On December 7, 2021, the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality (PES) hosted the next iteration in its series on power dynamics in emerging and alternative spiritual organizations.
This event featured anthropologist Giovanna Parmigiani, historian J. Christian Greer, and religious studies scholar Russell Burk, who joined PES assistant director, Natalia Schwien, to discuss their research methodologies when working with these marginalized spiritual communities and the steps they take to support a productive and respectful dynamic between themselves and their interlocutors.
Full transcript:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Power dynamics in Research Methodologies with Marginalized Spiritual Traditions, December 7, 2021.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: All right, welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today and thank you for sharing where you're joining us from in our chat. We're so excited to have you with us, so great to have you. I'm delighted to welcome back those of you who have been attending our events since the beginning, and to welcome those of you who are joining us for the first time. Thank you for your interest in our colloquia.
We're just thrilled that we get to host another one. It's really a pleasure and a joy. We're going to go ahead and get started. My name is Natalia Schwien. I am zooming in from Middlebury, Vermont, the traditional homelands of the Abenaki people. I am an MTS graduate from Harvard Divinity School and the assistant program director for the program for the Evolution of Spirituality at Harvard Divinity School. I will be moderating today's discussion on power dynamics and research methodologies while studying marginalized spiritual traditions.
In today's event, we will shift our focus from power dynamics and the potential for both harm and growth within alternative and emerging spiritual organizations to the study of these communities, specifically with regards to contemporary pagan traditions. I'm joined today to discuss their research methodologies-- our speakers' research methodologies-- when working with marginalized spiritual communities and the steps they take to support a productive and respectful dynamic between themselves and their interlocutors.
So now please allow me to introduce our speakers. I'm going to go ahead and invite them to turn their cameras on. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Dr. J. Christian Greer is a scholar of religious studies currently holding a postdoctoral position at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University. His forthcoming book, Angelheaded Hipsters, Psychedelic Militancy in the 1980s North America, published by Oxford University press, analyzes the expansion of psychedelic culture in the late Cold War era. Christian will be teaching a course this winter at the University of Amsterdam, which will offer participants a chance to delve into the scholarly inquiry of esoteric and occult movements.
They will study diverse perspectives and traditions and examine primary sources and secondary literature to clarify the way in which esoteric ideas manifested historically and how they continue to circulate in mainstream culture as well as in marginal contexts. I am a alum of one of his programs, one of his classes, and I can speak very-- I will speak very highly of the course. It was really an incredible learning experience and I got a lot from it. So if you're interested--
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: And it's great seeing you. It's great seeing you again. Let me just tell you-- oh, man, It's great seeing everyone on this panel.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thrilled to have you here. Thrilled that you're teaching another class on this topic. So attendees, if it's something that you're interested in, please please do a little-- Google and also see if I can pop something into the chat about it.
OK, we have Dr. Giovanna Parmigiani, who is an anthropologist and a scholar of contemporary paganisms. She serves as a lecturer on religion and cultural anthropology at HDS and as a research assistant at the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative at the CSWR at Harvard Divinity School, where she hosts a series of online lectures on nosel-- again, I mispronounced this. I'm so sorry. Nina, do you want to say it?
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Gnoseology. Gnoseologies. Thank you, Natalia.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: You're welcome. Thank you. Sorry. Gnoseologies. There will actually be an event tomorrow, so I'm going to just quickly pop that link in the chat for you. Here we go. Just a second.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thank you, Natalia. And thank you all who are here.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: And finally, Russell Burk is an ethnographer of religion and is a PhD candidate in the religions of the Americas at Harvard University. He's currently conducting field research in Chicago, Illinois for a dissertation on contemporary pagans interactions with African diaspora religions.
His research interests include critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, alternative spirituality, and religion and neoliberalism. So thank you, Christian, Giovanna, Russell for joining us on our conversation today. I'm going to go ahead and dive into our first question, and if you would like to also expand on your introduction and tell us a little bit more about your work and about your approach to your research, we'll get started.
And I will note to our audience that we will have time for a Q&A for the last 20 minutes of our discussion today, of our time together. And I'll give a little bit more information about what that looks like as we get closer. So thank you so much. Our first question is, "In what ways to see your identity as a researcher give you power over your research subjects, and how do you navigate that power?" And I will first pass the mic over to Giovanna.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thank you, Natalia, for this introduction and thank you all for being here. I'm very pleased to share this time and space, synchronously or asynchronously, if you will join us through the recording. So first of all, Natalia, I really like the question because you mentioning the power over indirectly gesture towards the fact that there are other ways to think about power, like power with or power to. And so before actually answering to your question, I think I need to add a few elements to help us out to understand what I do and where I work, right?
So I am an anthropologist, as you just said. I work the intersection between religion, women's studies, and politics. I was born in Italy-- as my accent makes clear-- and I studied in the UK and I did my PhD at the University of Toronto-- so someone is joining us from Toronto, I say hello-- before coming here at HDS.
I do my fieldwork in Salento, which is an area of Southern Italy, the heel of the boot, the southeastern fringe of the Italian Peninsula. And I like to think about myself as a slow ethnographer. That means that in order for me to be able to feel that I am able to say something meaningful, I need to spend lots of time on the field. And I spend more than 4 years in the past 10 in person, doing fieldwork in Salento.
And from this research, I wrote two books and a series of articles. The first book is called Feminism, Violence, and Representation in Modern Italy, published by Indiana University Press. And as well the emergence of femicide-- that is to say the killing of women by the hand of men for the fact of being women-- in Italy. And also I studied how Italian feminists enacted a politics of representation vis-a-vis gender violence. And this was based in Salento, obviously.
And my second book, which is forthcoming with Equinox Publishing is called Spider Dance. And in this book and in this ethnography, I studied a pagan community of women in Salento who recently reintroduced into the rituals an old dance, a traditional dance and music, called pizzica, that was used in the past to allegedly heal from the bite of tarantula spiders, into their rituals. So they are dancing and playing pizzica within the pagan rituals to basically heal themselves.
I do not know if everybody in the audience is acquainted with what I mean by ethnographic methods or by ethnography, so I'd like to spend a couple of words on what ethnographers do and what ethnography means. So ethnographers are trained to use their own bodies, persons, experiences, and lives as an instrument of knowledge. This happens through the use of a number of so-called qualitative methods, including interviews, photo-elicited interviews, questionnaires, the collection of life history, but especially and mostly through participant observation. That means immersing yourself in the life of the communities you are studying every day, 24/7, for at least one year-- maybe not in a row-- and to follow their lives, their everyday lives, including but not limited to special events like rituals or formal gathering.
