intersubjectivecritique
[The Pomegranate 15.1-2 (2013) 136-150] ISSN 1528-0268 (print)doi: 10.1558/pome.v15i1-2.136 ISSN 1743-1735 (online)
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2014. Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield S1 2BX.
An Intersubjective Critique of A Critique of Pagan Scholarship
Michael York1
Bath Spa University
Newton St. Loe
Bath, BA2 9BN
exchange@michaelyork.co.uk
Abstract
This paper responds to Markus Davidsen's critique of contemporary
Pagan Studies published in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion,
issue 24 (2012). In contrast to Davidsen’s “classical” and critical-naturalist
emphasis, insider research that is methodologically sound is defended.
Keywords: Pagan studies; religious studies.
Markus Altena Davidsen seeks to demonstrate “that pagan [sic]
studies is dominated by the methodological principles of essentialism,
exclusivism, loyalism and supernaturalism, and [to show] how
these principles promote normative constructions of ‘pure’ paganism,
insider interpretations of the data, and theological speculations
about gods, powers, and a special ‘magical consciousness.’”2 His
contention is that these principles are made to pass for cutting-edge
scholarship but that “almost every methodological and conceptual
weakness in the old religionist approaches is reproduced and concentrated
in the new field of pagan studies.”
Using the Handbook of Contemporary Paganism as an illustration of
the field in general, Davidsen wishes to demonstrate that the contributions
by those with an explicitly pagan and insider view are
1. Michael York formerly directed the Sophia Centre at Bath Spa University,
where he held the title of professor of cultural astronomy and astrology. He now
lives in Amsterdam.
2. Markus Altena Davidsen, “What is Wrong with Pagan Studies? A Review
Essay on the Handbook of Contemporary Paganism,” Method and Theory in the Study of
Religion 24, no. 2 (2012): 183.
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slightly more than double the number of those who operate from
a critical-naturalist viewpoint. He groups the authors into two research
programs: a religionist program with an insider perspective
and supernaturalist ontology, and a scientific program with an outsider
perspective and a naturalist ontology. The present proposer
is placed in the first group which Davidsen labels as self-conscious
and having “gone native in reverse” by becoming academics. The
religionist program ranges, allegedly, from descriptive to theoretical.
Hermeneutics and theology are theoretical and are described
as “incommensurable with the critical-naturalist program.”
Despite Davidsen’s dichotomy between the critical-naturalist and
descriptive-theoretical, he goes on to say that “Many scholars of religious
traditions lack an identity as scholars of religion and hence an
interest in method and theory as it is formulated on discipline level”
(my italics). The statement “Clearly, these young scholars [in a recent
PhD workshop on method and theory in the Netherlands] viewed
method and theory as a field apart rather than as the shared foundation
of the academic study of religion” appears not to recognize
that methodology and theory are tools in the study of religion—not
the study itself. Naming this a “foundational tool” would be perhaps
more accurate than naming it the foundation itself. The nuance
here, however, illustrates the problem of this kind of critique of religious
studies and misses the baby for the bathwater. Discussion of
methodology is important and vital, and with the sociology of religion
at least is an ever ongoing project. A sociologist like William
Swatos, an Episcopal minister, eschews any attempt to study his
own tradition—focusing instead, for instance, on Paganism in Iceland
as a subject in which he had no personal interest that affords
him the greater possibility of objective scrutiny. In an opposite
camp of thought, the late Jeffrey Hadden asked rhetorically, “Why
shouldn't natives, compassionately committed to their culture, be
trained to do sociological observation?”3
Hadden’s question is at the heart of the present critique. Last
year, in the AAR’s Contemporary Pagan Studies session, Nikki Bado
wished to eliminate the terms “emic” and “etic,” but the insider/
outsider dance in participation/observation research remains, and
each produces its own usefully significant insights and information.
Nevertheless, Davidsen appears then to counter his own argument
3. John Macquarrie, Twentieth-Century Religious Thought, London: SCM Press
Ltd., 1988 [1963]), 155.
