Sarah M Pike
Biographic Data
| ID | 147220 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sarah M Pike |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sarah M |
| FAMILY NAME | Pike |
| SIGNATURE | PIKE S M |
| AFFILIATIONS | California State University, Chico |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 70 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Ritual responses to environmental apocalypse in activist communities
This is the text of a keynote for the International Association for the Psychology of Religion Conference held in Groningen, the Netherlands in August 2023. The talk focuses on ritualized responses to grief around the climate crisis and other environmental threats, such as wildfires. I discuss two case studies: environmental/ climate protests and Indigenous-led restoration work as examples of “ecological rituals.” Protest-performances by the Red …
Rewilding Religion for a Primeval Future
Rewilding Religion for a Primeval Future
Leaving Traces: Transformational Events and the Porosity of Human and Environment
Transformative events are described by participants as ephemeral, appearing in and then disappearing from particular landscapes. What were cities teeming with costumed participants, art, and music seem to become “empty” deserts and meadows once again. Most transformative events have some version of the rule “Leave No Trace,” yet they leave many kinds of traces, material and immaterial, intentional and unintentional. What matter stays on-site, alt…
Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking
Globalization and climate weirding are two of the leading phenomena that challenge and change the way we need to think and act within the planetary community. Modern Western understandings of human beings, animals, and the rest of the natural world and the subsequent technologies built on those understandings have thrown us into an array of social and ecological crises with planetary implications. Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and…
There’s Divinity in Everything Here’: Ritualizing Ecological Practice at Pagan Nature Sanctuaries
Contemporary Pagan nature sanctuaries across the United States feature practices such as ecosystem restoration, species preservation, and green burial. Pagans ritualize these practices in ways that both express and constitute reverential or intimate relations between humans, soil, plants, rocks, nonhuman animals, and spiritual beings. Their nature sanctuaries also express particular relationships with the more-than-human world through creating va…
Do avatars weep? Ritual and sacred space at virtual burning man
In 2020, the organizers of Burning Man, a transformational festival that serves for many participants as a spiritual destination, decided to go virtual. Some ‘Burners’ dismissed a virtual festival as a ‘video game version’ of the event, while programmers and artists developed online venues that would facilitate transformation, a sense of community, and ritual activities, especially those around ‘The Temple,’ the spiritual heart of Burning Man. Ba…
Ritual and Democracy: Protests, Publics and Performances
Ritual and Democracy explores the complex intersections of ritual and democracy in a range of contemporary, cultural and geographic contexts. This transdisciplinary and theoretically innovative volume emerged out of a workshop held at the Open University in London, organized as part of the international research project, “Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource”, funded by the Norwegian Research Council and led by Jone Salomonsen. Th…
The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism
Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource
Diverse processes of democratic participation– and exclusion – are closely bound by ritual acts and complexes. This collection is the result of collaborations and conversations between international researchers who have focused on the use of those cultural resources identifiable as “ritual” as they reassemble democracy. The main question integrating the collection concerns the ways in which the performative qualities of ritual resources achieve t…
Chapter 7. Rites of Grief and Mourning
Rewilding Hearts and Habits in the Ancestral Skills Movement
This ethnographic study of the ancestral skills movement focuses on the ways that participants use tools in practices such as fire making and bow hunting to ritualize relationships with the more-than-human natural world. Ethnographic methods were supplemented with Internet research on the websites of teachers, schools, and organizations of this movement that emerged in North America in the 1980s and has recently experienced rapid growth. At ances…
Into the Forest
Tree-sits and similar actions are simultaneously rites of passage and rites of protest as activists’ deepening commitments to other species are shaped by love and feelings of kinship in the context of forest activism. Activists create protests as spaces apart, as the larger-than-human world becomes more real to them and the human society they were born into becomes more distant. In these spaces, they seek to decolonize and rewild what has been do…
Childhood Landscapes of Wonder and Awe
Chapter Three focuses on the experience of wonder within the landscape of childhood and introduces the notion that activists’ inner histories composed of memories and childhood experiences are brought to and emerge during activist gatherings and direct actions. The extent to which the remembered childhood landscape is imbued with wonder may affect the strength of activists’ grief over destroyed landscapes and mistreatment of nonhuman animals. At …