There are some who use-- some researchers, as a valid way to do research, who use an ethnographical-inspired method of research that-- inspired by participant observation, in which they look and participate to events like rituals and maybe do follow-up interviews. And so this is inspired, is valid, is a valid method, but it's not what we anthropologists mean when we think about participant observation.
So power over. We, as anthropologists and ethnographer, are trained to recognize and deal with power dimensions in our field work. We have to go through an ethics review before starting our field works that needs to be approved by the [? RMB. ?] But way beyond that, I have to say that questions about power, power dynamics, are always present in my field work.
So there are two main dimensions to how I think about power, the power I have over my interlocutors-- one on the field, and one in my writing, when I write about what happens in the field. On the field, I would say that issues around privilege, and even prestige, in a way, that is projected on me from the fact of being an academic who works at Harvard, who has been educated in some universities and not others, who can be, so to speak, a well-read intellectual, is a meaningful dimension in the specific context in which I am working.
So I have to be mindful of issues, especially around class, both economic studies and education, from the fact that I come from the North of Italy, and there's a kind of historical, tense dynamic between the North and the South part of the country. And, of course, the academic prestige of being the face of Harvard in Southern Italy.
Also I have to say I have the privilege-- this is something that actually I did not realize right away, but is something that many of my interlocutors throughout the years told me-- that I have the privilege to be part of a community, at least after same time, but also to be able to leave that community, more or less, whenever I want. This is, of course, very ambivalent because it's always very difficult to me to leave that community that I love very much. But also, it means that I can do that. They're always the one who stay.
And this is, I think, a dimension that I did not recognize right away as part of my dynamics in the field. But it's definitely meaningful from the point of view of my interlocutors. And in my writing, that's, I think, the toughest part for me. I, of course, use pseudonyms and other rhetorical device in order to protect the identities of my interlocutors, what I write about their lives and their stories, but I'm always the one who tells the story, who tells their story, and I feel very responsible about this and I try to do this very responsibly, also because this implies that not only what I write is hopefully published and read, but is also read by the community I'm working with.
And so this can potentially change the way they see, understand their being in the world. For example, when I was studying Italian feminists, they mostly followed what is called the thought of sexual difference. So they did not distinguish between gender and sexuality. And I was trained in North American feminist studies, and so to me, gender was really the dimension that I use in order to understand what was around me. And I was the one who introduced them to the notion of gender.
And this altered significantly the ways many of my interlocutors started to think about their being feminist and their experience of the world. So, of course, this happens within relationships. But you know, it's just an example to say that I feel very responsible about how I write and how my stories get read and understood.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Nina. I'm so appreciative of your mindfulness and your approach and your thoughtfulness for caring for your community and your interlocutors. So thank you for sharing. Christian, I'm going to pass the mic to you next.
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: Thank you. I have to say, it is such a pleasure to be on a panel with such esteemed colleagues, and really, to be a part of the program for spiritual evolution, which is such an important program. So first, let me just get a [CLAPS]. Thank you for having me. This is a beautiful opportunity and I'm really grateful to be here.
And let me also encourage everyone to check out some of the other videos in the series, which I did, just so I could intimidate myself, just so I could feel nervous enough to do a good job. I should say my name is Dr. J. Christian Greer. I'm at the Center for the Study of World Religions, and my focus is the psychedelic church movement.
And before jumping into this question of how my position might give power over people, I think it's important for me at least to try and reflect on the way in which what I do might belong to the general focus of this series, which tends to focus on heterodox religions or perhaps even pagan religions. And so while I focus on religions that can be broadly classified as psychedelic religions or psychedelic churches-- and that is to say fellowships that really placed sacramental value on the alteration of consciousness induced by psychedelics-- it's unusual how many of these groups are pagan or what we could consider be generically pagan.
So I'm thinking of probably one of the oldest psychedelic fellowships, that would be the Discordian movement. This is a group that is said to "worship chaos." Not exactly right, but yes, that's mostly correct. They venerate the goddess Eris, or Discordia. This is the personification of-- So yes, because they have Eris, that could be considered pagan.
Now we could go a little head in time and look at the Church of All Worlds. So this is a group that has a sacramental focus on psychedelic substances. However, they were founded as the Church of All Worlds, which is borrowed from science fiction, in fact. That's borrowed from Stranger in a Strange Land, a science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein. And in fact, that borrowing, that use of fiction to organize their religion, lent itself then to a larger pagan appreciation of the natural world and the spirits that inhabit it.
And going on even further to the Church of the SubGenius, another psychedelic group that had a sacramental approach to the alteration of consciousness through drugs. They have their own deity, Bob-- praise Bob. And then that, again, would open itself up to a larger appreciation of some of the invented or fictitious or spiritual entities that inhabit the world. So it's an interesting interface between the movement of psychedelic churches and we can call [AUDIO OUT] broadly construed pagan worldview.
And I even have a very spicy thesis here that always causes controversy. But it is my impression that the-- oh, ding dong-- the rise and development of psychedelic spirituality, beginning with its synthesis by Albert Hoffman in Sandoz laboratory in the '40s, and then moving into American culture through Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception, 1954, and then from '54 onward with the popularization of psychedelic substances, it's my argument that this popularization is intimately tied to the rise of pagan spirituality in America. I would go so far to claim that we wouldn't have paganism in America today if it wasn't for the psychedelic explosion.
There would be no-- OK, this is just my thesis and I'll back it up by saying that the rise of paganism as a social force in the '70s and '80s, I think, was another way of talking about the spread and diversification of the psychedelic worldview. And because of the war on drugs, psychedelics could no longer be the focal point for a spiritual movement, I think a variety of other discourses were created and implemented. And I think pagan was one of them.
Just a theory, OK? I haven't borne that out, but this is something, perhaps, Dr. Parmigiani and I can talk about it, possibly even argue about. Another one of those terms would be "new age." Anyways, I think that when we talk about heterodox religion in the last 70 years, I'm really curious to see how much of those heterodox strains of religiosity, how much they owe to psychedelics and how many of them are just another way of talking about the spiritual vibes and experimentation, the space for spiritual experimentation that was opened up by the popularization of psychedelics.
OK, it's a very long preamble. I should say that I'm not an ethnographer. I'm a historian. I'm a historian of esotericism and I was trained in the history of esotericism, and with a focus on psychedelic culture. And that was really a virtue to me because when I started my ethnic-- or my historical research-- this was about 10 years ago-- whenever I would go into the field to try to talk to some of the founders of these psychedelic religions, I could say, hi, I'm a historian of religion. Oh, where are you from? Oh, I'm from the University of Amsterdam.
