and a delightful AAR it was.

thursday night: drinks with pagan scholars!

friday: conference on contemporary pagan studies! presentations on:
--paganism and folk music by christopher chase
--pagans and "religioning" (studying religion as a process rather than a fixed set of practices) by cat mcearchern
--writing as an academic vs. writing as a practitioner by nikki bado-fralick and doug cowan (i liked their rhetoric of speaking different languages/using different skills sets, academia as a very serious game, and being willing to take risks and allow oneself to be changed by one's research. doug cowan says, "scholarship is the asking and answering of significant questions." i thought, that's a pretty good definition, but it could stand some tweaking because i think that's what religion is for as well... different sorts of questions, though.)
--panel on researching paganisms (ed. blain, ezzy, harvey), which sounds quite juicy -- i bought it last year, haven't gotten around to reading it. apparently it contains reflections by scholars on the process of doing research, and was advertised as being useful to scholars methodologically whether they care about paganism or not.

a few things i noticed: throughout CCPS and AAR, scholars used a nature-based definition of paganism, even those who'd worked heavily with reconstructionists, and it was never questioned or challenged. this doesn't surprise me, because the new pagan studies consultation grew out of the nature religions scholars network and mailing list. however, as far as pagan scholarship goes, these folks are *it* -- lots of big names were there and new academic books on pagans are being published hand over fist. (i can't wait to get my hands on chas clifton's upcoming her hidden children -- it's a history of wicca in america.) robert puckett returned to margot adler's summary of pagan theologies by describing it as a cluster of animistic, pantheistic, and/or panentheistic religions, but otherwise there was little effort to define paganism and an assumption that we all knew what we were talking about. on the other hand, there was no effort to define "nature" either. i'm not sure if we're clear on whether nature is wilderness relatively unaltered by humans, the entire cosmos, or an urban ecology of rats, squirrels, ashphalt and cockroaches. in any case, it's clear that technopagans and recons who don't consider themselves nature-based have no voice in pagan scholarship as it's developing now. i have to admit, i'm moving towards a historical definition myself: contemporary paganism is a 20th century phenomenon and almost all neopagan religions have some distant connection to gardner's wicca and the late nineteenth century british occult movement, whether they're directly influenced by them (like eclectic wicca) or rebelling against them (like recons who wanted more historicity than wicca provided or technopagans who wanted to use symbols that were already part of their lives).

i think right now my working definition is: twentieth- and twenty-first-century nature-based religions and/or religions that worship the old gods or gods inspired by pre-christian pantheons, OR religions whose ritual structure is directly inspired by/reacting to those groups and choose to retain the label "pagan." i do, however, draw the line at calling practices that don't involve some kind of worship, reverence, or celebration of being, nature, or the gods "pagan." that stuff is magick or occultism. it may be religious but i don't think it constitutes a pagan religion by itself. a philosophy, perhaps.

i like pagan scholars. they're fun as well as smart, and we laughed a lot at the conference.

there was also a screening of i still worship zeus, on worshippers of the greek gods in greece. the film was interesting but not very well paced. most interesting was that the subjects, though they felt persecuted, did not seem to the be the least bit countercultural.

saturday: many many many sessions. graham ward said he thought that western culture was entering a post-gender phase, with the focus moving to body and desire instead, and i thought, um, maybe in *academia*, but have you *visited* the suburbs lately? (i doubt he has.) later michael delashmutt criticized speculative science for its single-minded focus on immortality and space colonization without considering the fact that these things will likely only be available to rich white people a problem. i had a long conversation with queen_of_wands about how i love third wave feminism and queer studies, but their insights are useful to such a tiny class of people, especially when you consider that in most parts of the US second wave feminism still hasn't finished its job; and should you be spending your time theorizing about incredibly heady topics or trying to colonize space when we not only don't have equal work for equal pay STILL but people are still starving and don't have medical care? and we came to the same conclusion we always come to, that we do the best work for the world when we do what we're called to, and there's room for people to feed the hungry and research immortality based on where their passion is. but i'm still not entirely satisfied with that answer, because we live in a society that values profit above all else, and there are a lot of people out there who seem to be called to build sweatshops in third world nations, and other people who seem to be called to live wasteful lives of consumption. and of course i don't really believe they're called to do that -- i doubt that sort of thing really satisfies anyone's soul -- but we're certainly conditioned to believe that having money and stuff equals success in this world, and even that having money and stuff is evidence of virtue. i feel like i know my calling, like i was born knowing it and it's just been a process of narrowing it down to a practical expression. i guess sometimes i just wish i were called to something lower down the food chain, so to speak. i wish i wanted to feed the hungry, but i want to feed those who are hungry for knowledge and meaning.

