Tag Archives: academia

Parsing Paganism, Rejecting the F-Word

This whole issue of “Pagan fundamentalism,” Pagan identity politics, and related disputes have been giving me a lot of agita.

In fact, I do wish that “the f-word” had never been introduced, because rather than helping the conversation, it shuts it down.

As soon as you refer to someone as a “fundamentalist” or to a movement as “fundamentalism,” you have, within the sub-dialect of the chattering classes, declared that nothing those people say is worthwhile, that they have nothing to teach you, and that they should just sit down and shut up. Or stop calling themselves Pagans, whichever.

Historically, the term “Fundamentalism” was coined by conservative Christian theologians of the early twentieth-century and named after a book series called “The Fundamentals.” In other words, it presented itself as a back-to-the-roots movement.

The Latin word for root is radix, which gives us “radical,” a term (or person) about stripping away everything seen as extraneous and getting “back to the roots,” renewing your tradition. About the same thing, no? Yet it is more acceptable in academia, for example, to refer to one’s self as a “radical,” at least in some quarters, than as a “fundamentalist,” which would suicidal, professionally speaking.

According to Sabina Magliocco — whom I wish had chosen a different word, but she consciously chose it to be provocative — “Pagan fundamentalists” seem to be those who think that they have the truth and who are overly dogmatic.

Prof. Magliocco suggests that in the good old days, practice mattered more than belief, but now some people are getting all “fundamentalist” about belief. Yes, but. In the 1970s, for example, I encountered some very “fundamentalist” American Gardnerian Witches. Some Goddess feminists could be pretty dogmatic too.

But the people taking offense today are not Gardnerians. They tend to come more from reconstructionist Pagan traditions. And they are the ones being targeted by this current discourse, as best I can tell.

Whatever your position on “hard polytheism” is, I tend to have some sympathy with their position because, as stated above, being called a “fundamentalist” is sort of like being called a “racist.” It puts you in a box that it is almost impossible to climb out of — and that is a deliberate rhetorical tactic designed to marginalize a political opponent.

A friend wrote to me of the “childish” polytheists who ought, in his words, to “detach themselves from contemporary Paganism.” (That is, sit down and shut up while the grown-ups are talking.)

No, I would argue, they are as much a part of contemporary Paganism as you or I are. Are we going to slide into heretic-hunting? Is contemporary Paganism going to develop a handy acronym, like those Republicans who accuse fellow party members deemed insufficiently pure of being RINOS (Republican In Name Only)? (Democrats do it too, but they lack a handy acronym.)

As an editor in the field of Pagan studies, I look at Paganism as a way of being religious, not as specific beliefs or specific practices. I want to keep the tent big and broad.

Paganism old and new is creedless and flexible, as Michael York wrote in Pagan Theology: Paganism as a World Religion, yet some have written creeds (Gleb Botkin with the Church of Aphrodite in the 1930s, for example), and we haven’t thrown them off the boat.

Continuing with York, I still like his definition, even though it reads like a legal document:

Paganism is an affirmation of interactive and polymorphic sacred relationship by individual or community with the tangent, sentient, and nonempirical.” (162)

Parse those words carefully, and you will that Prof. York has stretched the tent as far as possible to include the hardest of hard polytheists and the nature-as-source-of-sacred value people, and everything in between. There is room under it for the committed “godspouse” as well as the person whose Paganism is heavily influenced by Jungian psychology. They are both doing religion in a way that we define as “Pagan.”

Here we do come back to the notion of “doing,” but I would allow that one’s “doing” might include relating to gods, spirits, and wights as discreet entities — and talking about it — which seems to be the crux, or a crux, of the current kerfuffle.

How Real Science Is Done

Isn’t this the truth about most published psychology research?

See more similar posts about scientific research.

 

Textbook Prices Outpace Inflation

I found this graph at the College Insurrection blog, a project of law professor William Jacobson.

When I first started university teaching, I never bothered to wander through the bookstore and see what the books that I assigned actually cost. Once I did, I was suitably shocked.

