Please donate now to pay our monthly server fees: [More Info]

Community Menu

Community Home Message Board Board Home Board Rules Board Extras:    Arcade    Calendar    Links CauldronMUX [Client] Sister Forums:    Asatru Lore

Menu

Home Site Info & Rules Site Archives Volunteers Needed Advertise Here Pagan Supplies Buy Pagan Books Buy Pagan Supplies Books & Media Books Home Games Home Music: Free | Pagan Online Books Pagan Book Browser Reviews:    Academic Books    Divination Decks    Fiction Books    Pagan Books    Speculative Books    DVD & Videotape Submit Review Pagan Features Article Library Auctions Chat Log Index File Library Humor Lessons Pagan Holidays Pagan Primer Pagan Rituals Pagan Supplies Pagan Youth Polls Reconstructionism Spell Grimoire [Blog] Web Resources Pagan Living Cauldron Cookbook Take Political Action Newsletter Back Issues Subscribe Other Features eCauldronMail Greeting Cards Syndicated Articles World News/Opinion Shopping Cheap Web Hosting Doxy's Bazaar Witchcraft Course Zazzle Old Indexes Article Index Webcrafting Index

Network Sites

Cauldron and Candle Cauldron's Grimoire RetroRoleplaying RetroRoleplaying: The Blog Software Gadgets The Terran Empire

Site Search

Entire Web The Cauldron

Charter Member

While this web site is designed to work in all major browsers, we recommend Firefox.

This site hosted on a Linode VPS Formerly hosted by Why Use Dreamhost?

Site copyright © 1998-2009 by Randall

Book Review: Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America
Author: Sabina Magliocco Hardcover, 280 pages Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Publication date: 2004 ISBN: 0812218795 Price & More Info: Click Here	"Must Have, Double Bag!" is old school comic fandom's term for things that a fan cannot live without -- and have any fanboy or fangirl cred in the eyes of her or his fan peers.   And a perfect, to-the-point description of this book.   Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America is written by a Gardnerian and Reclaiming practitioner who also happens to be a skillful folklorist and anthropologist, Magliocco is presently an associate professor at California State University, Northridge.   Witching Culture is thoughtful, insightful, fruitful, grounded, and, maybe, provocative.   Witching Culture is well-crafted and a joy to read.   Witching Culture is one of the best ethnographies that I've read in a long time.Magliocco manages to accentuate the participation in her participant-observations, but sustain a vibrant and keen postmodern theoretical analysis at the same time. She takes the reader there to a living experience of an alternative culture.   She addresses a broad range of topics shaping and challenging Neo-Paganism,especially Craft in the San Francisco Bay Area, from how magic is envisioned as a working relationship with world and deities to ritual art and artistry to Neo-Pagan shopping habits to identity construction and cultural borrowing, and more. Like the Neo-Pagan bricoleurs she discusses, she takes advantage of theories and insights borrowed from a number of disciplines and discourses, putting the mix to good, understanding use.   Magliocco considers Neo-Pagan culture to be oppositional to dominant culture, postmodern in its world view at a time when the dominant modern culture offers little beyond materiality, consumerism, alienation, oppression, and spiritual--if not economic--impoverishment. She traces some roots of this oppositionality to sources in the Romantic and European nationalist movements. And provides a good account of Neo- Paganism's cultural creativity in shaping magical ritual, even political action, from these sources, among others.   Her approach to the creative and enculturating role that song plays in today's Neo-Paganism alone makes the book worthwhile.   Witching Culture is a "Must Have, Double Bag!" book that all of us should be proud to add to our libraries.   Note: I am Sabina's friend, and the "Pitch" in the book. All I can assure you is -- as an old-school comic guy--if the book sucked, I'd say so. Far from it -- Witching Culture shines bright! Reviewed by Pitch