Culture, language & the language class

What is culture?

... culture may be regarded as a one or as many, as an all-inclusive system - the culture of mankind as a whole - or as an indefinite number of subsystems ...

(Leslie White, The Evolution of Culture, 1959)

The concept

The very concept of culture is, in itself, slippery, difficult to grasp. In the most recent issue of 'Current Anthropology', Barbara J. King sums up the present consensus over the term by quipping : "Apes have culture; humans don't." While primatologists like Frans de Waal argue that the higher apes are similar to ourselves, displaying the ability to hand down traditions from one generation to another, human scientists become increasingly reluctant to use the c-word.

This cannot be attributed to any kind of post-modernist shilly-shallying or game-playing ; on the contrary, Adam Kuper, well-known for his no-nonsense histories of anthropological thought, is dismissive of post-modernism precisely because of its emphasis on the importance of culture, and its enshrining of cultural difference. He cites, with approval, Walter Benn Michaels, who writes :

"The modern concept of culture is not ... a critique of racism, it is a form of racism. And in fact, as skepticism about the biology of race has increased, it has become - at least among intellectuals - the dominant form of racism."

Even those who do use the term are conscious of difficulties ; Raymond Williams, whose 'Culture and Society, 1780-1950', although published in 1958, still, to my mind, stands as one of the finest introductions to English literature in the 19/20th centuries, showed increasing discomfort with the word as time passed. As he put it in 'Keywords', 'Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language', at one time even admitting that he wished he 'had never heard the damned word'.

Teaching culture in the FL Class

Three unconvincing justifications

And yet the word is used, with very little exegesis, in many of the programmes and syllabi that govern the teaching of Foreign Languages in schools - both in the United States, and in France. The reasons advanced for this aspect of language-learning are several ; Kathleen Julié, (who prefers the term 'civilization' to 'culture'), takes a bread-and-butter approach and stresses the difficulties that a foreigner may encounter in entering into communication with people whose history and institutions are unknown, even when the language itself has been well-learned. Calling on her own experience as an immigrant to France, she refers to her astonishment at the discovery that her hosts saw the Dunkirk episode very differently from the way it is presented in English history books, speaks of the humiliation she suffered at the hands of a 'garçon de café' when she tried to pay him in small change, and then goes on to evoke the embarrassment she felt when she found herself using the term 'Oh, la vache!' at a formal dinner.

Here, then, teaching culture can be seen as one necessary strand in the communicative thread ; the competent speaker of a foreign language must possess a minimum of shared understandings with her conversational partners. 'Culture', viewed in this way, is an immediate practical resource. Other ways of justifying the cultural component are rooted in a more noble ambition ; thus, the American national standards read :

Opinions and attitudes, both hidden and expressed, are often based upon a surface-examination of other cultures using criteria that can be applied with validity only to one's own culture. The erroneous judgments that result from such assumptions, born of a lack of adequate information, understanding and sensitivity, eventually lead to negative reactions to members of different cultures.

The French Instructions Officielles state :

L'apprentissage d'une langue étrangère étant connaissance d'une ou de plusieurs autres cultures, il donne accès à d'autres usages, à d'autres modes de pensée, à d'autres valeurs. Apprendre une langue étrangère, c'est apprendre à respecter l'autre dans sa différence, c'est acquérir le sens du rélatif et l'esprit de tolérance, valeur d'autant plus nécessaire aujourd'hui que la communauté du collège tend de plus en plus à devenir une communauté multiculturelle.

Learning a foreign language, then, should encourage civic virtue.

A third type of argument stems from a particular way of seeing language. This holds that each different language vehicles a different vision of the world, and one cannot speak the language without speaking the culture. This is not a new thought ; as Whorf remarked,

'Different languages have sometimes been thought to be especially appropriate for use in different circumstances. It was a Renaissance commonplace that Adam first spoke to Eve in Italian, that for a while they spoke in French, and that the angel Gabriel spoke German when he expelled them from Eden'

He then adds : 'This was perhaps fanciful, but it is no fancy that different languages divide areas of experience in a variety of ways'

Whorf goes on to suggest that these different divisions are not only a matter of vocabulary - he cites the Eskimo example that has since become so infamous - but of the very structure of language itself : the North American Indian languages that he and Sapir studied expressed relations between different parts of the world in such a way that what might be seen as a state for the English-speaker could be experienced as a process for the Shawnee. These three kinds of justification for the cultural component - along with others - are often put forward as self-evident. Those who hold them are sometimes perplexed or even angry if one offers to question them. However, they can all be questioned.

