In this new theoretical crossroads, examining the
place of refugees in the national order of things
becomes a clarifying exercise. On the one hand, trying to understand the circumstances of particular
groups of refugees illuminates the complexity of 
the ways in which people construct, remember, and
lay claim to particular places as “homelands” or
“nations.” On the other, examining how refugees
become an object of knowledge and management
suggests that the displacement of refugees is constituted differently from other kinds of deterritorialization by those states, organizations, and
scholars who are concerned with refugees. Here,
the contemporary category of refugees is a particularly informative one in the study of the
sociopolitical construction of space and place.

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The White Goddess

National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees

List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Introduction A Native at Home: Producing Ethnographic Fragments of Neo-Shamanisms 1. 'White-Shamans': Sources for Neo-Shamans 2. Plastic Medicine Men? Appraising the 'Great Pretenders' 3. Taliesin's Trip, Wyrd Woden: Druid and Heathen Neo-Shamans 4. 'Celtic' and 'Northern' Shamanisms? Contesting the Past 5. 'Sacred' Sites? Neo-Shamans and Prehistoric Heritage 6. Waking Neolithic Ancestors: Further Controversies and 'Reburial' 7. Invading Anthros, Thieving Archos, Wannabe Indians: Academics, Neo-Shamans and Indigenous Communities Conclusion: Neo-Shamans in Post-modernity Appendix Resolution of the 5th Annual Meeting of the Tradition Elders Circle & AIM Resolution References Index

Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasy, alternative archaeologies and contemporary Pagans

This paper investigates the supposedly psychedelic Bufo toad and the allegedly psychedelic drug bufotenine, which is contained in the skin and glands of this toad. The Bufo toad has held a place in human mythologies and medicines worldwide since archaic times. Used by ancient peoples for a variety of purposes, its most spectacular effects, according to lore, involve magical and shamanic or occult uses for casting spells and for divination. In the Middle Ages, the Bufo toad was celebrated as a panacea and persecuted as a powerful poison. More recently, in the 1960s the Bufo toad was resurrected as a countercultural icon, with people purportedly licking or smoking the secretions to get high. Bufotenine has been at the center of a scientific debate since its discovery in 1893. This paper examines the extensive literature surrounding the Bufo toad and bufotenine, and untangles many of the myths and the misinformation that continue to vex both science and popular reporting. Finally, to promote further...

Bufo Toads and Bufotenine: Fact and Fiction Surrounding an Alleged Psychedelic

Magic is steeped in secrecy. Secret words supposedly open the doors to hidden treasure and remedy manifold ills; they are passed from magician to magician, like possessions, and competing practitioners contest the power of their hidden wares. Fantastic medieval witches held congress under the cover of furtive darkness and the Renaissance magi wrote their texts in garbled code. But the nature and function of this secrecy has been little explored. In contemporary England there is a burgeoning interest in the occult. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of secretive groups practice what they call magic. They have a theory of magical technology, an elaborate metaphysics, and an extensive literature that tells them how to go about their practice. This essay describes three aspects of their secrecy: the possession of secretive knowledge, the assertion of a secret-laden way of knowing different from any other way of knowing,

The Magic of Secrecy

This chapter explores linkages between forests and identity. It does this in a number of interrelating ways by considering how the very striking and rich materialities of trees and forest landscapes can become entangled in the creation of both individual and collective identities in many ways. This is often articulated through ideas of place and landscape and can operate on intermeshing scales which span from local to global. Identity here is taken as a performed and constructed outcome rather than a static and externally stable fact. The differing ways identities are performed through trees and forest landscapes, be it through work, history, culture, politics, are thus complex outcomes of entanglements between the human and the trees and forests themselves, whose physical forms and lively materialities also play a part in the bonds that exist between peoples and forests.

The White Goddess

Citations

National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees

Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasy, alternative archaeologies and contemporary Pagans

Bufo Toads and Bufotenine: Fact and Fiction Surrounding an Alleged Psychedelic

The Magic of Secrecy

Materiality and Identity – Forests, Trees and Senses of Belonging

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