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Norse Revival offers a thorough investigation of Germanic Neopaganism (Asatru) through an international and comprehensive historical perspective. It traces Germanic Neopaganism's genesis in German ultra-nationalist and occultist movements around 1900. Based on ethnographic research of contemporary groups in Germany, Scandinavia and North America, the book examines this alternative Neopagan religion's transformations towards respectability and mainstream thought after the 1970s. It asks which regressive and progressive elements of a National Romantic discourse on Norse myth have shaped Germanic Neopaganism. It demonstrates how these ambiguous ideas about Nordic myth permeate general discourses on race, religion, gender, sexuality and aesthetics. Ultimately, Norse Revival raises the question of whether Norse mythology can be freed from its reactionary ideological baggage.
Is research on antisemitism even necessary in countries with a relatively small Jewish population? Absolutely, as this volume shows. Compared to other countries, research on antisemitism in the Nordic countries (Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) is marginalized at an institutional and staffing level, especially as far as antisemitism beyond German fascism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust is concerned. Furthermore, compared to scholarship on other prejudices and minority groups, issues concerning Jews and anti-Jewish stereotypes remain relatively underresearched in Scandinavia – even though antisemitic stereotypes have been present and flourishing in the North ever since the arrival of Christianity, and long before the arrival of the first Jewish communities. This volume aims to help bring the study of antisemitism to the fore, from the medieval period to the present day. Contributors from all the Nordic countries describe the status of as well as the challenges and desiderata for the study of antisemitism in their respective countries.
The IASS (International Association for Scandinavian Studies) is the international organization for the research of Nordic literature, culture and linguistics. Since 1956 the IASS conference has been organized every other year. In 2016, the 31th IASS conference took place in Groningen (Netherlands). This 2016 conference revolved around the 21st century as an era characterized by dynamics with different implications. These ongoing global transitions are reflected in the humanities; the dichotomy between centre and periphery has invaded the literary discourse. In many small language areas, more translated literature is being published than literature written in the national language. This implies that cultural mediators play a major role in the production of literature. Their efforts are made visible in a transnational approach to the history of literature.
Ancestral North: Spirituality and Cultural Imagination in Nordic Ritual Folk Music offers a detailed exploration of Nordic ritual folk music, a music scene focused on the revival of ancient folkways and archaic music that has found remarkable popularity around the globe. Once the domain of Viking reenactors and neopagan practitioners, the niche sonic and visual aesthetics of this music have found widespread visibility through a new generation of popular films, television series, and video games. The authors argue that many of these musical and media products connect with longstanding cultural attitudes about the Nordic region that conceive of it as wild, exotic, and dangerous, while also being a place of honor, community, and virtue. As such, the Nordic region and its music often becomes a vessel for reactionary escapes from all manner of modern discontentment. However, the authors also posit that spending time re-creating the music of an imaginary past offers participants the possibility for engagement and re-enchantment in the multicultural present.
Despite the understanding of scholars that masculinity, far from being a natural or stable concept, is in reality a social construction, the culture at large continues to privilege an idealized, coherent male point of view. The Privilege of Crisis draws on the work of authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad--as well as contemporary postcolonial writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith--to show how recurrent references to a "crisis" of masculinity or the decline of masculinity serve largely to demonstrate and support positions of male privilege.
Scholars of religion have always been fascinated by asceticism. Some have even regarded this radical way of life-- the withdrawal from the world, combined with practices that seriously affect basic bodily needs, up to extreme forms of self-mortification --as the ultimate form of a true religious quest. This view is rooted in hagiographic descriptions of prominent ascetics and in other literary accounts that praise the ascetic life-style. Scholars have often overlooked, however, that in the history of religions ascetic beliefs and practices have also been strongly criticized, by followers of the same religious tradition as well as by outsiders. The respective sources provide sufficient eviden...
In the Hobsbawmian long 19th century, gender and processes of sexualization and feminization have been crucial in the construction of the »Jewish Other«. Ulrike Brunotte explores how these processes came about by addressing imaginative, aesthetic, and epistemological questions. She analyzes how literature, psychoanalysis and the performing arts traverse and react to the ambivalence of racialized stereotypes. The »femininity puzzle« presents itself in two ways: first in the role of effeminization of the male Jew in antisemitic discourse, and then in the transgressive forms of femininity connected to Jewish women, especially the allosemitic orientalization in the figure of the »Beautiful Jewess«.
Is the Germanic god Wotan (Odin) really an archaic archetype of the Spirit? Was the Third Reich at first a collective individuation process? After Friedrich Nietzsche heralded the "death of God," might the divine have been reborn as a collective form of self-redemption on German soil and in the Germanic soul? In Jung’s Wandering Archetype Carrie Dohe presents a study of Jung’s writings on Germanic psychology from 1912 onwards, exploring the links between his views on religion and race and providing his perspective on the answers to these questions. Dohe demonstrates how Jung’s view of Wotan as an archetype of the collective Germanic psyche was created from a combination of an ancient d...
This book explores the entanglements of gender and power in spiritual practices and analyzes strategies used by spiritual practitioners to attain what to social scientists might seem an impossible goal: creating spiritual communities without creating gendered hierarchies. What strategies do people within these networks use to attain gender equality and gendered empowerment? How do they try to protect and develop individual freedom? How do gender and power nevertheless play a role? The chapters in this book together and separately demonstrate that, in order to understand contemporary spirituality, the analytical lenses of gender and power are essential. Furthermore, they show that it is not p...
The nursing process generally is understood as key element of professional nursing care in Germany. This study follows this argument back to the introduction of the nursing process in the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, the German healthcare system underwent dramatic changes and economic reorganization, which can be understood as the emergence of the neoliberal rationale in Germany. The argument of cost explosion was used to restructure hospitals into enterprises that were to operate based on the logic of the market. Its cybernetic logic made the nursing process an ideal instrument to restructure nursing care. Perspectives of governmentality and critical accounting reveal the nursing process as an accounting tool which has made nursing calculable. And while German nurses valued its potential for professionalization, the findings suggest that a newly constituted accountable nursing vocation can instead be considered as de-professionalizing.