They'll go, oh, OK, good. You're not a real historian. You're from Amsterdam. Great. What do you want to know? The Amsterdam was my calling card, and I said, no, no, no, I'm serious student. And they're like, OK, OK. And I'd say, all right, well-- for example, I did a lot of fieldwork with the Church of the SubGenius. I did my best to meet as many of the people involved in that that were around. And when it came to negotiating power dynamics, I really emphasize the fact that I was, first and foremost, a person, first and foremost a curious person and then secondarily a researcher.
And what that meant was for grounding the experience of the people I spoke to. Instead of going there with a story or a thesis and asking them how that story or thesis matched their experience, I really wanted to know because I was curious, what was it like to start a religion in the late 1970s? We're talking about the Church of the SubGenius. What was it like to do it in that era? I mean, who were you talking to? Who were your opponents? Who?
And I think it's that spirit of curiosity that, in some respects and to some degree, leveled the playing field because I wasn't there to tell anyone. I was there honestly to learn. And these are people who are in their 60s, perhaps 70s, and possibly even 80s. So these are elderly people. And in the United States, elderly people are not treated very well. They're treated very poorly. And so if I-- at the time, I was young-ish, whatever. I would go and do my best to find them. They're all on Facebook, like many of our grandparents are. And I would say, hello, these are my credentials. I'm writing a book about this and I notice that you played a role in that. Would you be interested to talk to me?
And without fail, all of them were. And when I went to go visit them, it was really just a visit. And I think I was able to get so deep with them because I didn't go without doing my homework. I had read every single thing they had written or every single-- I did my best to accumulate all of the primary sources that I could through the library system or my own navigating through the cultic milieu. And if I couldn't find a source, I'd ask them to send it to me beforehand. And they were only too pleased to do so.
And so when I went there, I was able to pick up the conversation at quite a complex level. And what I noticed was, for example, I'm thinking of, for example, when I went to go visit Jay Kenny, who was a real force in the foundation of the Church of SubGenius. What I realized is he's been interviewed for the last few decades. And it really frustrates him now when an interviewer would come and not know the first thing about the topics we were talking about because he's tired of repeating the same story.
But when I would come, I'd be like, oh, no, no, no, Jay, Jay, Jay, forget that. I want to know about this one footnote in this one pamphlet that has not been-- And then he would say, oh, wow, well, it came from there. So I have to say that curiosity, that spirit of "I'm a human and you're a human and we're having human experiences and I just want to know more about it," because at the end of the day, being curious means I'm here for my own interest. I'm here for my own self-edification, and not, I'm here to grab the information and then go write a book about it. I'm not here to just take away whatever knowledge you have and then put that to a greater project.
And so I have to say the best part about studying what I study, which would be a contemporary, marginal, religious movement, which is the psychedelic church movement, is that a lot of these people are still alive and you can talk to them. And if you really click, you could become friends with them. And it's that possibility that really energizes my scholarship. Again, I want to emphasize that I got into this-- OK, of course, there's tons of money to be made in the study of religion. Everybody knows that. No.
The reason I got into it is because I'm a human person having new experiences, and I wanted to talk to other people who have had those experiences and took them seriously in the way that I have and enrich my own mental landscape. However, as Dr. Parmigiani said, even if you don't recognize it, these inequities are there, that even if you choose-- that could be just based on my age. It can be based on my position in the academy. It could be based on my skin color, or whatever. There's so many things that might not be at the fore of our conversations, but that are present.
And I think in identifying them, you can get to, I think, better conversations and better stories because another thing I've noticed is when I'll go and talk to some of these psychedelic churches, they've read my material on them. And so sometimes, they're telling me the thing that I wrote about them. And it's like, no, no, no. I wrote that. I'm here to learn what actually happened. And it's important to complicate and to complexity some of the objects of our discussion because now I think all scholars of paganism know that pagans are reading the scholarship on paganism if they are not pagan scholars themselves.
And so I guess I just put a great value on confusion and complexity and really challenging some of the master narratives we have about movements, that our interlocutors may even have been a part of. And I have to say that this really was driven home to me. So I've been conducting research with people from Discordianism and the Churches of the SubGenius for many years, and I was having a conversation with my partner. She brought up a great point, which was like, hey, what do all of your interlocutors have in common?
And I was like, well, nothing. This was a high epoch, and this person was an underground cartoonist, and this person was that. And then I realized that they were all white men. And I was like, oh, my god. So Dr. [? Michelle ?] [? Owing ?] encouraged me to find voices that didn't appear in the literature, voices that did not appear on the masthead, who were involved. And fortunately, I was able to find Elaine Riggs, who may not have been front and center in these publications, but through our conversations, I realized, oh my god, this is a part of the story that has been left out, that by introducing it, we get a different story.
And so all of this is to say that identifying my own-- the own inequities of power and the power relations that had governed my own research, by undermining that power relationship, I was able to find new sources of information that gave me what I needed to tell another story. And that other story, I think, is, like all good stories, not the last word on the subject, but generative. These are the vectors that will create the scholarship of tomorrow. These are the vectors that will allow us to understand the way in which these so-called marginal organizations are not marginal at all and, in fact, have go on to make bigger and more important and influential-- they've enacted more influential change than the story would allow us to believe.
Yeah, right. I could stop. Oh, Natalie. Are you-- I see you thumbs upping.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: I was going to make a Hanegraaff joke, that you're really diving into his arguments, getting into the discussion on rejected knowledge and how that politically is situated. So yeah. Christian, if you want to finish up, I'll pass it back to you.
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: No, this is it. I just want to say just that like all good scholarship, the more we look into marginalized communities and marginalized voices, the more productive work lays in front of us. Thanks.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you. I love the emphasis on generativity and on person to person relationality. And I think there's so much to be gained from holding complexity with the folks who we work with. So I am now going to pass the mic over to Russell. Thank you so much, Christian, for answering the question and exploring your own work further.
RUSSELL BURK: All right. Thank you, Natalia, for the introduction. And thank you, Giovanna and Christian, for your comments. I could get lost just trying to respond to what you all have said and to have some more questions about that thing. Maybe we can get to some of that later.
So to just say a little bit more about my work, I am studying American pagans who are interacting with African diaspora religions. And so what that means is pagan individuals who do not have a background in African diaspora religions. They don't have Cuban immigrant families. They weren't raised around families or in communities that practice African diaspora religions but from a background in paganism, for whatever idiosyncratic reasons, gain interest in African diaspora religions.
