Mattering the Invisible: Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral 2021000319, 2021000320, 9781800730663, 9781800730670

Citation preview

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Mattering the Invisible

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Mattering the Invisible Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral

Edited by

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Diana Espírito Santo and Jack Hunter

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

First published in 2021 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2021 Diana Espírito Santo and Jack Hunter

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Names: Espirito Santo, Diana, editor. | Hunter, Jack (Spiritualist), editor. Title: Mattering the invisible : technologies, bodies, and the realm of the spec tral / edited by Diana Espírito Santo and Jack Hunter. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2021000319 (print) | LCCN 2021000320 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800730663 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800730670 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Parapsychology and science. | Technology--Miscellanea. Classifcation: LCC BF1045.S33 M33 2021 (print) | LCC BF1045.S33 (ebook) | DDC 133--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000319

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-066-3 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-067-0 ebook

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction. On the Materiality of Unseen Things Diana Espirito Santo and Jack Hunter

vii viii 1

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

PART I. BODILY SEMANTICS, METAPHOR, AND MEDIATION Chapter 1. Organicism and Psychical Research: Where Mediums and Mushrooms Meet Jack Hunter

25

Chapter 2. Semantics of the Suffering: Torture Technologies and Mediumship in Buenos Aires Miguel Algranti

46

Chapter 3. Media Technologies and the Otherworld in Late Socialist Vietnam Gertrud Hüwelmeier

67

Chapter 4. Broken Words: Tools of Oracular Articulacy in Afro-Cuban Divination Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

90

PART II. ORDERS OF SOUND, SIGHT, AND MEASUREMENT Chapter 5. Radioaficionados and UFOs: The Social Life of Radios in Chile Diana Espírito Santo Chapter 6. Hospitality and Proof: Human Mediums, Technical Media, and Controversial Knowledge in Ghost-Hunting Practices in the United States Ehler Voss

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

111

132

vi • Contents

Chapter 7. Picturing the Unseen: Polaroid Practice and the Re-enchantment of the Western World Andrea Lathrop Ligueros

153

PART III. MATTERING INVISIBLE POWERS Chapter 8. Specters of Climate and the Construction of Ghostly Realities in Brazil Renzo Taddei

179

Chapter 9. Ontological Opportunism: Reanimating the Inanimate in Physics and Science Communication at CERN Anne Dippel

200

Chapter 10. Phantom Power, Parallax, and the Multiple Cities of Luanda: Manifestation and Materialization in Angola Ruy Liera Blanes

222

243

Index

259

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion. Mediation and Variable Communications Diana Espírito Santo and Jack Hunter

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Figures

Figure 3.1. Votive paper offering in the shape of media devices, to be presented to the ancestors. Photograph by Gertrud Hüwelmeier. Hanoi 2016. © Gertrud Hüwelmeier.

73

Figure 3.2. Votive paper offering in the shape of a horse and an elephant, to be presented to the spirits during a trance session. Photograph by Gertrud Hüwelmeier. Hanoi 2016. © Gertrud Hüwelmeier.

75 158

Figure 7.2. 8 × 10 Polaroid chemical experiment. Photograph by Andrea Lathrop, 2017. © Andrea Lathrop.

161

Figure 10.1. Visual representation of a parallactic movement. Designed by Ruy Blanes. © Ruy Blanes.

230

Figure 10.2. Composition of the Hotel Panorama as seen from Luanda Bay, the Luanda skyline, and the perspective from behind the Luanda skyline. Photographs by Ruy Blanes, 2007–15. © Ruy Blanes.

235

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 7.1. Light paint. Photograph by Andrea Lathrop, 2016. © Andrea Lathrop.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments

Some of the in-depth research that underlies the ideas in this book comes from Diana Espírito Santo’s three-year project “Technologies of Enchantment: The Generation of Evidence in Contemporary Spiritual-Scientific Imaginaries in Chile,” funded by Chile’s FONDECYT program (2016– 19), project 1160046. More recently, further work on themes of technology, spirit, ufology, history, neoliberalism, and their intersections has been made possible by ANID’s Programa de Investigación Asociativa (PIA), specifically the project SOC 180033 (2018–21), of which Diana is the director. As such, she would like to thank a host of people that allowed for the ideas, as well as the concrete possibilities, of this book to take shape. Among those in Chile she thanks Gonzalo Barceló, Vicente Didier, Alejandra Vergara, Alejandro Parra, Sergio Salinas, Annette Mülberger, César Parra, and Yerko Muñoz, and in Europe, Aja Smith, Theodora Sutton, Rodrigo Toniol, Jonas Buer, and, of course, Bruno Reinhardt. In relation to her chapter, her warm thanks also go to the ufology community in Chile, especially to Octavio Ortiz (and to Felipe Cisternas, who introduced him to her). Jack would like to thank Diana for inviting him to be a part of this project and allowing him to help steer its direction. He is also immensely grateful to his family for putting up with his bizarre interests and enabling him to do the work that needs to be done. Finally, both Diana and Jack would like to thank Marion Berghahn and Tom Bonnington for undertaking this project with so much professionalism and enthusiasm.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Introduction On the Materiality of Unseen Things Diana Espírito Santo and Jack Hunter

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

First Comments This book is about the matter—objects, apparatuses, technologies, instruments, and bodies—involved in the experience of the paranormal. “Involved” here may mean a variety of different things: that people experience spirits through mobile phones, for instance, or see them in polaroid photographs, or “hear” aliens through radios; or indeed, that they immerse themselves within the spectral dimensions of meteorology, quantum physics, or biology. But it also has a cosmogonical dimension. Inasmuch as it provides the medium for the manifestation of the unseen, matter enables the existence of the paranormal—it makes it possible and brings it into being, even if simply for the person manipulating the apparatus or object or experiencing a “sense of presence.” But this begs an important question, and that is the question of the nature of the medium itself. In a recent book by three media theorists—Galloway, Thacker, and Wark (2014)—the authors question normative understandings of mediation in their bid to contravene the basic tenets of the idea of communication as intrinsic to the concept. Media theorists, they say, tend to understand technological devices, for instance, as “imbued with the irresistible force of their own determinacy” (2014: 7). That means that media have the capacity to intervene in the world, and people can use them as tools for negative or positive influence: “Media are either clear or complicated, either local or remote, either familiar or strange” (2014: 17)—but they always mediate. However, the authors ask, “Does everything that exists, exist to be presented and represented, to be mediated and remediated, to be communicated and translated?” (2014: 10). They answer in the negative. Mediation as a theory is insufficient to account for moments in which there is an impossibility or insufficiency of com-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

2 • Introduction

munication and yet communication still takes place (2014: 16), either because the phenomenon in this communicative relationship is ineffable or because there is a refusal, or a silence (2014: 10), making it essentially ex-communicative. Thacker in particular argues in his chapter that media may be “haunted” when they span the gap between different ontological orders or realities, and he uses the concept of “dark media” to signal the absence of communicability, or representation—the media that paradoxically negate mediation itself. The occult has always had a necessary and causal relationship with technological and scientific materiality (cf. Sconce 2000 and Noakes 2019 for useful historical overviews). Indeed, as Bernard Dionysius argues, occultism does not develop separately but emerges from “within the development of rational schemes of science and communication” (2016: 2). Similarly, Christopher White’s historical research has explored the occult motivations of mathematicians and physicists in their quest to understand higher dimensional states and objects (2018). Richard Noakes, among others, has even argued that practices such as mesmerism and spiritualism played a pivotal role in the development of science and medicine in the nineteenth century (1999; 2019), during which time, for instance, the “placebo effect” was discovered, as was the unconscious mind, through investigations into these practices and experiences (see Blanes and Espírito Santo 2014). The spectral forces of occultism, as Dionysius says, cannot simply be taken as spectral, that is, ethereal and disconnected from scientific and technological innovation (2016: 9). Rather, they are embedded in the history and imaginary of technological and scientific innovation, which makes spectrality possible in the first place (and perhaps even vice versa). Sconce notes that, in response to Spiritualism’s conceptualization of the spirit world—composed of and transmitted through electrical currents (seen, for instance, in the idea of the “spiritual telegraph”)—neurologists of the same period legitimated theories of “insanity” based on “an unbalanced telegraphic relationship between the female mind and body” (2000: 13). As Gell argued, “The technology of enchantment is founded on the enchantment of technology. The enchantment of technology is the power that technical processes have of casting a spell over us so that we can see the real world in an enchanted form” (1994: 44). While Gell referred more particularly to forms of art, expertly performed works that capture and entrap us, for the purposes of this book we can understand enchantment in terms of matter more generally. Thus, the issues surrounding mediation take on a much more complex tone in the light of the co-constitutive nature of the paranormal and the technical and

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction • 3

scientific language that historically emerged, and continues to emerge, simultaneously with its experience. Our point then, to begin with, is that a look at matter does not imply that this matter mediates between worlds of the here and the beyond. As the authors mentioned above (Gallaway et al.) have argued, there can be an absence of communication in the matter of mediation. Indeed, instead of asking what matter communicates about the paranormal, we could ask not just if “paranormal” matter involves communication but, even if it does, if communication is essentially about meanings or messages, necessarily. Perhaps instead it is about contact. We explore this hypothesis in the conclusion to this book, in relation to the various contributions to this volume. In the conclusion we also explore versions of this relationship. These include the superimposition of discourses (of science and the mystical); the understanding of matter and technologies as “ghostly” or haunted, and feelings of “presence” through things, such as televisions and bodies, or spirit representations; and spirited technologies as somehow extensions of people. In this introduction we will do two main things. First, we will show that, historically, the connection between paranormality—or the “invisible” more generally—and matter does not reduce to mediation in its simplest form. We propose the need for a spectrum of mediational possibilities, or a lack thereof, in any given historical and ethnographic moment. Second, we will contest the idea that paranormal objects have “agency” and stress the need for different conceptual languages with which to approach the obvious impact of materiality in a consideration of the paranormal or the spiritual. In this volume, we suggest that material organization—in the form of technologies, machines, apparatuses, media, and bodies—participates in the generation of cosmologies of actants, and not just in their affirmation or registry. We propose, following theorists of material semiotics, that people matter the invisible in a variety of different ways. But contrary to Gell, for whom there was a “real” world—to be contrasted with the “enchanted” one—we believe that worlds are performed and enacted through different forms of relationality and thus become real. This includes taking into consideration the power of the very objects in question—a power not just to exert influence on the world but also to relate to other actors in a given setting and create possibilities for the paranormal to manifest, or simply to exist or transpire at any given moment. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost argue that “there is no definitive break between sentient and nonsentient entities or between material and spiritual phenomena” (2010: 10). This also means that technolo-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

4 • Introduction

gies and other materials are not divorced, ontologically, from the people that employ them. In this book we start with this symmetry: with the idea that we cannot pre-distinguish, analytically, between material and ethereal dimensions of technologies, sentient and nonsentient, human and material, but must instead do the work of extricating the relations obtaining between the different entities involved in each ethnographic instance in order to understand how this relationality creates vibrancies. In this we are echoing Beliso-De Jesús’s ethnography of Cuban American practitioners of Santería (2015) in which she argues that people experience media (whether DVD recordings or the internet) as if it were alive somehow—a platform through which spirits and deities can move (sometimes into people’s bodies). Media here does not mediate but rather multiplies and transgresses its condition as mere matter; it extends presences. This requires a flattening of the field of mediation. It also requires a consideration of how materialities act in “concert” (Abrahamsson et al. 2015).