Counter arguments

So far, I have outlined some of the reasons why the very concept of 'culture' is difficult to pin down, and shown that, for some anthropologists at least, one may even have reasons to be suspicious of the term. I have sketched in three reasons that have been invoked to justify including a cultural component in the teaching of an FL. These are :

• 1. knowledge of the culture can increase communicative competence.

• 2. knowledge of other cultures can increase tolerance and lead to greater self-awareness.

• 3. language and culture are so closely related that one cannot teach the one without the other.

I said that each of these arguments can be countered, and said that I would offer objections to them in a later message. That is what I am going to do now.

1. Communicative competence and culture

I will start examining the first argument by going through the three incidents that Kathleen Julié cited to illustrate her own disarray when arriving in France. First, I will say that none of them seemed to me to indicate communicative breakdown of an irretrievable kind. You will remember that she was surprised to discover that the French viewed the withdrawal of the British Army from mainland France differently to the way the British themselves described it in their history books. Here I will suggest that she was learning a useful lesson - one that schools may find it difficult to teach - and that is that interpretations of important events and views of heroes and villains may vary from one group to another, from one individual to another. I remember my own surprise, as an adolescent, on discovering that there were English men and women who regarded Winston Churchill as a poltroon.

I should have known. After all, Churchill was voted out of office the moment WWII ended. A lot of people out there must have thought he was less than wonderful. Similarly, Ms. Julié might have surmised that the French would have been less than enthusiastic to see their allies fleeing from the field to leave them to cope with Nazi invaders on their own. That neither she, nor I, had so reflected is, I think, an indicator of youthful naivety ; discovering that the opinions of our parents, or of our immediate neighbours, are not held by everyone is just part of growing up.

Moreover, it could be claimed that if there is a failure in schooling here, it is in the way that history was taught, rather than in the fact that time was not taken in language classes to give the French point of view of the British withdrawal from the European mainland.

The second incident was that 'garçon de café' who, it seems, turned his nose up at her small change. I must confess that I have some trouble working out how this is a question of 'civilization' or culture ; I remember British bus conductors or shop-keepers getting snooty with me on such occasions as I offered a large fist-full of copper coins to pay amounts over a shilling or two. And although I know the French have a reputation for being rude to customers, I've come across English barmen who could be just as ill-mannered. Once again, I rather suspect that the youthful Ms. Julié was finding out about the world which can, once one leaves the protections of home and close community, be a cruel and heartless place.

Finally, what about those diners who were shocked by her use of 'Oh, la vache!'? Here we have a classic case of straying out of register ; the existence of register seems to be a characteristic of all languages, and language teachers certainly need to alert their pupils to its importance. A good notional/functional approach should include some indications as to how discourse is shaped, and learners should acquire sensitivity to the need to adjust their ways of speaking to the occasions of their speech. But this, it may be argued, is a fact about language.

In fact, cultural competence may well be a general human skill ; we all make errors of adjustment to our surroundings at some time or another, but the ability to read a social situation, to judge from the expressions of those around us whether our behaviour is acceptable or not, is pretty much a human constant (an indeed, one specialist in language development has suggested that it is this ability, rather than any specific module, that accounts for children's being able to enter their mother-tongue with such apparent ease). The rules as to what is appropriate may differ from one human group to another - this is as true of social status groups within a single society as it is of nations - and it may well be that the school, as an institution the prime purpose of which is to equip children to go beyond their immediate primary groupings, should take pains to ensure that children sharpen their sensitivities in this domain. But this is not the same thing as teaching about the customs and institutions of other countries in the course of an FL programme.

Kathleen Julié's three moments of embarrassment turn out, I suggest, to have been encounters. By encounter, I mean a fully authentic moment of social interaction, unscripted and unprepared. Such moments are precious, necessary, for a number of reasons ; from our point of view, they are necessary because it is only when the language learner encounters the Other that the language becomes crucial and fully alive. While we may organize a limited set of such encounters in the class-room, the only way to experience them fully is to get away from school and get into the world. Nothing that teachers or educators can do will substitute for such moments.

2. Increasing tolerance through teaching culture

Let us turn now to the second argument for teaching culture ; that a familiarity with the practices and beliefs of others will lead us to a greater degree of tolerance. There is, unfortunately, little evidence to support this view. Familiarity may breed contempt as often as it leads to understanding. And understanding itself may not lessen antagonisms :

One of the worst wars in Nuer history occurred in the last generation between the Gun and the Mor moieties of the Lou tribe. It was known as kur luny yak, the war of letting loose the hyena, because so many people were killed that the dead were left for the hyena to eat. It is said that in this struggle men displayed unusual ferocity, even cutting off arms to seize ivory amulets.

