embarked on a project entitled "The Pagan Census" in an attempt to gain sociological data from the Pagan community across the U.S. Receiving funding from the Faculty Development Fund at West Chester University, Berger was aided in this project by over 15 students who helped her to code and enter data for the survey. Together, Berger and Arthen wrote and distributed their survey through Wiccan and Pagan organizations across the country, as well as in journals, on the internet and at festivals. The duo received over 2000 responses, providing Berger with one of her main sources of information. Throughout her 11-year period of fieldwork, Berger had to use snowball sampling to retrieve her data on the Pagan community, something that she attributed to the "secrecy of groups and practitioners". She conducted formal interviews with over 40 practicing Pagans, and over 60 others instead were informally interviewed during conversations at Pagan events, following which Berger recorded their responses in her fieldnotes. She participated in rituals with ten different Wiccan covens, two of which were all-female covens, and the other eight of which were mixed-gender in structure, but all of whom assembled in the Northeastern United States. Accepting that this regional focus might affect her results, she supplemented her fieldwork by reading literature on Paganism from across the country, concluding that "the differences among groups and practitioners within the United States are less important than the similarities." Unlike the sociologists Margot Adler and Loretta Orion, both of whom had been or became Pagans whilst studying the movement, Berger stated that she had not joined the religion, thereby remaining an "outsider" throughout her research, but had made many friends within the Pagan community. A Community of Witches was a part of a series of books entitled 'Studies in Comparative Religion' that were published by the University of South Carolina Press, and edited by Frederick M. Denny. In Denny's preface to the book, he remarked that it "adds significantly to the steadily growing scholarly literature" on the subject of Wicca and contemporary Paganism, being of "considerable use for our understanding of how other new religious communities are sustaining and developing themselves in the unprecedented rich tapestry of American religious pluralism." Synopsis Starting with a preface in which Berger explains how she first began studying the Wiccan and Pagan community of New England, Berger opens the main part of her book with a description of