Tag Archives: academia

We Might as well Wear Lineages on our Chests

Posted on by

Academic bloggers Megan Kate Nelson and Elizabeth Covart are re-thinking the way that we wear badges at conventions—and other forms of labeling. What might work better than NAME and INSTITUTION (or for the non-affiliated, CITY)?

In Nelson’s post, I like “Academic lineage, a la Game of Thrones. Everyone always asks anyway (which I find bizarre when you’re 15 years out of graduate school), so you might as well cop to it.”

It’s true, at the American Academy of Religion, House McCutcheon sneers at the remnants of House Eliade. We might as well be open about it.

Shai Feraro on Canaanite Reconstructionism

Posted on by

Israeli scholar Shai Feraro talks about Canannite (i.e., Pagan) reconstructionism in present-day Israel. This is an excerpt from his presentation at the recent conference of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism in Riga, Latvia. (Wish I could have been there.)

He makes a reference to the “Canaanites” who were not reconstructionists. That would be these “Canaanites.” Note that some members were fighters in the Irgun — and there is apparently a story there from the days of the Israeli struggle for independence. Basically, this movement wanted to form an Israeli/Hebrew identity that was separate from both Jewish religion and Zionism — a re-enchantment of the land.

(Video by Christian Giudice.)

Contemporary Pagan Studies at the AAR, 2015

Posted on by

All of the evaluating and negotiating is completed, and the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion will be presenting the following sessions at the annual meeting, held November 21–24, 2015, in Atlanta:

1 Joint session with the Indigenous Religious Traditions Group: “The Problem of ‘Religion’ in the Study of Indigenous and Polytheistic Traditions.”

2. “Valuing Paganism in Public and Open Spaces.”

3.  “Tradition and Resistance in Paganism.”

I will post more about the contents of each session when the program book is ready.

Pentagram Pizza with Layers of Woo

Posted on by

pentagrampizza • Lydia Crabtree not only knows “woo,” she can organize it into a ten-part scale and a four-part diagram. Fascinating.

And there is a Part 2: “Parenting to the WooWoo.”

• Where did “the humanities” come from? Come travel back to the good old days of “philology.”

• Philology is not old enough for you? Relax with some Babylonian tunes.

2015 Pagan Studies Call for Papers Now Online

Posted on by

The Contemporary Pagan Studies Group’s call for papers for the November 2015 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion can now be viewed online.

General instructions for submitting are here. And the deadline is Monday, March 2.

There, That’s Done, Almost. Also John Cowper Powys

Posted on by

Ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, destroyed at the orders of Henry VIII (Wikimedia Commons).

Where did the week go?

It seems like setting up the AAR sessions — two solo for Contemporary Pagan Studies, two co-sponsored, and one “quad” (four sponsors) — that plus a little snow, some fire department maintenance work, and some chainsaw issues that don’t belong here totally exhausted all my psychic energy. Just need to line up one more panel respondent.

When it is completed, I will publish the line-up of papers.

For refuge, I have fled to Glastonbury, not the real town but a close relative, John Cowper Powys’ massive novel A Glastonbury Romance.

As the explorer/writer Lawrence Millman said in a 2000 Atlantic piece, “One doesn’t read Powys so much as enlist in him.” (Of course, if you read all of A Song of Fire and Ice, you have “enlisted” in George R. R. Martin. Most people watch the TV series.)

This is all the fault of Carole Cusack, who in a recent blog interview on Albion Calling pronounced that “the entire oeuvre of John Cowper Powys should be of crucial interest to contemporary Pagans, but I suspect that he is almost unread these days, to everyone’s detriment, not just the Pagans.”

I took that as a challenge, and the helpful inter-library loan librarian quickly produced not just A Glastonbury Romance (1933) but Powys’ Autobiography (1934), which I read first. I could write more about the Autobiography. It’s frank enough, but repetitious — a good editor could have cut it by 40 percent without cutting meat. To quote Millman,

It is a record not of Powys’s achievements but of his various inadequacies. In it he described his manias and phobias, his “idiotic” mouth and “Neanderthal pate,” and particularly his sexual failures. He discussed “the sickening moments of dead sea desolation that came to me from my ulcerated stomach” and his chronic constipation. He called himself a “scarecrow Don Quixote with the faint heart of Sancho.” And yet the mood of the Autobiography is not gloomy or self-pitying. After all, this book was written by a man who treasured being “ill-constituted.”

I was surprised, therefore, how good A Glastonbury Romance is, if you are willing to give it time. Robert Altman would have struggled to direct a hypothetical movie version, there are so many interlaced stories going on.

Some of them are pure soap opera: Will Sam admit that he is the father of Nell’s baby? Will John and Mary be happily married even though they are first cousins? Will Mad Bet’s magical working against Mary destroy her marriage? Will the Communists destroy Philip’s factory? What is the nature of the esoteric books that Sam is getting from Owen the Welsh antiquary? And what is the Holy Grail?

