements between past, present and future in their houses. Moreover, while engaging with their houses, my interlocutors not only had to make decisions about how to change or preserve character; they also had to engage with the ways in which other people had related to the past, which materialized in the choices made by previous owners. In this way, while removing old wallpaper, or maintaining a conservatory installed by a previous owner, Clare engaged in a non-verbal ‘dialogue’ about time and character with

Connections of character 69 the other people who had also inhabited her house. The longevity of the house as a constructed object, in comparison to my interlocutors’ lifespans, enabled it to work as a template within which different people could experiment with their own versions of time; time being understood here as something forged by everyday social practices (Munn 1992). During an event discussed in the previous chapter, Clare and one of the charity shop’s customers related secondhand dresses to their memories of youth. In doing so, they built a shared past. In the context of the home, objects and the house itself were the very media through which my interlocutors were able to produce and share narratives and an experience of the past. Often they chose to erase the traces of other people in order to allow their own family to belong. Nevertheless, whenever my interlocutors enjoyed the choices made by previous owners, they maintained them. That is, a previous owner’s personal decision about how to physically arrange the past became something to which my interlocutors could relate, in the same way that my interlocutors enjoyed the re-enactment of a national story in Lucy’s shop. What is important for us (both writer and reader) to recognize with regard to such practices is that when my interlocutors sacrificed their leisure time to work on their houses they were participating in society on another level – they were ‘scaling up’. Through the house they became part of society by becoming part of British history and character. That is, they forged an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 2006 [1983]) with other people who were also involved in preserving character and its connection to the national. This imagined community was also very physical, as the marks of people and the past were all around. Moreover, broader society reciprocally became part of them by entering their individual and familial routines. Within the same movement, my interlocutors were ‘scaled up’ to the national and the national was ‘scaled down’ into family routines. As a consequence, Britain was implicated in the things one bumped into around the house. It was connected to the objects that surrounded my interlocutors. It could be found in the public charity shop, but also in the private domain. Connections to Britain were actualized while an individual was mending bric-a-brac or refurbishing their house. As remnants of the past, houses and objects with character enabled my interlocutors to forge a connection with a British past while simultaneously making this past part of their intimate lives in the present. Not surprisingly, the nation is often discussed through the imagery of home (for example Hage 2000: 40). For my interlocutors, this was not only a discursive strategy, but a connection that they experienced daily. In other words, this was not only a metaphorical relation, but a metonymic one. I realize that I am repeating and insisting upon my argument about the entanglement between the national and the personal. This is intentional, as the pervasiveness of the national in my interlocutors’ intimate routines will help the reader to better grasp what is at stake when the retired residents of the seaside engage in formal politics, which will be discussed in Chapter 4. Beyond that, all of these descriptions are intended to show how the national is daily forged at the seaside through routine practice.

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The nation in practice There are at least two different analytical approaches to the national that we need to consider here. One the one side, in the 1970s and 1980s, nations were mainly defined by social scientists as substantial entities (Brubaker 2009). This strand of scholarship (e.g. Gellner 1983; Smith 1986, 2006 [1983]) has focused on longterm macro-cultural and structural transformations that have contributed to the emergence of nations. This perspective, Rogers Brubaker (2009) argues, tends to treat the nation as something fixed and given: that is, an internally homogeneous bounded group. For Benedict Anderson (2006 [1983]), for example, nation is an ‘imagined political community’ that originated in the need for social continuity after the end of religious paradigms. Once formed, the nation was treated as something static: The groupist social ontology that underlies and informs much writing about ethnicity, race, and nationhood has managed to withstand several decades of constructivist theorizing, including now familiar critiques of reification and essentialism from feminist, poststructuralist, postmodernist, and other theorists. (Brubaker 2009: 28) To move beyond substantialist assumptions, social scientists have discussed the nation as dynamic and processual – and this forms a second strand of analysis of the national. This means avoiding beginning the discussion by defining the nation, which encourages substantialist responses that include an inventory of cultural traits. Instead, they have focused on how the nation works (for example, see Verdery 1993; Calhoun 1997: 4–5; Brubaker 2004; Eley and Suny 1996; Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008; as well as Billig 1995; Edensor 2002; Skey 2011). This is in line with the conceptualization of nationalism as a ‘social phenomenon’ (Gingrich and Banks 2006). Thus, the national is something that people continuously recreate and reproduce through their practices. In other words, initially nation–states had often been seen as the perfect example of Durkheimian conceptions of society: ‘a sort of “super-being” to which individual members quite properly display an attitude of awe’ (Giddens 1991a: 13). That is, nations tend to be portrayed as delimitated systems which have their own inner unity. However, in line with arguments about ordinary ethics (Laidlaw 2013), recent scholarship on nationalism has discussed how the national is negotiated daily. Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss (2008, 540), for example, argue: This is the nation not as the object of talk but rather as an unselfconscious disposition about the national order of things that intermittently informs talk. The nation in this sense is a way of seeing, doing, talking and being that posits and sometimes enacts the unproblematic and naturalizing partition of the world into discrete ethnocultural units.

Connections of character 71 Their argument is in line with Billig’s notion of ‘banal nationalism’ and Skey’s arguments about ‘national thinking’. These perspectives draw attention to the way that nationalism is reproduced not only through being the subject of discussion but in particular through the manner in which this discussion occurs. Eric Hobsbawm (1992 [1983]) can be seen as a precursor to scholars who have drawn attention to the way that national macro-narratives are reproduced in daily life (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008). That is, Hobsbawm addressed the way that history needs to be locally appropriated through ‘invented traditions’ and rituals in order to be assimilated. According to Hobsbawm, when society faces a rapid transformation that destroys old patterns, new (invented) traditions emerge. These new traditions use history as a legitimizing tool to enable group cohesion. Nevertheless, Hobsbawm still differentiated between ‘genuine traditions’ and invented ones, rendering the latter less authentic. This is rather problematic when dealing with my interlocutors’ routines, since their practices, as discussed in Chapter 1, make the past as real and tangible as possible. Here it is useful to consider an anthropological approach to history that emphasizes the way in which the past is never a settled matter, but continuously under construction (Hirsch and Stewart 2005). This means that new engagements with that past are not necessarily less genuine or authentic than others. The idea that the past is linear, fixed and unchangeable is a particularly Western one (ibid.). Through my interlocutors’ visits to charity shops, and the activities in their homes, a national understanding of the world was continuously reproduced. When they decided how best to maintain or update the character of things they were also inevitably discussing how to better interpret the past. Each time they did so they reinvented the nation on their own terms. This does not mean ‘faking’ the nation, but quite the opposite: each of my interlocutors was deeply invested in being as loyal as possible to character and its connection to national history, even though each of them had a different take on what should be done. In their homes they implemented their own creative and subjective appropriations of the nation. They also produced their own versions of authenticity, maintenance and change. Within these kinds of highly personal appropriations of the national very little was said about the colonial aspects of national history. My interlocutors realized that the history of Britain had violent and shameful aspects, such as colonialism and the international slavery trade (see for example Eddo-Lodge 2018: 1–56), but this did not stop them from considering that there were also noble aspects to it. Moreover, all of those mentioned in this chapter shared a working-class upbringing. While some had endured greater economic difficulties than others during their childhood, most referred to some sort of economic constraint in their past. Improving one’s economic situation (and having the resources to buy a house, for example) could be seen as distancing oneself from one’s social origins. The next section considers how my interlocutors dealt with this; after all, connecting to their past was central to their routine.

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Class and home ownership In their 20s, my retired interlocutors benefited from an era when mortgage rates were lower and they were able to buy their houses. The savings from their salaries provided the first deposits for their mortgages, and before reaching the age of 30 they owned their first properties. They told me of their hard work, which was successful for some in that the profit made from the sale of their first house (guaranteed by a growing housing market) provided the deposit for the next. By selling the house for a higher price they were not only able to pay off the previous mortgage but could also put down a higher deposit on the mortgage of their next, and better, house. This enabled people to gradually upgrade their properties. Although the housing market enabled this improvement, mortgages were only available to those who were guaranteed a constant income from a stable job. In this sense, having a secure professional career was still the necessary condition that enabled them to improve their lives. Houses and home ownership have attracted great interest in the UK due to the increase in privately-owned properties during the twentieth century. According to Chris Hamnett (1995: 259), since 1914 a nation of renters has been transformed into a nation of owners. While home ownership was associated with middle-class life in Britain until the beginning of the twentieth century, with the growth of home-ownership opportunities the working classes also slowly gained access to private property. According to Hamnett (1995), the only group that did not gain access to home ownership were unskilled workers. As a consequence, there was not so much a relation between class and ownership as between class and house type. By the end of the last century, professionals and managerial workers in the UK mostly owned detached or semi-detached houses, while other groups largely owned semi-detached or terraced houses or flats (ibid.). Many scholars have debated the ways in which home ownership enables wealth accumulation (Saunders 1978, 1984; Savage, Watt and Arber 1992; Hamnett and Seavers 1994). These scholars have been interested in evaluating whether access to home ownership has allowed people to change broader social structures and overcome situations of oppression. However, Mike Savage, Paul Watt and Sara Arber (1992) have argued that home ownership is not independent of professional status. That is, people still need to have a stable job in order to benefit from house ownership and its potential benefits, as the stories of my interlocutors seem to prove. My interlocutors’ decisions to leave their original towns and join the growing service industry allowed them to buy period houses and enjoy character. Within a Bourdieusian framework, this could be interpreted as social class mobility: they left their original working-class villages and improved their economic standards, entering a middle-class habitus. Not surprisingly, attention to character has been understood as a middle-class strategy for reproducing distinction and controlling space. As mentioned in the Introduction, Michaela Benson and Emma Jackson (2013, 2014) have investigated the ways in which older and retired residents of England use ‘character’ to materialize and naturalize middle-class values and practices.

Connections of character 73 In line with Jackson and Benson, Valerie Walkerdine (2003) has described what happened to her research interlocutor Lisa when she improved her living conditions. Lisa purchased a cottage in a village in the north of England with the proceeds from the sale of a Victorian house that her family had been able to buy through the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme, introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government, which allowed some working-class people to become homeowners. In this new setting, according to Walkerdine, Lisa adopted the style of a rural middleclass businesswoman, looking down on foreigners and people who lived in council houses. In order to inhabit this new self, Lisa had to negate her past: ‘I want to argue that she imagines remaking herself and this demands a complete negation of her Other self’ (Walkerdine 2003: 245). Similar to Lisa, my interlocutors also owned period houses which they were very proud of. Moreover, they also had access to things that previous generations of their families did not: ownership of period houses and comfortable living standards. However, when preserving character – through objects that had history – they were not attempting to detach themselves from their working-class origins; quite the opposite. My interlocutors were interested in how these objects and houses were able to tell and make tangible stories about Britain and their families. Their behaviour towards their houses was very different to Walkerdine’s description of Lisa. Lynva, Clare, Peter, Julie and others were not using the consumption of heritage to ‘negate’ their other selves or childhoods. Instead, objects with character and period houses were linked to their ‘other’, their poor selves. The brandy bottle was always on top of the fridge to remind Lynva of where she came from, just like Peter’s father’s medals in the hallway. Although Peter’s family had not benefitted from house ownership in the past, his father had served in the war and was therefore directly implicated in a British history of which the Edwardian period was part. Even though his father served in the army in the 1940s, and the term Edwardian refers to an earlier period, both still fit within a British temporal framework. Therefore, by combining medals and the house Peter also combined his personal memories and a British past. He constructed a past in which he and the house belonged together. There was no displacement of who Peter once was, just an ‘amplification’ (Keane 2006) of it. That is, the materiality of character offered an opportunity to connect past and present, and nationalist thinking emerged as a particularly useful strategy for this (re)connection. Similarly, when Julie put her father’s sketches beside the old fireplace in her cottage, like Peter she produced a past in which her working-class stories and the old house with character belonged together. Although she came from a working-class family of traders, she was still able to perceive her period house as a way to connect to her relatives. Instead of facing some kind of ‘survival guilt’ (Walkerdine 2003: 243) or ‘classed diaspora’ (Hey 2003: 321) for having achieved a comfortable financial position, my interlocutors invested their finances and physical effort in period houses that helped them to connect with and feel the past. They still bought Laura Ashley, used eBay and other modern appliances, and transformed their houses to fulfil their daily needs. However, all of this had to be

74 Connections of character carefully negotiated with character in order not to risk removing ‘the heart and soul’ of things. Claims about character do not, therefore, reflect an avoidance of change, but rather a commitment to a particular kind of change, one that respects the physical indexes of the past. This ethnographic investigation of character in Margate and the nearby areas demonstrates that although some of the features of ‘character’ used to belong to the middle and upper classes, my interlocutors appropriated them in a way that was linked to their working-class memories. This is possibly due to the fact that such objects allowed for different engagements with the past. Similar to the practices I observed in Margate, Cathrine Degnen and Katharine Tyler (2017b) have discussed the way that old buildings in Dodworth index multiple generations’ personal histories, experiences and sense of belonging to the town. Degnen and Tyler present the case of Wentworth Castle, which was owned by the Earls of Stafford from the eighteenth century onwards but after World War II came to be owned by the local council, as happened to many other English country houses. This castle was ‘an index of substantial shifts in broader socio-economic and political epochs of British history’ (Degnen and Tyler 2017b: 44). As a consequence, despite its upper-class symbolism the castle figured in their working-class interlocutors’ memories and experiences of the town, connecting all of them to a broader national narrative. As I have been arguing, the notion of character suggests a specific way of considering change: one that connects ethics and aesthetics. My interlocutors’ practices show the ways in which they recurrently turned to the materiality of things to evaluate what kinds of changes should or should not occur. Nurturing the physical connection between past and present was a central strategy for living a good, respectful life; in other words, an ethical life. The situations described above demonstrate that the acquisition of certain old objects did not only or necessarily represent an attempt by my interlocutors to improve their status within a given social structure, but also an opportunity for self-construction while reconnecting with their upbringings. In other words, while some working-class people who have achieved a comfortable financial position try to construct an ‘other’ middle-class self that ignores their upbringing (Walkerdine 2003), my interlocutors were aware of their origins and tried to construct a daily life that respected the past: They say you do things to become middle class, but that’s not it. You don’t do it for the name. You do it so maybe you have a little better work conditions and comfort. I did it for my family. I didn’t want my children to go down the [coal-mining] pit like all my brothers did … And now I don’t know which class my children are – they aren’t middle class but they also aren’t working class. In this quotation, Lynva discusses her discomfort with the fact that her attempt to build a better life might be read as an attempt to improve her status. She showed me on many occasions that she was proud of her social origins. ‘Made in Britain’

Connections of character 75 objects and period houses often helped her to tell me stories about the ‘old days’, as I know that she also did with her grandchildren. Thus, in this context Britain was not only a topic of political debates but an important part of my interlocutors’ intimate routines. People’s homes enabled them to bring together memories of their working-class upbringings and provided contemporary access to comfort and financial stability. Similarly, multiple remnants of the past found around town enabled them to forge a more general (British) register of belonging, allowing them to connect past and present.

Nationalism outside the home Remembrance Day Similar to what took place at the charity shop and inside my interlocutors’ houses, a national past was often apparent among the different versions of the past that emerged in practices around town. The connection between Margate and Britain was evident in particular on holidays that were intended to celebrate the nation. For example, 11 November is Remembrance Day, the day on which World War I ended and on which all of the soldiers who have died for Britain in wars are commemorated. Every year many ceremonies take place on Remembrance Sunday, the closest Sunday to 11 November. These ceremonies usually involve a set of rituals. Some of my friends spent Remembrance Sunday in the traditional way. This included watching the Queen lead the official service, wearing poppies – fabric flowers that symbolize the hope that emerged after the war, according to my interlocutors – or participating in a two-minute silence, held during meetings in areas of town that were bombed, to honour those who died in the war. Not everybody agrees about the proper way to narrate this episode of human history. For example, John McCrae’s (2015 [1915]) poem Flanders Fields describes how poppies bloomed on the graves of dead soldiers, bringing a message of hope that life may emerge in the most unexpected places. McCrae was not necessarily questioning the war itself. Wilfred Owen’s (1920) Dulce et Decorum Est, on the other hand, focuses on the tragedies and horror of the war, clearly condemning it.1 Moreover, in the UK there is still very little public acknowledgement of the way that Britain specifically relied on colonial power to recruit Indian, African and Caribbean soldiers (Eddo-Lodge 2018: 11). During my research I always allowed for conversations about nationalism and wars to emerge spontaneously, and if the opportunity presented itself I asked further questions. My interlocutors often explicitly and spontaneously said that they were strongly against wars; for example, the fact that the UK had sent troops to Iraq under Tony Blair’s government. On the other hand, this did not mean they would not remember or show respect for those who had died in wars. Clare and Peter were what she called grave ‘adopters’. That is, they assumed responsibility for taking care of the grave of a soldier who died in World War I. His name was William. Clare talked quite fondly of William, who was very young

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when he died. She knew about him because the organization that created the ‘adopters’ scheme provided information about the people buried in each grave. To Clare, remembrance had a material presence in her life, in the form of William’s grave. Although Remembrance Sunday was especially important for celebrating William, taking care of the grave required work and effort all year round. Therefore, it was not only on Remembrance Sunday that their connection with William was experienced. According to Clare, every couple of months she and Peter would go to the graveyard to take care of William. ‘We can’t let William down. He must look pretty. It’s like he is real … I’m mad’, she said, suddenly realizing the way she was talking about William. ‘But he did exist at one time’, she continued. On Remembrance Sunday a service took place at the graveyard. All of the adopters attended the event and placed fabric poppies on the graves. They then observed a two-minute silence out of respect for those who had died in wars. Therefore, Clare felt she was part of an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 2006 [1983]) of British people. This was an experience that she was happy to share with a Brazilian anthropologist (i.e. me), without ever making me feel excluded from such practices. I had also been invited to take part in other Remembrance commemorations, which showed that in practice such events do not necessarily work to exclude people of other nationalities, as one might expect, although obviously not everyone would or should be interested in taking part in them. Through these practices the ‘imaged community’ was also physically real and present. In the same way that the past left marks on the objects found in the charity shop, on Remembrance Day people also addressed the marks left behind by national history. In the same way that my interlocutors attempted to protect the character of a 1950s bracelet, so they tried to maintain the physical indexes of the past around town. For example, Clare showed me William’s grave. It was a hollow rectangle made of concrete. As William came from Scotland, previous adopters had filled the middle with Scottish stones. However, Clare and Peter found out that these were not the right stones, since they were not from the specific area from which William was supposed to have come, and they intended to change them as soon as they had enough money to do so. Therefore, in the same way that Edwards’ (1998) interlocutors expressed a preference for specific materials connected with the history of their area (as discussed in the previous chapter), here the right way to pay homage to William was to reproduce this material connection to the area that he came from. Thus, William was a young Scottish soldier who fought for Britain in the war, who is now buried in England and has been adopted by an Irish–English couple. Through William, a connection between England, Northern Ireland and Scotland was continuously reproduced. The national past was, therefore, very physically felt and experienced. The national past was made present. While taking care of William, Clare also remembered the relatives she had lost in war, and took the opportunity to tell me some of their stories. As Clare put it: ‘This is something for my husband and I to do together’. Also during Remembrance Sunday, in a memorial service in Trinity Square in Margate, people remembered the bombing of Holy Trinity Church during the

Connections of character 77 war. During the national commemoration the town became a large garden of fabric poppies; the whole town transformed into the national. Through various rituals the town of Margate was transformed into Britain. All of these rituals reminded my interlocutors that they ‘shall not forget’, as they often said. Britain emerged whenever character led to a national version of the past. As a consequence, the exact soil that constitutes Margate, and the exact buildings that distinguish its seaside, also allowed people to connect to Britain. Britain was not only the larger territory of which Margate was a part, but another aspect of Margate’s exact territory. According to my interlocutors, rituals such as these worked to remind them that the history of Britain is implicated in the very materiality of their town; in its pillars, stones, graves and squares. All of these contain Britain’s past in their biographies, and therefore in their materiality. That is, the passing of time has left marks that have altered the very soil on which my interlocutors live. The remnants of bombs can still be found here and there, and on a couple of occasions while I was conducting my fieldwork the train system had to stop because a buried bomb had been discovered. In that sense, the war was still physically experienced; not in the way that Owen (1920) describes it, as pure horror, but as part of family memories that came to influence people’s routines in Margate. Here we can consider the ethics of memory again and evaluate how ethical it is to speak about wars in these terms. From an outside perspective, such commemoration could be interpreted as a celebration of what had happened. This would be problematic, as it would suggest some sort of idealization of horrific times. While following and observing my interlocutors, however, I had the sense that the commemorations were more an act of mourning than a celebration of something they treasured. Márcio Seligmann-Silva (2006), for example, has considered the importance of mourning rituals after human tragedies, while Kehl (2009) has drawn attention to the fact that the act of forgetting often has more to do with the capitalist rhythm of productivity than with an attempt to avoid historical tragedies in the future. As a consequence, recalling the past did not necessarily mean attempting to reproduce it exactly as it was, but was rather the beginning of a process of remembrance during which my interlocutors could come to terms with what had happened. Although they did not verbalize the psychoanalytical advantage of these practices, now and then they provided glimpses of what was going on, in references to relatives and discussions about the pain of the war and what they could do to be respectful of it all. Even if they had not been in the war themselves, the war had been present in their upbringings – in the solitude of Peter’s father, for example. As in the charity shop, by finding the indexes of the past around town my retired interlocutors had the opportunity to consider who they had been, who they were now, and how these things came together. This was not only a mental evaluation; it was also a sensory experience. However, this does not mean that problematic conceptions of nation and nationalism – those that promote exclusion, violent discourses and racism – do not circulate in the UK. Nevertheless, social analysis is, among other things, an attempt to tease these differences apart.

