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In Search of the Uncanny: Inspirited Landscapes and Modern Witchcraft
Abstract
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 with their view of an inspirited world. Practitioner-visitors to the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall report a wealth of eerie experiences. Situated at the foot of Boscastle harbor, nestled down a steep and winding route, its place in the landscape encourages ready connections to esoteric experiences. This sense is reinforced by a network of sacred sites weaving outwards from the museum, and the well-used occult and folk magic items held in the displays: tangible and material sites of the uncanny. For these visitors, such encounters in the museum hold particular significance. Here, a dynamic landscape, inhabited by genius loci (spirit of place) combines with an inspirited material culture contained inside the museum. In an animated cosmology, the uncanny is encountered through emotional, sensory, and embodied materialities.
... According to Brzóstowicz-Klajn (2022), the prevalence of Slavic motifs in recent Polish popular culture is evident, and the notion of Slavicness encompasses a particular historical context while transcending mere historical facts resonating with profound underlying needs, aspirations, and collective sentiments. Neopaganism is frequently characterized as a spiritual path rooted in reverence for nature, where encounters with the natural world facilitate connections with entities beyond the human realm (Pike, 2001;Clifton, 2004;Davy, 2007;Cornish, 2020). Both eclectic and reconstructionist neopagans draw upon folklore from pre-Christian cultures to inform their rituals and beliefs. ...
Slavic Witches and Social Media examines the role of social media in the spiritual practices of modern Slavic witches and draws a comparative analysis between contemporary neopaganism and Catholicism in Poland.
This volume presents a fresh and comprehensive examination of Slavic witches within the context of the growing popularity of neopagan religions and the integration of social media in religious practices. It delves into contemporary witchcraft in Poland, including the prominent Wicca tradition, native Slavic beliefs with their diverse pantheon of deities, extensive demonology, and profound respect for nature, as well as individual, eclectic paths.
Through a digital religion study, this book investigates how neopagans and Catholics incorporate social media into their spiritual journeys. Its vivid portrait of a Slavic witch provides a deeper understanding of their beliefs, practices, and engagement with social media platforms. This book is dedicated to scholars in the fields of religious sociology, digital religion, and ethnography with a deep fascination for exploring folk magic and Slavic traditions and their adaptation to the emerging digital landscape.
It is an insightful resource for researchers in theology, communication, and new media, as well as for all researchers and individuals who share an interest in the captivating realm of contemporary witches and witchcraft.
... In some cases, deities help facilitate these changes, as Witches ask (or work with) a deity to bring about a particular outcome. Cornish (2020) notes that in addition to deities, Witches engage with "an inspirited landscape . . . populated by more animistic and less anthropomorphic inhabitants" (p. ...
WitchTok describes a sub-section of the social media platform TikTok, which caters to Contemporary Pagans and other practitioners of modern Witchcraft. Through short micro-videos, users share snapshots of their lives, providing a window into their religious identities and practices. Through a qualitative analysis of videos and comments, this exploratory study examines how modern Witches engage with religion through this digital space. Although this platform is wholly virtual, WitchTok is also eminently material. Through sharing and commenting on videos of spells, potions, altars, and other practices, users engage with a range of material objects. By announcing the magical properties of materials, instructing how to use certain objects, and advising where items can be found, WitchTok reveals how Witches conceptualize materiality and magic. The promotion of products, businesses, and personal brands in this space also reveals how Witchcraft is shaped by consumerism. In contrast to scholars who distinguish between “traditional” Witchcraft and “consumerist” Witches, I argue that WitchTok highlights the complex entanglements of Witchcraft with consumer capitalism.
