Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

This paper is an analytical comparative study of young women on TikTok who adhere to goddess aesthetics and devotion to make meaning of their gender, sexuality, traumas, and self-image. By using the examples of Aphrodite, who represents the “light” side of the Divine Feminine, and Hekate, who represents the “dark” side of the Divine Feminine, we see that young women in the United States are making meaning of what they consider to be distinctively feminine traits, and using that as a means of empowerment, regardless of the colors, symbols, and themes they choose to adhere to. This paper is a digital ethnography that employs religious aesthetic and feminist theories from a lived religion perspective.

*Cry Witch!* is one of Colonial Williamsburg’s (the living history museum) most popular programs. It depicts Virginia’s best-known witch trial, the 1706 trial of Grace Sherwood. In the show, reenactors portray key characters including Sherwood and witnesses, and audience members play the jury. At the end of the hour-long performance (which includes outlandish testimonies and a woman dragged out screaming), tourists take Sherwood’s fate into their hands, and they almost always vote to condemn her of the crime of witchcraft. To better understand how self-identified witches receive this play, I interviewed 10 in the Williamsburg area to hear their opinions. In this work, I show that fantastical representations of witch trials affect present-day witches by reinforcing negative stereotypes of how women deemed evil should be punished. I also find that witch trials are not taken as seriously as other American wrongs because of how absurd they sound to modern audiences. 

Grounded in ongoing ethnographic and archival research, this presentation offers reflections on the Eponian Faerie Faith, an eclectic, nature-oriented form of contemporary Paganism that developed during the 1980s in the American Southeast. The key formulator of the Faerie Faith, Lady Epona (the late Dr. Patricia Zook, 1951-2016), combined initiatory structures drawn from Dianic Witchcraft with elements of Celtic and American New Thought philosophies (especially the work of Max Freedom Long) to offer practitioners a "shamanistic" path for personal development. While numerically small, the Eponian Faerie Faith stands as a fascinating case study for exploring the ways that new religious movements appeal to and/or invent tradition to legitimize their practices.

The “homecoming narrative” is commonly used as a description of shifts in identity within Pagan community but has been critiqued in cross-religious comparative work on conversion. My broader work explores how people develop a sense of Druidic identity within a tradition that has no authoritative texts or leaders but does have shared cultural models for understanding and acting within a relational world. In this paper, I focus specifically on the experiences that drive Druids to seek new meanings outside their religions of upbringing, how this leads to discovering Druidry, and how Druidic identity is deepened through ongoing spiritual and practical experiences. Using autoethnography, interview data, and text analysis, I examine American Druidry considering theoretical approaches drawn from ethnoecology, cognitive anthropology, and organizational anthropology in order to shed light on ways we can better understand the development of identity and community within new decentralized nature-centered religions.

One topic that has long sustained the interest of Buddhist studies scholars and historians is the advent of writing in South Asia and the early written transmission of Buddhist literature. Now that we have a large body of evidence from the Gandhāran Buddhist literary tradition, which provides the earliest extant material witnesses of Buddhist manuscripts, we can begin to ask new questions about a Gandharan scribal or literary culture. What might the regional forces have been just before and after the turn of the common era that led Buddhists to write down their texts in Gandhara? What role did Gandhara’s unique language and script (Gāndhārī/Kharoṣṭhī) play in developing its own scribal culture? Given the important role of language in the identity of different Buddhist communities, can we identify in Gandharan Buddhist materials anything like a Gandhari Buddhist language politics?

I aim to explore Yogācāra texts reflecting the Buddhist history of Sanskritization. In the northern Abhidharma and Yogācāra literature, the term vyañjana means alphabet syllable or letter for constituting expressions of Buddhist teachings. Commentators on the Abhidharmasamuccaya (AS) state that vyañjana consists of 42 arapacana syllables regarded as originally formulated in the region of Gandhāra. Following the definition of vyañjana in AS, however, the Yogācārabhūmi explains 48 alphabet syllables used for formulating Sanskrit expressions. This change reveals the Sanskritization and the Brahmanization that Yogācāra confronted and accepted. Yogācāras modified their attitude toward Sanskrit and adjusted the Buddhist terminology in accordance with the vocabulary in the Sanskrit grammar. Moreover, Yogācāra did not limit their curriculum to the Buddhist doctrine and discipline but included Sanskrit grammar, mathematics, and astronomy of the Brahman tradition. My presentation will show that the examination of Yogācāra literature helps us widen our knowledge of Sanskritization in the Buddhist tradition. Furthermore, I will also argue that Indian Yogācāra commentators in 6th C.E. were aware of this Sanskritizaiton earlier Yogācāra confronted and documented this awareness.

The Vedic knowledge form of semantic derivation is an indigenous commentarial method widely embraced across the Buddhist and Brahmanical traditions. These religious traditions utilized this method to elucidate their sacred texts, investing significant effort in reconfiguring the explanations to support their religious theory and practice. This paper delves into the diverse explanations found within the Gandhari commentaries, Pali texts, and Yaska’s Nirukta. It highlights how Buddhist texts in South Asia inherited these interpretations and showed traces of early sources in the Middle Indic forms. In the instance where a noun can be explained in a way that contradicts its current contextual usage, Buddhist commentators elaborated extensively in their commentaries to reconcile such contradictions. The study demonstrates that Buddhist semantic derivation has a longstanding tradition predating the early commentaries, consistently aligns with an underlying Buddhist ideological framework, and reflects an underlying understanding of the stable relationship between sound and its referent.