78 Connections of character The local History Society If the relevance of Britain and its dense entanglement with the local territory can be seen during the practices on Remembrance Sunday, a national celebration, it can also be observed in less ritualized and more trivial engagements around town. An example was one of the local history societies, the members of which met once a month at a local church to research the history of the area (Balthazar 2019).2 It was 10 am on a Saturday morning when I attended the History Society for the first time. There, volunteers sold tea and popular homemade scones for 50p. There were around 50 people, most of whom were over 65. People were talking to each other, and we were soon directed into the church hall by someone who appeared to be the leader of the event. I will call her Sonia. In the church hall, Sonia and other members of the society presented and shared their research findings: photos, archives and objects. As previously mentioned, churches in England are often used for non-religious events. Sonia was not born in the area. She had come there to teach wealthy local children, and soon became the churchwarden, which made her responsible for the production of an inventory of everything in the building. One day, while carrying out her duties, she found some documents that proved the existence of a connection between the royal family and the local church. This piece of information triggered her curiosity, encouraging her to pursue a doctorate in history and research Thanet’s past. This accomplishment resulted in local respect for Sonia. She was around five feet tall, with curly grey hair and glasses, and at that initial meeting was dressed in a grey skirt and soft pink cardigan. Under her guidance the members of the society gathered to research the history of the area, using local library files, the internet, personal documents donated to the church and anything else that they could find. They produced quarterly newsletters about their latest research and sold booklets. Sonia explained how the research process took place: The documents look like this. These are birth, marriage, death, and baptism records. In them you can find out quite a lot of information. For example, the marriage certificate always has the bride and groom’s families’ addresses, their occupations, status, etc. And they also say who witnessed the ceremony, allowing us to understand who was connected to whom. What I love to see is how professions change over time. One person could be a professional in one document, and then have gentrified in another. She also explained that although she was not interested in buying old objects, she often benefited from donations that helped to reconstruct local history: ACB: Do you ever go to shops to try to find some archives? Sonia: Some people do, I don’t. There is this local auction every month and some people go. But I haven’t the room for that anyway; I can just keep a small

Connections of character 79 number. Sometimes people give me things and I accept for the social interest of it. ACB: What you mean? Sonia: The other day someone gave me a prize cup for a sports competition from an old boy’s school in the area. But what I was really interested in was the list of prizes that came with it: tea knives, for example. Why would a child be interested in a collection of tea knives? This tells us a little bit of the social history of the time. It’s like this photo in which you can see that by that time all boys wore sandals. It helps you to picture an image of how those people lived. Here, Sonia was using objects from an old, local all-boys boarding school to investigate the sort of life they had probably had at that time. Documents relating to the different local families enabled the mapping of their connections, and objects enabled my interlocutors to ‘picture’ the people they were researching. Together those objects and documents reconstructed the past. Another very active member of the History Society was George, who had been researching the history of a local house he was fond of. He was around 70, and retired. Through newspaper archives, library documents and the internet, George had tracked down all of the owners of this house and its history. In 1967 the house was knocked down, and the land was used for the construction of the modern building that stands there today. My interlocutors often spoke about places that no longer physically existed, such as the house that was being researched by George. When I asked Sonia if she knew the history of her own house, she explained that she lived in a modern flat but knew the history of everyone who had lived in the block: ‘I probably know more about them than I know about the people who are around me. I have been living with them for 20 years now’. Like Clare, who talked about William as if he were alive, Sonia ‘lived’ with the people she researched. It would be easy to describe my interlocutors as ‘irrationals’ for talking about people who were no longer alive, and Clare herself acknowledged how strange it might sound. What I hope the reader realized after reading the previous chapter, in which I analyzed the experience of character, is that the sensory stimuli of such objects – indexes of the past – are quite powerful in generating feelings and making the past present. In that sense, my interlocutors obviously realized that these people were dead, but they were trying to verbalize or acknowledge the ways in which they could still be felt in spite of this, just as Catherine ‘felt’ the woman who had dropped food on her dress (Chapter 1). While describing her fieldwork in Dodworth, Degnen (2005) uses the concept of the ‘three-dimensionality of memory’ to explain how she could see the absent people and places remembered by her interlocutors as she walked around the town. Degnen (2005: 739) argues that ‘people do not “layer” meaning onto the otherwise unchanging physical forms of the environment. Rather, they construct relationships with place’. That is, memory transforms people’s experiences of the landscape. Similar to Degnen, my interlocutors envisaged Margate and the nearby areas as something more than a physical territory or objective space.

80 Connections of character They engaged with the town (its monuments, buildings and houses) in terms of its temporal elements. Sonia engaged with one of the local churches in terms of its connections to the royal family, and George engaged with a house that no longer existed. The past, as Degnen has described, was not a ‘layer’ of history placed upon things, but delivered a particular experience and connection to the area. The same thing happened at the local charity shop, where the past connected to objects and enabled a particular experience of the shop and other people. Both inside and outside the shop, a British past and a local past were continuously made present. The whole town enabled the madeleine moments described in the previous chapter. Furthermore, in the same way that old objects in the charity shop triggered people’s memories and helped them to produce a shared narrative about the past, within the History Society people shared their views about the town’s past and its connections to national discourses. Once again, the community was not only ‘imagined’ (Anderson 2006 [1983]). Relationships were built through people’s shared interests in the past. A British town The character of Margate, the town itself, was often associated with a ‘kiss me quick’ culture. As my interlocutors explained, this related to their memories of childhood, when the working classes used to go to the seaside to enjoy the beach and its playful atmosphere at least twice a year. These cheerful scenes at the beach relate to a very traditional image of the British seaside. ‘Well, when you arrive in Margate and you see the bay and the city architecture, if you were brought up in England, you used to come to places like this for holidays’, said an artist who had recently moved to live in the area. According to this artist, it is Margate’s potential to relate to other seaside memories (‘places like this’) that attracts people to the area. Therefore, even when my interlocutors treasured Margate as a fun environment within which they could enjoy the beach, their appreciation of the area applies to many British seaside towns. In this sense, Margate’s beach can be valued as a British memory. Not surprisingly, the British seaside is often associated with images of decay and obsolescence. After all, it is an area where people (residents or visitors) are invited to enter a different temporal experience, one that does not obey the rhythm of productivity. The shared awareness of character invites everyone to feel the past. At the British seaside time seems to follow a different clock (or no clock). This different temporality has positive and negative implications: on the one hand, Margate is often associated with the playfulness and joy of childhood; on the other, the town has become synonymous with decay and the negative images commonly associated with older age (see Degnen 2018). This can be seen, for example, in Martin Parr’s and Tony Ray-Jones’ popular photographs of the British seaside. Images of children and old people seem to represent this ‘other time’, which is not the time of the productive adult. The ‘other’ temporality experienced at the seaside has also meant that it has often been a destination for retreats.

Connections of character 81 After learning about my research, Gregory, another member of the History Society, suggested that I follow a guided walk organized by the Royal Geographical Society. A document promoting the walk explained that ‘On this walk you’ll discover the origins of this traditional seaside resort and see how it evolved from a small fishing village to become the home of one of Europe’s most influential art galleries’ (Royal Geographical Society 2014: 4). The document then described a three-and-a-half-mile walk around the town, during which one would encounter different historical artefacts (buildings, signs, statues, etc.) that help to tell the story of the place. The name of this project was ‘Discovering Britain’. In the same way that people in the History Society were continually invested in connecting the past and the local area, here Gregory and the Royal Geographical Society encouraged me to pay attention to certain buildings in order to discover Britain. Simply put, the houses, shops and objects that furnished the town could and often were associated with Britain, together with the beach and historical monuments. In the charity shop one could find a vase that was ‘Made in Britain’, in Lucy’s shop British flags and memorabilia of the war could be appreciated, and war monuments and Edwardian houses could be encountered around the town, together with the national colours and flags that decorated the children’s play equipment on the beach. By inhabiting Margate, my interlocutors were directly engaging with Britain and producing connections and disconnections to forge themselves as British. What this chapter has shown is that the production and celebration of the nation is not an isolated practice that happens once a year on Remembrance Day, but something in which my interlocutors invested their energy throughout the year. During their daily routine in their houses and in shops, they encountered remnants of the past that allowed a connection to a British past to emerge. As

Figure 2.1 A castle made of sand with flags on top

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a consequence, dates of national importance were directly connected with my interlocutors’ daily routines. Therefore, Britain was more broadly experienced on those nationally important dates, but more intimately experienced inside the house, such as when my interlocutors redecorated their fireplaces. In contemporary Margate the national was not only the work of the state but also the work of the general population. My interlocutors worked to sell ‘Made in Britain’ objects, they worked in their British houses and they worked to take care of William’s grave. Imagined communities (Anderson 2006 [1983]) and concrete relatedness were forged during national rituals, inside the charity shop with people they had just met or when they were alone or with their spouses at home. While doing these things, they appropriated the nation on their own terms. In turn, what is particularly interesting about these practices is that they enabled those of my interlocutors who were not born and bred in the area to connect to their origins. This will be further discussed in the next and final section of this chapter.

Nationalism and class Imogen Tyler (2013) has argued that the British citizenship promoted in politics and the media in the post-war period was an identity formulated in opposition to class, slowly dissolving class allegiances. Britain became a ‘nation of citizens’ that – inspired by the works of authors such as John Maynard Keynes, William Beveridge and Thomas Humphrey Marshall – should promote equality and political solidarity across social classes through the welfare state. This process of ‘individualization’ intensified under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, which came to power in 1979. According to Tyler, Thatcher acquired support for austerity measures following a common neoliberal strategy of using the 1970s economic recession to leverage people’s fear. The welfare state and, in turn, nonBritish citizens, were blamed for the crisis (Tyler 2013). Tyler’s arguments are definitely important and compelling. However, what is interesting in all of the ethnographic situations described in this chapter is that through the ‘the history in things’ the connection between the working classes and British history is not ignored, but reinforced and celebrated in a different way. The group of retired people with whom I engaged came from various places across the UK in Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. They moved away from their original homes and towns by making use of contemporary resources provided by the government – for example, the greater availability of mortgages and state-funded education – and improved their financial situations. Within this context of mobility, national thinking emerges through the mediation of character as a way to connect past and present as well as different people in town. People from different parts of the UK who had recently retired to Margate and the surrounding areas shared memories intimately connected to British narratives. This happened, for example, in the charity shop when people who did not know each other found a common topic of conversation after encountering an object with ‘Made in Britain’ character. In houses, a British past – materialized

Connections of character 83 in the house itself – connected couples’ memories and the pasts of the house and the nation. Therefore, an attention to the national does not necessarily generate an ‘atomization’ or ‘individualization’ (Tyler 2013), but rather other kinds of engagements between people. More importantly, it seems that it is the very character of things that allows for this ‘scale shift’ from class to nation. If there were no sensory stimuli helping to create experiences of the past that make the national tangible, political claims about British citizenship would probably not be as effective. I have shown in this chapter that if we provisionally ignore what is happening in formal politics or the media we can see that the national continues to be reproduced by lay people, and that it is effective as such, generating relationships and connecting to the values of their upbringings. This is why nationalism is not the result of the passive assimilation of political propaganda, a claim that I presented and disputed in the Introduction. Is this consolidation of nationalism helping to silence class oppression? Probably yes, in the sense that discourses about the national, especially political ones, often mention a ‘mobility’ that is not available to all (Skeggs 1997, 2004, 2005). This, in turn, could encourage us to see my interlocutors’ practices as in line with a political agenda that claims geographical and social mobility and regeneration, while obscuring class issues and social inequality. However, an ethnographic approach to such practices shows the complex negotiations that such ‘mobility’ involves. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Bourdieusian (1984) arguments tend to frame working-class mobility as ‘upward mobility’ within a social hierarchy. What I am trying to show is that my interlocutors have their own conceptions of what kind of ‘mobility’ and ‘change’ is ethically acceptable, and these usually involve a consideration of character. That is, my interlocutors did not simply freely create new connections between people and places, as encouraged by neoliberal discourses about the subject (Walkerdine 2003). Following my interlocutors’ reasoning, this free arrangement of people and things would be a modern construct. However, if a concrete remnant of the past (an object with character, an index) is found, this object may help to inspire changes. In other words, the character of objects may inspire self-revision and formation. As argued in Chapter 1, there is an important affinity between ethics and aesthetics here. It is the notion of character (understood as a temporal index) and the connections it affords that inspire my interlocutors to change. Physical things mediate between different forms of identification with the past. Moreover, the physical thing itself, which allows for this scale shift between class and nation identifications, also connects class and nation in the sense that they cease to be opposing discourses (whether political or not). As shown in the case of Lynva, old ‘Made in Britain’ objects enabled her to engage in consumption practices without forgetting her family history in the coal mines, in very much the same way that an old house enabled Julie to move from South London to Thanet while continuing to feel intimately connected to her history and memories. Finally, while adopting a grave in Thanet, Clare and her husband generated a sense of belonging to Britain that encompassed their multiple nationalities; that is, an Irish woman married to an English man who together have

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‘adopted’ the Scottish William. Therefore, my interlocutors neither experienced the ‘freedom’ (Laidlaw 2013) to build themselves, nor were deterministically defined by their class origins (as in Bourdieu 1984); they actualized their family values and ethics (especially regarding character) in their own ways. As part of these events, the nation inhabits domains such as the market, the home and the very constitution of nature – materialized here in Margate’s beach. To reduce the national to a tool of political parties is to ignore its power, strength and relevance to everyday practices. This chapter has shown that nationalist sentiments are intertwined with people’s lives far beyond the ballot box, profoundly transforming the role of the nation in their routines. However, there is one problem: in experiencing the national past, they not only make sense of their individual trajectories, but also envisage a particular future for their town (in reference to such past). This envisaged future clashes with the current regeneration plans for Margate, and is something that my interlocutors were intensely engaged in, for example, when they protested to maintain Manston Airport. The next chapter discusses the ways in which the local council’s regeneration project appropriated the past, and its disconnections from my interlocutors’ understanding of character. In the remaining chapters of the book we will come to understand what kinds of practices have challenged my interlocutors’ ways of living, and how they turn to nationalist populism as a strategy to fight for the ethics (and character) they believe in.

Notes 1 This comparison between the two poems is made by Ravit Reichman in the course The Ethics of Memory at Brown University: https://www.edx.org/course/the-ethics-of -memory 2 Part of this ethnographic description of the History Society was first published in the chapter ‘From Houses and Grandparents to Brexit’ (Balthazar 2019), in the volume Cycles of Hatred and Rage, edited by Katherine Donahue and Patricia Heck. I call it ‘the History Society’ instead of its original name to protect the privacy of my interlocutors.

3

Disconnections of character A town undergoing regeneration

The previous chapter described how my interlocutors’ engagement with character often led to nationalist practices, turning the national into something personal and very concretely shared by residents of the seaside. This chapter continues to discuss the practices of my retired interlocutors while also considering local and regional councils’ plans for the area. It will demonstrate how official institutions and different social groups developed varied ways of engaging with character, often leading to a disconnection between their understandings of it. My argument is that such disconnections have contributed to the emergence of the kind of sentiments that have led my interlocutors to commit to right-wing politics. Moreover, the objective of the chapter is to show that although economic frameworks help to map the social oppression endured by segments of the population, they limit our understanding of certain temporal practices taking place in the area. I will show that an emphasis on economic motivations helps to conceal my retired interlocutors’ efforts to maintain the character of place. By attending to the ways in which their ethical concerns contributed to particular engagements with time, we may understand how they came to support Brexit.

Local regeneration and the creative industries As mentioned in the Introduction, the area of Thanet where I conducted my research is regionally administrated by Kent County Council (KCC). KCC intends to grow the local ‘creative industries’ sector in order to overcome the economic stagnation that the area experienced after the 2008 financial crash. In the case of Margate, the situation was already difficult before the crash, and the town had been defined as a ‘pocket of deprivation’ (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister 2004). In its 2010–2015 vision for the county, KCC’s goal was to transform Kent into a leader in the field of visual arts, which would also leverage tourism (Kent County Council 2010). Although there is a more recent plan for the county (Kent County Council 2017), here I will focus on the earlier one, which first led to the changes analyzed in this research. In order to attract the creative industries, it became essential to invest in and support ‘culture’, ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ (Kent County Council 2010). The plan recognized that the UK had moved from a manufacturing economy

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to a growing knowledge-based economy which could increasingly benefit from creativity and the arts: ‘Creative industries account for 6,4% of UK GDP and grew at 5% per year between 1997 and 2007, compared to 3% for the rest of the economy’ (Kent County Council 2010: 7). Therefore, culturally-led regeneration would revitalize the economy. Relevant to the discussion in this book is the understanding of character put forward in KCC’s plan. In this document character refers to the distinctive identity of the area. The plan also considered the county’s cultural heritage, with the intention of protecting the historic environment and buildings while in parallel setting ambitious targets for new housing development. Kent … is one of the few areas of the UK that has a very strong and clear identity, easily located on a map by most UK residents. Kent is rich in folklore and has played a critical role in the history of our country. It is environmentally and geologically distinctive, giving it a strong character. It comprises buildings, monuments, buried archaeological heritage from early human remains at Swanscombe, prehistoric megalithic tombs in Medway valley, Roman forts and historic towns to the remains of our industrial heritage and twentieth century defence sites. (Kent County Council 2010: 15) According to this document, ‘character’ would help to transform the area into a tourist destination, as such distinctiveness could easily be used as a marketing feature. Artists were seen to have a pioneering role in reasserting the character of the area: We are making places so poorly that we need artists to re-assert the stories and sense of place … When something is taken away by the process of regeneration artists are often brought in to ‘put back’ sense of place. Look first at what defines the character of place. (Blanc and Surtees 2009, in Kent County Council 2010: 21) In other words, artists were considered to be the suitable people to ‘put character back’, which is something in which my interlocutors, although not artists, were also invested, as seen in Chapters 1 and 2. Additionally, the document recognized that such historic environments could promote a sense of belonging and community engagement. Therefore, the KCC plan was concerned with ensuring that participation was open for all. It emphasized the importance of being experimental and taking risks in order ‘to engage as wide a range of people as possible in cultural activity’ (Kent County Council 2010: 26). This economic strategy reproduced ideas put forward by the urban studies theorist Richard Florida (2012; see also Pratt 2008 for a better understanding of the debate) in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Florida developed the term ‘creative

Disconnections of character 87 class’ to describe a new emerging class of programmers, designers and information workers in the USA (a term soon imported to the UK). The fundamental economic drive of this class, according to Florida, was ‘creativity’. He argued that it was important to grow a creative community in order to boost economic development. In line with Florida’s arguments, the KCC project emphasized that some segments of the population were central to the creative development of the county: ‘We will prioritise the visual arts so that artists, artists’ studio providers and visual arts audiences will come to Kent confident that they will be welcomed and rewarded’ (Kent County Council 2010: viii). The displacement caused by the Olympic Park developments in East London was seen as an opportunity to attract the visual arts community to Kent (ibid.: 13). While attributing the capacity to ‘put the past back’ to artists, the document ignored the different people and multiple ambitions involved in negotiations of character. It identified just one kind of legitimate social actor for properly engaging with and restoring character: the artist coming from London. Moreover, together with a simplistic definition of character there seemed to be a particular definition of innovation and change: ‘We want to tell our own story about Kent by interpreting the past in a way that is relevant for today’ (Kent County Council 2010: 16). Within this context, ‘relevant for today’ inevitably meant that which was capable of attracting visitors from outside. Consequently, this discourse connected character to such visitors. Beyond that, the most sensitive aspect of the document was the argument that the creative arts were necessary for building communities and helping people to come to terms with change. Although the arts may be helpful, this framing encourages a mindset that ignores the fact that local residents, being ethical individuals rather than victims, might already have their own strategies for this. Put differently, the document seemed to suggest that creativity needs to be brought from London in the form of arts professionals who can help locals to create communities. Even though the document did not intend to go against the wishes of people in Margate, it did not offer a framework capable of recognizing the varied ways in which people may engage with change and produce different logics of transformation. As discussed in the previous chapters, my retired interlocutors have been involved in complex evaluative processes about how to properly change places, and they independently put great effort (and responsibility) into producing community. The very way that the council’s strategy and argument were constructed – only recognizing certain types of (artistic) practices as creative – produced exclusion. As we will observe throughout the chapter, this appropriation of character differs from that of my retired interlocutors’ engagements, which prioritized the local people. As the reader has probably realized by now, this analysis will inevitably deal with the relationship between regeneration and gentrification, but my aim is to show that there is more to this than a matter of economic oppression. The next sections describe some of the consequences of the ideas proposed in the KCC vision.

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The politics of depriving a town As mentioned in the Introduction, Margate has been defined as a ‘pocket of deprivation’ by central government (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister 2004). Tyler (2013) argues that since the 1970s neoliberal modes of capitalism have relied on the production of abject subjects and stereotypes of people and places. Such stereotypes help to create an image of crisis and promote anxiety and fear that, in turn, will lead to public consent for austerity policies and border-control regimes. As an example, Tyler discusses how, under the neoliberalism of New Labour, there emerged in the UK a powerful consensus that council estates were abject border zones within the state (Tyler 2013: 159). Therefore, instead of promoting public policies to support the improvement of council estates, the government blamed individuals for their economic situation. Council estates were used to build an image of crisis and justify austerity measures. According to Tyler, ‘class struggle is struggle against classification’ (2013: 173, italics in original). This means that social oppression should be understood primarily as a naming practice. For example, the fact that council estates were deemed negative by the government generated negative behaviour towards the people who lived in those areas. In a manner similar to what happened at St Ann’s, as mentioned in the Introduction, this outside stigmatization silenced the residents of council estates and limited their access to different areas of society, which reinforced their exclusion and poverty. As a consequence, it is the (political) formulas of naming and what these names ‘have done to our thinking’ that we should be aware of (Tyler 2013). Following Tyler, we could interpret the events taking place in Margate – the act of defining a ‘crisis’ and a ‘deprived’ town, and the need for regeneration – as part of a political project consolidating itself by creating ‘abjects’ (Tyler 2013). In the same way that council estates were deemed negative, Margate was deemed a ‘dumping ground’ (The Centre for Social Justice 2013: 6). As a solution, a local regeneration project was put forward by the council, to which there was a critical local reaction in Margate and the nearby areas. In 2012, the TV presenter and retail and marketing specialist Mary Portas concluded a review of the future of the UK’s high streets. The then Prime Minister David Cameron asked the Department for Communities and Local Government to lead the government’s response to her recommendations, including setting up the Portas Pilot project, which would invest in different ‘deprived’ areas (Department for Communities and Local Government 2013). Margate’s Town Team, a voluntary organization, won a grant of over £100,000 from the Portas Pilot: An area of high deprivation and low income, Margate has been labelled as ‘Britain’s second worst ghost town’ with its 36.1 per cent vacancy rate. Margate’s Portas Pilot will turn the town’s fortunes, putting education and enjoyment at the heart of its transformation. Empty shops will be used for an enterprise centre and courses, ‘job club’ services and pop up shops. A new quality market will be opened with stalls offered to entrepreneurs, and

Disconnections of character 89 website, free public WIFI, high street co-ordinator, marketing material and work to improve the look of the local area also help revitalise Margate. (Department for Communities and Local Government 2012) Therefore, the initiative would contribute to Margate’s regeneration process. In this official discourse nothing was said about the way that what already existed in Margate could play an important role in the lives of people who lived there. As a consequence, anything in town that did not correspond to the vibrant economy that the government had planned for the area was easily framed as decay and deprivation, in need of a ‘turn of fortune’ – a framing that leaves no space for us to consider the validity of temporal practices that do not correspond to the capitalist rhythm of productivity. During its execution the project gave rise to many conflicts, including the withdrawal of some members of the Town Team who did not agree with what was being done with the money. Particularly disruptive was the fact that Portas was forbidden to enter some of the local establishments, as they felt that she was attempting to benefit by depicting local residents badly on TV. Until recently it was not clear to many locals what had been done with the money, and I have attended local meetings with some of my retired interlocutors in search of answers. Nevertheless, the reactions of some High Street shop owners to Portas were especially relevant to my research. Some were very disturbed by the fact that Portas suggested during one of the public meetings that they needed to be filmed and appear on her TV show in order to receive financial support from the government. In local newspapers and on social media these shop owners claimed that Portas was taking advantage of taxpayers’ money to ridicule them on TV and thus attract a larger audience. They also questioned the extent to which the High Street required regeneration. The owner of a cider bar in Old Town (which did not fall within the area initially targeted for investment) tried to explain the conflict in one of the national newspapers: On the side that I’d be included in, ultimate gentrification is the goal. But I hesitate over it. Obviously it becomes safer and more relaxed, but I don’t think material aims should be our priority. I don’t know that turning everything into a coffee shop is a good thing. (Williams 2012) In this statement we observe two issues that are important for understanding Margate. First, as the shop owner puts it, there are at least two ‘sides’ to the town: Old Town, of which he considers himself to be a part, and the ‘other’. Secondly, there is ambivalence and scepticism towards a regeneration project that might turn everything into a ‘coffee shop’. After much protest from locals, Portas retracted what she had said and worked with those who welcomed her. This scepticism towards regeneration projects and the way people would be portrayed on TV is in line with Tyler’s (2013) arguments about the relation

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between naming strategies and class struggle. The High Street shop owners worried that they would be badly represented by the media. As Tyler (ibid.) has also discussed, the point is not to question the extent to which such names represent reality, but to investigate the context within which they are produced and what they are used for; for example, whether they are used to reproduce social oppression and silence people. The following sections investigate the potential oppressive outcomes of the council’s plan. However, while most scholars have focused on the economic oppression involved in regeneration projects, I will emphasize temporal oppression. I will demonstrate that the council’s plan encouraged the multiplication of practices that ignored and sometimes displaced my retired interlocutors’ temporal experiences, which were described in the previous chapters; that is, regeneration projects enact an ‘emptying of time’ (Giddens 1991a) that preclude my interlocutors from engaging with character on their own terms. The intention here is not to vilify the strategy adopted by the council, but to offer a critical analysis that will later help in the understanding of the political turmoil taking place in the area. The following sections consider the promotion of the local arts scene and the refurbishment of a traditional amusement park as part of the council’s strategy to regenerate the area.

A new art gallery in town ‘It’s like a bus shelter’ In light of the government’s categorization of Margate as a deprived area, one of the strategies employed for its regeneration and development was the opening of the Turner Contemporary gallery on Margate’s seafront in 2011. The gallery has no permanent exhibitions, but presents contemporary international artists who have a conceptual connection with the British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), after whom the gallery is named. The intention was to recreate a connection between Margate and Turner, who used to come to the area to work. The gallery is a modern, off-white, high-ceilinged, concrete and glass building with multiple rooms (see Figure 3.1). While exhibitions and community events (such as the knitting club and children’s activities) usually take place on the second floor, the first floor has the ticket desk, gallery shop, café, a (rentable) conference room and usually a temporary art installation. The gallery’s annual calendar brings to Margate the work of well-known artists such as Piet Mondrian, Tracey Emin and Auguste Rodin, and includes multiple talks and workshops throughout the year that explore the themes of the exhibitions. The gallery is free and open to the public. Victoria Pomery, the gallery’s director, was previously a senior curator at Tate Liverpool, which was also intended to play a central role in the regeneration of the impoverished area in which it was established (see Dewdney, Dibosa and Walsh 2013). Although the Turner Contemporary is not part of Tate (a national art gallery based in London), it is part of the Tate Plus network within which different creative institutions share experiences and strategies under the leadership of Tate.

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Figure 3.1 The Turner Contemporary gallery

This means that the Turner Contemporary is highly influenced by the strategies developed by Tate, although it is not a Tate gallery. The gallery is the result of the convergence of two initiatives. John Croft, a local resident and former chairman of Margate Civic Society, wanted to reinforce Margate’s connection with Turner. This converged with KCC’s strategy to regenerate the area. The construction of the gallery cost £17.5 million, which was funded by KCC, Arts Council England (ACE) and the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA) (Lees and McKiernan 2012). Since its construction, the reaction to the Turner Contemporary has been ambiguous. Some people living in Margate regretted the huge amount of money spent on an art institution from which they thought they would not benefit. They wished this money had been directly invested in poor areas to help people in deprived situations. On the other hand, the council and the gallery have argued that in its first year this enterprise generated 130 full-time equivalent (FTE) positions and 330,000 additional visits to Margate (Morris Hargreaves McIntyre 2011), which benefited people in the area.1

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The cultural heritage specialist Jason Wood was invited by the Turner Contemporary to describe the process of its construction. His document reveals some of the peculiar challenges faced by the gallery’s architect, David Chipperfield. Among the concerns of local people, who were involved in the negotiations from the beginning, was the necessity of always recognizing Margate’s ‘character’ in the project. According to Wood (2010: 4): The proposed building … was three storeys high with a flat roof and balconies. It is fair to say this did not win universal approval. In particular, there was a general sense of unease among local people who were not happy with the roof design or the lighting arrangements. At the public meeting a voice in the audience shouted, ‘What’s this design got to do with Margate?’ David Chipperfield took note and re-inspired by these comments went back to first principles and the reasons why Turner had come to Margate – namely his fascination with the natural light. Despite being a venue for contemporary art, the Turner Contemporary had to recognize the historical past of its local context. According to Wood (2010: 2–3), Chipperfield was the ideal person to do this since he was ‘comfortable with both innovation and history’. Margate locals expected a connection between past and present, local history and art. Chipperfield’s answer to those expectations was to produce an off-white building covered with windows and glass (see Figure 3.1) that enables the visitor to see the natural colours of Thanet’s sky and be reminded that this was the specific place where Turner chose to paint. By visiting the Turner Contemporary, one engages not only with innovation but with the historical past of the town; at least, this was the intention. Furthermore, the building’s design also had to be sensitive to two other listed sites – the 1815 stone pier known as Harbour Arm (see Figure 3.2) and the Droit House, which was originally built in 1828 and rebuilt in 1947 after being bombed during World War II (it appears on the left in Figure 3.3) – which are right next to the gallery’s location. In this sense, the construction of the gallery in Margate demanded an engagement with all the physical characteristics of the area that contained traces of the past, in very much the same manner as my interlocutors have done with their houses. Like old objects and houses, the town of Margate itself has an agency that pushes people in a certain direction. One needs to respect its ‘character’ when innovating. As Wood put it, there was ‘[a] need to integrate the old town character with the modernity of the new gallery’ (Wood 2010: 4). Unfortunately, the efforts of Chipperfield and his team were not enough to satisfy some of my interlocutors, or other locals. They still saw the Turner Contemporary as a disruption. There were many different reasons for people’s criticisms, although two main ones were given by my interlocutors: on the one hand, they said that the gallery was not made for local people, since contemporary art was not what they really needed; on the other, its architecture had ruined Margate’s historical seaside view.

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Figure 3.2 The Harbour Arm

Figure 3.3 The Turner Contemporary gallery and the Droit House

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Clare’s husband Peter, a 65-year-old retired school teacher originally from Thanet, explained his point of view while we were sitting having breakfast at their home. He had been very reluctant to visit the gallery ever since I met him, more than a year before this meal. Despite dropping his wife off at work in the area – at this time she was volunteering at the charity shop like me – he hardly ever walked around Old Town or entered the gallery. Clare pointed out on many occasions that being a retired design teacher she thought he would love some of the exhibitions. However, he was still reluctant to go, until the day his brother-in-law came to stay and decided to visit Margate and the gallery, taking Peter with him. I asked Peter if he had liked it; he said no and explained why: It would be better if they had used local materials like bricks and flint walls that are very common in Thanet. I wanted it to be for the people. By that I mean a certain feeling. I wanted it to be warm in there. And I’m not talking about temperature. It’s not cosy in there. They made it for other people. I look at it and it tells me nothing. It’s like a bus shelter, it has no character and could be anywhere. Peter was saying that buildings must have an argument: that is, they must ‘say’ something. In other words, things must have a narrative, and this narrative must be related to the material narrative (the flints) that existed before, which he referred to as ‘the local’ or ‘character’. When this is not the case, it feels ‘cold’. In the same way that character produces certain feelings inside the charity shop, it does so elsewhere in town. That is, the physical characteristics of a town can trigger people’s memories and produce warmth, or preclude it, as the gallery did, since it was cold. Again, this relates to the way in which some of my interlocutors often disagreed with the changes made by previous owners of their houses. Peter would probably have removed the gallery from Margate and put ‘the past back into its place’ if he could. In his own house he had the right to do so, but in town he could only argue for it. If, to Peter, the architecture of the building represented some kind of discontinuity from what had been there before, this was not the intention of the architect. Interestingly, despite having completely different opinions, Peter and the Turner Contemporary architect were invested in the same principle: they were both engaged in interpreting Margate’s character. However, they disagreed on the way that this should be done. While Chipperfield understood that in this novel situation glass and concrete could come to symbolize and relate to the painter Turner, to Peter concrete was a resource specifically connected with the construction of modern buildings. Turner and these materials had two very different historical origins, and they indexed the past in different ways. Similar to Lynva’s criticism of plastic in the previous chapter, here it is concrete that challenges the character of the buildings and the area. Like plastic, concrete is particularly resistant to time and to the materialization of the passing of time through degradation.

Disconnections of character 95 This once again relates to Edwards’ (1998) interlocutors’ criticism of the local planner in Alltown, who introduced ‘Victorian detail’ where he was not supposed to. In both cases stones are not just stones, but have a connection with local areas and their past and people. When addressing this, Edwards focused in particular on how such claims about the past promoted a sense of belonging while also working as a political tool to define who did not belong: the town planner. However, beyond these important considerations I intend to emphasize less how such practices work to reinforce entitlement towards the local area than how they relate to particular feelings about the past. The Turner Contemporary was ‘cold’, as Peter said. It did not enable the kinds of ‘sensory memories’ (Campen 2014) shared at the charity shop or in the History Society. As we have seen, these kinds of memories were instrumental to and effective in allowing people to develop relationships in the area. Loretta Lees and John McKiernan (2012: 20) understand the Turner Contemporary as a ‘top down model of regeneration using an iconic building’, influenced by the Barcelona model of regeneration (see Balibrea 2001; Degen and Garcia 2012, cited in Lees and McKiernan 2012). Lees and McKiernan argue that such art-led regeneration projects have become a popular strategy for dealing with post-industrial deprived areas, mainly under the leadership of New Labour and its promotion of ‘Creative Britain’. Lees and McKiernan maintain that there is little evidence that art-led regeneration solves social problems, and advocate that long-term and detailed research is needed in order to justify such arts-led social improvement. Chipperfield is considered to be part of a generation of ‘star-architects’. Gabriel Elias de Souza and Otávio Leonidio Ribeiro (2014) explain that architecture has developed through an intense dialogue with the mass media, the consequence of which is that the media has not only contributed to the dissemination of architecture but has influenced the very constitution of the profession. One outcome of this has been the transformation of some architects into celebrity personalities who represent particular lifestyles desired by consumers around the world. According to Souza and Ribeiro, another has been the fact that buildings have often been developed with reference to the visual experience that they enable. In other words, iconic buildings are those that produce interesting photos. Thus, three-dimensional architecture is valued most in terms of its ability to be successfully translated into the two dimensions of a photo. Such iconic buildings are then used to market an area for the purpose of tourism. These media and marketing strategies, clearly employed by the local council, encouraged an engagement with places and buildings (as abstract twodimensional images) that was very different from that of my interlocutors. The consequence was that neither people in disadvantaged economic situations nor financially-stable retired residents connected to the gallery. The project encouraged temporal experiences which my retired interlocutors did not recognize as meaningful to their lives. Therefore, as Peter concluded, ‘[t]hey made it for other people’.

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A discomfort with conceptual art Not all my interlocutors were as critical as Peter. That is, they would not necessarily bind themselves to one side of the debate. When questioned about the architecture of the building, my interlocutors did not think twice before pointing out its lack of character. However, engaging with the practices that took place in the gallery was not always met with reluctance. While some expressed negative opinions about the construction of the Turner Contemporary, others hoped that Margate’s regeneration would contribute to the improvement of the town’s economic situation. While they sometimes struggled with exhibitions of highly conceptual art, at other times they recognized the importance of the institution for generating jobs and bringing well-known pieces of art to town. Although the gallery had no permanent exhibition of Turner’s paintings, a major curatorial principle in all exhibitions was to conceptually connect these artworks to the work of Turner. Very often my interlocutors did not accept this connection. For example, regarding an abstract painting shown in one of the exhibitions, Clare said: ‘If you look at a Turner painting, you can see something that matches the title. This other artist, you can see nothing. There’s no link between the two. Turner uses subtle colours, so that you can’t see the image from up close. It’s so clever’. In response, I tried to argue that there was possibly a conceptual connection between the two paintings, instead of a similarity between the materials or techniques used by the two artists. In other words, the connection was not between the images that they had painted, but between the ideas and intentions behind them. Clare replied: ‘But there’s no concept there [in the work of the contemporary artist]. It’s just splashes of blue paint’. While I was trying to discuss the conceptual debates in which the artists were engaged rather than the material aspects of the painting, Clare assumed that because the images showed no visual similarity, and because the painting in question showed no connection to the landscape, no concept was involved. In that sense, in my interlocutor’s perspective the contemporary artist failed by not representing the landscape of the local area as Turner had done. With time, I learned the kind of art that my interlocutors tended to enjoy. They appreciated more realistic and representational paintings, those that reproduce what exists outside the work of art – usually a landscape. More specifically, they tended to enjoy and were very supportive of local artists who skilfully painted the places where they lived. The fact that the administration of the Turner Contemporary tended to prioritize international artists instead of local ones in its initial years led to continuous criticism. In the same way that Peter said that the Turner Contemporary building ‘says nothing’, to Clare the painting ‘has no concept’. In both situations they seemed to regret the absence of elements that connected to local histories and routines. In other words, they criticized aesthetic forms – either the building itself or the art exhibited within it – that claimed an abstract and conceptual connection to Turner. Bourdieu (1984: 34) has discussed a working-class aesthetic tendency to prefer images and art that reproduce the world in which people live and ordinary life:

Disconnections of character 97 ‘[J]udgement never gives the image of the object autonomy with respect to the object of the image’. For Bourdieu, this is the consequence of a class disposition to value the functional aspect of things. That is, to people of working-class origins an image fulfils its functional principles only if it represents the outside world. The upper classes, in contrast, are able to detach themselves from the urgencies of ordinary life, producing abstract kinds of art. In line with Bourdieu, my interlocutors continuously denied the autonomy of images or concepts from the physical world they inhabited. Nevertheless, this did not mean that they preferred the mechanical reproduction of landscapes, as what Clare considered clever about Turner’s painting was exactly the fact that he played with the border between realism and abstraction. In other words, the fact that images should not be autonomous from the ordinary world did not mean they should be reduced to mere reproduction. Once again, what mattered was that the intrinsic connections between people, place and the past – character – were not missed. As Yarrow (2018) has similarly argued, when trying to maintain character there is great scope for variation and creativity. Bourdieu (1984) discussed how taste in art often works as an instrument of class reproduction and social oppression. He deconstructed the Kantian idea of the ‘pure gaze’ of the artwork in order to emphasize that people who exhibit a ‘legitimate’ taste in cultural expressions have been socialized in such practices through education and/or social origin. The consequence is that the lower classes are forced to believe that their lack of knowledge of art is a matter of personal inability, which contributes to the naturalization of class oppression. However, what we observe among my interlocutors is that they did not feel intimidated by the expressions of high art proposed by the gallery and council initiatives. They were involved in their own creative practices and evaluative principles, ones that treasured character and its British undertones. Whereas Bourdieu (1984) condemned people of working-class origins to a taste for necessity (see Chapter 1), my interlocutors, who shared such a background, confidently emphasized their aesthetic dispositions. Before moving on to discuss other regeneration projects, I believe it is fair to say that the Turner Contemporary’s administration has put an increasing effort into strategies that considered the dissatisfaction of certain local residents. For example, in recent years they have increased the number of projects that support local artists. The point here is not to demonize the gallery, which faced a great challenge from the very beginning. Instead, the aim of the book is to unpack the exact moment when different temporal ethics disconnect. The following sections continue to explore such disconnections.

Reopening the local amusement park During the twentieth century, when Margate was a prominent destination for the working classes of London and elsewhere, its most popular attraction was Dreamland. This was a 16-acre amusement park built in 1921, with a wooden roller coaster, ballroom, cinema and many restaurants. By the end of the last

98 Disconnections of character century, Dreamland had closed its doors and the area had been sold to developers. However, during the time of my fieldwork the local council issued a compulsory purchase order that forced the owners to sell the property to the Dreamland Trust, which intended to refurbish and reopen the park. Many local residents had protested to encourage such an outcome. During this time the Trust organized a public meeting to discuss their plans; this was advertised in a local paper as a ‘calling for creative minds’. The Dreamland Trust seemed to be aligned with Florida’s ideas (2012) about the creative class, and their call was also in line with the importance KCC’s regeneration strategy placed upon ‘creativity’ (see Kent County Council 2010: 23). The meeting took place in the Turner Contemporary and was attended by around 130 people, mostly from the new creative class that had recently moved to the town during the regeneration process. My retired interlocutors from the charity shop did not attend the meeting. The intention of the event was to introduce the company chosen to refurbish Dreamland. One of the staff members presented, to the gathering, their plans for ‘creative minds’: ‘Society moves on. So, I believe it is about putting [old] things in the [present] context but preserving the DNA. And what we like about this project is that it is place-making, it intends to make Margate more than what it is’. This staff member explained they had already bought some old ‘plane toys’ and intended to use them for photo shoots: ‘I want every corner of Dreamland to be like a photo opportunity … Who wants to take a picture of their kid in one of those vintage toy cars? But any of those vintage toy cars is very expensive, I need you to help me to come up with solutions’. At the end of the event, the reaction to the presentation was very positive. The first woman to speak said: ‘That video that you showed, that was how I felt about Dreamland and I would love that people could feel like that’. After this statement, many people in the audience began to talk about their memories. One could see that they were very inspired and moved by the presentation. Many made suggestions for what could be done, and the Dreamland team showed interest. They were explicitly concerned about memories not being forgotten. They suggested different ways in which memories could be given a place in the amusement park, such as through bricks with names, interviews, a mural of old photos, a museum, etc. Finally, someone asked about the synergy between the Turner Contemporary and Dreamland, and the presenters explained their intention: ‘[T]o have a common calendar, not only with the Turner but with the business in Old Town and so on. The new is here in the Turner and the heritage is there’. As discussed in Chapter 1, Giddens (1991a: 18) has argued that one of the main characteristics of contemporary life is the ‘emptying of time’. Giddens adopts a ‘modernist’ (Harris 1996: 3) approach to time that envisages a ‘rupture’ between an embedded ‘before’ and a disembedded ‘now’. In Margate, and in line with Latour’s (1993) arguments, this ‘emptiness’ of time is not pervasive but particular to certain institutions and practices that my interlocutors considered ‘modern’. To people like Clare, some things have character, i.e. they have time in them, while others are simply ‘modern’. The Dreamland Trust team seemed to reproduce this distinction when the staff member differentiated between the ‘new’ (the Turner

Disconnections of character 99 Contemporary) and ‘heritage’ (Dreamland). Not surprisingly, this staff member also set up a spatial separation: the new ‘here’ in opposition to the heritage ‘there’. While the experience of character took materiality and the past into consideration, modern institutions operated an ‘emptying of time’ (for example, glass symbolized Turner, despite the fact that glass did not index the past). An attention to the character of things differentiated between changes that maintained a sense of continuity with the past and those that broke away from it. To my interlocutors, modern constructs such as the Turner Contemporary produced change in a way that caused an ‘emptying of time’. The gallery was not made of flint. That is, while my interlocutors forged diverse and sometimes new associations between the past and place, not all were acceptable. As a result of their own understandings of character, they did not simply accept whatever was proposed by the government and its neoliberal agenda. Therefore, when they forged new connections to places and people they did so by respecting the character of things. The problem, however, was that my interlocutors continuously experienced an expansion of ‘modern’ buildings and practices in Thanet. In other words, the problem was not that ‘modern’ buildings existed, but that the ever-expanding nature of regeneration projects risked de-characterizing the whole town, and that such logic was apparently accepted by political representatives who did not always issue compulsory purchase orders to stop development. In Margate I have witnessed people’s continuous efforts to prevent historic areas from being sold to developers and transformed into modern buildings, thus ruining the local character. Cathrine Thorleifsson (2016) has observed something similar in Doncaster, a white-majority, working-class town in South Yorkshire that relied heavily upon its coal and mining industry before the pits closed in the mid-1980s. At the time of her research the city council was trying to ‘rebrand’ the area for tourists by creating exhibitions and renaming places as a celebration of its noble industrial past. Similar to Dreamland and the Turner Contemporary, the tourist strategies in Doncaster were future-driven, the role of the past being to revamp the town, leverage tourism and create jobs. Nevertheless, these efforts were also received with scepticism by some of Thorleifsson’s interlocutors: ‘You have these people who want to give Donny a trendy twenty-first century makeover. But new names and fancy hotels won’t sort out the kind of problems we have in town’ (Thorleifsson 2016: 562). Like my interlocutors’ arguments about the Turner Contemporary (which also took its name from a noble past with which it did not properly connect), Thorleifsson’s interlocutors seemed to be protesting against the way that certain marketing strategies overestimate the power of names. Both ethnographic examples show how people differentiate between their own engagements with their towns and the ways in which such areas are being ‘sold to outsiders’. The ability of objects to connect to an experience of the past was exactly what my interlocutors missed at the Turner Contemporary. People like Peter expected to see in the gallery something that celebrated and re-enacted the past and his memories, thereby reinforcing the local character and producing a certain feeling. In this sense, it was not enough to simply claim a connection with the past as the gallery did; it was important to present the physical aspects

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of this connection. Because the correct materials were not used in the gallery, its character was ruined and ‘involuntary memories’ (Proust 1992 [1913], in Deleuze 2000) were not triggered. The glass could not trigger my interlocutors’ memories, unlike objects found in the charity shop; neither could it be used to reproduce, as the local historical societies did, the social history of the area. And, as we have seen, these temporal experiences were instrumental in making people who recently moved to the area connect with each other. In removing character, regeneration also removed the very media through which people connected to each other and made sense of their past and present. Here the past (and its materiality) was central in producing a present that made sense to my interlocutors. Since the Turner Contemporary did not provide the ambience of ‘museums of everyday-life objects’ (Macdonald 2002), as mentioned in Chapter 1, they felt that the gallery had been built for other people. When discussing the role of local museums, Macdonald’s interlocutors similarly voiced a distinction between ‘building for tourists’ and ‘building for the people of Skye’. The Turner Contemporary challenged my interlocutors’ notions of the character of things (their indexical properties). In the gallery, the name Turner acted like a brand that was intended to deviate from the biographical narratives of objects and people and support the construction of Margate as an artistic place. In this re-signification of things, glass related to Turner who related to Margate. These, however, were connections that not all of my interlocutors recognized. In reference to their conception of character, the gallery was inauthentic and inaccurate. The regeneration project’s approach to character was inevitably inspired by an economic, profit-driven strategy. As a consequence, some of the aspects of character that were treasured by my interlocutors – the different temporal rhythms of ‘drifting off’, for example – did not fit well with the council’s plans for the town. From the perspective of transforming Kent into a vibrant tourist destination for the visual arts, some of my interlocutors’ practices were easily associated with decay and obsolescence. Inevitably, my interlocutors continued to voice their sense that they were losing their town through such transformations; a loss, I hope the reader has realized by now, that was very practically and concretely experienced and felt.

Retirement, consumption and memory talk During her ethnographic research with old-age, working-class residents of Dodworth in the North of England, Degnen (2005, 2012) mapped practices similar to the ones that I have encountered among the retired residents of Margate and the nearby areas: People in Dodworth endlessly place each other by shared memories of where what had been and by what events they had experienced together. Part of figuring out who is who in the village necessitates a referencing back in time to activities, relationships, and places of habitation occupied by the person in question previously. What is particularly striking in memory talk is how place operates within this shuttling back and forth between past and present.

Disconnections of character 101 Both places and people are named explicitly in this discourse, and are explicitly linked. (Degnen 2005: 733). Similar to the way that my interlocutors related time and place, hers performs ‘a form of remembering which is remarkably spatialized’ (Degnen 2005: 737). Degnen describes this connection between memories and spatial referents as a ‘three-dimensionality of memory’ (2005: 737), which was cited in the previous chapter. She argues that people define who they are by situating themselves within the history of the local village. The past, therefore, has a functional role, constituting local connections and exclusions: [N]on-Dodworthers who have moved into the village later in life … described to me the feeling that one ‘needs a passport to live in Dodworth’. People who have not lived in Dodworth for an extended period of time do not have the same level of access to, nor perhaps the same interest in, the memory talk as I describe it here. They are also cut off from some local channels of social engagement for the same reason. (Degnen 2012: 76) For Degnen, this memory talk has an important role in enabling people to cope with profound local transformations. As Degnen conducted research in an industrial setting, she is referring to post-industrial transformations: ‘[M]emory talk that reproduces such closely interwoven interpersonal bonds may serve as a sort of fire-break in the face of such overwhelming rupture’ (2005: 742). Like Degnen’s interlocutors, many of the retired people in Margate were born and raised in working-class environments, although in contrast many had left their original villages. Nevertheless, they were still involved in the enunciation of different memories that took into consideration the particular spatial referents that they encountered around town. ‘Made in Britain’ objects, period houses and the character of places allowed them to connect with each other. As described in the previous chapter, this ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 2006 [1983]) was often a national community. Thus, my interlocutors did not necessarily experience the sort of ‘overwhelming rupture’ described by Degnen, but still treasured memory talk. While considering the experience of time, Degnen draws on Munn’s (1992) arguments about the symbolic construction of time. As mentioned previously, Munn is concerned with the ways in which daily practice defines what counts as ‘time’ and how the definition of time is profoundly linked to power hierarchies. Degnen (2005, 2012) argues that experiences of time and its significance may shift as a person ages. She (2018) describes how youth-oriented Western societies, especially in North America or Britain, promote discourses about old age that emphasize notions of loss, decline and abjection – the opposite of the exercise of agency, control and independence, which are profoundly treasured within these contexts.