Performance storytelling in the UK frequently celebrates a vision of pre-industrial literature and heritage – one which, just as in genre fantasy, is intertwined with magical elements and a portrayal of a more harmonious connection between communities and the green landscape. As a storyteller and a fan of storytelling, I wholly recognise the appeal of this antidote to the grimmer excesses of modern life, not least for the identity and belonging it can offer those who grew up in middle-class suburban Britain, and for the inspiration it can offer for environmental conservation. Indeed, many storytellers attempt to address humanity’s current destructive relationship with the environment through the telling of traditional tales: in sharing a pre-industrial perspective on land, and evoking wonder in the growing environment, it is believed we can re-inspire ways of interacting with the physical world that are more imaginative, respectful and (in Weber’s term) ‘enchanted’. Without denying the benefits of ‘eco-storytelling’, in this chapter I highlight the influence of a distinctly British nostalgia and romanticisation on this construction of storytelling, particularly in its privileging of rural/wild space, and suggest that this limits its application. Cultural criticism, mythography and oral history theory jointly imply that story-making remains a key element in how humans apply structure and meaning to lived experience – and (as shown by cultural geographers, collectors of ‘urban legends’ and authors from Garner to Gaiman) this is still true of our relationship with modern, built spaces. I argue that the designation and privileging of pre-industrial traditions – and indeed the distinction between urban and rural space – can be understood as stories in themselves, born of attempts to make sense of industrial urbanisation; but that, rather than undermining efforts to address environmental damage through stories, this understanding enhances our work as tellers of tales, in any medium. It enables a more intimate awareness of the meaning we seek in stories, the distinctions and categorisations we apply to them, and the choices we make in what we tell or listen to, or watch, or read. And it reveals that urban, built space should receive equal attention in re-enchantment through storytelling: not only is there a rich seam of modern folklore here that is underrepresented in UK storytelling work, but stepping beyond our common parameters will open our creative practise to audiences we otherwise neglect – thus promoting social integration, celebrating diversity and engaging directly with the enchantment of those spaces where much of the population live and work.
This chapter explores the interconnectedness between stories, place and creator and the ways that knowing, walking and feeling a place is so vital to engaging with content. Experience of place inevitably leaves gaps as not everything can be seen and touched and smelled and felt, thereby creating spaces for imaginative engagement. The stories and histories of place are also fragmentary, what remains are often spectral traces of the past in the present. Equally, comics as a medium is built on gaps and elisions, and often manifests on the page as empty space, but one rich with creative potential. The chapter centralises PhD research that connects these gaps by creating papercut comics that tell stories of witch folklore that is deeply connected to specific places, using walking as a creative method.
The chapter looks at the first of these papercut stories, one about a Cornish woman called Joan Wytte whose reputation as a witch has posthumously grown with the stories that have developed around her, and who supposedly died in Bodmin Jail in 1813, but was not buried until 1998, after her remains had been exhibited at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle. Her literal envelopment in the land has furthered what Cornish (2020) refers to as ‘the inspirited landscape’ around Boscastle, and the short walk from the museum to her gravestone has become a pilgrimage for visiting witches and Pagans to pay their respects. As Solnit notes, a path can allow one to connect to the stories that are soaked within in, ‘a form of spatial theatre’ (2014: 68).
The story emerged from a connection with the landscapes that house them, in turn facilitating a re-imagining of the lore of the land rendered as papercut. Papercut is a technique that utilises both what remains and what is taken away to form the image. The use of silhouette is particularly important as these, like many representations of witches themselves as well as the landscapes that surround them, are recognisable as contour, but the detail remains hidden.
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 generates dialogic relationships between people, places, and things. While much museological debate acknowledges dynamic relationships between people and things, for contemporary witches these objects are literally alive in an inspirited world. This has a bearing on how they apprehend the museum as a space for multiple forms of engagement.
