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Native Faith (not) only for Men: Gendering Extreme Right-Wing Slavic Neopaganism in Poland
Mariusz Filip
Pantheon: Journal for the Study of Religions, 2015
The paper is focusing on the question of gender in extreme right-wing Slavic Neopaganism in Poland. My aim is to explore the position(s) of women within this movement. I investigate the rival views of the male-female relationship – subordination and partnership – by comparing two groups related on ideological and personal level, and yet organized according opposing priciples. The example of Zakon Zadrugi “Północny Wilk” exercising the principle “only for men”, and Zakon Krwi Aryjskiej (with a female section Bogini Wojny) exercising the principle “not only for men”, allow me to follow some changes occurring within Neopagan movement in Poland. gender, men's studies, women's studies, Neopaganism, National Socialism, Native Faith, Zadruga, Poland
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Nordic Paganism/Shamanism, Vikings, White Supremacists Imaginary, Viking Past, Neo-paganism/Neo-Shamanism, and Far-right Religio-Nationalism Bigotry
Damien Marie AtHope
Religious Nationalism Around the World “In order to understand the role of religion in modern nationalism, it’s important to first recognize that nationalism is, at its most fundamental level, a form of identity.” “Religion’s powerful impact on modern politics may seem obvious, but for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was an assumption among social scientists that religion was destined to wither away. So, as nationalism exploded in the nineteenth century, religion often played a smaller role in society as it gave way to newer and more secular notions of society. For example, in addition to replacing the monarchy with a republic, the humanist revolutionaries of the French Revolution also transformed Catholic churches into “Temples of Reason.” Both the monarchy and the Church became anachronisms. After all, who needs the Church when you have reason?” “And yet, religion refused to go away. By the late-twentieth century, clear reminders of the importance of religion in the modern world were abundant. In Europe alone, the Troubles in Northern Ireland between Protestants and Catholics, the genocide in Srebrenica carried out by Orthodox Serbs against Muslim Bosniaks, and the Catholic-fueled Solidarity movement in Poland all showed the importance of religion in modern politics and modern nations. Scholars now recognize that modernity can in fact undermine religion, as was predicted for many years, but the very same modernization is also destabilizing. And as the pace of change accelerates in the world around us, that instability is disconcerting, and it can lead us to seek out those forces that provide us with a greater context and help us to feel more grounded. In that way, the chaos of the modern world can actually strengthen religion.” “In order to understand the role of religion in modern nationalism, it’s important to first recognize that nationalism is, at its most fundamental level, a form of identity. It tells us who we are, and that in turn can impact our values, our purpose, and our sense of where we belong. And like all forms of identity, nationalism is inherently tied to the concept of “the other.” If you pause and think about your core identities—whether that be your national identity, ethnicity, gender, occupation, religion, or role in your family—each identity is shaped in response to what you are not. The identity of fathers is shaped in response to what sets them apart from both mothers and children. The identity of Protestants is shaped in response to what distinguishes them from Catholics. Similarly, American national identity is tied to those values and characteristics that distinguish it from other nations. Universal characteristics aren’t useful in-group identification. As a result, national groups are always informed and shaped by the traits that distinguish them from other groups.”
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Primal Roots: Ancestry and Race in Extreme Music Discourses
Irina Maria Manea
In the following essay our discussion will center around the problem of identity building within the extreme heavy metal scene, which resorts to certain myths, images and stereotypes in its lyrical discourses in order to empower this identity. We are investigating one recurrent theme which is the preoccupation for heritage and ancestry and therefore the attempt to revive what is perceived as traditional and authentic. New heathenism is an evergrowing phenomenon that opposes a highly idealized and glorified past to a modernity conceived as corrupted and non-authentic, seeking to offer an alternative to it through its laudatory rhetoric about history, religion and nature. Nuances of this ideological trend can be encountered in the lyrical discourses of Black and Pagan Metal, underground music scenes which also display a traditional and conservative tendency, but which can also degenerate into more extremist forms such as racism. How and why are they exploring these trends, how can we integrate them into a broader historical context and why is the reception of the past so important to them are a few of the aspects we are going to address.
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Context Is EverythingContext Is Everything: Plurality and Paradox Plurality and Paradox in Contemporary European Paganisms
Kathryn Rountree
2015
Modern Pagan and Native Faith groups and movements have sprung up across Europe-as in the rest of the world-in recent decades, yet comparatively little has been published about them compared with the extensive literature on British and American Pagans and Pagan traditions. 1 This is beginning to change, especially in relation to Central and Eastern Europe. 2 All such movements, wherever they are, share some important characteristics-especially the valorization of human relationships with the rest of nature and polytheistic cosmologies-and could be said to belong to a global new religious phenomenon, albeit one that frequently invokes ancient religions. 3 But local expressions are extremely diverse-even within a single country-in terms of their beliefs, practices, values and politics. The relative importance of ecology, magic, ethnic politics and indigenous tradition varies enormously. Amidst this variety, large numbers of Pagans and Native Faith followers participate in global communities and communication networks via the Internet, bypassing cultural and geographical boundaries. 4 Thus they have it both ways, asserting the primacy of the local while enjoying connections with, and often borrowing from, their counterparts in other places. This volume examines a variety of such groups and movements across the European region, many of whose goals involve the construction of authentic, indigenous, personal and group identities in the face of hegemonic, pan-regional and globalizing forces during a challenging period in Europe. Often side by side, there are revival or
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"Men Constructing Masculinity in Polish Rodzimowierstwo: Tradition and Nature", Pantheon. Pardubice, 2015
Scott Simpson
Polish Rodzimowiercy frequently endorse a form of gender essentialism. Males and females are seen to have essentially equal but different roles in life. In seeking appropriate gender models, male Rodzimowiercy use at least four sets of paradigms: natural and biological phenomena as signposts towards proper behavior; the roles of pre-Christian and rural society as models for behavior; modern Rodzimowierstwo leaders and elders as models for behavior; and Gods as archetypical exemplars of character and behavior. Polytheism offers multiple models of masculinity which can be emulated by mortal men, as appropriate to different circumstances and stages of life. Even if the models for male and female behavior are essentially different, they are not essentially singular models for each.
