SUBJECT POSITIONS: MONARCHY, CIVIL RELIGION AND FOLK RELIGION IN BRITAIN

As Head of State, Head of the Church of England and the living symbol of the national unity, the British monarch embodies the political and religious institutions of the United Kingdom. Consequently, the ceremonies and events involving the monarch and the royal family constitute a central part of the civil religion of the nation-state. One potential problematic of the official discourse on national identity made available through the civil religion is the principle of heredity, which by elevating the status of royal birth simultaneously lowers the status of the mass of the people. However, this positioning does not cause widespread offence, or provoke general hostility towards the institution of monarchy. On the contrary, as the public mourning for Diana Princess of Wales demonstrated, royalty has the power to mobilise the sentiments and actions of millions. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted over the past ten years, my concern in this paper is with unofficial public participation in royal ceremonials and events as folk version of the official civil religion. More particularly I am concerned with the ways in which these folk participants negotiate their socially inferior positioning by switching between the competing discourses of democratic egalitarianism and of heredity status, discourses which the concept of constitutional monarchy seeks to combine