Making the Strange Familiar
Issued Date: 8 Feb 2016
Abstract
From studying Pagan festivals as a graduate student to writing about Burning Man, Hare Krishna hardcore music, ecstatic dance and so-called eco-terrorists twenty years later, this essay describes my journey as an academic through what many other religious studies scholars might consider the fringe of our academic purview. In the essay I consider the ways in which the concerns that emerged in my earliest work in Pagan Studies—sacred space, the role of memory in identity construction, relationships with the more-than-human world, ritual creativity, religious freedom, childhood experience and religious improvisation—continue to be central to my scholarship over two decades later.
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References
Bivins, Jason. Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195340815.001.0001.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/464648.
Orsi, Robert. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Pike, Sarah M. “Dark Teens and Born-Again Martyrs: Captivity Narratives After Columbine.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77 (2009): 647–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfp038.
———. Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
———. New Age and Neopagan Religions in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
———. “No Novenas for the Dead: Ritual Action and Communal Memory at the Temple of Tears.” In Afterburn: Reflections on Burning Man, edited by Lee Gilmore and Mark Van Proyen, 195–213. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.
———. “Performing Grief in Formal and Informal Rituals at the Burning Man Festival.” In Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual. Vol. 2 - Body, Performance, Agency and Experience, edited by Jan Weinhold and Geoffrey Samuel 525–40. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2010.
———. “The West Memphis Three: Demons in the Dock . . . Or the Press Box?” Trans/Missions August 24, 2011. http://www.trans-missions.org/?p=43700
Sontag, Susan. Where the Stress Falls. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2001.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/464648.
Orsi, Robert. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Pike, Sarah M. “Dark Teens and Born-Again Martyrs: Captivity Narratives After Columbine.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77 (2009): 647–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfp038.
———. Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
———. New Age and Neopagan Religions in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
———. “No Novenas for the Dead: Ritual Action and Communal Memory at the Temple of Tears.” In Afterburn: Reflections on Burning Man, edited by Lee Gilmore and Mark Van Proyen, 195–213. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.
———. “Performing Grief in Formal and Informal Rituals at the Burning Man Festival.” In Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual. Vol. 2 - Body, Performance, Agency and Experience, edited by Jan Weinhold and Geoffrey Samuel 525–40. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2010.
———. “The West Memphis Three: Demons in the Dock . . . Or the Press Box?” Trans/Missions August 24, 2011. http://www.trans-missions.org/?p=43700
Sontag, Susan. Where the Stress Falls. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2001.
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