Britain’s common-sense crisis

In her classic 1974 monograph Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village, the anthropologist Juliet du Boulay offers a telling vignette. A peasant woman is readying loukoumi, or Turkish delight, before guests arrive at her house for a name-day celebration, and du Boulay offers to extract the sweets from their untidy-looking box, and display them in a dish for better decorative effect. The woman disagrees, saying “No, that’s not as it should be”. The anthropologist disagrees in turn, provoking the woman’s final word on the matter: “It’s not that you don’t agree, it’s that you don’t know.” The woman cannot explain why her instinctive, customary approach is correct and the anthropologist’s reasoned innovation is not. It is simply a matter of common sense, in the literal sense of the shared but unsp