Heathens of many names: multiplicity in religious self-descriptors among contemporary Norse-oriented Pagans
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a digital survey of the reception of Viking-themed and Norse-inspired media products among self-identifying Heathens, 76% of 407 respondents stated that they were comfortable using several terms to describe their religious identity. The bulk of the respondents resided in the United States of America (51%), followed by Nordic countries (22%), the United Kingdom (8%), and Canada (7%)—a geographical distribution that is also, to a large extent, reflected in the interview sample. Twenty-seven follow-up interviews revealed differences in terminological preferences and interpretations. Several respondents considered one term to be the most accurate descriptor, but used another to present themselves in social interactions. This raised the questions of how and why Norse-oriented Pagans select the self-descriptors that they do. Although respondents differ in terms of terminological choices, the motives and rationale that drive their selection are strikingly similar: terminological precision, successful social bonding, and avoidance of social stigma. Norse-oriented Pagans practice religious polyonymy (multiple names for the same thing or person) to ensure success in social interactions and manage social impressions of themselves and their religion’s public image. In a broader perspective, this study addresses how political and ideological context(s) and alignment can motivate choices about how to communicate one’s religious identity and why they vary.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it