Playing Croquet with Hedgehogs: (Still) Becoming a Scholar of Paganism and Animism
Issued Date: 8 Feb 2016
Abstract
A reflection on the development of a career partly concerned with the study of Paganisms. After indicating some ways of using a quotation from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the article considers the question of the subject matter of Pagan Studies. It connects contemporary Paganisms and other cultural phenomena (e.g. indigenous religions and animisms) and indicates the importance of respecting the hosts of our research. The second half of the article concerns the “difficult game of academia.” It offers some ideas about learning how to play, being open to serendipity, and being aware that some colleagues think different rules are important.
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References
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———. “Discworld and Otherworld: The Popularisation of Pagan Fantasy Literature.” In Popular Spiritualities: The Politics of Contemporary Enchantment, edited by Lynne Hume and Kathleen McPhillips, 41–51.Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.
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———. Listening People, Speaking Earth: Contemporary Paganism. London: Hurst, 1997.
———. “Performing and Constructing Research as Guesthood.” In Anthropologists in the Field ,edited by Lynne Hume and Jane Mulcock, 168–82. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
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———. The True Israel: Uses of the Names Jew, Hebrew and Israel in Ancient Jewish and Early Christian Literature. Leiden: Brill, 1996.
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Pratchett, Terry. Lords and Ladies. London: Gollancz, 1993.
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Young, David E., and Jean-Guy Goulet, eds. Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: the Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1994.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Published in a combined volume with Through the Looking Glass. London: Puffin., 1963 [1865].
Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Daly, Mary. Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language / Conjured by Mary Daly in Cahoots with Jane Caputi. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.
Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard. “Witches of the West: Neopaganism and Goddess Worship as Enlightenment Religions”, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5, no. 1 (1989): 77-95.
Geertz, Clifford. 1998. “Deep Hanging Out”, The New York Review of Books, 22 October 1998. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1998/oct/22/deep-hanging-out/ .
Hallowell, A. Irving. “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View.’” In Culture in History, edited by Stanley Diamond, 19–52. Columbia University Press, 1960.
Harvey, Graham. Animism: Respecting the Living World. London: Hurst. 2005.
———. “Discworld and Otherworld: The Popularisation of Pagan Fantasy Literature.” In Popular Spiritualities: The Politics of Contemporary Enchantment, edited by Lynne Hume and Kathleen McPhillips, 41–51.Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.
———. ”Fantasy in the Study of Religions: Paganism as Observed and Enhanced by Terry Pratchett.” Diskus, 6, 2000. http://basr.ac.uk/diskus_old/diskus1-6/harvey-6.txt .
———. Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life. New York: Routledge, 2013.
———. “Gods and Hedgehogs in the Greenwood.” In Mapping Invisible Worlds, edited by Gavid D. Flood, 89–93. Edinburgh: Traditional Cosmology Society, 1993.
———. “Guesthood as Ethical Decolonising Research Method.” Numen 50, no. 2 (2003): 125–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156852703321506132.
———. Listening People, Speaking Earth: Contemporary Paganism. London: Hurst, 1997.
———. “Performing and Constructing Research as Guesthood.” In Anthropologists in the Field ,edited by Lynne Hume and Jane Mulcock, 168–82. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Harvey, Graham. 1995. ‘Satanism in Britain Today’, Journal of Contemporary Religion 10: 283-96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13537909508580747.
———. The True Israel: Uses of the Names Jew, Hebrew and Israel in Ancient Jewish and Early Christian Literature. Leiden: Brill, 1996.
Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge, 2011.
———. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge, 2007.
Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes Of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014.
———. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Pratchett, Terry. Lords and Ladies. London: Gollancz, 1993.
———. Soul Music. London: Gollancz, 1994.
Stausberg, Michael, and Steven Engler, eds. Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion. London: Routledge, 2011.
Tawhai, Te Pakaka. “Maori Religion.” In The Study of Religion: Traditional and New Religion, edited by Stewart Sutherland and Peter Clarke, 96–105. London: Routledge, 1988.
Turner, Edith. “A Visible Spirit Form in Zambia.” In Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: the Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience, edited by David E. Young and Jean-Guy Goulet, 71–95. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1994.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Who is Afraid of the Ontological Wolf? Some Comments on an Ongoing Anthropological Debate.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 33, no 1 (2015): 2–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/ca.2015.330102.
Young, David E., and Jean-Guy Goulet, eds. Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: the Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1994.
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