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in the admission that critical theorists have come to suspect the very
category of religion: “Critical theorists no longer study religion or religious
activity as such, but aim to analyze how people talk about religion,
which social constructions people label religion, and how the
resulting discourses serve to legitimize power structures.” Admittedly,
as Davidsen concedes, this is important but “also leaves much
out of the question.” He concludes that “It is not surprising that religionists
are unwilling to adopt an approach that requires them to
give up both [sic] their methodology, object, and identity.”
But other than simply saying this, there is little in Davidsen’s critique
of “religionists” (e.g., Susan Greenwood, Robert Puckett, Michael
York, Jone Salomensen, Graham Harvey, Melissa Harrington, etc.)
that supports his contention that they have abandoned methodological
rigor. His declared focus was on the Handbook of Contemporary
Paganism edited by James Lewis and Murphy Pizza, but he
then critiqued Melissa Harrington—who did not contribute to the
handbook— a selection that suggests a selectivity on Davidsen’s part
to support a bias that itself is not objective or neutral. He nevertheless
concludes that a positive program (e.g., that suggested by Martin Riesebrodt
and Ivan Strenski) “provides the shared theoretical objects we
need in order to build and sustain a discipline identity as scholars of
religion,” and “by offering theoretical and conceptual models instead
of deconstruction and criticism of the religionist position, the positive
program puts us in a stronger position to demonstrate the relevance
of method and theory also to religionists.”
It is important, certainly, to avoid what Michael Hill refers to as sociologie
religieuse, an autonomous intellectual activity which remains
beyond the scrutiny of other sociologists.4 And to the extent that
pagan academics veer toward religious sociology, Davidsen’s critique
is valid and necessary. Classical sociology by contrast has been
lauded for its value-neutrality, terminological precision and colleague
consensus but increasingly more negatively appraised in terms of
its reductionistic epiphenomenal positivism. As Eileen Barker put
it, even “social scientists are useful only in so far as they communicate
information which corresponds to the object of their study
rather than colouring, distorting, confusing or over-simplifying an
already messy and complicated reality with the addition of their personal
beliefs and values.”5 For the critical-naturalist approach where
4. Michael Hill, A Sociology of Religion (London: Heinemann, 1973), 9–11.
5. Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice? (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1984), 36.
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one’s personal biases and blindness may still be operative, the review
through one’s peers is perhaps the best approximation to objectivity
that our investigative approaches can achieve.
Today, in place of religious sociology and classical sociology, a
more “middle way” appears to be the preference in both the United
States and the United Kingdom as well as related areas. The suspension
of judgment in the unbiased collection of data is still extremely
important, but there is additionally the recognition that in any valuefree,
consensual study, some things remain beyond the scope or possibility
of achievement. Sociology today more openly acknowledges
its limited position.
But another aspect of classical sociology that “middle way” sociology
has inherited and continues is precisely in the area of terminological
precision. It is here where the theoretical religionist has a key
role to play in the understanding of religion in general and paganism
in particular. My argument is that to understand any particular
religion or religious practice, a fundamentally helpful adjunct is to
understand the underlying theological worldview or framework—
whether this is articulated or not, and whether established or in the
process of development. Whilst many today, and this applies to
pagans as well, believe that theology is a Christian exercise alone,
theological speculation precedes Christianity and occupied attention
among the Greeks, Romans and Vedic peoples. It can also be
discerned among others as well, and without including theology
within religious studies and/or the study of religion(s), the criticalnaturalistic
approach is crippled from the start.
Without doubt, etics can pursue the uncovering of theology and
its analysis as well, but emics have some receptive advantages in
terms of being able to understand perhaps more fully the implications
of certain beliefs or filtering lens to the practice itself. In contrast
to Davidsen, theology is more than speculations simply about
gods, powers, and a special “magical consciousness.” Theology concerns
in addition the ideals of a religion in terms of the identity of and
relationship between shared understandings of the world, humanity
and the supernatural. Again recalling Hadden, Evans-Pritchard
was convinced that the first condition for the anthropologist is to
speak the native’s language or, in the case of Paganism as a relatively
re-emergent spirituality, a Pagan “language.”6 More directly
6. Edward Evans-Pritchard, “The Morphology and Function of Magic: A Comparative
Study of Trobriand and Zande Ritual,” in Magic, Witchcraft, and Curing, ed.
