Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the political and moral discourses that surround Twelve Step Fellowships in the UK, and how such discourses influence and interact with my positionality as an ethnographer working with secular and non-theist members of twelve step groups in London.

Paper long abstract:

In the UK, Twelve Step Fellowships (TSF’s) have a place both in popular imagination, and in many people’s lives. This means that when I describe my research on non-theism in TSF’s to people I meet, there is often some level of familiarity. The impressions they have vary, but whatever their understanding of, or proximity to, 12-step groups, the subject usually prompts talk of agency, wellness, and secularity. It produces discourse which is thick with political and moral commitments. Underlying almost all of these conversations is a question of whether or not TSF’s are good -whether or not they ‘work’, whether or not they are to be taken seriously. This question hovers in the conversation, it imbues and frames my response, it calls me forth to communicate my position.

In this talk, I explore how I might negotiate such questions in relation to my anthropological commitment to taking what my informants say, do, and experience, seriously. The proximity of my fieldsite, as well as of secular milieu within which I live most of my life, plays into how I think about my research and the ways in which I carry out my analysis. I will discuss how I have found myself navigating the affective and discursive manifestations of particular moral, political, and existential commitments within which I am immersed, the different points of tensions that arise as I do so, and the ways that I attempt to navigate these tensions in my work.