The alchemy of life: Magic, anthropology and human nature in a Pagan theology

Abstract

Reclaiming is a contemporary Pagan tradition rooted in the understanding that sacrality infuses the cosmos. Reclaiming teachers critique the ‘mechanistic’ basis of modern science and its rejection of magical thought, implicating this worldview in oppression, environmental devastation and colonialism. Their concerns resonate with an emerging critique among historians, who argue that the Enlightenment's rejection of Europe's ‘superstitious’ past was tied to the colonial project of refuting the religious and magical beliefs of non‐Europeans. Engaging with Reclaiming theology exposes the still‐uncomfortable relationship of anthropology to ‘non‐rational’ forms of knowledge. In embracing systems of thought profoundly repudiated since the Enlightenment and reimagining what it is to be human, Reclaiming understandings potentially disturb anthropology at its roots, including its very delimitation as a ‘science of humanity’.

Anthropological theologies: Engagements and encounters

“…Anthropology, as Malcolm Haddon () and John Morton () demonstrate, when conceived as an unconscious form of religious performance, marks a transformative instance where the secular‐rationalist boundaries between theology and anthropology coalesce and become indistinguishable. Throwing anthropological epistemologies into relief against pagan, Islamic and Christian theologies, Rachel Morgain (), Gerhard Hoffstaedter () and Philip Fountain () illuminate productive fissures and interrogate the borders separating the secular and the religious. They do so by examining the positioning of the anthropologist, through attentiveness to ethnographic detail and by identifying instances of transgression between faith and life.…”

Anthropological proselytism: Reflexive questions for a Hare Krishna ethnography

“…politics without the state) as elitist intellectual ‘prescriptions’ for radical social change—but rather as ‘contributions’, ‘possibilities’, or ‘gifts’ (Graeber : 12). This enticing idea of ethnography proffered as a ‘gift’ has certain religious overtones of its own (see, e.g., Morton ; on ‘grace’ as a ‘gift from God’ and on anthropology's ‘lack of grace in the presence of divine revelation’). In fact, I suggest it opens up other possibilities for thinking about the hidden influence of Christianity on anthropology.…”

“… By extension, we might explore how ethnographic context is carried across into our teaching, as in the situation described by Morton () when one of his Aboriginal students claimed that as ‘I had worked with Aboriginal people; I had visited sacred sites; I must have picked up some spirit of the ancestors; this spirit had manifested itself’ in the midst of one of Morton's undergraduate lectures. …”

Sacred materialism: Things and relations in a US Pagan community

“… See Morgain () for a discussion of Kubrin's views on this scientific revolution and its connection to political and social upheavals. …”