10 - Conclusions

Summary

Introduction

In these conclusions I ask, ‘What sort of place is Newmarket?’ and ‘What sort of people claim allegiance to its windswept Heath and horse-dominated way of life?’ To some degree this book responds to my desire to ‘make strange’ the sometimes taken for granted and homogenised notion of ‘British culture’:

Much has been written recently of the dangers to anthropologists of essentialising visions of non-western societies. Less has been written recently of the dangers to people in the West of their essential visions of themselves.

(Carrier 1990: 706)

Though some aspects of racing society may seem utterly ‘foreign’ to outsiders, there is also much which finds resonance amongst a wider British audience. The ideas encompassed by the saying of: ‘like father, like son’, for example, the inheritance of sporting talents and the explanation of traits as ‘in the blood’, are common to many contexts outside racing. The difference seems to me that within the racing industry these ideas are worked out more fully, albeit in the guise of another species.

In 1988 Borneman related race, ethnicity, species and breed to horse-breed classification in America and concluded that:

The mythical systems produced through classificatory devices, while experienced as innocent speech, are in fact constructed first, by a plagiarism of the social world, and second, by a harmonisation of that world with its dominant discourse. This kind of myth is neither simply a charter for reality nor is it an invention of pure thought. It is both a language for analogically representing another reality – an hierarchical system of human differentiation – and a means by which that reality can be validated. (1988: 48)