SubscribeJanuary 5th, 2011
belief and scholarship
I have finished reading Her Hidden Children: The rise of Wicca and Paganism in America by Chas S. Clifton and I have to say I am glad I read the book. It’s a solid piece of scholarship.
That may not seem much in the way of praise, but it is really. Not that there aren’t things about the book that I find “interesting,” there are and I will tell you about them shortly but let me digress just a bit before I do.
There is another author the I have have spoken of here, Arthur Versluis. While I find his subject area fascinating, what I could never get past is the fact that his books read like apologetics while taking the shape of a scholarly examination. These are not the same thing at all. I don’t care at all what the beliefs of the scholar are about his subject area. I do care if he or she is able to think past them for the purposes of a clear examination of what is in fact the case. Versluis doesn’t seem to be able to do that very well and Clifton can.
Still (and here is where I find “interesting things” in the text), Clifton’s personality and personal beliefs do pop up occasionally throughout the book and, I should say, I was delighted by the appearance of those because otherwise the book, while good research, is written with a rather dry style. But I think there is a reason for that. Whether conscious or unconscious, I suspect Clifton is compensating for the somewhat precarious position pagan studies has in the academic world, and the even more delicate position out-pagans have in most academic departments. It’s like the first woman doctor – I bet she had to really work hard to prove she was as good as her male colleagues. It’s not rational, but change stirs up some deep wells of irrationality and taking pagans and paganism seriously is asking for a pretty big change for most academics. It’s this, I think, that explains Clifton’s writing style.
So here’s one of the twinkly bits. In chapter five (West Coast Wicca) there is this:
Two other legacies of the feminist Witchcraft of the 1970s are the concept of consensus-based decision making and, as noted above, a free-form approach to history and mythology that valued “empowerment” over documentation. The consensus decision-making process, already familiar to Quakers and to political anarchists, and modeled in some instances on tribal practices, offered a challenge to hierarchical coven structure and lineages. (On the other hand, people who have studied with famous feminist Witches such as Starhawk and Budapest usually manage to work that fact into their conversation.) Occasional critics of the consensus process will note that strong individuals seem to get their way even through consensus-based decision making, but the model of more egalitarian, fluid leadership is now firmly in place in many Wiccan circles. (emphasis mine)
A moment please: snort, giggle…OK
There’s Clifton the community member and participant. It speaks to his experience as a believer and adds an evaluative touch to the work really only possible for those who are both insiders and academics. And while such a tone transgresses the cautious scholarly (dry) tone he has so carefully established, it does no harm at all the the value of the study. This, I think, is because while his personality shows through (his insider status appears at these moments) what never happens — his belief never overshadows his scholarship. This is what Versluis does (over and over), why I think of his work as apologetics, and what irks me when reading his books, since I see the facts of the subject area as important.
Another brief digression: one of my favourite books is Awash in a Sea of Faith by Jon Butler. The chapter in there on the occult in American religion is both important and very well done. Partly this is the scholarship (very good), but partly this is the fact that Butler is there as a person while never straying from his choice to place facts in precedence to whatever his personal beliefs may be. His writing style allows for the natural assimilation of personality and a dedication to a factually-based reality.
This balance of a personality-based style and scholarship is what Clifton misses, but I suspect this has nothing to do with his capacities as a writer and everything to do with the position pagan studies holds in the larger academic world—and Clifton’s ideas about how to compensate for that tenuousness. And you know this isn’t a problem, because as I said, I am glad I read the book. I have a couple of new things to think about and a couple of resources that were brought to my attention that I now want to check out. But it is interesting, this example of how belief and scholarship resonate in the larger culture and how one can work past the obstacle that an unfortunate conjunction of those forces can become.
It reminds me of some advice a professor gave me once. He said a PhD isn’t the place for outrageous things. It’s the time to prove yourself. Once you’ve done that then be as out-there as you want. Good, solid advice given the nature of the academic world. And I suppose pagan studies (especially by pagans) is there still, still proving itself.
December 18th, 2010
cultural appropriation/what it is and isn’t
Over at Letter from Hardscrabble Creek there is a comment relating to Clifton’s sense of hilarity about “earnest” Pagans that lecture “about ‘cultural appropriation’.” Clifton’s right of course. No Pagan got to be one without appropriating the hell out of history. But it’s really the comment (@Karen A. Scofield) that I want to address. In in she says “not all cultural appropriation is bad. Some is, like doing sweat lodges without enough knowledge and background.”
To talk about this I need to tell you just a little about my “lineage.” A big part of my family are from the Salishan language group. Then there’s some Kootenai, some Blackfoot, some Shoshone, some Yakima and others too. Racially/ethnically I’m mostly Briton, with Jew, Gypsy, Saxon and probably some Welsh (if what I know of the family history is correct.) I’m not an Indian, I’m what, in Rez speak, would be called a “breed.” Then so are we all.
We humans are a travelling species and have been since we were properly not even human but Homo erectus. And I bet those “cousins” weren’t so different from us. When human women travel we tend to collect bodily secretions from some of those we meet along the way and when human men travel they tend to leave a decent sized sample of theirs for the edification of the locals. Some of those travel exchanges ended up as kiddies, and so our “breedness” is continued.