After I had taught a little more, I began to realize that, for instance, the differences between the “fourth edition” and the “fifth edition” were not exactly substantive.  They mainly existed to damage the used-textbook business, I think.

Around the Pagan Blogosphere

• I too am one who is uncomfortable with the word “faith” in Paganism because of the baggage that it carries. When I worked on a couple of collaborative projects with Evan John Jones, he sometimes spoke of the “Old Faith,” which always jarred me, even though I think that for him it was simply a synonym for “religion.” The Allergic Pagan” starts with the same discomfort and ends up defining four styles of Paganism/nature religion, which might be useful categories.

• Sam Webster starts a new blog with an opening post: “Welcome Thinking Pagans.”

• London blogger Ethan Doyle White has started a series of interviews at his blog Albion Calling.  The first one was with British scholar of esotericism Dave Evans. The newest one is with me.

• And have a look at my blogger sidebar. I try to keep all links up to date — if you encounter a dead link, let me know — and you do not have to give me money to be listed.

“Don’t Mess with Firefly”

Not just a cult-favorite TV show but an issue of free speech on campus at the University of Wisconsin. With Neil Gaiman  and a thick-headed campus police chief. Don’t underestimate the fans of Firefly.

UPDATE: Sorry, the YouTube link disappeared for a while.

Two Items Involving Ronald Hutton

First, an interview by Ethan Doyle White with British scholar of esotericism Dave Evans, who did his doctorate with Hutton at Bristol and speaks well of him:

Having a conversation with Ronald is a delight, and I had him to myself every 3 weeks or so, for a precious half an hour, for almost 3 years. I am a very lucky person. He is indeed a very friendly man, but no pushover when you work for him- he is a superb adviser on academic work; firm but fair, and he will not allow crap work to get through the filters- he steered, cajoled, encouraged and generally supported some very difficult stuff I was doing, at the same time as managing his perpetually massive workload in other areas.

Second, news that Professor Hutton will be hosting a program for the Yesterday Channel (half-owned by the BBC, I am told) called Professor Hutton’s Curiosities, about little-known museums in the London area. I think that one of these is the Horniman Museum. Let me know if it is any good, since I do not have satellite or cable TV.

 

Journalism and the AAR-SBL

Journalists are few at the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature’s joint annual meetings.  But the New York Times‘ Mark Oppenheimer, searching around for “the narrative,” noted that some fraction of the participants wore flowing robes and weirdly remarked about people carrying hefty reference books, as  Steven Ramey notes in his fisking of Oppenheimer’s reportage at the Bulletin for the Study of Religion blog. (My take: Oppenheimer saw books and just guessed at what they might be.)

My frustration at Oppenheimer’s representation of the AAR/SBL conference illustrates the limits to the descriptive aspect of both ethnographies and the news.

As for the Pagan studies sessions, no one from the Pagan Newswire Collective showed up, which might be a better thing than the sort of odd reporting that PNC produced last year in San Francisco. PNC is providing community news announcements in the regions that it covers, and  it has one pretty good blog, The Juggler. But I sense a loss of momentum.

Todd Berntson of Pagan Living TV, which is I think still in the start-up phase, attended the “Mapping the Occult City” pre-conference event and did some on-camera interviews with some of the presenters. I expect that that video will be available before long.

I know from my own reporter days that it is hard to attend a big meeting and get “the story.” You hope for a newsworthy keynote presenter, or maybe you find someone colorful to profile in a news feature.  “Mapping the Occult City” could have been presented as a documentary, since it included an architectural tour and a performance, as well as talking heads. Maybe at least those interviews will be archived some place.

Data-Mining and Student Success

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education discusses using data-mining techniques for better student advising.

One way to ensure that students will reach the finish line is to quickly figure out if they’ve selected a suitable track. So the Arizona State system front-loads key courses. For example, to succeed in psychology, a student must perform well in statistics.

“Kids who major in psych put that off, because they don’t want to take statistics,” Ms. Capaldi says. “They want to know, Does their boyfriend love them? Are they nuts? They take all those courses, then they hit statistics and they say, ‘Oh, God, I can’t do this. I can’t do experimental design.’ And so they’re in the wrong major. By putting those courses first, you can see if a student is going to succeed in that major early.”