That interest ranges from sort of adding a single loa to a personal pantheon, or studying concepts that come from African diaspora religions, all the way up to pursuing full initiation. And my primary source of theory is critical race theory and critical whiteness studies. And without taking all the time I have to try to describe my concepts, my contention is that to combat white supremacy, whiteness needs to be reimagined, right? And deconstructed and reconstructed.
And if you all have questions about that, ask me about them later. But I could write a whole dissertation about this, right? So anyway, so my perspective is that there is a history of pagan resistance and pagan creativity, pagan reimaginings of the relationship between human beings and nature, pagan reimaginings of gender and sexuality. There's this established history of radical pagan resistance that is not without its problems, but the history is there.
And so I'm interested in how pagans are contending with whiteness, how pagans are interrogating whiteness, and what sort of productive work may or may not be taking place in these pagan interactions with African diaspora religions. And so I think my main concerns with the power that I have in my interactions with my interlocutors are two sided, right? On the one side is the fact that I'm a scholar of religious studies working with a minority religious community, which comes with responsibility. And that responsibility is multifaceted.
I mean, Giovanna talked about the sort of ethical concerns that come with being an ethnographer and the sort of training we have to go through and review we have to go through. And Christian, I appreciate you talked about talking with pagans who have read things that you've published. And so in a way, the scholarship that has been written has become part of their way of explaining their own history and experiences, and that's something that's been written a lot about with the anthropology of African diaspora religions and the way that anthropologists in that past have revealed secrets that were not supposed to be revealed, and then, like, later on have circled back to become sources used by practitioners for keeping track of the history of practices.
So there's all different kinds of responsibility about how it is we are going to tell the stories that we're telling, how are we going to write about our interlocutors, how are we going to write about our interactions with them and what good and harm can come from the stories we're telling, what we're publishing. So there's a power of this privilege to tell these stories, whether it's in a classroom or in a publication. And that comes with the responsibility of we should be protecting the communities that we study. And I think that's just true for any scholar of religion have that concern, even with communities that were criticizing.
And so the other end of the coin for me is that as a scholar of critical whiteness studies, it's my responsibility to analyze how race is used to make meaning and how white supremacy operates in the context of the study. And because in religious studies, in scholarship, more broadly, in society, historically, the way of addressing whiteness is to be silent about it, right? So how do I balance wanting to be respectful and accurate and protective of the community that I am studying and also do the sort of criticism that I think is ethically mandated by the type of scholarship that I'm trying to do. Because I am studying a community that is a religious minority, but people in this community are people of privilege and of different kinds of privilege. Whiteness is not monolithic.
But so I have this balance of responsibilities that I'm still in the field and still navigating. So a lot of what I have are some sort of inchoate thoughts and more questions than anything else. In terms of methods of doing critical whiteness studies, the first thing that I always try to keep in mind is that my perspective and criticism comes from, and has to come from, a place of rigorous training and study, right? So comes from training and study in decolonial thought, queer of color critiques, and Black feminism especially.
And it's important to note that the perspective that I have comes from that sort of basis because if criticisms come from a place of moral superiority, it's, one, bad scholarship, and, two, it actually works to reinforce white supremacy. And the way that happens is one of the sort of mechanisms that whiteness used to maintain itself and perpetuate itself is the ability of white people to name the whites that are wrong. So if I say those guys who marched in Charleston with tiki torches, those are racists, those are white supremacists, that also gives me the ability to say, but I'm not one of them, right? The White supremacists are over there, right?
Those practices are racist, but I'm not taking part in those practices. So the drive to and pattern of white people naming white racists gives white people the ability to occlude their own privilege. And so being a PhD candidate at Harvard and having an absence of self-awareness of the white supremacy structures that have gotten me to have the opportunities that I've had and have funded my research are something that have to be kept in mind when doing critical whiteness studies.
And in terms of how this specifically operates for me with the community that I study is that I'm very aware that I have this perspective that is based on rigorous study and training that my interlocutors, for the most part, do not share. I'm also very aware that they have perspectives that I don't share, and not because I haven't studied, but because they have done work, they have a capacity for a kind of imagination that I do not have. And so there are plenty of scholars who are scholars and insiders, but I'm not.
So this sort of, like, reminding myself of the places where my perspective is, I know, deficient reminds me that what I'm trying to do is be in dialogue and to be in dialogue with people who, for the most part, share my political and ethical commitments. And so I think in the next questions, I need to speak more about that sort of give and take. But I'm really-- like, I'm sitting in this tension, right? This is a question that I'm struggling with right now. And I've been talking with my advisor talking with other ethnographers who have done ethnographies of whiteness to try and figure out how to navigate this.
Because not only is it a tool of white supremacy to try and name the whites who are or are not racist, it's also not productive for people with a similar political commitments to just cannibalize one another, right? To be, like, here is the right way to do anti-racism and so let's pick apart the people who are doing it. And if work in critical whiteness studies doesn't have an eye towards something that is actionable or something that can add to a dialogue that is productive and constructive for real work, with material results to take place, then I think it's not actually doing the work that critical whiteness studies is meant to do.
Yeah, I think I'll stop there. But yeah, I just want to reiterate that I really like these questions because I have been wrestling with them and talking about them with other colleagues to try and piece these together. So yeah. I just really appreciate the opportunity to come here and talk about it with you all.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you, Russell. And we appreciate the opportunity to speak with you. Thank you for your openness with the complexity of your research and the complexity of thinking through these heavy and important and critical conversations. So it's great to hear your perspective as you are approaching your own work. So thank you.
And it fits in very well with the next question, which I'm going to turn back to Russell, for which is, "In what ways do your research subjects have power over you?"
RUSSELL BURK: Yeah. So looking at this question before, I thought this is, for me, this is the hard one. And I don't like the idea that I have to go first. But also, I feel like my answer to the previous question kind of flows into this one. So I'll talk a little bit about theory because it sort of shapes my understanding of the powers that my interlocutors have.
So Tanya Luhrmann has written about a human capacity for-- I'm forgetting her exact language and I don't want to paraphrase too much here-- but there is a human capacity for-- I don't remember if she says altered states or otherworldly experiences. I forget exactly what her language is. But basically for what, in some contexts, might be called ecstatic experiences or the ability to-- really, the ability to see the world and experience reality differently, and that this is a human capacity that can be strengthened through repeated intentional ritual work.
