Język angielski, matura 2021 - poziom dwujęzyczny - pytania i odpowiedzi

I am sitting in a café near Paddington station, drinking a delicious espresso. The coffee is a real reward because I have just spent the whole morning accidentally-on-purpose bumping into people and counting the number of those who said “Sorry”. This time I gave up my usual method of getting an inconspicuous research assistant to break sacred social rules while I watch the result from a safe distance. I have bravely decided that I must be my own guinea pig. I don’t feel brave. I feel scared and exhausted. I want to abandon the whole “Englishness” project here and now, go home and lead a normal life. Why am I doing this? Good question. Perhaps I’d better explain. I am an anthropologist.

We are constantly being told that the English have lost their national identity – that there is no longer such thing as “Englishness”. There has been a spate of books bemoaning this alleged identity crisis, with titles ranging from the plaintive Anyone for England? to the inconsolable England: An Elegy. However, having spent much of the past twelve years doing research on various aspects of English culture and social behaviour – in pubs, at racecourses, on trains and street corners – I am convinced that “Englishness” is not obsolete. In my book I examine the hidden, unspoken codes of conduct governing English behaviour which cut across class, age, sex, region, sub-cultures and other social boundaries.

The aim of my book is to describe a “grammar” of English behaviour. Native speakers can rarely explain the grammatical rules of their own language. In the same way, those who are most “fluent” in the rituals, customs and traditions of a particular culture generally lack the detachment necessary to explain the “grammar” of these practices. This is why we have anthropologists who can do this in an objective and coherent way.

Most people obey the unwritten rules of their society instinctively, without being conscious of doing so. For example, you automatically get dressed in the morning without consciously reminding yourself that there is an unspoken rule of etiquette that prohibits going to work in one’s pyjamas. But if you had an anthropologist staying with you and studying your behaviour, you would be asked: “Why are you changing your clothes?” “What would happen if you went to work in pyjamas?” “What else can’t you wear to work?” And on, and on, until you were heartily sick of it. Then other people from different groups of society would be watched and interrogated, and hundreds of nosy questions and observations later, the “grammar” of clothing and dress in your culture would eventually be deciphered.

The human species is addicted to rule-making. Every human activity, without exception, including natural biological functions, is hedged about with complex sets of rules and regulations, dictating precisely when, where, with whom, and in what manner the activity may be performed. Animals just do things; they eat, mate, or play; humans make an almighty song and dance about it. This is known as “civilisation”. The rules may vary from culture to culture, but they are there. Different foods may be prohibited in different societies, but every society has food taboos. We have rules about everything. My focus on rules is therefore not some strange personal whim, but the recognition of the importance of rule-making in the human psyche.

A. Out-of-town shopping malls may be in decline, but in inner cities from New York to Hong Kong new malls are booming. And many are blending seamlessly into the urban fabric. One example is a birdlike structure called the Oculus which is nowadays the focus of the World Trade Centre district devastated on 9/11. The Oculus’s unusual architecture beckons from afar. From the outside, it reminds you of a bird or a dinosaur skeleton. But the Oculus is more than a piece of striking architecture. It is a popular tourist attraction which also functions as a mall, with more than a hundred stores.

B. The mall’s owner, the Westfield company, promotes it as “The New New York Place to Be” and hopes that tourists and commuters will be drawn to its stores. A professor of architecture at the City College of New York points out that, despite its original exterior, the Oculus is just another example of global urbanism, virtually indistinguishable from the Dubai Duty-Free Mall, because the same generic multinational shops are now to be found in cities throughout the world.

C. In the early 2000s, when enclosed malls lined only with stores were the standard, the architect Chris Law proposed the first “open city” concept. Beijing’s central business district was chosen as the site for this innovation. Law injected his design with a heavy dose of public space, including sidewalks and trees that would shade the pedestrian outdoor space. He laid out the shops and restaurants around two distinct plazas – one brimming with an interactive water feature and a massive screen to show televised events, and the other for a quiet reading session over a cappuccino.

D. Rather than setting out a detailed blueprint for the whole complex, Law created a master plan with a design framework for other architects to fill in, making it appear as if the complex had developed organically – “just like cities do”. Later, the developer also entrusted Law with a design for another outdoor retail development in Chengdu. Since it was located near an ancient temple, Law respectfully designed structures with timber portal frames to match the cultural heritage of the district, laying out the stores and restaurants along intimate, tree-lined lanes.

E. Another place which has recently experienced the innovative weaving of malls into the urban fabric is Hong Kong. Most of the city’s three hundred shopping centres do not sit on asphalt parking lots, but on subway stations and underneath skyscrapers. Hong Kong’s transit provider is also a real-estate developer, and has capitalized on the value created by its subway stops. Thousands of people live, work and play in those high-rise megastructures, which include dwellings, offices and leisure facilities, and malls are deliberately placed on the intersection of all pedestrian flows, which makes them, by design, impossible to miss.