Appropriating, Romanticizing and Reimagining: Pagan Engagements with Indigenous Animism

Abstract

This chapter explores the tension between cosmopolitanism and indigeneity in contemporary Pagan engagements with the animism of indigenous cultures. Fisk discusses three modes whereby Pagan “new animism” may risk Western imperialism: first, through direct appropriation of indigenous beliefs and practices; second, through a romanticized, essentialized view of indigenous cultures; and third, through a reimagining of indigenous cosmologies as “one’s own heritage”—the mythic and religious traditions of Europe (as in Heathenism and Druidry). She argues that attempts to heal the wounds of modernity and “return” to a state of authentic connection with nature should not appropriate the worldviews of indigenous peoples—as salvific symbols or in the pretense that they are the same as those of the European past—without attending to indigenous political realities.