102 Disconnections of character My interlocutors’ temporal experience was influenced not only by their age, but also by their experience of retirement. That is, free from employment duties (and tight work schedules), they could focus on practices that were profoundly meaningful to them: ‘drifting off’, engagement with character and sensory memory. These practices were not only valuable for older people, as described in Chapter 1, although older people were often those who had the spare time to engage in them. It was precisely because they were free from the oppressive job market that they could engage with temporal frameworks and temporalizing practices that were more important to them. As a consequence, memory talk was not so much a strategy for coping with the broader (post-industrial) economic transformations imposed on them (as victims), but an ethical concern that they put forward when they had the opportunity. In other words, memory talk was not necessarily an outcome of broader political events – that is, it was not a practice caused by social structures – but a particular way in which ethical subjects constructed time and change through their activities (in line with Munn 1992). This movement to understanding memory talk as part of an ethical project, instead of a residual outcome of power structures, is central for the argument of the book – as this will later on inspire my interlocutors’ engagements with formal politics. Nevertheless, in the face of the regeneration projects put forward by the government some retired residents of the seaside perceived their current form of living as under threat. After all, they were clearly not the profitable artistic community or the visiting tourists targeted by the council. Their valorization of character, ‘drifting off’ and sensory memory was often associated with ‘decay’ and in need of a ‘turn of fortune’. Moreover, considering my interlocutors as ethical subjects instead of victims of broader structures allows us to recognize how their memory talk might in fact offer resistance to broader economic transformations, including the local council’s regeneration plans. Therefore, instead of being a palliative outcome of broader economic transformations, memory talk is an ethical project that challenges the temporal conceptions offered by the council. As Paul Connerton (1989) has argued, remembering is a political act, since ‘our experience of the present very largely depends upon our knowledge of the past’ (Connerton 1989: 2; see also Munn 1992: 109). As a consequence, different political orders depend on the control of images of the past for their legitimization. The memory talk performed by my interlocutors offered a resistance to the temporal logics put forward by the local council and its attempt to rebrand Margate as an arts scene. While arguing this, it is worth noting that I am not saying that my interlocutors consciously attempted to revolutionize neoliberalism. Instead, they were ‘just’ putting forward a temporal logic that made sense to them, although this had consequences. Despite this resistance towards regeneration, the kinds of practice performed by my interlocutors are often interpreted by scholars as part of the same gentrified movement that my interlocutors questioned, as will be discussed in the next section.

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Gentrification and the arts at the seaside As discussed in the Introduction, I have been engaging with Margate and the nearby areas for the past eight years. Initially I lived in the area for 15 months. After I returned to live in London I continued to visit at least once every couple of months. In 2016 I moved back to Brazil, where I am originally from, and since then I have visited at least once a year. Finally, in 2019 I had the opportunity to spend a couple of months living again in Margate. This experience enabled me to observe and engage closely with the results of the changes that the town has undergone in recent years. Between 2012 and 2013 a growing number of artists started to move to Margate. As was intended by the KCC plan, many of them left East London and acquired period houses in Margate for prices that they would never have found in the capital. Although they were not my main group of interlocutors, I continuously met them around town and soon got to know some of them. An English artist, who was around 40 years old at the time and had recently moved with her husband from London, agreed to be interviewed by me. She explained that she and her husband worked in the creative industries, which meant they could work online at home and commute to London if they needed to attend meetings. They had met other professionals who were in a similar situation and had also just moved to the area. Together the couple and the other professionals they met organized local events, such as reading groups or concerts, and tried to promote the local arts scene. Just like my retired interlocutors, these creative professionals also treasured the character of the terraced houses that they had just bought and put a lot of effort and investment into refurbishing them. The number of creative professionals residing in the area was small when I first lived there, but greatly increased over time. When I returned in 2019 I could see a growing number of ‘trendy’ shops and ‘artsy places’ in town that sold expensive goods at London prices. Visitors acknowledged the local gentrification by calling Margate ‘Shoreditch by the sea’, in reference to the gentrified London neighbourhood. In parallel, all residents talked about the rising house prices. That is, due to the growing number of people moving from London to the seaside, housing was becoming more expensive. Meanwhile, the local arts scene continued to flourish. For example, the 2019 Tate Turner Prize exhibition – an important prize in the UK – took place at the Turner Contemporary, and with council support local artists organized a concurrent art festival to promote the new local creative community. Whereas the first artists to move to the area were in their 40s and bought properties, with time there was an increase in the number of younger professionals who had just entered the job market. This new generation often saw in Margate an opportunity to make a living while working in the arts, a professional move that would not be possible in London due to its high living costs. Some of these young artists were the children of the generation to which my retired interlocutors belonged. Within Margate’s new creative community there was a variety of

104 Disconnections of character ages, backgrounds and types of work experience. Some were born in Kent or even Thanet, but there was an increasing number of young artists moving from other areas of England, especially London. Sophie Mallet (2017) has produced a combination of art and social analysis of what has been going on in the area, approaching these events from the perspective of gentrification and social oppression. Mallet challenges the idea that there is a real difference between ‘regeneration’ and ‘gentrification’. To explain her argument, she cites Sarah Glynn: [P]ublic debate is being dominated by a political spin that allows gentrifying policies to be portrayed as logical and progressive development. Gentrification, as we know, comes in many forms and scales, from the wholesale redevelopments that accompany the Olympics, through the middleclass colonization of our urban riversides, to the piecemeal changes wrought by individual private investors. But it is taking place everywhere, and is actively promoted by the town and city authorities under the name of ‘regeneration’. (Glynn 2007, in Mallet 2017: 1) The term ‘gentrification’ was created in the 1960s to describe the way in which the middle classes were no longer moving to suburban areas of larger cities in the way that the previous generation had done. By remaining within or moving to inner-city areas, these classes generated geographical inequality (Glass 1963). As discussed in the Introduction, according to Neil Smith (2002), the problem with processes of gentrification is that they do not solve local social inequality, instead they attract wealthier classes and push away poorer populations. Processes of regeneration intended to attract wealthier consumers to an area, such as that taking place in Margate, can be considered intimately connected to gentrification. This means understanding that both gentrification and regeneration reinforce local inequality between residents instead of tackling it. In the case of Margate, Mallet acknowledges that the influx of Londoners and the local creative development have forced the displacement of some of the previous residents. Like other artists in the area, although not all, Mallet produces a self-reflexive analysis that considers how she, as an artist, has also benefited from the situation, which she claims is an issue of ‘complicity’. Mallet draws attention to the way that ‘being nice’, as many artists claim to be, does not circumvent the fact that they might be reproducing social oppression and spatial displacement. Mallet (2017) considers one of the flagship regeneration projects supported by the local council, in which homeowners from a nineteenth-century square in the neighbourhood of Cliftonville were offered match-funding to refurbish and maintain the façades of their houses (i.e. the outside character of such buildings). She draws attention to the fact that no money was given for people to improve the interiors of their homes, thus demonstrating that the project was intended for outward appearances and tourists rather than for residents. She acknowledges that the architect’s intention was to create ‘soft borders’ that act as fences and guarantee that the space would be used in the ‘right way’ (Mallet 2017: 13–14). She also

Disconnections of character 105 considers the way the local landscape has been transformed into a ‘DFL (Down from London) grey’, i.e. a middle-class aesthetic preference for painting their houses grey. Therefore, it was not only the developers who performed gentrification, but any individual who committed to a homogenized ‘aesthetics of space’ (Mallet 2017: 13) that pushed away other segments of society. Lastly, Mallet is sceptical of artistic practices that seek ‘engagement with the community’, because they often privilege big, spectacular moments and showing off, instead of the actual engagement. The use of such practices in development projects has helped to mask the oppressive transformations taking place, which is also called ‘artwashing’ (O’Sullivan 2014). Mallet argues that it is important to resist the spectacle. When I asked, artists often argued that they did not intend to contribute to the ongoing processes of local gentrification, tending to depict ‘developers’ as those responsible for the rise in local prices. Among the different art institutions in Margate, ‘engagement with the local community’ was often a ‘box to be ticked’ in funding applications, generating some controversial outcomes. Despite artists saying it was their desire to be ‘open to all’, my retired interlocutors usually felt that they remained a closed group. Nowadays, given the increasing house prices, even artists, and especially those who do not own their properties, have started to face difficulties with regard to the cost of living in the area. Thus, there are different waves of gentrification, with previous gentrifiers being displaced by wealthier incomers. Although not part of the arts scene, as they had recently acquired houses in the area the retired residents could be seen as contributing to this gentrifying logic. The next section continues to discuss how, although they may help to drive up the local housing market and contribute to Margate’s gentrification, they also offer resistance to the ideas put forward by the council.

Character and the consumption of places In line with the ideas put forward by Mallet (2017), many authors have argued that the emergence of a heritage obsession in Britain over the past few decades is an attempt by different segments of the middle classes, including the service classes, to secure their class values through the appropriation of a past that does not belong to them (Wright 1985; Thrift 1987; Urry 1995). These scholars have often researched these topics as part of a broader interest in the ‘geographies of consumption’ (Jackson and Thrift 1995). That is, they have investigated how consumption has changed the way that people engage with space. The term ‘service class’ refers to people employed in professional, managerial or administrative occupations in the public or private sector. With the increase of the service economy in the UK (Lash and Urry 1987), many people of workingclass origins have entered service occupations. This class is marked by residential mobility, following employment opportunities and ‘quality of life’ motivations (Urry 1995). If Nigel Thrift (1987), for example, is correct, despite its heterogeneity, the service class is majorly influenced by advertisements. This argument

106 Disconnections of character about the influence of advertising seems to draw on ideas about the ‘culture industry’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1972 [1944]). That is, scholars attribute to mass media the capacity to alleviate the tension produced by capitalist-market oppression via the entertainment of consumers. Thus, entertainment and consumption enable professionals to escape reality and enjoy immediate pleasure. According to Thrift (1987), a combination of countryside and heritage traditions have been promoted through advertising as the ‘imagined village community of the past’ and sold to the UK service classes. Thrift has argued that this class is colonizing the countryside and narratives about the past that never belonged to them: Members of the service class have a strong predilection for the rural ideal/ idyll … more than other classes they have the capacity to do something about that predilection. They can exercise choice in two ways. First of all, they can attempt to keep the environments they live in as ‘rural’ as possible. Such process can operate at a number of scales. Homes can be covered with Laura Ashley prints and fitted out with stripped pine furniture. Developments that do not gel with service class tastes can be excluded in the name of conservation … Second, they can colonise areas not previously noted for their service class composition … [and] mould these in their image. (Thrift 1987: 78–79) In line with such arguments, Alan Warde (1992) connects consumption with three main objectives: exchange value, the expectation that an acquired object might be exchanged for something else later; use value, the satisfaction of wants and needs; and identity value, i.e. an object’s use in enhancing one’s identity, through group identification, status, etc. Warde’s (1991: 224) arguments about ‘[t]he process whereby individuals purchase existing houses, one at a time, and come to turn their newly acquired property, either through their own labour or by instructing a small builder to renovate in a particular locally-consensual aesthetic style’ directly relate to the kind of ‘aesthetic unity’ discussed by Mallet (2017: 13) in reference to the regeneration/gentrification of Margate. As I initially acknowledged in the Introduction, in many ways my interlocutors could be seen to fit this description. Despite their working-class origins, they have entered service-class occupations, enjoyed residential mobility and are actively involved in maintaining the surrounding environment in accordance with character. This involves Clare and Peter’s use of Laura Ashley wallpaper (described in the previous chapter) and the effort they spent on maintaining local heritage. As a consequence, while acquiring houses at the seaside they could be seen to be contributing to the ‘consumption of places’ (Urry 1995) and to social logics that help to displace people facing economic poverty. Nevertheless, the pervasiveness of character conceals the varied ways that people engage with it. From the practices described above, we may observe that my interlocutors strongly criticized branding and marketing strategies that ignored the historical connection between people and place. Although the definition of who qualifies as ‘local’ may always be contested (Strathern 1984), they did not

Disconnections of character 107 subscribe to the council’s agenda. Moreover, even if they enjoyed advertisements and TV shows that portrayed a countryside life in period houses, they had very strong opinions about how to engage with the consumption of character while connecting to their own past and memories. Defining them as passive consumers who easily subscribed to the narratives promoted by the market leads to a misinterpretation of everything that they routinely proclaimed and put effort into. This conceals the complex ethical negotiations they were involved in, and how they invested not only money but physical energy, time and care in ensuring that changes maintained the character of things. Such a framework also conceals the difference between my retired interlocutors’ aesthetic dispositions and those pursued by other ‘gentrifiers’; for example, the ‘DFL grey’. These nuances are fundamental to understanding people’s different approaches to time and its consequences for politics. Here I am not trying to deny the importance of critical analyses of contemporary consumption practices or the cultural industry and its relation to alienation, only that such analyses should not work to hide the non-passive engagements that might occur between subjects and objects; that is, the ways in which objects may ‘come to life’ and reveal a power not previously expected by scholars. As we observed with regard to the practices at the charity shop (Chapter 1), the engagement with character offered a rhythm very different from that put forward by a cultural industry that alienates people (as in Adorno and Horkheimer 1972 [1944]). Among my interlocutors, heritage did not work to mask an ever more consumerist alienated subject, but it worked as an important tool with which the subject could reorganize memories from their own life (see Chapter 1). Simply put, the problem is that this theoretical framework of the ‘geographies of consumption’ often offers a very limited understanding of the consumer. That is, it proposes the myth ‘that mass consumption has seen a rise in irrational desires which replace an earlier more utilitarian and rational relationship to material culture’ (Miller 1995: 22). In other words, even when taking the subject into consideration, it assumes that people act as individuals who make rational choices about goods (or places) in order to maximize their self-interests. For example, although John Urry (1995) attempted to develop an analysis that was sensitive to time, his work on the consumption of heritage still positions people’s engagement with heritage as a colonization of the past that ignores the complex negotiations of character. In line with modern Western conceptions of time (Hirsch and Stewart 2005), his framework considers the past as linear, fixed and unchangeable. As a consequence, when people express claims of proprietorship towards buildings that relate to an upper-class history, scholars assume that consumers are attempting to mask their own origins and improve their status. All the negotiations regarding such buildings are reduced to a power struggle which ignores the generative aspects of such practices. Lastly, this reduces people involved in the consumption of period houses to ‘dead statues’ (Wright 1985: 71, in Thrift 1987). According to Miller (1995: 16), this kind of framework is premised upon Marxist-economic models that tend to homogenize social relations:

108 Disconnections of character To be a ‘consumer’ as opposed to being a producer implies that we have only a secondary relationship to goods. This secondary relationship occurs when people have to live with and through services and goods that they did not themselves create. The consumer society exists when, as in industrial societies today, most people have a minimal relationship to production and distribution such that consumption provides the only arena left to us through which we might potentially forge a relationship with the world. It is in this secondary stage that people ‘appropriate’ objects on their own terms. The task of the researcher should be to follow such engagements in order to illuminate the specific and plural uses people give to things: ‘To move forward in a dialectic based upon reason requires an attempt to break down the terminologies of “aggregate” and “mass” and to delve deeply into the nature of consumption as a social, cultural and moral project’ (Miller 1995: 17). This does not mean that consumption is necessarily good, but that it is also not necessarily bad either. As I see it, Miller (1995) addresses concerns that later debates on ‘ordinary ethics’ (for example, Laidlaw 2013) have brought forward, such as the way that people develop very different evaluative processes for engaging with the decisions of daily life. These processes cannot be reduced to an all-encompassing moral logic, but are appropriated and engaged with in very particular ways. In the case of my retired interlocutors, for example, a generalist framework about the ‘geographies of consumption’ completely ignores the complex negotiations involving character and how these may differ from practices developed by creative groups of artists. It also fails to address the way that the character of such places may connect to working-class stories and values (as discussed in the previous chapters). My interlocutors felt that the initiatives proposed by the government were not produced for them. Although they were not part of the ‘deprived’ population of Margate, the ones made ‘abjects’ in Tyler’s (2013) terms, they also criticized branding strategies that ignored the local history. Instead, they were involved in ‘memory talk’ (Degnen 2005) that connected them to the British history of the area. Retirement offered them an opportunity to focus on temporal activities that were important to them and that challenged official narratives about Margate. Moreover, if we are not able to recognize the profound difference between my interlocutors’ engagement with character and the kinds of narratives put forward by the council, we miss the kind of dissatisfaction that influences their voting decisions. I attribute such a misunderstanding to a conceptual framework, reproduced in varied disciplines, that depicts people as either victims of capitalism, enduring poverty and oppression, or passive individuals who subscribe to soul-stealing consumption practices (see also Miller 1995). This framework, often influenced by Bourdieu (1984), precludes an acknowledgement of how people consciously evaluate their practices and find their own ways to be loyal to the kind of social environments in which they were raised. An attention to my interlocutors’ explicit valorization of character demonstrates that they envisaged a profound entanglement between time and materiality, between the past and the physical aspects of things. In addition, those who were

Disconnections of character 109 raised in working-class contexts explicitly acknowledged the role of workers in the existence of such things, producing an entanglement between people, aesthetic and the past. This awareness inspired their decisions about what actions and changes should occur and encouraged criticism of practices that did not contribute to the maintenance of character; for example, the events that often took place at the Turner Contemporary.

The limits of creative ‘diversity’ When considering the ability of the creative classes to economically and culturally develop areas, Florida (2012) gave special attention to the role of diversity in the improvement of creativity. Florida defines diversity as ‘an openness to all kinds of people, no matter their gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, or just plain geekiness’ (2012: ix), and argues that its capacity to challenge the social categories we have imposed on ourselves generates great economic advances. According to Florida, as the ‘old’ economic order (i.e. the Fordist model) has failed, creativity will unleash new energies, talent and potential that will ultimately lead to economic improvement. Therefore, this is a ‘future driven’ strategy that resonates with Giddens’ conception of ‘life-planning’ (see Chapter 1) and turns ‘diversity’ into an economic necessity: ‘The only way forward is to make all jobs creative jobs, infusing service work, manufacturing work, farming, and every form of human endeavor with creativity and human potential’ (Florida 2012: xiv). Nevertheless, implicit within this framework is a very limited understanding of diversity that makes it not ‘open to all’. That is, diversity as described is seen as something that fuels the economy and can be put into work, but what about forms of creativity that do not necessarily generate profit? This definition (which has clearly influenced KCC plans for Margate) also assumes that diversity can always be incorporated within marketing strategies and development. Finally, such a conception of diversity is often infused with negative ideas about older people and their unproductivity (see Degnen 2018). As shown throughout this chapter, the practices encouraged by such a definition of diversity produce exclusion. On the one hand, we may encounter people in disadvantaged economic situations who are not incorporated into the creative practices taking place in Margate (Mallet 2017). On the other hand, there are also my interlocutors, whose engagements with time did not fit an agenda of productivity and profit. As they are retired they have allowed themselves to explore the kinds of practices that celebrate their working-class upbringings and were not necessarily interesting to the international tourists targeted by the marketing strategies of regeneration. While engaging in ‘memory talk’ and the celebration of character they did not fit into the temporal logic of the market. In other words, my interlocutors’ attention to character led people to envisage and feel an intrinsic connection between people, place and history. While doing so they were not responding to a rupture within the temporal frameworks with which they were raised, but the very opposite: they were continuously invested in maintaining objects that allowed the connection between past and present. If

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such connections were either ignored or erased they were unable to experience ‘involuntary memories’; that is, the connection between past and present and the relationships with their neighbours that emerged from it. They were not able to (physically) connect the current events of their lives to memories from their childhoods. They were denied central aspects of what makes them who they are. The insistence on a romanticized definition of diversity has meant that not only were my interlocutors’ narratives and values denied, but such denial was naturalized and hidden. The romanticized conception of diversity seems to connect with perspectives that Hage (2012: 303) criticizes for reproducing a division between materialism and idealism, and which are ‘complicit in reproducing the belief in the existence of one and only reality’. Hage, who has also engaged with the study of nationalist practices (see Chapter 4), has found in Viveiros de Castro’s work on multinaturalism a more efficient strategy for qualifying the different (national) realities that people inhabit. This perspective challenges multiculturalist arguments by claiming that difference is not only experienced in terms of representations and concepts (i.e. idealism or ‘culture’), but also in relation to bodily sensations (i.e. materialism), creating varied realities. From this perspective, I argue that in Margate the council promoted a multicultural agenda that ignored the extent to which the use of concrete or flint would affect bodies and transform people’s experience of reality. The anthropological contribution here, as suggested in the Introduction, is to show how the disconnections emerging in Margate not only concern differences within the same reality, but differences between realities. My argument is that the experience of character triggers temporal engagements that challenge dominant Western conceptions of productivity and linear time, which are those put forward by regeneration projects. In other words, my interlocutors can be seen to be interested in ‘morsels of time’ (Proust 1992 [1913] in Deleuze 2000) that are ‘ungovernable’ (Hage 2012) according to the current normative conceptions of time. The disruptive experience encouraged by character has therefore been able to engender political turmoil within the temporal framework of capitalism (as we will observe in the next chapter regarding Brexit). By unpacking the consequences of the growing regeneration of Margate, this chapter has demonstrated the tangible outcomes of what my interlocutors considered a threat to contemporary Britain: the logic of urban development that leads to an ‘emptying of time’ (Giddens 1991a). In other words, there was a disconnection between their interpretation of character and that of the council. This disconnection was made more oppressive through the use of simplistic conceptions of ‘diversity’ that ignored the very different ways that people engaged with time. The consequence of this, as we will observe in the next chapter, is that my interlocutors found in populist politics an opportunity to express and elaborate their anxiety. In other words, they took the valorization of character (explained in Chapter 1) and its connection to national discourses (discussed in Chapter 2) into formal politics.

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Note 1 Later in my fieldwork I came to know local artists who had worked with the staff at the gallery and who felt terribly oppressed by its rules and values. Nevertheless, I will not explore this topic, as it relates to a slightly different problem than the one I tackle in this chapter, which is the temporal experiences encouraged by the regeneration projects.

4

Intersections of character The Brexit vote

The previous chapter discussed the fact that some residents of the seaside did not support some of the urban transformations implemented in the local area. My retired interlocutors’ practices, for example, followed a temporal logic that was different from that of the regeneration project and the ideas put forward by the local council. That is, although many people at the seaside were interested in maintaining the character of the local area, they did so in different and sometimes conflicting ways. This chapter considers the discomfort of some of my interlocutors with ‘immigrants’ living locally.1 Such discomfort combined with a dissatisfaction with certain political leaders and local projects was then expressed in their support for nationalist populism. So far the reader has learned about the different ethical negotiations in which my interlocutors were engaged when they attempted to maintain the character of things. Here I consider how their practices connected to formal politics. I intend to conclude a task that I set for myself in the introduction to this book, which is to use a new approach, one that emphasizes ethics and temporal experiences, to show the theoretical limits of current explanations of Brexit. Moreover, addressing Brexit from the perspective of character enables us to contemplate the ‘intersections’ (Degnen and Tyler 2017b) that emerge between different domains of social practice – such as class, race and nationality.

