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.

The resurgence of religiosity in post-communist Europe has been widely noted, but the full spectrum of religious practice in the diverse countries of Central and Eastern Europe has been effectively hidden behind the region's range of languages and cultures. This volume presents an overview of one of the most notable developments in the region, the rise of Pagan and "Native Faith" movements. Modern Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Central and Eastern Europe brings together scholars from across the region to present both systematic country overviews - of Armenia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, and Ukraine - as well as essays exploring specific themes such as racism and the internet. The volume will be of interest to scholars of new religious movements especially those looking for a more comprehensive picture of contemporary paganism beyond the English-speaking world.

The resurgence of religiosity in post-communist Europe has been widely noted, but the full spectrum of religious practice in the diverse countries of Central and Eastern Europe has been effectively hidden behind the region's range of languages and cultures. This volume presents an overview of one of the most notable developments in the region, the rise of Pagan and "Native Faith" movements. Modern Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Central and Eastern Europe brings together scholars from across the region to present both systematic country overviews - of Armenia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, and Ukraine - as well as essays exploring specific themes such as racism and the internet. The volume will be of interest to scholars of new religious movements especially those looking for a more comprehensive picture of contemporary paganism beyond the English-speaking world.

This volume brings together experts in ethnology, anthropology, folklore, sociology and history of art, in order to discuss the varieties or religious expression through ritual performance, empirical ethnographic analysis and sensory modes of perception. The primary goal of the book is to re-centralize the importance of expressing religion through performance, art and the senses, and to approach performative action as religion in a variety of sociocultural, historical, political and spiritual contexts. The authors in this volume examine, in distinct yet convergent ways, how religion is creatively expressed, ritually performed and sensorially experienced at present and/or in the past. The significance of this book lies exactly on the richness and diversity of expressions of religion that are presented here, and on the multi-disciplinary dialogue that is generated among diverse theoretical, analytical and methodological approaches.

This anthology of essays, Northern Myths, Modern Identities, explores the various ways in which ancient mythologies have been cultivated in the cultural construction of ethnic, national and supra-national identities from 1800 to the present. How were Old Norse, Finno-Ugric and Frisian myths employed as rhetorical devices in national narratives? And how did (and do) these new interpretations convey a sense of ‘northernness’? This volume approaches these issues from an interdisciplinary and international perspective, and brings together case studies from Scandinavia, the Baltic region, Friesland, Britain, the United States and even Japan. Thus, it provides a unique insight into the reception history and uses of northern myths in the present, and their role in the creation of modern identities. Contributors are: Tim van Gerven, Gylfi Gunnlaugsson, Simon Halink, Sumarliði R. Ísleifsson, Otto S. Knottnerus, Joep Leerssen, Daisy Neijmann, Han Nijdam, Robert A. Saunders, Katja Schulz, Tom Shippey, Carline Tromp, and Kendra Willson.

Pre-Christian religions previously hidden from the English-speaking world are brought to light in this groundbreaking volume. The resurgence of religiosity in post-communist Europe has been widely noted, but the full spectrum of religious practice in the diverse countries of Central and Eastern Europe has been effectively hidden behind the region's range of languages and cultures. This volume presents an overview of one of the most notable developments in the region, the rise of Pagan and Native Faith movements. Modern Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Central and Eastern Europe brings together scholars from across the region to present both systematic country overviews of Armenia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, and Ukraine as well as essays exploring specific themes such as racism and the internet. The volume will be of interest to scholars of new religious movements, especially those looking for a more comprehensive picture of contemporary paganism beyond the English-speaking world.