Wicca or Pagan Witchcraft is the most popular branch of contemporary Western Paganism. Its self-image is that of an ‘old religion’; a reawakening of the spiritual values, ideas, ideals and practices of Pagan ancestors. Amongst these ideas is a romantic veneration of ‘Nature’. Nature is considered to be ensouled, alive, ‘divine’: Wiccan beliefs encompass elements of pantheism and animism. The divine is described both as an impersonal ‘force’ or ‘energy’ manifest in the world of nature and as deities – Goddess and God – who are venerated in ritual in different forms at different seasons of the year. These forms draw on images of wild and untamed nature – the Huntress God, the Green Man of the forest, the Sun God, and agricultural deities, such as Corn Goddess and Corn God. Themes and symbols drawn from nature are central to Wiccan belief and practice, but hearken back to a world far removed from the experience of most Wiccans. How does Wicca view its relationship to the world of nature and does Wiccan belief and practice provide a basis for an environmental ethic?
The so-called “homecoming” is one of the most (if not the most) popular ways of depicting the process of becoming a follower of Neo-Paganism found in literature, from Margot Adler’s classical Drawing Down the Moon (1979) to contemporary authors, like Graham Harvey. It is interesting that “homecoming” simultaneously occurs in Neo-Pagan literature, as the common way of becoming Pagan, seen as opposite to the process of conversion (usually as a rapid change of religious beliefs). The critique of the “homecoming” defined in the academic field concentrates on showing that there is a possibility it may be more a theological notion, rather than a model of religious change to contemporary Paganism. The broad definition of religious conversion, understood as change in religious behaviour and beliefs, does include “homecoming” as one of the possible conversion narratives. Therefore, we may speak of a “coming home experience” as one of the main themes – but certainly not the only one – that is present in the histories of conversion to contemporary Paganism.
This article discusses Neo-Pagan journeys to archaeological or heritage sites (such as ancient temples and stone circles) associated with pre-Christian religions and deities. It argues that within the rationale of a Neo-Pagan worldview, several common binaries dissolve and reveal themselves as continuities at sacred sites: human body and earth body, the past and the present, inner and outer worlds, self and other, human and deity. In the course of Pagans’ bodily performances at sites, inner and outer landscapes co-create and flow into one another: the lived body becomes a fundamental text and starting point for knowledge. Through somatic modes of attention - by attending to and with their bodies in surroundings that frequently include the embodied presence of others - Neo-pagan pilgrims experience themselves not as isolated subjectivities but as sharing an intersubjective milieu with other pilgrims and with the Earth itself. For women in particular, journeys to sacred sites potentially contribute to a radical re-inscription of the female body by exposing women to alternative representations of the feminine and by providing contexts in which the feminine can be re-imagined, re-experienced and performed differently through symbolic activity and ritual. In Butlerian terms, women potentially perform gender differently at sacred sites.
For many anthropologists, longterm ethnographic fieldwork does not end when they leave the field, as the journey towards ethnographic understanding evolves for years after physically returning from the field. In an auto-ethnographic mode, this paper traces the author’s return journey from the field, through transformations in their understanding of soul abduction and spirit-revenge among upland members of the Nyishi tribe in the Eastern Himalayas. The paper traces the author’s journey from initial ontological immersion in fieldwork materials, through a reductionist withdrawal from the data, to the “redemptive symmetry” of a multispecies approach: one which recognizes the human and more-than-human origins of such spirit phenomena.
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 contributed to strategic perspectives on the history of a modern movement. Simultaneously, revisionist histories have provided new spaces to trace alternative connections to the past through less rational and more analogic ways. This chapter explores how the “traditional wise-woman”—made tangible through the tale of the "Wayside Witch” at Cornwall’s Museum of Witchcraft—provides a sensory and emotional means to consider the past in the present. It traces how empirical sources are one thread in a complex and dynamic sense of historicity where official histories are continually combined with multiple sources and polyvocal accounts towards creative ways of making meaningful histories.
Since the early 1990s, increasing numbers of occultists have come to identify as practitioners of "Traditional Witchcraft", "Traditional Craft", or "Old Craft". This article maps out this milieu, outlining the existence of both its modern Pagan and Luciferian components and in doing so demonstrating that the term lacks precision for etic scholarly purposes. It follows this by exploring what purpose this term actually serves, examining both its historical development and its contemporary usages to illustrate how it represents a form of rhetorical self-identification adopted by occultists seeking to retain the label of "Witchcraft" while evading associations with "Wicca" and at the same time functioning as a legitimation strategy by foregrounding the inheritance of "Tradition".
