Ok… this is not exactly what was asked for… but it is what I have at the moment!
-Thad
The Neopagan religion of Heathenry (a movement to reconstruct / revive the practices, beliefs, and worldviews of pre-Christian northern Europe) has largely been approached by scholars either in the context of studies of explicit white supremacy by bizarre and marginal groups (Kaplan 1996, 1997; Gardell 2003; Goodrick-Clark 2003) or as primarily descriptive accounts (usually in passing) within contemporary pagan studies (Harvey 1997; Berger, Leach, and Shaffer 2003; Berger 2005; Clifton 2006; Davy 2007). This bipolar differentiation in approach disregards the significance of race in Heathenry as a whole (as well as in the broader Pagan movement) as well as disassociating radical and explicit white supremacy from the spectrum of white racial identifications of which it is a part.
Rather than tending toward a focus on what Mattias Gardell (2003) has labeled the radical racist segment of Heathenry, as most in-depth studies have thus far, it will be important for studies to look at the way other Heathens (Gardell’s antiracist and ethnic categories) discursively negotiate and construct relationships with whiteness as a category of racial identification.
Thesis and Scope
Howard Winant (1994) has noted that since the cultural upheavals of the Civil Rights era there has been a distinct crisis of identity for white Americans.
The prospect that whites may not constitute a clear majority nor exercise unquestioned racial domination in various institutional settings has led to a crisis of white identity. As previous assumptions erode, white identity loses its transparency, the easy elision with ‘racelessnes’ that has accompanied racial dominance since the end of the Reconstruction period in 1877. Today the very meaning of ‘whiteness’ has become a matter of anxiety and concern. In this respect, whites have been racialized in the post-civil rights era (Winant, 1994, 64).
Many have sought to emphasize “ethnicity” over “race” as a result of this crisis and the alterations to racial and ethnic relations it has entailed. Emphasizing identities such as English, German, Irish, Italian, and the like was conceived of as a way to diminish the significance of a monolithic white racial identity. However, the further and further away the majority of white Americans get from “old country” origins, the less and less those traditional ethnicities mean. Most identify more fully with a white, “Euro-American” racial identity than with any more specific European ethnicity. [Even those who do think this way are still treated, and socially constructed/located as white.]
Not all Heathens are white, but the overwhelming majority are, if for no other reason than that the link to “Germanic” heritage provides much greater social capital and opportunities for identification for whites than non-whites. Heathen positions on issues of race and ethnicity range the gamut from explicit white-supremacist neo-Nazis, for whom white racial purity is a primary concern, to adamantly multiculturalist, political liberals who insist that their religious choice has nothing to do with either race or ethnicity. Most Heathens find themselves somewhere between these two poles, and the divisiveness of the constant squabbling over race leads to a widespread frustration with the debate, which has been actively waged for approximately four decades now. Most Heathens can tell you with a great deal of accuracy where they stand within this complex and shifting field of contested identities, however, and it remains one of the primary issue over which they differentiate themselves from one another.
My working hypothesis is that Heathenry serves its participants as (among many other functions) a field for the negotiation, contestation, and definition of racial and ethnic identifications for white Americans after the Civil Rights movement. Civil Rights undermined the casual and easy superiority of white identity. Race, ethnicity, and religion (among a number of other related terms) are all discursive categories of identification which are actively contested by means of projects of identification which articulate not only the meaningful content of, but also the structural relationship of these categories. It is hardly the only location for such negotiation. Other religious and political movements (such as Christian Identity and the Tea Party phenomenon) serve as similar arenas for the negotiation and contestation of whiteness. Heathenry, however, is the point of overlap between the rapidly growing Neopagan religious phenomena and radical racists, with substantial numbers having left Christian Identity churches (for example) to participate in Heathenry (Gardell 2003, Kaplan 1997).