John Middleton (New York: National History Press, 1967 [1929]), 61, 79.
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in a religious studies context, Rodney Stark has argued that the most
important factor for a truly scientific study of religion is entry into
the field of ‘persons of faith.”7 This notion is refined further by Nicholas
Campion who insists, in his doctoral dissertation, that the emicetic/
insider-outsider relationship is “not a polarity but a constantly
shifting set of ideas and experiences which may vary with time and
location.”8
So in contrast to Davidsen’s allegations, insider interpretations of
data are important for a more complete picture—especially when, as
Kenneth Pike maintains, the interpretations of emic phenomena by
two etics will always be in some ways different. Moreover, normative
constructions of “pure” Paganism are impossible in an academic
context since there is no such thing as “pure” Paganism.9 Most if not
all Pagan scholars are aware that there are many Paganisms, and
Paganism as a religious orientation itself is still fully in an ongoing
process of defining itself. In actuality, contemporary Paganism may
be no more than an “etic” formulation that is useful primarily for
outsiders—one which may prove additionally and hopefully to be
advantageous for insiders.10 In the study of religions and the study
of paganism, it is eventually imperative to grasp that every pagan is
both a participant of an emic group or practice but simultaneously a
member of society and shares in its adoption of etic views concerning
what paganism is, does and claims to be.
The supernaturalist agenda of contemporary Pagan scholars is
another allegation of Davidsen’s. What this fails to recognize, as
Davidsen also fails to recognize in Susan Greenwood’s study of
magical or alternate states of consciousness, is the expansion of the
field of religious studies to beyond the restrictions of empirical analysis
to the phenomenologically concrete and readily available. From
the Call for Papers for the 2013 Royal Geographic Society-Institute
of British Geographers annual conference in London for a session on
7. Rodney Stark, “Atheism, Faith, and the Social Scientific Study of Religion,”
Journal of Contemporary Religion 14, no 1 (1999): 54.
8. Nicholas Campion, “Prophecy, Cosmology and the New Age Movement:
The Extent and Nature of Contemporary Belief in Astrology” (PhD thesis, Bath Spa
University, 2004), 10.
9. Kenneth L. Pike, Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of
Human Behaviour (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 44–8.
10. Steven Sutcliffe, Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices
(London: Routledge, 2003), 16.
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Occult Geographies: (Im)material Agents and the Geographical Imagination,
for instance, we hear that because geography is now additionally
turning “its attention to engaging with those elements of place
that remain unseen and to exploring the relationality between materiality,
agency and the invisible as affect or spectrality,” a focus has
arisen that seeks to explore how physical affect “stirs, moves, disturbs,
confuses and distorts our perception.” The particular focus
here is on the occult, the occluded, the invisible and perceptually
obscured but still knowable. If we translate this to Pagan supernaturalism
(recognising simultaneously that contemporary Paganism is
at least equally concerned with the ecological), we can fathom that
a Pagan framework includes the uncanny “such as unseen agency,
strange naturalisms, magic, ecologies of the spectral, and [their positioning]
within esoteric practice.”11 Referring to the geographical, the
Call for Papers is concerned in particular with what has been often
ignored and deliberately hidden practice. Because of the biases and
limited focus that is possible with the etic position, emic subjectivity
becomes an important and necessary complement to the criticalnaturalist
study of religion.
In defense of the current academic study of Paganism, it becomes
legitimate to ask how much the sociology of religion is a theological
position in itself. There may be no final answer to this, and the
question remains an open one. Ernst Troeltsch’s contention that sociology
is the history of the present is debatable since history is not a
science but a descriptive art. Nevertheless, Troeltsch does recognise
that sociology is a discipline that “pays attention to the structure
and function of human society, to the conditions under which social
changes occur, and to the interaction of the various social groupings
which exert checks and pressures upon each other.”12
However, the statement that “religious beliefs . . . are so much a
product of the social environment in which they are located that it
is possible to give a comprehensive account of their meaning and
significance which is composed entirely of socio-economic explanations”
is both an oversimplification and an assumption of linear
hierarchy.13 The reductionisms characteristic of Comte, Tylor, Spencer,
Frazer, Durkheim, Marx, Lenin and perhaps Weber invariably
involve an evaluative judgment about religious phenomena. The
11. RBG-IBG, Annual International Conference 2013, http://conference.rgs.org/
AC2013/77.
