The Man with the Waistcoat and Cravat: Ronald Hutton's Contributions to Anthropology, Folklore, and Pagan Studies

Abstract

The Man with the Waistcoat and Cravat:Ronald Hutton's Contributions to Anthropology, Folklore, and Pagan Studies Sabina Magliocco Keywords Ronald Hutton, Paganism, Neopaganism, Pagan studies, anthropology, folklore, ethnography, postcolonialism, archaeology, ritual At the beginning of his important essay "How Myths Are Made," Ronald Hutton cites the following anecdote from The Innocent Anthropologist, Nigel Barley's memoir of his ethnographic fieldwork among the Dowayo of Cameroon. Barley had asked an interlocutor: "Who is organizing the festival?""The man with the porcupine quills in his hair," the interlocutor replied."I can't see anyone with porcupine quills in his hair," Barley objected."No, he's not wearing them," the informant clarified.1 While Barley used the anecdote to illustrate how the Dowayo tend to describe things ideally, rather than as they actually are, for Hutton, it was a metaphor for the fact that human perception is culturally and historically determined. We fail to notice things that are quite obvious to others, or see things that cultural outsiders cannot perceive, based entirely on our cultural expectations. Hutton links this process to myth-making—the creation of narratives that may have little basis in reality, yet can be foundational or transformational. A concern with how the nature of reality is culturally and historically constructed lies at the core of all of Hutton's work. It is the thread that [End Page 4] connects his wide-ranging interests, from the archaeology of pagan Britain to the English ritual year and its romanticization, to the construction of the figures of the witch, the druid, and the shaman and their instrumentalization in different time periods and for different political and cultural purposes. His books and articles do not so much tell us all about these subjects, as they illustrate how and why they have been narrated in particular ways during particular historical periods. While his method is that of an historian, his approach is more like that of an anthropologist or a folklorist, with its precise attention to context, to the voices of all the various stakeholders, and to the ways people perform belief. In this discussion, I will make two separate arguments. First, I will explore the intersections of Professor Hutton's scholarship with my disciplines, anthropology and folklore studies, to argue that he not only makes use of them in the sense of being an interdisciplinary scholar, but contributes substantively to historicizing them as currents of thought in the broader tapestry of European epistemology, whose threads he is constantly teasing out for his readers. Secondly, I will argue that Hutton's interdisciplinary scholarship made the academic study of modern Pagan religions not only possible, but respectable. As a folklorist and anthropologist specializing in the study of legend, ritual, and belief—in other words, the very processes at the center of Hutton's lifelong inquiry—I can attest that his understanding and appreciation of these disciplines are extraordinary for one not trained in either. Usually when we talk about interdisciplinary research, we refer to scholars whose investigations draw from literature in several allied fields to address a particular issue. Seldom, however, does their knowledge extend so deeply into those fields as to reflect back to them their own histories and epistemologies. When Hutton writes about anthropology or folklore studies, in contrast, he gives us a mirror in which we see reflected the history of these disciplines in a wider context. He goes beyond just borrowing literature to offering a deep and nuanced understanding of the development of ideas in those fields. I will offer two examples of this principle in action. The first is his treatment of anthropological approaches to witchcraft. Although implicit in earlier work, this treatment first became a central focus for Hutton in his 2004 article "Anthropological and Historical Approaches to Witchcraft: Potential for a New Collaboration?" published in The Historical Journal.2 The key argument of that article is that in order to understand the [End Page 5] figure of the European witch, historians ought to make use of the contributions of anthropologists to the study of witchcraft in non-Western cultures. In the early 2000s, anthropology was just emerging from a period in which it had essentially told European historians...