Evans-Pritchard goes on to recount a series of feuds and battles, some of great ferocity, between different sections of the Nuer. In fact, Nuer themselves regarded warfare and fighting as arising from identity rather than difference. 'We have our fighting among ourselves and the X have their fighting among themselves. We do not fight the X. We fight only among ourselves. They have their own fights,' one of his informants told him. Similarly, observation of American street-gangs showed that their acts of violence were far more likely to be perpetrated on one another than on strangers ; violence is a form of recognition. (It seems to be a fairly general rule that the most likely victims of violence are also the most likely perpetrators, and share a common social position).

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that understanding another people's customs will necessarily lead one to have a more positive attitude to them : knowing why it is that Indian wives may be expected to immolate themselves upon their husbands' funeral pyres does not make one any more tolerant of the practice. A full explanation of the functioning of the competitive exams that are used by the French educational system to certify its teachers will not persuade most English or Americans that this is a reasonable way of selecting educators. Nor does closer acquaintance with English food seem to induce greater culinary tolerance on the part of French people. So I will conclude that there is much wishful thinking about the effects of 'teaching culture', and that it cannot, by any means, be expected that it will necessarily lead to an increase in tolerance.

3. Culture is language, language is culture

Now we come to the idea that language and culture are so intimately entwined that you cannot have one without the other. This is often simply announced as self-evident ; however, let's be clear as to where that leads. Take the example of a wide-spread language such as English : it is spoken as either first or second tongue in a large number of states around the world - some of which are very different from others. Yet the language remains recognizably English. Do all speakers of English necessarily share a common culture? Or take the case of French ; did those Algerians, Senegalese, or Vietnamese who learned French, some of them speaking and writing it with considerable mastery, thereby become French?

And what to make of societies where several languages are spoken : do we conceive of their members as changing culture when they change language? Do we believe that the Flamand and the Walloon are, the one, Germanic, the other Latin? These are thorny questions, to say the least of it - and often enough, the answers are politically loaded.

Among linguists, the belief that culture and language are organically linked is known as the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis. Whorf wrote :

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.

Different languages, then, express different realities. Today, few linguists would agree with a formulation of the theory as extreme as this : at the most, the language you speak can be seen as having some constraining influence on thinking (for example, people who speak languages which do not distinguish between yellow and orange may have difficulty recalling that two similar objects differed on this characteristic - but they are perfectly capable of distinguishing the one from the other while they can see them). And the environment in which you live may have some effects upon the language - and it is here that the old story about the Eskimo words for snow comes into the picture. (For a very skeptical view of this, have a look at Geoffrey Pullam's 'The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax')

Some linguists are adamant in their rejection of S/W ; Pinker states roundly that '... there is no scientific evidence that languages dramatically shape their speakers' ways of thinking.' Thought, says Pinker, is prior to language (animals can think); language expresses thought rather than shaping it. It may express it badly - as Pinker remarks, all of us have had the experience of finding it difficult to say what we mean - but when it does, we will do our best to find a way round the difficulty.

It may be that when people say that Language and Culture are entwined, they are conflating Language with what people say. It is the case that when we speak or write, the meanings that we exchange are rooted in time, space, and our place on the cultural map. But the code itself, the language, is not - except in so far as it is a human attribute, and humanity itself is temporally, spatially and culturally situated. That, at least, is what I take the Chomskian position to be.

In that case, we might well teach the language without reference to a particular culture. Young Americans could learn to speak Spanish to each other to encode their own experiences and beliefs, without needing at any time to enter into the experience and beliefs of people who speak Spanish as a native tongue. Watching Disney dubbed in FL would be a perfectly reasonable approach to language-teaching it would seem. This is not a position which I hold. I believe that there are good reasons for drawing upon the kinds of things that we refer to as culture in our classes. I'll now begin to outline why and how.

Culture - another definition

So far, I have pointed to some of the difficulties that one may have with the term 'culture', have addressed some of the reasons that are given for including a cultural component in FL teaching, and suggested that the arguments are not totally compelling. I'll now take a rather more positive tack.

To begin with, let's look at one of the basic definitions that everyone cites when talking about culture. The English anthropologist, Edward Tylor, in his book 'Primitive Culture', first published in 1871, set out what he meant by the term 'culture' on the very first page :

Culture or Civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

The key word here is probably 'acquired' ; culture is learned, rather than given. And it is learned through inter-relationships with others. Tylor then goes on :

... the uniformity which so largely pervades civilization may be ascribed, in great measure, to the uniform action of uniform causes : while on the other hand its various grades may be regarded as stages of development or evolution, each the outcome of previous history, and about to do its proper part in shaping the history of the future.