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Contested Matter in the History of Spiritualism The idea of spiritual “presence” is largely connected to materials—or the lack thereof—and the ideologies that underlie them, which are seen to enable or disable such immanence. In Christianity this is very plain. Matthew Engelke (2007) has explored how, in the Masowe Church in Zimbabwe, an apostolic denomination with a “live and direct” manifestation of faith, people are very wary of materiality. Even texts are thought to be dangerous: “They take the spirit out of things” and are, “quite literally, physical obstacles” (2007: 7). However, this repudiation of matter, including the physical structure of the church, does not preclude a painstaking negotiation of what can count as “insignificant” materialities, for instance, honey. Engelke applies Webb Keane’s notion of “semiotic ideology” (2003) to his ethnographic study in order to question both how materiality is deployed and how divinity is experienced through different approaches to the morality of things. Of course, Engelke’s example is almost the exact opposite of modern Spiritualism and its derivatives, which sought ardently to achieve spirit presence through things—be these bodies, devices, or mysterious substances such as ectoplasm. Indeed, certain mechanical operations and machines in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were designed with the explicit purpose of achieving this immanence. This may be surprising, given the long-established division between religious beliefs, mean-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Introduction • 5

ings, and motivations, all of which are thought to exist in the minds of individuals in particular communities, and technologies proper, which operate independently of such concerns and “do their work “in the real world,” producing their effects in accordance with established laws of physics” (Stolow 2013: 2). Indeed, as Stolow says,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Technology refers to an order of things existing outside of and independent from all such dispositions, uses, and frameworks of meaning, and there is not supposed to be anything allegorical about the work technologies perform or the things they can or cannot do. (2013: 3)

Stolow’s Deus In Machina (2013) is a collective attempt to refute a purely instrumentalist view of technologies and to understand, through case studies, that “reality” does not exist independently of the machines and techniques that bring it into being. This volume seeks to pursue this agenda not just with technologies but with matter more broadly—as a whole, the authors here question a divide not simply between human and technical agents but between materiality and a nonvisible world of beings and other forces that it sets in motion or participates in. These do not merely pertain to the “religious” domain. We aim to produce, in the words of Eugene Thacker in his preface to Erik Davis’s TechGnosis, ethnographic analyses of “religion-without-religion” (Davis 2015: xiii). What Davis suggests, according to Thacker, is that technology is religion by other means, both in a contemporary and historical perspective (2015: xiv). Technologies, and the materials used in evoking forces within other domains, manipulating them, grounding them, or producing contact, have never been completely “material” in their machinations. For instance, in the same book, Davis describes how Michael Faraday, a British experimental scientist, discovered the existence of electromagnetism in the 1830s and suggested that this could consist of force fields, or vibrating patterns, rather than discrete physical particles (2015: 44). With this discovery, “Faraday suggested a new vision of the cosmos: corporeal reality was in essence an immense sea of vibrations and insubstantial forces” (2015: 45). It is from this alchemical vision of pure potential that we believe the first spiritualists took their cue. And it was an alchemy that was to easily confound science with magic: “The fact that Spiritualism’s occult fun house sucked in so many prominent scientists simply reflects the larger cultural confusion caused by the explosive growth of science and technology during the industrial revolution” (2015: 61). The effects of mesmerism, Spiritualism, psychical research, and other occult sciences of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occurred on

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

6 • Introduction

multiple planes of space and influence, at the same time as they were also clearly inspired by an industrial modernity and its reaches. On the one hand, the appearance of wireless telephony (the telegraph), to state an obvious example, in which the ether was filled with “converted voices waiting to be picked up on a suitably sensitive receiver” (Noakes 2016: 138), was a perfect metaphor for the long-distance “phone calls” mediums made to spirits every time they sat in a séance. The idea of the “spiritual telegraph,” a spiritualist technological fantasy of “transmitting” from the beyond, shows, as Sconce says, that “such fantastic visions of electronic telecommunications demonstrate that the cultural conception of a technology is often as important and influential as the technology itself” (2000: 27). Spiritualism produced the first modern fantasies of “discoporative electronic liberation” (2000: 27). On the other hand, Terry Castle describes how the popular spectacle of “phantasmagoria,” “illusionistic exhibitions and public entertainments in which ‘specters’ were produced through the use of a magic lantern” (1988: 27), was inspired by the idea that the mind could be “filled with ghostly shapes and images” (1988: 29). The scientific “demystification” of mesmerism led to the emergence of dynamic psychiatry, techniques of hypnotism, psychoanalysis, and the notion of the unconscious. But people imagined consciousness—and perhaps still do—to be analogous to flows of electricity and information, in some sense justifying imaginaries of disembodiment through apparatuses and technologies, as well as the anthropomorphization of media (Sconce 2000: 8–9). As Castle argues, “Producers of phantasmagoria often claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that the new entertainment would serve the cause of public enlightenment by exposing the frauds of charlatans and supposed ghost-seers” (1988: 30). Of course, they did no such thing. Perhaps this was not because of the public’s ignorance or inability to accept evidence. This, we speculate, might have been because the rules at stake were not necessarily rules of the Enlightenment per se; that is, a logic that enacts staunch divisions between animate and inanimate, or between material and immaterial dimensions. In the next few paragraphs we will explain what we mean by this. While all historians of Spiritualism concur that the events at the Fox sisters’ home in Hydesville, New York, where rappings on the walls were interpreted as messages from the spirit world, in codes, impelled the growth of the American spiritualist movement, others—such as Robert C. Cox (2003)—note that there were other, more forceful versions of Spiritualism that emerged simultaneously and even before the Fox events. One of these was Harmonial Spiritualism, founded by

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction • 7

Andrew Jackson Davis—the so-called “Poughkeepsie Seer.” Cox describes that as a young man—one who often experienced mesmeric somnabulistic (sleepwalking) states—Davis began to perceive the physiological “interiors” of those around him, diagnosing bodily afflictions, much like a human x-ray. Further, “as his spiritual senses sharpened, he began to see not only the physical structures of individuals but the structures of the universe as well, as if one could be exchanged for the other” (2003: 8). Harmonial Spiritualism posited the integration of all creation: man as a microscope, a miniature universe, and laws that effectively entangled, if not eliminated, the distinction between spirit and matter (2003: 9). This treatise—Harmonial Spiritualism—was inspired by Swedenborgism, among other movements. Emanuel Swedenborg was a Swedish mystic and scientist who had been the recipient of angelic visitations and visions of the otherworld in the 1740s. According to Cox, “he grasped the celestial key, discerning an elaborate set of “correspondences” between the divine and natural worlds” (2003: 12). Mormonism was another powerful influence among early spiritualists, according to Darryl Caterine (2014). Joseph Smith Jr., the founder of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, wrote, “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes . . .” (1843: 239, in Caterine 2014: 375). Therefore, spiritual development was simultaneously a process of “transmuting one’s material” (Caterine 2014: 375). Refining matter was also of concern to Andrew Jackson Davis. Caterine describes how, in Davis’s seminal text The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations and a Voice to Mankind, published a full year before the Fox sisters began to communicate systematically with their “ghosts,” a particular theological argument is made about progression, matter, and alchemy (2014: 376). Nature came into being through a spontaneous manifestation of the primordial reality, the Sensorium, into a series of concentric worlds of ever-decreasing material condensation. Creation proceeded, in other words, as a cosmic alchemical process in reverse, with finer matter devolving into a coarser materiality. Through progression, however, Nature continued to unfold as the steady refinement of all things back to their original source, driven by what Davis called its indwelling principle of “motion.” (2014: 376)

Davis’s messages in this book were also motivated by the increasing weight of industrialization in people’s moral frames and by its inevitable obstructions. Indeed, the value of modern technology “was not

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

8 • Introduction

to be found in its economic applications, but rather in its potential for use as a metaphysical teaching tool” (2014: 378). Electricity in particular intrigued Davis: “It is the elastic substance that exists within and surrounds all things. . . . It is constantly and incessantly engaged in rarifying and purifying all things; and it is a medium to transmit power and matter in particles” (1847: 144, in 2014: 378). Thus, in Davis’s own cosmology, so Caterine argues, technology was simply an extension of the natural world. In death, man becomes exceedingly more “fine” as a material body made of particles (2014: 379). But Davis’s alchemical transformation is further illustrated in the work of John Murray Spear, a Universalist minister who converted to Spiritualism in the 1850s. Caterine recounts how in 1852 Spear began to receive messages from a set of spirits calling themselves the Association of Electricizers, led by American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin (2014: 380). They transmitted instructions for the building of a device called the New Motor, whose purpose was to transform coarse matter to finer matter, echoing A. J. Davis’s ideas. Franklin explained through his medium—Spear—that the machine would harmonize with the minds of people it came into contact with in order to facilitate the flow of benevolent spirits into society (2014: 381). Spear’s machine, as Sconce notes, which he built in a piecemeal fashion with instructions from the other world, was to be a “convergence of electromagnetisms, both physical and spiritual,” a “source of infinite, self-generating energy”; “nothing less than a “living” machine” (2000: 39). Wires were seen as sacred; zinc and copper as symbolic of the human organism (2009: 40). As we can see, in relation to American Spiritualist history, the notion that “technology can observe nature innocently while the human body becomes increasingly uncontrollable or unreliable in the course of the nineteenth-century” (Kassung 2015: 5–6) is absolutely untenable. Matter—technologies, devices, objects, and bodies—was enmeshed in a web of knowledge and effect in which it absolutely transcended its place in the dualistic universe. Christian Kassung, in an article on “self-writing machines,” argues that, in order to obtain a symmetrical perspective, “one has to go a step further and assume that society and nature, or, in our case, man and machine, require the same level of explanation” (2015: 9). This means fundamentally setting aside any understanding of what matter, materiality, and objects are and do in favor of how they emerge from and function in systems greater than themselves. There is an obvious critique of mediation theory in the anthropology of religion, which we can posit. When the medium literally becomes the message, the notion of mediation collapses. Birgit

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Introduction • 9

Meyer says that media shapes and forms the transmission or messages, participating directly in the cosmologies it mediates (2011). But communication can be varyingly absent from these processes, or it can take alternative shapes where it is no longer glossed as communication; messages are far from universal qualifiers of the relationship between matter and the paranormal.

Toward Material Semiotics

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Our stance here is not that objects have “agency,” nor that they are more or less “material,” and even less that the paranormal or invisible somehow “communicates” through them. Social archaeologist Lambros Malafouris has traced a kind of genealogy of the “agency” of things in anthropology, observing that “on closer inspection the much-celebrated post-processual passage from the passive to the active artifact was essentially a reevaluation of the human rather than the material agent” (2016: 121). However an object may construct a social reality, Malafouris argues, it tends to ultimately turn upon human intentionality (2016: 121). For instance, Gell has an influential definition of “agency” in his book Art and Agency (1998: 20), cited in part by Malafouris: “Things” with their thing-y causal properties are as essential to the exercise of agency as states of mind. In fact, it is only because the causal milieu in the vicinity of an agent assumes a certain configuration, from which an intention may be abducted, that we recognize the presence of another agent. . . . Because the attribution of agency rests on the detection of the effects of agency in the causal milieu, rather than an unmediated intuition, it is not paradoxical to understand agency as a factor of the ambience as a whole, rather than an attribute of the human psyche, exclusively.

So far, so good—agency belongs to a system, an ambiance, rather than to a person or even a single object. But then he makes a distinction between “primary agents,” “who initiate happenings through acts of will” (1998: 21) and intentionality and who are “categorically distinguished from ‘mere’ things or artefacts” (1998: 20), and “secondary agents” through which the primary ones distribute their own agency (1998: 20). These can be cars, dolls, religious items, artwork. The definition in the citation above in which Gell suggests agency to be a property of a kind of atmosphere contradicts significantly his proposition of “kinds” of agency—clearly, some are more important than others. Malafouris

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

10 • Introduction

in particular takes issue with what he sees to be a counterproductive distinction: “On the one hand, it seems to imply that Gell accepts that intentionality is a criterion of agency attribution; on the other, it violates the above-mentioned symmetry between persons and things” (2016: 136). According to Malafouris, what Gell is doing by saying some agents are more “primary” than others is to place the human mind and its intentions over and beyond material engagement, as if objects were somehow deficient in this regard (2016: 136). In their seminal volume Thinking through Things, Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell also criticize Gell’s tendency to see objects only in the light of their social relationships: “His art objects stop short of revising our common sense notions of ‘person’ or ‘thing.’ For agency, here, remains irreducibly human in origin, and its investment into things necessarily derivative” (2007: 17). We are sympathetic to their notion that people “think through things”—as well as with the idea that “no theory can encompass” the diversity of ways people do this, because “disparate activities may well generate equally disparate ontologies” (2007: 17). Thus, there is no one theory, but a method for generating a multiplicity of concepts or theories. For instance, in Morten Pedersen’s chapter, Darhad Mongol shamans don specific robes that enable them to access transcendent kinds of perspective. In this particular case, “shamanic knowledge is embedded in different religious artefacts, such as the shamanic costume, whose intricate design triggers people’s momentary conceptualization of social relationships which otherwise remain unseen, and for the same reason, to a large extent unknown” (2007: 141). In Martin Holbraad’s now much-cited chapter, he argues that the sacred powder on which the prestigious Cuban babalawos exercise their divination craft, is also a power, of sorts. Thus, object and idea, thing and concept, can be collapsed in this particular ethnography. The key to this collapse, according to Holbraad, is the notion of motility: the movement of both the object (a powder)—marks made by the diviner while he is calling the deity—and the concept (the deity, power) that is moved into existence (immanence) by an initiated diviner with a powerful powder. If the motility of powder dissolves the problem of transcendence versus immanence for babalawos, then motility also dissolves the problem of concept versus thing for us. And this because the latter problem is just an instance of the former. After all, the notion of transcendence is just a way of expressing the very idea of ontological separation. (2007: 218)