This work will depend centrally on the racial formation theory of Michael Omi and Howard Winant. Omi and Winant (1994) theorize “race” not as an objectively real thing, but rather as a socially constructed and contested category. The “content” of the category of race is not set an unquestionable, but it rather the subject of racial projects, efforts to articulate and determine what both race as a category in general and particular racial identities more particularly mean. These projects influence and struggle over the significance and meaning to be attributed to racial identifications and the relative status / hierarchy to be observed between them. Rogers Brubaker (2004) demonstrates that ethnicity, race, and nation are “perspectives on the world rather than entities in the world” (Brubaker, 4). Similarly to Omi and Winant, Brubaker demonstrates the unstable and contested nature of racial (as well as ethnic and national) identification. These thinkers are foundational to my understandings of the overlap, conflict, and negotiation of race, ethnicity, and religion. The theorizing of Pierre Bourdieu (1998) regarding the constitution of fields, and the role of habitus, capital, active position takings, and trajectories within those fields will contribute substantially to my analysis of overlapping fields such as Heathenry, whiteness, race, religion, ethnicity, and the like. His understanding of the dynamics within and between fields will play a substantial role in framing my analysis of Heathen negotiations of religiously and racially defined social locations and group boundaries. I will also be attempting to keep actively in mind the call by Brubaker to disaggregate both data and theory. In particular I will seek to follow his advice to avoid discussion of “identity” in favor of more specific terminology (self-identification, identification-by-others, categories, organizations, projects, etc…)
Methodology
Published materials by Heathens themselves about Heathenry have expanded exponentially over just the last few years and academic research focusing on the movement has thus far been almost exclusively ethnographic in focus ((Kaplan 1996, 1997; Blain 2002, 2004; Gardell 2003, Snook 2008). An analysis of racial and ethnic identification projects must take into account the public face which the voices of Heathenry are presenting to their allies and enemies, as well as to potential converts. Therefore, it seems advisable to investigate this movement literature more closely than has been done thus far.
This project is not intended to serve as a full or exhaustive analysis of published Heathen literature. Such a project becomes increasingly unrealistic by the day. What I do wish to accomplish, is to give a number of particularly located snapshots of current identity projects within contemporary Heathenry. I wish to explore the dynamics of their interactions with surrounding groups and ideologies and their construction and maintenance of categories, groups, and other sorts of identifications so as to shed light on and promote the understanding of the processes involved. I will be particularly focusing on ethnic, racial, and religious identification; though national, gendered, and sexual identifications of various sorts are sure to be involved in the analysis as well. In intend to focus on cases within Gardell’s ethnic and antiracist categories.
Through discourse analysis of these documents, I plan to look at the ways race, ethnicity, nationality, heritage, culture, religion, spirituality, and other related categories of identification are constructed and presented as cultural products in relation to other similar categories within the broader context of U.S. society. My goal is to reach a greater understanding of they ways these categories are used by Heathens to negotiate relative positions within the various fields of U.S. political, religious, and racial/ethnic identification.
Significance
Virtually all previous substantial work done on Heathenry has looked specifically at the overlaps of Heathenry and explicit white supremacy/separatism. This is certainly an important topic of study, but it runs the risk of sensationalizing the topic rather than investigating how and why it occurs. One substantial strain of Heathenry (called Odinism by Jeffrey Kaplan (1997)) derives directly from early 20th century ethnonationalist movements (of which the Nazis are a prominent example). The other major strain of Heathenry (which Kaplan calls Ásatrú) arose during the early 1970s (the period of the Civil Rights movement), and has been the site of serious contestation over race and ethnicity for the intervening four decades. Focusing only on the explicit and open racism (which overlaps with neo-Nazi organizations, Christian Identity churches, and the like) is to ignore the significance of the negotiating the dangerous waters of whiteness that occur through the rest of the movement. Kaplan’s Ásatrú spectrum of Heathenry, in fact, has much more to contribute to our understandings of the negotiation of racial identifications among the average white American than do those openly and proudly racist folks he calls Odinists.
Heathenry is the location of ongoing debate, contestation, and negotiation of the relationship between race, ethnicity, and religion and the content and structural significance of each of these categories. Understanding this negotiation is of serious significance to understanding the construction, presentation, and marketing of white supremacist and separatist ideologies. Also, as pointed out by Gardell (2003), Heathenry is the point of contact and overlap between the radical racist right and Neopaganism, which according to the American Religious Identification Survey has been the (exponentially) fastest growing variety of religion in the United States for most of the last decade. The role of racial and ethnic identification in this spectrum of religions will be of increasing significance to studies of race and religion in the United States whether or not these growth trends continue.
