The alchemy of life: magic, anthropology and human nature in a pagan theology

Reclaiming is a contemporary Pagan tradition rooted in the understanding that sacrality infuses the cosmos. Reclaiming teachers critique the 'mechanistic' basis of modern science and its rejection of magical thought, implicating this worldview in oppress

Beyond 'Individualism' : personhood and transformation in the reclaiming pagan community of San Francisco

Many social scientists have sought to understand the dynamics of personhood in Western modernity, asking in particular whether it can be said that personhood in 'the West' is more individualistic than is typical elsewhere. Following Marcel Mauss, a number of anthropologists have suggested that the dominance of commodity exchange in modern Western societies lays a basis for individualised social relations over and above the relational patterns of gift exchange prevalent in many smaller-scale societies. Theorists from Weber to Foucault have likewise suggested that rationalised institutions in Western modernity condition an individualisation of subjectivity. Members of the San Francisco Reclaiming Pagan tradition seek to challenge the individualism, atomisation and rationalisation of social life they associate with wider US society, through ritual magic, activism and community-building. At times, they are able to create numinous worlds of beauty and interconnection against what Weber calls the "disenchantment of the world" (Weber [1919]1991 :155), helping to forge, in part, a more relational basis to their sociality. In doing so, they foreground many sites of relationality that exist in US society under a veneer of individualism, from gift exchange among kin networks to corporeal dissolution in crowds. Yet, their theories and cosmologies also valorise a particular type of artistic, expressive individualism, while their practices absorb and mirror some of the individualising and rationalising tendencies of wider systems and discourses they seek to resist. As a result, patterns of personhood and sociality in Reclaiming illustrate some of the complexities obtaining in US sociality more broadly. Examining these complexities highlights the individualising effects modern Euro-American institutions can have on subjectivity, while calling into question any overly-simplistic link between Western societies and 'individualism'. As such, this study can contribute to the project other anthropologists of personhood have begun: of problematising the dichotomy of 'Western-individualism' and 'non-Western-sociocentrism' which has at times underpinned anthropological studies of personhood

Prayer as Inner Sense Cultivation: An Attentional Learning Theory of Spiritual Experience

How does prayer change the person who prays? In this article, we report on a randomized controlled trial developed to test an ethnographic hypothesis. Our results suggest that prayer which uses the imagination-the kind of prayer practiced in many U.S. evangelical congregations-cultivates the inner senses, and that this cultivation has consequences. Mental imagery grows sharper. Inner experience seems more significant to the person praying. Feelings and sensations grow more intense. The person praying reports more unusual sensory experience and more unusual and more intense spiritual experience. In this work we explain in part why inner sense cultivation is found in so many spiritual traditions, and we illustrate the way spiritual practice affects spiritual experience. We contribute to the anthropology of religion by presenting an attentional learning theory of prayer

The Gendered Culture of Scientific Competence: A Study of Scientist Characters in Doctor Who 1963-2013

The present study examines the relationship between gender and scientific competence in fictional representations of scientists in the British science fiction television program Doctor Who. Previous studies of fictional scientists have argued that women are often depicted as less scientifically capable than men, but these have largely taken a simple demographic approach or focused exclusively on female scientist characters. By examining both male and female scientists (n = 222) depicted over the first 50 years of Doctor Who, our study shows that, although male scientists significantly outnumbered female scientists in all but the most recent decade, both genders have consistently been depicted as equally competent in scientific matters. However, an in-depth analysis of several characters depicted as extremely scientifically non-credible found that their behavior, appearance, and relations were universally marked by more subtle violations of gender expectations. Incompetent male scientists were largely depicted as effeminate and lacking in masculinity. In addition, many incompetent male and all incompetent female scientists served regimes that were problematically effeminate, collectivist and pacifist, or male-rejecting and ruled by women. Although Doctor Who avoids overtly treating women and men unequally, strong codes of masculine capability and prowess nevertheless continue to influence representations of scientific competence, pointing to the continued pervasiveness of such associations within wider Western culture. Professionals working to encourage gender-inclusive practices in science should look to subtle discourses about the masculine culture of science in addition to institutional and structural impediments to participation for women and gender minorities