While there are many problems with this formulation - and most particularly with the idea that the different societies we can observe today, or which Tylor's generation could observe in Victorian times, could be arranged upon an evolutionary tree - I find it a useful reminder of the degree to which human societies resemble each other. In the present social climate, when so much is made of this or that specificity, in which eating habits, clothing, or the way one cuts one's hair - not to mention differences in religion, in political organization or in modes of consumption - may be seen as setting one community apart from another, this is, perhaps salutary. Indeed, it leads me to formulate the following :

There is only one human culture. This culture is a crucial component in the history of our species, and can be thought of as coeval with it. Tylor is right to point to its evolution, but wrong to believe that some present societies represent evolutionary backwaters, stagnant pools that have calmed and settled at a certain point, leaving others to outstrip them. They have evolved in different ways - but none have become so different as to spin out and beyond the overarching culture of humanity itself.

Take a Tralfamadorian view of the one culture : imagine that you can slip along all four dimensions. You follow rivers, climb mountains, fly over plains and skim across oceans, occasionally diving deep down into them. You will see deserts and islands, wilderness and great cities ; all of them are connected - even though some are less obviously so than others. All of them form but one whole Thing. That is human culture.

To some extent we understand this almost without prompting - people learn to negotiate their way in one country or another with little detailed knowledge of how things work there. Of course, there are moments of misunderstanding, moments of embarrassment - but these occur even within the frontiers of our own part of the world. And how quickly we learn! One unfortunate encounter, and we draw so many lessons from it. (Do you remember finding out about love when you were an adolescent? I think that I had more profoundly unsettling experiences discovering how to be a lover than ever I had when finding out how to talk to and work with people from other countries. Moreover, failures in this domain were far more painful in their consequences - and perhaps more fruitful in what they suggested - than were the communicative breakdowns in conversation with French people occasioned by my Englishness).

An example - haggis

Many of the differences in practice and belief that we stress as iconic of deep cultural rifts are, if looked at closely, of minor significance. Take, for example, the haggis : the OED will tell you that this is a 'dish consisting of the heart, lungs and liver of a sheep or calf, etc. ... minced with suet and oatmeal, minced with suet and oatmeal seasoned with salt, pepper, onions etc., and boiled like a large sausage in the maw of the animal'. We consider this to be emblematic of Scotland, and it will be served with great ceremony wherever Scots - and their guests - gather together to celebrate such an occasion as 'Burns' Night'. But the word itself is of Medieval English origin, and, the OED informs us, it was 'a popular English dish till 18thC, but now considered specially Scotch'.

In fact, something like the haggis was widespread throughout Europe - Homer speaks of it, although his is roasted rather than boiled - but began to give way to more sophisticated products, such as the sausage or black pudding, as people came to have more to spend on food, and to have access to more resources. The rich of the Roman Empire had already begun to abandon the dish. However, as C. Anne Wilson writes, '(i)n Britain the haggis was still a regular food in the Middle Ages; and in remote highland areas it survived until modern times'. The stuffed sheep's maw survived in the upland districts because the inhabitants remained among the last to be drawn into the capitalist economy ; eating such food went along with poverty and isolation.

The Scottishness of the haggis emerged at the time that Scotland's identity was constructed around a Romantic image of the Highland tribes during the nineteenth century - (see Trevor-Roper). Lowland Scots who, before this time would have been enraged by any suggestion that they were culturally similar to the ragged mountaineers whose savagery had been as much an embarrassment to Scottish kings as it became an annoyance to the English, began to dig around in their family trees to find some justification for their donning one of the newly invented clan tartans.

A second example - regional costumes

A similar story could be told about the 'coiffe' worn by women in Brittany, and other items of clothing associated with one region or another. Here is Ariès :

Encore au XVIIe siècle, il n'y avait pas de costume proprement populaire, a fiortiori pas de costumes régionaux ... Les pauvres portaient les costumes qu'on leur donnait ou qu'ils achetaient chez les fripiers. Le vêtement du peuple était un vêtement d'occasion, comme aujourd'hui, la voiture populaire est une voiture d'occasion ... Aussi l'homme du peuple était-il habillé à la mode de l'homme de qualité quelques dizaines d'années plus tôt : dans les rues de Paris de Louis XIII, il portait le bonnet à plumes du XVIe siècle, et les femmes se coiffaient du chaperon de la même époque. Il arrivait que le décalage variait d'une région à l'autre selon la rapidité avec laquelle les gens de qualité du pays suivaient la mode du jour. Au début du XVIIIe siècle, le femmes portaeint encore en certaines régions ... des coiffes du XVe siècle. Au cours du XVIIIe sièlce, il s'est produit un arrêt et une fication de cette évolution, l'un et l'autre dus à un éloignement moral plus accentué entre les riches et les pauvres ... le costume régional est né à la fois d'un goût nouveau pour le régionalisme ... et des diversités réelles du costume, de l'inégal retard des modes de ville et de cour à atteindre chaque population et chaque pays.(p. 87)