Across Buddhist literary traditions, texts are often rewritten and repurposed. Multiple tellings of stories appear in a range of forms, excerpts of certain texts are interpolated into others, editors expand and contract sources, and translations abound. This paper asks what Buddhists are doing when they engage in such practices, and with that, what revisions can reveal about South Asian Buddhist theories of language. A close, comparative reading of three related texts serves as the basis for exploring a few of the ways Theravāda Buddhists have utilized language creatively, both to bring entirely new texts into being by altering the language of earlier texts, and also to re-imagine and re-present other texts by engaging with language’s surplus of meaning.

Jean Toomer’s life (1894-1967) was marked by a series of conversions. His novel Cane – an essential work of the Harlem Renaissance – was the result of one such conversion. This paper traces Toomer’s conversions – to Quaker mysticism, for instance, or to the teaching of Georges Gurdjieff – as it challenges familiar accounts of religious conversion. While exploring white, evangelical expectations of conversion experiences, this paper interrogates the North American cultural reliance on redemption narratives as a persistent manifestation of American exceptionalism. Conversion experiences grounded Jean Toomer’s sense of self while propelling him forward on his quest for wholeness within himself and with the universe. In many ways, conversion was the work of his life. This paper explores his work and its implications for the American call to progress. Furthermore, it demonstrates the lived hybridity of mystic practice and esotericism by examining the progression of Toomer’s conversion experiences.

This paper discusses hybridization of “mystical” and “esoteric” in the thought and action of 20th century mystics Nicholas and Helena Roerich – Russian then cosmopolitan writers, artists, and peace activists. This enigmatic couple influenced Theosophy, Anthroposophy and New Age movements, but also sparked much controversy. We analyze their “Agni Yoga” book series to find three points where the boundaries between mystical and esoteric categories blur. These are (1) the architecture of transcendent reality, (2) how to access or unite with it, and (3) how this leads to practical transformation of consciousness. The Roerichs’ esoteric path connected to their interfaith cosmology of a “Fiery World” and their mysticism in action by way of world travels, peace activism, and sublime art, fusing Eastern Christian, Buddhist, Islamic and Hindu elements. Rather than artificially separate mystical and esoteric categories, we conclude it is more useful to empirically analyze more such cases along these three axes.

A People's History of Magic and Mysticism uses decolonial counter-narratives created with student scholars in a classroom setting to illuminate the less explored corners of Black theological and religious history.  Specifically Black esoteric thought, practices, and ontology of the Americas.

A consensual notion of transcendence can be drawn from the movement on the defense of the rights of Indigenous Peoples and the rights of Nature that I define as the “ethics of belonging” and its two constitutive concepts: kin relationality and ecological belonging. Kin relationality predicates that all living beings and phenomena share a familial identity. Within the value system of ecological belonging, an individual’s identity concerning the natural environment is centered on the sentiments of responsibility. Indigenous perspectives on transcendence differ from Western religious and scientific accounts regarding the motives, scope, and rewards of ritual action. Grounded in this understanding, I profile the two concepts above compared to three commonly self-transcendent states, as understood in Western contexts: compassion, gratitude, and awe. I draw similarities across Indigenous traditions, and with Western approaches to the science of religious experience, and how kin relationality and ecological belonging give rise to cultural variations.

How might small tribal nations in California's Owens Valley productively engage federal entities such as the National Forest Service when seeking to protect cultural resources and advance tribal interests? This question is at the heart of a new project focused on wildfire science, management, and mitigation in the Eastern Sierra region. Proposed by the authors of this paper to several small Owens Valley tribes, including the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, the Big Pine Paiute Tribe, and the Bishop Paiute Tribe, and now sponsored by the National Science Foundation, this project began in 2022 and will continue at least until 2025. Our paper will address two primary topics. First, we will reflect on the nature of religious and cultural claims made by our partners that have thus far escaped legibility in consultation settings. Second, we will discuss ideas for rethinking the asymmetries inherent in most consultative practices so this problem is diminished.

This paper draws on eighteenth-century manuscripts from Indigenous and non-Indigenous sources, located in Moravian archives. It explores how a spatial and environmental perspective can be used to understand the practices of eighteenth-century Mohican and Lenape Moravian Christians, rooted in a land-based epistemology. Moravian Munsee and Mohican Christians continued to prioritize the gathering and trading of medicines, as well as the protection and cultivation of ancestral corn despite being incarcerated and removed from their land. The archives also reveal the importance of traditional hunting practices and grounds, and the marks of relations with animal kin, such as clan animals. Finally, the paper examines how Indigenous interpretations of the so-called Moravian blood and wounds Christology were formed through a relation to the natural world. This includes engaging with the side wound and blood of Christ through the consumption of nurturing Maple tree sap, hiding in sheltering rock caves, and honeybees sucking nectar.

This paper investigates how TCRs are being operationalized in ways that overcome the epistemic violence and injustice of cultural resource management policies. Through semi-structured interviews with Tribal Chairs, Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (THPOs), agency planning staff, and archaeologists, I describe ongoing conflicts of interpretation between Tribal and agency approaches to state-run cultural management. Despite applications of the term that perpetuate colonial legacies by attempting to limit Indigenous relationships with the Land, Indigenous groups routinely reappropriate this and cognate terms (such as Tribal Cultural Properties, Cultural Landscapes, and Cultural Places) to advocate for their cultural heritage and the biotic health of their communities. By comparing how Tribal and agency authorities in California interpret cultural resource protection policy and, especially, the language of “cultural resources,” I offer critical insight into how conflicts over land and resources are meted out through rights-based legal structures.