Graham Harvey

Indigenous religious musics

Celebrating the diversity of indigenous nations, cultures and religions, the essays which comprise this volume discuss the musics performed by a wide variety of peoples as an integral part of their cultural traditions. These include examinations of the various styles of Maori, Inuit and Australian Aboriginal musics, and the role of music in Korean Shaman rituals. Indeed, music forms a key component of many such rituals and belief systems and examples of these are explored amongst the peoples of Uganda, Amazonia and Africa. Through analysis of these rituals and the part music plays in them, the essays also open up further themes including social groupings and gender divisions, and engage with issues and debates on how we define and approach the study of indigeneity, religiosity and music. With a complimentary CD featuring some of the music discussed in the book and further information on other available recordings, this is a book which gives readers the opportunity to gain a richer experience of the lived realities of indigenous religious musics

Satanism in Britain today

Abstract It has been alleged that 10 per cent of the population of Britain are Satanists who conspire (perhaps influenced by a real Devil) to corrupt and blaspheme against everything godly, good or socially valued. This paper discusses the views and activities of self‐identified Satanists in Britain, especially the Temple of Set, the Church of Satan, the Order of the Nine Angles and Dark Lily. It also comments on ad hoc, adolescent and multi‐generational Satanism. Satanism is a series of techniques for allowing individuals to affirm, develop and express themselves, and to do what they wish to do in the context of a spirituality. It does not require belief in the Satan of the Christian pantheon although thriving on the sinister image and the hostility it can evoke in Christians and the media. Satanism is an adversarial form of self‐religion.

Endo-cannibalism in the making of a recent British ancestor

Following his death in 1975, the ashes of Wally Hope, founder of Stonehenge Peoples Free Festival, were scattered in the centre of Stonehenge. When a child tasted the ashes the rest of the group followed this lead. In the following decades, as the festival increasingly became the site of contest about British heritage and culture, the story of Wallys ashes was told at significant times. His name continues to be invoked at gatherings today. This paper discusses these events as ‘the making of an ancestor’, and explores wider contexts in which they might be understood. These include Druidic involvement in the revival of cremation, Amazonian bone-ash endo-cannibalism, and popular means of speaking of and to dead relatives. In addition to considering the role of ‘ancestors’ in contemporary Britain, the paper contributes to considerations of ‘ancestry’ as a different way of being dead, of a particular moment in the evolution of an alternative religious neo-tribal movement, of the meanings of ‘cannibalism’, and of the ways in which human remains might be treated by the bereaved and by various other interested parties.

Indigenising in a Globalised World

Being Indigenous seems, by definition, to be about belonging to a place. Sometimes it is even defined as belonging in specific places. Near synonyms like “native” and “aboriginal” can be used to locate people in relation to ancestral, pre-invasion / pre-colonial places. However, Indigenous peoples are no more enclosed by geography than other-than-indigenous peoples. Complex and extensive trade routes and migration patterns are important features of the pasts of many Indigenous nations. Tangible and intangible goods were gifted or exchanged to ferment and cement inter-national relations. In the present era, Indigenous peoples have a significant presence in global forums such as the United Nations (UN), in environmental discussions, in cultural festivals and in diasporic communities. This text uses Indigenous performances at the annual (Sami organised) Riddu Riddu festival in arctic Norway and the biennial Origins Festival of First Nations hosted in London, U.K., to exemplify explicit and taken-for-granted knowledge of place-as-community. The entailment of animistic insistence, that places are multi-species communities requiring respectful and mutualistic interaction, points to the transformative potential of Indigenous spatiality.

If ‘Spiritual But Not Religious’ People Are Not Religious What Difference Do They Make?

Modernitys project of secularisation may be challenged by the resurgence of religion in the public sphere (indicated most dramatically by religiously motivated conflicts but also in more everyday contexts). The rising profile of spirituality in healthcare and business training programmes may offer other challenges. Classically, spirituality has been differentiated from religion along seemingly Cartesian lines: the former being the fully interiorised and privatised form of putatively communal and institutionalised religion. This paper questions whether this division works. Taking a relational or personalist approach to the topic, it considers what interactions and commitments are helpfully labelled and theorised as spirituality. It seeks to make sense of the difference the ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR) phenomenon makes to scholarly debates about ways of re-assembling human and larger-than-human acts in the everyday world. The paper is based on a keynote presentation given at the Annual Conference of the British Association for the Study of Spirituality in May 2016 which addressed the question ‘Can spirituality transform our world?’.

Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona

Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona by Adrian J. Ivakhiv Bl o oming t on: Indi an Uni ve r s i t y Pre s s , 200. 0 23 3389 9. x x1 + 326.

Bardic chairs and the emergent performance practices of pagans

About a still proliferating public performance movement but with roots among Antiquarians, eccentrics, Welsh culturalists, hippy festival provocateurs and others. I survey some history that’s not been brought together like this before. And it mounts up to an argument about recent British cultural history – at least at the fringes. In an important book about cultural production among / by new religions

Capitalism and Christianity, American style

Connolly is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, but he is a political scientist with a difference; everything human is grist to his mill. This relatively short book constitutes a virtuoso performance. Its central argument is simple enough: a combination of cowboy capitalism, evangelical Christianity and a providential view of history constitutes a malign influence in present day North America, promoting a bellicose ethos resonating through sermons, Fox News, practices of consumption, investment priorities and state policies. These resonances diminish diversity, short-change future generations, ignore urban poverty and promote extensive economic inequality. They must be countered by a coalition of both religious and secular forces. Even those whose politics are different or more weakly espoused will learn a great deal from this book, especially concerning method in the social sciences. There are no pure form of realities like Capitalism and Christianity. There is a ‘capitalist axiomatic’, ‘a set of elements knotted together in a way that resists capture by a formal analysis. Once so knotted it creates constraints and possibilities as it bumps along, adding new components here, dropping others there and facing unexpected obstacles at other moments’. The particularities of a particular age give rise to a remarkably contingent ‘capitalist assemblage’. Christianity is just as complex a reality. Christianity ‘is both a long-term shifting constellation of existential experiments and a set of contending spiritual dispositions informing to various degrees the lives of about one-third of the world’s population’. Spirituality indicates ‘individual and collective dispositions to judgement and action that have some degree of independence from the formal creeds or beliefs of which they are a part. The relationship between creed and spirituality is real but loose . . . (containing) a variety of possible nuances’. In any particular ‘state-capital-Christian imbrication’, all these diverse elements are imbricated, intercalated, infused, incorporated (words Connolly likes) in their own special way. Connolly addresses the notion of causality within these complexes head-on. State-capital-Christian imbrications preclude attempts to define each component autonomously. ‘Each element sometimes forms a volatile force, variously surging into the others and containing energetic uncertainties within itself that might agitate its companion. The stability of each, thus depends significantly upon the balance that each element maintains with several others; the emergence of disequilibrium in one is apt to bump or jump into the others too.’ ‘Causality,