Note that the modality of pre- senting the rules is always that of a warning: never contradict! As if the manual for new visitors to the land took after a guide to a madhouse or a zoo: do not upset the inmates!
However, while a genuine anthro- pologist maintains detachment for the sake of objective description, here the point is to learn the rules in order to blend in. Implicitly relying on the terms by which the natives conceive of themselves, the positions of us and them are already being reversed. Participant ob- servation occasionally leads to full immersion even for professional an- thropologists. Picking up on these allusions, the collected Penguin edition ironically advertised HTBA as an anthropological work: Mikes has been studying the British for a long time; here … [he] offers the fruits of forty years of field research to all aspirant Brits.
Having himself been born abroad, Mr Mikes is in the ideal position to counsel others in the same unhappy state — and even Brits born and bred may pick up a few unexpected tips from his … sharp observation[s]. In classic anthropology the non-Western Other was seen as primitive, tribal, preliterate, prehistoric etc.
Here it is an Eastern European Other, a marginal alien from a periphery, who comes to scrutinize, therefore: to exoticize, the West. The opposition between civilized and uncivilized the very core of classic anthropology thus becomes ultimately confused, leaving the reader with the impres- sion that either uncivilized is normal or civilization as such is bizarre. Framing emigration as an ethnographic fieldtrip, HTBA thus de- stabilizes the basic disciplinary principles and the political, cultural and geographical hierarchies they construct.
How to blend in, how to stand out: The art of imitation Addressing enforced aliens who, unlike tourists, are there to stay, HTBA takes the necessity of integration for granted. It is to be achieved by imi- tation. One should not be an alien at all. There are certain rules, however, which have to be followed if you want to make yourself as acceptable and civilized as you possibly can. By be- coming indistinguishable from the natives, the alien turns culturally and socially invisible in his or her own right.
Invisibility of this kind is not the only price to be paid for integration. That is, failed integration brings ridicule from the natives; success makes one ridiculous in his or her eyes. As a result of blending in through imitation, self-ridicule is inevitable because the thing to be imitated is profoundly ridiculous: HTBA detects this in every socio- cultural feature of English life.
Especially in language which, in line with anthropological traditions, is one of its main areas of inquiry. As the arena of social intercourse, language is a privileged field of mimicry both in its semantic and pragmatic aspects. In both cases, the lesson to be drawn is to abandon meaning and comprehensibility. Do you? Rain in the morning, then a bit of sunshine, and then rain, rain, rain, all day long. Being inaudible or repeating non-communicative utterances are viable newcomer strategies because it is not the limited competence of the alien but the very nature of the English language that causes communicative deficiencies.
The divergence of words and meanings is shown to be a particular and all-pervasive feature of English. And in the designation of urban spaces: How to plan a town.
The divergence of sense and meaning comes to underlie nearly all English utterances inasmuch as they are mostly either understatements or overstatements.
These also fail to capture the true meaning of a situ- ation as their intent and linguistic expression never coincide. HTBA gives plenty of examples, the funniest ones from the phraseology of wooing 30— The politics of understatement pertains to the status of the alien. Mikes is worth quoting in full: The British Civil Servant, unlike the rough bully we often find on the Con- tinent, is the Obedient Servant of the public.
Before the war, an alien in this country was ordered to leave. He asked for extension of his staying permit, but was refused. He stayed on all the same, and after a while he received the following letter I quote from memory : Dear Sir, The Under-Secretary of State presents his compliments and regrets that he is unable to reconsider your case, and begs to inform you that unless you kindly leave this country within 24 hours you will be forcibly expelled.
If the underlying order of things is absurdity, then any effort to understand the rules of conduct necessarily fails. Therefore, the task of the newcomer is not to lift the veil of nonsense from the socio-cultural patterns of native life to reveal their underlying logic as anthropol- ogy would do but to imitate them in their very nonsensicality.
