Review of Danielle Kirby, Fantasy and Belief By Carole Cusack

https://www.academia.edu/145828836/Review_of_Danielle_Kirby_Fantasy_and_Belief?email_work_card=title Danielle Kirby’s Fantasy and Belief is a re-working of her doctoral dissertation, which was submitted in 2009. The substantive foci of Religious Studies have changed considerably in the past four years, and Kirby’s interest in online communities, the scriptural potential of fantasy and science-fiction narratives, and in the emergence of other-than-human identities (spiritual, mechanical, animal) has entered the mainstream to a certain extent. The book is fresh and interesting, and the extensive online ethnography that Kirby marshals to render the conceptual framework and lived reality of Otherkin, those people who ‘believe themselves to be spiritually and/or physically other than human’ (p. 39) is a valuable, in-depth case study in an emergent field often characterised by brief and cursory treatments. ...