Aloha,
I'm still thinking about *poppy* wicca, but the matter that I've
been circling seems equally relevant here.
Academics and scholars both use resource materials and produce them.
There's a certain etiquette and protocol about what resources are
useful; how their authenticity may be confirmed; what inferences
or conclusions may be drawn from them; and how the chain of
primary, secondary, and more distant resources bundle together
in academic/intellectual (sub) cultural contexts.
Non-academics, however, also use some of the same resource marterial
but sometimes produce a different sort of resource material. Academic
and intellectual resources may turn up in (sub)cultural contexts way
outside their *native* ones. Non-academics may violate the academic
protocols for the use of resources, but end up putting those resources
to creative use in non-academic contexts.
What I've been turning over is this: What should academics appropriately
expect vis a vis resources when non-academics put those resources to
uses that serve in non-academic contexts?
In regard to folklore resources, let's say that two non-academic groups
end up creating two different reconstructions of a magical endeavor.
The groups both rely on the same academic resource material, yet
their reconstructions are markedly different.
A non-academic book offering 100 spells for love and money made
easy is not the same a a book offering 100 similar spells translated from
Classical Greek. What should academics expect if the author of the
former taps the latter?
Musing Do I Have To Chant A Spell In Welsh To Use The Mabinogion
For Neo-Pagan Magic? Rose,
Pitch
Hawawa ka he’e nalu haki ka papa.
*When the surfrider is unskilled, the board is broken.*
--Mary Kawena Pukui, translating a Hawaiian proverb
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