So that’s that. We travel, we exchange goods, ideas and bits of our selves and have been doing that from before we were human at all. And really, that kind of takes some of the “oh, so awful” out of the charge of cultural appropriation. And in Indian Country: I mean if you go to a big Powwow today you are going to see some Ojibwa dancing in a plains style outfit, to a drum that might be from one of the southwest tribes, and likely carrying some beadwork style that originated with the Cree (and they were mixed Indian and French.) So there is no “pure” anywhere. “Pure” is a narrative, an idea that has a BIG ideological baggage train behind it. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the facts of human history.
However, there is something to be said about what Karen had to say about the sweat. The man that is the head of my family tells us that the sweat is to be used. He invites anyone who wants to listen to the spirits, who wants to heal themselves, to come and sweat. According to him there is no “wrong” way, except if you are “told” by the spirits what to do and you ignore that. There are no “rules” exactly—except for basic respect. That whole thing about the “right” way is largely from a specific set of cultures that are big on hierarchy anyway. And it is a political device that was born out of the need to survive white contact, but that’s another whole post and one I’m unlikely to write.
What’s true is that if you claim to be running an “authentic Sioux sweat”, I don’t care if you’re Sioux or not, you probably got it mixed up and I doubt your Aunty would approve. The sweat is a methodology, a known way of getting the body, the mind, the spirit, ready to listen to the songs, to the spirits, the animals, the other powers. It’s a technology for getting humans in the “place” where they can listen to what is already shouting in their ear. It’s like Zen. The “right” way to practice zazen is to sit still and listen. You don’t need a fancy anything, the seat cushion doesn’t have to be the right colour or the right size. Just so, the right way to do a sweat is to go in with respect for the wood, the rocks, the willow, the water, the fire, the blankets, your skin (I not glad to be around people who try to burn you out of a sweat as a kind of one-up-manship), the songs and each other. Go in with respect, sing, get hot and listen. Then come out and get clean. And don’t brag around about how holy you are, not even to yourself. That’s it.
What you don’t want to do is think that this makes you an Indian. It doesn’t. I don’t care how many lessons some Indian charged you for, or how many real Indian names you got in some weekend ceremony, none of that makes you Indian. It may be important, the names you got. Those times may have taught you wonderful things, but all that means is that you are what you are with some additional knowledge, and hopefully, wisdom. The presumption of so simple an identity change, the most egregious kind of identity theft, that’s really the only kind of “appropriation” you want to avoid. Mostly that’s because it is dangerous to you, because it is an illusion, but also, it is essentially and deeply disrespectful of the long-term alliance between the Earth of their homeland and the People who have listened to It for countless generations. And I would have thought being a Pagan is really about that respect, that alliance. Learn from it, sure. But don’t mock it by claiming it for your own. Build your own alliance. That way it’ll be real and true.
October 31st, 2009
The tendency to worship lone wolves
There is a rather good article on Ayn Rand called Mrs. Logic at NYmag.com. The author, Sam Anderson, is an admitted ex-devotee but he keeps a careful path in the article between the good and the bad. It’s hard to do with people like Ayn Rand.
What strikes me about human lone wolves – people like Ayn Rand and Christopher McCandless – is not so much them, but their followers. I mean there will always be those who are mad hatters. The world is very hard on some of us, and sometimes we simply cannot cope with what happens. Rand’s terrible childhood, McCandless’ schizophrenia, these are things that made them what they were, and because of what they were – the madness, the intelligence and the ferocious desire – they became our mad hatters.
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October 21st, 2009
Crescent moon and culture crossing
Coming home from class there was a seriously beautiful crescent moon setting in the south west. Its upper tip looked like it was embedded in cloud and so it appeared to hang there, a pendulous yellow sliver hung from a cloud.
The air felt wet but the rain clouds had broken up during the 4 hours of class. The roads and fields were still sodden and it was warm so earth smells carried high and clear. Running home was like swimming through a light scented sea. Odd way to put it, but true to the experience.
I really like the class. Partly this is because the material is of deep personal interest, but partly it is because the way in which analytical philosophers disarticulate the body of any theory is so alien to me, it feels as if I am an anthropologist in an alien world – and I love that. It is really hard and takes a lot of work to learn to see in this new way, to predict how the next step of the argument for or against any position will go, or to, more generally, see the body of an argument as an articulated thing that can be dis-membered and re-membered.
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October 20th, 2009
The origin of morality
There is an article in Chronicle of Higher Education called “Moral in Tooth and Claw.” It cites people like Frans de Waal, Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson and essentially says that, despite some arguments to the contrary, “recent research in cognitive neuroscience and moral psychology suggests that human morality may be much more “animalistic” than Western philosophy has generally assumed.”
It seems to me obvious that human moral behaviour must have evolved from behavioural forms already existent in the species’ lineage. Otherwise, how did it get there? No one (of any real knowledge) seriously questions the fact that the vestigal limbs of any number of creatures are there because there was once a set of ancestors to whom those limbs were not vestigal but very useful. No one (same caveat) questions the fact that development of things like eyes are based on, and evolve from, earlier visual-center forms. That makes perfect sense.
