A meeting place for those who prefer to take a scholarly/academic approach to Paganism, both ancient and modern.

It is important to note that there is a huge difference between thorough study and scholarship. Knowing a great deal about a field and being able to discuss it with a great deal of facility and accuracy is not scholarship.

Scholarship is a particular kind of game that requires being willing to engage in a particular kind of hoop-jumping.

This is *not* a tribe simply for intelligent discourse. It is a place for people with scholarly intent to come together and to foster a climate for lending credibility to Paganism in the academy.

Membership by scholars with advanced (i.e., Masters and above) degrees is encouraged but is not a requirement.

By "scholarly," the creator of this tribe means that information can be documented and that primary sources (original writings or field study) can be traced.

In other words, footnotes are our friends, and folklore is not to be confused with research... unless it's research in folklore. Likewise, it is to be assumed that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data."

Feel free to use your own working definitions of words like "Pagan" and "religion," but be able to back it up with scholarship, not just opinion.

If you delight in making inferential leaps, please have a rationally supportable idea of where you were standing when you achieved liftoff.

If you can read Heraclitus in the original Greek or Giordano Bruno in the Italian, so much the better...

Ideally, we will be able to share information toward building a network of scholarly resources that would be acceptable as bibliographic material in the Academy.

It is assumed that you have a theoretical foundation in some discipline regarding Paganism: Religious Studies, Anthropology, Classics, Theology, Folklore, Linguistics, or Sociology, for example.

It is also assumed that you are able to name your social and theoretical location and your preferred hermeneutic, i.e., your basic approach to your scholarship, and how those things impact what you have to say to this diverse group.

We are not here to argue theoretical foundations--those are the domain of our individual disciplines. We are here for interdisciplinary cooperation and affirmation.

In the early life of this tribe, a lot of energy got directed toward alligators, in whom we seemed to be up to our asses, and it was easy to lose sight of the fact that our initial objective was to drain the swamp. Most of the early threads from this tribe have been deleted so that the wrangling may be forgotten (by the Moderator, mainly, who has too good a memory of times when he has been beaten up, as opposed to beaten in battles of wits).

Let us support one another in the pursuit of knowledge rather than sidetracking ourselves arguing theory.

Plain old breeze-shooting is discouraged here, because ideally these archives will serve as a point of reference for participants. The companion tribe to this one designed for breeze-shooting is The Pagan Scholars Cafe tribes.tribe.net/paganscholarscafe.

http://tribes.tribe.net/paganscholars