If their practices are inherently absurd, then integration into the native community equals nothing less than joining a group of idiots. This is what HTBA detects in the admittance of aliens, i. Before you are admitted to British citizenship you are not even considered a natural human being … they simply doubt that you are provided by nature.
As reflected in the very linguistic form describing it, when ceasing to be an alien one simply reaches the level of idiocy necessary to join the na- tives, a group of half-wits. In view of the letter quoted above asking the illegal alien to leave, the stylistic absurdity of expulsion thus mirrors the semantic absurdity of admittance. All this, of course, serves comical effect. Assimilation and contribution Encouraging newcomers to blend in by the mimicry of local rituals, what HTBA proposes is passive assimilation.
Today, this might sound retrograde: multiculturalism is more support- ive of the idea that immigrants should be appreciated in their very oth- erness, even if it is a matter of debate whether social cohesion is better served by identity politics or by melting pot strategies. An abbreviated version of HTBA has been released as a Level 3 Penguin Reader for the students of English; which not only shifted the book intended readership from immigrants to any- one learning English but also turned a critique of the language into a textbook of teaching it.
What the peculiar dynamic of a both imitative and creative linguistic assimilation, then, demonstrates is a dialectical encounter changing both the newcomer and the host. Deciu Ritivoi Again in anthropological terminology Occident vs. Whereas HTBA encouraged his readers to imitate practices alien to them, How to Be Inimitable reasserts these practices as features of an unmimable English exceptionalism which the observer, now in the secure position of an assumed identity, also shares.
In an apparent paradox, then, the observer, a newly naturalized Brit, has become in- imitable as a result of imitation. He was born into a Jewish—Hungarian family following an assimilatory path; yet during the s ands the young Mikes was increasingly exposed to a threatening stigmatization as an alien who did not genuinely belong to his native land. In his autobiography, Mikes recounts the shock of discovering his Jewishness at a young age and that the ensuing insecurity led to the constant denial of his Jewishness when moving to Budapest to study and work How to Be Seventy 29—30, 95— His conversion to Christianity was a desperate at- tempt to overcome this self-denial How to Be Seventy 83 , and so was his leaving for Britain in By fleeing the country Mikes tacitly accepted his hyphenated identity and the fact that it had made him an unacknowledged alien.
Once in Britain, these inherent ambiguities of self-fashioning only surfaced in new forms. The urge to adapt, i. For Mikes, performing a mimetic integration in Britain was a task familiar from his time in interwar Budapest, also determined by a constant struggle to adapt, to pass as a local. I am an alien myself.
What is more, I have been an alien all my life. Only during the first twenty-six years of my life I was not aware of this plain fact. I was living in my own country full of aliens, and I noticed nothing particular or irregular about myself; then I came to England, and you can imagine my painful surprise.
I return to this below. On the other hand, , the year he references to, was also the time of the introduction of anti-Jewish legislation in Hungary declaring him an alien among, and by, his fellow Hungarians. Hites Something to which, albeit in English, his later namesake has also contributed.
How to Be Seventy — Yet the confusions in British political geography are even more far- reaching. The tea example, featuring a stereotypical cultural item, also points to this wider context.
A similar imperial misappropriation of local functions and mean- ings takes place with regard to the distinction between local and for- eigner in the following anecdote: I spent a lot of time with a young lady who was very proud and conscious of being English.
Once she asked me — to my great surprise — whether I would marry her. My mother would never agree to my marrying a foreigner. What a silly thing to say. It consists of four countries and each of them has its own unique and ancient culture. Irish and British differ very much and do not love each other. And Scotland and Wales are two more countries that donated kilt, bagpipes and many other interesting items to the world. They say that poor people put on their best clothes and go to the city at the weekend in Europe.
In England, it is the opposite - the rich dress poorly. In Europe, people rarely talk about the weather, but in England this is a tradition. Real Englishmen talk about the weather a few dozen times a day. In Europe, people value their friends. Download How to be an Alien by George Mikes. Copyright Disclaimer: This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
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