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Walking the Old Ways: Studies in Contemporary European Paganism (2012)
Adam Anczyk
2012
Contemporary Paganism is often described by its followers as a revival or reconstruction of the religions of pre-Christian Europe, which is sometimes referred to as "The Old Way". Most followers of the Neo-Pagan movement state revitalisation of the Old Faith is not only a matter of individual choice of religion that is strongly rooted in tradition, but also a new form of spirituality that can change the World. This book presents various ways of conceptualizing Paganism in contemporary Europe and offers some possible answers to the question: where the Old Ways will lead us in the future?
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THE ATTITUDES OF THE CONTEMPORARY POLES TOWARDS THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL PAST POSTAWY WSPÓŁCZESNYCH POLAKÓW WOBEC ARCHEOLOGICZNEJ PRZESZŁOŚCI
Michał Pawleta
Folia Praehistorica Posnaniensia, 26, 2021
This paper aims to present how the past is viewed in contemporary cultural and social narratives, and defines contemporary attitude to the past among Poles. My deliberations are placed in the context of the present-day society / culture and their constituting processes, namely the phenomenon of forgetting the past, democratization of the past, its privatization / individualization, commodification of the past and new ways of experiencing it. The paper will specifically concentrate on the archaeological past-that is the past created by archaeologists, and on archaeological heritage. It address three crucial issues, namely: (1) how changes in the historical context of post-1989 Poland influenced the emergence the renaissance of the past and different narratives about it; (2) what are the most important and widespread forms of presenting and/or experiencing the archaeological past in the present?, and (3) what are the main motivations that lie behind contemporary Poles interest in the past, archaeological heritage and activities undertaken around it? Finally, it is argued that the changes in the people's attitudes towards the past have led also to a transformation in the hierarchy of aims and methods in education and dissemination of the knowledge about the past within institutions concerned with the past on a professional level.
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Gender and Sexuality
Koushik Varma
Miller Distributors Limited, 2016
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Pagan Metal Gods: The Use of Mythology and White Supremacy National Socialist Black Metal
Jillian Fischer
react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture, 2022
Black metal's relationship to National Socialism consists of a complicated nexus of historical and musicological narratives. Scholars such as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Keith Kahn-Harris, and Jeffery Kaplan have undertaken a significant amount of painstaking academic work to trace some of the histories of radical right groups, both within the black metal scene and as ideological/political movements more broadly. However, black metal has been particularly susceptible to appropriation by radical right groups, as seen in the emergence of national socialist black metal (NSBM) bands in the 1990s, which incorporate black metal's musical emphasis on heavily distorted guitars and shrieked vocals with far-right political ideologies. The question of why black metal has been especially susceptible to appropriation by those with neo-fascist and radical right viewpoints has been less considered. In this article, I will argue that the black metal scene has been appealing to national socialist group members as a result of shared interests in paganism and mythology. Through an analysis of album art, lyrics, and the musical aesthetics of three national socialist black metal bands-Burzum, Graveland, and Der Stürmer-I will demonstrate how a similar fascination with paganism and mythology allows NSBM artists to place themselves within a national socialist lineage, as well as reinforce and adapt far-right political ideologies to fit within black metal aesthetics. Paganism and pagan mythology as lyrical tropes have been established within black metal due to prominent bands incorporating it into their aesthetic. Although
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NATIONAL INDIFFERENCE CONCEPT AND CONTEMPORARY WWII MILITARY REENACTMENT IN CZECH LANDS: A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF THE GROUPS REENACTING HULTSCHIN AND ESTONIAN SS CONSCRIPTS
Petr Wohlmuth
Acta Poloniae Historica, 2024
For the first time in the Czech Republic, a research project on contemporary military re-enactment has been carried out based on oral history. The research team managed to record memory narratives of, among others, three military reenactment associations, two of which still engage in a controversial reenactment of Wehrmacht Heer units (coming from the Hultschin/Hlučín/Hulczyn region). At the same time, the third reenacts Estonian SS units. In the spirit of post-positivist oral history, the collected narratives have been analysed primarily to reveal the cultural content, forms, and processes that shape the historical subjectivity of the narrators, that is, the way they understand themselves in history. One key cultural form the narrators use is the so-called ‘national indifference’. The reenactors refuse to identify themselves ethno-culturally (and ideologically) with German or Czech/Czechoslovak warring sides. These cultural forms are further augmented with the concept of an ‘ordinary soldier’, which is well-known in reenactment studies. As a result, reenactors self-interpret themselves as subjects who reenact Axis German armies, but consciously, within liminal contexts, whilst rejecting Nazi ideology, which makes them significantly more acceptable in Czech military reenactment milieus. In this respect, the study provides a comparative view of the Hultschin and Czech Estonian SS reenactors within the context of reenactor associations.
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