Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions: European Configurations
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Aston, Katie. "Formations of a Secular Wedding." Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions: European Configurations. Ed. Monique Scheer, Nadia Fadil and Johansen Schepelern Birgitte. London,: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 77–92. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 27 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350065253.ch-006>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 27 September 2021, 09:06 UTC. Copyright © Monique Scheer, Nadia Fadil and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen and Contributors 2019. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 6 Formations of a Secular Wedding Katie Aston This chapter will explore the humanist weddings as sites in which we may come to grasp one outline of the secular body, its accompanying emotional, ethical registers and speech acts. In particular, I will explore secular self-fashioning (Hirschkind 2011: 639) and the negotiations made by humanist celebrants who perform these rites. What will become apparent through the discussion below is the way in which the person is framed as an individual being – rational and sovereign. This kind of conscious self-fashioning demonstrates how secular humanists cultivate what Asad calls ‘the rhetoric of sincerity’ (2003: 52 cited in Hirschkind 2011), arguing that being ‘true to oneself’ is both a moral duty but also presupposes a certain kind of sovereign self, displayed through acts of sincerity. This particular discussion of secular moral and ethical concerns draws from the work of Webb Keane, specifically his work on sincerity (1997, 2002, 2006) and his work on secularism as a moral compulsion (2013). In addition, I will demonstrate how the body is the means through which secular and ethical concerns can be attained. This view of the body draws on the work of Saba Mahmood’s and her study of Islamic prayer in which she defines the body as ‘not so much as a signifying medium to which different ideological meanings are ascribed, but more as a tool or developable means through which certain kinds of ethical and moral capacities are attained’ (Mahmood 2001: 837). It is important, however, to make a distinction between the overt and the more subtle forms the secular body takes (Lee 2015: 88). In a previous work (Aston 2015) I have examined overt expressions of non-religious worldview clothing, for example (see also Lee 2015). In this chapter, however, I will explore the more subtle negotiations of interior and exterior lives, as they emerge/reveal themselves through the wedding ceremony. My examination of the secular humanist body and its emotion registers draws from data collected between 2011 and 2013 during fieldwork with British secular humanists. The research I undertook was a multi-sited ethnography, exploring the material and visual manifestations of what I called ‘nonreligious’ expressions (see Aston 2015; Lee 2012). As part of the research I worked with celebrants who had been trained by Humanist UK (formally British Humanist Association or BHA) to perform non- religious weddings and funerals, and members of the public accessing this service. The 78 Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions: European Configurations data includes interviews with approximately 10 celebrants who performed ceremonies on behalf of Humanist UK. I also examined wedding scripts and interviewed 15 couples who were either planning a humanist wedding or had already had one. These weddings will form the main focus of this chapter. Humanist UK Founded as the BHA in 1965, Humanist UK has a longer history as part of the Union of Ethical Societies, which were instituted in the latter part of the nineteenth century with the aim of ‘disentangl[ing] moral ideals from religious doctrines, metaphysical systems and ethical theories’ (Campbell 1971: 74). Humanist UK has continued to cultivate these principles today. The organization today promotes itself as ‘the national charity working on behalf of non-religious people who seek to live ethical and fulfilling lives on the basis of reason and humanity’ (humanism.org.uk, emphasis added). Humanist UK is an organization of activists, and at present runs a number of secularist campaign on issues which include challenging the automatic appointment of Bishops to the House of Lords and arguing for representation of non- religious (including humanist) perspectives on the religious education curriculum in the UK. In his exploratory essay, Charles Hirschkind suggests that ‘a secular person is someone whose affective-gestural repertoires express a negative relation to forms of embodiment historically associated (but not limited to) theistic religion’ (2011: 368). But, as I will argue below, there is no clear negative relation to religion in the secular humanist milieu. Although humanist ceremonies are an alternative to religious ceremonies, they are also an alternative to prescriptive, secularized civil ceremonies. But it is worth mentioning a further concern of secular humanists regarding religion: the perception of religious control on the body. This concern has manifested historically in the ‘free-thought’ movement, from which Humanist UK emerges (see Royle 1980 or Schwartz 2010, 2013 for a feminist perspective). These movements began to promote rights to abortions and challenged divorce laws and free speech regulations. As noted above the campaigns of the Humanist UK continue to centre on these ethical issues, plus more contemporary concerns such as female genital mutilation, gay rights (including marriage rights), assisted dying and faith schools. Figure 6.1 ‘Please don’t label me.’ Image courtesy of Humanist.co.uk. Formations of the Secular Wedding 79 Participants I interviewed were particularly passionate about the Humanist UK campaigns against faith schools (Figure 6.1) and for assisted dying. The narratives of these campaigns included a concern for the segregation of children on the grounds of faith and the moral right to control your own life and death. This kind of campaigning drives a secular humanist narrative about the sovereign self and the cultivation of the social body and underpins some of the discussion below.1 This kind of work assumes a number of things about personhood, particularly of universal human rights and freedom of individuals versus cultural freedoms and tradition. Finally, the body is framed as a site of anxieties and conflict, typically between secular humanist groups and their ‘others’. But it is worth emphasizing again that this does not mean only the ‘religious’ other. As well as campaigning, the organization also provides pastoral services, and at the time of my research, had a network of just over 300 celebrants accredited by them to perform non-religious ceremonies (see also Engelke 2014, 2015a, 2015b). Typically, they offered provision for members of the public who wanted non-religious alternatives to life-cycle ceremonies celebrating birth, marriage and death. Humanist UK began performing these ceremonies as early as the 1960s. Only in recent years, however, have these become formalized, introducing a programme of accreditation and training for celebrants and increasingly sophisticated marketing material. The third strand of the Humanist UK work was the facilitation of local humanist groups. These Humanist UK-affiliated meet-ups are usually places for debate and discussion, and indeed this is part of their appeal for many (Engelke 2015a). Many humanist celebrants also attend local humanist groups (there are approximately sixty groups nationwide). During my research I interviewed Lavender and Karl, two celebrants from south London, who explained that they had set up one such local group, which gave people ‘a space to talk to people about their thoughts [and] just make friends with like-minded people’ but caveated that ‘the group did not always just talk about [humanist] issues’. What is important to recognize about the work of Lavender, Karl and other celebrants included in this chapter is that their humanism was an active and lived worldview. Lavender explained to me that I’m like humanism in action. [Matthew Engelke’s] findings are that people who become celebrants are not wanting to engage on such an intellectual level as much as a doing humanism. … I’m like that, I’m not so keen on these intellectual discussions. Celebrants’ work differed from these local groups, and during their work with the public, they were not always likely to encounter committed humanists. It’s important to recognize they were not anti-intellectualist, but almost all celebrants expressed to me an awareness of the practical limitations of a purely intellectual approach to humanism, and of rationalism. Indeed, not all celebrants supported the local humanist groups for this very reason. In June 2012 I met Melissa at her home in Devon, where she invited me to stay for the weekend to observe two ceremonies she would be performing. She explained to me 80 Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions: European Configurations on a walk around the local Devon countryside that she had attended a couple of her local humanist meetings but had found them deeply frustrating. Her particular group had been anti-Christian and focused on a rationalist, scientist critique of theology and religions more generally. While these arguments may have rung true for her on a theoretical level, they did not seem relevant to her own work with grieving families, or during weddings. Funerals especially, but also weddings and naming