Aloha,
Since the book came up on-list by title, here's the short version of my
review of _Witching Culture_ (for the *Reclaiming Quarterly* web site).
http://www.reclaimingquarterly.org/
Witching Culture
Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America
Sabina Magliocco
University of Pennsylvania Press
280 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth 2004 | ISBN 0-8122-3803-6 | $55.00s | £36.00
Paper 2004 | ISBN 0-8122-1879-5 | $19.95s | £13.00
Witching Culture is one of the best ethnographies that I've read in a long
time.
Magliocco manages to accentuate the participation in her
participant-observations,
but sustain a vibrant and keen postmodern theoretical analysis at the same
time. She takes the reader *there* to a living experience of an alternative
culture.
She addresses a broad range of topics shaping and challenging Neo-Paganism,
especially Craft in the San Francisco Bay Area, from how magic is
envisioned as a
working relationship with world and deities to ritual art and artistry to
Neo-Pagan
shopping habits to identity construction and cultural borrowing, and more.
Like the
Neo-Pagan bricoleurs she discusses, she takes advantage of theories and
insights
borrowed from a number of disciplines and discourses, putting the mix to
good,
understanding use.
Magliocco considers Neo-Pagan culture to be oppositional to dominant
culture,
postmodern in its world view at a time when the dominant modern culture
offers little beyond materiality, consumerism, alienation, oppression, and
spiritual--
if not economic--impoverishment. She traces some roots of this
oppositionality to
sources in the Romantic and European nationalist movements. And provides a
good account of Neo-Paganism's cultural creativity in shaping magical
ritual, even
political action, from these sources, among others.
Musing Good Books Are Alive & Published! Rose,
Pitch
I nanea no ka holo o ka wa`a i ke akamai o ke ku hoe.
One can enjoy a canoe ride when the paddler is skilled.
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