12. Quoted in Macquarrie Twentieth-Century Religious Thought, 155.
13. Hill, Sociology of Religion, 12.
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religious explanation is considered to be in some sense unreal - especially
as it is based on some non-empirical point of reference, that
is, on an area beyond the means and legitimization of traditional
science.
Consequently, the implicit assumption in the epiphenomenalist
approach is also theological—whether rationalistic, naturalistic,
or empirical, and in degree of bias it differs little from the sociologie
religieuse position which remains convinced of the transcendent and
revelatory character of religion. As with the Ritschlian tendency to
identify religion in practice as the application and pursuit of social
goals deriving from revelation or mystical insight, the epiphenomenalist
reduces religious ideals and activities to empirical statements
about the social world. Non-empirical goals are thereby eliminated,
and a range of meaning which is significant to the religious adherent
falls beyond the scope of this kind of sociology.
A journal devoted to methodology and its theory, such as Method
and Theory in the Study of Religion, will retain an expected bias toward
classical, epiphenomenal, or critical-naturist scientific positions. But
to the degree that the contemporary sociologist operates more intermediately
between the domains of both religious sociology and
epiphenomenalism, judgment is not passed on such things as the
validity of revelation or channeling or, more broadly, Davidsen’s
supernaturalist ontology. Whilst belief itself is not considered to be
beyond the scope of empirical scrutiny, this rationale and defense
of observation is balanced by (1) recognizing that belief most often
takes a social form and (2) assuming that a complete explanation is
not possible in every case. The sociologist researcher makes no judgment
over the “reality” or “unreality” of religious belief but keeps
instead within a particular frame of reference which simply studies
the meaningfulness of a set of religious beliefs to its adherents. But
as Hill observes (1973:15), “the sociological approach to religion [is]
one among a number of possible approaches, each of which is valid
within its own sphere of reference and using its own techniques.”14
Nevertheless, religious belief as an object of study requires that we
know what the religious belief is. It is here precisely where the importance
of the insider is to be recognized. Academic emics are in the
position to facilitate an understanding of what the beliefs of a paganism
or some other religion are and to bridge that understanding for
an etic analysis. Though referring to whisky, Aeneas MacDonald
14. Ibid., 15.
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makes a germane comment that would be equally applicable to the
critical-naturalist critique of the insider-religionist program, namely,
“hierarchies and authority go down before the sovereignty of a
heightened and irresistible intuition.”15
Any handbook on religion or virtually on any subject is going to
contain lacunae. Not everything can be covered or included. Davidsen
finds that three omissions in the handbook are telling:
“Firstly, no single chapter is devoted to a discussion of solitaire practitioners
despite the fact that this group accounts for at least half
the total number of pagans (Berger: 167). Secondly, pagan use of the
Internet is not systematically discussed even though the Internet is
identified as important for the membership explosion in the 1990s
(Berger) and as increasingly important for Pagan community maintenance
(Ezzy). Thirdly and related, it is regrettable that none of the
articles treat the widespread Pagan use of fiction as inspirational
texts.”16
But academic Pagan studies of these areas are to be found elsewhere
in the field—e.g., Douglas Cowan’s Cyberhenge: Modern Pagans on the
Internet17; as well as Douglas Ezzy and Helen Berger’s 2009 article
“Witchcraft: Changing Patterns of Participation in the Early Twentyfirst
Century”18 and other works; the Contemporary Pagan Studies
Group’s 2009 session on “The Relationship between Literature and
Contemporary Paganism” at the American Academy of Religion’s
annual meeting; and Morgan Davis’ 2012 paper on “The Witch is
Alone.” Concerning solitary practice, however, it is difficult to get an
emic perspective since, with the exposure to fieldwork, such practice
would no longer be solitary. Admittedly, survey research and other
techniques will need to be forthcoming in this area to help close the
gap that Davidsen perceives.