We do not need to reanimate a world that is already flowing with forces and movements of all kinds, says Ingold (2010). What Henare et al.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Introduction • 11

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

(2007) and Ingold have in common is a basic attention to the affordances of things—in the former’s case, the conceptual affordances that lead, in effect, to the existence of many “worlds” or ontologies; in the latter’s, the phenomenological ones, which question the division of humanity and nature. And indeed, the critique Ingold has of the methodologies of the “ontological turn,” which Holbraad´s work (2012; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017) has been considered to be a fundamental part of, is that it is far too conceptual. We have no space here for an in-depth consideration and critique of this influential “turn” in recent anthropology, or for even a brief consideration of Ingold’s sophisticated ecological anthropology. But we will say that in relation to the themes of this book in particular, we feel that, paradoxically, while we agree with both, neither one of these perspectives does full justice to what we have called “paranormal matter.” However, there is much that we can take from each. For instance, in Ingold’s “dwelling perspective,” matter, objects, landscapes, even navigational instruments and maps are temporal markers that are engaged with perceptually: as an example, “places exist not in space but as nodes in a matrix of movement” (2000: 219). In terms of cartography, in another example, Ingold says, The more it aims to furnish a precise and comprehensive representation of reality, the less true to life this representation appears.” In contrast, “wayfinding depends on the attunement of the traveller’s movements in response to . . . his or her surroundings. . . . Ways of life are not therefore determined in advance, as routes to be followed, but have continually to be worked out anew. And these ways, far from being inscribed upon the surface of an inanimate world, are the very threads from which the living world is woven. (2000: 242)

Ingold is thus diametrically opposite to Gell in his understanding of the inherent “animacy” of the world. “The animacy of the lifeworld, in short, is not the result of an infusion of spirit into substance, or of agency into materiality, but is rather ontologically prior to their differentiation” (2006: 10). One does not “infuse” an object with life, Ingold argues. Animacy is not “a way of believing about the world but a condition of being in it” (2006: 10). This has to do, on the one hand, with the relational constitution of being, with the idea that the separation between organism and environment is false (2006: 12–13), and on the other, with the primacy of movement, with the idea that we are all immersed in movement, caught up in the movement of things, even the weather and the earth, all the time (2006: 15–16). All enti-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

12 • Introduction

ties issue paths, leave traces, move. There is no “inanimate” world to contrast with an “animate” one, just as there is no “agent” to contrast with a “non-agent.” Inhabitation is prior to occupation, according to Ingold, and indeed, he argues that we are all “closet animists” (2006: 11). But Ingold has little to say about the properties of the metaphysical imagination as such, and the capacities of things—objects, and technologies—to enter into dialogue, or formations, which dissolve the boundaries of their “objecthood,” so to speak. For that, we need an approach that, according to what Holbraad and Pedersen (2017: 215) have argued, should speak to “the ethnography of things, as opposed to the things themselves.” In these authors’ revision of the introduction to Thinking through Things (TTT), they take up the Ingoldian challenge of looking at the materials themselves and their properties (2017: 216). But rather than understanding these materials’ enmeshment in forms of life, which would be Ingold’s stance, Holbraad and Pedersen propose to raise the question of the conceptual affordances of matter (2017: 218), and understand these “materials’ transformation into forms of analytical thought” (2017: 219). Holbraad’s own objection to his own chapter in TTT was that ontology was thought of only through the lens of the diviners themselves—the human end. A “pragmatology” (Holbraad and Pedersen 2016: 238), by contrast, involves a far more “thing-driven” component (2016: 239). Pragmatology “designates the activity of extracting concepts from things (pragmata) as a distinctive analytic technique” (2016: 239). The problem with a consideration of materials, matter, or objects, or even technologies, from the point of view of their “paranormal” use and the cosmologies implied in and through this interaction, is that neither concepts nor matter should figure as prior to the anthropological analysis itself. Our interest is neither in animate worlds (even if all materials are animate) nor in an anthropology that collapses concepts with, or extracts them from, things. When we analyze “invisible” things or entities, it makes it even more imperative to understand how they can come about in systems of things, people, and ideas, the relations of which create certain possibilities for becoming. And importantly, how this “coming about” or “becoming” can be variably experienced, noncommunicable, and even nonconceptual. We could follow Karen Barad’s statement that “the primary units of analysis are no longer objects with inherent boundaries but rather phenomena that are entangled and intra-acting” (2007: 429). For Barad, matter is a doing; it refers to the “materialization of phenomena—it does not refer to an inherent fixed property of abstract, a priori and

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction • 13

independent Newtonian objects” (2003: 822). In this sense, different categories of phenomena need to be performed in the world in order to gain existence. We should probably start our exploration of different languages of paranormal matter here. Instead of exploring the entire field of material semiotics, from Bruno Latour to Karen Barad, we can take three keywords and unravel their relevant dimensions to the project of this book. One of them, as suggested by Barad, is performance. Another might be relationality, the idea that matter comes into being through its relations with others in the same network or assemblage, with greater or lesser stability. And yet another, heterogeneity, a term and concept used by Annemarie Mol and John Law to describe the idea that materiality is multiple, subject to constant reorganization and assembly. These three concepts are employed to varying degrees in actortheory-network, new materialism, and relational materiality. What do we mean by performance, or enactment? This question goes to the heart of the discussion above on agency, and on whom or what is thought to be acting. Simon Choat (2018: 1030) argues that “Western philosophical tradition has tended to treat matter as something that is brute and inert: a passive substance to be mastered and manipulated by active human subjects.” We have thoroughly internalized these distinctions all too well. In contrast, the notion of performance or enactment requires an “actant” (Latour 2005) who is not necessarily a human being, or even sentient as such, but is a source of action with no particular motivation or intentionality. An actor, or operator, according to Jane Bennett (2010), makes things happen. In the light of the new materialism approach (vital materialism), which she defends, this makes perfect sense, for even a “human is a heterogeneous compound of wonderfully vibrant, dangerously vibrant matter” (2010: 12–13). But it is assemblages that Bennett focuses on most intently, which owe their agentic qualities to the “vitality of the materials that constitute” them (2010: 34). Agency here is “confederate,” fully “distributed” (2010: 38); it is the “assemblage” that has the power of enactment, since “elements by themselves probably never cause anything” (2010: 33). Inherent performance, we could say, is the vibrancy of which Bennett writes. But it is not determinate, nor is it efficient necessarily, but emergent: “The vital materialist must admit that different materialities, composed of different sets of proto-bodies, will express different powers” (2010: 31). Assemblages are living, vibrant confederations with the power to enact certain realities. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost add to this description by saying that matter “becomes” rather than simply “is” (2010: 10): “It is in these choreographies of becoming that we find cosmic forces

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

14 • Introduction

assembling and disintegrating to forge more or less enduring patterns that may provisionally exhibit internally coherent, efficacious organization” (2010: 10). Matter, for them, is always more than “mere” matter— there is an excess that forces us to think of causation in more complex ways (2010: 9). But the enactment of boundaries in these assemblages of matter, through material-discursive practices, as Barad says, is also a performance of sorts (2003: 803). This she calls “agential intra-action” (2003: 817), in which she says the primary units are not “things” but phenomena, on their way to becoming “matter”:

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Agential intra-actions are specific causal material enactments that may or may not involve “humans.” Indeed, it is through such practices that the differential boundaries between “humans” and “nonhumans,” “culture” and “nature,” the “social” and the “scientific” are constituted. Phenomena are constitutive of reality. Reality is not composed of things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena but “things”-in-phenomena. (2003: 817)

Through an analysis of apparatuses in Niels Bohr’s physics experiments, Barad argues that apparatuses are “constituted through particular practices that are perpetually open to rearrangements, rearticulations, and other reworkings” (2003: 817). This is part of science, she says. Agential intra-actions are particular material enactments that may not involve people (2003: 817) but that transform phenomena into matter. Reality is not “composed of things-in-themselves” but of things-inphenomena, and the “world is intra-activity in its differential mattering” (2003: 817). Boundaries are in constant reappraisal and constitution through material-discursive practices. This might be what Law and Mol refer to when they say that “materials are interactively constituted; outside their interactions they have no existence, no reality” (1995: 277). So, by performance, or enactivity, we actually mean interactivity, or indeed, intra-activity, the processes whereby matter (persons, things, entities of all kinds) comes into being. Law and Mol’s relational materialism argues this well. They argue that materiality and sociality are part and parcel of the same thing: “When we look at the social, we are also looking at the production of materiality. And when we look at materials, we are witnessing the production of the social” (1995: 274). Materials themselves are “relational effects” (1995: 274), they only achieve significance inasmuch as they find themselves in relation to others. Law and Mol give Latour’s example of Pasteur being “the successful scientist.” They say that this statement is an “ordered network, a relational effect” (1995: 277). It is not just scientific objects and phenomena that are effects of the products of interactions,

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction • 15

but all things—spirits, people even. “Bacteria, cultures, microscopes, laboratories, laboratory assistants, farms and farmers, cows, diseases, vaccines—all of these and many more were assembled together” (1995: 277) to produce “Pasteur, the scientist,” not Pasteur the failed politician, family member, French citizen. This is why semiotic relational materialism is nonhumanist, they say. This does not mean that there are no strategies—by humans or not—to achieve variations of scale or durability (1995: 282). And indeed, strategy is inconceivable without representation or at least imagination (1995: 281). They give us an example of an early jet engine, built in the 1950s by Bristol Engines. The first designers used pencils and paper; these initial drawings were then converted to a set of engineering drawings. It was asked whether the right materials were available. Engineers and materials scientists then set to work to produce a design for the “real” engine, which included specifications to machinists on how to cut metal. Then, the drawn engine was made into a wooden engine, in three dimensions. Only after this step was the wooden engine translated into a metal engine (1995: 281–82). “In sum: strategy both organizes and produces material distinction” (emphasis in original, 1995: 182). In this light, matter also needs to be seen in context. Abrahamsson et al. (2015) argue this for the fatty acid omega-3. We need to understand food, they argue, not simply in relation to the people consuming it but to greater webs of causation and effects, which include globalization and politics. Matter never acts alone (2015: 15), but in concert and relation with others in a given web, necessarily: “Omega-3 is not matter itself all by itself” (2015: 5). This means, for us, that there may or may not be a stable project of “paranormal mattering” in any given local arrangement. Both socially and phenomenologically, for the people involved, and ethnographically, for us as observing and participating scholars, we may not have a continual production of something we call the “spiritual,” or “paranormal,” or “godly,” or “divine.” It may only be there intermittently, variably, conditionally, in a “patchwork” or through “local” and “partial connections,” as Law and Mol suggest (1995: 287). Perhaps there is no whole, or totality, when we speak of experiencing the paranormal through matter or media, or technology. For Ian Hacking, models “enable us to intervene in processes and to create new and hitherto unimagined phenomena” (1983: 37). Some of these models, or strategies, we could say, we have described above in the sections on Spiritualism, psychical research, and parapsychology. These include models of ectoplasm, the spiritual telegraph, psychic currents, vitalism, psi, the voices of the dead or aliens, the apparatuses to ascertain and measure

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

16 • Introduction

them, and many others that have borrowed from and contributed to the languages of science and materiality of their époque. But models are finite and inconsistent because the phenomena they produce are deeply heterogeneous, and no single model is fully satisfactory. Indeed, what material semiotics gives us primarily is the idea that ontologies are not stable but immanently unstable: assemblages can form, disassemble, and reassemble as something else altogether. In a scientific laboratory, according to Law, one finds instruments, rulers, animals, cell-lines, detectors, microscopes, notes, books, experimental results, and rumors—all assembled together in a “messy mundanity” (2008: 4). As Law, and also Mol, shows in relation to lower limb atherosclerosis (2002), there are many ways in which a scientific “fact” can be materialized. This is not to discount scientific and medical bodies of knowledge; rather, it is only to say that matter is constantly done, what Law calls mattering. In relation to atherosclerosis, for example, the “illness” can be mattered in myriad forms; from an angiogram, which reveals the position and size of the blood vessels after the patient has been injected with a dye, to an ultrasound, which shows the speed of the passing blood, to the operating table, where the disease appears in the vessel under intervention as a thick white paste (Law 2008: 10). There is not one disease but many. Thus, the body is multiple. This is another way of saying there is no single ontological monopoly over “reality.”