but sitting there, having listened to amy hollywood and graham ward and slavoj zizek -- all brilliant theorists -- i realize i am still a much more concrete thinker than many of the people that surrounded me. as intellectual as i am compared to most people, i think i'm on the oddly practical end of academia. it's a strange position to be in.

great session on angels in america. a lesbian and a straight man performed the scene where harper confronts joe, and then switched roles and did it again. it was a great way to discuss exploring gender through performance. interestingly, they conflated gender with sexual orientation, so that a lesbian is thought to have a different gender than a straight woman. not sure how i feel about this move, but interesting.

i also heard a presentation as jesus as intersexed and hybrid, drawing on images of the church as the body of christ, among other things. it was kind of neat. i observed that judith butler was all over the place at AAR and went to finally order myself copies of her books (clearly getting them out of the library over and over is going to get old).

later, a presentation on crowley as an example of living neoplatonism in the twentieth century. the speaker related crowley's comment about the sexually disinhibiting effect of the sound of a tom-tom on british women, and afterwards the moderator commented, "i don't know if the gift shop tells tom-toms, but..." many giggles from the audience.

sunday: heard a presentation on cinema-going as a religious practice, responding to clive marsh's new book. i realized i value viewer-response studies but don't really want to do them. i'm a literary critic, and i like doing some popular culture work, but the status of texts as art is important to me. i feel like the difference between culture studies and lit crit is that in the former you can study things that are aesthetically crap if they're influential, but in the latter you have to make a case for their artistic worth. i think i'm in the latter camp -- though my crit is pretty historically inflected. not everything i study is Art, but i don't want to study anything i don't think is beautiful.

i presented my paper on goddess religion in popular novels and popular novels as missionary documents, with much success. lots of compliments, several business cards. later, a rel&lit scholar from university of chicago told me it was the best paper she'd heard all conference. *blush*

monday: attended one of the first two official pagan studies sessions at AAR. i think it was very successful. doug cowan presented on how pagan date books have gone totally mainstream. he suggested that this is a level of exposure that other NRMs can only dream of, and that the way these datebooks impose a pagan sense of time and history onto structured urban date planner culture is a interesting and potentially significant juxtaposition. looking forward to his next book. he's an excellent speaker.

in the evening, one of my colleagues, martyn oliver, delivered a pessimistic talk on the state of religion and literature as a field -- basically, it has no institutional support. this is not a worry to me, really -- we get hired in english or religion departments, or sometimes for general humanities teaching -- but the fact that most of the arts, religion, and literature sessions at the AAR are boring to me is. i feel like an alien there in sessions dominated by anglican brits who are doing religion and theology, not religion and lit. (angels in america session this time being a wonderful breath of fresh air.) so, basically us american pluralists need to start our own journal and start making noise at the AAR business meetings where topics are chosen. we can do this. martyn also suggested a rephrasing to "religions and literatures," and i responded with the thought that our major research question should be the relationship between the two -- a question that we can go on answering pretty much forever, as the relationship of each religion to its art is different and always developing.

tuesday: i went to hear my colleague patton dodd's paper, then had lunch with two of my roommates. we all spewed about our research and it was great! then, the long train ride home.

i love AAR. religion scholars are a nice bunch of people, and the atmosphere is generally friendly, almost celebratory. i look forward to next year in DC!