But apart from these three “‘omissions,” Davidsen focuses on
seven people in particular. He finds essentialist fault with Robert
Puckett’s assertion that “the ‘normal’ state of Wiccan charisma is
15. Fritz Allhof and Marcus P. Adams, eds., Whiskey and Philosophy: A Small
Batch of Spirited Ideas (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2010), x; Jeffrey K. Hadden, ed.
“Review Symposium: The New Religious Consciousness, edited by Charles Y. Glock
and Robert N. Bellah.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 16, no. 3 (1977): 308
16. Davidsen, “What Is Wrong with Pagan Studies,” 188.
17. Douglas E. Cowan, Cyberhenge: Modern Pagans on the Internet (New York:
Routledge, 2005).
18. Douglas Ezzy and Helen Berger, “Witchcraft: Changing Patterns of Participation
in the Early Twenty-first Century,” The Pomegranate 11, no. 2 (2009): 165–80.
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democratic, magical, and non-routinized.”19 Perhaps Puckett might
have said that Wiccans report and feel that this is the “normal” state
of affairs despite the all-too-human power corruption that can sometimes
be witnessed as the “High Priest(ess) syndrome.”
In critiquing Melissa Harrington’s contrast between what she
calls “authentic, communal and ethical paganism” and “commercial,
commodified, and materialistic new age,” Davidsen claims that
“the many self-identified pagans who are solitaires and work magic
for materialistic ends” are excluded by Harrington’s exclusive division.
What is curious here would be any fieldwork or reference on
Davidsen’s part that confirms that solitaries are working magic for
materialistic goals alone or even for the most part. But Harrington’s
point is that Alexandrian and Gardnerian Wicca (as well as Ordo
Templi Orientis initiates) do not “pick and mix” as is more characteristic
of New Age practice but remain committed to “Wicca [or the
OTO] as a sole religious path.” As for “fluffy witches,” she sees them
as possibly the “the future of Paganism.” And concerning the assertion
of an elite “real paganism” in contrast to the “commodified…
[and] New Age witchcraft” that Ezzy appears to ”lump” together
with the initiate versions, Harrington finds Davidsen’s allegations
as “a very Pagan-sour-grapes term to use in such a targetted way”—
“one of the oldest insults in Paganism.” She firmly denies that she is
a biased or Wiccan religionist but describes herself instead as “a tolerant
universalist.”20 Rather than doing identity management and
boundary-work to force less prestigious co-religionists out of an elite
Wiccan/Pagan category and into the pejorative New Age category,
Harrington would appear to be more engaged with the necessary
identity location and boundary understandings of different Pagan
and Wiccan practices.
Davidsen assumes carte blanche that Unitarian Universalists are
necessarily liberal Christians, but in my own research, I have encountered
Unitarian Universalists who are surprised to learn that they
might be considered Protestants. The Christian affinities of Unitarian
Universalism have been steadily waning, such that the denomination
essentially divides now between humanists and Pagans. The
notion that Pagans might also be Christians is highly debatable—as
has been witnessed on Sam Webster’s “Beginning the Pagan Restoration”
web page with his comment “And, no, you can't worship Jesus
19. Davidsen, “What Is Wrong with Pagan Studies,” 188.
20. Melissa Harrington, personal communication, 25 November 2012.
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Christ and be a Pagan” and the numerous objections he received in
the feedback comments.21 Christo-Pagans, crypto-Pagans, even Mormons
all attest the Pagan-Christian fusions, but Harrington’s comment
was that “the biggest difference between Paganism and new
age is that new ager can remain Christian whereas Pagans usually
do not.”22 And surely academics can expressly wonder how Pagans
can “square [their Pagan orientations] with a true Christian faith
when the bible is totally against it” while still remaining bona fide
academics.