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Plan of the Book We have divided this book into three sections, to showcase the heterogeneous potential of working with the concept of “mattering.” The first section, called “Bodily Semantics, Metaphor, and Mediation,” is an exploration of the metaphorical and somatic aspect of what we have called invisibilities. It recognizes that there are different “designs,” be they human or not, that affect people’s relationships with matter and with the paranormal. In only some of these is there a clear “transcendent” to mediate to; others forge routes that confound or even invert the two (transcendence and immanence), or deny their distance in the first place. The body here is imperative to how these cosmologies are framed, experienced, and enacted. For instance, Jack Hunter’s chapter draws on his ethnographic experience with mediums in Bristol to explore how spiritualists, psychical researchers, and parapsychologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries drew and continue to draw

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction • 17

from biological and organismic models (as a sort of countercurrent to those employing reductionist and mechanist models) to make sense of paranormal phenomena, especially those experienced in the context of spiritualist séances. It is suggested that organismic and ecological frameworks might provide fruitful avenues for investigating the processes by which invisible entities are mattered. Next, Miguel Algranti’s chapter deals with affect, and pain, through an essentially topological approach. In his ethnography of a well-known spiritist center in Argentina—and in particular, through a specific incident in which a medium was possessed by the spirit of an ex-guerrilla fighter who had been tortured with an electric prod—Algranti argues that the body of the medium is an “expressive surface for spirits and apparatus alike,” collectively developing the “entanglement between the sentient and the non-sentient as a topological space.” This gives rise, through conceptual and perceptual ambiguities, to a shared semantics of suffering. In this case, spiritual beings and technologies are not opposing categories. Gertrud Hüwelmeier’s chapter is a testament exactly to the dynamic of mediation itself. In her ethnography of Vietnamese forms of spirit mediumship and veneration, she argues that “people, things, technologies, and spirits are related in particular ways,” and thus one could say that it is precisely this “relatedness that brings them into action,” into being. By contrast, in Anastasios Panagiotopoulos’s chapter, notions of mediation that have distance between divinity and humanity as their premise are problematized. Rather, for the practitioners of Afro-Cuban religion that he works with, it is disruption of mediation that is achieved through oracular consultations and initiations. Oracular pronouncements come as “tools” to “fix” problems of articulacy, of living one’s path as the gods have planned. “Words” here are both literal and metaphorical. In the second section, which we have titled, “Orders of Sound, Sight, and Measurement,” we argue that there tends to be an imperative to record the invisible, to make it evident, through visual and other means. But this of course runs into many paradoxes and has a strong ambiguous element to it. What exactly is being registered, and by whom, and how can we trust it? “Mattering” as a frame can help unwind how this construction, as well as deconstruction, of the invisible as an order of measurement can take shape. This is explored by Diana Espírito Santo in her chapter on UFOs and amateur radios in Chile, where she shows how both the conversations of the amateur radioaficionados and the overwhelming event of the appearance of a UFO over Santiago in 1985 were constructed and performed by the multiple actors. She uses

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

18 • Introduction

Barad’s notion of “diffraction”—as a dynamics of inter-activity—to show how Chile’s ufologists enact particular versions of reality at particular moments. In Ehler Voss’s chapter on American ghost hunters, he looks at the charisma of his main interlocutor and the processes involved in the production of “evidence.” While hearing is a skill one learns, there is also something particular to the medium that allows them to evoke results from the apparatus, something connecting the person to the machine at the core. Indeed, he adds that “the common clear distinction between animated human mediums and inanimate technical media is thus the result of a work of purification, because the two are inseparably connected with each other.” There is a profound ontological ambiguity here, which does not depend on the burden of proof. Andrea Lathrop Ligueros presents a similarly thought-provoking case study on the role of Polaroid photography in re-enchanting the West, through media’s capacity to shape perception. Lathrop makes a distinction between “disembodied” media such as the telegraph and the “material and embodied capacity of photography to empirically make things visible,” especially analog machines such as Polaroid. In particular, she analyzes the so-called thoughtographs of the American psychic Ted Serios, a process whereby thoughts are “materialized” onto the photographic medium. In the third section, “Mattering Invisible Powers,” we go to the core of the conceptual and material processes involved in sensing or perceiving something, a language by which this “other” comes into being within a particular frame of reference. Science is one of these frames; but often such frames are interchangeable, pliable, and porous. Renzo Taddei’s chapter, for instance, deals with the boundary-crossing potential of science and spirits. Meteorology, the study of the climate, is immanently intangible. Learning to navigate the world of climate sciences, he says, required a “thorough deconstruction of some of the most basic phenomenological intuitions about reality, and a reconstruction of them over new grounds,” grounds that he calls “phantasmagorical.” Boundaries between weather predictions and the “interventions” in the weather system by the main chief (medium, shaman) of the Coral Snake Foundation become matters of interpretation. Science is a discourse that fluctuates between these. In her ethnography of particle physicists at CERN, a nuclear research laboratory between France and Switzerland, Anne Dippel enacts, through her analytical writing, what is essentially a productive conversation between an “enchanted” indigenous cosmology and Western scientific cosmology. Particles are understood as “tricksters”; and people’s worlds are seen as “animated by

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Introduction • 19

invisible fields.” Indeed, she says, “Western science is superseding the dialectics of object and subject.” Finally, Ruy Blanes’s chapter explores the materialization and objectification of Angolan witchcraft, ndoki, through the notion of “parallax.” Parallax is a shift in positionality and perspective that allows one to trace the effects and consequences of invisible realms. Ndoki has certain languages and signs of what he calls “presentification,” not just in human bodies—it is not self-contained— but distributed through multiple and polyhedral means, manifesting its “phantom power” even in aspects of the city Luanda itself. Blanes employs a parallactic technique for describing his ethnography, and in this way also reminds us that the anthropologist herself is a component of the mattering dynamic.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Diana Espírito Santo, PhD UCL, 2009, has worked variously on spirit possession and mediation in Cuba, with Afro-Cuban espiritismo, in Brazil, with African-inspired Umbanda, and more recently in Chile, where she is currently examining ontologies of evidence and technologies in parapsychology movements, paranormal investigation, and ufology. She has published many articles, is writing her third monograph, and has coedited four volumes, including The Social Life of Spirits (University of Chicago Press) with Ruy Blanes. She currently works as associate professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Jack Hunter, PhD, is an honorary research fellow with the Religious Experience Research Centre and a tutor with the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture, both at University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He is also a research fellow with the Parapsychology Foundation and a professional member of the Parapsychological Association. He is the author of Manifesting Spirits (2020), Spirits, Gods and Magic (2020), and Engaging the Anomalous (2018); coeditor of Talking With the Spirits (2014); and editor of Strange Dimensions (2015), Damned Facts (2016), and Greening the Paranormal (2019). References Abrahamsson Sebastian, Filippo Bertoni, and Annemarie Mol. 2015. “Living with Omega-3: New Materialism and Enduring Concerns.” Environment and Planning D 33: 4–19. Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3): 801–31.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

20 • Introduction ———. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha M. 2015. Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion. New York: Columbia University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, DC: Duke University Press. Blanes, Ruy, and Diana Espirito Santo. 2014. The Social Life of Spirits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Caterine, Darryl. 2014 “The Haunted Grid: Nature, Electricity, and Indian Spirits in the American Metaphysical Tradition.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82(2): 371–97. Castle, Terry. 1988. “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphysics of Modern Reverie.” Critical Inquiry 15(1): 26–61. Choat, Simon. 2018. “Science, Agency and Ontology: A Historical-Materialist Response to New Materialism.” Political Studies 66(4): 1027–42. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. 2010. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 1–46. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cox Robert. 2003. Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Davis, Erik. 2015. TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. Foreword by Eugene Thacker. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Dionysius, Bernard. 2016. “Mind the Gap: Spiritualism and the Infrastructural Uncanny.” Critical Inquiry 42: 899–922. Engelke, Matthew. 2007. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley: University of California Press. Galloway, Alexander, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark. 2014. Excommunication: Three Inquires into Media and Mediation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gell, Alfred. 1994. “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology.” In Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, edited by Jeremy Coote, 41–63. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon. Hacking, Ian. 1983. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (eds.). 2007. Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. Abingdon: Routledge. Holbraad, Martin. 2007. “The Power of Powder: Multiplicity and Motion in the Divinatory Cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or Mana, Again).” In Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, edited by Amiria Henare et al., 189–225. Abingdon: Routledge. ———. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holbraad, Martin, and Morten Pedersen. 2017. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction • 21 Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. ———. 2006. “Rethinking the Animate, ReAnimating Thought.” Ethnos 71(1): 9–20. ———. 2010. “Ways of Mind-Walking: Reading, Writing, Painting.” Visual Studies 25(1): 15–23. Kassung, Chrisitan. 2015. “Self-Writing Machines: Technology and the Question of the Self.” Communication +1 4(1): Article 5. [Retrieved 17 September 2018] from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol4/iss1/5/. Keane, Webb. 2003. “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things.” Language and Communication 23: 409–25. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, John. 2008. “The Materials of STS.” Updated 9 April 2009. Retrieved 15 December 2017 from http://heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2008Ma terialsofSTS.pdf Law, John, and Annemarie Mol. 1995. “Notes on Materiality and Sociality.” Sociological Review 43(2): 274–94. Malafouris, Lambros. 2016. How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. Boston: MIT Press. Meyer, Birgit. 2011. “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies and the Question of the Medium.” Social Anthropology 19(1): 23–39. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Noakes, Richard. 1999. “Telegraphy is an Occult Art: Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and the Diffusion of Electricity to the Other World.” British Journal for the History of Science 32: 421–59. ———. 2016. “Thoughts and Spirits by Wireless: Imagining and Building Psychic Telegraphs in America and Britain, circa 1900–1930.” History and Technology 32(2): 137–58. ———. 2019. Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2007. “Talismans of Thought: Shamanist Ontologies and Extended Cognition in Northern Mongolia.” In Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts in Ethnographic Perspective, edited by Amiria Henare et al., 172–204. Abingdon: Routledge. Sconce, Jeffrey. 2000. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stolow, Jeremy. 2013. Deus In Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between. New York: Fordham University Press. White, Christopher. 2018. Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Part I

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Bodily Semantics, Metaphor, and Mediation

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Chapter 1

Organicism and Psychical Research Where Mediums and Mushrooms Meet

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Jack Hunter

We are sitting in a darkened garden shed in suburban Bristol known as the Bristol Spirit Lodge. The windows are blacked out, the door is locked, and a red light has been switched on in the corner, which bathes the room in a warm, womb-like glow. In the north corner of the lodge is a curtained-off area known as the “cabinet,” with a high-backed chair inside for the medium to sit in. The curtains are pulled aside so that we, the sitters, can see the medium through the gloom as she enters into her trance state. As we watch, her legs begin to move about jerkily, she breathes heavily, and she pushes herself up on the arms of the chair with her head bowed, while the circle leader, Christine, reads the opening prayer and begins the séance: Heavenly Father and Spirit Friends. We ask that you draw close to us tonight. We are sitting together in Love and Light, and are working only for the highest good. We invite communication with the spirit world, that is evidential of continuing life and consciousness. We invite physical phenomena that may be witnessed by us all, and be spoken about to others, so that they too may become open towards belief. We thank Spirit for their Love and Protection and ask for a circular canopy to be placed over us all. Thank you, amen.