And one of the things she writes about is that not everyone necessarily has this capacity. And I don't think I do, right? Or maybe I just don't have the patience to put the work in or haven't put the work in to have these sort of mystical experiences. So I see this as a deficit for me, where bad scholarship of religion would try to make a distinction between-- well, I'm not going to get to that.
Anyway, but so I understand that there is a perspective on reality that I do not share with my interlocutors, and I understand it as something that I am lacking, right? Now for my understanding of whiteness and for my thoughts about the work that has to be done to combat white supremacy, I think that it is a process that has to have imagination, that there has to be something. It's not just deconstructing, right? There has to be generative, imaginative answers, and imagining new ways of being, new cultural forms and practices that are at outside of heteropatriarchy.
So I'm going to talk about two theorists who have shaped my understanding of this. One is Sylvia Wynter. And so Sylvia Wynter argues that human beings are both mythos and bios, right? Like, we are not simply biological beings and that human evolution and our understanding of what constitutes human has been and always will be shaped by language. And so she argues that the current genre of the human clearly treats certain people as not fully human, right? So women, people of color.
Basically, white men of means are fully human because that's what our current genre of the human is based on. And so she argues that to undo this, we have to think of a new genre of the human, that it has to be an imaginary, mythopoetic process of rethinking what it means to be human, that to undo colonialism and racism, work has to be done at that very basic ontological level of starting with, what does it mean to be human?
So then-- I'm not conflating these two theorists, but Roderick Ferguson has also written about-- and this comes from his book, Aberrations in Black-- how ruptural components of culture-- and he's talking about non patriarchal racial formations-- both expose normative universal discourses and structures as being contingent and open up a space to think about different ways of being outside of heteropatriarchy. And when I'm saying "heteropatriarchy," I'm including capitalism and white supremacy alongside that.
So in both of these cases, they're not making the exact same argument, but both are saying that there is a place of imagination, right? There has to be someone to do the sort of imaginative work about what it means to be human or there has to be someone to create and exist in cultural formations that are outside of heteropatriarchy in order to make the sort of opportunity to do that sort of imaginary work. And I think that pagans might be really good at this, right?
And I mentioned before the documented, strong history of pagan radical critiques and radical pagan imagination. So this is something that I think my interlocutors might have that is very powerful, that I know that I don't. And you could say about scholarship in general that scholars are often very, very good at identifying problems; not as often good at generating actionable strategies, right?
And so I think that this is a place where I deeply admire my interlocutors and that I hope I can learn from them, because this is work that I think needs to be done that I don't think I'm the person to do it. And so I think that the training and perspective that I have can be in dialogue with theirs, but I'm very aware of this power that my interlocutors have, and this vast potential that I see in pagan practices and in the history of paganism.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you. Thank you for your humility and honesty in answering that question. It's a complicated question and I really appreciate it. I'm going to pass the mic over to Giovanna with the same question. "In what ways do your research subjects have power over you?"
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Yes. Thank you, Russell, for this. I think it was very explicative and very honest, as Natalie just said. And working on imagination is awesome, and I think we should have some conversation about this. I'm very excited about your work. Yes, so how my interlocutors have power over me.
So first off, I'm a woman. And in the particular field work-- I will give more experiential dimensions rather than a theoretical one in my response to the questions. I'm a woman in Italy. Academia is pretty much still a men's club. There are women, of course, but both academia and local intellectuals are mostly men. And while I encountered scholars who-- anthropologists, especially-- who are very supportive of me, I always have to negotiate this identity as a woman.
And also, it's a fairly patriarchal society, in some contexts more than others, in some geographical areas more than others. But where I do my fieldwork, I feel patriarchy in ways I honestly had forgotten since I moved away from Italy. And so this dimension is something I would like to mention. For what pertains, my one to one, so to speak, relationship with my interlocutors, of course, there's always lingering idea of consent. We are required, as ethnographers, to ask consent that interlocutors can withdraw at any time, including when I'm writing about those. The ethnography is done. And I think it's a very important device that we have in place to negotiate and renegotiate our relationship.
If consent is given at the beginning of our research, we don't have to take for granted, as anthropologist and ethnographers, that this will be the case forever, right? As Russell mentioned, other colleagues in the past eventually revealed, in the name of having received consent, some details about what they saw and participated in that should not have been shared. So this is another dimension that I think is very important. If you want to-- If your life or academic life, or your career, so to speak, is linked to how much you publish and what you say, you're always in this position of having to remind yourself that you cannot take for granted the experience you lived. You have relationship with your interlocutors that are gifts, and that they decided to include you in their life, they made you part of their lives.
And this is not something that happens by default, one could take for granted, and it's not, again, a given. It's more like a gift. And as Russell was mentioning about our capacity to experience the uncanny, let's say, I don't think that I'm at the type of photographer who thinks that if something can be learned, I want to learn it. And so being the position of a learner is not always very easy because, of course, I have to, as a Harvard-affiliated scholar, have to show and be in the position of a learner in a community, in the communities I'm working in.
I really much like-- I really, really, really like being this position of being able to learn, but it comes with its own mockery and it's own maybe doubts about some the funny mistakes. We should have a question on the mistakes that you make [INAUDIBLE] ethnography. But maybe for another series.
And yeah, for example, at the beginning of my current work with pagans, I try to ask the right questions, right? And not always, I'm in a position of knowing what I'm asking, if it's the right question or not. And I noticed that my interlocutors were responding to this question in kind of standardized ways because they had dealt with other anthropologists in the past who were asking similar questions. And they, I think, very kindly wanted to please me by giving the information they thought I would have appreciated. But in fact, if I had remained at this superficial sort of a knowledge of and participation into the community, I would have written really bad ethnographies, I think.
So it's not a given that because I'm an ethnographer, I will be allowed to be part of the lives of the people I'm working with. This is something really very-- I think it is very humbling, knowing that somehow, you have to make sure to build trust by maybe learning how to do things differently or learning times and timelines that are not matching yours. So yeah, as for the main power over dynamics that I find in my field, yeah, these are my two cents.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Wonderful. Thank you. I love the emphasis on learning. And if any students from HDS are tuning in, I highly suggest taking one of Dr. Parmigiani's courses. The emphasis on learning in that space as well really, I think, it's a wonderful place to grow as a scholar but also as a person in a divinity school, learning and engaging with other traditions.
So I highly encourage checking out Dr. Parmigiani's classes.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thank you, Natalie.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: I'm going to pass the mic over to Christian, but I also just want to quickly be mindful of time. We have a couple more questions and I definitely want to make sure we leave some room for our wonderful audience members. So Christian, same question. "In what ways do your research subjects have power over you?"
