Description
Book Synopsis Pagan and Native Faith movements have sprung up across Europe in recent decades, yet little has been published about them compared with their British and American counterparts. Though all such movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitioners’ beliefs, practices, goals, and agendas are diverse. Often side by side are groups trying to reconstruct ancient religions motivated by ethnonationalism—especially in post-Soviet societies—and others attracted by imported traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Goddess Spirituality, and Core Shamanism. Drawing on ethnographic cases, contributors explore the interplay of neo-nationalistic and neo-colonialist impulses in contemporary Paganism, showing how these impulses play out, intersect, collide, and transform.
Trade Review “…provides a wealth of case studies and fresh perspectives on the spread of these contemporary spiritualities across the continent… an important and much–anticipated volume that helps us understand how contemporary Paganisms and Native Faith movements develop and spread across the globe in postmodernity. It will hopefully be followed by additional anthologies that will explore these new forms of religiosity from changing perspectives.” • Reading Religion
“Most importantly, perhaps, this volume contributes to the critical effort of sociologically contextualizing Western paganisms as products of glocalization– an interplay between the effects of globalization and local concerns…Students and scholars of the sociology or anthropology of religion and pagan studies will no doubt find this book a useful tool, as it is one of the first complete volumes to explore paganisms in Europe and the complexities and influences of global and local politics, culture, and social change on these emerging movements.” • Anthropos
“The reviewed book presents an outstanding effort in researching contemporary Paganism and Native Faith movements in Europe nowadays.” • Pantheon Journal
“All in all, this book is of undoubted value to scholars of contemporary Pagan studies, helping to reveal a wide array of previously unknown case studies. Other scholars of religious studies with a particular interest in nationality and national identity may also find much to intrigue them here.” • Nova Religio
“…the volume does a fine job of employing descriptive and ethnographic material to highlight the complex interworkings of the analytically-distinguishable but practically-interacting traditionalism and eclecticism.” • Anthropology Review Database
“Rountree’s welcome and timely edited volume addresses topical, cutting-edge issues with regard to contemporary European Pagan and Native Faith movements. Focusing on the theoretical richness born out of the tensions found between ‘the local’ and ‘the global,’ past and present, the volume provides a refreshing approach to understanding these movements.” • Amy Whitehead, University of Wales Trinity Saint David
Table of Contents List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Context is Everything: Plurality and Paradox in Contemporary European Paganisms
Kathryn Rountree
Chapter 1. Sami Neo-shamanism in Norway: Colonial Grounds, Ethnic Revival and Pagan Pathways
Siv Ellen Kraft
Chapter 2. It’s Not Easy Being Apolitical: Reconstruction and Eclecticism in Danish Asatro
Matthew H. Amster
Chapter 3. Modern Heathenism in Sweden: A Case Study in the Creation of a Traditional Religion
Fredrik Gregorius
Chapter 4. The Brotherhood of Wolves, Czech Republic: From Ásatrú to Primitivism
Kamila Velkoborská
Chapter 5. Soviet-era Discourse and Siberian Shamanic Revivalism: How Area Spirits Speak through Academia
Eleanor Peers
Chapter 6. In Search of Genuine Religion: The Contemporary Estonian MaausulisedMovement and Nationalist Discourse
Ergo-Hart Västrik
Chapter 7. Emerging Identity Marketsof Contemporary Pagan Ideologies in Hungary
Tamás Szilágyi
Chapter 8. Hot, Strange, Völkish, Cosmopolitan: Native Faith and Neopagan Witchcraft in Berlin’s Changing Urban Context
Victoria Hegner
Chapter 9. Paganism in Ireland: Syncretic Processes, Identity and a Sense of Place
Jenny Butler
Chapter 10. On the Sticks and Stones of the Greencraft Temple in Flanders: Balancing Global and Local Heritage in Wicca
Léon van Gulik
Chapter 11. Iberian Paganism: Goddess Spirituality in Spain and Portugal and the Quest for Authenticity
Anna Fedele
Chapter 12. Bellisama and Aradia: Paganism Re-emerges in Italy
Francesca Ciancimino Howell
Chapter 13. Authenticity and Invention in the Quest for a Modern Maltese Paganism
Kathryn Rountree
Notes on Contributors
Index
