Page - 56 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/02

Charivari or the Historicising of a Question | 55www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 55–66 Arno Haldemann Charivari or the Historicising of a Question The Irrelevance of Romantic Love for the Audio-Visual Performance of Marriage in Bern in the 18th and 19th Centuries ABSTRACT Citing Oscar Wilde, in their call for papers the editors of this volume ask the question “Who, being loved, is poor?” On a meta-theoretical level, this article seeks to contextualize this question and its citation socially. On an empirical level, it contrasts the socially highly determined question and its implicit presuppositions with the findings of a local case study from the canton of Bern in the 18th and 19th centuries. When we examine precarious mar- riages through petitions for dispensation from the preacher’s threefold reading of the banns from the pulpit, the collective audio-visual dimension of marriages in an agrarian society with scarce resources becomes apparent. With the petitions, the couples tried to avoid attention and thus escape the communal tribunal of a charivari and the like. In Bern, the material and media dimension of weddings were largely governed by local standards. Charivaris were audio-visual means for society to communicate shared values regarding marriage. An expression of the locally accentuated moral economy, they did not reflect romantic ideals of love. The performance of weddings as large and public rituals was a communal compulsion rather than the expression of an individualistic and therefore crea- tive event. The performative wedding as the epitome of individualism is a very young his- torical development and strongly linked to a late-modern bourgeois culture of singularity. KEYWORDS Oscar Wilde, Bern, Charivari, marriage, romantic love, bourgeoise culture, individual- ism, intimacy, agrarian society, collective performance, codes of communication BIOGRAPHY Arno Haldemann received his education in history and religious studies at the Univer- sities of Bern and at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) in Paris. In his PhD project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, he is researching the genesis of civil marriage in the Swiss Canton of Bern between 1742 and 1865. He focuses on the interaction of deviant subaltern actors wanting to get married, resistive local communi- ties, families and corporations and the arbitrating Bernese marriage tribunal. Thus, he in- vestigates the interrelation of actor’s agency, communal customary legal and moral con- cepts and contemporary population policy. Arno Haldemann is a member of the Gradu- ate School of the Humanities at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg of the University of Bern. DOI: 10.25364/05.4:2018.2.4