Arizona State’s retention rate rose to 84 percent from 77 percent in recent years, a change that the provost credits largely to eAdvisor.

It might work.

My university has tried all the usual approaches:

  • Every faculty member must advise some undergraduates (particularly in their first year).
  • Certain trained faculty advisers will do it and be rewarded with release time.
  • Specialist staff advisers will do it, freeing up professors to teach.

I think I saw the whole cycle go around and start over again.

As a freshman at Reed College years ago, I was the victim of ineffectual advising. I was assigned to a professor of foreign languages. She was not informed about things outside her department. She just said OK to whatever courses I chose and signed the forms. It was not until my second year that I began to realize that I had made some bad choices in terms of meeting requirements and taking things in sequence. It took me another year to get straightened out and on track.

A more aware human adviser could have helped me sooner. For a university with complicated “distribution requirements,” a human adviser plus the data-mining might actually help a lot.

 

How I Spent My Afternoon

I don’t know where the morning went — this and that, some fire department communications — but then I started assembling the next issue of The Pomegranate, and immediately encountered the Lithuanian typography issue.

As in, some of the special characters, such as e-with-a-dot-over-it, are not in our normal font, Book Antiqua.

But ah, Book Antiqua is derived from Palatino (my favorite default font), and my installation of Palatino has all those characters.

So it’s point-and-select-and-change fonts for about half an hour until every special Lithuanian character in the article is changed to Palatino, which is slightly narrower but has about the same x-height as Book Antiqua.

And, oh yes, the bibliography has to be checked and uploaded to the Equinox website for some indexing purposes and also sent to the guy in England who does the Digital Object Identifiers.

At which time it is beer-thirty.

This is after all the original editing, the selecting and working with peer reviewers, the interaction with the two authors, and the re-editing.

And there are people who complain about the cost of academic journals and who think that everything should be free.

Well, you naïve whiners and whingers, who is going to do what I have been doing for no pay whatsoever? I’m nowhere near finished. There will be more hours of work in Adobe InDesign and on the web before the issue is ready for the printer — who also expects to be paid, and not in rainbows and unicorns.

You, impoverished graduate student, haven’t you learned how to do interlibrary loan yet? Get a librarian to show you how, or go the university’s library website.

And if you do not have a university affiliation are you not aware that many public libraries have inter-library loan librarians? Or that you can walk into most state university libraries, make nice, and get a “patron” card that includes various borrowing services?

You only have to pay retail for downloaded articles from academic publishers if you need them right now.

Currents in Esoteric Studies

The current newsletter of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism is available for download. In it, some of the members discuss their current doctoral work. It is always interesting to see how new scholars are formulating just exactly what “esoteric studies” covers.

Like Pagan studies — there is some degree of overlap — esoteric studies (if I may personify it) struggles to find out who it is. Egil Asprem, doctoral candidate and blogger, writes,

On the one hand, you often hear that the field has now matured, but when you look for some of the signs that characterise a mature academic field it is hard to see them in practice. I am particularly thinking of the lack of agreement on fundamental issues, such as ”what is it”, ”how do we study it”, ”what’s its importance”, and ”how is it related to the broad spectrum of human activity”. If you pick up the three most popular introduction books to the field, you’ll find three very different ways of handling these fundamental questions.

Kocku von Stuckrad, an established scholar but still “younger” in academic terms, makes the comparison:

It is a kind of identity work that I perceive in the study of esotericism, but also in ”pagan studies” and related fields of research. This identity work often leads to a neglect of critical methodological reflection, which I find problematic. What we need is an active collaboration with as many colleagues as possible, no matter whether or not we like their definitions of esotericism, in order to build up networks that can make research into these historical and cultural dynamics sustainable for the future. If we study these phenomena as part of the cultural history of Europe and North America, in an increasingly globalized perspective, we will be able to integrate the field of Western esotericism” in larger research structures and critical scholarship. This will also help students who enroll in our programs to find a job after their studies.

More resources in the newsletter about courses and research opportunities, chiefly in Britain and the Netherlands.