The local rise of nationalist populism A local hotel In 2012, Eleonor was around 65 years old and the owner of a small local hotel in the Cliftonville neighbourhood of Margate. Although she was not retired, she was the same age as my other retired interlocutors. Her hotel was a popular meeting point for the retired residents of Thanet, who often stopped for a cup of tea while walking around town or arranged to see friends there. Eleonor was responsible for customer relations, while her husband took care of the hotel’s kitchen. While trying to learn more about the area during the time that I lived there between 2012 and 2013, I used to stop by to spend the afternoon reading, observing people and drinking tea. As she seemed to do with all customers,

Intersections of character 113 Eleonor once approached me and introduced herself. When I explained that I was Brazilian and doing research in Margate, she joined me for a conversation. On one of the occasions that we talked, she brought me a collection of old postcards that she had kept, explaining that these were a good way to learn about what people used to discuss in the past. Eleonor told me that she had been born in a modest environment, just like her husband. During their childhood and teenage years they had observed the wealthy people coming to the hotel they now owned: ‘We were like Oliver Twist, glancing through the window and watching the other half with their nannies and amazing life’. When Margate’s economy started to face problems in the second half of the last century, the hotel was put up for sale and Eleonor and her husband bought it: ‘We bought our dream’. Nevertheless, Eleonor told me they had been struggling to make ends meet, although she had transformed the hotel into a sort of museum despite these difficulties: I’m like a mum, keeping people’s childhoods; I have adopted their memories. There is a little car on display that is worth a fortune, but I can’t sell it because one of my customers used to play with it during his childhood and comes here every weekend. I have realized how many alone – not lonely! – people there are in the world, and how when they don’t have anyone to leave their things to they donate to the [hotel]. It’s a living museum, because we try to use everything, for example the antique silver sugar bowls on the restaurant’s tables. On another day, one of my clients gave me an old bracelet, and my husband complained that I must start saying no because there are no empty places to put things in. And I realized that while I was listening to what he was saying I was petting the bracelet. My husband complained that I was giving more love to this object than I have given him in a long time. This mixture of remembrance, happiness and sadness in Eleonor’s words could also be seen in the hotel itself. The three-storey Edwardian building had dark red carpets, low ceilings and narrow corridors full of old clothes, toys, kitchen appliances and more. Some objects were displayed individually behind glass with their donors’ names, while others were assembled in different storage rooms which visitors could access. Similar objects tended to be displayed together: old sewing machines in one room, all of the children’s accessories in another, etc. The large number of objects – probably around 1,000 – was a challenge for anyone trying to maintain a high level of hygiene in the hotel. While some people found the place ‘creepy’, others thought it was interesting. Similar to the way that Sonia (described in Chapter 2) used an old prize cup to imagine the past in the History Society, Eleonor related the objects in the hotel, and the hotel itself, to the past. While the hotel reminded her of her personal memories, the objects within it reminded other customers of their childhood. As at the charity shop, Eleonor and her customers were involved in what Macdonald (2002) has defined as a ‘museum of everyday-life objects’. Both of these environments reproduced a way of life in order for visitors to feel the past. As discussed in Chapter 1,

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this required one to embark on a different temporal experience, that is, to ‘drift off’ through free association and, triggered by objects that index the past, feel the past in the present. This kind of experience was also a way that people connected and related to other people in the area, a way of feeling that they belonged. Eleonor explained to me that selling the hotel would probably solve all of her financial problems, but said it did not feel right to sell people’s memories. She explained part of the difficulties she was facing: It’s hard because we have to fight from the bottom and from the top. The other day we had a problem with health and safety, because they wanted us to stop using handmade jam and cream with our tea and scones. Everything needed to come in packages. I said that I wouldn’t do it. We are fighting local authorities to maintain things the way they have always been. Although it may seem rather naïve to an outsider that discussions about jam and cream were perceived as a ‘fight’ worth having, these small details were exactly the sort of characteristics that distinguished character and enabled people to ‘feel’ the past. These details allowed for the Proustian effect and sensory memories to occur (see Chapter 1). At her hotel, Eleonor had problems not only with the jam and cream but also with the concertina-gate elevator, which authorities considered dangerous to customers. Beyond that, according to Eleonor, there were other pressing issues. With regard to a recent battle to prevent the council from transforming one of the local hotels into ‘flats for immigrants’, she said that had the council abandoned this plan it would have been ‘[o]ne small movement that could have made a lot of difference, and stopped all the resentment’. Listening to her at the time, I said I could not fully understand it, that is, why this would have stopped all the resentment. She then argued that I could not understand it because I was not English. I could have felt offended by her comment, as she had associated my nationality with an inability to understand the situation, yet I took it as a fact: I am Brazilian and I did not fully understand what she meant (In the book’s Final considerations I further unpack the implications of her statement). So I asked her to explain, and she continued: The problem with the area is that many landlords don’t live here and don’t care about it. And the people that live here, after having to deal so many times with vandalism, and getting no help from the government, just gave up. They lost pride in the area. The community spirit is gone ’cause half the people don’t know their neighbours. You can see the difference between that part [Cliftonville East], with many trees and flowers, and that part [Cliftonville West]. In the past when something happened to the trees, for example, the community would gather and solve it. But it just doesn’t happen anymore. The town is divided. There is no sense of community. Between 2012 and 2013 I rented a flat in Cliftonville East, the ‘orderly’ part of the neighbourhood. Nevertheless, it was part of my daily routine to walk past

Intersections of character 115 Cliftonville West. While walking around town, I was able to observe the kinds of situations that Eleonor referred to. When KCC regeneration plans were still beginning to be implemented in 2012 (see Chapter 3), some areas of the town presented clear signs of material poverty. By this I mean I could see multiple stores that had been shut down, with abandoned façades and windows covered with posters. There was often a great amount of rubbish left in the streets, and mattresses and pieces of furniture left behind in abandoned gardens: The wards of Margate Central and Cliftonville West, in Margate, are some of the most deprived in the South of England, together they suffer from an unemployment rate of 13% (the national average is 7,9%, the average in the South East is just 2,5%). In the poorest parts of these wards the rate is 38% with 63% of the population dependent on welfare. In addition they have some of the highest levels of crime and anti-social behaviour in the country. There are high levels of decay and dereliction among seafront properties. Out of town landlords have left a large number of properties derelict and poorly maintained, attracting squatters and problem behaviour. 82% of households in Margate Central and Cliftonville West live in privately rented flats, the population is young and transient and the flats unsuitable for families. There are also high numbers of refugees and asylum seekers. (Lees and McKiernan 2012: 19) At the time, on the streets of Cliftonville, especially Cliftonville West, I heard very different accents: Eastern European, Chinese, Indian, Arabic and others. Because I am not a native speaker of English I had some difficulty in identifying these, so I often relied on other people. In addition, many languages were spoken in this part of town. While engaging with people at the charity shop in Old Town or in the History Society, I hardly met anyone who introduced me to the ‘immigrant’ residents of Cliftonville West, the area described as the most ‘deprived’ of town (Lees and McKiernan 2012: 19). Similar to Eleonor, although not necessarily in reference to immigration, my other retired interlocutors often felt uneasy about some of the streets in Cliftonville West. They were shocked by the fact people ‘did not take pride’ in the area and left so much rubbish outside. Although this could have been considered the responsibility of the council, my interlocutors could not understand why people did not simply pick up the rubbish themselves, as they said they would have done in their own streets. Some of my interlocutors did live in Cliftonville, but they usually chose to reside on streets in the eastern part that were considered more orderly. Three or four particular streets were perceived as the worst in the area by those who did not live in Cliftonville West. Most of my interlocutors moved around Thanet by car, which meant they could avoid those streets with which they did not want to come into direct contact. Therefore, I felt the people that some of my interlocutors labelled ‘immigrants’ were very distant from the events that I was engaged in as a researcher, despite the geographical proximity, and I will tackle this distance further on in the chapter.

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McKenzie (2012, 2017) has discussed a problematic strategy employed by different boroughs in England to allocate public housing. Citizens are often moved to areas very far from where they originally lived, which wrenches their social ties apart. This has all sorts of negative consequences for people’s routines. Moreover, it means that residents have not chosen the areas in which they live, and therefore often struggle with the challenges that they bring. To make things worse, the council’s strategy of continually allocating people who were enduring precarity to Margate meant that there was a concentration of unemployment in an area that already had few work opportunities. Because there was so much diversity (in the sense of multiple languages being spoken) and at the same time precarity in Cliftonville West, it was hard to understand what was going on and how to respectfully engage with the people there. In other words, as both an anthropologist and a Brazilian, and therefore as a foreigner myself, I had difficulty in making sense of this context (for example, why the rubbish was accumulating). To make things even more difficult, there were often explicit signs of verbal violence, such as couples fighting in the streets, mothers screaming at their children and people shouting at each other, as well as drug dealing and large groups of men hanging around together, which made me feel threatened.2 These sorts of events were defined by the council as ‘anti-social behaviour’ (Thanet District Council n.d.c). From the rubbish in the streets to formal politics My interlocutors resented the dog poo in the gardens, the rubbish in front of the buildings and the mattresses in the streets. They also did not know how to talk about it. ‘If I say something I am criticized, but because you are not from here you are allowed to say something without being considered racist’, said one of my interlocutors, a retired English resident of Cliftonville East. She expressed her anxiety while facing the fact that, despite feeling that she did not share the same cultural values as some of neighbours, she could not state or discuss her opinion. She continued: ‘I think that when you go to a different country you should not try to change the culture. You should try to learn their language and their manners ... This whole thing with UKIP, I do not agree with many of their ideas but I can see where this is coming from’. She was referring to the fact that UKIP (the United Kingdom Independence Party) had at that time in 2013 just won seven of the eight seats in the local council elections. This particular interlocutor did not vote for UKIP, but many of her acquaintances did, and she understood why. It is important to note that not all of my interlocutors explicitly criticized the level of immigration in England or supported UKIP. Eleonor, however, had voted for UKIP. Paul Gilroy (1987: 49) considers the demand for ‘commitment’ to stem from a racist attitude: ‘How long is long enough to become a genuine Brit?’. My interlocutor’s statement can be seen to reinforce this racism by suggesting that people should somehow adapt to the local culture, as if they were some sort of ‘other’ and not British. Here, there was a problematic association between the local problems

Intersections of character 117 in Cliftonville West and ‘other cultures’: my interlocutors were often charging people which they imagined to be ‘immigrants’, but who they often did not really know, for the problems they were encountering in town, and assumed that commitment to the local culture would solve the matter – instead of assuming that the problems were inherent to the local culture and people. According to Gilroy (1987), racism is a process and therefore changes over time. He stresses the way that British nationalism involves a specific form of racism which engenders absolutist notions of culture and identity: that is, ‘[a] conception of cultural differences as fixed, solid almost biological properties of human relations’ (Gilroy 1987: 39). This language of national cohesion and homogeneity encourages a mindset that black people, for example, are outsider aliens who cannot conform to the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 2006 [1983]) of the British nation and will cause the dissolution of British values and imperial greatness. Gilroy has argued that not only extremist parties but also the Conservative Party, left-wing movements and the UK media have employed populist and homogenizing discourses about the nation. He argues that racist nationalism often differentiates between authentic and inauthentic British citizens – and my interlocutors claims about ‘other cultures’ could be seen to be reproducing this distinction between authentic and inauthentic citizens. Nevertheless, despite growing debates about anti-racism, the responsibility of residents towards the maintenance of their areas, especially with regard to the preservation of character, was not something my retired interlocutors were ready to dismiss. The past chapters have shown that my interlocutors felt the need to protect the material history of objects and the buildings in town, especially people’s homes. These things were often connected to long-lasting narratives about loyalty and sacrifice during British wars and history. As discussed, national history was profoundly entangled with my interlocutors’ memories of working-class upbringings. Such remembrance practices involved the investment of time, physical effort and money. This is why my interlocutors were disappointed when the regeneration agenda put forward by the local government helped to de-characterize the local area. That is, my interlocutors’ engagement with space was marked by their attention to the temporal quality of the landscape around them, which was accessed through the notion of character. This generated an experience of ordinary life that could be very different from that of others who were not interested in the character of things. On the one hand, my interlocutors did not understand how respectful individuals could ignore the ethical concern for the environment in which they lived. The advantage of conducting ethnographic research was that I did not only hear their claims, but followed their practices, so I could see what exactly they were referring to when adopting racist language. Although I also witnessed situations in which people uncarefully reproduced racist stereotypes, in other moments the connection between the problematic expressions ‘immigrants’ or ‘other cultures’ and the rubbish being thrown around was not completely gratuitous because they were trying to acknowledge that the rubbish left behind was worst in those areas in which they physically encountered people speaking other languages or where

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they saw people wearing garments that they associated with ‘other cultures’, such as a veil. They often said ‘other culture’, ‘immigrants’ or did not know how to account for people’s different habits (regarding rubbish and other things) without feeling they were entering into a very sensitive discussion. They felt they could not talk about it because any acknowledgement of people who seemed to show other cultural values was easily associated with racism. My point is that even if some of them did in fact easily engage in racist discourses, others who were trying to avoid racism genuinely did not know how to account for different habits without using language that was considered to be racist. In saying this, I am not trying to excuse them, but to describe the complex situation in which I was immersed. On the other hand, local authorities were often a different source of problems, either by imposing legal ‘health and safety’ obligations that only complicated the maintenance of character or by promoting a simplistic language of diversity that encouraged regeneration projects that threatened to erase the local physical indexes of the past. That is, the council’s romanticized claims about diversity (see Chapter 3) did not help my interlocutors to address the challenging aspects of coexisting with people who were interested in other (non-characterful) daily practices. As a consequence, the problem was not necessarily the ‘other cultures’ or the council representatives per se, but how together they contributed to the continuation of practices that destructed and diminished the values and physical objects that mattered to my interlocutors. These things played a fundamental role in giving meaning to their lives and connecting them to the local people and area, as has been described in other chapters. As Eleonor said, she felt as if she was constantly in a fight. It was at that time that Farage, the then leader of UKIP, arrived in town claiming to have the courage to say what others would not. In 2015 he competed for Thanet South in the general election. As described in the Introduction, among other things he promised to remove the rubbish from the streets and protect Manston Airport. The airport, like Eleonor’s hotel and the charity shop, allowed my retired interlocutors to experiment with memories that connected them to relatives and neighbours who had also recently moved to the area. These kinds of practices were central to the purpose of their daily life. Not all my interlocutors voted for UKIP. Although they could relate to some of the party’s arguments, they realized that UKIP was perceived as morally negative. Farage did not win a place in parliament. The campaign for Brexit, in turn, allowed my interlocutors to defend their ethical considerations without necessarily supporting parties that had been historically associated with racism. The two political movements seemed to be connected in terms of their nationalist agendas and references to the past. Even if not all of my retired interlocutors related well to Farage or UKIP, the great majority supported Brexit. In 2016, 63,8% of Thanet (compared to 53,4% in England) supported the nationalist and populist campaign for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. In the next section I consider how political and social scientists have interpreted this phenomenon, before unpacking the problematic aspects of the analytical frameworks that have been employed.

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How nationalist populism operates According to Ernesto Laclau (2005), individuals who are continually dissatisfied with their political representatives’ actions and responses to their claims may begin to reaggregate themselves around a common dissatisfaction. This generates an ‘equivalential chain’ of new associations between people. Although they connect on the grounds of being dissatisfied, their reasons for being so may vary greatly. This, in turn, offers an opportunity for populist political leaders who rely on ‘empty signifiers’ (Laclau 2005: 38). That is, populist discourses often draw upon vague ideas about ‘us versus them’ that suit very different purposes. Mudde and Kaltwasser (2017: 6) define populism as a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people. In other words, it is a dualist political logic (Judis 2016: 14) that opposes a homogeneous ‘good’ (the people) to a homogeneous ‘evil’ (often the elite). It threatens liberal democracies by rejecting notions of pluralism and minority rights in the name of ‘the will of the (pure) people’. Because there can only be contested versions of who ‘the people’ are, there is always a danger that politicians speaking in the name of ‘the people’ will employ a totalitarian discourse. Since they draw upon a ‘thin’ rhetoric of empty signifiers, populist narratives are often combined with ‘full’ ideologies such as nationalism or socialism (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017: 19). These combinations of ‘thin’ rhetoric and ‘full’ narratives help to create very different populist political movements. The main difference between right- and left-wing populisms, however, is often the use of immigrants as scapegoats (Judis 2016: 15). The growing affiliation to UKIP and Brexit could be considered to combine thin populist rhetoric with nationalism to create a right-wing political movement, even though it shows a ‘left’ anti-corporate concern for workers (see also Mann and Fenton 2017; Balthazar 2019). The campaign for the UK’s withdrawal from the EU was led, on one side, by right-wing Conservative leaders such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, with a small amount of support from some Labour MPs, and on the other by a UKIPled project fronted by Nigel Farage. The Leave discourse depicted the country’s independence as the ‘democratic problem’ of reinstating the sovereign will of the British people, often framed as ‘taking back control’. It also argued that detaching from the EU would bring economic and political advantages in terms of trading with other independent sovereign states (Inglehart and Norris 2016). At the centre of this perspective was a language that carefully avoided references to race, instead depicting immigrants as an economic threat to the white British working classes (Virdee and McGeeverb 2017). Included in this was a theme of ‘island retreat’ (Winter 2016) and a demand for restrictions on immigration. Representations of

120 Intersections of character the UK as an island play a problematic role in obscuring the country’s historical dependence on colonialism and slavery (for example, see Tyler 2012). Following the unfolding of these events, we can observe the emergence of at least two major interpretations of nationalist populism in the UK: one which focuses on racism and how the ‘legacies of empire’ were fuelled by the manipulation of voters through social media; and a second which focuses on class struggle. In the following sections I will engage with aspects of both before arguing that they share a temporal normativity that precludes analysts from understanding my retired interlocutors’ claims about character.

The ‘legacy of empire’ argument Scholars have argued that Brexit was only able to attract voters from different political and class backgrounds by drawing on ‘long-standing racialized structures of feeling about immigration and national belonging’ (Virdee and McGeeverb 2017: 3). As the argument goes, the British Empire, which articulated an elite form of expansionist worldview that later also came to incorporate the working classes, relied on a scientific sense of superiority over other races to justify its colonial endeavours. With the decline of empire, the ‘deep reservoirs’ of racism were turned towards non-white ‘intruders’, such as immigrants from India and the Caribbean (Virdee and McGeeverb 2017). The situation worsened with the working class’s crisis of representation, which opened a political space in which the right could build upon a working-class politics of resentment and long-lasting national racism. In other words, racism was always there and Brexit is merely the historical moment when the political context allowed for its activation. According to some authors, it demands for a nostalgic return to a time when ‘Britain was the global hegemon of the capitalist world economy … where everything from ships to spoons were marked with a Made in Britain stamp’ (Virdee and McGeeverb 2017: 4, italics in original). According to Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson (2019), after the end of the British Empire the upper classes became less wealthy and resorted to austerity measures to maintain their wealth. In order to justify austerity to the lower classes, however, they blamed immigrants. The lower classes believed this propaganda because they had been educated in a racist educational system that proclaimed national superiority and shared ‘mystical’ ideas about the past that failed to address Britain’s immigrant origins. Since the Brexit vote there has been a proliferation of cases of xenophobia in the UK as some have felt entitled to violently attack others who are perceived as ‘immigrants’, either because they speak other languages or show connections to ‘other’ cultures. Beyond this, social media also played an important role in support for nationalist populism. That is, in 2018 the public became aware that a British political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica Ltd, had been hired to develop social media marketing strategies in order to increase support for the Leave campaign. This event contributed to the public’s perception that social media had played an important role in the rise of populist movements across the globe, especially regarding the propagation of ‘fake news’.

Intersections of character 121 ‘Fake news’ refers to false information deliberately created by marketing strategists to influence people’s emotions regarding, for example, political leaders and candidates. Cambridge Analytica combined big data mining tools and information from social media accounts to generate knowledge about how people react to propaganda. This knowledge was then used to expose people to the kind of information (fake or not) that would cause the emotional reaction intended by marketing strategists (Cardoso 2018). In other words, Cambridge Analytica’s software was able to provide very different audiences with the exact pieces of information that would encourage them to take the political action intended by the marketing plan. This strategy was used to promote Brexit. The anthropologist Hage (2000) has discussed the relation between nationalism and racism in his investigation of the situation in Australia in the 1990s, and his analysis seems to apply to events in the UK. Hage argues that practices claimed to be ‘racist’ are better analyzed as ‘nationalist practices’, as they involve a sense of privilege towards the national territory. Therefore, people who perceive themselves as authentically British feel some sort of privileged right over space and act as a sort of ‘spatial manager’, a person who feels entitled to push away ‘intruders’. The ‘immigrant’ then becomes an ‘other’ who can be managed and removed. In other words, if ‘they’ (the ‘immigrants’) do not prove their loyalty they should be sent ‘back’. This notion of sending people ‘back’ in Hage’s research resonates with the Brexit slogan ‘take back control’ (as mentioned in the Introduction). After the Brexit vote, many residents of the UK felt the right to demand that ‘immigrants’ were sent back to their countries. This claim completely ignored not only Britain’s immigrant roots, but also the fact that the British Empire was responsible for centuries of exploitative relations with and oppression of other countries and peoples. Although my interlocutors did not consider themselves racists because they did not engage in physical acts of harassment, people like Eleonor still expressed the entitlement over territory that Hage wrote about. For example, when she criticized the transformation of one of the local hotels into ‘flats for immigrants’, Eleonor positioned herself as Hage’s ‘spatial manager’. Although she was not directly involved in actions that subjugated others, she still supported a public discourse that encouraged those who were willing to engage in violent physical and verbal behaviour against ‘immigrants’. As Hage (2010) explains, the consequence of this sort of violent attitude is that people who suffer racism feel intimidated and want to hide, as they fear the idea of leaving the house and suffering new violent attacks. This is a cruel psychological process. Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon (2008), Hage (2010: 126) argues that Racism … works as a centrifugal force. For the racialized subject who is ‘trying to be’, and struggling to ‘pull him/herself together’, a more energyconsuming centripetal effort is required for their self to maintain their sense of togetherness in the face of others. Since the Brexit vote I have friends who, because they were perceived to be ‘immigrants’, have been shouted at in the streets to ‘go home’. Others have been afraid

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to speak in public, in case their accents are recognized and they become targets for violent behaviour. People started to live in fear after the Brexit vote. The situation got to a point where no matter how ‘British’ your passport said you were or you considered yourself to be, as long as someone saw in you physical traits that did not reproduce idealized images of white English-British people, you could become a target for violence. Luckily, as a Brazilian I personally did not experience any sort of explicit violent attack, although I certainly empathize with people who did. When the Brexit vote occurred I had been doing research for four years, so I already had easy access to practices at the seaside and was greatly immersed in the local routine. My Brazilian friends who were living in England and who were not anthropologists, however, were often surprised that I managed to mingle in areas and participate in activities that were not as cosmopolitan as those in London. They confided that they faced difficulties in engaging with British, especially English, people. Consciously or unconsciously, this often led them to hang out with other Brazilians, relying on the comfort offered by a shared diaspora. For them, the practices relating to character that Eleonor described above seemed out of reach and exclusionary. Just as I had initially been a bit disgusted with the teddy bear that had character (see Chapter 1), so many of my Brazilian friends remained disgusted by certain nationalist practices. With Brexit, the sense of animosity grew and my friends felt even more discouraged from attempting to engage with people like my research interlocutors. With the growing cases of racist harassment in the news after the referendum, some Brazilians were intimidated, showing a ‘lack of commitment’ to British practices that ironically probably only made people like Eleonor even more uncomfortable. In other words, if Eleonor’s greater intention was to increase people’s commitment to the maintenance of character and the local area, she probably got the opposite.

