Greenwood, Susan

   Anthropologist and Pagan teaching undergraduate courses on shamanism and altered states of consciousness at the University of Sussex in Great Britain. Greenwood has written widely on nature religion and magic, taking a critically sympathetic approach to issues of identity, gender, feminism, morality, and the environment. She is the author of two important volumes on magic: Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld (2000), exploring British Paganisms and neo-shamanisms, especially wicca, as expressed through concepts of the other world; and The Nature of Magic: An Anthropology of Consciousness (2005), which theorizes magic as a form of altered consciousness itself. In the latter volume, Greenwood deals with a general concept of “magical consciousness,” on the one hand, and localized animistic engagements with living landscapes, on the other, although the tension between the general and particular is not resolved: the concept of animism itself might sidestep the need for a concept of a singular, universal (to humans) magical consciousness.