This essay departs from Freud's 1919 essay, Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny), exploring the Indigenous uncanny instantiated in recent works that traffic in ghostly encounters, by well‐known Australian Indigenous artists: (1) Tracey Moffatt's Night Spirits photographs from her 2013 show, Spirit Landscapes, and The White Ghosts Sailed In, from her solo show, My Horizon (2017 Venice Biennale); (2) Warwick Thornton's 2013 experimental documentary, The Darkside, based on Indigenous ghost stories, and his 2015 show The Way of the Ngangkari. These works create a powerful aesthetic that acknowledges the displacement of Aboriginal people during European settlement as well as long‐standing ancestral connections.
Post-Ottoman temporal topologies—cases where the past, present, and future may be bent around one another rather than ordered linearly—may produce uncanny histories. The uncanny is activated, as Freud noted, when something secret comes to light, but also when the expectations of a given genre are exceeded. In these cases, the genre of historicism has been violated. Rather than contending that the post-Ottoman world is entirely different from Western Europe, the examples here alert one to the presence of uncanny histories in many other places since historicism has nowhere managed to eradicate its alternatives. Unsettled pasts of violence and displacement and presents beset by ongoing tensions (political, economic, religious/ethnic) do contribute, however, to a particular vitality and saliency of uncanny histories in the post-Ottoman sphere.
This book presents twenty chapters by experts in their fields, providing a thorough and interdisciplinary overview of the theory and practice of magic in the West. Its chronological scope extends from the Ancient Near East to twenty-first-century North America; its objects of analysis range from Persian curse tablets to US neo-paganism. For comparative purposes, the volume includes chapters on developments in the Jewish and Muslim worlds, evaluated not simply for what they contributed at various points to European notions of magic, but also as models of alternative development in ancient Mediterranean legacy. Similarly, the volume highlights the transformative and challenging encounters of Europeans with non-Europeans, regarding the practice of magic in both early modern colonization and more recent decolonization.
This article focuses on St Nectan’s Glen, Cornwall, where layers of ritual deposition imply a long history of spiritual significance—an implication that is debunked by a diachronic examination of the site, which reveals a relatively recent, and conscious, crafting of the sacred.
How would our understanding of museums change if we used the Vintage Wireless Museum or the Museum of Witchcraft as examples – rather than the British Museum or the Louvre? Although there are thousands of small, independent, single-subject museums in the UK, Europe and North America, the field of museum studies remains focused almost exclusively on major institutions.
In this ground-breaking new book, Fiona Candlin reveals how micromuseums challenge preconceived ideas about what museums are and how they operate. Based on extensive fieldwork and analysis of more than fifty micromuseums, she shows how they offer dramatically different models of curation, interpretation and visitor experience, and how their analysis generates new perspectives on subjects such as display, objects, collections, architecture, and the public sphere.
The first-ever book dedicated to the subject, Micromuseology provides a platform for radically rethinking key debates within museum studies. Destined to transform the field, it is essential reading for students and researchers in museum studies, anthropology, material culture studies, and visual culture.
It is often assumed that museum exhibits are inert but, in contrast to artifacts in most mainstream institutions, those at the Museum of Witchcraft, The Valiant Soldier community museum, and the Dartmoor Prison Museum are felt to be fully functioning and, to some extent, potent or dangerous. In order to consider why this is the case, this essay investigates how museums are considered to “kill off” their exhibits and why this process does not occur in these small, independent organizations. Notably, the three venues have few or no paid members of staff and limited opportunities for gaining state funding. Operating largely independently of the public sector, they have no need to adopt official priorities and in consequence their modes of practice differ from those encountered in major institutions. They also have close links to their immediate location and communities. Focusing on these museums therefore raises the possibility that the “death” of objects is not a necessary condition but that their demise depends upon the specific character and circumstances of display.
