EL PAGO AL ACREEDOR APARENTE

It had taken four long weeks of waiting for the meeting, but finally, I was sitting in the office of Philip Davies, the Cathedral’s Chapter Clerk. According to Durham Cathedral’s website, ‘The Chapter Clerk is the senior administrator in the Cathedral and is responsible to Chapter for the administrative support and functionality and matters of legal and financial compliance across the Cathedral’s operation’ (‘Governance’ 2017). In non-cathedral terms, the position could be better understood as a Managing Director. Welcoming me at the small reception of the cathedral office, we made the short walk through the rabbit warren building to his own office. Pulling a seat in towards his desk for me and taking a seat at his desk he asked me to give him a sense of my research so that he might ‘pitch accordingly’, I told him, ‘Basically, I’m looking at the relationship between the people of Durham Cathedral and the building, and the manner in which they change each other’. Nodding understandingly, he began:

That’s interesting because I often say, to myself as well as to others, that what this is about is relationships. In terms of what makes us distinctive, is there anything other than the fact that we’re congregated around this particular space, this architecture?... What is it that makes us distinctive? (Recording, 7 April 2014)

Philip’s question is an important one, and one I have spent much time trying to answer, for my own piece of mind as much as for the purpose of this thesis. ‘Community’ was a much-used word during my fieldwork and often the same term was used to describe many different areas or groups of people within Durham Cathedral. Early on in my fieldwork, I would ask anyone who used the word, who they meant when they said ‘community’. I would often get the same reply, ‘Well, us of course’, accompanied by a vague wave of the hand, leaving me unclear as to whether ‘community’ involved only those in the room, or everyone who wandered through the building, or even if it involved the building itself. This last point was often particularly confusing because people would refer to those who were employed at the Cathedral, either in the office or as a part of the Chapter, as ‘the Cathedral’. For example, people would tell me news such as, ‘The Cathedral is planning a charity event in the nave on Wednesday’, or ‘the Cathedral doesn’t want to charge an entry fee’. Whilst I was always acutely aware that these people were referring to either the office workers’ plans or the Chapter’s plans, their referring to them through the Cathedral was often confusing when thinking about community. Indeed, on certain occasions, even those I spoke to from the office or the Chapter would

refer to a section of the community as ‘the Cathedral’, leaving me even more unsure as to who they were referring to. The volunteers? The worshippers? The people of County Durham? Or the building itself? All these seemed to be commonly referred to as parts of the ‘community’.

Indeed, I discussed this very point with the Chapter Clerk when I asked what he thought ‘Durham Cathedral’ was: ‘Is it the stones or is it the community of Durham Cathedral’? Giving a short laugh and commenting on the size of the question, he replied,

I think it’s both actually, isn’t it? Because if you say to people, ‘What do you mean by Durham Cathedral?’ which I do, I start off by saying, ‘Do you mean that building on the hill or within it? Do you mean the school? Do you mean the shop? Do you mean the restaurant? Do you mean the library? Do you mean the office? Do you mean the riverbanks?’ – which are effectively a public park – all of which belongs to the Cathedral. ‘Do you mean Prebends Bridge? Do you mean the exhibitions and concerts and the sort of events that go on in the Cathedral? Or do you mean the services that go on in the Cathedral?’ Because they are all Durham Cathedral in its different kinds of manifestations. And, depending on who you are talking to at any one time, it could be any one of those things, or it could be a combination of those things, but they’re all Durham Cathedral. And when I say that, people usually go, ‘Oh yeah, I see what you mean’. You see it’s also the thing about how many people are employed voluntarily or paid staff, which is now nearly 900 people engaged on this site. That’s mainly volunteers, 700 of them, but we have 150 staff, and then there are contractors as well, on top, who come in and do things like run the kitchens in the school, and whilst they’re not a part of our staff they obviously have a strong connection to the place. In Durham terms, 900 people makes us a very major employer, even if you just count the paid staff. That’s one of the largest employers in Durham, apart from the University, the County Council, and the prison. I think the Cathedral is perhaps the fourth biggest employer of paid staff in Durham (Recording, 13th _{May 2014).}

In the Epilogue to Amit’s edited work ‘Realizing Community’ (2002a), Cohen argues that the term ‘community’ has become a word used to describe that ‘something is shared among a group of people at a time when we no longer assume that anything is necessarily shared’ (emphasis in the original). The use of the term has become so over generalised that Cohen, commenting on the vagueness of the term, suggests that

it has become ‘virtually meaningless’ (2002a:169). Despite this, the term has persisted, as Amit’s opening page synopsis suggests. ‘The persistence of the term itself shows that the idea continues to resonate powerfully in daily lives’ (2002b:i). Therefore, in situations in which the term is ‘deployed indigenously … we have something to work on ethnographically and interpretively’ (Cohen 2002a:169).

With this in mind, the structure of this chapter will not work towards any formative conclusions of community in Durham Cathedral. Rather, through the narratives of individuals who inhabit the building, this chapter aims to give the reader a sense of the difficulties which arise in the inhabitation of such a diverse, and historically and culturally significant building, and will present some of the people and the roles they can take up inside the Cathedral, to give a general sense of those who maintain, operate, and use the building. However, the aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that the Cathedral is not a backdrop to people’s lives, rather it is actively taking part in the lives of those inhabiting it. Therefore, it is important to mention Appadurai’s (1995) concept of locality-production as opposed to a static idea of community. For Appadurai, local identity is a ‘property of social life’, which, nevertheless, is also ‘materially produced’. Therefore, locality is constantly produced and reproduced both socially and materially, and the materiality of the actual Cathedral becomes an important part of social life. Degnen demonstrates that ‘place works not just to tie people as individuals to places, but that it also works to tie individuals to each other’ (2016:1650), and indeed, the Cathedral as a place is what ties together those working for and inhabiting its spaces.

Nevertheless, as the concept of community is often used by those inhabiting the Cathedral, I will use it myself. Somers suggests that by approaching concepts such as communities and identities through narratives, one can examine ‘how individuals construct identities in concrete temporal, spatial and relational contexts, both as specific historical persons and as members of wider societal orders’ (Somers 1994 cited in Fog Olwig 2002:127-128). Commenting on such an approach, Somers states that ‘It matters not whether we are social scientists or subjects of historical research, but that all of us come to be who we are (however ephemeral, multiple, and changing) by being located or locating ourselves (usually unconsciously) in social narratives rarely of our own making’ (1994:606, emphasis in the original). In the following narratives of individuals from different areas of cathedral life, the issues of living in, around, and with a building such as Durham Cathedral begin to reveal themselves from differing angles and in doing so help to develop a complex picture of the community and the daily negotiations lived out by those who inhabit the Cathedral.