As Tylor puts it, the 'uniform action of uniform causes' leads to large-scale uniformities - but these uniformities are often obscured by the specific details through which they are manifest in one area or another. Thus, throughout Europe, the 18th and 19th centuries see the ermergence of regional reactions to the increasing powers of national centres, and the flattening out of markets. Communities are forged around such symbols as are available to hand - here a boiled sausage, there a lace bonnet or a broad-brimmed hat.

Culture vs. Cultures

Ruth Benedict sketched out the concept of culture which still informs much that is said about the matter today - and in a way which will have some appeal for language teachers. She wrote :

In culture ... we must imagine a great arc on which are ranged the possible interests provided either by the human age-cycle or by the environment or by man's various activities. A culture that capitalized even a considerable proportion of these would be as unintelligible as a language that used all the clicks, all the glottal stops, all the labials, dentals, sibilants, and gutturals from voiceless to voiced and from oral to nasal. Its identity as a culture depends upon the selection of some segments of this arc. Every human society everywhere has made such selection in its cultural institutions. Each from the point of view of another ignores fundamentals and exploits irrelevancies. One culture hardly recognizes monetary values; another has made them fundamental in every field of behaviour. In one society technology is unbelievably slighted even in those aspects of life which seem necessary to ensure survival ; in another, equally simple, technological achievements are complex and fitted with admirable nicety to the situation. One builds an enormous cultural superstructure upon adolescence, one upon death, one upon the after-life. (Patterns of Culture, p. 17)

Benedict, like her teacher, Franz Boas, was persuaded that cultural differences were deep, inexplicable in terms other than their own, and, in some way, freely chosen - although the agent of this choice is an anonymous 'society', to which members are subservient. The conception of culture that Boas and Benedict have left us - and which underlies so much of the prevalent discourse in the political arena of the United States, and which has also become current in France - whatever the generous intentions of its originators, renders the world opaque : we can only really understand the other through a process of assimilation which is almost mystical - the anthropologist regarding his field-work as a 'Vision Quest' in which he makes a voyage of self-discovery at the same time as he immerses himself in the world of the other.

I think I have made it clear that I do not share this vision ; cultural traits do not float free of determination, but are shaped by larger forces - ecological, economic and sociological. The Scot's taste for haggis is neither inscribed in his genes - an idea that Benedict and Boas would have rejected with repugnance - nor plucked out of thin air. It can be traced to the relationships between England and Scotland, to the identification of the highland clans with resistance to the Act of Union of 1707, and to the use of the hills of Scotland as a playground by the English aristocracy and the Royal Family in the nineteenth century. (Note, by the way, that, as Kuper remarks, cultural differentiation is founded upon similarities ; here the inclusion of both the Scot and the English in the same nation state motivates the search for marks of distinction)

Culture, language and understanding the world

To grow towards an understanding of such matters is to grow towards an understanding of how the world works : that is what school is for. The foreign language teacher does not operate in a vacuum ; she or he has a part to play in the general scheme of the school. Like the history teacher, the geography teacher, the mathematician or the first language teacher, her job is to offer the child the tools with which to come to terms with the complexities of life. This involves embarking on a journey which, while building on the foundations laid down by the family and the immediate environment, gradually draws the child out into the wider world. In order to do that, we must wager that the world is comprehensible, open to rational inquiry - which, after all, is but to acquiesce in one of the major values of our own culture.

The foreign language teacher has a specific role to play within this scheme ; by teaching a language other than the mother tongue, she may enable the child to acquire a greater understanding of how language itself works, she may enable him to enter into contact with a richer and wider group of others than he would encounter if he were to remain monolingual, and - this is the focus of my concerns here - she may help him towards some understanding of how our species copes with the world. By working on the distant, and perhaps, at first sight, exotic practices and institutions of those societies where the FL is spoken, by examining how such and such an element of culture can be analyzed and comprehended, the learner moves out and along the spiral that leads from self to the universe.