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: First, I just want to say it's such a hard act to follow. I think Russell and Nina have really given us so much to think about, so I hesitate to add any more. But I'll just add one particular moment where I looked extremely foolish, which I'm happy to share. Nina brought up the moments where we make mistakes. And I think the prime example for me is as an historian of psychedelic spirituality, it's my pleasure to be able to speak to some of the representatives who have really put their ass on the line for the freedom that people have today to use cannabis or whatever other psychedelic substances they do.
And I think the key name here would be John Sinclair, the founder of the White Panther Party. You know, John Lennon wrote a song about him, Ten for Two. This is probably the most important figure in the history of cannabis legalization, and it's been my pleasure to know him for the last eight years. And I remember the first time we met. Of course, I screwed it up.
I had done a lot of research. I read as many back issues of the White Panther newspaper as I could, I read his manifestos, I listened to all the MC5 albums. And there we were, having an espresso and enjoying each other's company, and then I hit him with it. I gave him my theory of why the White Panther Party created their own psychedelic religion, which was called Zanta. That's not important.
So I unloaded on my elderly friend all of this theory I had. And very politely, he listened, and he nodded, and he furled his brows, and then said, nah. What you forget is that it was a lot of fun. We did all of this because it brought us joy. You have all of these theories about the nature of secularism and modernity, and he's like, it seems as though you're a scholar talking to other scholars. However, when we talk, I was talking to other people. And the conversations that I were having was very difficult.
So as a scholar, what power do my interlocutors have over me? It's listening. How good of a listener am I, and how much respect do I have for the people I'm talking to? And the only way to determine that is to look at the scholarship I produce. At the end of the day, is my scholarship legible to people outside of the study of religion? Then I've done my job. Because I've been able to take what they tell me and then synthesize it with my own beliefs into something that is interpretable.
However, I should also say, though, that when I do have these very frank conversations, I always preface it by saying, at the end of the day, this is my story. At the end of the day, the research I'm doing is mine and this is the story that I want to tell because I think it's true. And it's never good to be beholden to anybody when you do your scholarship. So I think being very upfront about that throughout the whole process is very important, really letting your interlocutors know, listen, I'm doing a project. Here's what I think and here's what I am going to write about and I want to know what you're--
And then I think if you're very open hearted person, that can change. But it's very important throughout the process to insist on the fact that this is your project and you're not doing a oral history. And there's a very fine distinction there. But to tell you the truth, I just want to hear what the other panelists have to say, so I'm going to cut it off right there.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: I think that was great advice. Thank you, Christian. So we're going to just hop to our fourth question and skip over our third, which is, "How have your own research methods changed as a result of your interaction with interlocutors, who have their own distinctive methods for making sense of the world?" And if we could keep the responses to about to two minutes, three minutes max, that would be wonderful, just so we make sure we have time for our guests.
Christian, would you like to go next?
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: Yeah, sure. No, no, no, please, please. However, can I ask you to clarify a little bit here?
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Sure, yeah. So your own methodology, as you've been engaging with your interlocutors, how has your methodology, perhaps, changed in response to their methodology of approaching their own tradition or approaching their own storytelling or their own-- so also some of the people who you've engaged with. I mean, they have such rich, intense public positions. So how has your methodology shifted in relation to theirs?
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Yeah. Yeah, thanks. I have to say that, for the most part, a lot of my interlocutors, particularly when I looked at people from the Discordian movement and really around there, particularly groups in the 1980s, what I noticed is that they didn't agree at all with my basic framework, which is, oh, all of these groups belong to a tradition, which is the movement of psychedelic churches. That phrase has not been used by people within that movement. That's something I'm projecting on.
And so what happened was I went and visited a representative from a lot of different fellowships. For example, the White Panther Party saw themselves as an anti-racist organization, very much as an auxiliary to the Black Panther Party. And then I would go and visit people who were associated with the Neo American Church, that saw themselves as much more closely associated with the Native American church and the legal allowance for them to use peyote. And then I talked to people from Discordianism.
Each one of these groups saw themself as associated with its own movement. Each one had its own institutional history. And as a scholar, I came out of nowhere and said, oh, no, no, no. Let me rewrite this history and redraw the boundaries of what your institutional associations are. That, I have to say, was uniformly rejected by a lot of the groups I researched. However, I think by virtue of the patience of my interlocutors and my own willingness to hear about the own oversights in my own research, I was able to adjust that thesis to something that I found to be more accurate, but never indebted to any of the groups, never be-- I shouldn't say "indebted." Totally indebted. Never beholden to any of the groups I spoke to.
And so once again, let me just insist on my own scholarly practice, which is about a heart to heart approach, a heart-forward approach. Because at the end of the day, these are real people with real stories. And at no time do I think the scholar should hold themselves as somehow apart and separate and better. No. We're all humans who are involved in human activity. And so I think it just behooves us to, as my old advisor used to say, look with the eyes of our heart.
When we investigate, we look with the eyes of our heart. So basically, that's it, that I just do my best to keep an open mind and open heart to what my interlocutors are saying, but never be beholden to them.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you. Russell, I'm going to pass it to you.
RUSSELL BURK: Yeah. I was going to say I hope beyond the hope that it changes more, right? I definitely still feel like I'm sitting in [? contention ?] with a lot of things. And I guess to touch back on a point I made before, about how I don't think it's productive to sit and point and say, this was racist, that was racist. So part of the purpose of making that distinction of making that not be the practice is an understanding that working against white supremacy, working to understand white supremacy, is an ongoing process that takes constant vigilance, right?
And so I'm talking with people, interacting with people, and thinking about the ways that they are rethinking their own whiteness while I'm going through the same process because it is a continual process from a different starting point. And so I feel like no one has cracked the code on how to do this. I feel like the manuals for how we ought to rethink whiteness, how we ought to be approaching questions about white supremacy, like, there are multiple bestsellers that I think all fall short.
And so I'm really hoping that somewhere in the dialogue between the perspective that I have and the perspective that my interlocutors have, I'm really hoping that we can learn something from each other. Like, that's why I find this project interesting. If I didn't think there was that potential there, this wouldn't be a project worth pursuing. So I am anxious to find out how my methods will change more.
I know that already-- I mean, Giovanna has told me about this that I have, at times, had a very strong, harshly critical perspective on phenomenon that I'm studying. And I think that there is a place for that. But I also think that I had a very, very limited perspective when all that I was doing was spitting fire, right? So I think that there is a place for that and I think that speaking criticisms and speaking them clearly and loudly is necessary when studying whiteness. But I also have come to learn that that is a starting point. That is not the end of an analysis. That's a bad thesis, right?