The ‘left behind’ argument Beyond the argument about the legacy of empire, Brexit has also been explained as a reaction by the ‘left behind’ working class to the neoliberal austerity policies of recent years (Goodwin and Heat 2016), which corresponds to a broader phenomenon across Europe (Inglehart and Norris 2016). This strand of analysis argues that, beyond its racist undertones, it is important to acknowledge that the Brexit vote speaks to the oppression endured by some of the lower classes in the UK. That is, recent forms of capitalism have contributed to a polarization between cosmopolitan elites and disenfranchised lower classes, a disconnection between the ‘local communal cultural particularity’ and ‘abstract liberal cosmopolitanism’ (Kalb 2009: 208; see also Friedman 2003). Within these contexts, populist–nationalist movements are a way of resisting liberal elites’ globalizing modernisms that ignore the realities and demands of the lower classes. Nevertheless, Douglas Holmes (2016) has felt the urgency of warning all social scientists about the fascist connotations of these political movements. Building on these arguments, the anthropologist Gillian Evans (2007, 2010, 2017a, 2017b) provides an insightful analysis of the popularity of right-wing

Intersections of character 123 nationalist parties in post-industrial areas of England. Evans conducted longterm ethnographic research on a post-industrial council estate in Bermondsey, a London borough, and argues that before the 1960s the council estate was largely white and its residents relied on an ethic of reciprocity and care for their environment. However, with policy changes in the late 1970s (Evans 2010; Koch 2014), housing began to be allocated according to necessity instead of commitment to the neighbourhood. As a consequence, the long-lasting logic of community reciprocity was disrupted. With the growing immigration of a multi-racial population to the council estate and, according to Evans, the state’s failure to provide a rationale for this new formation, suspicion towards ‘outsiders’ increased. In parallel, Katharine Tyler (2015) conducted research with a British ‘white working-class’ family who had lived most of their lives on another council estate in a town close to London. She interviewed Simon, aged 42, a divorced father of two. In line with Evans’ arguments, Simon thought that the estate where he was brought up and his mother still lived had changed. Here I reproduce his opinion: It’s like nobody seems to care anymore … When I was young … all the gardens were immaculate, the houses were well looked after … The estate has deteriorated in the way that it looks, the way that the people treat the estate … There’s not a lot of community spirit here anymore. (Tyler 2015: 1178, Ellipses in the original.) According to Tyler, the fact that Simon was brought up on this council estate, and therefore had multiple emotional ties to the area, encouraged him to criticize the newcomers’ ‘lack of discipline’ in relation to the upkeep of their homes and the estate. Here Tyler cites Edwards’ (2000) arguments about how incomers develop negative reputations if they are perceived to exploit the estate’s resources without any sort of reciprocity. This sense of reciprocity is directly connected to notions of responsibility towards one’s environment. The feelings expressed by my research interlocutor Eleonor, therefore, were similar to those of Simon. At the time Eleonor believed that voting for UKIP might help to change the situation. Evans (2010) recognizes a direct relation between the sense of local community reciprocity traditionally expressed by the working classes and nationalist politics. The national becomes a new way of voicing this local sense of community and opposing outsiders. According to Evans, whenever there has been a political void with regard to such issues of localism, right-wing parties such as the British National Party (BNP) have been able to rise in popularity by means of a discourse about white British ethnicity and a national sense of community (Evans 2010).3 In the UK, such a ‘void’ in political representation has been mainly experienced by disenfranchised working-class Labour Party voters from the 1990s onwards. When the party turned its attention and commitment towards a middleclass audience and propounded a centrist multiculturalism rather than a left-wing agenda under New Labour, workers were left without representation (Rhodes 2011; Edwards, Evans and Smith 2012; Mann and Fenton 2017).

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Within this context, some voters decided to withdraw from electoral politics. For example, residents of council estates in South England felt betrayed by political leaders who did not commit to their ‘personal’ and ‘intimate’ politics (Koch 2014, 2016). They expected political representatives to be involved in ongoing efforts to build respectful homes and communities. That is, they wanted politicians to be part of local networks of support, care and loyalty. This expectation was not met by centralized public policy schemes, and politicians were driven away by the logic of political practice, i.e. routines that demanded alliances and engagement with ‘outsiders’. As a consequence, voters have experienced a democratic disenchantment. Nevertheless, New Labour’s ‘multicultural language’ continued to be appropriated by different right-wing populist parties in order to attract the white ‘indigenous’ people of Britain who were anxious to reconstruct a sense of community (Rhodes 2011; Evans 2010). Many voters saw this as an opportunity for a ‘protest vote’. That is, feeling betrayed and forgotten by the state, they expressed their resentment through collective support for right-wing politics (Smith 2012a, 2012b). In other words, expressions of resentment have been common in neighbourhoods that have struggled with the demise of their sense of place and belonging in ‘post-industrial Britain’ (see also Crinson and Tyrer 2005; Degnen 2005; Hart 2008). This helps us to understand what was going on with Eleonor. As she explained, Eleonor came from humble origins where there was a broad sense of community. That is, Eleonor can be seen to reproduce a working-class responsibility towards the local area. In reaction to the combination of a void in political representation and the language of multiculturalism, Eleonor ‘scaled up’ the local community into a national one, and saw in Farage and Brexit an opportunity to voice her anxieties. The ‘left behind’ argument entails an emphasis on how right-wing parties have attempted to ‘inculcate’ (Evans 2017a: 90) a sense of ‘indigenous’ entitlement among the white working class: Thus, the increasing economic inequalities experienced by everyone – black, white and Asian – living in these neighbourhoods were reconfigured by the far-right as the specifically cultural battles of white residents to compete for scarce resources against black and Asian outsiders/immigrants. (ibid.) That is, voters are understood to be suffering from a situation of precarity that has made them more susceptible to manipulation by means of a political language of ethnicity. In other words, the very fact that they have endured economic oppression, community disintegration and insecurity has encouraged them to commit to racist political movements.4 Although Eleonor did not experience oppression in the same way as that described by Evans, my earlier description of the hotel helps to demonstrate that she felt insecure and under pressure. The analyses presented in the last two sections have made important arguments about the current situation, examining both the racist outcomes of Brexit and the

Intersections of character 125 economic oppression experienced by lower classes in the UK. In turn, I intend to contribute another argument to these critical reflections, one that takes into consideration people’s different experiences of time.

Avoiding the ‘post’ paradigm The inevitable outcome of the arguments presented above – that is, that Brexit is related to structural racism and/or economic oppression – is that at the end of the day voters are just responding to economic or racist structures with the tools offered by political leaders. Everything that they do tend to be reduced to a political game played by parties and party candidates, who are able to direct voters towards their interests. As a consequence, life becomes a facet of politics and there is no real need to investigate people’s actions. Ethnographic findings can be seen to fit within this broader structural framework. Thus, working-class voters are trapped within a ‘science of unfreedom’ that ignores their capacity to ethically evaluate their own actions (Laidlaw 2013). In other words, the complexity of people’s lives is reduced to the overcoming of matters of necessity – a ‘struggle for survival’ (Evans 2017a) – or to the mechanical reproduction of racist values. In order to make sense of such events it is then sufficient to pay attention to political leaders and social structures, as has usually been the case in social scientific studies of political phenomena. The advantage of approaching people who come from working-class origins but are not struggling for survival, such as my retired interlocutors, is that this provides an insight into the kinds of ethical values that inform their practices beyond matters of ‘necessity’. There is a chance that these are the precise values that have led them to re-unite (in terms of political alliances) with people who come from similar origins but continue to endure precarity.5 Moreover, conceptions about a ‘deep-rooted nostalgia for the British Imperial project’ (Virdee and McGeeverb 2017: 8) fall short in explaining how exactly nationalist sentiments remain relevant to people despite their growing awareness of anti-racist movements. Beyond that, research that focuses on messages delivered via social media often says very little about the precise reasons for voters’ emotions and actions. Once again, voters are treated as the passive masses portrayed by economic models. While arguing this, I do not deny that unscrupulous political tools have been created that threaten the premises of democracy. Neither am I diminishing the importance of media analyses that map how such processes work. I am merely claiming that there is an imbalance between the foci of such analyses, and that a large amount of attention is given to the ‘supply’ side of politics while very little is said about the way people appropriate and potentially transform such discourses and meanings in reference to their local contexts. That is, for a populist political movement to occur there must be an encounter between the ‘supply’ and the ‘demand’; the ‘supply’ being the politicians and parties, and the ‘demand’ being the constituencies inclined to vote for them (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017). Most analyses tend to focus on the first. Attention to the ethical (Laidlaw 2013) allows us to consider what may have informed people’s decisions about how to

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act (and vote). This opens up the possibility that people’s thinking is never simply manipulated, but that they instead always evaluate how best to act in accordance with their own values. In other words, the objective here is to recognize my interlocutors’ ethical considerations by developing a perspective capable of envisaging the way that they ‘reflectively evaluate’ (Laidlaw 2013) their actions. This does not mean that they are necessarily ‘good’, but that they are evaluative. It also does not mean that they have complete control over their lives, as this would reinforce depictions of the autonomous self-regulated subject propounded by different neoliberal narratives (see Walkerdine 2003). Although my interlocutors have been affected by major structural transformations, they have evaluated how to engage with such transformations in ways that respect the values with which they were brought up. In other words, if they have been forced to change they have continuously considered how to do so while maintaining the character of things and a respect for their past. As discussed above, character provides them with a logic for how to change. It is important to emphasize that I am not trying to deny the connection between the Brexit vote and racist discourses and practices. As discussed elsewhere (Balthazar 2019), some of my interlocutors would reproduce Brexit slogans about the UK being an island, for example, without realizing the problematic way in which such a metaphor obscures the British colonial past. Eddo-Lodge (2018) emphasizes the direct relationship between British history and the slave trade. Although the plantations on which African people were forced to work were in Britain’s colonies, which allowed British people to see the money without the blood (2018: 5), slavery did not only happen in faraway lands but in many slave ports across the country: Liverpool, Bristol, Lancaster, Exeter, Plymouth, Bridport, Chester, Lancashire’s Poulton-le-Fylde and London. Later, people from the colonies were promised that fighting for Britain in World War I would guarantee colonial freedom, a promise that was not fulfilled. Stephen Bourne (2010) has described the role of black communities on the Home Front during World War II, and Eddo-Lodge (2018) has observed that soldiers who decided to stay on in Britain after the war faced racism, a racism and sense of exclusion that EddoLodge herself has experienced when she hears people shouting that they ‘want their country back’. Therefore, the point here is not to deny the continuous existence of racism in the country, but to acknowledge that its continuity does not necessarily mean that all nationalist practices are deprived of ethical evaluations or careful considerations of how to be respectful to oneself and others. In other words, not all people are passively reproducing racist legacies, refusing to acknowledge the necessity of producing a fairer world. Some are invested in trying to mediate between an acceptance of change and the maintenance of what is central to their lives: the character of things. Neither do I dispute the fact that some people in England experience and suffer from structural oppression, in combination with a sense of being excluded from politics, as arguments about the ‘post-industrial demise’ have shown (see Smith 2012b; Evans 2017b). Although many of my interlocutors were born in

Intersections of character 127 working-class contexts, during their lives they managed to enter a ‘service class’ that provided them with some financial stability, an opportunity not shared by all British citizens. However, as a researcher I have been cautious with analytical frameworks that, like the regeneration policies, have helped to silence my interlocutors. Chapter 3 has shown that it is precisely such an emphasis on the economy that justifies the kind of regeneration projects that my interlocutors criticized. I cannot uncritically commit to this sort of analytical framework without the risk of portraying my interlocutors’ anxieties towards the local de-characterization of the seaside as meaningless and of indirectly contributing to the same mindset that justifies regeneration. As I have argued in the previous chapters, the significant influence of Bourdieu’s approach to class struggle on a variety of social–scientific research conducted in the UK has contributed to an over-emphasis on claims of belonging and proprietorship (i.e. class dispute) that helps to obscure the particular sensory experience of the past that some nationalist practices entail. As I argued in Chapter 1, although my interlocutors do express a sense of proprietorship (which has now been scaled up to the national level), this is only one aspect of their maintenance of character. People do not orientate their attitudes with reference only to (economic) competition, as Bourdieusian frameworks encourage us to think. To implicitly reinforce this is to corroborate deterministic economic premises about society. More importantly, explanations of Brexit (the two arguments described above) also explicitly or implicitly reproduce a ‘modernist’ (Harris 1996: 3) temporal framework of ‘rupture’ that implies deterministic conceptions of time. That is, the language of either ‘post-industrial’ or ‘post-colonial’ implies a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. As a consequence, the analytical framework itself imposes the temporal determinism of a ‘succession of instants’ that contrasts with the ‘past experienced as present’ through character (as carefully discussed in Chapter 1). For example, Evans argues: After more than 100 years of labouring people’s heroic struggle to make the means for a dignified life, this undoing of the urban industrial working class was a tale of tragic demise. (2017b: 216) Despite the ‘struggle’, within this framework the industrial community is represented as achieving some level of ‘secure social order’ (Giddens 1991a: 10): ‘a dignified life’. This moment is opposed to the dangerous and lethal post-industrial situation: the ‘tragic demise’. Thus, the post-industrial moment clearly represents Giddens’ ‘disembedded modernity’. In turn, Dorling and Tomlinson (2019: 10) reduce Brexit voters’ engagements with the past to the ‘mystical’ interpretations of people who could not cope with the consequences of the post-colonial period. The conception of temporal rupture implicit in the ‘post’ (-industrial, -colonial and -modern) paradigm, I argue, helps to conceal some of my interlocutors’ own

128 Intersections of character notions, appropriations and transformations of ‘time’, which directly relate to their ethical concerns. As discussed in Chapter 1, modernist frameworks assume a ‘rupture’ and an ‘emptying of time’ (Giddens 1991a) that run counter to my interlocutors’ attention to the ‘history in things’, i.e. the character of objects and places. The logic of character does not accept a dissociation between time and materiality, as discourses about ‘rupture’ implicitly do. The consequence is that the analytical instruments of ‘rupture’ themselves (e.g. the use of ‘post’) impose a temporal determinism that helps to obscure highly complex and effortful daily negotiations regarding the maintenance of character. For example, whatever my interlocutors do to protect character is then depicted as a counter-intuitive attempt to ‘go back’ in time to the moment before rupture (to what happened before the ‘post’). In other words, my interlocutors’ references to experiences of time are immediately interpreted through conceptions of a ‘past’ that is linear, fixed, unchangeable and profoundly separated from the present (cf. Hirsch and Stewart 2005). Like me, Cathrine Thorleifsson has argued that the working classes ‘were not merely victimized by the effects of neoliberal restructuring programmes and deindustrialization, but strived to cope with and give meaning to the changes affecting their lives’ (2016: 1). That is, British working-class people actively engaged with different narratives about the past to generate a social reconnection in a context of post-industrial existential insecurity. Nevertheless, Thorleifsson has argued that such ‘projects over … memory’ (2016: 1) are a response to the ‘the dissolution of industrialism’ that are destined to fail since the past is ‘now unattainable because of the irreversibility of time’ (Thorleifsson 2016: 5). Despite her attempt to avoid portraying people as victims, she resorts to a language of ‘post-industrial’ Britain and, consequently, her interlocutors’ engagement with temporal practices ends up being framed as a response to a rupture in time that is inevitably led to fail. I am, therefore, arguing that by resisting the ‘post’ (-industrial, -colonial and -modern) analytical framework we are able to observe that my interlocutors had a particular understanding of time that influenced how they should change and maintain things, which they articulated through the notion of character. As the book has shown, although certain appropriations of character and experiences of the past may have become problematic, and were used to claim proprietorship, this was not the whole story. Beyond this, character was also about a creative ‘drifting off’ that offered people a break from ‘clock-ticking’ productivity. Although it is fundamental that the social sciences recognize the ways in which nationalist practices relate to or reinforce racist attitudes, it is also important that in doing so they do not act to reinforce a temporal logic that only works to obscure people’s practices and values (especially those of the working class who have been historically oppressed). Beyond that, the ethnography of character helps to emphasize that within certain social scientific analytical frameworks there is a temporal normativity that aligns well with the interests of capitalism: a taken-for-granted temporality of abstract and unstoppable ‘clock-ticking’ time. Therefore, an ethnographic approach informed by an anthropological perspective on ethics allows us to revise our theoretical frameworks in order for them to better suit our goals.

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Brexit, time and age Not all Brexit voters emphasized the issue of immigration as Eleonor did. As mentioned in the Introduction, although the blaming of ‘immigrants’ quickly and understandably highjacks the debate, among the various issues that were voiced ‘immigrants’ were only part of a larger ‘problem’. Clare, for example, explained: ‘To me it is not about immigrants, but about control over decisions and not being controlled by France and Germany. Cameron would get to those meetings and nobody would listen to him. Those people making decisions are all high on money. We want our country back’. Clare said this while we were both at Lynva’s house. As mentioned in the previous chapters, Clare and Lynva are retired residents of the seaside. Clare is Irish and Lynva is Welsh. It was July 2016 and my first day back in the area after the UK referendum. I was trying to understand Clare and Lynva’s reasons for voting for Brexit (see also Balthazar 2017). While listening to Clare’s statement, three elements immediately caught my attention. First, she differed from Eleonor in not attributing her anxieties to immigrants, instead feeling that the EU entailed the supremacy of France and Germany, a hierarchy to which she was opposed. Second, that the people making these decisions were very wealthy, and therefore could not relate to her life of hard work. Finally, that she wanted her country ‘back’ from such a situation. One common reaction to this kind of argument has been that it is simply ‘false’, as Germany and France never ‘controlled’ the UK. To explain why 52% of voters would commit to this false argument, scholars have argued that they were manipulated by the lies of political leaders, either because they had endured an oppressive economic situation or because they shared racist sentiments and mystical ideas about the past (as mentioned above). Nevertheless, the previous chapter in particular showed that my interlocutors were very critical of the local and regional councils’ projects for the area. Thus, they never passively adopted leaders’ arguments without ethical evaluations and criticism. They also did not endure an economic oppression that would have force them into Brexit; despite their working-class origins, in retirement my interlocutors had managed to achieve some economic stability. Finally, there is the issue of the ‘mystical past’. As the argument goes: Many British people’s understanding of their empire’s past and their country’s future, and how Britain is now viewed by former colonies and the rest of the world, is largely myth and nostalgia. This misunderstanding has been fuelled by an elitist education system that extols military patriotism, heroic deeds and public service. (Dorling and Tomlinson 2019: 10) According to Dorling and Tomlinson, the ‘false’ assumptions involved in Brexit were related to misunderstandings about the British past caused by education. This claim, however, completely ignores my interlocutors’ complex engagement

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with time and the past. First, as the reader saw in the previous chapters, my interlocutors never passively accepted the historical narratives provided to them, but actively and effortfully engaged in negotiations about how to understand and properly maintain the past. In doing so, they were seriously committed to the physical ‘proof’ that lay in remnants of the past (objects that have character). Lastly, this whole process was profoundly effective in generating relationships and allowing people to access their memories and interpret their own lives. In Margate, the past was never only a chapter in a history book that had been taught in school. However, as I have been arguing, in order to begin to understand my interlocutors’ relation to the past we need to move beyond analytical frameworks that render voters (especially those of working-class origins) as passive in the face of broader political and economic structures. The morning after our discussion about Brexit, Clare concluded by saying: ‘The people who fought for Britain in World War I and World War II to defend it from the Germans, they wouldn’t like this ... That’s what really gets me’. As mentioned in Chapter 2, her father-in-law had been one of these soldiers. Let us for a moment consider that Clare may be not a passive voter manipulated by lies, but may in fact have an argument. This would mean that something had been lost, and as a voter she is trying to use politics to ‘take it back’. Considering what she was saying, this loss had to do with what happened during the wars, and it was being ignored by the people in power. I then ask myself: after eight years of careful engagement with people at the seaside, have I witnessed my interlocutors actually losing anything that related to these wars, anything to which political leaders were not paying attention because they were focused on money? Yes, in fact I have. Manston Airport, for example, which was mentioned in the anecdote with which this book began. While investing in practices to transform the (deprived) seaside into a vibrant economy, political leaders have tended to ignore the fact that the value of places such as the airport cannot be reduced to their economic efficiency, in the same way that older people’s values and history cannot be reduced to (a lack of) productivity (see Chapter 3). However, both social scientists and political commentators tend to snort at my interlocutors’ claims, as topics such as Manston Airport are not perceived to be as important as economic oppression or international immigration. According to them, voters were mistaken about what really matters because they were attached to mystical ideas about the past which conferred upon them a sense of national superiority and inspired them to return to empire. What is central to note here is that when my interlocutors acknowledged the old rivalry between England and France or Germany during the referendum, they were not nostalgic for an ‘unattainable’ bygone era (Thorleifsson 2016). They were not trying to return to a time that has gone, a time before the end of empire or de-industrialization. They were instead proclaiming their loyalty to and respect for a (past) time that was present all around them – in the objects at the charity shop, in buildings around town and the furniture of their homes – and which was fundamental for their engagement with a local sense of relatedness. Therefore, they were using political tools to proclaim the importance of historical narratives

Intersections of character 131 that directly related to the physical things and practices that mattered to them and were locally experienced as under threat in the face of an ever-expanding logic of productivity and regeneration. My argument is that the remembrance of old times continuously performed by my interlocutors was not a response to a rupture in time (as in Giddens-esque frameworks), but more an adaptation of old (often working-class) values to new, daily situations. In other words, my interlocutors’ references to the past were not some sort of daydream continuously accessed in order to cope with the consequences of economic crisis or a rupture in (colonial) history. They were not ‘victims’ of broader structural transformations, desperately responding to economic precarity with unreal and idealized narratives, but rather people engaging with notions of past, present and future that made sense to them and to their upbringings. While protecting character, my interlocutors were continuously building time (as in Munn 1992). This logic did not engender a mechanical reproduction of the past – an irrational desire to go back in time – but an effort to produce a present that continued to index the past. This was about creating a certain feeling, as Catherine explained in Chapter 1. That is, it concerned complex and effortful negotiations about how to mediate past and present (and future) in physical and sensorial ways. Moreover, it engendered a temporal experience that held creative potential and which helped to forge a subject who was able to connect their past, present and future. As Yarrow (2018) has pointed out, the maintenance of character is a ‘logic that a building or monument can be understood to undergo change, even of a radical kind, while becoming more essentially what it already is’ (Yarrow 2018: 338). Therefore, the attention to character was not only about claiming proprietorship of places and excluding outsiders, but also about the very way in which people actualized their family histories and memories, and as such it was effective. My interlocutors were reinforcing a narrative that connected husbands and wives and different generations of families. They were also connecting all of these people to the area in which they now lived, transforming the whole town into an index of the past that triggered ‘memory talk’ (Degnen 2005, 2012). In retirement and old age they had finally found an opportunity to invest in a temporal experience that they treasured, but which was highly oppressed by the temporality of productivity. Nevertheless, my interlocutors perceived that local character was continuously threatened by regeneration projects and other social practices that ignored local (and national) material history. The importance of character does not fit well with the growing numbers of ‘modern’ projects proposed by the regeneration strategies implemented or supported by local and national governments. Eleonor, for example, continuously struggled to keep her hotel open. In the logic of the economy, character is a synonym for decay, unless there is an artist around to regenerate it (see Chapter 3). The experience of character requires ‘drifting off’ and an unconscious approach to one’s memory, often rendering a sense of time that is not ‘productive’ according to capitalist productivity (Kehl 2009). Therefore, Margate and the nearby seaside areas have often been associated with decay and deprivation. In the same way that regeneration practices push away people in poverty, they also

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push away those who are not on board with the capitalist investments intended to transform Margate into a thriving economy – those who are now retired. Although my retired interlocutors approved of some of the changes suggested by the government, they were wary of the rhythm of these changes and the direction that they were taking. When it came to politics, they committed to a political language that took on board their concern for character, and Manston Airport was a clear example of this. My interlocutors were invested daily in ‘putting the past back’, and with regard to politics they tried to voice the same ethical principles. They ‘wanted their country back’, and used the Brexit vote as a way to proclaim the importance of narratives and practices that related to the past. Therefore, Brexit can be understood as the result of a clash between two or more different ways of understanding, perceiving and feeling time. Thus, if there were people like Eleonor who were ready to reduce the matter to a problem of ‘immigrants’, this was not the case with all the Brexit voters that I have met, and it should not deter analysts from investigating what was actually at stake. The contribution of an anthropological perspective is to acknowledge that people may have very different (temporal) engagements with the same landscape, which lead them to engage in intense disputes about place and territory. Like Hage (2000: 22), I keep wondering: ‘Had this loss been better acknowledged and dealt with, would it have found a less ugly way of expressing itself?’ In recent years Hage (2012) has drawn on Viveiros de Castro’s conception of multinaturalism to discuss nationalist practices. According to Hage (2012), multinaturalism asks us to consider how differences are not only about ideological constructs but about people’s varied experiences of reality, which leads us to consider the existence of multiple realities. Throughout the book I have shown that my interlocutors’ attention to character delivers a particular (temporal) feeling, which is not necessarily shared by people who are not involved in the same practices. These differences were very physical, not only a representation, reflecting the body’s ‘capacities to affect and be affected by other bodies’ (Viveiros de Castro 2004: 3, in Hage 2012: 299): Multinaturalism here invites us to give some cultural differences a stronger ontological consistency, highlighting the fact that there are certain differences that simply cannot be encompassed and captured by one’s own symbolic, cultural or political apparatus. (Hage 2012: 302) An attention to character was a fundamental strategy through which people who had recently moved to the seaside built connections to others whom they had just met. As a consequence, although people like Eleonor were geographically close to the people whom she considered ‘immigrants’, the fact that they did not share an attention to character meant that they did not share an opportunity to connect. In this sense, despite residing in the same town, they were very distant from one another. Eleonor’s ‘apparatus’, to use Hage’s term, did not allow her to connect to the ‘immigrants’. This disconnection was not properly grasped either by the

Intersections of character 133 council’s romanticized conceptions of diversity (see Chapter 3) or by public narratives that only emphasized the racism of nationalist practices. As I see it, my interlocutors’ engagement with Brexit may be perceived as the ‘ungovernable’: that which ‘exhausts [the] conventional political imagination that is part of a particular form of governmentality’ (Hage 2012: 294) – also cited in the Introduction. Hage uses this term to acknowledge the challenge that immigrants from Islamic backgrounds pose to Western forms of governance and their logic of multiculturalism. I understand my interlocutors’ experience of character to transform their temporal experiences to an extent that challenges current normative and political accounts of time. An attention to character transforms reality and demands an understanding of ‘diversity’ that moves beyond the romanticized versions of cultural difference promoted by multicultural politics. Nevertheless, if the language of multiple realities seems to suggest the complete impossibility of contact between people who are invested in different practices and ethical principles, the ethnography of character shows the opposite, as the following and final section will explain. The language of multiple realities does not imply that there are no intersections, only that we should not take these as given.

