{"id":6133,"date":"2013-12-03T18:27:57","date_gmt":"2013-12-04T01:27:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6133"},"modified":"2013-12-03T21:13:30","modified_gmt":"2013-12-04T04:13:30","slug":"animism-religion-bloggers-and-the-aar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6133","title":{"rendered":"Animism, Religion, Bloggers, and the AAR"},"content":{"rendered":"

The annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion<\/a> 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<\/a>. Me, I am co-chair of the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group<\/a>, but I suspect that all my colleagues go through the same process \u2014 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”\u00a0 for next year’s meeting.<\/p>\n

The last part is done in collaboration with your steering committee, which in our case is scattered over nine Northern Hemisphere time zones \u2014 plus one in Australia.<\/p>\n

The “call” is released in January, and people have about two months to submit proposals for papers, invited panel discussions, roundtables, etc. \u2014 most of which will be turned in at the last possible minute, for what are professors but students who never left the university?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

One of our themes in 2014 (in San Diego) will be the New Animism<\/strong>, “new” in that it moves away from Edward Tylor’s<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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

But while academia moves at its careful pace, there are plenty of other people writing about animism.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/a>.” 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":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":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[137,68],"class_list":["post-6133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academia","tag-animism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-1AV","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6232,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6232","url_meta":{"origin":6133,"position":0},"title":"Contemporary Pagan Studies Group’s Call for Papers","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 21, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"The process to submit papers for the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group's sessions at next November's American Academy of Religion meeting is now open. The submission deadline is March 3, 2014. More information and links can be found here. Call for Papers We invite individual papers, papers, sessions, and roundtable proposals\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":510,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=510","url_meta":{"origin":6133,"position":1},"title":"Animism, Disney, and MorelsIt started\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 11, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Animism, Disney, and MorelsIt started when someone passed on a quote from an article in the August 2005 issue of Vanity Fair about Disneyland:I thought about everything it was and it wasn't, the cornucopia of image, illusion, and icon, and realized, very much to my delight, that Disney is a\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5433,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5433","url_meta":{"origin":6133,"position":2},"title":"Nature Religion as She Is Conceptualized in 2013","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 9, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"I am off Thursday to Cherry Hill Seminary's \"Sacred Lands and Spiritual Landscapes\" symposium. Although not one of the marquee speakers, I have a small part to play as a respondent for one panel. What does a respondent do? First, you read all papers in advance. Of course, there is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8361,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8361","url_meta":{"origin":6133,"position":3},"title":"2017 Pagan Studies “Call” Completed, Will Be Published Soon","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 10, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"As I mentioned, my term has co-chair of the American Academy of Religion's Contemporary Pagan Studies Group ended this year. It's been a log run, if you figure that this effort to bring Pagan studies into the academy started in 1995, with an informal \"who are we\" meeting, more of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3409,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3409","url_meta":{"origin":6133,"position":4},"title":"The Day of the Dead is not Just for Humans","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 4, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"At Adventures in Animism, Heather Awen builds a shrine.","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":690,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=690","url_meta":{"origin":6133,"position":5},"title":"Graham Harvey speaks on Animism","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 19, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Pagan scholar Graham Harvey is just back from convention-ing in Australia, where among other things he did this interview on animism on Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio. Listen online or download the 23-megabyte mp3 file. Capsule description:The oldest living religion, Animism, has a new advocate in pagan expert, Graham Harvey. But\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\/6133","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=6133"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6155,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6133\/revisions\/6155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}