Eventually the medium settles down, relaxing into the chair with her eyes tightly shut. The circle leader gently turns up some music playing through a small CD player next to the cabinet, and we wait in the red glow, eyes fixed on the meditating figure sitting between the heavy curtains. She is now in the depths of her trance state, and we are waiting

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

26 • Jack Hunter

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

silently and expectantly for something to emerge. Toward the middle of the second track on the CD, about ten minutes into the session, we hear growls and grunting coming from the inside of the cabinet, indicative of a spirit trying to make its presence known. Christine, the circle leader and founder of the Bristol Spirit Lodge, gently welcomes the proto-voice, and in a warm relaxed tone encourages the spirit to open up and talk with the assembled sitters. Christine has been doing this for several years now—patiently sitting with developing mediums on a weekly basis and helping spirits to manifest in her garden shed. Even in a séance with a well-developed medium, it can take a while before the spirit personality starts to engage in a coherent dialogue with the assembled group. In this instance the spirit is an undertaker by the name of Graham, mattered through the body of his entranced medium. The medium leans forward, with her shoulders pushed broadly upward and her arms hanging heavily, and begins to cough: Circle Leader: Would Graham like to chat now? Graham: [More coughing] Circle Leader: Is there anything you would like to say? Graham: [Grunting, rocks back and forth in the cabinet] Circle Leader: Hello Graham. Graham: [Rocking back and forth] Am . . . Circle Leader: . . . Yes . . . Graham: Am I too loud . . . for the camera? Circle Leader: No, you’re fine. Just carry on. Graham: Good. I do not see why I should need to adjust. Circle Leader: You don’t do you! As you’re on camera now, would you like to tell us what you used to do? Graham: Again? Circle Leader: Yes again, sorry. I know it must get boring for you . . . Graham: Very well. I was an undertaker, a long, long time ago . . .

The process of manifesting spirits at the Bristol Spirit Lodge, therefore, is often a gradual one, involving many brief exchanges like this—at least to begin with. It may take many weeks, or even months, for a distinctive spirit personality to fully express itself in a séance, and some do not make it at all—appearing once or twice as garbled vocalizations but never becoming a fully communicable entity. There is a great deal of coaxing involved in the process, of gently encouraging the spirits to make themselves known through the medium, by asking questions and making supportive comments to the spirits as they try to communicate. The first signs of a presence might take the form of twitches, spasms, gestures, or gurgling sounds that are noted by the circle leader and in-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Organicism and Psychical Research • 27

dicate a desire to speak. As noted by Nurit Bird-David in the context of Nayaka spirit possession in India, these subtle movements and gestures may be understood as a sort of meta-communication, “namely, communicating that [spirits] are communicating” (Bird-David 1999: 76). They are focused in on by the group and gently encouraged over time. What begins as a slight twitch may eventually, through this process of engagement and participation, come to express itself as a fully developed personality. Arguing along similar lines, Bird-David understands the devara—a variety of nature spirits incorporated in Nayaka spirit possession practices—as manifestations of relational personhood, brought into existence through social interactions, specifically through engaging them in conversation and dialogue. She writes that “keeping the conversation going is important because it keeps the Nayaka devaru interaction and in a sense the devara themselves ‘alive.’” Moreover, and remarkably similar to the practices of the Bristol Spirit Lodge, Bird-David describes the form this interaction takes as “highly personal, informal, and friendly,” consisting of “joking, teasing, [and] bargaining.” The conversations held between spirits and their communicants are said to include “numerous repetitions or minor variations on a theme” (see, for example, Graham’s frustration above about being asked to retell his backstory time and time again), in which the Nayaka and the devara “nag and tease, praise and flatter, blame and cajole each other, expressing and demanding care and concern” (Bird-David 1999: 76). The interactions between spirits and sitters at the Bristol Spirit Lodge could equally be described in this way—the spirits are brought into the world through dialogue and conversation, but above all through interaction with the sitters. The point I am getting at here, in the context of this book, is that the kind of spirit communication I observed at the Bristol Spirit Lodge (Hunter 2018) does not seem to be so much a case of turning the medium on like a radio receiver and then tuning in with a dial but rather is more like a process of nurturing—a participatory process of encouragement and growth, gradually enabling the spirit to manifest. Mediumship development, I therefore suggest, is perhaps better understood using an organic rather than technological metaphor. This will be the theme of the following chapter—exploring the possibility that organismic and process models might offer a better framework for understanding the kind of spirit communication that takes place in mediumship development circles, where the paranormal is “mattered” through the biology of the physical body.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

28 • Jack Hunter

Greening the Paranormal

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The world plainly resembles more an animal or a vegetable than it does a watch or a knitting-loom. Its cause, therefore, it is more probable, resembles the cause of the former. The cause of the former is generation or vegetation. The cause, therefore, of the world, we may infer to be something similar or analogous to generation or vegetation. (David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, pt. VII)

It is not often that I find myself in agreement with the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711–76), but in this instance I think that I do. Hume’s statement was made in response to the Reverend William Paley’s (1743–1805) famous “Watchmaker” argument for the existence of a divine creator. Paley had argued that the world resembles the intricate design of a pocket-watch mechanism in the way that it has apparently been “put together” by a conscious designer. This is taken as evidence for the existence of the God of classical theism. Hume’s critique is to suggest that the world, when we really look at it, more closely resembles a living organism and not an artificial mechanism. From this Hume reasons that the cause of its existence is much more likely to resemble similar, if not identical, processes to those observed in the sphere of biology—processes of organic growth and gradual development rather than anything artificially put together by human hands. If we follow Hume’s line of thinking here then it makes sense to suggest that biological, or organismic, models of the world might be a closer match to reality than mechanistic and reductionist frameworks. In the recent edited book Greening the Paranormal: Exploring the Ecology of Extraordinary Experience (2019), I have suggested, along with colleagues and contributors, that there is a “green” or ecological dimension to the paranormal, not just in terms of the content and effects of paranormal experiences (which often carry an ecological message and occasionally result in a dramatic shift in ecological awareness for experiencers) but also in the sense that there appear to be deeper underlying ontological connections that run through ecology and the dynamics of the paranormal. Building on some of the ideas explored in that book, the perspective here suggests that models and concepts from biology and ecology might provide novel new frameworks for understanding extraordinary experiences and phenomena and their place in the natural world. This is a sentiment that is echoed in the work of Sir Alister Hardy (1896–1985), eminent biologist, marine ecologist, and founder of the Religious Experience Research Centre, who was engaged in a lifelong quest to understand the relationship between religious

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Organicism and Psychical Research • 29

experience and the wider contexts of biology and ecology. In his first Gifford Lecture (1963–64), Hardy wrote: I will confess that perhaps my main interest in ecology is the conviction that this science of inter-relationships of animals and their environment will eventually have a reaction for the benefit of [humankind]. . . . I believe that one of the great contributions of biology this century will be the working out of ecological principles that can be applied to human affairs: the establishment of an ecological outlook. (Hardy 1966: 24)

The suggestion here, then, in the context of the wider themes of this book, is that we might be able to apply this “ecological outlook” to our understanding of a wide range of “human affairs,” including religious experience, mediumship, the paranormal, and other processes by which human beings matter the invisible. Before we proceed to look at some of the key principles of organism, ecology, and their relationship to the paranormal, however, I first want to take a moment to unpack the distinction between organicist and mechanist modes of understanding the world.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Organicism and Mechanism Broadly speaking, the distinction between organicism and mechanism can be broken down into a debate about whether we adopt a holistic or a reductionistic perspective on the world. Gilbert and Sarkar (2000) write that reductionism is the basis of most physics and chemistry. They suggest that it has a twofold function. Firstly, it functions as an epistemology, a way of finding out about the world by breaking it down into its constituent parts. This is an epistemological framework that also comes with the assumption that all scientific knowledge will eventually be reduced to the “terms of physics.” Secondly, reductionism also serves as an ontology—an understanding that the world is best explained in terms of its constituent parts (particles and subatomic particles, for example) and that reality is structured from the “bottom up” (Gilbert and Sarkar 2000: 1–2). It is this understanding of the world that justifies the millions spent on projects like the Large Hadron Collider, where physicists smash particles together to try to access the fundamental building blocks of the physical universe. By contrast, the organicist view sees the holistic, top-down perspective as essential for understanding the world around us. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake, an example of an organicist thinker, gives a useful definition of organicist philosophy:

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

30 • Jack Hunter

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

This philosophy denies that everything in the universe can be explained from the bottom up, as it were, in terms of the properties of subatomic particles, or atoms, or even molecules. Rather, it recognises the existence of hierarchically organised systems which, at each level of complexity, possess properties that cannot be fully understood in terms of the properties exhibited by their parts in isolation from each other; at each level the whole is more than the sum of its parts. (Sheldrake 2009: 26)

One way in which this broader “holism-reductionism” debate filters down into ecological science is in the context of modeling the development of ecological systems, where it is known as the “emergentismreductionism” debate (Bergandi 2011). Emergentists argue that ecological systems are best understood in terms of the complexity that emerges from the numerous interactions that take place within them. In their paper on the sociology of ecological science, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark (2008) identify a tension early in the development of the field between those researchers who assumed such an organicist, holistic, and teleological interpretation of ecosystem development and those who assumed materialist, reductionist, and mechanistic views. To illustrate the features of the organicist approach to ecosystem development, Foster and Clark refer to the work of plant biologist Frederic Clements (1874–1945), who is best known for his research into plant succession—the process by which plant communities develop from pioneer species through to climax vegetation. For Clements, the direction of succession toward increased biodiversity, greater complexity, and increased interdependence was indicative of some form of teleological drive, with the climax community essentially understood as a single living organism. Foster and Clark explain Clements’s view of ecosystem development in the following terms: Clements provided an idealist, teleological ontology of vegetation that viewed a “biotic community” as a “complex organism” that developed through a process called “succession” to a “climax formation.” He therefore presented it as an organism or “superorganism” with its own life history, which followed predetermined, teleological paths aimed at the overall harmony and stability of the superorganism. (Clements and Chaney 1937: 51, cited in Foster and Clark 2008: 326)

From this perspective, succession is always directed toward “harmony” and “stability” within the ecosystem, and is the process by which such “superorganisms” grow to maturity (for more on this see Hunter 2020, especially in relation to notions of harmony in nature). Understood through the lens of emergentism (an organicist perspective), ecosys-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Organicism and Psychical Research • 31

tem development is a process whereby different elements of the system work together for the mutual benefit of the whole—the “superorganism.” James Lovelock’s famous “Gaia hypothesis” is essentially an extension of this general observation about ecosystems to the whole Earth system. The Gaia hypothesis, developed by Lovelock and Lynn Margulis (1938– 2011), in the 1970s, essentially suggests that the Earth itself is a single living system, composed of multiple interrelated parts (including the chemical and mineral composition of the Earth, as well as all organic life forms), which effectively work together to maintain a stable global system through homeostatic processes (Lovelock 2000). In other words, nature is always striving to maintain a certain balance and is continuously moving toward increased complexity and interdependence. This teleological interpretation of Gaian principles has its critics, however. In his 1982 book The Extended Phenotype, for example, outspoken atheist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins argued against the Gaia hypothesis precisely on the grounds that it seems to present a top-down teleological explanation for global homeostasis (i.e. that it is, in some sense, purposefully steering itself toward balance and complexity). He writes,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

A network of relationships there may be, but it is made up of small, self interested components. Entities that pay the costs of furthering the well being of the ecosystem as a whole will tend to reproduce themselves less successfully than rivals that exploit their public-spirited colleagues, and contribute nothing to the general welfare. (Dawkins 1982: 237)

Even Lovelock himself has gone to great pains at times to distance himself from the apparent teleological implications of his hypothesis, writing that “nowhere in our writings do we express the idea that planetary self-regulation is purposeful, or involves foresight or planning by the biota” (Lovelock 1990). This obvious effort to distance the Gaia hypothesis from notions of teleology, or some sort of collective natural mind, is perhaps indicative of deeper issues running through Western science and its efforts to remove God (or anything that seems even remotely similar, such as teleology) from the world. Mechanistic and reductionist models essentially remove the need for teleological motivations. Historian of biology Garland Allen (2005) also suggests that the eventual dominance of the mechanistic approach in biology was part of a drive in the 1850s to “professionalize those aspects of biology that had previously been considered largely descriptive, speculative and not amenable to experimental analysis” (2005: 262–63), a tendency that also likely helps to explain the prevalence of reductionist models through-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