This does not come easily - any more than mastery of the phonological system, of the lexicon or the structuring rules of a foreign language - or indeed the mother tongue - comes easily. It needs hard work, including a painful tearing at the roots of being - for one of the effects that this outward movement has is to make our point of departure itself subject to critical scrutiny (I am using the term 'critical' here in the sense of 'judgement' or 'appreciation' - as in 'literary criticism'). The 'cultural component' of the FL syllabus should be just as demanding and just as rigorous as the communicative or cognitive components.

Culture in the school - festivals

Let me take as an example the kinds of things that are brought into Primary School classrooms in France as being cultural : Martine Kervran, in 'L'Apprentissage Actif de l'Anglais à l'Ecole', a handbook for trainee primary-school teachers, writes :

L'évocation des fêtes du calendrier ... offre une ouverture exceptionnelle sur ce qui participe à l'identité d'un pays. On privilégie, à l'école élémentaire, les célébrations britanniques qui offrent un point de départ idéal à l'analyse des traditions sociales, unité d'une nation.

Kervran then lists the major festivals celebrated in Great Britain. These are Halloween, Guy Fawkes Night and Christmas. Other occasions, such as Easter, Mother's Day or April Fool's Day are given less prominence, in part because they are celebrated in much the same way in France. I want to look more closely at Christmas. Kervran tells us that in Britain the festival is spread over three days, that the British send each other large numbers of Christmas cards, well in advance of the day itself, and that these are put on display around the chimney. Children hang out Christmas stockings on Christmas Eve, and Christmas dinner consists of a stuffed turkey, with sauce, followed by plum pudding and mince pies. At the end of the meal, the diners pull crackers, and then listen to the Queen's Christmas message.

I'll start with a little background research - for upper-level classes, this could be done as a web-quest, for as you will see, most of the material is available over the internet.

Christmas is interesting for a number of reasons - not the least of which is that there is not, in fact, such a consensus over its meaning and its worth as the term 'the British Christmas' might suggest. Not all Britons celebrate it ; Muslims, Hindus and Jews do not do so, but neither do all Christians. Until the 1950s, for example, Christmas was not a holiday in Scotland, where the Kirk had managed to maintain a ban on celebrating the birth of Christ since the 16th century ( You may wish to look at a couple of Welsh traditions. Elsewhere on the net, Dylan Thomas remembers his childhood Christmas : I don't know that you'll learn much about Welsh Christmas traditions, but you'll enjoy the ride.). Other Christian groups, such as the Seventh Day Adventists, remain firmly opposed to what they see as at best an example of Papist backsliding, and at worst as the work of the Devil. And of course, agnostics or atheists may well duck out of the season of goodwill.

Given that teachers will find children in their classes from a variety of family backgrounds, they would obviously be well-advised to avoid giving the impression that there is a complete consensus over a religious festival. Indeed, it is part of the conception of schooling that I have advanced here that it is the teacher's job to introduce children to the complexities of the world. The Christmas period offers us a number of opportunities to do just that. I'm going to look at three specific aspects of what we take to be the English tradition of Christmas, and attempt to see what leads they offer the teacher. In what follows, I'll examine the Christmas Cracker, the Christmas Turkey, and Father Christmas.

1. The Christmas Cracker

I'll begin with the cracker ; it is mentioned in just about all the English language text-books in France that cover Christmas, and is seen as something that is peculiarly English. Where did it come from? According to the account given by the firm 'Absolutely Crackers', it seems that the beginnings of what was to become the traditional English Xmas Cracker are to be found in the Parisian 'bon-bon'. To this, the London confectioner Tom Smith first added the idea of enclosing a slip of paper with a motto written on it (no - he didn't get that idea from Chinese fortune cookies, for these were not to appear for about another 80 years - when they were invented in San Francisco). When the idea was taken up by other sweet-makers, he looked around for a gimmick which would keep him ahead of the pack - and came up with the cracker. (Compare the Absolutely Crackers' story with another version).

This narrative leaves a number of loose ends. It doesn't explain why the cracker was so successful in England but never took off in France or in other European countries - although the Japanese, apparently have taken to them, and a German manufacturer had come up with a similar design, calling them 'Silvesters'. Nor does it explain why the cracker became specifically associated with Xmas - Smith produced them for all occasions and would have liked to have developed a year-round market for them, but this didn't happen. (Perhaps the explosive crack of a log upon the fire which Smith said first gave him the idea is so hibernal in its connotations that the cracker is indissolubly connected to celebrations of the winter solstice - which is, after all, what Christmas is about).

