{"id":2165,"date":"2010-12-16T19:39:47","date_gmt":"2010-12-17T02:39:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2165"},"modified":"2010-12-16T19:39:47","modified_gmt":"2010-12-17T02:39:47","slug":"why-we-do-pagan-studies-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2165","title":{"rendered":"Why We Do Pagan Studies – 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Part 1 here<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Just to continue the previous discussion, let’s look at a Pagan scholar’s (in both senses of the term) book, Niki Bado’s Coming to the Edge of the Circle<\/em><\/a> (Oxford University Press, 2005).\"Coming<\/a><\/p>\n

Its subtitle is\u00a0 “A Wiccan Initiation Ritual.”\u00a0 But is that all <\/em>that it is about? Nope. What she is doing is challenging the model by which anthropologists and scholars of religion have been understanding initiation and rites of passage for the past century, Arnold van Gennep’s<\/a> “tripartite model.”<\/p>\n

Fifteen years ago, when I wrote the introduction to Witchcraft Today Book Two: Modern Rites of Passage<\/a>, <\/em>I too used van Gennep’s model: separation, liminality<\/a>, and finally reintegration into the group. It was the gold standard, so to speak.<\/p>\n

Going out, experiencing something, coming back and re-integrating\u2014it explains everything from the teenage years to Freemasonry.<\/p>\n

But what Nikki Bado did five years ago was to offer a new model of initiation, one based on what she called somatic praxis<\/a><\/em>, “a repetitive discipline that engages both the body and the mind in learning” (viii). Her analogy is learning to drive a car, which also requires a “body-in-practice.”<\/p>\n

One thing you could say right away was that van Gennep’s model focused more on the person-in-the-group, whereas Bado’s is more about how the person herself changes through “the ritual performance of initiation,” which she describes more as repeating circles than as movement out and back in again.<\/p>\n

“As a scholar,” she writes, ” I intended from the outset to use Wiccan initiation ritual as material to think with” (145). In other words, her goal is not to discuss Wicca and only Wicca, but initiation in general.<\/p>\n

There is a lot more too it, of course, and Bado spends many pages basically explaining Wicca. But she always returns to the body-in-practice model.<\/p>\n

There is some parallel here with Tanya Luhrman’s “interpretive drift,” although that model\u00a0 focuses more on cognition. (And Luhrman, having gathered what she needed for her dissertation and Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft<\/em><\/a>, sailed off into the sunset, leaving an island of angry natives behind her.)<\/p>\n

Bado as a Pagan scholar has several purposes:<\/p>\n

1. To propose a new model of initiation that can be applied across religious traditions and cultures.<\/p>\n

2. Since she herself follows a new religion\u2014Wicca\u2014and is also writing about it, she has to demonstrate that instead of a “special pleading” she is actually able to offer scholarly (not practitioner) insights that are “otherwise not available to scholarly examination” (145). Thus she must turn her “insider” status into an asset, lest she be accused of taking the easy way, writing about what she is already involved in, perhaps with less than full objectivity.<\/p>\n

(Never mind that Jews write about Judaism, etc. Members of new religious movements are viewed with more suspicion as to their contribution to the larger work of the academy.)<\/p>\n

3. By using Wicca as her model instead of some other religious tradition, and by discussing her own participation, she also does indeed make a case that Pagan scholars of religion can do good work in the academy. Her work and others’ work makes the study of Pagan religions and Pagan ways of being religious more legitimate.<\/p>\n

Do they also help Pagan practitioners? Perhaps indirectly. But that is not what sold the book to Oxford University Press. Point number 1 and possibly number 2 sold the book, I suspect.<\/p>\n

When you write an academic book proposal for a publisher, you try to forecast good sales in the scholarly market\u2014and, as sort of holy grail, adoption of your book as a classroom text that students must buy. Sales to “general readers,” i.e., the practitioner buyers, are secondary or even tertiary, behind library sales. The publisher hopes for them, but they are not what push the book’s publication, most of the time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Part 1 here) Just to continue the previous discussion, let’s look at a Pagan scholar’s (in both senses of the term) book, Niki Bado’s Coming to the Edge of the Circle (Oxford University Press, 2005). Its subtitle is\u00a0 “A Wiccan Initiation Ritual.”\u00a0 But is that all that it is about? Nope. What she is doing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-yV","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7925,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7925","url_meta":{"origin":2165,"position":0},"title":"Passing of Nikki Bado","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 22, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I was just informed today of the passing of an old friend and colleague in Pagan studies, Nikki Bado, who taught at Iowa State University. She had been on medical leave for the last year or so, and apparently suffered a heart attack after her last surgery. I have forgotten\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"nikki","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/nikki.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6225,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6225","url_meta":{"origin":2165,"position":1},"title":"New Issue of ‘Pomegranate’ Journal Published","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 16, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Some people are perplexed as to why this issue carries a 2012 date, although the articles are copyright 2014. We got behind schedule a couple of years ago and have been slowly catching up. The 2013 volume will be a double issue published during the first half of 2014, d.v.,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Paganism\"","block_context":{"text":"Paganism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=paganism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1121,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1121","url_meta":{"origin":2165,"position":2},"title":"Handbook of Contemporary Paganism in Print","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 14, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"My contributor copy of the new Handbook of Contemporary Paganism from Brill arrived. (You can tell from the price that it is intended primarily for the institutional market.) Here is the table of contents:\"The Modern Magical Revival,\" Nevill Drury\"The Influence of Aleister Crowley on Gerald Gardner and the Early Witchcraft\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Paganism\"","block_context":{"text":"Paganism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=paganism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6035,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6035","url_meta":{"origin":2165,"position":3},"title":"Pentagram Pizza: It’s Revived Again","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 26, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00b6 At Pagan Square, Rebecca Buchanan rounds up children's books featuring Norse gods and heroes. \u00b6 Bright Spiral is an online comic about occult initiation. Trippy and complex. \u00b6 \"Chilled-out multitasking hipster psychics don\u2019t seem so eccentric anymore\" and \"We are in the middle of an occult revival.\" Again. \u00b6\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"childhood\"","block_context":{"text":"childhood","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=childhood"},"img":{"alt_text":"pentagrampizza","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/pentagrampizza.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":586,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=586","url_meta":{"origin":2165,"position":4},"title":"1939 and All ThatJason Pitzl-Waters\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 31, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"1939 and All ThatJason Pitzl-Waters draws attention to a 2001 interview with Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone recently re-published in the online zine The Wiccan-Pagan Times.Janet Farrar, who came to the Craft in the late 1960s, seems to dancing around a more skeptical position as regarding Gerald Gardner's finding a\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":196,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=196","url_meta":{"origin":2165,"position":5},"title":"Maxine Sanders interview The Wiccan\/Pagan\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 1, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Maxine Sanders interview The Wiccan\/Pagan Times has an interview with Maxine Sanders, another pioneer of the Craft. It was her often nude and then-blonde self who appeared skyclad in so many late-1960s and early-1970s books and articles, such as the Time-Life Books Man, Myth and Magic encyclopedia, not to mention\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2165"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2181,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2165\/revisions\/2181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}