32 • Jack Hunter

out the social sciences and humanities (which have similarly strived to be recognized as objective sciences). At any rate, an essential difference between the organicist and mechanistic views of ecology is in the extent to which each approach attributes directionality and the role of complexity in natural phenomena. For the organicist, individual organisms work together (consciously or not) in the direction of increasing complexity and greater interdependence, while for the mechanist there is no such collaboration—we are dealing with an essentially Newtonian picture of the world that emphasizes competition between individual organisms—the classic “survival of the fittest” scenario. Now, having outlined what is meant by the term “organicism” and how it differs from the mechanistic view, which still seems to dominate the sciences, I want to shift attention to consider some key figures in the history of psychical research who have drawn on such organic models, metaphors, and theories to understand the nature and dynamics of the paranormal.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Organicism in Psychical Research As much as spiritualists, psychical researchers and parapsychologists have employed technological metaphors to understand paranormal phenomena—such as the notion of the “spiritual telegraph,” for example, or the brain as a “receiver” of consciousness and spirits (especially among researchers of psychics and mediums)—and have borrowed models from the queen of the “hard sciences,” physics (forces, fields, waves, and rays, for example; cf. Natale 2011), other researchers have taken their inspiration from organismic and biological models in their efforts to “matter the paranormal” through the language and concepts of science. Historical examples include Franz Anton Mesmer’s (1784–1814) notion of “animal magnetism” as a natural force that flows through and connects all lifeforms, and which may be manipulated for all manner of therapeutic purposes. Mesmer’s notion of animal magnetism, sometimes also known as the “mesmeric fluid,” was understood as a semi-physical substance that imbues otherwise inanimate matter with life force or vitality. Historian of parapsychology Carlos Alvarado explains that “Mesmer saw it as emanating from the heavenly bodies and present in nature in general” (Alvarado 2006: 139) as a sort of universal connecting principle. Mesmer’s idea was an early manifestation of what would later come to be known as vitalism. This is the perspective that

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Organicism and Psychical Research • 33

“living organisms defy description in purely physico-chemical terms, because organisms possess some non-material, non-measurable forces or directive agents that account for their complexity” (Allen 2005: 266– 67). Biologist and psychical researcher Hans Driesch (1867–1941), for instance, saw the resonances between biological and parapsychological processes and offered his own vitalist interpretation of certain paranormal phenomena. In his book Psychical Research (1933), for example, Driesch makes the case for what he terms “a kind of super-vitalism” (1933: 171) underlying all manner of normal and paranormal manifestations. In a discussion of ostensible “paraphysical materialisations”— such as those that were ostensibly produced by the physical mediums of the early twentieth century—Driesch suggests that they can simply be thought of as extensions of otherwise normal physiological processes:

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

In fact, normal organisatory and constructive assimilation, as it appears, for instance, in regeneration, would have to be amplified only in regard to its effects (“small” and “big” are always relative notions). Materialisation would at the same time be a supernormal embryology. (Driesch 1933: 119)

Examples of the kind of materializations Driesch is referring to here were documented by numerous scientific observers at the tail end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. During séances with a prominent medium of the 1920s, Eva Carrière (1886– c. 1922), for instance, the Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Charles Richet (1850–1935) claimed to have observed and documented a mysterious substance that on numerous occasions was seen to emanate from the medium’s mouth, breasts, navel, fingertips, vagina, and scalp. This substance was described as coalescing into crude limbs, referred to as “pseudo-pods” (a term introduced to psychical research from cellular biology), and human-like heads that would move independently and were highly sensitive to both light and touch. Richet described in detail “the formation of divers objects, which in most cases seem to emerge from a human body and take on the semblance of material realities, clothing, veils, and living bodies” (Richet 1923: 4). These materializations were also observed by other researchers, including Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (1862–1929), who saw them dissolve back into the medium’s body and took numerous extraordinary photographic plates of the bizarre phenomenon (Sommer 2009: 304). The term “ectoplasm” (from the Greek: ektos meaning “outside,” and plasma meaning “something formed or moulded”) was eventually coined by Richet to refer to these bizarre phenomena, which were being observed in spiritualist séances across Europe (Brower 2010: 85).

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

34 • Jack Hunter

Ectoplasm has since entered popular culture through the blockbuster Ghostbusters movies, in which it is usually portrayed as a green slime, though in the reports of psychical researchers it was most frequently described as a white, wet, and gauzy substance that was tepid to the touch. It is interesting to note in the context of this chapter that this influential term was also borrowed explicitly from the lexicon of cellular biology, deriving from the concept of protoplasm—the living part of cells. Robert M. Brain has suggested that for physiologists such as Richet, ectoplasmic materializations “became a special instance of protoplasm investigation, and therefore of Life in its most fundamental operations, yet within supernormal settings” (Brain 2013: 113). Another key figure in fin de siècle science whose work effectively blurred the distinction between natural and supernatural processes was Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), co-formulator of the theory of natural selection with Charles Darwin (1809–82). In addition to his status as a naturalist, Wallace was also a prominent proponent of Spiritualism. Fichman (2001) has suggested that it was Wallace’s conversion to Spiritualism in the 1860s that was the impetus for his “enunciation of an explicit evolutionary teleology” (2001: 228), as distinct from Darwin’s more mechanistic (and much less teleological) understanding of the process of natural selection. For Wallace, the evolutionary process was simultaneously physical and spiritual. A similar sentiment is felt in the later work of Sir Alister Hardy, who speaks of a “Divine Flame” directing and flowing throughout the evolutionary process (1969), echoing the vitalist understanding of life and blurring the line between the biological and the spiritual. Biochemist and cellular biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s book The New Science of Life is a more recent example of this trend in the “natural history of the supernatural” (Watson 1973). Though the book is not specifically parapsychological in nature—it primarily deals with broader themes in biology and physiology related to morphogenesis (the processes that give living organisms their shapes and structures)—Sheldrake’s theories have nevertheless been used to explain parapsychological phenomena, especially with his notion of “morphogenetic fields” (Schroll 2016). In the preface to the 2009 edition of his book, originally published in 1981, Sheldrake explains the main thrust of his argument: This book is about the hypothesis of formative causation, which proposes that nature is habitual. . . . This hypothesis is radically different from the conventional assumption that nature is governed by eternal laws. But I believe that the idea of the habits of nature will have to be considered sooner or later, whether we like it or not, because modern cosmology has

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Organicism and Psychical Research • 35 undermined the traditional assumptions on which science was based. (2009: 1)

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Like the organicists and vitalists discussed above, Sheldrake rejects the reductionist and mechanistic understanding of the cosmos, epitomized here with the example of “fixed laws of nature.” Drawing on evidence from anomalies that challenge our established models—such as apparent fluctuations in measurements of the speed of light since the 1920s (Sheldrake 2012: 108)—Sheldrake instead proposes that what science has defined as unchanging laws might in fact be something more like “habits” of nature, subject to gradual dynamic change. If, as Hume suggests, the world really does resemble more “an animal or vegetable” than a mechanism, then might we not also expect natural laws to be dynamic rather than static, and to evolve, change, and adapt over time like living organisms do? This form of organismic thinking takes us from the level of cell (Driesch), organism (Richet), and species (Wallace) right through to the cosmic scale. From this perspective, the cosmos—from the micro to the macro—becomes a seething mass of constantly moving, changing, and evolving life. Combined, these perspectives begin to come close to something resembling the “philosophy of organism” developed by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). Peter Sjöstedt-H (2016) provides a useful definition of this position as framework that seeks to overcome the problems in the traditional metaphysical options of dualism, materialism, and idealism. . . . The philosophy of organism seeks to resolve these issues by fusing the concepts of mind and matter, thereby creating an “organic realism” as Whitehead also named his philosophy. (Sjöstedt-H 2016: 14)

The philosophy of organism, then, has the potential to reveal novel insights into a range of phenomena that are not adequately explained by mainstream reductionist perspectives by drawing on organismic principles. In the next and final section of this chapter, I want to tentatively continue this line of thinking by applying three broad principles of organic life to the practice of spirit mediumship. Just as Driesch thought that ectoplasmic materializations might represent a superextension of the otherwise normal processes of embryology, might we not also be able to superextend other organic principles (at the very least metaphorically) to make sense of the dynamics of the paranormal? The organic principles and processes I want to discuss in this context are nurturing/birthing, symbiosis, and systems, though there are likely other organismic principles and processes that would also provide similarly useful models.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

36 • Jack Hunter

Growth, Process, and Birthing

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Growth—the capacity to change over time—is one of the defining characteristics of living organisms and is seen throughout the plant and animal kingdoms—on the micro and macro scales. Seeds grow into flowers, tadpoles turn into frogs, metamorphosing caterpillars become butterflies. Reproduction and birth, whether in the form of cell division for single-celled organisms or the process of fertilization by the meeting of gametes producing seeds, eggs, or live birth, is another fundamental characteristic of living things. Might we also find echoes of these principles in the dynamics of paranormal experience? An interesting illustration of how the principle of growth and birthing might be applied to the paranormal can be found in Edith Turner’s (1921–2016) famous description of the manifestation of the Ihamba spirit during a ritual healing ceremony in Zambia. Her account of the manifestation of a gray plasma-like entity at the climax of a ritual performance captures this gradual process in intricate ethnographic detail. The climax of the ritual comes after a long social-emotional process, with ebbs and flows of intensity, slowly building over a number of hours before eventually erupting. Turner describes the final moments, as the spirt is manifested and extracted from the body of the afflicted patient, in terms reminiscent of labor and birth—perhaps describing something similar to the natural culmination of the “superextended” embryological processes observed and described by Driesch and Richet: And just then, through my tears, the central figure swayed deeply: all leaned forward, this was indeed going to be it. I realised along with them that something was now going to be born. Then a certain palpable social integument broke and something calved along with me. I felt the spiritual motion, a tangible feeling of breakthrough going through the whole group. (Turner 1998: 149)

As already mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, my own experience of mediumship development in Bristol was also of a slow and gradual process, often taking many weeks of the medium sitting in development circles for distinctive spirit personalities to emerge as fully communicable entities. In this case, the metaphor of birth, or labor, seems a much better fit for what I observed in the field than the technological analogy of the medium as a receiver, for example, or some sort of machine. Indeed, each séance could be viewed, much as in Edie Turner’s description of the “calving” of the Ihamba spirit above, as a ritualized birth or labor process. Recall my description of the Bristol

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Organicism and Psychical Research • 37

Spirit Lodge as a warm and womb-like space, bathed in red light, where spirits are “born” through the bodies of entranced mediums, gently encouraged into the world by a circle of expectant sitters.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Symbiosis The biologist Lynn Margulis (1938–2011), co-creator with James Lovelock of the Gaia hypothesis, first gained notoriety with her work on symbiosis in the natural world. Symbiosis refers to the formation of a mutually beneficial relationship between two living organisms. Margulis suggested that the tendency among living organisms to symbiotically coexist, collaborate, and support one another was a significant driving force of evolutionary change. This was a counterpoint for evolutionary science to the much more competitive “survival of the fittest” model, which often dominates discourse on evolution (Margulis and Bermudes 1985). A classic example of the kind of interspecies cooperation Margulis was highlighting is seen in the relationship between trees and mycorrhizal fungi in forest ecosystems. The term “mycorrhiza” (Greek— mycor: fungus; rhiza: root) was coined in 1885 by the German plant physiologist A. B. Frank (1839–1900), who described these structures as “neither root nor fungus, but rather—analogous to the thallus of the lichen—an association of two differing components to form one morphological organ” (Hatch and Doak 1933: 85)—a symbiosis. Mycorrhizae are a very fine, filamentous kind of fungus that have been found in association with the roots of 90 percent of all plant species, but are especially associated with various tree species in woodland systems. They interface with the root systems of trees and plants to essentially extend the tree’s access to water and nutrients in the soil. The fungi help the trees to access these vital resources in exchange for sugars that the tree produces through photosynthesis, as fungi do not photosynthesize themselves. This is a reciprocal relationship that is mutually beneficial for both of the species involved—the trees get more water and nutrients, and the fungi get access to vital sugars. As if this reciprocal relationship were not extraordinary enough, mycorrhizal fungi also effectively form a network in the soil, known as a mycelium, that enables communication and nutrient transfer between trees and other plant species. These networks are so widespread in the soil of forest ecosystems that they are sometimes referred to as the “wood-wide web” (Bonfante and Genre 2010). Recent research on these

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

38 • Jack Hunter

networks among the roots of tomato plants has even found evidence of the exchange of electrical signals between plants (Volkov and Shtessel 2020). Mycologist Paul Stamets has even gone so far as the suggest that the mycelial networks that interconnect woodland ecosystems could provide a substrate for intelligence, much like the complex neurological structures of the brain and nervous system. He writes,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

I see mycelium as the living network that manifests the natural intelligence imagined by Gaia theorists. The mycelium is an exposed sentient membrane, aware and responsive to changes in its environment. As hikers, deer, or insects walk across these sensitive filamentous nets, they leave impressions, and mycelia sense and respond to these movements. A complex and resourceful structure for sharing information, mycelium can adapt and evolve through the ever-changing forces of nature. (Stamets 2005: 4–6)