People often overlook the uncanny nature of homecomings, writing off the experience of finding oneself at home in a strange place or realizing that places from our past have grown strange. This book challenges our assumptions about the value of home, arguing for the ethical value of our feeling displaced and homeless in the 21st century. Home is explored in places ranging from digital keyboards to literary texts, and investigates how we mediate our homecomings aesthetically through cultural artifacts (art, movies, television shows) and conceptual structures (philosophy, theology, ethics, narratives). In questioning the place of home in human lives and the struggles involved with defining, defending, naming and returning to homes, the volume collects and extends ideas about home and homecomings that will inform traditional problems in novel ways.
Widely acknowledged to be one of Freud's greatest cultural works, when Totem and Taboo was first published in 1913, it caused outrage. Thorough and thought-provoking, Totem and Taboo remains the fullest exploration of Freud's most famous themes. Family, society, religion - they're all put on the couch here. Whatever your feelings about psychoanalysis, Freud's theories have influenced every facet of modern life, from film and literature to medicine and art. If you don't know your incest taboo from your Oedipal complex, and you want to understand more about the culture we're living in, then Totem and Taboo is the book to read.
Contemporary western Paganism is now a global religious phenomenon with Pagans in many parts of the world sharing much in common - from a nature-revering worldview and lifestyle to a host of chants, invocations, ritual tools and magical practices. But there are also locally-specific differences. Local religious contexts, landscapes, histories, traditions, politics, values and norms all impact on local Paganisms. This is nowhere more evident than in a strongly Catholic society, where religion and culture are deeply entwined. Taking the Mediterranean society of Malta as a case study, this book invites readers inside the world of a small, hidden sub-culture. Showing what it is like being Pagan in a society where the vast majority of the population is Roman Catholic, and Catholicism permeates every sphere of public and domestic, social and political life, Rountree reveals that Paganism here is a unique brew of indigenous and global influences. Pagans employ both creativity and borrowing in constructing identities within a cultural context characterized by antagonism as well as continuity. This book explores the intersections of religious and cultural identity, the global and local, Paganism and Christianity, with insights grounded in rich ethnographic detail based on long-term fieldwork. Rountree makes invaluable comparisons with other studies of modern Pagans and their various worlds.
Although the legacy and work of John Michell is frequently associated with a culturally liberal neo-tribalism, certain aspects of Michell's thought can be, and have been, interpreted as an esoteric extension of more explicitly right-wing political positions, ones which are currently convergent with the political subcultures surrounding the European New Right both in Europe and also among newly emerging right-wing groups in the US. This essay examines the ways in which the work of John Michell is resonant with many of the philosophies of the European New Right, and how in his final years and after his death new markets for his work are emerging in the various subcultures associated with right-wing Paganism.
This article posits that the vernacular understanding of crisis as existing in a different sort of time needs to be mined for what it tells us about social perceptions of temporality. Using three ethnographic examples from Cyprus, I ask here what temporal features we may identify that lead our interlocutors to see certain periods as “times of crisis”. In particular, I propose a notion that I call the uncanny present to refer to a particular sense of present-ness produced by futures that cannot be anticipated. Crisis, I claim, becomes such precisely because it brings the present into consciousness, creating an awareness or perception of present-ness that we do not normally have.
