‘And Raise Me Up a Golden Barrow’

The stories we tell ourselves about our beginnings are a vital part of our sense of identity and belonging. For Druids living in the UK those stories tend to be deeply rooted in a sense of connectedness with the landscape and with the ‘Ancestors’, usually situated in an imagined and often idealized pre-Christian past. Since the time of William Stukeley, himself associated with the Druid Revival of the Eighteenth Century; the Druids have been associated in the popular romantic imagination with the ancient burial mounds that proliferate in the landscape. The fact that this association is not historically correct has done little to weaken its power. This paper will focus on the construction, in recent years, of a number of barrows, mimicking the Neolithic monuments, and designed to take human cremated remains in niches built into the construction. The fact that this initiative has proved hugely popular with Druids, but also with many others testifies to the power that the barrows hold over the imagination. Why is this? What stories are being told about the barrows, and do those stories have to say about connections to ‘deep time’, to the land, to each other, to community and to the future.

The narratives of ethnocentric Buddhist identity

This article describes several narratives in Southeast Asian Buddhism. I use the term ‘ethnocentric Buddhism’ to describe these. Collectively, they contribute to the formulation of Buddhist identity, particularly in modern Myanmar. They are based upon a localized form of Buddhism which is often at odds with more universalistic understandings of Buddhism. These new and emerging Buddhist identities are often protectionist in their outlook. They also embrace forms of action which are sometimes in considerable tension with more passive forms of Buddhist behavior. The national and ethnic concerns they represent evoke a rhetoric of intolerance and discrimination which are often violent in their expression. The description of these narratives has the aim of understanding Buddhist ideas and practices that contribute to the emergence of a chauvinistic and nationalistic Buddhist identity.

Unity in Diversity

Interfaith Scotland (IFS) represents a substantial number of religious bodies in Scotland and the representation of non-Christian religious minorities is fundamental to the interfaith movement. In a country in which religious minorities make up a tiny fraction of the population, in comparison with England and other European countries, narratives of diversity have become more prominent in the public sphere. Interfaith Scotland has depended on the world religions paradigm to promote its version of religious pluralism as embodied in its structure and represented in its literature, reinforcing the equivalency and paramount importance of the ‘major traditions’, while groups which do not fit neatly into one of these traditions have no representation on the organisation’s governing board. On the other hand, the world religions approach means that religious groups like the Scottish Pagan Federation are re-made according to that mould in Interfaith literature, with stress on an overarching intellectualised tradition constructed from disparate sources. This closely parallels the processes out of which the world religions paradigm arose in the 19th century with the construction of ‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’ and other world religions as discrete intellectualised traditions.

Politics before God

America’s 2018 midterm elections provide an opportunity to assess white evangelical Protestants’ counterintuitive embrace of Trump. Reports of the President’s past infidelities, suspicious business deals, and possible electoral collusion with Russia appear to have done little to abate the support of America’s most socially conservative law-and-order voters - white evangelical Protestants. PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) data demonstrates though Trump never polled above 50 percent favourability with white evangelical-Protestants during the primaries, since his 2016 election the constituency has only grown more ‘Trump-drunk’ with a record 75 percent endorsing the President and his commitment to put ‘America First’. Although America’s Christian right have long-standing Republican inclinations, evangelicals’ self-abasement under Trump remains difficult to understand. White evangelicals have migrated from a Christian movement guilty of overt partisan identification to a movement willing to corrupt their faith values and religious tradition for political opportunities. The effect, as Gerson (2018) notes, is a faith tradition now riddled with ‘political tribalism and hatred for political opponents, with little remaining of Christian public witness.’ Keller cuts deeper, saying ‘evangelical’ used to mean those who took the moral high ground, but now it’s nearly synonymous with ‘hypocrite’ (Keller cited in Gerson, 2018). ‘With an end-justifies-the-means style of politics that would have been unimaginable before [Trump]’ (Jones cited in Coppins 2018a), it seems America’s evangelicals are putting politics before God. Subsequently, this article reflects on four dimensions of Trump’s success with white evangelicals. First, it discusses howTrump and the GOP presented 2016 as the ‘last chance election’. Secondly it explores Trump’s ‘priestly rhetoric’ and evangelicals’ ‘priestly faith’ in him. Thirdly, what have white evangelical-Protestants achieved under Trump in return for their votes? Lastly, how has Trump changed American evangelicalism and the nation? Is nativism and tribalism consuming their faith-tradition just as it’s dividing the country?