The mycelium network, then, is itself a liminal being. It exists at the juncture of tree roots and fungi in a mutually dependent symbiotic relationship. Can this idea also be superextended into the realms of the paranormal? If symbiosis is a principle of nature, then it may also help us to understand, for example, the relationship between mind and matter. The liminal nature of the mycelium is reminiscent of Carl Jung’s (1875–1961) notion of the “psychoid”—an entity that serves as a bridge between mind and matter. Jung identified the psychoid as a transcendent entity that manifests at the juncture of unconscious (nonphysical) and external (physical) influences (Addison 2009). Psychologist Jon Mills refers to the psychoid as a “liaison between mind and body” (Mills 2014: 237). Jung’s conception of the unconscious also includes aspects external to the individual psyche, arguing that “a psychological truth is . . . just as good and respectable a thing as a physical truth [because] no one knows what ‘psyche’ is, and one knows just as little how far into nature ‘psyche’ extends” (Jung 2007: 157). The mycelial network may provide a useful alternative framework for understanding the relationship between mind and matter—not as separate and discrete phenomena but rather as symbiotically connected to one another. The liminal nature of the mycorrhiza also brings to mind the ideas of the psychical researcher Lawrence LeShan, who put forward the suggestion that spirits, as communicated with during Spiritualist séances like the ones I attended, might be understood as “functional entities,” a concept that he borrowed from mathematics. In particular, he was concerned with understanding the nature of an enigmatic entity known as Uvani, the primary spirit control of the famed twentieth-century

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Organicism and Psychical Research • 39

medium Eileen J. Garrett (1893–1970). LeShan explains that functional entities like Uvani do not have any length, breadth, or thickness. They cannot be detected by any form of instrumentation, although their effects often can be. . . . They do not have continuous existence whether or not they are being mentally conceptualized . . . they exist only when they are held in the mind, only when being conceptualized, only when being considered to exist. (LeShan 1995: 167)

Just as the mycorrhiza exists at the juncture of the root and the fungus, spirit controls emerge at the point at which they are interacted with—they are liminal beings emerging at the intersection of different systems, as LeShan suggests. As the interaction and participation intensifies, so the “presence” of the spirit also intensifies, and when the interaction ceases, the spirit’s presence subsides. In true organicist form, from this perspective spirit communication is much more than the sum of its individual parts—it is part of a system.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

(Eco)Systems Perhaps the most important concept emerging from the study of ecology is the notion of the “ecosystem,” and of “systems” more generally. Deep observations of the natural world give rise to an image of an interconnected whole, with different cycles, processes, and functions constantly interacting with one another. These complex interactions constitute a system. Eugene Odum (1913–2002), one of the pioneers of scientific ecology, provides a useful definition of the ecosystem as a unit of biological organization made up of all of the organisms in a given area (that is, “community”) interacting with the physical environment so that a flow of energy leads to characteristic trophic structure and material cycles within the system. (Odum 1966: 262)

Above all, therefore, ecosystems are about relationships—relationships between organisms (such as plants, animals, microbes, zooplankton, fungi, and more), as well as relationships between organisms and the nonliving environment (including elements such as water, minerals, gasses, sunlight, and so on). These interactions include the exchange of energy and nutrients through “food chains,” which themselves form wider interconnected networks referred to as “food webs” (Dickinson and Murphy 2007: 11).

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

40 • Jack Hunter

Plants, in all of their varied forms—grasses, shrubs, trees, seaweed, phytoplankton, and so on—are referred to as “primary producers” and are unique among living organisms for their capacity to capture energy from the sun through the process of photosynthesis. It is through plants that all energy enters into the food chain. Plants are consumed by herbivores, who in turn are consumed by predators. In this way the sun’s energy is shared out among biological organisms in an ecosystem, gradually decreasing as it moves higher up the food chain (Dickinson and Murphy 2007: 13). Energy and nutrients are also constantly cycling around this system through processes of growth and decay. Energy, nutrients and carbon collected and stored by trees, plants, and animals as they grow are slowly released back into the system when they die through the action of decomposers such as bacteria and fungi. Everything is connected through cycles, networks of flow and reciprocal exchange in the ecosystem. In a remarkable case study demonstrating just how interconnected natural systems are, journalist George Monbiot gives the vivid example of the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park in 1995 after an absence of some seventy-five years. It is presented as a case study in what ecologists call the “trophic cascade”—the chain of interactions flowing downward through the ecosystem from the top of the food chain to the bottom (Paine 1995)—from the effect of the reintroduced wolves on deer populations, and the deer’s effect on trees and shrubs, through the trees and shrubs’ role as stabilizers of soil, and so on. This chain of complex interactions eventually reached the rivers, which became increasingly stable and meandered much less following the reintroduction of the wolves (Monbiot 2014). From the ecological perspective, all “living” and “nonliving” components of an ecosystem are engaged in a continuous process of interaction—exchanging elements and changing forms. This is the understanding of the interconnectedness of the natural world that Alister Hardy was talking about—an ecocentric perspective. Much like the double-slit experiment in quantum physics, which suggests that the act of measurement determines the outcome of the experiment, the concept of the ecosystem reminds us that we are also participants in the system. From the ecological perspective, we cannot remove ourselves from the system we are observing, whether we are observing a forest ecosystem, a laboratory experiment, or a séance in a garden shed in Bristol. In his recent book Ecologies of Participation (2018), Zayin Cabot explains his preference for the idea of “ecologies”

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Organicism and Psychical Research • 41

over “ontologies” precisely for the reason that ecology implies our own participation in the system: I use the term ecologies to allow us to interact. Ontology by itself breeds conflict, implying that “I” am closer than “you.” Ontologies, while provocative, remain useful paradoxes, but have little place in our lives. Ecologies are more useful and liveable, if we are going to come together, and thus I argue for participation. (Cabot 2018: 10)

More broadly, the “systems” view that emerges from the science of ecology emphasizes complexity. As already noted in the case of succession, ecosystems tend generally toward greater complexity, biodiversity and interconnection. If complexity of this sort is a principle of the natural world, then perhaps we as social scientists and investigators should also embrace the complexity of the paranormal rather than perpetually trying to reduce it down to a simple explanation. I have argued elsewhere, for example, for the need to understand spirit mediumship practices as consisting of multiple component parts, processes, and influences unfurling holistically. In a single mediumship demonstration, for instance, there are simultaneous psychological, experiential, physiological, interpersonal, transpersonal, social, cultural and other processes all interacting with one another, producing a phenomenon that resists reduction to any one of its constituent parts (Hunter 2018). Again, the mediumistic demonstration, like an organism, is more than the sum of its parts.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion In the broader context of this book, my aim in writing this chapter has been to suggest that it is not that there is something special about “technologies” or “media” that necessarily entwines them with the paranormal but rather that there might be something special about matter itself, and the ways in which it organizes and becomes increasingly complex through natural processes. Technologies, after all, are just complex arrangements of matter, and so are bodies, rocks, ecosystems, stars, and planets. It is also clear that there seems to be something important about the way in which we participate and interact with such complex configurations of matter—the way that we relate to them—which may give rise to emergent experiences and phenomena that cannot be adequately reduced to their constituent parts. In the

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

42 • Jack Hunter

case of the Bristol Spirit Lodge, the physical matter of the medium’s body becomes the means of expression for invisible spirits through a process of nurturing and encouraging them into existence, which in many ways resembles a birthing process. Movements of the body are observed and become the movements of spirits in a symbiotic relationship. Above all, it becomes clear from all of this that the medium is not a machine, and that if we really want to understand what is going on in the context of the séance we may have to look for new models and metaphors. It is also important to point out that this chapter is not an attempt to reduce the paranormal to the material, or vice versa, nor am I trying to say that the paranormal, mediumship, or religious experience more generally can be explained away in naturalistic or materialist terms. Rather, this chapter suggests that the mediumship experience—and the paranormal more generally—is complex and accordingly best understood holistically, like an ecosystem. To this end, although I have only been able to give a cursory overview of some key organismic principles—growth, birth, symbiosis, and systems (and there are others)—I have tried to illustrate how they might provide useful alternatives to reductive materialist frameworks and technological models. Ultimately, organicist and mechanist interpretations of psychical phenomena are expressions of the same impulse to fit the paranormal into the established frameworks of the hard sciences, but in my experience organicist models seem truer to life. Furthermore, an organicist and ecological perspective may provide us with innovative frameworks for tackling the problem of the mind-body relationship—a problem that arose in part from René Descartes’s (1596–1650) dualistic model of mind and matter as fundamentally separate phenomena—and help us to reconceptualize our understanding of its nature. For example, applying the principle of symbiosis to the problem might suggest that mind and matter are inextricably connected, something like Jung’s notion of the “psychoid” as a connecting principle between mind and matter (Addison 2009). Alternative models of nonlocal consciousness, which see mind as ubiquitous in nature (Radin 2006), the philosophical model of panpsychism, which sees consciousness as a fundamental property of the universe (Velmans 2007), idealism, which sees all as mind (Kastrup 2019), and animism, understood in the sense that the cosmos consists of “persons,” not all of whom are human, engaging in reciprocal relationships (Harvey 2005), all present new possibilities for reconceptualizing old problems. Whichever perspective we ultimately adopt going forward—and I would suggest that the truth is probably somewhere in

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Organicism and Psychical Research • 43

between all of these, and more—it will likely involve a radical reconsideration of the nature of matter. It is my hope, therefore, that this preliminary excursion might inspire others to follow some of these mycelial threads to see where they lead.

Jack Hunter, PhD, is an honorary research fellow with the Religious Experience Research Centre and a tutor with the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture, both at University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He is also a research fellow with the Parapsychology Foundation and a professional member of the Parapsychological Association. He is the author of Manifesting Spirits (2020), Spirits, Gods and Magic (2020), and Engaging the Anomalous (2018); coeditor of Talking With the Spirits (2014); and editor of Strange Dimensions (2015), Damned Facts (2016), and Greening the Paranormal (2019).

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

References Addison, Ann. 2009. “Jung, Vitalism and ‘The Psychoid’: An Historical Reconstruction.” Journal of Analytic Psychology 54: 123–42. Allen, Garland E. 2005. “Mechanism, Vitalism and Organicism in Late Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Biology: The Importance of Historical Context.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36: 261–83. Alvarado, Carlos. 2006. “Concepts of Force in Mesmerism, Spiritualism and Psychical Research.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 70.3(884): 138–56. Bergandi, Donato. 2011. “Multifaceted Ecology Between Organicism, Emergentism and Reductionism.” In Ecology Revisited: Reflecting on Concepts, Advancing Science, edited by Astrid E. Schwarz and Kurt Jax, 31–43. Dordrecht: Springer. Bird-David, Nurit. 1999. “Animism Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40: 67–79. Bonfante, Paola, and Andrea Genre. 2010. “Mechanisms Underlying Beneficial Plant-Fungus Interactions in Mycorrhizal Symbiosis.” Nature Communications 1(48): 1–11. Brain, Robert M. 2013. “Materialising the Medium: Ectoplasm and the Quest for Supra-Normal Biology in Fin-de-Siecle Science and Art.” In Vibratory Modernism, edited by Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower, 112–41. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Brower, M. Brady. 2010. Unruly Spirits: The Science of Psychic Phenomena in Modern France. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

