Abstract

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.

Kathryn Rountree is Professor of Anthropology at Massey University. She has published on contemporary Paganism in Malta and New Zealand, feminist spirituality, animism, shamanism, pilgrimage, the contestation of sacred sites and, more broadly, between religion and science. Her books include Embracing the Witch and the Goddess: Feminist Ritual-makers in New Zealand (Routledge, 2004), Crafting Contemporary Pagan Identities in a Catholic Society (Ashgate, 2010), the edited volume Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Modern Paganism (Palgrave, 2017) and the co-edited Archaeology of Spiritualities (Springer, 2012).

“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