Reflections on “Borrowed Magic”: Gendered Epistemologies, Ritual Authority, and the Politics of the Sacred at AAA 2025

Authors : Betül Özel Çiçek

Pages : 679-690

Doi:10.21798/kadem.2025.197

View : 43 | Download : 97

Publication Date : 2025-12-29

Article Type : Other Papers

Abstract :This Letter to the Editor critically engages with the “Borrowed Magic” roundtable held at the 2025 American Anthropological Association (AAA) Annual Meeting, reading it through the author’s research on the Goddess cult as a device for historiography and theology. The letter examines the unresolved tension and resulting theological aporia between the “woman-centered” symbolic continuity of Goddess traditions and emerging non-binary frameworks. It further analyzes the generational conflict between authority rooted in long-term embodied practice and performative, aesthetically driven ritual forms circulating in digital environments. Discussions on the anti-colonial ethics of “research refusal” in bio-archaeology and the reproduction of historical knowledge through multimodal methods, such as sonic alchemy, are integrated into the analysis. The letter argues that contemporary spiritual communities are not merely ethnographic objects but active “laboratories of epistemology” where authenticity, memory, and gendered power are continuously renegotiated.
Keywords : Cinsiyetlendirilmiş epistemoloji, Ritüel otoritesi, Tanrıça kültü, Kutsalın siyaseti.

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