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The title of this thesis is “‘The place that words come from….’, An Ethnography

of Quaker Worship Practices and their Social Enactment”. I take up Collins (2002b) concern that in order to try to understand Quakers we need to make central the experience of the Meeting for Worship and the other ritual extensions in Business Meetings and decision-making that flow from it. This focusses on the conditions for social enactment that Quaker practices create. This is not, therefore, primarily a study of the daily lives of Quakers insofar as their activities can define a picture of what it is to be a Quaker. This assertion is an explanation of the starting point, the ritual worship, not an empirical claim. It may transpire that there is now a disjunction between the experience of worship and the conditions for social enactment, and I consider aspects of the ethnography that indeed point in this direction.

The initial starting point of the study is Quakers and their participation in worship. I set the event of the Meeting for Worship in St Andrews Meeting. This starting point is justified by the Quaker tradition, by the account of contemporary

practice in the canonical account, Quaker Faith and Practice (QF&P) and by the

ethnographic evidence set out in Chapter 3, Section 2, on the reasons Quakers give for joining Quakers. These sources establish the engagement and

qua non of Quaker practice and that all else – decision-making, discernment, authorisation, agency and coming to unity – flows from this.

I show through the ethnography that engagement in the ritual has two key components. Firstly, there is a potential encounter with some transcendent function that is symbolised by silence and referred to variously as Light, Inward Light, Seed, and Source. This is therefore an empty space symbolised by the seated circle of worshippers and is experientially a sense of openness to presence and disclosure. It is thought that from this engagement in silence words may constellate and be articulated. Secondly, it entails a practice of

‘centering-down’ 38 _{which enables worshippers to bring their experience of}

personal stillness into the corporate silence. This is the stillness that may be carried beyond the place and time of the meeting as the basis for social enactment. It is from this engagement and through this way of knowing that guidance for social enactment is thought to derive. It is these foundational aspects that I engage with in the initial phenomenological description of the worship ritual.

I present a set of tensive relationships between the elements of inner stillness and outer silence, and the tradition of the Light and personally held cosmologies. I suggest that these tensions are managed by the invariant form of the ritual, personal elaborations of spiritual practices and the Quaker narrative. In short, in the construction of Quaker practice, in what appears as unity in diversity, process unites and content divides. Put another way, concern with

38 _{This practice is fully explored in Chapter 3, Sections 3 & 4, and so is not defined}

epistemology, the ‘how’, occludes the potentially disclosed character, the ‘what’, of the Light.

So far, therefore, I take Quakers on their own terms as a starting point. However I theorise that Quakers and their practices can be situated in the contemporary ‘spiritual landscape’ (Taylor, 2007, Heelas & Woodhead, 2005) and that their relationship with it can be described using a development of secularisation theory. My argument is that Quaker practices take part in the dynamics created by the social biases and cross-pressures of this context. They adapt to them, absorb them, contribute to them and resist them in various ways. The elements of the Quaker tradition allow Quakers to do this. I submit that Quaker practices dramatise a number of features of this developed reading of a secularisation process. I theorise that Quaker practices through their Christian-rooted traditions are not acted upon but are implicated in secularisation – and that the ethnography elucidates this. Quakers’ engagement in the process of secularisation includes their resistance and adaptation to its pressures.

In Sections 3-7 of Chapter 2, I identify and explore themes that arise from the ethnography of the Meeting for Worship. I set out in detail the combining of elements – techniques of the body, speech, silence, cosmological assumptions, group identification and ethical action – in the ritual event. I argue that this combining is both a personal ‘harmonic integration’ of these elements and is a shared aesthetic in the ritual creation of an ‘artwork’ in worship. This set of relations enables Quaker practice to adapt and recreate itself. The picture is of a religion that works for its members, allowing them with a sincere sense of the

sacred, (however they articulate that), to engage in spiritual practices and community. It enables them to find a Quaker ‘way’. These practices are the positive and actively-fulfilling source of both inspiration and group membership. I discuss these elements in the light of the cross-pressures identified in the spiritual landscape. For example, pluralism and relativism produce multiple cosmologies, while individualism asserts the validity of each, and fragelisation makes matters tentative and discourages assertion or affirmation. Individualism and subjectivisation locate truth and authority in the person and produce tensions between the individual and the group. The recourse to nature and naturalism makes the body central to the experience of worship. Certain patterns emerge as adaptations to the cross-pressures within the spiritual landscape. This produces a practice economy in which the elements of Quaker practices are combined in individual practices. This can be viewed from different perspectives as a signal achievement of a form of secular religion or by contrast the hollowing out and loss of the tradition.

I consider the conditions that are created by the centrality of the worship ritual for the processes of social enactment. Through further ethnographic material on Business Meetings, I assess institutional and group control of the process and in doing so, I chart a shift in the criteria used for discernment from inspiration by the Light to a ‘sense of the meeting’ (Best, 2010).

I finally take four general features of Quaker practices – ritual, ethical testimony, decision-making, and the range of cosmologies – and consider how they have shifted significantly in their relationship to each other by plotting them within the

‘grid-group’ model (Douglas, 1996, 1990, 1998) and Cultural Theory framework (Thompson, Ellis & Wildavsky, 1990). Furthermore, these shifts are consistent with secularisation theory and may be explained by the pressures and dialectics I theorise above as constituting the spiritual landscape.

I conclude that Quakers are a dispersed community of practice and a complex, adaptive, pluralistic enclave. Their practices maintain a fragile and complex balance of tensions that create unity in diversity; process unites, content divides, epistemology dominates over ontology, ethics displaces inspiration, and diversity in personal stillness is masked by corporate silence. I suggest that renewal initiatives are similarly vulnerable to these pressures and simply reflect and even amplify these patterns whilst providing a reflexive space. However Quakers also keep open a ritual space in which explorations of many cosmologies may be possible and in which sincere and deeply felt concerns may be discerned. This, I suggest, rests upon an understanding that sets

worship apart from daily life (Pilgrim, 2008)39 and allows it to offer a radical

reframing of experience and this contrasts with the perspective of seamless continuity between the domains of the sacred and the everyday, such as proposed by Collins (1994, 2005, 2008) and Coleman and Collins (2000).