RORY MACLEAN
News Editor

For Margaret Visser, the way people take an oath says a whole lot about them.

In Canada, the oath of citizenship portrays a culture that can only be described as ritually informal, says Visser, a British-born anthropologist who professes a deep interest in “ordinary behaviour.”

She became a Canadian citizen in 1973, but when she began her research on oaths — and curses, their negative enforcers — she couldn’t recall the proceedings of her own ceremony so she turned to the Internet, watching a series of homemade videos from the citizenship ceremony.

What she saw were a series of strikingly modest ceremonies. Neon lit rooms, a judge, some family members and sometimes a Mountie. In one video, proceedings were interrupted by a fire alarm, so the oath was performed outdoors to the sound of traffic. The family member holding the camera, who at one point was asked to remove his red ballcap that said Canada, remarked aloud that it was probably the weirdest ceremony anyone had ever witnessed.

And it was pretty weird, said Visser, but there was something so Canadian about it all.

“Every time I saw one of these clips, and I watched each one several times, I was moved to tears,” she said. “I am an easy crier, I admit.”

What moved Visser was the honesty of the whole affair, something that struck the heart of what oath taking was all about.

“The Canadian ceremony seemed to me the most honest. A display of what can only be called ritual informality”¦ the only sartorial rule being, no hat,” she said.

Visser, who delivered a brief history of oaths and curses Feb. 23 as the visiting Whelen lecturer, remarked how bewildered some of these new Canadians must have been at the low key nature of the citizenship ceremony. Many of these people had come through trying, even dangerous circumstances to get to Canada, and now “the intensity levels were turned down so low that the oath takers usually just looked forward politely,” she said.

“Many of them might have been amazed by this messy, rumpled, short-lived affair. But many of them have lived in Canada for so long by that time that they were probably used to it — the invisible but iron-hard rules of being and remaining casual. The speeches were hardly A-plus but that seemed just right.”

The Canadian ceremony was done without ostentation, without promising things it was not going to give, said Visser.

“Precisely what people need when they have been looking for a new home”¦ It said, ”˜please make yourself at home.’ Modest understatement succeeded in underlining, not effacing what was being said.”

I swear: A history

Oaths have always been an expression of the bonds between people. They are limits. The root word of oath in greek actually means fence, said Visser.

Swearers become bound to other people and must instill in them a faith in the sincerity of the pledge.

Oaths were and are public affairs, typically being held before an audience of people.

“The people watching are very important to the proceedings,” she said.

“In the ancient world people swearing commonly called up curses against themselves should they not fulfill their promise,” she said. These curses usually invoked a swearer’s family, who would be forced to endure a curse if the swearer broke it.

Liquids were also often spilt, usually wine or blood, in many ancient swearing ceremonies, representing irrevocability.

Oaths involving blood survive to this day with the schoolyard practice of becoming blood brothers.

“Children maintain their own secret tradition of oath taking,” she said. “Cross my heart and hope to die, that phrase calls up a curse on the swearer.”

Visser argues that modern societies often exhibit a suspicion of swearing, that she traces to Jesus.

“The founder of Christianity told his followers never to swear. All you need to say, Jesus said, is yes if you mean yes and no if you mean no.”

Many Christians down the centuries have refused to take oaths of any kinds, including the Quakers, who were often persecuted for their refusal.

Swearing has become much less commonplace than it once was, and has been largely replaced by contracts. But contracts lack the human touch of oaths.

“People today are asked to put enormous faith into the law,” she said. “The law is outside the human person. It is coercive by nature. An oath on the other hand engages the whole person, and the swearer confronts other people in person, as she swears.”

Despite playing a smaller part in modern life, swearing oaths still remains an integral part.

Perhaps the most memorable oath in many people’s lives is the wedding vow. Even the engagement ring represents an oath in the traditional sense — the ring represents the visible, public reminder of the promise to marry.

Visser reminds us why oaths have had such a long tradition. They represent a solemn bond between people; a trust that means more than the sum of the words in the oath.

How unfortunate, Visser says, that when most people think of swearing now, something entirely different usually comes to mind. These “swears” are the farthest thing from an oath, she says. She even has something to say about the ubiquitous word “fuck.”

“I can understand when people use it as an exclamation mark, but it gets really boring when people use it as a comma.”

photo: Flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0