Review of American Heathens (Jennifer Snook, Temple, 2015) (original) (raw)
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Book Review of American Heathens: The Politics of Identity in a Pagan Religious Movement
American Heathens is the first ethnographic study of American Germanic and Northern European Paganisms (variously called Heathenry, Asatru, Odinism, Forn Sed, and others). As such, it can be situated alongside Jenny Blain’s Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic: Ecstasy and Neo- Shamanism in North European Paganism, which explores the reconstruction and practice of Germanic and Northern European shamanism. Both Snook and Blain are participant-observers who self-identify as Heathen, and in Snook’s case, this perspective permits a nuanced discussion of culture and politics in the religious movement. This is a useful counterpoint to the often inaccurate reports about Heathenry published in the media and by organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which makes American Heathens an important contribution to research in this denomination of Neo-Paganism.
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Translation-both multi-and intra-lingual-is vital to anthropological method. Drawing a distinction between two opposing modes of translation ("domesticating" versus "foreignizing"), this paper considers the ontological and ethical consequences of these two interpretative strategies, in particular by critically engaging with the doctrine of Donald Davidson, the theoretical inspiration for João Pina-Cabral's work, World. I argue, instead, in favor of a "pagan" or pluralizing conceptual method, inspired by Feyerabend, Lyotard, and Hans Peter Duerr, and I suggest that their approaches demonstrate that even the polymodal ontology of Latour is lacking in plurality. In conclusion, I consider how the notion of foreignizing translation relates to the method associated with the ontological turn in anthropology.