Pride and Prejudice: Identity Management in English People's Talk about `this Country'

Abstract

This article discusses the ways in which a sample of English respondents oriented to the task of formulating an account of their country in an interview context. Attention to both the content and the organizational features of talk suggested that respondents were generally reluctant to be heard to speak about `this country' in categorical terms, to adopt an explicitly national footing or to display a sense of patriotic national pride. They treated all of these as potentially hearable as symptomatic of `typical' Anglo-British xenophobia. In contrast to many extant analyses, which suggest that national discourse may provide a legitimate vehicle for the expression of exclusionary or racist sentiments, it appeared that, for these English respondents in this context, talk about `this country' was often treated as a delicate topic, functionally equivalent to, and subject to the same opprobrium as, talk about `race'. At the same time, however, various features of the respondents' discourse pointed to the presence of banal (Billig, 1995) national referents. Possible interpretations of this are discussed.