2. The Christmas turkey

Now let's look at that turkey ; an early migrant from America, it first leaves a written trace in 1541, and it is reported to have been first placed upon the English Christmas table by Henry VIII. It took its place alongside indigenous fowl such as the swan, or the peacock, for the rich, the bustard, or the heron for the less well-off. Several different birds might be served at any one sitting, for diversity was valued - up until the 18thC, seabirds such as the gull also made their way to the table. As tastes changed, the barnyard fowl such as the goose and the turkey displaced the swan and the peacock - both tough and stringy - and one would see flocks of geese and turkeys being driven to the London market, waddling their way from Suffolk and Norfolk. It took them from the end of August to make their way to arrive in time for the Christmas period. Still, the turkey was just one among a number of possibilities - sometimes quite literally. Here is the recipe for Yorkshire Christmas pie, much appreciated during the 18thC :

First make a good standing crust, let the wall and bottom be very thick : bone a turkey, a goose, a fowl, a partridge and a pigeon. Season them all very well ... Open the fowls all down the back, and bone them ; first the pigeon, then the partridge, cover them ; then the fowl, then the goose, and then the turkey, which must be large ; season them all well first, and lay them in the crust (one inside the other), so as it will look only like a whole turkey ; then have a hare ready cased, and wiped with a clean cloth. Cut it to pieces ... and lay it as close as you can on one side; on the other side woodcocks, moor game, and what sort of wildfowl you can get. Season them well and lay them close ; put at least four pounds of butter into the pie, then lay on your lid, which must be a very thick one, and let it be well baked ... These pies are often sent to London in a box as presents ; therefore the walls must be well built. (Wilson, p. 125)

(By the way, it has been suggested that one of the reasons why plum pudding became so popular as an Xmas dish was that it travelled well - you could send a bit to your aunt in Australia and be sure that it would arrive in an edible condition - like wedding cake).

So when did roast turkey become the centre-piece of the Christmas meal? It may have been Charles Dickens - responsible for so much of our traditional Christmas - who set it in aspic. The ghost of Christmas Present comes complete with "Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit, and punch" - but it is just the turkey that Scrooge sends to the Cratchits at the end of the tale.

However, as Dickens' tale itself illustrates, a turkey would not appear on every English table on the 25th of December - many families would have been much too poor. The real generalization of the 'traditional Christmas' has to wait for the introduction of mass-farming methods and for a rise in living-standards that was not to come fully to fruit until after the Second World War. At which point, the turkey became an attractive economic proposition - a bird easily adaptable to battery-farming methods, and large enough to feed a party, it became the poultry of choice for festive family gatherings.

3. Father Christmas

What about those stockings? In some European countries, such as Holland, children expect to find their shoes full of goodies on Christmas morning. When I was a child, my stocking would be bulging with oranges, tangerines, brazil nuts and perhaps a small plastic toy ; I remember discovering that one of my school-friends left a pillow-case out overnight, and feeling rather envious. I wondered how many brazil nuts would fill a pillow-case.

If Charles Dickens wrote much of the script for the English Christmas, our ideas of Father Christmas owe more to American writers such as Washington Irving. Dickens' Spirit of Christmas Present was a kind of Jolly Green Giant :

``I am the Ghost of Christmas Present,'' said the Spirit. ``Look upon me!''

Scrooge reverently did so. It was clothed in one simple green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free: free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. Girded round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.

``You have never seen the like of me before!'' exclaimed the Spirit.

The benign old fellow with the long white beard, the sleigh and reindeer and a base at the North Pole is largely American - see the How Stuff Works site , and follow the link to Clement Moore's 'The Night Before Christmas'. Then go see the reindeer. Finally, admire the Coca-cola red clothes that Haddon Sundblom designed for Santa Claus between 1931 and 1964.

The American advertising men's conception of the gift-giver of the winter solstice is a jolly, rotund fellow, offering good times to all. Not everyone is convinced : Santa is Satan warns one web-master - I don't know whether this particular site is serious or not, but he is not the only one to be suspicious of Father Christmas - Richard Bucher, a Lutheran pastor, subjects him to a delicate dissection, concluding that, while we might have put up with the old fellow if he had kept to his own day - January the 6th - he has little to do with the observation of Chirst's birth. Bucher's brief summary of the history of Santa Claus seems unexceptionable - the linking of the legend of St. Nicholas, tossing gold down the chimney into a young woman's drying stockings, or through the window and into her empty shoes, to the earlier figures of Odin and Thor, flying through the air on the back of a giant horse, and distributing largesse to the deserving, has been remarked upon by many commentators. That is the image I want to examine a little more closely.

Across the night skies of Europe, at both the summer and the winter solstice, rides a ghostly army. At its head, the figure of a pagan God - sometimes Odin, sometimes Saturn, sometimes Dionysius. This horde is particularly active in winter-time, concentrating its activities between the 25th of December and the 6th of January - the Twelve Days of Christmas. It is believed to be made up of those dead souls who have not been properly laid to rest.

