Following the Queen: The Place of the Royal Family in the Context of Royal Visits and Civil Religion

The starting point for this article, following Bocock (1985), is that rituals focusing on the royal family form a central component of a British civil religion. In this context events such as the Golden Jubilee celebrations and the public mourning for Diana need to be viewed within the context of a larger cycle of royal rituals, some of which are performed only once during a reign, some annually and others hundreds of times a year. In these latter events, the royal visits, the civil religion and the legitimacy of the monarchy are being routinely produced and reproduced. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork amongst a network of “real royalists” my argument is that lack of awareness of these routine practices leads to the mistaken viewing of popular responses to royal events as something new and exotic in British culture.