Hi everyone,

I'm posting my personal reply to Pitch to the list, as I hope it will help defuse / re-focus some of the conversation on this topic.

BB,
Sabina

Hi Pitch, 

I'm not sure I agree with you completely about the "lowbrow" nature of Wicca and Neo-Paganism.  I'm very uncomfortable with terms such as "highbrow," "middlebrow" and "lowbrow" to begin with, largely because they are not value-neutral, and the determination of what belongs to which category is based more on judgement than on observable characteristics.   

I would feel more comfortable writing about "elite/ academic," "popular" and "folk" levels of culture, with the following stipulations: "elite/academic" culture is characterized by formal transmission in an academic setting, or one limited to paying students or self-selected audiences, with a fair degree of separation between the purveyors of the material and the audience.  Purveyors need formal training and certification to pass the stuff along.  "Popular" culture is promulgated by the mass media, and is also characterized by distance between producers and consumers of the product, though the authority to disseminate is based less on formal certification than on access to means of production.  "Folk" culture, on the other hand, is characterized by informal transmission in face-to-face groups, a lack of distance between producers/ promulgators and consumers/ audience, and a constant feedback loop between the two.  In folk levels of culture, everyone is a creator/ performer a!
nd!
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 at the same time a consumer/ audience member.  Each member of a society can participate in any or all of these levels of culture; and the categories themselves are not exclusive, but feed into one another constantly. 

Looking through this more nuanced lens, it appears to me that Neopaganism and Wicca partake of all three of these levels.  The materials for much of the construction of contemporary Paganisms derive from academic and elite levels: literature, folklore studies, historical studies, anthropology, etc.  At the same time, the crucible for the development of rituals, praxes and worship has traditionally been the coven, grove or small group of practitioners: a perfect example of a folk group.  At some levels, Neopagan/ Witchen society functions much like a traditional folk group, with dense, multi-layered, overlapping networks.  Because we live in a market-driven, capitalist society, these movements are now also promulgated by the mass media, albeit in a very different context than the folk group. 

Some of our discomfort with pop-Wicca comes, I believe, from the de-contextualization of practices that we have experienced in the small group, but which now are marketed at a mass level for individual consumers to buy and imitate at will.  Along with this comes a distortion of certain aspects of the religions as they are adapted for a mass audience. 

Think of it as the same process that happens to music when it moves from a small, face-to-face club or coffee-house venue to a mass-marketed, giant rock concert one.  We're having the same arguments as music fans who complain that their favorite small-time band sold out and got ruined once they went big-time, and that a particular category of music [fill in with your fave] is no longer any good now that it's gotten popular. 

Does this help shed any light on our discussion? 

BB & xo 
Sabina 
Sabina Magliocco
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
California State University
18111 Nordhoff St.
Northridge, CA  91330-8244