British and other nationalities In contrast to the homogenized media stereotypes of the nation criticized by Gilroy (1987), references to nationalism in my fieldwork connected Irish, Scottish, English, Welsh and other people through practices such as taking care of William’s grave (discussed in Chapter 2). Beyond that, and to make things even more complicated, my interlocutors’ identifications often changed depending on the social dynamic (Edwards and Strathern 2000). For example, in conversations with Alis, another Welsh woman living locally, Lynva often addressed their shared memories of being ‘born and bred’ in Wales. However, when Clare, who is Northern Irish, joined in the discussion, it was their shared British memories that they accessed. Through these daily engagements, multiple interconnections between different identifications were forged and negotiated. Other situations demonstrated this kind of interconnection between what, from the outside, could be perceived as differences. For example, Clare and her English husband Peter were very close to some of their neighbours on their street. They often organized street parties and got together to solve whatever problems they encountered regarding the area, such as an excess of tourists parking their cars in the street or rubbish left in the gardens. Clare and Peter were particularly fond of the neighbours opposite to them, whom I will call Steven and Sophie. Steven and Sophie were both born and raised in the area, but are the children of Greek immigrants. When telling me about his past, Steven joked that to people in England he was Greek and to people in Greece he was English. As this kind of comment causes some people to feel as if they are being targeted for prejudice, I asked how he felt about it. Steven said he did not mind it, and while saying so he seemed to be genuinely comfortable. Therefore, although the ‘particularization’

134 Intersections of character of a person – i.e. ‘where are you from, since you do not seem to be from here’ – may sometimes be perceived as racism, for the claim to actually be offensive depends on whether one considers such ‘particularization’ to be a problem (see Hage 2010). Steven did not seem to perceive it as such. Steven and his wife have always been very engaged with the local Greek community and church, in support of which they have held different charity events. Clare and Peter attended some of these events, and invited me to one. This street party was no different from the many other events that people in the area organized for charitable causes. Guests usually paid to participate, and in turn were served tea and scones (a traditional English pastry) and entertained by performances. The one that I attended at Steven’s house was also attended by all of the street’s neighbours and many members of their church community. Clare was particularly committed to raising as much money as possible for the church by helping to sell raffle tickets. As they were retired, both couples tended to use any spare money to travel. Clare and Peter visited an international destination at least once a year, and whenever they were abroad Steven and Sophie kept their house key. In this way they took turns to take care of each other’s homes. Beyond that, throughout the year they visited each other for tea or meals, or took walks on the beach together. Their friendship has encouraged Clare and Peter to visit Steven’s family’s hometown in Greece, where he owns a house. Among their affinities was a political inclination. Like Clare and Peter, both Steven and Sophie had also voted for Brexit. We might assume that, as they come from Greece, this couple would have been inclined to vote to leave the EU, as so many Greek citizens had voted for Greece’s withdrawal in their national referendum in 2015.6 Nevertheless, what is interesting here is the fact that Clare and Peter’s valorization of Britain did not necessarily mean a distancing from other nationalities or a sense of superiority; quite the opposite. Throughout the years, Clare has repeated to me multiple times how lucky she feels to have Steven and Sophie nearby. Steven and Sophie, like Clare and Peter, also owned an old house that had character. An important aspect of their friendship has been how both couples have helped each other to take care of their homes and maintain the character of the local area. In other words, it is not only one’s place of origin or identity that connect or disconnect people, but also the practices they decide to share. In treasuring the same things, and working closely to maintain their houses, they connected to each other. As Edwards (2000) has argued regarding English kinship, it is not only place of birth that defines relatedness but also how one has learned to engage with place. Although identities matter, they were not the sole element that residents of the seaside considered when connecting to or distancing themselves from others. Particularly important within these different practices was the need to show a sense of reciprocity towards the local area and people. People were more concerned with practices (places, things and other people) than they were with identities.

Intersections of character 135 Similar to the practices I encountered at the seaside, Tyler’s (2012) interlocutors in Leicestershire also saw national history mirrored in the local area. They engaged in discourses about the past to construct and make sense of the present, which involved efforts to maintain and protect landmarks that signified ‘English village life’. Tyler acknowledges that the racialized hierarchies of the British Empire have continued to influence contemporary discourses and practices through the reproduction of ‘acts of forgetting’ (Baunman 1997: 53, in Tyler 2012). She argues that many discourses and practices dedicated to remembering the past in contemporary England emphasize memories about the rural and essentially middle-class ideal English village that ignore their colonial legacy. Although the discourses put forward by my interlocutors may have helped to conceal profoundly oppressive aspects of British history (e.g. colonialism), what the previous chapters have shown is that there were no set definitions about the correct ways of preserving the pasts of places and objects. While character related to conceptions of authenticity, there was not one single way to engage with it. The outcomes of engagements with character were not defined by groups of people who either did or did not belong, but by shifting comparisons between the different ways one might act responsibly towards the local area, which sometimes but not always related to national history. Therefore, character here did not relate to the fixing of identities or ‘absolutist’ conceptions of culture (as discussed by Gilroy 1987, for example), but to a particular strategy of change and transformation that respected the (national) past. In their attention to character my interlocutors were involved in the maintenance of historic places and objects. Similar to what Yarrow (2018) has observed among Scottish heritage professionals, it was in the very act of trying to reproduce the past that people created novel social arrangements. In the events observed above, the English heritage of houses at the seaside became entangled with Clare’s memories of Northern Ireland. In parallel, Peter related their period house to the experience of being raised in a working-class context (discussed in Chapter 2). Moreover, some English traditions were envisaged in relation to Greek traditions through Steven and Sophie’s practices. Clare never felt that she had to share Steven and Sophie’s religious beliefs to help to raise money for their church; they had enough things in common to be able to respect their differences. Thorleifsson (2016) encountered a similar situation during her fieldwork in Doncaster in South Yorkshire. While analyzing the rise of nationalist populism, Thorleifsson mentions that her Sikh interlocutor Aadi had voted for UKIP. According to Thorleifsson (2016: 10), by considering himself British, Aadi was ‘scaling globally to include an appreciation of historical Asian–British links and the British Raj’. Such ‘intersections’ (Tyler and Degnen 2017b) between what, from the outside, look like clear-cut separations of different national identities, prove the potential rift in racist narratives about a homogeneous white British ethnicity. On the one hand, my ethnography shows that we should not oversimplify diversity as a beautiful instrument for the construction of a creative and progressive society (as discussed in the last chapter), since people have very different

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ways of considering time, creativity and change, and these profoundly transform their experiences of ‘reality’ (Hage 2012). That is, we need to acknowledge the very diverse and complex ways in which people experience their local areas, as these may produce acute disconnections and disputes. On the other hand, however, to acknowledge such differences does not mean adopting absolutist or xenophobic language, because intersections do exist. If my interlocutors seemed to experience the sense of ‘diluted nationhood’ criticized by Gilroy (1987), it does not mean that there is just one way of restoring nationhood, as there is no single way of maintaining the character of things. My ethnographic research shows that respecting the national past, which is important for many people, directly involves intersections with other nationalities. These intersections – between class, race, different nationalities and realities – emerged during negotiations of character. Similar to the way in which Aadi scaled his narrative to produce a connection between India and Britain, so my interlocutors scaled their engagement with character in order to link British history and working-class experiences. In line with Gilroy’s (1987) arguments about the permeability of Englishness and blackness, here we observe that practices addressing nationalist sentiments do not necessarily reproduce a homogenized image of what constitutes Britain or the British. In other words, a discourse about the importance of Britain may not work to propound ethnic absolutism, but rather to emphasize the relevance of trying to connect to place and show responsibility towards the local community. Among my retired interlocutors, such practices were always performed with an attention to the historical connection between place, physical forms and people – the character of things. Moreover, these practices have proved to be strategically powerful in resisting neoliberal reconfigurations of urban space. The permeability of concepts of national authenticity has appeared in other anthropological research. Candea (2010b), for example, has pointed out that the definition of ‘Corsican’ – i.e. that which authentically belongs to the island of Corsica – is never straightforward, and therefore a troubled game. Drawing on Strathern’s (2004) work, Candea acknowledges the fractal quality of discussions about ethnicity, nationalism, and authenticity: In Crucetta, distinctions between really Corsican things and banal, normal, mere ones constantly shifted, disappeared, and re-emerged. While this made room for much debate, discussion, and disagreement over issues of authenticity, what emerged as patently obvious to everyone was the existence of such a distinction, its evident and unquestionable nature unaffected by the difficulty of pinning it down. (Candea 2010b: 96) In Margate and the nearby areas the same seemed to be true, as I believe could be the case in other parts of the UK and elsewhere. Even if people agree that character is important and use nationalist politics to proclaim their values, they continuously differ on what does or does not have character.

Intersections of character 137 Nevertheless, in order to emphasize such intersections, researchers need to allow ethnography to recalibrate their analytical premises. Otherwise we risk adopting theoretical frameworks that only help to conceal our interlocutors’ ethical principles and daily efforts. In the case of Brexit, I hope to have shown the importance of choosing theoretical tools to enable the recognition of my retired interlocutors’ care for, and large investment in, the maintenance of the ‘history in things’. Such an argument challenges theoretical perspectives that reduce people to victims of larger economic structures or spectators passively manipulated by the media. What I have found at the seaside is a profound valorization of British history, materialized through the conception of character but immersed in complicated intersections and negotiations between people with very different backgrounds and lives. The illumination of such intersections is fundamental to a research strategy that intends to de-naturalize simplistic populist binaries and media stereotypes. Through the critical contribution of an anthropological approach to nationalism I have demonstrated how an ‘other’ temporal experience may coexist within Western taken-for-granted conceptions of linear time. Moreover, through an understanding of nationalist politics from the temporal perspective of character, we may be able to envisage a space for the negotiation of politics that respect the ‘history in things’ while also avoiding racist homogenized media stereotypes. That is, the book shows not only how difference exists, but how it intersects. The intention is ‘to create a space which allows for a multiplicity of realities to coexist together’ (Hage 2012: 128). Lastly, my analytical angle engenders a respectful attitude towards my interlocutors by acknowledging their capacity to reflect upon their actions and change their ‘time’. This professional attitude has ethical implications: it does not position social scientists as ‘God-like’ creatures (see Laidlaw 2013: 17–18) responsible for rescuing the oppressed classes, but as analysts capable of providing conceptual frameworks that help to change the conversation in ways that will hopefully produce better public negotiations. The ethical implications of this research will be further discussed in the Final considerations.

Notes 1 I will continue to write ‘immigrants’ within quotation marks to remind the reader that although this term was used by some of my interlocutors, the people referred to did not necessarily identify with it. 2 It is important here that the reader bears in mind that Cliftonville has been significantly gentrified in recent years due to the regeneration projects described in the previous chapter. This gentrification is problematic both for the vulnerable residents who are pushed out by the high prices and for my retired interlocutors who, although connecting to some of these practices, remain critical of their broader consequences. 3 According to Evans, the BNP is a far-right racist party that managed to gain some support in the first decade of the 2000s. The major difference between the BNP and UKIP is that the second propounded a less explicitly racist discourse (Evans 2017b). In contrast to the BNP, UKIP was able to extend its influence beyond Conservative seats in the south and east of the country to reach the post-industrial heartlands (Evans 2017b).

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In May 2014 UKIP won 24 of the UK’s 73 seats in the European elections, becoming the first party other than Labour or the Conservatives to win so many. 4 Evans (2017a) has developed a critical analysis of the different stages of Bourdieu’s work, making important arguments about how aspects of his framework have contributed to a symbolic violence ‘which renders invisible the sociality and rich cultural life of the … working classes’ (2017b: 95). I have developed such a criticism within the pages of this book. Nevertheless, regarding the analysis of right-wing politics, Evans associates social practice with matters of ‘necessity’, as Bourdieu did in his latter, less anthropological works (Evans 2017b). 5 The referendum result was an overall vote to leave the EU by 51,9% to 48,1%. England voted Leave, as did Wales, whilst Northern Ireland and Scotland voted Remain. One series of polls of 12,500 people that took place between 21 and 23 June found that the lower middle class and the lower classes (64% of classes C2 and DE) mostly voted Leave, together with an older population (65% of people aged 65 and over voted Leave), while the upper classes and the younger generations mostly voted Remain (Lord Ashcroft 2016 in Mann and Fenton 2017). According to Mann and Fenton (2017), aggregate correlations of the Leave–Remain majority produced by local authorities ‘showed that Leave majorities were reported in Local Authorities, which were characterized as being (a) industrial, (b) poor educated, (c) having cheap house prices and (d) low income’ (Mann and Fenton 2017: 28). In their perspective, people’s votes in the referendum were greatly influenced by their votes in the 2015 general elections: 65% of those who voted Leave had previously voted either for Conservative or UKIP (Mann and Fenton 2017). Thanet is divided into the constituencies of North and South Thanet, and Margate is part of North Thanet. In line with Mann and Fenton’s (2017) arguments, in the 2015 general elections 49% of the residents of North Thanet voted for the Conservative Party and 26% voted for UKIP. Meanwhile, 38% of South Thanet voted for the Conservative Party, while 32% voted for Nigel Farage, the leader of UKIP at the time (Thanet District Council n.d.b). 6 In 2015 Greece held a national referendum to decide whether the country should withdraw from the European Union.

Final considerations The ethics of an anthropology of nationalist populism

A Brazilian writing about the British As mentioned in the previous chapter, while I was doing research at the seaside Eleonor said I could not understand some of the conflicts in the area because I was not English. ‘You won’t understand the fight unless you are English. English people are very class conscious’, were her words. She associated being English with being class conscious, and this provided English people with a perspective that I, a Brazilian, would not be able to grasp. Her argument resonates with Edwards’ (1998) and Strathern’s (1984) reflections on the interplay between class struggle and the control of knowledge in England, especially knowledge of place. That is, knowing the history of an area (including its local class disputes) and being connected to it confers upon people a sense of proprietorship. On multiple occasions in England I have experienced this subtle association between understanding the class system and feeling some sort of privileged relation to Britain. I consider people who have made this kind of comment to be acting as ‘spatial managers’ (Hage 2000), i.e. people who believe they have the right to (national) territory. The consequence is that researching the class system in England is not only about analyzing how power operates ‘out there’, but that having access to such knowledge is in itself a practice imbued with power. To control the debate on class is to be implicated in the struggle. Nevertheless, I experienced this sort of proprietorship not only at the seaside, but inside academic institutions in England. At one particular public debate, when one of the panellists referred to my work a respected English scholar stated that I did not really understand class, despite the fact that by this time I already had peer-reviewed publications on the subject. I was struck by the similarity of this attitude to that of Eleonor, although the scholar in question did not explicitly refer to my nationality. Even though I had been invited to present at this event, I could not attend because I was in Brazil and did not have enough funding to afford the trip. Nevertheless, I had a friend in the audience, and after learning about this criticism I got in touch with the scholar by email in order to better understand it. In contrast to Eleonor, who attempted to explain her perspective to me, the scholar gave an excuse and left the conversation without addressing the issue. When I met her at another event a couple of years later and once again approached

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her in particular to talk about Brexit, she made it clear that they were attempting to develop the debate, making it implicit that I was not included. At the time I wondered whether this could all have been some sort of misunderstanding, or that maybe my work was just not good enough to deserve attention. However, when the same person explicitly jeopardized one of my book publications by delaying and killing the review process; then I realized that the situation was beyond reasonable and directed at me. Because my knowledge of class was robust enough that people could no longer easily criticize it, the issue now was racism: the scholar claimed I needed to call people such as Eleonor racist and was failing to properly do so. As Tyler (2013), drawing on Skeggs (1997), has argued, the practice of naming is highly influenced by class disputes, so I was aware that adopting the language that was encouraged by the scholar to describe people from a working-class origin could contribute to middle-class historical prejudice against them. I have never tried to ‘excuse’ Eleonor from the problematic aspects of the nationalist discourses and practices in which she was engaged – and this can be seen in Chapter 4. However, she actually sat down with the Brazilian anthropologist. Despite claiming that my nationality limited my understanding, she dignified me with a respectful conversation. Meanwhile, the scholar who proudly proclaimed the ethical duty of calling Eleonor racist did not even grant the Brazilian anthropologist a place at the table, but rather continuously tried to make me invisible. Add to this the issue of language, and the situation can become quite intense. No matter how good my English, there has always been someone ready to point out that I need a proofreader. I have been privileged to learn English since I was little, and have spoken fluent English since I lived abroad for the first time at the age of 15, during which time I received a distinction for my command of the language. Nevertheless, when so many people comment on your English, you start to fear making your work public and looking like a fool, and this obviously discourages you from having a voice; it actually intimidates you. I have witnessed very respected and senior professionals in Brazil dealing with similar issues. I realized I simply had no resources left to deal with the matter: I had taken extra English classes, I had a solid grasp of grammar, and I knew I could get my ideas across. But still, there was always someone saying that there was something ‘funny’ in the text, something that ‘did not ring quite right’. They could not point out the mistake, it was just a ‘feeling’. Now, looking back and being more confident in my skills, I think ‘of course’ there was something ‘funny’ – I am Brazilian, after all. Language is not only how you convey ideas; it is also how you learn to shape your ideas. I will never speak English like a native speaker. I have never tried to change the fact that I am Brazilian. I am proud of this, which is why I was not offended when Eleonor observed I was not English. However, by the time I started to receive passive-aggressive reactions to my work (probably because I was a Brazilian daring to say something about the British), my insecurity about my English made me start to wonder whether people were being hostile towards me or whether it was in fact my (supposed) language problem. Was I getting it wrong? Was I misinterpreting what I perceived to be

Final considerations 141 unfair attacks? And how was I to get help, if academic institutions in the UK seemed to show no awareness of what was going on, while my peers in Brazil had absolutely no idea of the practical challenges of being a Brazilian and writing about the British in the British academic context? I lost count of the many times that Clare and Lynva, my research interlocutors, sat down with me and reminded me that my English was good enough, telling me that I must not be confused about what was going on and how I was feeling. You start to question your ability to interpret events, and cannot make sense of the harsh emotions you are experiencing. It has been an intense journey and, despite the generosity of some of my academic colleagues and interlocutors, I have faced it alone. Hage (2010) argues that one of the worst forms of racism or prejudice is when people proclaim their commitment to universal equality but in practice continuously – although potentially without racist intent – remind you that you do not really belong there: ‘because it lures the subjects into dropping their defences vis-à-vis the dominant culture thinking for a moment that they are not racialized, that they can self-constitute themselves into “normal” universal subjects of modernity’ (Hage 2010: 125). As a white middle-class Brazilian, I never thought I would be the target of prejudice. As most equality and diversity monitoring forms in England only differentiate between ‘white’ or ‘other race/other ethnicity’, I respectfully assumed I would not claim the particularization of an ‘other’. As Hage argues, ‘the subject is seduced into hoping and believing in universality as the space where they can form themselves into a subject. The effect of rejection that follows this moment of hope is inevitably a form of social/psychological disintegration’ (Hage 2010: 125). The point here is not to take revenge against the scholar mentioned above, because this is just one example of a much more pervasive situation. I also have no intention of depicting myself as a victim, as white and middle-class I have been privileged in many ways. More than anything, I have been able to meet talented and supportive people in academia, those who have helped me to get where I am now (please see the book’s acknowledgements). The aim of appraising this situation is to make explicit to the reader that while writing this book I have been aware that I am not only discussing conflicts ‘out there’, at the seaside, but also acting within these conflicts. What I write has consequences for all my interlocutors, and I took this ethical responsibility very seriously. Racism is not only ‘out there’ in certain nationalist practices at the seaside, but also within the academic institution. In making this claim, I am not trying to avoid confronting racist attitudes by describing racism only as a ‘structural’ phenomenon. I hope that I am doing the opposite, and am instead being transparent about the way in which my actions and words have consequences, which is why I have used them carefully. On the one hand, I have been very careful to conduct research on nationalist populism that does not contribute to the reproduction or legitimization of a political discourse that jeopardizes the social sciences’ commitment to universal equality. On the other, I have avoided actions that may support the perception that racism is associated solely with Brexiters, especially Brexiters of working-class

142 Final considerations origins who have historically endured different forms of oppression. More than anything, I have avoided reducing nationalist practices to a simplistic ‘sense of colonial superiority’, which falls short in explaining what the national actually does for people. This book tells a story about nationalism that considers racism, but it is not only about it. It begins with a Brazilian meeting people at a charity shop in Southeast England, and then pursues the memories, histories and relationships that unfolded from this encounter. Chapter 1 introduced the logic of character. That is, it considered how my retired interlocutors living in the seaside area of Margate and nearby towns in Southeast England often adopt an idiom of ‘character’ to refer to the way that objects index the past. This relationship to objects engenders a particular temporal experience that challenges normative conceptions of linear time. I argued that such attention to character influences their ethical evaluations of actions and what should or should not be done to objects, houses, places and the local area. As a consequence of this logic, the ‘good’, that which is ethically superior, has a form and shape. Chapter 2 discussed how such logic may connect, although not always, to a British register of the past. While scaling their working-class memories to the level of the nation, my retired interlocutors connected working-class history and national sentiments. This connection was negotiated through the very materiality of the houses and places they inhabited, which held remnants of the past. While negotiating, celebrating and maintaining character, and connecting it to British history, retired residents of Margate connected to the local area and each other. Thus, Britain ceased to be only the theme of political debates or celebrations during national rituals, and emerged as something very pervasive, personal and concrete in my interlocutors’ daily routines. Chapter 3 discussed the way in which the multiple appropriations and interpretations of character did not always run in the same direction. As Margate has been defined by the central government as a ‘pocket of deprivation’, regeneration projects have been developed to overcome its situation of economic precarity. I have addressed how such projects are not only problematic in terms of economic oppression, but also in terms of the deterministic temporal framework that they adopt, which tends to ignore the claims and values of my retired interlocutors. Lastly, Chapter 4 recounted how my interlocutors’ dissatisfaction reached formal politics in the Brexit vote, and how analysts have, like some politicians, adopted a temporal determinism which precludes an understanding of my interlocutors’ practices. Nevertheless, within these practices, beyond their connection to national sentiments and disconnection from regeneration projects, emerge intersections. Irish, Welsh, English, Greek, Scottish, Brazilian and other people come together through practices that protect the local character. The British heritage, which my interlocutors treasure, is made to tell multiple stories that challenge homogenized descriptions of nationality. I have argued that approaching Brexit through the perspective of ethics is fundamental to resisting a temporal paradigm that ignores people’s own appropriations of time and locks them into a language of ‘necessity’ and manipulation by the media.