So I'm excited to see how my methods are going to continue to change. And invite me back in four or five years and I will talk about that more.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Yeah. We'll put it in the calendar, Russell. And again, thank you for your humility and your honesty and your response. I think that's a really important perspective. So Giovanna?
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Yeah. So to me, the only ethical way to be in the field is to accept and commit to the relationships that I build on the field from a place of vulnerability. That means my being in a position of a learner, but also knowing the power dynamics that we just talked about. And from a standpoint of intimacy, I'm not talking about any romantic thing, but the feeling of being interconnected and how my well-being and their well-being is connected, to really be part and be together in life.
And this can be messy. This can be scary. This is really time-consuming. I mean, every day, I spend at least-- every day, even when I'm here-- I spend at least two hours per day connecting with my interlocutors on the field. And it's not something I do because I have to, that part of my life. And accepting this dimension, I think, was not something I was necessarily prepared to when I was doing my PhD. But this is how I think the field will somehow change me.
And this is how power differentials can be transformed somehow. So the prestige that people project on me can be used, for example, when I go with my interlocutor to talk about local administrations or politicians, for them to gain-- for my interlocutors to gain something from them. This can be used in good ways, right?
Or I can do translation or help with homework, with babysitting, this kind of stuff. All of this, being part of each other's lives-- of course, differently with different persons, obviously-- it's really part of the transformative experience of ethnography, I think.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Well said. Thank you, Giovanna. We're going to move on to our first audience question. Just so our audience knows, we have about 15 minutes or so. Please use the Q&A feature at the bottom of the screen to submit a question to the speakers. These questions are not visible to other participants. But if you prefer your question to be anonymous and your name to not be mentioned, then please specify that when you submit your question.
Our first question is from [? Meian ?] [? Yu. ?] The question is, "What are some of the approaches you use to avoid coming across as an expert when studying marginalized population as an outsider? Specific examples, if possible. And thank you for this insightful panel talk."
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Can I answer this question?
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Yeah.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Well, just starting to answer. So I think being in the position of a learner and somehow inhabiting this position and accepting it and working with it allowed me to be able to be perceived not as the expert of the situation. Also knowing that what I was doing and what I'm doing is something that is gifted to me, it's not something that I, necessarily, am entitled to helped me very much in negotiating my personality. Lots of listening.
I always tell my students that when I'm starting a project, a new project, I don't ask questions. I don't do interviews for at least six months into my fieldwork. I just hang out with people, follow them, maybe ask some practical questions-- how I do this or how to do that. But my research is not part of my agenda. I just flow with them for at least six months.
And I also-- I have to say this publicly-- I don't take fieldwork notes at the beginning of my ethnography because I think that writing down is somehow fixing some gaze, some interpretation, some avenues that they're not necessarily the ones I want to take and they were not necessarily the ones that my interlocutors were taking, or to think about their lives. So I might jot down a few key words here and there, just to remind me who I talked to or what I did, and who should I return to if I want to know more about something. But really, accepting for it to be part of your life, for your research to be part of your life.
And therefore-- yeah, this is a tip that I shouldn't have said. But you know, this is it. OK.
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: No. Dr. Parmigiani, I have to say, that really rung my bell, which is being human first. But I should also say that if there's any junior scholars out there, don't be afraid to be the expert because sometimes that's your only calling card to be invited to these communities.
So for example, in my own experience, as a younger person going out to talk to people who are many decades older, they were curious to talk to an expert. They wanted to finally have a conversation with someone where they didn't have to start at square one. And they thought, oh, wow, well, you've read all my books so I don't need to give you the song and dance. We can actually just kind of communicate about, so I know you were involved in this, but how did it feel? Or do you feel as though the person you were then is the person you are now?
And expertise is not necessarily alienating. In fact, sometimes it can be comforting because you can approach them in the spirit of openness and generosity without a judgment and without having them to be who people think they are instead of people who they are. So I'll just say that expertise is not always a bad thing. Sometimes, it can be a door opener.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: If I can chime in, I think I really do agree with you. There are context in which actually being the experts allow you to get more information and to connect more with some of the interlocutors. I think we have a toolbox that we can use, and sometimes, being an expert is a good thing, as you said, and sometimes it's not. But we should be able to use the tool as needed. So thank you, Christian, for reminding us this.
RUSSELL BURK: I mean, I don't think I'm an expert at anything. So that kind of helps. But yeah, I think there have definitely been points where someone learning that I'm a PhD candidate has opened doors, right? The community that I work with is extremely well-read, so oftentimes, that makes somebody want to say, like, well, what do you think about [INAUDIBLE], this article she wrote in the '90s or whatever.
So I think it depends on context. Yes, sometimes that's a real conversation starter. I think that my approach and verdict out on how well it's going to work is to just be totally upfront about the questions that I have. And with my interlocutors, I've found that to be really helpful because the sort of context in which I'm interacting with people are sort of book groups and classes and small gatherings of people who all have questions.
And so I think making it clear that I'm interested in learning and interested in having a dialogue has been my main approach because I feel like that's the most honest approach. And I think that has really helped facilitate the great conversations and relationship building.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you. I love the approach on the humanness of these conversations. And thank you, all three of you, for your advice and response to that question. We're going to turn to a question from Greg Brown. It is, "How would you respond to Lincoln and Guba's position?" So Lincoln and Guba wrote a programmatic article about qualitative research, that the information and its interpretation involve power so that the participants should have a way to member check the information and especially any emerging patterns or interpretations as they emerge, and then have new levels of understanding themselves as a result of the process of the research and interpretation.
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: Well-- No, you go. You go, Doctor. You go.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thank you for this question. It's very important. I do agree. To me, in my experience, when I say that I'm part of the life of people and the people I'm working with are part of my life, it means that what is in my mind is shared. I'm thinking about an article, I'm thinking about interpretation. I wouldn't say in the first six months of ethnography, but later on, the more the relationships get stronger and closer, I start consciously reflecting on what I'm seeing and what I'm experiencing with at least some of the person, the closest person I'm working with.
And I cherish this not only because it allows me to explain, to do some code switching and to explain what I live, so how I understand my position, how I understand our relationship, but also how I understand my being an academic, but also how as an academic, I can explain what I think I understood to a wider audience. So when I talk about committing to relationships, to me, this comes together with sharing my being me and my being an academic and scholar who is doing ethnography on the field.