Davidsen’s position is that Jone Salomonsen, as an illustration of
methodological loyalism to both subjects and subject—and to be serious
as a researcher—feels obliged to believe what her informants
believe. It would seem that, more accurately, Salomonsen is simply
taking seriously that her informants believe what they say they believe
rather than that she must also believe what they believe. What Davidsen
appears to fail to recognize is that conversion to a denomination
or cult is indeed different from that to a church or sect. The boundaries
of the latter are more rigid and determined. Neither the denomination
nor cult has provisions for making judgments of heresy; their
borders are porous and fluid. To lump both sects and cults together as
simply “new religious movements” betrays a terminological imprecision
on Davidsen’s part that violates scientific methodology from the
start. It is doubtless that abuses of power and intimidation could occur
in an initiation into a group like Reclaiming, but Salomonsen did not
find that to be the case and is simply reporting what she encountered
in a specific instance. Despite Siân Reid and Christel Manning statements
in the Handbook that there are different kinds of conversion, let
alone that initiation is something that follows “conversion,” they are
not the same thing. A witch choses to be initiated because she has
come already to believe in the principles of witchcraft.
Davidsen likewise finds that the “loyalism” exhibited by Murphy
Pizza also supports ontological essentialism and exclusivism.
In her study of children in Pagan communities, he argues that, like
other Pagan scholars, she does “not question insider interpretations,
but [presents] them as if they were bare facts.” There may in
this case be indeed an example of “the pagan self-understanding
as creative, innovative and distinctive no matter the facts,”23 but
21. Sam Webster, “Beginning the Pagan Restoration” (http://www.patheos.com/
Pagan/Beginning-Pagan-Restoration-Sam-Webster-01-16-2013.html).
22. Melissa Harrington, personal communication, 25 November 2012.
23. Davidsen, “What Is Wrong with Pagan Studies,” 192.
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it may also be simply a question of presenting what it is that Pizza’s
respondents are saying. In this instance if not others as well,
we may have a similar example of what Douglas Burnham and
Ole Martin Skilleås explain concerning the aesthetic evaluation of
whiskey from a phenomenological perspective. “Maybe the problem
we are having is that we are seeing objectivity and subjectivity
as the only two alternatives.” They suggest intersubjectivity as
a preferred third alternative. “By ‘intersubjectivity’ we mean that
funding [the kinds of knowledge and competencies the researcher
brings to the challenge of judgment] and practices are achieved,
directly or indirectly, through our interactions with other people—
as guides, companions, reviewers, and so on.” In this context,
judgments are “normative, defensible, and public.”24 The framework
upon which intersubjectivity depends consists of a mutually
shared language as well as the conditions to make that language
meaningful. The “coming home” and Goddess devotion metaphors
of contemporary Western Paganism are part of Paganism’s
language that scholars seek to share with their colleagues and the
wider public.
When Davidsen turns to Pagan theology, the Pagan academics
he is critiquing do not, only allegedly, report the supernatural
assumptions of their informants “loyally,” but also use a supernaturalist
ontology to theorize. He appears particularly dismissive of
Graham Harvey’s “other-than-human-persons” animism. Whilst
I myself may have some difficulty with Harvey’s theology, it is a
legitimate form of personalism, in this case, polytheistic rather than
monotheist, and is presented as a theological perspective that has
resonance with many contemporary Pagans. Various conclusions
are then drawn from this theology qua theology. Davidsen’s critique
here appears not to be with methodology but with terminology.
With Harvey, Salomonsen, and others, the more major error on
Davidsen’s part, however, lies with his classical but rejected sociological
position that continues to pass judgment on the “reality” or
“unreality’ of religious belief rather than simply acknowledge and
present its meaningfulness for its adherents.
Articulated and/or unarticulated theology must sooner or later
come under scrutiny with any academic study of religions. It is part
of the informing picture and shapes the values and meanings that
24. Allhof and Adams, eds., Whiskey and Philosophy: A Small Batch of Spirited
Ideas, 144, 147.
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make up the worldview of any particular religiosity. To understand
a religion but not to understand its explicit or implicit theological
perspective is to be handicapped in the overall project. Theology
and religion “go together like a horse and carriage.”
It is also important to understand that theology is an on-going
and open discussion. It is not a fixed and permanent compendium
of thought and perspective. Perspectives shift and change; contemporary
thought is conversational—continuing past dialogue but
re-examining, discussing and extending it. A theology becomes
moribund when it becomes rigidly codified into dogmas, doctrines
and creeds. Unlike Christian theology for which Paganism represents
an effort toward radical re-evaluation, Pagan theology is a
present-day dynamic. This does not translate, however, as Davidsen
contends for my own explorations of theology, as “dynamistic.”