In this timely collection, the authors examine Indigenous peoples’ negotiations with different cosmologies in a globalized world. Dussart and Poirier outline a sophisticated theory of change that accounts for the complexity of Indigenous peoples’ engagement with Christianity and other cosmologies, their own colonial experiences, as well as their ongoing relationships to place and kin. The contributors offer fine-grained ethnographic studies that highlight the complex and pragmatic ways in which Indigenous peoples enact their cosmologies and articulate their identity as forms of affirmation. This collection is a major contribution to the anthropology of religion, religious studies, and Indigenous studies worldwide. Contributors: Anne-Marie Colpron, Robert R. Crépeau, Françoise Dussart, Ingrid Hall, Laurent Jérôme, Frédéric Laugrand, C. James MacKenzie, Caroline Nepton Hotte, Ksenia Pimenova, Sylvie Poirier, Kathryn Rountree, Antonella Tassinari, Petronella Vaarzon-Morel

Is God Back? Reconsidering the New Visibility of Religion examines the shifting boundary between religion and the public sphere in Europe and the Middle East. Asking what the 'new visibility of religion' means and challenging simplistic notions of living in a 'post-secular' age, the chapters explore how religion is contested and renegotiated in the public sphere – or rather, in different publics – and the effects of these struggles on society, state and religion itself. Whereas religion arguably never went away in the USA, the re-emergence of public religion is a European phenomenon. Is God Back? provides timely case studies from Europe, as well as extending to the Middle East, where fledgling democracies are struggling to create models of governance that stem from the European secular model, but which need to be able to accommodate a much more public form of religiosity. Discussions include the new visibility of neo-Pagan and Native Faith groups in Europe, Evangelical Christians and Church teaching on sexuality in the UK, and Islamic social Movements in the Arab world. Drawing from empirical and theoretical research on religion and national identity, religion and media, church-state relationships, and religion and welfare, Is God Back? is a rich source for students and scholars interested in the changing face of public religion in the modern world, including those studying the sociology of religion, social policy, and theology.

Food, Festival and Religion explores how communities in northern Italy find a restorative sense of place through foodways, costuming and other forms of materiality. Festivals examined by the author vary geographically from the northern rural corners of Italy to the fashionable heart of urban Milan. The origins of these lived religious events range from Christian to vernacular Italian witchcraft and contemporary Paganism, which is rapidly growing in Italy. Francesca Ciancimino Howell demonstrates that during ritualized occasions the sacred is located within the mundane. She argues that communal feasting, pilgrimage, rituals and costumed events can represent forms of lived religious materiality. Building on the work of scholars including Foucault, Grimes and Ingold, Howell offers a theoretical “Scale of Engagement” which further tests the interfaces between and among the materialities of place, food, ritual and festivals and provides a widely-applicable model for analyzing grassroots events and community initiatives. Through extensive ethnographic research and fieldwork data, this book demonstrates that popular Italian festivals can be ritualized, liminal spaces, contributing greatly to the fields of religious, performance and ritual studies.

This volume investigates performance cultures as rich and dynamic environments of knowledge practice through which distinctive epistemologies are continuously (re)generated, cultivated and celebrated. Epistemologies are dynamic formations of rules, tools and procedures not only for understanding but also for doing knowledges. This volume deals in particular with epistemological challenges posed by practices and processes of interweaving performance cultures. These challenges arise in artistic and academic contexts because of hierarchies between epistemologies. European colonialism worked determinedly, violently and often with devastating effects on instituting and sustaining a hegemony of modern Euro-American rules of knowing in many parts of the world. Therefore, Interweaving Epistemologies critically interrogates the (im)possibilities of interweaving epistemologies in artistic and academic contexts today. Writing from diverse geographical locations and knowledge cultures, the book’s contributors—philosophers and political scientists as well as practitioners and scholars of theater, performance and dance—investigate prevailing forms of epistemic ignorance and violence. They introduce key concepts and theories that enable critique of unequal power relations between epistemologies. Moreover, contributions explore historical cases of interweaving epistemologies and examine innovative present-day methods of working across and through epistemological divides in nonhegemonic, sustainable, creative and critical ways. Ideal for practitioners, students and researchers of theater, performance and dance, Interweaving Epistemologies emphasizes the urgent need to acknowledge, study and promote epistemological plurality and diversity in practices of performance-making as well as in scholarship on theater and performance around the globe today.