It seems that there are only two reasons to question the development of morality from earlier forms. The first is because many of us still seem to have a stake in seeing human beings as fundamentally separate from non-human animals, and the second is because it is the mind.
The species chauvinism I think we will get over, as we have learned to get over thinking of other groups of people as something other than human. The ability to see the mind as something of the earth, of matter, that may take longer.
Still, my question stands. If not of our evolutionary history, then where does it come from?
October 17th, 2009
Animal sensiblity, video addendum
How compassionate are humans compared to other animals?
This is what I mean about needing to be careful when assessing others by virtue of the content of our feeling complexes (see post just before this). Clearly, both humans and macaques have compassion but the content of that feeling complex is also clearly different when comparing the human and macaque versions. Of course, what is also true, is that the causal relations differ between our species when comparing the various complexes (say between the complex known as compassion, and the one known as respect [for authority]) and their place in the overall set of complexes.
This video is also rather strong support for the contention that we need to continually assess our intuitions about our own states and those of others using empirical evidence. If we don’t do this, then all we really do is assess what we believe to be true by virtue of what we believe to be true. And of course, doing this isn’t going to get us anywhere sane.
October 17th, 2009
Animal sensibility
Originally seen on Pharylngula, but also part of National Geographic’s Visions of Earth 2009, here is Dorothy’s body, and her troop’s witness of her passing.
Although I still have trouble understanding why, it still seems contentious to interpret the stance of this gathering of chimpanzees as some set of feelings related to grief. I suppose it must be the implications of those apparently expressed beliefs that is so disturbing. If they have grief, for example, that means they know something about what death means, which, in its turn, means the gathered chimps have a capacity to understand and express consequences to not just self but the group, which is an ability to abstract, which leads to the idea that they have what we usually think of as morality.
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October 14th, 2009
Ardipithecus
I’ve been watching the Discovery episode that aired last Sunday on the 4.4 million year old fossil skeleton of “Ardi” (Ardipithecus ramidus). I’ve also started reading the articles that Science Magazine has made available online.
At this point all I have to say is “Wow!”
Well, not quite all…I remember when (see how old I sound!) there was fervid conversation about whether in the hominid line we were bipedal or large-brained first. Such vehemence there was. Then Lucy came along and decided that argument once and for all. Now there’s another female ancestor who is blowing apart questions we didn’t even know we had. This thing about knuckle-walking as an evolutionary change that came after the split of the evolutionary line that produced both the chimpanzee and humans — it raises the possibility of the question about whether uprightness was present prior to that lineage division. Maybe not a strong possibility — in fact probably absurd since it would involve the chimp/human ancestor having made the “decision” to become bipedal, and then the chimp “un-deciding” — but there nonetheless. Such notions, if nothing else, are fun to think about.
And the question of the grasping toe. Goodness. Such delights to ponder.
September 7th, 2009
Geertz, “an eye at once cold and concerned”
I’m reading Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics by Clifford Geertz. I have read only the first two chapters. I am moved by it.
It’s been a long time since I last read Geertz, and when I did, I loved his facility with both words and thought. The man can write, but more importantly, he can think while doing it.
Here he is from chapter two:
“…to judge without understanding constitutes an offense against morality.”
“To engage in that style of thinking called social scientific is to attempt to transcend the logical gap that separates them by a pattern of conduct, which, enfolding them into a unitary experience, rationally connects them.”
“In the field, the anthropologist has to learn to live and think at the same time.”
“As I have suggested, this learning process can advance only so far, even under the best of conditions, which anyhow never obtain. The anthropologist inevitably remains more alien than he desires and less cerebral than he imagines. But it does enforce, day in and day out, the effort to advance it, to combine two fundamental orientations toward reality—the engaged and the analytic—into a single attitude. It is this attitude, not moral blankness, which we call detachment or disinterestedness. And whatever small degree of it one manages to attain comes not by adopting an I-am-camera ideology or by enfolding oneself in layers of methodological armor, but simply by trying to do, in such an equivocal situation, the scientific work one has come to do. And as the ability to look at persons and events (and at oneself) with an eye at once cold and concerned is one of the surest signs of maturity in either an individual or a people, this sort of research experience has rather deeper, and rather different, moral implications for our culture than those usually proposed.”
“The professional ethic rests on the personal and draws its strength from it; we force ourselves to see out of a conviction that blindness—or illusion—cripples virtue as it cripples people.”
September 4th, 2009
Talk to plants and proud of it; some of them even answer back
I am in a hotel room. It’s civil twilight, just before dawn. The day of the wedding, the air is cool coming in the open windows, the sky as it lightens looks clear. This morning at 10 we will drive up to the reservation to start the visiting process.
When I crossed the Columbia yesterday and pulled off the road at the horse monument (yesterday’s posted photo) I could smell the sage brush. It’s a smell I find incredibly welcoming; I felt welcomed, like by a relative. It’s exactly the same feeling I get when I run across a friend I haven’t seen in ages, that quick glad burst of happiness, the sense of familiarity, belonging, family.
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