The British Nativity Play

Year upon year the scene is set for what has, for many in Britain, become a strikingly and tangibly familiar image of Christmas and ultimately of childhood. Shepherds fiddle distractedly with their tea-towels. Angels preen their sparkly foil wings and hoist up their white woollen tights. Proudly bejewelled Kings fight over makeshift cardboard crowns. The school nativity play has become an ingrained part of British culture, and perhaps even something of a rite of passage. Despite the continuing prevalence and popularity of this ritualized narrative in British churches and schools, this phenomenon has not, until now, attracted any sustained academic study. This paper discusses four qualitative interviews I conducted in 2016 with parents whose children had recently performed in a nativity play at a non-faith state primary school in London. Examining how these parents interpreted their experiences, understandings, and memories of this dramatized narrative, I consider how the religious/cultural narrative is retold and reinterpreted through and in relation to personal life narratives. I draw upon anthropological and psychological theories of meaning seeking, memory making, and identity construction to explore how personal participation in, connection to, and narration of cultural/religious narratives might impact the type of valueattributed to their contents.

Claiming Identity, Delineating Category

Identity is an important focus for discourse in the contemporary world, used as an indicator of elements that are felt by an individual to be an important part of how they see and understand themselves. Self-identification commonly employs terms that can also be used to signify an analytic category, and the understanding that underlies these different uses is often neither wholly shared nor entirely distinct. Recognition of different use is thus potentially significant in research related to the groups, behaviours or concepts signified by such terms. This paper utilises concepts of religion(ing) and kink - both terms which can be, and are, used as claimed identities and as analytic categories - to reflect upon the porosity of such concepts when they are deployed in individual and academic narratives. Qualitative research into kink (understood as a marker of identity) is used to explore how personalised practices contribute to religioning processes (understood as a category label). This offers opportunities to consider how personalised practices contribute to the religioning processes of world- and/or meaning- and/or story-making, and also demonstrates the porosity of concepts like kink and non-kink, religious and non-religious, as they are constructed, maintained and/or disrupted within individual and academic narratives.

Millennialist Narrative and Apocalyptic Violence

The Babi movement of Iran came to a society in the nineteenth century that had a set millennialist narrative, which included an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good (led by the Imam Mahdi) and evil. Its founder, the Bab, at first appeared to claim to be just the intermediary for the Imam Mahdi, but later claimed to be the Imam Mahdi himself. This set in train expectations that the apocalyptic narrative of violence would begin. The writings and actions of the Bab were provocative, but there was nothing in them to suggest an initiation of violence. Indeed, he specifically held back from calling for a jihad, which the Imam Mahdi was expected to do. Over a period of time, however, the Islamic clerics escalated matters, calling on the state to intervene to halt the spread of the movement. This led eventually to violent confrontations in three locations in Iran in 1848-1850 and an attempted assassination of the Shah in 1852. This paper looks at the events of 1848-50 and describes how the apocalyptic narrative played out. It frames the events that occurred within the theoretical schema of assaulted, fragile and revolutionary millennialist groups suggested by Wessinger and examines the stages in the escalation of the conflict, the narratives that informed this, and specifically at those factors that increased the likelihood of violence. It also examines developments after 1852 that moved the focus of the religion, now called the Baha'i religion, from catastrophic millennialism (pre-millennialism) to progressive millennialism (post-millennialism).

Scientism and Post-Truth

The last decades have seen an increasing interest towards Shamanism in the Western world, both among scholars and those who practise shamanism. The academic interest has been mainly focussed on identifying the differences between forms of contemporary Shamanism in the West and traditional Shamanisms as experienced among indigenous peoples. A related aspect that needs further development in the field is the analysis of the philosophical underpinning that lies behind this relatively new religious tradition and its manifestations. Initial findings, derived from data collected as part of a research project on autochthonous and trans-cultural Shamanism in Italy, suggest that there are two paradigms shaping the neo-shamanic experiential approach. I will start by clarifying the notion of paradigm as the founding basis of every reasoning process, cultural production and hence religious movement. Then, I will argue that the Scientistic and Post-truth paradigms represent two founding bases of Neo-shamanism and its scholarly recognised traits and will conclude by addressing the issue of a potential contradiction between the two will be addressed.

Old Tool for New Times

This paper aims to show how different typologies of narration can be involved in the place-making process of a religious centre in India based on the claim of a yogi to have discovered in a jungle an ancient holy place, Garh Dhām, through his powers. As recorded by a devotee-run website, it was claimed to be the same place where King Surath met the sage Medha – as narrated in theDevīMāhātmya, a famous section of the Markaṇḍeya Purāṇa – and where the first ever Durgā Pūjā (worship) was ‘historically’ celebrated. The ‘discoverer’ is a yogi, Brahmānand Girī, who living in jungle was able to find hidden temples thanks to his austerity (tapasyā) and yogic powers (siddhis). The narration of his life story and of his powers recalls those appearing in Indian hagiographies and texts that describe siddhis. The discovery of a holy place by a yogi does not represent an isolated case since similar discoveries dot the history of Hindu religious orders. As in these latter cases, the place-making process of Garh Dhām aims to give authority and legitimacy to the foundation of a new religious centre and so to further spread the Durgā cult in the area and to attract pilgrims.