Living Water: Christian Theologies and Interethnic Relations in Fiji

In multiethnic Fiji, where ethnic relations are often seen as fraught and potentially charged with conflict, and where religion closely follows lines of ethnicity, attempts by Christian churches to mediate interethnic relations and build multiethnic congregations can face difficult challenges. In this article, two contrasting Christian theologies are explored, both of which draw on theologies of water as a means of mediating interethnic engagements. In these examples, processes of forging interethnic relationships are seen as variously harmonious and dissonant, unifying and separating. Drawing connections between the layered imagery of water employed in these Christian contexts and wider Pacific imaginaries of water in baptism and in the ocean, I explore these shifting processes of forging interethnic relationships in the contested context of contemporary Fiji

On the use of the uncanny in ritual

In 'The Future of an Illusion', Freud suggested that religion allows a person to 'feel at home in the uncanny' - that unsettling interplay of suppression and memory that arises from living subject to fears and anxieties in an unpredictable world. Here, the author examines a ritual called the 'Wild Hunt' that occurred during her ethnographic research among contemporary Pagans to explore how uncanny encounters within religious rituals can help participants come to terms with fears and anxieties, transforming inchoate emotions stemming from trauma or dislocation. Following Otto, the author suggests that such a sense of the uncanny can be central to the power of religious ritual. These uncanny elements within religious ritual provide an illustration of how religious experiences can help participants to feel 'at home in the uncanny', thereby bringing together the seemingly disparate accounts of Otto and Freud on the relationship between religion and uncanny experience

Mapping the boundaries of race in The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood

Originally screening in 1970, serials featuring the people called �Silurians� have taken up issues of xenophobia and militarism among present-day and future humans. As a species awakened under Earth�s surface, the trajectory of human-Silurian encounters in these stories raises moral, social and political questions regarding the nature of contemporary (British) society and its readiness (or unreadiness) to relate with, make peace with, and share land with �outsiders�. This chapter examines how these issues are taken up in the 2010 serial The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood. Looking beyond the overt narrative, it interrogates how scientific and social-scientific knowledge subtly frames the terms of this encounter, structuring events in ways that perpetuate long-standing racial inequalities in our lived world, and largely occlude the more radical possibilities inherent in this situation. Nonetheless, this radical potential lies underground in this serial, challenging us to reconsider how our Earth is shared today

Sacred materialism: Things and relations in a US Pagan community

Ever since Marcel Mauss wrote The Gift, the notion that things exchanged as gifts take a personalised social form, and that they partake of and mediate relational sociality, has held an important place in anthropology. Examining material practices among contemporary Pagans in the Reclaiming tradition, this article shows how they seek to imbue things with personhood, exploring the sacredness of things as alive, active and participating in social relations. In doing so, these Pagans work to forge an alternative economy founded on gift exchange and generous labour, which they hope might form a basis for a different kind of sociality from the capitalist system dominant in the United States. In practice, the encounter between gift and commodity forms in this community is a source of both conflict and emergent forms of sociality, as these alternative economic practices are fashioned around the margins of mainstream economic life

Sexual liberation: fighting lesbian and gay oppression

The oppression of homosexuals and the struggle against it in Australi

Mana for a New Age

From chakra healing to African drumming, sweat lodges to shamanic journeys, New Age movements, particularly in North America, are notorious for their pattern of appropriating concepts and practices from other spiritual traditions. While continental Native American and Asian influences are perhaps most familiar as sourcing grounds for New Age material, the traditions of Pacific Islanders, particularly Hawaiians, have not escaped New Age attention. In particular, the movement known as ‘Huna’ has introduced Hawaiian-sounding words and concepts to the New Age vocabulary. Chief among these is the concept of ‘mana’, controversially subsumed within what is often a large laundry list of non-western religious and philosophical nomenclature, under the generic category of ‘energy’ or ‘life force’. Continually adapted through succeeding generations of Huna teachings, and further adopted into sections of the related contemporary Pagan movement through the tradition known as ‘Feri’, the concept of ‘mana’ displays some consistent themes across these traditions, quite different from its meaning in Hawaiian contexts. In being adopted into these movements, it has been transformed to fit within a field of ideas that have developed in western esoteric traditions from at least the late eighteenth century