Circles of Community, Strategies of Inclusion
Chapter Six analyzes the efforts of activists to create community by bringing together people with different agendas and backgrounds and the resultant tensions and conflicts that come about in the process. I look closely at activists’ work to connect environmental and animal rights activism with concerns about social justice, especially with regard to people of color. Activist gatherings are imagined as free and open spaces of inclusivity and equ…
Rites of Grief and Mourning
Through the study of grief over lost places, tree friends, whole species, and human comrades, I suggest that protests can be understood as rites of mourning. Memories of childhood wonder, feelings of love and kinship for other species, empathizing with oppressed human communities, raging at injustice with hardcore bands, all make the loss of friends and other species keenly felt as activists face the realities of mass extinction and climate chang…
Conclusion
In the book’s Conclusion, I explore what it means to act “for the wild” and “for the animals” throughout one’s lifespan. Radical animal rights and environmental activism can be seen in relation to other radical protests of the early twenty-first century, including Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock Dakota Pipeline protest, as well as anti-government protests on the Right. I conclude by suggesting what this study has, in …
At the Turn of the Millennium: Youth Culture and the Roots of Contemporary Activism
Chapter Two lays out some historical context for the other chapters by charting the convergence of youth culture, North American spiritual and political movements, and environmental and animal rights activism. Radical activism among young adults emerged from the conjunction of a number of historical forces such as anarchism, Paganism and deep ecology. These forces shaped the particular ways activism has come to be expressed within the radical env…
“Liberation’s Crusade Has Begun”: Hare Krishna Hardcore Youth and Animal Rights Activism
Chapter Five explores the interweaving of music, Hindu religious beliefs, and activism motivated by rage in the context of hardcore punk rock. In this chapter, I describe the unlikely convergence of hardcore punk rock, Krishna Consciousness, and animal rights in youth subcultural spaces in order to understand how the aural and spiritual worlds created by some bands shaped the emergence of radical animal rights. At times these music scenes nurture…
Freedom and Insurrection around a Fire
Chapter 1 introduces the reader to activists’ lives and work and provides background on the communities I most often interacted with. It consists of a thick description of an Earth First! gathering I attended and the anti-fracking protest that took place at the end of the action.
For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism
For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism
Drawing on analyses of activist art, music, and writings, as well as interviews and participant-observation in activist communities and at protests, For the Wild explores the ways in which radical environmental and animal rights activists’ commitments develop through powerful experiences with the other-than-human world during childhood and young adulthood. The book addresses the question of how and why activists come to value nonhuman animals and…
Mourning Nature: The Work of Grief in Radical Environmentalism
Radical environmental and animal rights activists mourn nonhuman others in a variety of ways that express their kinship with these others and strengthen their commitments to radical causes. Grief is a central motivating factor in conversion and commitment to activism. It is both an expression of deeply felt kinship bonds with other species and a signilcant factor in creating those bonds. Nearly all environmental and animal rights protests referen…
Making the Strange Familiar
From studying Pagan festivals as a graduate student to writing about Burning Man, Hare Krishna hardcore music, ecstatic dance and so-called eco-terrorists twenty years later, this essay describes my journey as an academic through what many other religious studies scholars might consider the fringe of our academic purview. In the essay I consider the ways in which the concerns that emerged in my earliest work in Pagan Studies—sacred space, the rol…
Religion and Sustainability: Social Movements and the Politics of the Environment
Book Review| August 01 2014 Religion and Sustainability: Social Movements and the Politics of the Environment Religion and Sustainability: Social Movements and the Politics of the Environment. By Lucas F. Johnston. Acumen Publishing, 2013. 224 pages. $99.95 cloth. $29.95 paper. Sarah M. Pike Sarah M. Pike California State University, Chico Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nova Religio (2014) 18 (1): 117–11…
Earthly bodies, magical selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community
For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism
Drawing on analyses of activist art, music, and writings, as well as interviews and participant-observation in activist communities and at protests, For the Wild explores the ways in which radical environmental and animal rights activists’ commitments develop through powerful experiences with the other-than-human world during childhood and young adulthood. The book addresses the question of how and why activists come to value nonhuman animals and…
Mourning Nature: The Work of Grief in Radical Environmentalism
