(N)etnographies of Contemporary Paganisms

The “homecoming narrative” is commonly used as a description of shifts in identity within Pagan community but has been critiqued in cross-religious comparative work on conversion. My broader work explores how people develop a sense of Druidic identity within a tradition that has no authoritative texts or leaders but does have shared cultural models for understanding and acting within a relational world. In this paper, I focus specifically on the experiences that drive Druids to seek new meanings outside their religions of upbringing, how this leads to discovering Druidry, and how Druidic identity is deepened through ongoing spiritual and practical experiences. Using autoethnography, interview data, and text analysis, I examine American Druidry considering theoretical approaches drawn from ethnoecology, cognitive anthropology, and organizational anthropology in order to shed light on ways we can better understand the development of identity and community within new decentralized nature-centered religions.