This figure is to be discerned behind beliefs in fairies - see, for example, Katherine Briggs, 'The Fairies in English Tradition and Literature' - and, according to Carlo Ginzburg, may be related to the belief in the witches' sabbath. Ginzburg sees the hunt as a male conception ; women are more likely to perceive - and to join - a cortège of ecstatic females, lead by one or another of the incarnations of Diana.

Not that it is a good idea to be about when the the wild bunch pass overhead : if you do see them, you are likely to be picked up and carried along on their terrible hunt. However, those who do have the courage or foolihardiness to join in may be richly rewarded :

En Silésie, on raconte l'histoire d'hommes furieux qui, pendant plus d'une heure, hurlèrent de concert avec la Chasse Sauvage. En remerciement de leur aide, ils virent tomber du ciel des quartiers de chevreuil ... 'Tu as aboyé avec nous, alors tu peux aussi dévorer avec nous!' (Bertrand Hell).

So although the hunt is dangerous - it will swoop down and empty the cellars of beer and wine, murder babies in the womb, and drop the bleeding cadavers of its human victims upon passers-by and upon the rooftops (see Hell on this) - it can also be generous, and its passage is necessary to the fertility of the fields and the well-being of men. Like Father Christmas, it brings abundance in its saddlebags.

Christmas can, then, be placed within the context of a series of celebrations clustered around the winter solstice - these include Hallowe'en, Guy Fawkes Night, Hogmanay and the Twelve Days. Often enough, these are fire festivals. They involve rounds of visiting, neighbours going from one house to another, and the exchange of gifts. A feast - a collective meal - is central to such festivities.

The Christmas cracker, although quite specifically English in its particular form, is the kind of thing that one would expect to find linked to a fire festival - and the reference to the cracking log in the grate is a reminder of this. The Christmas turkey, spreading from the New World and thrusting out such meats as the boar's head or game birds, is an apt choice for a society that has replaced the hunt with intensive stock-raising, and which can proudly call upon far-flung colonies for a speciality which is both exotic and commercially attractive. And Coca Cola's Santa Claus is a fitting transmogrification of the leader of the Grateful Dead for a world which has made of the gift a gratuity.

It is often said that the Christmas festivities as they are promoted in the modern world have emptied the holiday of its true religious meaning. This is doubly the case : not only has Christmas been de-Christianized, but it has been torn from its original moorings from which the Church had never fully unleashed it. For the Christian, Easter is always present in Christmas : God is born to die and to return from the dead. The gifts that are offered to the Holy child mark him out for suffering and sacrifice. In the secular version, as Rudolf crosses the sky above the shopping mall, death is forgotten and the dangers that accompany gift-giving are brushed to one side.

So it may be that one of the things that schooling could do is to pick over the crackers, the plum pudding and the roast turkey, to array and organize them so that the deeper cultural messages can be properly heard once more. A re-discovery of the meaning of mid-winter fires for our pre-electrical ancestors, a placing of the gift within the round of reciprocity and obligation, and a recognition of that verity which our humanity condemns us to comprehend - that every birth announces its own death : these, I suggest, would be good things for the school to look into.

I would, then, place the study of Christmas within a concentric series of contexts, working back and forth from one level to another as the project progressed. The work would, of necessity, be cross-disciplinary - in the Primary school, this would pose no great problem, for the teacher would be able to organize and implement the whole series. In secondary-schools, several subject teachers would need to work together ; that is as it should be, for most people agree that the compartmentalization of learning is a Rather Bad Thing.

We might start with the concept of the celebration : ask the pupils to list the different occasions for festivities that they experience in a year. We might at first distinguish between personal festivities, such as birthdays, weddings and christenings, and collective festivities such as Christmas, the 14th of July, Easter and so on. Place these upon a calender, and look to see if there are any regularities - are there more birthdays, weddings, christenings and so on is some months than in others? - do collective celebrations tend to cluster around certain periods of the year?

Widen out from this - have the children look for data of a greater generality ; it isn't likely, for example, that the skewed distribution of births through the year for the nation as a whole will show up in your classroom, and you might need to send them to the reports of the US census to discover that births are not evenly distributed - and neither are marriages.

These activities would give an occasion for looking at ways of talking about time, days of the week, months and seasons. You would also introduce and use the language for making comparisons, for making hypotheses, expressing surprise and so on. You would also need to talk about the life-cycle, about conception and birth, about sowing and reaping. Before going on to the next phase, the teacher might want to consult the pages that Frazer gives to the European fire festivals.

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