Dear colleagues:
Thomas McKean of the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen and I are seeking submissions for a panel we are proposing for the American Folklore Society meetings entitled "SPIRIT OF ALBION:" LAY AND EXPERT KNOWLEDGE AND THE RECLAMATION OF BRITAIN'S PAGAN HERITAGE. Below is a short abstract.
Throughout Britain, public entities such as English Heritage, voluntary associations and individuals are engaged in reclaiming an imagined pagan past. Reclamation, part of the process of tradition, involves re-imagining and re-appropriating previously disclaimed, discarded and sometimes forgotten practices and ideas, often with the goal of establishing identity. While some form of re-imagining history is a constant feature of identity creation, the pagan leitmotif is enjoying widespread diffusion in the early twenty-first century, as authenticity and localization are projected into distant historical eras. The indeterminacy of the pagan past lends itself well to elective re-creation. In Britain, pagan reclamation has been adopted by a variety of groups, among them modern pagan religions, which revitalize and experiment with elements of pre-Christian practice in an effort to reconnect with the natural world, community and the sacred. This movement embraces some aspects of expert knowledge production - for example, archeological evidence concerning ancient cultures and their customs - and resists others, for instance by demanding the reburial of prehistoric human remains currently held in museums and archeological curation facilities. In the process, widely differing entities that seek to create identity through blood, culture and place may come into conflict over the interpretation of knowledge.
This panel seeks to explore how British pagan heritages are currently being created and reclaimed; to understand the similarities and differences between various forms of pagan reclamation; to comprehend how Britain and the past is imagined in these reconstructions; to address the role of expert knowledge in the construction of these imagined pasts; and to link these processes both to larger economic, political and cultural movements such as globalization/localization, and to smaller individual and community initiatives.
We're also willing to consider papers on a broader theme of European pagan reclamations. If we get enough papers, we could conceivably do a double panel, one section with a British focus and the other with a more European one. If you are interested, please send a short abstract or an inquiry to me ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) or Thomas McKean ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) no later than March 22, 2010.
The conference will be in Nashville, Tennessee (USA) from 13-16 October, 2010. For more information, please visit the AFS meeting website at http://www.afsnet.org/annualmeet/index.cfm.
Thank you,
Sabina Magliocco
Professor and Chair
Department of Anthropology
California State University - Northridge
18111 Nordhoff St.
Northridge, CA 91330-8244
"If we want things to stay the way they are, everything will have to change." ~ Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard
