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A Community of Witches: Contemporary NeoPaganism and Witchcraft in the United States, by Helen A. Berger. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 148 pp. $24.95 cloth. ISBN: 1-57003-246-7.
Helen Berger's A Community of Witches sets out to locate the contemporary Witchcraft and NeoPaganism movement as a religion of late modernity using Anthony Giddens's structuration theory. In 11 years of field research in the Northeastern United States, she concentrated on Earth Spirit Community, a gender-inclusive teaching coven. She attended Pagan festivals and rituals, read Pagan journals, visited Internet web sites, conducted over 100 interviews, and distributed a Pagan Census. Her 2000 respond dents confirmed that a large proportion of members are white, female, middle-class, and college educated, and that 41 percent are parents raising children.
Well organized, clearly written, and aimed at an academic audience, Berger's book covers issues of identity creation, the coven, the Pagan community, children, and the consequences of the religion's expansion. Her first substantive chapter introduces the movement's focus on ritual and gender identity transformation. Drawing on Giddens's notion of self-identity as a negotiated and reflexive achievement, Berger understands the religion's rituals as facilitating members' self-transformation: Women become empowered through identifying with the Goddess while men identify with the Homed God who "loves women as equals" (p. 42). She claims members are "attempting to create a community of equity between men...