Final considerations 143 I hope the book has offered the reader an opportunity to imagine relationships beyond the categorical oppositions offered by populist political discourses, which are (often unintentionally) reinforced by some scholars. That is, I hope it has offered the reader an opportunity to ‘negotiate peace’, as Latour (2002) has put it. As I have argued, I believe the discipline of anthropology is particularly well suited to create a ‘space where otherness is both radically other and yet has something to say to us’ (Hage 2012: 297). Nevertheless, for anthropology to do this work properly, we need to have a serious discussion about the ethical premises of our practice.

Character and the ethics of anthropological practice As discussed throughout the book, Giddens (1991a) has described a modern ‘emptying of time’ that my retired interlocutors in the Southeast of England have tried to resist through their attention to and maintenance of character. Giddens not only argued that contemporary Britain has experienced an ‘emptying of time’, but acknowledged the particular role of social science experts in the development of this process: ‘Expert systems are disembedding mechanisms because … they remove social relations from the immediacies of context’ (Giddens 1991a: 28). Also particularly instrumental for this process, he argues, is the practice of writing, which can be a tool for the abstraction of knowledge from its original context. As I have argued, the logic of character runs in the opposite direction: it attempts to reconnect people, place and the past, avoiding discourses and practices that promote the ‘emptying of time’. We may now consider the particular role of anthropology within this scenario. Anthropology, especially its British strand, has been historically concerned with salvaging forms of life on the brink of disappearance. In this sense, there seems to exist some affinity between my retired interlocutors’ efforts to maintain the character of things and (British) anthropology’s work to document indigenous forms of life in the face of the ‘disembedding’ forces of capitalism or globalization. We can see aspects of this legacy in the very practice of the discipline; for example, what Candea (2010b: 1) calls a ‘tradition’ in British anthropological writing of embedding the theoretical argument within description, in order for the argument to slowly render itself explicit while being ‘infused with the complexity of detail’ of each ethnographic case. Candea concludes: ‘The argument proceeds primarily by means of a narrative traced and shaped through a sequence of partial positions which do not add up to a whole but to a journey’ (Candea 2010b: 2). That is, anthropology has for decades been involved in a form of argument that attempts to re-embed social practice. This is a central aspect of ethnographic writing, which among other things attempts to locate people’s values and behaviours within the social context in which they took place. What I think this suggests is that even within the social sciences there are forces that attempt to promote abstraction and the ‘emptying of time’, while others attempt to reconnect people, place and the past. As Latour (1993) has argued, we have never been modern. Moreover, as mentioned in the Introduction, in recent anthropological debates

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there has been an ‘ethical turn’ that has attempted to intensify this process of embeddedness and contextualization by arguing against the reduction of social practices to abstract structures. However, the anthropological study of Britain, and more specifically of Brexit, differs in a problematic way. In this respect, it is worth considering two events. The first was a meeting of ethnographers of the UK in a conference that took place in 2016, just after the national referendum. There were around 50 anthropologists at this event, during which we debated our impressions of the recent Brexit vote. Whereas I expected to hear ethnographic evaluations of the referendum that were carefully built into an argument, what I heard instead were outraged personal opinions about the referendum’s outcome. People spoke about the negative consequences for their departments and for the country and international relations as a whole. Although I could understand how disappointed people were, I did not hear one single ethnographic case that explained the vote for Brexit or elucidated voters’ perspectives. Talking to a colleague, we discussed how hard it was for ethnographers to separate spontaneous emotional reactions from their professional approach. This prompted me to consider the following questions: Where does the role of the ethnographer stop, and the individual with personal opinions begin? Is ethnographic knowledge the same as personal opinion? And, did the fact that I was not a citizen of the UK, and was therefore not equally affected by the referendum, reveal the advantages (or disadvantages) of ethnography ‘away from home’? The second event occurred during a social gathering with some of my colleagues in England in the same year. I was back in Brazil at that time, and was visiting London for a couple of days. During this visit I witnessed my anthropology colleagues’ shock at the referendum result. They often argued that they did not know a single person who had voted to leave. Some confessed to me the desire to move to another country and avoid being part of the current political events. Some even started to actively support a second national referendum, as if the sentiments that inspired the first one could be silenced and erased. This, in turn, made me wonder: is anthropology about making sense of some people, but not everyone? In other words, if all populations deserve anthropological empathy, why shouldn’t those who voted for Brexit? And, if they can be understood through an anthropological perspective, what kind of anthropological knowledge could exist that enriches debate without, for example, justifying racism? In parallel, different publications acknowledged that the anthropological community was ‘bewildered’ (Green et al. 2016: 2), which seemed to demonstrate the fact that personal opinions had reached specialized journals. At the time, Social Anthropology, the official journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, published the immediate reactions of 24 anthropologists to the Brexit result. Very few of these had conducted long-term empirical research in the UK, and the general comments presented very little if any ethnographic material. Similarly, some anthropology departments in the UK organized symposia about Brexit at which, once again, very few speakers had conducted ethnographic research in the country.

Final considerations 145 Simply put, at first the referendum result was denied the most basic strategy employed by anthropologists to address other phenomena: that is, ethnographic research. Therefore, it was denied ‘embeddedness’. I consider there to be two problematic consequences of this practice. On the one hand, it shows that anthropology continues to contribute to the reproduction of colonial binaries. On the other, anthropology stops halfway in its exploration of the discipline’s potential to contribute to solving the political turmoil that is now taking place in the UK and beyond. Let me carefully unpack these two consequences. If, when it comes to certain ‘Western’ events, we speak personally, instead of using the ethnographic parameters we apply to ‘others’, aren’t we still reproducing the ‘us versus them’ divide? In other words, why do anthropologists speak personally when it is about Brexit, but ethnographically when it comes to Brazil? This either points to a blurred line between personal opinion and ethnography which calls for an urgent clarification, or it speaks to the maintenance of ‘us versus them’ dichotomies where there is a geographic demarcation of places that become the ‘object’ of empirical research – and which call for a ‘decolonization of thought’ (Holbraad, Pedersen and Viveiros de Castro 2014). If anthropology is in the business of embeddedness (as suggested above), it still limits embeddedness to certain controlled areas. It tends to locate embeddedness and different forms of ethics in places like, for example, Brazil. This awareness of continuous anthropological bias is particularly important in order to guarantee the full achievement of what we (anthropologists) have claimed for more than half a century: the recognition that otherness – that which challenges one’s values and practices – is not out there, in Brazil or Melanesia, but also within Europe and North America. In other words, recent political events such as Brexit offer anthropologists, and the social sciences more broadly, a great opportunity to reflect upon the practice of our discipline, the ways of thinking that we advance and the kind of world that we are helping to construct. In the years after the referendum the analysis of Brexit seems to have improved. Many scholars quickly moved to conduct empirical research on the UK’s political situation, and some interesting arguments have been put forward, as I have discussed in Chapter 4. The argument in this book, however, is that when it comes to the anthropological study of Britain, this research is still greatly influenced by limiting conceptual frameworks and methods (the ‘post’ paradigm). People’s reasons for voting Leave, which were clearly perceived by many within and beyond the discipline as a negative moral choice, were too quickly explained through economic or racist social structures. As I have argued, this framework relies on modern premises that conceal my interlocutors’ efforts to avoid the (modern) ‘emptying of time’. As I have shown, my retired interlocutors’ attention to character delivers a different temporal experience than the one prescribed in normative and dominant conceptions of (modern) time. We are only able to grasp this non-normative experience of time by drawing on useful anthropological parameters; referencing Hage (2012), I call this an ‘anthropological contribution to critical debate’. Moreover, with regard to the debate around ethics, this book has contributed to a consideration of the role of objects and aesthetics in the formation of ethical

146 Final considerations subjects. I have shown that my interlocutors’ practices offer an interesting entanglement between ‘freedom’ and ‘material determinism’: people are not defined by the kinds of (working-class) physical environments in which they grew up, but this aesthetic does come to have a powerful influence on their ethical considerations. Such an acknowledgement is only possible through an ethnographic perspective that is not reduced to the method of participant observation or either the researcher’s personal opinion. That is, instead of working with a priori theoretical categorizations which are tested during fieldwork through participant observation, the ethnographic journey attempts to revise analytical tools in order for them to better reflect the practices of our interlocutors. While proposing a comparative analysis of ethical life, Laidlaw (2013) argues that an ethnographic account of ‘others’ (whoever this ‘other’ might be) may in itself be an ethical practice, since it offers both the writer and the reader an opportunity to re-evaluate their own ideas about what constitutes ethical practice. In other words, while reading an ethnographic approach to the ethical life of people at the seaside we may use the ideas of ‘others’ (in this case my retired interlocutors) to revise our own taken-for-granted principles. It would mean approaching the description of character as a pedagogical process of ‘self-formation’ (Foucault 1997). This, however, prompts the question of relativism. In other words, how far is anthropology willing to go with regard to ‘other’ principles, especially those that challenge our most treasured commitments to equality and democracy? Does offering nationalist populism an anthropological perspective necessarily mean justifying racism, an action that may work to disqualify the very existence of the discipline? I believe the answer is no. As I see it, we can use the ethnographic journey through character to better understand and re-evaluate our anthropological practice. First, because we will only be sure about how ‘other’ the Brexiter is if we deviate from stereotypes and apply a rigorous methodology to our arguments. Second, because doing so allows the anthropologists to identify the limits of our professional ethics. For example, through an ethnographic approach to ethics, the discomfort experienced by my colleagues in anthropology with regard to Brexit may be seen as not so different from that experienced by my interlocutors with regard to the rubbish at the seaside (see Chapter 4). Both groups faced practices that painfully challenged what they took to be a good, ethical life; in the case of my research interlocutors, this was a responsibility towards the place where they lived, and in the case of my colleagues in anthropology it was a commitment to a politics that avoided racism and promoted international equality. And in both cases there were more radical individuals who intended to quickly erase the views of all who thought differently; on the one hand, by committing to racist politics, and on the other by defending a second referendum that would quickly mask the anxieties of a great part of the older population in the UK. In parallel, the book demonstrates that Brexiters hold other values that many anthropologists and social scientists can relate to; for example, a sort of resistance to exaggerated capitalist forms of productivity and the valorization of different temporal experiences. Therefore, the ethnography of character helps us to better understand

Final considerations 147 our own practices, and how similar or different we are to that which some despise. It enables us (anthropologists and social scientists) to contemplate the limits of our own ethical premises. This does not mean suspending our professional moral judgements in the name of ‘cultural relativism’, but instead using ethnographic accounts to reevaluate whether our practices are really leading to the ethical goals that we desire. I suggest that the difference that exists between academics and Brexiters such as my interlocutors is not between ‘ethical’ and ‘unethical’ practices, but between two different forms of ethics. While my interlocutors treasure in-group cohesion and loyalty, academics tend to prioritize universal equality (which is directly connected to the modern roots of academia, as pointed out by Giddens). This sort of comparison allows for the analyst to better qualify the values and bias put forward by her own practice. As Latour (2002) has pointed out, regarding people’s very different takes on how one ought to live a life, we are already ‘at war’ against each other. Often, by claiming universal values, academic practice fails to recognise its own bias. Ignoring the specificity of the ethics of anthropology and academic practice will only jeopardize any chance of success in ‘promoting peace’. If avoiding a proper anthropological engagement with nationalist populism brings emotional and ethical comfort to analysts (who are not forced to see the biased aspects of their own practices), it also means that anthropology is not giving its full epistemological contribution to ‘creating peace’. While it continues to do so discomforted ‘others’ become angrier and put more effort in disputing space. As a consequence, academics (as people concerned with the modern commitment to universal equality) may lose any chance they have of holding onto their most treasured ethical principles. The growing public delegitimization of academia by political leaders seems to announce this process is already taking place. Anthropology, as I see it, may be, among other things, an academic practice that experiments with forms of negotiation between different (ethical) principles. Therefore, it is not a discipline that documents the experience of diversity ‘out there’, but one that experiments with the negotiation of otherness in practice. Each publication, lecture or presentation can work as an exercise to mediate difference. This book, for example, is an attempt to do so. It describes the encounter of a Brazilian anthropologist with Brexit voters, and all the connections, disconnections and intersections that emerged from this. From fieldwork to writing strategies, the research involved different forms of negotiation. More than anything, the book shows that populist binaries and media stereotypes do not hold up when confronted with the complex negotiations that take place in people’s routines at the seaside. Among Brexiters there are very different sorts of people, many of them effortfully working to be ethical subjects. This, I hope, offers the reader an opportunity to imagine that a voter that holds a very different political position may be someone with whom one can engage with. I cannot guarantee that intersections between different values and realities will emerge between these two, but we can deliberately set ourselves the goal of using all of the available anthropological resources to encourage this to be a successful endeavour.

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Index

advertising 3, 12, 17, 106 aesthetic: and character 54–55, 109; and ethics 9, 23, 54–55, 74, 83, 145–146; and gentrification 105–107; and working class 52, 96–97 agency: and class 10; and ethics 8; of objects 45, 47–48, 92; and older age 101; and temporality 43 anthropology: of Britain 10; and critical debates 5–7; ethics of 139, 143–7; of ethics 8–10, 47; and ethnography 14–15, 25; and time 43 architecture 19, 57–58, 80, 92, 94–96 art 4, 39, 68, 81, 90–92, 95–97, 103–105; see also artists artists 37, 86–87, 90, 96–97, 103–105, 108, 111

and place 105–109; and proprietorship 50–53, 127, 139; spatialization of 17, 18; theory 10, 11, 12, 13 colonial: and anthropology 6, 10, 145; and Brexit 2–4, 25, 126–128, 131, 135, 142; and nationalism 71, 75, 120 council estate 17, 40, 123 conservative 2, 3, 82, 117, 119, 137–138 consumption: and class 52; of heritage 3, 4, 11, 73; and nationalism 59, 83; of places 105–108; and retirement 23, 100 creative industries 22, 85–86, 103 creativity 24, 37, 85–87, 97–98, 109, 136 culture: and ethics 7, 9; and multinaturalism 110; and racism 116–118, 135, 141; and regeneration 24, 85; of the seaside 19, 80

belonging: anthropology of 15; and Brexit 120, 124, 127; and localism 50–51, 95; and museums 38; and nationalism 74–75, 83; and regeneration 86 Brazil 1, 6, 31, 103, 139–141, 144–145; see also Brazilian Brazilian 5–6, 25, 76, 113–114, 116, 122, 139–142, 147 Brexit 3, 5–8, 23–4, 55, 84–85, 110, 112, 118–122, 124–127, 129–130, 132–134, 137, 140, 142, 144–147 Broadstairs 18, 19, 22, 39

deprivation: and neoliberal politics 88–89; social 3, 20–22, 85, 142; and time 131 diversity: and anthropological practice 141, 147; and ethnography 16; in Margate 116; and regeneration 24, 109–110, 118, 133, 135 Dreamland 97–99

categorizations 14, 15, 68, 146 China 57–60, 64 class: in academia 11, 139–141; and aesthetic 52, 96–97; and Brexit 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 119–120, 122–125, 127–131, 135– 137; creative 98, 109; and deprivation 88, 90 and gentrification 104–105; and home ownership 72–75; and localism 49–52; and nationalism 60–62, 82–84;

empire 3, 120–122, 130, 135 essentialization 7 ethics: and aesthetics 23, 54–55, 74, 83, 145; anthropology of 7, 8, 9, 10; of anthropological practice 139, 143, 145–147; and Brexit 128, 142; and class 12, 13, 84; and ethnography 14; and memory 35, 43, 53, 55, 77, 84; ordinary 8, 10, 14, 43, 70, 108 ethnography: and class 51; and the ethics of anthropology 144–146; and intersections 133, 135, 137; as methodology 13–15; of right-wing movements 24–25; and temporality 128

160

Index

fake news 120–121 Farage, Nigel 1–2, 24, 118–119, 124, 138 France 10, 18, 39–40, 57, 129–130 freedom 2, 8–9, 11–12, 36, 54, 84, 126, 146 gentrification 6, 17, 24, 87, 89, 103–106, 137 Germany 129–130 Greece 133–134, 138 heritage: and Brexit 6; and character 10, 11, 24, 39, 47, 63, 135; consumption of 4, 11, 17, 24, 73, 105–107; and intersections 142; and nationalism 63; and regeneration 86, 92, 98–99 immigrants: and Brexit 2, 4–5, 112, 114–115, 117–121, 124, 129, 132–133, 137 interdisciplinary 10, 12 involuntary memories 33–35, 38, 44–45, 54, 61, 66, 100, 110 island: and colonialism 119–120, 126 KCC (Kent County Council): regeneration plans 85–87, 91, 103, 109, 115; what is 18 Labour Party 17, 123; see also New Labour life-planning 44–46, 53, 109 localism 50, 123 made in Britain 57–61, 63, 74, 81–83, 101, 120 Manston Airport 2, 4, 9, 55–56, 84, 118, 130, 132 Margate: and character 10; and deprivation 5; ethnography in 14, 16; historical description of 18–24; and right-wing politics 1 Marxist 12, 107 material determinism 12, 146 materiality: and Brexit 128; and ethics 12; and the formation of subjects 47; and nationalism 68, 73–74, 77, 142; and the past 41, 44; and regeneration 99–100, 108 media (mass): and architecture 95; and Brexit 3, 120–121, 125, 133, 137, 142, 147; and the consumption of places 12, 106; and nationalism 59, 82–83, 89–90; and racism 117

memory: and Brexit 128, 131; collective 61; ethics of 35, 37, 55, 77, 84; and nationalism 58, 61–62, 80; and place 79; and regeneration 100–102, 108–109; and retirement 22; and storytelling 38–39; and temporal experiences 32–35, 41; see also involuntary memories methodology 13, 14, 146 modernity 41–44, 92, 127, 141 multiculturalism 15, 123–124, 133 multinaturalism 110, 132 nationalism 71, 75, 120 nationalism: and Brexit 6; and class 82–83; and house 67; and intersections 133, 136–137; and populism 119; as practice 70–71, 75; ordinary 14, 15, 24, 59; and racism 56–57, 60, 77, 117, 121, 142 neoliberal: agenda in UK 17, 82, 88, 99, 122; capitalism and Brexit 5, 128, 136; capitalism and time 36, 38; subject 11, 12, 17, 83, 126 New Labour 17, 88, 95, 123 nostalgia 6, 125, 129; see also nostalgic nostalgic 39, 120, 130 older people: and the seaside 22; stigmatization of 109; and temporal experience 102 philosophical 27, 33 political representation 123–124 political structures: and ethics 8, 53 politics: formal 16, 24, 56–58, 69, 83, 102, 110, 112, 116, 142 populism: and anthropology 139, 141, 146– 147; and Brexit 1–4, 6, 25, 112, 119–120; and ethics 7, 14, 84; ethnography of 13–14, 23; and time 27; and UKIP 135 post-colonial 3–4, 127 post-industrial 3–4, 61, 95, 101–102, 123–124, 126–128, 137 post-modern 3, 27, 44, 55, Proust, Marcel 32–38, 41, 43, 45, 51, 58, 68, 100, 110, 114 psychoanalysis 36, 37, 55 public housing 116; see also council estate racism: and academia 140–141; and anthropology 144, 146; anti- 6; and Brexit 3, 25, 120–121, 125–126, 133–134, 142; and nationalism 56–57, 60, 77, 116–118; and spatial manager 121 Ramsgate 18, 19, 22

Index reflexive 8, 104 reflexivity 9; see also reflexive regeneration: and Brexit 12, 115, 117–118, 127, 131, 137; and the charity shop 28; and creative class 109–110; and gentrification 104, 106; of Margate 22, 24, 84–90, 95–100, 142; and memory 102; and retirement 102; and social mobility 83 relativism 25, 146–147 remembering 32, 35, 61, 101–102, 135 remembrance 38, 75–78, 81, 113, 117, 131; see also remembering responsibility: and anthropological practice 6, 141; and character 49; and class 11; and ethics 9; and localism 53, 87, 115, 117, 123–124, 136, 146; and nationalism 75 retirement 20, 22–23, 27, 45, 66, 100, 102, 108, 129, 131 self-formation 9, 44, 53, 68, 146 social geography 10 social media 3, 89, 120–121, 125 social mobility 13, 15, 83, social sciences 6, 10, 13, 43, 47, 53, 128, 141, 143, 145 sociology 5, 6, 10 storytelling 38 structures: political and economic structures and Brexit 4, 125, 130, 137; of racism and Brexit 3, 5, 120, 145; social structures and ethics 8–9, 12–13, 53, 102, 144; social structure and home ownership 72 temporal experience: and Brexit 5–6, 25; of character 23, 35–37, 43–45, 53–54, 114, 131, 137, 142, 145; and

161

decay 80; and nationalism 56, 61; and retirement 102 temporality: and Brexit 128, 131; of character 41, 44, 53; future-driven 24; and nationalism 80; of rupture 55; see also temporal experience Thanet 1, 3–4, 9–10, 14, 18–19, 21–22, 62, 78, 83, 85, 92, 94, 99, 104, 112, 115–116, 118, 138 therapy: self- 44–45 time: emptying of 27, 41, 43–44, 49, 90, 98–99, 110, 128, 143, 145; and rupture 43, 55, 98, 101, 109, 127–128, 131; see also temporality; temporal experience Turner Contemporary 90–96, 98–100, 103, 109 UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) 1, 2, 4, 8, 24, 116, 118–119, 123, 135, 137–138 vote: Brexit/Leave Vote 2–3, 5–7, 24–25, 112, 120–122, 125–126, 132, 138, 142, 144; and ethics 13, 24–25; protest vote 124; for UKIP 116 war: and Brexit 130; and character 92; and memory 5, 30, 58, 60, 63, 73–74; and nationalism 75–77, 81; and racism 126; and UKIP 1, 4; and welfare 17, 22, 82; of worlds 147 west: and freedom 12; and nationalism 59, 67; see also western western: and colonial bias 145; conceptions of time 71, 107, 110, 137; and multiculturalism 133; nationalism 6, 67; and older age 101