Celebrating The Southern Seasons

As the twentieth century drew to a close, a pioneering book brought rituals and ceremonies down to earth and closer to home. Celebrating the Southern Seasons showed how the traditional European festivals we inherited can be a more profound experience if they are in tune with the seasons, how they can be adapted for Aotearoa, and how rewarding an appreciation of longstanding Maori festivals can be. In 2005, ten years after the book's first publication, New Zealanders are much more inclined than previously to consider how various traditions can enrich our celebrations here and now. Matariki, the New Year celebration at Winter Solstice, has undergone a massive resurgence - and other seasonal festivities are springing up all over the country. The time is ripe for an updated and expanded edition of Celebrating the Southern Seasons. In the tenth anniversary edition of this unique work, author Juliet Batten sheds more light on customs, symbols and meanings attached to seasonal changes. She reports not only on forms of celebration that New Zealanders have inherited and found but also on those we have devised and adapted. And she suggests readings, myths and stories to enrich our high days and holidays, strengthening the book's role as a valuable resource.

The southern garden produces delights in all four seasons, from asparagus to tomatoes, apples to collard greens. Make use of the bounty of your garden or farmers' market with new twists on familiar favorites. Recipes for Apple Radish Salad and Bacon Apple Burgers break up a fall parade of crisps and crumbles. Instead of roasting, make Whiskey Braised Sweet Potatoes or Sweet Potato Peanut Stew and add greens to Shrimp and Grits. Recipes for preserving herbs, pickling peaches and berry jams mean that your harvest will never go to waste. Let experienced gardener and cook Cathy Cleary walk you through four seasons of fresh, flavorful cooking.

Embracing the Witch and the Goddess is a detailed survey of present-day feminist witches in New Zealand. It examines the attraction of witchcraft for its practitioners, and explores witches' rituals, views and beliefs about how magic works. The book provides a detailed portrait of an undocumented section of the growing neo-pagan movement, and compares the special character of New Zealand witchcraft with its counterparts in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia. Kathryn Rountree traces the emergence and history of feminist witchcraft, and links witchcraft with the contemporary Goddess movement. She reviews scholarly approaches on the study of witchcraft and deals with the key debates which have engaged the movement's adherents and their critics, and ultimately presents what Mary Daly declared was missing from most historical and anthropological research on witchcraft: a 'Hag-identified vision'. Based on fieldwork amongst witch practitioners, Embracing the Witch and the Goddess is an important contribution to the emerging profile of present-day witchcraft and paganism.

All of us have the right to choose and organise our own ceremonies according to our beliefs: this book tells us what we have to do and how to do it. Events covered within the book include: weddings (formal and informal), commitment to partnerships, renewal of vows, name giving/naming, graduation, significant birthdays, divorce, stepfamily acceptance, house dedication, 'sorry', funerals and memories. Combining details of organising a celebration or ceremony, a wealth of suggested readings and music, checklists and advice on how to write and structure your own ceremonies, CEREMONIES & CELEBRATIONS is an essential handbook.

Land of Beautiful Vision is the first book-length ethnography to address the role of material culture in contemporary adaptations of Buddhism and the first to focus on convert Buddhists in New Zealand. Sally McAra takes as her subject a fascinating instance of an ongoing creative process whereby a global religion is made locally meaningful through the construction of a Buddhist sacred place. She uses an in-depth case study of a small religious structure, a stupa, in rural New Zealand to explore larger issues related to the contemporary surge in interest in Buddhism and religious globalization. Her research extends beyond the level of public discourse on Buddhism to investigate narratives of members of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) about their relationship with the land, analyzing these and the FWBO’s transformative project through a thematic focus on key symbolic landmarks at their site, Sudarshanaloka. In considering cross-cultural interactions resulting in syncretism or indigenization of alien religions, many anthropological studies concentrate on the unequal power relations between colonizing and colonized peoples. McAra extrapolates from this literature to look at a situation where the underlying power relations are quite different. She focuses on individuals in an organization whose members seek to appropriate knowledge from an "Eastern" tradition to remake their own society—one shaped by its unresolved colonizing past.

Occasions for Words is a fabulous resource and inspiration for both professional celebrants and those who only make the occasional speech. Included in this unique collection are professional poems suitable for any Australian occasion.

"Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery. Shirane discusses textual, cultivated, material, performative, and gastronomic representations of nature. He reveals how this kind of 'secondary nature, ' which flourished in Japan's urban environment, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment when it began to recede from view. Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane also clarifies the use of natural and seasonal topics as well as the changes in their cultural associations and functions across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world."--Back cover.

Subtitled 'Rituals for Aotearoa', the book gives information about customs, symbols and stories relating to seasonal change from Maori and European perspectives. It examines the meeting of the two dominant cultures of Aotearoa, and provides an overview of seasonal celebrations. Each seasonal section examines the heritage from Maori, pagan and Christian European traditions and offers suggestions for developing and structuring rituals.