Taking the reader into the heart of one of the fastest-growing religious movements in North America, Sabina Magliocco reveals how the disciplines of anthropology and folklore were fundamental to the early development of Neo-Paganism and the revival of witchcraft. Magliocco examines the roots that this religious movement has in a Western spiritual tradition of mysticism disavowed by the Enlightenment. She explores, too, how modern Pagans and Witches are imaginatively reclaiming discarded practices and beliefs to create religions more in keeping with their personal experience of the world as sacred and filled with meaning. Neo-Pagan religions focus on experience, rather than belief, and many contemporary practitioners have had mystical experiences. They seek a context that normalizes them and creates in them new spiritual dimensions that involve change in ordinary consciousness. Magliocco analyzes magical practices and rituals of Neo-Paganism as art forms that reanimate the cosmos and stimulate the imagination of its practitioners. She discusses rituals that are put together using materials from a variety of cultural and historical sources, and examines the cultural politics surrounding the movement-how the Neo-Pagan movement creates identity by contrasting itself against the dominant culture and how it can be understood in the context of early twenty-first-century identity politics. Witching Culture is the first ethnography of this religious movement to focus specifically on the role of anthropology and folklore in its formation, on experiences that are central to its practice, and on what it reveals about identity and belief in twenty-first-century North America. Copyright
From the frozen landscapes of the Antarctic to the haunted houses of childhood, the memory of places we experience is fundamental to a sense of self. Drawing on influences as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and J. G. Ballard, The Memory of Place charts the memorial landscape that is written into the body and its experience of the world. Dylan Trigg's The Memory of Place offers a lively and original intervention into contemporary debates within "place studies," an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of philosophy, geography, architecture, urban design, and environmental studies. Through a series of provocative investigations, Trigg analyzes monuments in the representation of public memory; "transitional" contexts, such as airports and highway rest stops; and the "ruins" of both memory and place in sites such as Auschwitz. While developing these original analyses, Trigg engages in thoughtful and innovative ways with the philosophical and literary tradition, from Gaston Bachelard to Pierre Nora, H. P. Lovecraft to Martin Heidegger. Breathing a strange new life into phenomenology, The Memory of Place argues that the eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves. The result is a compelling and novel rethinking of memory and place that should spark new conversations across the field of place studies. Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University and widely recognized as the leading scholar on phenomenology of place, calls The Memory of Place "genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature. It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force." He predicts that Trigg's book will be "immediately recognized as a major original work in phenomenology."
An important area of contention that arises when the scholars of today approach the religions of Witchcraft and Paganism concerns the origins of modern Witchcraft and whether any historical continuity exists between contemporary Pagans and the ancient pagan religions of Europe.
This essay returns to two foundational ethnographies in the anthropology of spirit phenomena by E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Vincent Crapanzano, as well as Jean Rouch's controversial Les Maitres Fous, to problematize the ongoing and subtle ways in which cultural relativism and its subsequent critiques reproduce disengagement from and disavowal of the uncanny metaphysics of others, even while we anthropologists represent them. Arguing that the stakes of what gets to count as 'real' in anthropology have had and continue to have profound consequences for how we imagine sociality as well as practice encounter across ontological difference, I trace, with Marily Strathern, James Clifford, and Michel de Certeau's help primarily, how incommensurability with 'uncanny' phenomena is both created and sustained at three points in the anthropological project: fieldwork, the writing of ethnography, and the reception of ethnography. I close by advocating that we risk opening ourselves to the ontologies of others.
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 well established that the past is recorded and represented through narratives, artefacts and events in multiple and diverse ways, and museums are often idealised sites for historical knowledge. Historicity is contingent on current
needs and agendas, and often contested. Through retelling over time certain elements are highlighted or downplayed. Since the burial, the life and death of Joan Wytte has become vividly invested with new meanings as her story becomes incorporated into the landscapes of folklore, Cornish histories
and magical practices.
