Helen Cornish

• Goldsmiths University of London

Fifteen years ago an outpouring of new academic material asserted the value of being an insider in religious research. Conventional assumptions that linked objectivity with outsider status were challenged. This valuable burst of scholarship worked hard to critique the kind of research that preceded it, where faith or identity was seen to compromise...

Antiques Roadshow Events are held in historic locations across the United Kingdom. On site, experts evaluate objects brought in by attendees, who are often cast as passive recipients, while edited highlights make up the long‐running BBC TV program. Through Collaborative Event Ethnography at one Roadshow Event we show how object stories are navigate...

Relations between people and places can be understood through the metaphor of conversation. Contemporary Pagans and Witches who visit the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall often take walks into the surrounding countryside. By tracing three walks (Rocky Valley labyrinths, Saint Nectan’s Waterfall, and the memorial to Joan Wytte in Minster W...

Drumming and chanting are core practices in modern magical-religious Witchcraft in the absence of unifying texts or standardized rituals. Song and musicality contribute towards self-creation and community making. However, Nature Religions and alternate spiritualities are seldom included in surveys of religious musicking or soundscapes. This article...

There is little about globalized modern magical-religious Witchcraft that isn’t borrowed. It is well established that it is a creative response to modernity rather than an ancient continuous practice. Its inventiveness also makes it ripe for charges of religious appropriation. Complaints are compounded by claims that Nature Religions and New Age ar...

It might be expected that practitioners of contemporary magico-religious traditions consider they have a special relationship with the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall. In this ethnographic article I examine how visiting practitioners in search of familiarity and authority approach the collection in a sensory and emotional manner that gen...

Definitions of magic are often circular and limited to rationalist parameters. They tend to embrace a set of beliefs about the irrational possibilities of control over unseen and supernatural sources, succinctly described by Keith Thomas as “the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxieties.” For more than a century, foundational anthropo...

The uncanny is commonly identified as an emotional encounter, where the known somehow slips out of place; it is embodied and sensory, but understood primarily as feelings. Home is safe and familiar, history is considered rational and chronological, and the supernatural is both untrue and to be feared. Yet all these are challenged by modern witches...

This article explores the role played by ghost walks in imparting and enlivening the histories of cities for tourists.Drawing upon research in York, London, Brighton and Edinburgh the article explores the manner in which the uncanny nature of the topic allows ghost walks to behave differently to other forms of dark tourism or thanatourism (Lennon a...

Using Collaborative Event Ethnography as a research method, a team of 21 researchers conducted fieldwork at the Antiques Roadshow in Ightham Mote, Kent. This article reflects on the experience of queuing at the event and how it was experienced and discussed by researchers and participants. Drawing upon Mol, the article approaches the practice of qu...

Over the last 20 years British witches have reconsidered historical orthodoxies handed down from earlier generations. Over this time most practitioners have followed the lead of contemporary historians who offer revised empirical accounts that suggest received claims about continuity have no basis in the historical record. In doing so, they contrib...

The extent to which researchers in religious fields claim membership of the group has long been a subject of debate in the social sciences. While many theoretical and methodological concerns have been thrashed out since the 1980s, which have resulted in a general consensus that prioritises “good research”, regardless of membership or position. Howe...

It is well established that while folk festivals appear to illustrate an ancient, bucolic past, they are contemporary markers of history and belonging. Cornish folk festivals can provide a valuable illustration of this. The Padstow May Day celebration, the Obby Oss, epitomises this sense of timelessness and spontaneous celebration. It attracts nume...

The skeleton of Joan Wytte, or the Fighting Fairy Woman of Bodmin, was displayed in the Museum of Witchcraft in Cornwall in the UK for several decades until her eventual burial in nearby woodland in the autumn of 1999. Her story has been deployed as a critical historical source and a demonstrable link between Cornwall and magical histories. It is w...

History and heritage are often asserted as indicators of continuity. However, meaningful pasts are mobilized according to the needs of the present, and continually reinvented and transformed. This paper seeks to explore the dynamic and fluid ways that the past is continually under revision to meet such needs. Contemporary British Witches are curren...

Examining contemporary British witchcraft necessitates representing its historical context, currently a highly contested arena. Both magical practitioners and scholars have heavily critiqued the “orthodox” histories of unbroken lines of tradition reaching back to the distant past that were prevalent in the early to mid‐twentieth century. However, c...