And nor am I seeking to construct Paganism as “root religion,” as
Davidsen also contends. Paganism’s radical or original nature is an
historical observation—unless, as Davidsen appears to wish, contemporary
Paganism’s affinities with primal religiosities are to be
discounted and denied.
If we are not restricting the research strictly to what we learn from
respondents, theology is largely an analytical study that is beyond
Davidsen’s critical-naturalistic remit. Nevertheless, he identifies four
contributors to the Handbook for their presentations of Pagan theology.
And in this discussion, he appears to feel that any discussion
of the supernatural is automatically revealing of a supernaturalistic
bias. This sounds yet again like the classical sociological approach
that wants to deny the godhead, the magical and the non-empirical
as factors in religious belief.
Whilst I do say that the gods may be understood as energies, I
do also say that they might also have bodies as solidified states of
energy. Davidsen, however, reduces this to “York’s main point is…
[ultimately], all human conceptualizations of the divine are reducible
to a single complex of immaterial energy.” He finds it “interesting
to see how contemporary Pagan theologians refer to classics such
as Tylor on animism, Marett on mana, Hubert and Mauss on magic
etc.”25 but will ignore or completely overlook my discussion of complexity
theory because it does not fit his limited understanding of
what is involved to make sense of pagan belief. For him, explanation
becomes legitimation.
25. Davidsen, “What Is Wrong with Pagan Studies,” 193.
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Along with Harvey’s and my ontological speculations on the
supernatural (rather than our “supernaturalist ontological speculations”
[my italics]), Davidsen takes aim on Greenwood’s “supernaturalist
epistemology.” Although he applauds Tanya Luhrmann’s
work on interpretive drift (1989),26 he is not favorable when it comes
to Greenwood. Both Greenwood and Luhrmann “entered” the magical
otherworld, but unlike Luhrmann, Greenwood does not feel
compelled to retreat from ”interpretive drift.” She speaks indeed
from the position of an insider, but she is nonetheless able to use academic
language to explain the non-traditional and magical. Davidsen’s
critique of her is based on his assumption that Greenwood
maintains the romantic idea that the life of the cultural primitive
is the most desirable and authentic. And without further explanation,
he appears to contest that contemporary Paganism as a “nature
religion” is compatible (for an inaccurate overkill, Davidsen uses the
word ‘identical’) with indigenous religion. Davidsen then translates
the similarity of an empathetic shared worldview into an alleged
“privileged epistemological access.” Consequently—and apparently
“sadly,” speculative metaphysical legitimation, essentialist ideas,
and ideological projection supplant “a rational argument based on
accurate ethnography.”27
Bearing in mind that Davdisen’s article has been designed for a
journal on methodology for which presumably largess and creative/
innovative imagination is not to be allowed, he nevertheless appears
to have missed that the handbook is simply a handbook, and although
scholars have contributed to it, it need not strictly serve the purpose
of scientific ethnography but can instead provide speculations, opinions,
information and understandings of various Pagan topics and
issues for both the Pagan community and a wider lay community. In
the present case, these contributions have been furnished by Pagan
scholars working in the field, and they have partaken of a particular
(in this case, Pagan) language of intersubjectivity.
In conclusion, let me say that much of what Davidsen says is
worthy and necessary for consideration. Pagan scholarship, as
does any scholarship, welcomes constructive critique that encourages
self-reflection as well as deeper understandings of our subject.
Davidsen himself appears to come full circle and, drawing on both
26. Tanya M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary
England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
27. Davidsen, “What Is Wrong with Pagan Studies,” 194.
York An Intersubjective Critique of A Critique of Pagan Scholarship 149
© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2014
Ivan Strenski and Riesebrodt,28 calls for the recasting of religionistinsider
research into a “positive program” that examines the logic
of religious practice, its belief modalities and social functions to
offer “theoretical and conceptual models instead of deconstruction
and criticism of the religionist position.”29 But at the same time, it is
important to remember that the notions and practices of things like
intersubjectivity and middle-way sociology that accepts subjects’
beliefs as valid for the subjects themselves are vital for expanding
our fields of research beyond the limited and traditional confines
that in themselves have often restricted the expansion of knowledge
and understanding.
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