This article focuses upon modern pagan witchcraft as practised within Cornwall as an exemplar of ethnic identity construction and praxis within the Celtic spiritualities. It offers a close reading of texts produced and strategies employed by practitioners in developing a viable history
or myth of origin for their beliefs and practices and the specific ethnic identities constructed within the Duchy based upon notions of the Celtic periphery and spiritual liminality. I will argue that the concept of 'tradition' as expressed through the now outdated theoretical framework of
cultural evolution plays a crucial role in the formation of these constructs, which owes as much to the historical roots of Modern Pagan Witchcraft as it does the development of Celtic nationalism within Cornwall. The recent growth of digital media has enabled practitioners to communicate
these identity constructs to a worldwide audience, disseminating their histories and identities to co-religionists and the interested, non-specialist public, presenting their historicity as objective truth; as such my research has focused in particular on 'insider' texts, both on paper and
virtual. As the congruence of ethnic and 'outsider' approaches described by Hale has recently found its strongest statement within the modern pagan community in Cornwall with the emergence in this last decade of a self-styled 'Traditional Cornish Witchcraft' (hereafter TCW) which claims for
itself the continuation of pre-modern, vernacular witch beliefs and practices, I have chosen to focus upon its development and presentation. Its progenitor having been born in Kent, moving to Cornwall only in the late 1990s, as a construct TCW provides a significant case study for both the
inception and growth of a tradition within the Celtic Spiritualities and the development of an ethnic identity among the 'Cardiac Celts', contributing to what it means to be Cornish or 'Celtic' in the early twenty-first century.
What are we to make of the Latina schoolteacher who considers herself a good Catholic, rarely attends Mass, but meditates daily at her home altar (where she mixes images of the Virgin of Guadalupe with those of Frida Kahlo, and traditional votive candles with healing crystals), yet feels particularly spiritual while preparing food for religious celebrations in her neighborhood? Diverse religious practices such as these have long baffled scholars of contemporary religion, whose research started with the assumption that individuals commit, or refuse to commit, to an entire institutionally-defined package of beliefs and practices. Social surveys typically ask respondents to self-identify by denominational or other broad religious categories. Sociologists attempt to measure religiosity according to how well individuals conform to the official religious standards, such as frequency of church attendance, scripture reading, or prayer. This book points the way forward toward a new way of understanding and studying religious behavior. Rather than try to fit people into prearranged packages, the book argues, scholars must begin to study religion as it is actually lived and experienced in peoples' everyday lives. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, as well as recent work by other scholars, the book explores the many ways that people express themselves spiritually and shows that they rarely fit neatly into the categories developed. Challenging those who see declining church attendance as the death of religion in the Western world, the book demonstrates that religion is as widespread and vital as ever, if you know where to look.
This article analyzes stories of ghosts and criminals told by residents and workers in urban high-rise buildings and suburban gated communities in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. For many in Chiang Mai's “communities of exclusion,” the fantasy of progressive, orderly neighborhoods and intellectual, prosperous communities coexisted with stories of empty streets haunted by violent ghosts and drug-addicted foreign invaders. With the added shocks of economic and political crises in 1997 and 2006, events that littered the Chiang Mai skyline with abandoned buildings, the idea of progress in Chiang Mai—in the Thai idiom of khwam charoen—underwent its own crisis. Through an analysis of these stories of progressive or haunted sites, I show how, for many in these communities of exclusion, the fantasy of progress and development has been rendered uncanny.
During the middle years of the twentieth century, British pioneers of Wicca, the neopagan witchcraft religion, adopted prehistoric megaliths as ‘sacred sites’ and appropriated the folklore that surrounded them for their own magico-religious purposes. In turn, Wiccan interpretations of such sites resulted in the creation of a new ‘alternative archaeological’ megalithic folklore.
This article draws on studies of medieval monasticism and northern indigenous ontologies to show how we might heal the rupture between the real world and our imagination of it, which underpins the official procedures of modern science. Though science is not averse to dreams of the imagination as potential sources of novel insight, they are banished from the reality it seeks to uncover. Ever since Bacon and Galileo, nature has been thought of as a book that will not willingly give up its secrets to human readers. The idea of the book of nature, however, dates from medieval times. For medieval readers as for indigenous hunters, creatures would speak and offer counsel. But in the transition to modernity the book was silenced. This article suggests that by acknowledging our imaginative participation in a more-than-human world, and the commitments this entails, we can reconcile scientific inquiry with religious sensibility as ways of knowing in being.