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: Yeah. I think-- exactly. To echo everything you said, and also looking at the evaluative criteria that Lincoln and Guba posited, it's all very helpful. But I think it's important to keep in mind that it's also very abstract, that this is such important research and it's so important to have guidelines, which when I'm actually talking to historical figures, if I tried-- if I brought out this list and was making sure that I had credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability, which are the four criteria, it would be so stilted and uninteresting.
In fact, I think it would make my interlocutors clam up and be like, oh, my god, am I talking to, like, a Google bot? Am I talking to, like, literally, a computer? And as Dr. Parmigiani said, being human, leading with your humility, and as Russell, I think, has done a great job of illustrating, really doing your best to not come as a scholar, but to come as someone with an investment in the field, who wants to share in knowledge creation. And also, just as an aside, I bounce my drafts by my interlocutors. And I ask them, did I get anything wrong?
And it's not uncommon for them to say, I don't agree with your interpretation, but yes, you have correctly or you have properly communicated my perspective. And that's my goal. I say I just want to make sure your perspective is right, not the interpretation. And that's the difference that I really put a lot of importance on.
RUSSELL BURK: Yeah, so I mean, I think this points to something that I've had a real problem with. And that is that my training in critical race theory has taught me that there are times where, like, speaking up, identifying something as being problematic. And that doesn't just mean saying, that was racist. It might mean saying, are we actually taking this thing into account? What are we missing? What are the implications that aren't being discussed right now?
That that's an imperative, right? That that is what my training has prepared me to do. But if I walk into the field and I start doing that, then, one, I've completely disrupted whatever setting I'm in; two, I could easily become combative and be seen as hostile to the people that I'm working with. And so I don't-- and I've thought about just saw this question, of how would I approach presenting my sort of analysis and observations to my interlocutors.
And one of the problems with doing an ethnography of whiteness, that I've spoken with other ethnographers about this, is that if you frame questions-- it's that we easily learn the things that we are supposed to say, right? So in certain settings and circumstances, we will say the things we are supposed to say and then do and say things that totally contradict that in other settings. We're talking about white supremacy and racism.
So I don't know how-- and I've thought about this-- I don't know how to approach this problem because I don't think that ethnography should result in a sort of jack-in-the-box surprise at the end of a long period of interactions, that here are Russell's thoughts on how whiteness is being used or what are the implications of certain practices or discourses. But I don't know how to do that without destroying the project.
And the problem with-- I'm not saying, oh, it would ruin my work. No, I think what I am doing is important and I think that totally destroying the ability to do the work I'm doing would negate something that is, I think, useful and important work.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Excellent. Thank you, Russell. I think that actually lends a perfect bridge into our final question for today's session. Another question from [? Meian ?] [? Yu, ?] which is, "How--" and we have about five minutes to answer, so I'm just being a little mindful of time because it's such a rich question-- "How do you think of reciprocal relationships in research? As a researcher, you get paper or a book and publish, as Dr. Greer said. And what does the community receive in return? Not necessarily in a monetary way or material good way. Or do they receive a monetary compensation for their time? And how do you honor those communities who spend their time with you, opened their hearts, and shared their knowledge? How do you see reciprocity and generativity in that space?"
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: I know Dr. Parmigiani buys them lunch and dinner. I know you hang out. . I know you're nice enough to pick up the tab.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: I do hang out. I do hang out. No, in my case, visibility is a very important dimension. So in the case of feminists, for example, I recently gifted the book-- finally, could go back to Salento after a couple of years. I gifted the book to one of the main interlocutors who actually was very moved by reading the story of her life or herself, or seeing herself in my book as a memento, you know, of her political activity. And she gifted the book to her son, for example, which I found very moving.
In the case of, for example, of the pagans, being an ethnographer who went native on the fields and became a pagan herself was a way to validate-- they felt validating their experience a particular way to live their lives vis-a-vis the hegemonic context that is not very keen towards magic and this kind of framework to live, to be in the world and understand the world. So in my experience, visibility, validation, and being part-- their story are written down, their story are readable, and they grant immortality, you know, in a way, as the classics taught us.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you so much, Giovanna. Christian or Russell, would you like to respond to any further?
RUSSELL BURK: Yeah, sure. I don't know how to word this without getting myself in trouble. Well, I like, want to be authentic and accurate and never put words in anybody's mouth and, as I've said before, to be protective of the community that I'm interacting with.
And the fact of the matter is that work in critical whiteness studies gets defensive responses, generally speaking. And my hope would be that I have a shared commitment to a project of interrogating whiteness with my interlocutors, at least with most of them that I've worked with personally. My hope would be that criticisms would be seen as constructive, and my hope would be that I can develop criticisms that are constructive, that would contribute to an endeavor that I think we share. And that probably will not be the way that it is always received.
And I mean, I suppose that I can control that insofar as I can do the best quality work that I can.
J. CHRISTIAN GREER: I have nothing to add. I mean, I'm in such awe of the other panelists and how sharp they are. I just want to say here, here. And really, it's so inspiring to be on a panel with such strong scholars and to be a part of the program for the study of spiritual evolution.
NATALIA SCHWIEN: Thank you, Christian. And I second that here, here. So thank you so much Christian, Giovanna, and Russell for joining us today, and thank you to our audience for tuning in, and thank you for your wonderful questions. We encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter for information on future events, including upcoming colloquia and our inaugural conference on ecological spirituality this upcoming April 27 through 30, 2022, which Dr. Parmigiani and Dr. Greer will both be speaking at. So you'll be able to catch their work in a much more in-depth space, with-- well, I don't know. A similar-- more specific. There you go.
A little bit about the conference. This exciting event will feature over 100 speakers from all over the globe. And as previously announced, we are planning to hold a fully hybrid conference in which it is possible to present and to attend sessions either in-person or via Zoom. Though we understand that this might change if there is a new surge in COVID cases. We may move to an entirely online format. And so for this reason, we suggest don't buy your plane tickets yet if you're intending to join us in person, though we hope you will be able to.
And we will open our registration portal in January. So if you would like to receive more information, sign up for our newsletter, check out our websites. Thank you all so much again. Thank you to our wonderful speakers for such an enriching and informative and honest and open conversation, and for all of the wonderful advice that you've shared today. And we look forward to speaking to you again soon. Wishing you all health and safety, and thank you so much again. Have a great week.
SPEAKER 2: Sponsor-- Program for the Evolution of Spirituality.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2021, President and Fellows of Harvard College.