Radical environmental and animal rights activists mourn nonhuman others in a variety of ways that express their kinship with these others and strengthen their commitments to radical causes. Grief is a central motivating factor in conversion and commitment to activism. It is both an expression of deeply felt kinship bonds with other species and a signilcant factor in creating those bonds. Nearly all environmental and animal rights protests referen…
Rewilding Hearts and Habits in the Ancestral Skills Movement
This ethnographic study of the ancestral skills movement focuses on the ways that participants use tools in practices such as fire making and bow hunting to ritualize relationships with the more-than-human natural world. Ethnographic methods were supplemented with Internet research on the websites of teachers, schools, and organizations of this movement that emerged in North America in the 1980s and has recently experienced rapid growth. At ances…
Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource
Diverse processes of democratic participation– and exclusion – are closely bound by ritual acts and complexes. This collection is the result of collaborations and conversations between international researchers who have focused on the use of those cultural resources identifiable as “ritual” as they reassemble democracy. The main question integrating the collection concerns the ways in which the performative qualities of ritual resources achieve t…
Out in the Field: Reflections of Gay and Lesbian Anthropologists
Do avatars weep? Ritual and sacred space at virtual burning man
In 2020, the organizers of Burning Man, a transformational festival that serves for many participants as a spiritual destination, decided to go virtual. Some ‘Burners’ dismissed a virtual festival as a ‘video game version’ of the event, while programmers and artists developed online venues that would facilitate transformation, a sense of community, and ritual activities, especially those around ‘The Temple,’ the spiritual heart of Burning Man. Ba…
Ann Suter, The Narcissus and the Pomegranate: An Archaeology of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter
Ann Suter, The Narcissus and the Pomegranate: An Archaeology of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 328 pp., $65 (cloth)
The Odin Brotherhood: A True Account of a Dialogue With a Mysterious Fraternity
Book Review| October 01 1998 The Odin Brotherhood: A True Account of a Dialogue With a Mysterious Fraternity The Odin Brotherhood: A True Account of a Dialogue With a Mysterious Fraternity. By Mark L. Mirabello. Holmes Publishing Group, 1997. 94 pages. $19.95 cloth. Sarah Pike Sarah Pike California State University, Chico Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nova Religio (1998) 2 (1): 159–160. https://doi.org/…
Out in the Field: Reflections of Gay and Lesbian Anthropologists
The Burning Man Festival: Pre-Apocalypse Party or Postmodern Kingdom of God
This festival is an important cultural and religious site that exemplifies the migration of religious meaning-making activities out of American temples and churches into other spaces
Earthly bodies, magical selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community
Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community
New Age and Neopagan Religions in America
Ancient Mysteries in Contemporary AmericaIntroduction to the Religious Worlds of Neopagans and New AgersEarly Varieties of Alternative Spirituality in American Religious HistoryThe 1960s Watershed YearsHealing and Techniques of the SelfAll Acts of Love and Pleasure Are My Rituals: Sex, Gender, and the SacredThe Age of Aquarius
Witching culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America - Magliocco, Sabina
Ann Suter, The Narcissus and the Pomegranate: An Archaeology of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter
Ann Suter, The Narcissus and the Pomegranate: An Archaeology of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 328 pp., $65 (cloth)
Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal
Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event (review)
Reviewed by: Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event Sarah M. Pike Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event Katherine K. Chen Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009; 240 pages. $25.00, ISBN 978-0-226-10237-5 To many outside critics, Burning Man, an annual arts event that takes place for a week around Labor Day in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, is a chaotic, countercultural festival…
Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event
Book Review| July 01 2012 Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event. Katherine K. Chen. Sarah M. Pike Sarah M. Pike Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal for the Study of Radicalism (2012) 6 (2): 152–154. https://doi.org/10.2307/41889964 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search…
Religion and Sustainability: Social Movements and the Politics of the Environment
Book Review| August 01 2014 Religion and Sustainability: Social Movements and the Politics of the Environment Religion and Sustainability: Social Movements and the Politics of the Environment. By Lucas F. Johnston. Acumen Publishing, 2013. 224 pages. $99.95 cloth. $29.95 paper. Sarah M. Pike Sarah M. Pike California State University, Chico Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nova Religio (2014) 18 (1): 117–11…
Making the Strange Familiar
From studying Pagan festivals as a graduate student to writing about Burning Man, Hare Krishna hardcore music, ecstatic dance and so-called eco-terrorists twenty years later, this essay describes my journey as an academic through what many other religious studies scholars might consider the fringe of our academic purview. In the essay I consider the ways in which the concerns that emerged in my earliest work in Pagan Studies—sacred space, the rol…