Add the (feeble) influence of the dead, the palpable influence of The Past, the wind that blow through people’s dreams, and the all-out astral-plane battles between different factions trying to determine the future of Glastonbury. It’s really quite complex.

You might say that I have enlisted and will see it through to the end.

This is how the [blank] see me

Posted on by
I copied this from a friend's Facebook feed. I don't know where it started. This is the Internetz.

I copied this from a friend’s Facebook feed. I don’t know where it started. This is the Internetz.

In the middle of working out Contemporary Pagan Studies Group sessions and co-sponsored sessions for next November’s American Academy of Religion annual meeting.

So far this has taken hundred of emails—so it goes—and a phone call this morning from Norway. Landlines still have their place.

It feels so good to accept a proposal; and it is hard writing the rejection notices. Some people just feel that they have to dazzle you with theory and a document that sounds more like a book proposal. Dude, you have twenty minutes!

Others—and this is more insidious—seem to mistake the AAR for Pantheacon or some other Pagan gathering. We are not there for theological discourse. (Nevertheless, some people evident are there for that, and here is a take-down of them.) No crypto-theology/thealogy, please.

And I hate to read proposals where the writer already has a conclusion but has not done any research yet. Please leave some space for serendipity and the thrill of discovery, or why are you doing this?

LAP Lambert and the “Book-Mill Iceberg”

Posted on by

Slate contributor Joseph Stromberg chronicles his trip through “the shadowy, surreal world of an academic book mill.”

The bloggers and academics who’d written these posts had gotten emails virtually identical to mine and wrote about how the company obtained the rights to tens of thousands of theses, dissertations, and other unpublished works for essentially nothing; sold copies of them as books to unsuspecting online buyers (who assumed they were purchasing proofed, edited work); and kept essentially 100 percent of the proceeds. LAP Lambert, I learned, is the print equivalent of a content farm: a clearinghouse for texts that generate tiny amounts of revenue simply by turning up in search and appearing to be legitimate, published works.

So, naturally, I replied to Holmes, telling her I was interested in hearing more.

It’s a marriage of content-scraping and tax-evasion, by the sound of it. Certainly there is evasion of paying royalties. And this:

Some naive academics think publishing will add cachet to their C.V., but they find that having the Lambert name on it is an embarrassment.

Authors in the developing world may be the most easily exploited, thinking that they are being published by a prestigious German house. And like all vanity presses, this one makes some of its money by selling copies to the books’ authors.

Journalistic Cliches and Their Academic Cousins

Posted on by

My least-favorite journalistic cliche is “time will tell.”

Despite the president’s charm offensive, some pundits say that the world will end next Tuesday. Time will tell.

Read the whole list of 150 here.

As a journal editor, I could make my own list, particularly those stupid bits of wordiness that get between the reader and an actual thesis statement, in which the writer actually takes a position on the issue.

Some sample candidates:

I plan to explore the intersection between . . .

In this paper I will argue  . . .

This article compares . . .

Get out of the spotlight, academic writer, and say something about something.

Animism, Religion, Bloggers, and the AAR

Posted on by

The annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion is followed by what I think of as Hell Weekend. At least it is that if you chair or co-chair one of the many program units. Me, I am co-chair of the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group, but I suspect that all my colleagues go through the same process — after Thanksgiving wears off, you have just a weekend to answer the online survey that constitutes your program-unit survey and, most importantly, to compose the “call for papers”  for next year’s meeting.

The last part is done in collaboration with your steering committee, which in our case is scattered over nine Northern Hemisphere time zones — plus one in Australia.

The “call” is released in January, and people have about two months to submit proposals for papers, invited panel discussions, roundtables, etc. — most of which will be turned in at the last possible minute, for what are professors but students who never left the university?

Then the AAR staff, aided by wizard computer algorithms and trained owls, must fit all of the planned sessions into a four-day meeting, knowing that whoever gets the dreaded Tuesday-morning slots (when many participants are already leaving) will feel marginalized, disrespected, and sad.

One of our themes in 2014 (in San Diego) will be the New Animism, “new” in that it moves away from Edward Tylor’s old idea that animism is merely the first step of the ladder on the way to monotheism and instead treats it as a viable way of approaching the world, in which other-than-human entities are also active agents.

Not coincidentally, there is a book tie-in, the release of Graham Harvey’s edited collection, the Handbook of Contemporary Animism, currently available only in high-priced hardback from the friendly people at Acumen Publishing for whom I have nothing but the highest regard.

But while academia moves at its careful pace, there are plenty of other people writing about animism.

I have some books that I need to review here, but, meanwhile, click over to read about the December Animist Blog Carnival on the theme of “Animism and Religion.” Lots of good stuff here. (No connection with the AAR.) And consider this blog post to be my after-the-fact contribution to the blog carnival.