BLAIN, JENNY

(1949– )

Senior lecturer in applied social sciences in the Faculty of Development and Society at Sheffield Hallam University, where she leads the master’s program in social science research methods. As an anthropologist studying identity and meaning within today’sPaganisms, Blain has written extensively on paganism and contemporaryHeathenry, especially shamanisticseidr, focusing on issues of insider research, the anthropology ofaltered states of consciousness, andgender. Her bookNine Worlds of Seid-Magic:Ecstasyand Neo-Shamanism in North European Paganism(2002) presented autoethnographic and insider research on contemporary seidr practitioners and shamanistic interpretative work on Heathen religions inNorthern Europeand contributed to the theorizing of indigenous British and North European shamanisms, as well as to interpretations of Heathenry past (in the Eddas and Sagas) and present (among practitioners).Her journal articles address and contribute to research on shamanisms, Paganisms,ritualstudies, gender andsexuality, folklore, and heritage studies, and her contributions to undergraduate texts (including the introductory sociology textThink Twice[2005] she coauthored with Lorne Tepperman) attempt to introduce students to the complexities of thinking about how spirituality and worldview (includingcosmology) interface with the everyday world. Blain was coeditor and contributor to the volumeResearching Paganisms(2004), which offered new epistemological, theoretical, and methodological considerations on research in the study of culture and identity, through the case example of newnatureor earth religions, including her own chapter on seidr. WithRobert Wallis, Blain codirects the Sacred Sites, Contested Rights/Rites project examining contemporary Pagan engagements with the past, particularlynew-indigenesatsacred sites.