Chapter Outline:
1) Heathenry
This chapter will give an overview of Heathenry as a movement. I will discuss Heathen practices, beliefs, worldviews, and social structures, as well as the history of the movement. Substantial space will need to be committed to the divisions within Heathenry over issues of race and ethnicity. I will also discuss in this chapter the fit, or lack thereof, of the term “religion,” particularly as this relates to issues of racial and ethnic identification.
2) The Problems of Previous Scholarship
Here I will discuss the previous scholarship on Heathenry. I will pay particular attention to work which discusses the issues of race and ethnicity. I will discuss the ways that the theoretical approaches used in these works serve to exoticize white supremacist Heathens and discursively distance them in problematic ways from more mainstream or “normal” struggles with the contemporary meaning of whiteness.
3) My Relationship to Heathenry
My own social location in regard to Heathenry is complex and highly relevant to my approach to this topic. My fifteen years of participation and continued adherence to the movement clearly influence how and why I deal with this material. I intend to (briefly) lay out my history with the movement and then discuss my perspectives, concerns, and agendas as a white, male, Heathen scholar studying problematic issues within my own community. This will need to include a discussion of objectivity /subjectivity. Without this chapter I do not see that I can responsibly and ethically do this work.
4) Racial Formation, Rogers Brubaker, and Ethnopolitical Projects
I will discuss in depth here the theoretical framework I am using for understanding “race,” “ethnicity,” and “religion” (among others) as categories of Identification. I will especially deal with the theoretical writings of Michael Omi, Howard Winant, and Rogers Brubaker. This chapter will allow me to formulate the conceptions of these categories as negotiated projects which will be central to the rest of the work.
5) Whiteness
The connections between whiteness and Heathenry require a thorough discussion of the history and genealogy of the term, as well as theoretical understandings of the category in its contemporary contexts. This chapter will, among other topics, discuss the relationship of white racial identification to imperial Christendom and U.S. (ethno)nationalism.
6) Subcultural Identity Theory and Othering
Working from Christian Smith’s subcultural identity theory and postcolonial discussions of “othering,” I will discuss the ways Heathens negotiate their social locations and self-understandings via the drawing of symbolic boundaries with relevant outgroups (a.k.a. “othering”). I will particularly look at they way Heathens identify themselves in relation to Christianity and Wicca. This chapter will set the stage for later discussions of the symbolic negotiation of the boundaries of whiteness and the othering of those identified as non-white.
7) Nationalism: Race and Nation in the U.S.
In this chapter I will discuss the continuing relationships between white racial and U.S. national identifications. Drastically altered and highly problematized by the cultural transformations of the Civil Rights movement, I will argue that this relationship continues to inform and shape a great deal of contemporary understandings of whiteness, and not only for Heathens.
Heathen Projects of Racial and Ethnic Identification
This chapter will focus on demonstrating a number of divergent racial and ethnic projects of identification produced in published Heathen literature. I will use at least one case study form each of the three subsets of Heathenry identified by Gardell (2003). I intend to demonstrate the ways that projects across the spectrum of Heathen divisions relate to and negotiate the problems of whiteness. This will include the ways these projects deal with the relationships between whiteness and both U.S. nationalism and the lingering heritage of Christian imperialism.
9) Heathenry as a Field of Negotiation: Whiteness after Civil Rights
This final chapter will serve to bring the preceding discussions together into a solid conclusion. I will show how Heathenry serves it’s adherents as an arena for making sense of a racial identification which has lost much of it’s meaning after Civil Rights (or at least had that meaning seriously challenged and problematized). This chapter will include theoretical conclusions that will hopefully be applicable and usefully for studies outside of the specific context of Heathenry, as well as suggestions and ideas directed to practicing Heathens.
?
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Tags: Thad, thesis