Into the Forest
Tree-sits and similar actions are simultaneously rites of passage and rites of protest as activists’ deepening commitments to other species are shaped by love and feelings of kinship in the context of forest activism. Activists create protests as spaces apart, as the larger-than-human world becomes more real to them and the human society they were born into becomes more distant. In these spaces, they seek to decolonize and rewild what has been do…
Childhood Landscapes of Wonder and Awe
Chapter Three focuses on the experience of wonder within the landscape of childhood and introduces the notion that activists’ inner histories composed of memories and childhood experiences are brought to and emerge during activist gatherings and direct actions. The extent to which the remembered childhood landscape is imbued with wonder may affect the strength of activists’ grief over destroyed landscapes and mistreatment of nonhuman animals. At …
Circles of Community, Strategies of Inclusion
Chapter Six analyzes the efforts of activists to create community by bringing together people with different agendas and backgrounds and the resultant tensions and conflicts that come about in the process. I look closely at activists’ work to connect environmental and animal rights activism with concerns about social justice, especially with regard to people of color. Activist gatherings are imagined as free and open spaces of inclusivity and equ…
Rites of Grief and Mourning
Through the study of grief over lost places, tree friends, whole species, and human comrades, I suggest that protests can be understood as rites of mourning. Memories of childhood wonder, feelings of love and kinship for other species, empathizing with oppressed human communities, raging at injustice with hardcore bands, all make the loss of friends and other species keenly felt as activists face the realities of mass extinction and climate chang…
Conclusion
In the book’s Conclusion, I explore what it means to act “for the wild” and “for the animals” throughout one’s lifespan. Radical animal rights and environmental activism can be seen in relation to other radical protests of the early twenty-first century, including Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock Dakota Pipeline protest, as well as anti-government protests on the Right. I conclude by suggesting what this study has, in …
At the Turn of the Millennium: Youth Culture and the Roots of Contemporary Activism
Chapter Two lays out some historical context for the other chapters by charting the convergence of youth culture, North American spiritual and political movements, and environmental and animal rights activism. Radical activism among young adults emerged from the conjunction of a number of historical forces such as anarchism, Paganism and deep ecology. These forces shaped the particular ways activism has come to be expressed within the radical env…
“Liberation’s Crusade Has Begun”: Hare Krishna Hardcore Youth and Animal Rights Activism
Chapter Five explores the interweaving of music, Hindu religious beliefs, and activism motivated by rage in the context of hardcore punk rock. In this chapter, I describe the unlikely convergence of hardcore punk rock, Krishna Consciousness, and animal rights in youth subcultural spaces in order to understand how the aural and spiritual worlds created by some bands shaped the emergence of radical animal rights. At times these music scenes nurture…
Freedom and Insurrection around a Fire
Chapter 1 introduces the reader to activists’ lives and work and provides background on the communities I most often interacted with. It consists of a thick description of an Earth First! gathering I attended and the anti-fracking protest that took place at the end of the action.
For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism
For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism
Drawing on analyses of activist art, music, and writings, as well as interviews and participant-observation in activist communities and at protests, For the Wild explores the ways in which radical environmental and animal rights activists’ commitments develop through powerful experiences with the other-than-human world during childhood and young adulthood. The book addresses the question of how and why activists come to value nonhuman animals and…
Mourning Nature: The Work of Grief in Radical Environmentalism
Radical environmental and animal rights activists mourn nonhuman others in a variety of ways that express their kinship with these others and strengthen their commitments to radical causes. Grief is a central motivating factor in conversion and commitment to activism. It is both an expression of deeply felt kinship bonds with other species and a signilcant factor in creating those bonds. Nearly all environmental and animal rights protests referen…
Rewilding Hearts and Habits in the Ancestral Skills Movement
This ethnographic study of the ancestral skills movement focuses on the ways that participants use tools in practices such as fire making and bow hunting to ritualize relationships with the more-than-human natural world. Ethnographic methods were supplemented with Internet research on the websites of teachers, schools, and organizations of this movement that emerged in North America in the 1980s and has recently experienced rapid growth. At ances…
Sociology (24 works) · History (20 works) · Art (18 works) · Political science (15 works) · Aesthetics (14 works) · Environmental ethics (12 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Politics (12 works)