44 • Jack Hunter Cabot, Zayin. 2018. Ecologies of Participation: Agents, Shamans, Mystics, and Diviners. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Dawkins, Richard. 1982. The Extended Phenotype: The Gene as the Unit of Selection. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dickinson, Gordon, and Kevin Murphy. 2007. Ecosystems. London: Routledge. Driesch, Hans. 1933. Psychical Research. London: Collins. Fichman, Martin. 2001. “Science in Theistic Contexts: A Case Study of Alfred Russel Wallace on Human Evolution.” Osiris 16: 227–50. Foster, John B., and Brett Clark. 2008. “The Sociology of Ecology: Ecological Organicism versus Ecosystem Ecology in the Social Construction of Ecological Science, 1926–1935.” Organization and Environment 21(3): 311–52. Gilbert, Scott F., and Sahotra Sarkar. 2000. “Embracing Complexity: Organicism for the 21st Century.” Developmental Dynamics 219: 1–9. Hardy, Alister. 1966. The Divine Flame: Natural History and Religion. London: Collins. Harvey, Graham. 2005. Animism: Respecting the Living World. London: Hurst & Company. Hatch, A. B., and K. D. Doak. 1933. “Mycorrhizal and Other Features of the Root Systems of Pinus.” Journal of the Arnold Arboretum 14(1): 85–99. Hume, David. 1998. Dialogues and Natural History of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hunter, Jack. 2019. Greening the Paranormal: Exploring the Ecology of Extraordinary Experience. Milton Keynes: August Night Press. ———. 2018. “A Study of Spirit Mediumship in the UK: Towards a Nonreductive Anthropology of the Paranormal.” PhD diss., University of Bristol, England. ———. 2020. “Harmony and Ecology.” In The Harmony Papers, edited by Nick Campion, 209–220. Lampeter: The Sophia Centre Press. Jung, C. G. 2007. Psychology and the Occult. London: Routledge. Kastrup, B. 2019. “Analytic Idealism: A Consciousness-Only Ontology.” PhD diss., Radboud University Nijmegen. Retrieved 5 July 2020 from https:// philpapers.org/archive/KASAIA-3.pdf. LeShan, Lawrence. 1995. “When Is Uvani?” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 89: 165–75. Lovelock, James. 2000. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Margulis, Lynn, and David Bermudes. 1985. “Symbiosis as a Mechanism of Evolution: Status of Cell Symbiosis Theory.” Symbiosis 1: 101–24. Mills, Jon. 2014. “Jung as Philosopher: Archetypes, the Psychoid Factor and the Question of the Supernatural.” International Journal of Jungian Studies 6(3): 227–42. Monbiot, George. 2014. Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life. London: Penguin Books.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Organicism and Psychical Research • 45 Natale, Simone. 2011. “A Cosmology of Invisible Fluids: Wireless, X-Rays and Psychical Research around 1900.” Canadian Journal of Communication 36(2): 263–75. Odum, Eugene P. 1966. “The Strategy of Ecosystem Development.” Science 164: 262–70. Paine, Robert T. 1995. “A Conversation of Refining the Concept of Keystone Species.” Conservation Biology 9(4): 962–64. Radin, Dean. 2006. Entangled Minds. New York: Paraview Pocketbooks. Richet, Charles. 1923. Thirty Years of Psychical Research: A Treatise on Metapsychics. London: The MacMillan Company. Schroll, Mark A. 2016. Transpersonal Ecosophy. Vol. 1. Llanrhaeadr-ymMochnant: Psychoid Books. Sheldrake, Rupert. 2009. A New Science of Life. London: Icon Books. ———. 2012. The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Scientific Inquiry. London: Coronet. Sjöstedt-H, Peter. 2016. “The Philosophy of Organism.” Philosophy Now (June/ July): 14–15. Sommer, Andreas. 2009. “Tackling Taboos—From Psychopathia Sexualis to the Materialisation of Dreams: Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (1862–1920).” Journal of Scientific Exploration 23(3): 299–322. Stamets, Paul. 2005. Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press. Turner, Edith. 1998. Experiencing Ritual: A New Interpretation of African Healing. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Velmans, Max. 2007. “The Co-evolution of Matter and Consciousness.” Synthesis Philosophica 22(44): 273–82. Volkov, Alexander G. and Shtessel, Yuri. B. 2020. “Underground Electronic Signal Transmission between Plants.” Communicative and Integrative Biology 13(1): 54–58. Watson, Lyall. 1973. Supernature: The Natural History of the Supernatural. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Chapter 2

Semantics of the Suffering Torture Technologies and Mediumship in Buenos Aires Miguel M. Algranti

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction Victor Turner, the father of anthropological thinking about ritual as a process, defined ritual as “a prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in mystical beings or powers” (1968: 19). Through ritual, specifically concerning the liminal period in Van Gennep’s rites de passage, Turner saw how the participants could achieve the transformation of their social context and themselves. However, Turner’s differentiating ritual as “occasions not given over to technological routine” is only partly successful. The tactic helps us acknowledge the noninstrumental quality of festivals, celebrations, and other rites permeated by play. But it obscures the link between ritual and technology that develops when “technicians of the sacred” (Eliade 1964) engage in rites aimed at specific empirical results such as healing patients or producing evidence from the dead. Surely there is a technology of ritual, and surely modern technology has its ritualistic qualities, but what is the established relation when ritual and technological routines goes hand in hand? Are spiritual beings and technologies necessarily opposing categories? What kind of context of meaning supports both spiritual and technological activities? In this chapter, I am concerned with examining this aspect as one part of a general interest in the agencies of spiritual beings. The argument is limited to an analysis of an ethnographic description of the culto a Dios, one of the main rituals in the Asociación Escuela Científica Basilio or Basilio Scientific School Association, arguably the largest scientific spiritualism congregation in Argentina. After a brief introduction to the

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Semantics of the Suffering • 47

Basilio School’s social history in Argentina, I will set up the ethnographic case study so that I can, firstly, explore how technology and science shape the practices of spiritual mediumship. I will center this exploration on the body and its instrumental uses in spiritual mediumship reflecting both on Michel Foucault’s “technologies of the self” and on the sociological observation from Marshall McLuhan’s phenomenology of media (1964) that communication technologies function as an extension of our bodies, conditioning the pace and scale of social life. Secondly, I will analyze the analogy between torture technologies and mediumship presented in this particular ritual as the analytical key to entering an ontologically porous semantic dimension of physical pain, where material and spiritual contexts collide. My general thesis is that the fundamental dynamic in the process of both spirit mediumship and torture technologies, within Basilio’s spiritualism rituals, is related to the function of suffering as somatic disambiguation. That is to say that in spiritual mediumship, the process by which a sensation is identified with a unique meaning and context orientation, resolving its intrinsic polysemy/ambiguity, is often a joint articulation over bodily pain. The instrumental use of the medium’s body as an expressive surface for spirits and apparatus alike collectively develops the entanglement between the sentient and the nonsentient as a topological space of their own where the use of contextual and perceptual ambiguity gives rise to a shared semantics of the suffering. Production and legitimization of spiritual knowledge within the ritual, then, lies not only in the eloquence of the spiritual medium’s performances but also in further critique and research that renders the spirits as agents independent from their host. The relational nature of spiritual entities in the ritual suggests alternatives ways in which materiality, meaning, and agency can be socially organized and reshaped.

The Basilio Scientific School Association Many academic studies have already pointed out modern spiritualism as a religious stream deeply related with science and technology (Swatos 1990; Bianchi 2004; Albanese 2006; Lewgoy 2006; Viveiros de Castro Cavalcanti 2006; Stolow 2008; Aubrée 2009; Gimeno, Corbetta, and Savall 2010; Ludueña 2011; Corbetta 2012; Walker 2013; Enns 2015). One of its most influential expressions, French Spiritism, is so consubstantiated with telegraphy imageries that its founder, Allan Kardec, is considered to be the “codifier” of the doctrine, rendering spiritism as

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

48 • Miguel M. Algranti

the first coded system of beliefs. The similarities between nineteenthcentury spiritualism and its coetaneous technologies go way beyond imaginaries and, in many ways, constitute an interdependent model for their practices. Telegraphy and spiritualism were parallels not only because they both represented methods of communication capable of transmitting written information across vast distances but also because they both involved deciphering signals from noise, as it is often unclear whether the message received is produced by “an intelligent operator at the other end of the line” or simply by the testing instruments themselves. Furthermore, as David Walker (2013) argues, Modern Spiritualism historically assumed skepticism and operational intrigue, and it constituted itself in displays and spaces for which observers had, or were outright provided with, the technologies of disenchantment and the tools of ritual critique. Amid technological routines, scientific methods, and religious concerns, modern spiritualism introduced discontinuity itself as the business and space for religion and found new ways to dwell within its tensions. In Latin America’s Modern Spiritualism, as Lewgoy (2006) observes, “science” and “religion” are not separate concepts or part of specialized jargon but cultural categories of understanding of our times that carry a high axiological resonance. To this observation I would add that these categories do not compose watertight compartments but are crossed by complex localized and historical dialectics. Technologies and miracles, as products and evidence of these discourses, often work in tandem, extending, legitimizing, or sometimes resisting the dominant sociopolitical order. The somewhat recent interest that academia took in “Western Esoterism” as a general label for all those traditions that had been rejected by rationalist and scientific thinkers since the eighteenth century, the period of the Enlightenment, as well as by dominant forms of Protestant Christianity since the sixteenth century, the age of the Reformation (Hanegraaff 2016), urges the need to address the myriad appropriations and uses the label took in Latin America. Within the region, it is difficult to understand the complexity of Western Esoterism’s impact without making sense of the Catholic Church as a determining power in structuring legitimacy within the religious field (Frigerio 2007) or paying attention to the specific implementations and social role of communicational technologies such as telegraphy, the print industry, and railroads, or state-socialized technologies such as public schools or the subsequent registration of cults. For scientists and religious leaders alike, esoterism became the polemical “Other” that they needed to define and demarcate their own identity. The region

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Semantics of the Suffering • 49

presents certain common guidelines that make Spiritualism a mirror to understanding Latin American modernity as a perpetual multilayered work in progress for both resisting and extending colonialism. In Argentina particularly, the strong presence of esoteric groups and spiritualist associations is correlated with the sociocultural transformations linked to the modernization project, including the formation of a national state and its appropriation of the regional space (Wright and Ceriani 2018). Just as Masonic lodges accompanied the Latin American independentist revolutionary spirit, establishing official branches in Argentina from 1852 onward, spiritism, imported by boat in the 1870s, would do the same for science and pedagogy by proposing a secular spirituality that theosophy would later relocate into a more initiatory and personal dimension. The role of communication technologies such as telegraph lines, railroads, or printed media in this process not only gave the movement the means to reach the public sphere (Quereilhac 2012) but also the impression that modern science was seizing the territory of miracles by providing new languages and models of technical intermediation. In the penultimate decade of the nineteenth century, a cultural movement emerged in Argentina, whose protagonists were later known as the “Generation of the 80.” Although occult literature was not well-considered in the Buenos Aires society, a group of people identified with that cultural trend and, attentive to what was happening in Europe and the United States, began to meet with the concern of deepening what goes beyond established religions. A young Danish man named Nicolás Kier (1865–1947) participated in these encounters. Spiritist books were imported from Spain by Emilio de Pérsico, who, when retiring in 1907, transferred ownership of his bookstore to Kier. From then on the bookstore was renamed Theosophical Bookstore, and it began the intense task of disseminating these works, making them accessible to the general public. Kier continued with the importation and translation of the principal spiritual and esoteric literature. The exponential growth of the print industries in first decades of the twentieth century functions as a key element in the accommodation and propagation of esoterism in this latitude. But even by speaking the words of science and following the path of religion, the modernity of Argentine spiritualism lies neither in its singularity of affiliation or dictation nor in its capacity to collapse and harmonize cultural dichotomies, but instead in its navigations and encampments among them. This cultural climate, where technical and religious themes overlapped, is very much exemplified by the 1877 speech by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, father of the national law 1420 of public education and consecrated mas-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

50 • Miguel M. Algranti

ter mason, at the inauguration of the first electric telegraph in Buenos Aires:

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Today we admit the existence of the ether, which cannot even be imagined, so dissolved that it fills the universe, conducts light, electricity by waves as you like, and is therefore within us, as if we lived within a sea that penetrates and unites us at the same time. Science begins to make room for the incredible, and yet the communion of souls was the means and the end of all religions, and science respected the incredible for centuries. Today we believe in the telephone, which is more incredible than the communion of souls that we are determined to deny. The telephone is based on a sea of vibrations that makes waves, and transmits sounds in seconds around the earth. We are already in the realms of the incredible. (Sarmiento, 1993)

If telegraph lines converted Argentina into a connected nation, the concepts of electricity and telegraphy allowed for a unique displacement of agency, projecting unthinkable possibilities of an ethereal world into visible communities and reformulating an often-radical political program as an act of spiritual communication. In Argentina’s religious landscape, structured by a colonial-made Catholic hegemony, the introduction of spiritualism confronted a more traditional and institutionalized role of the Catholic believer by presenting the figure of the explorer-researcher who will seek alternative or disputed epistemologies (Ludueña 2015). The notion of the believer as a seeker and researcher of the numinous was complemented by that of the spiritual medium existing on the peripheries of society where the enlightened understanding of progress, electricity, sexuality, and spirituality collide. If in North America, as Sconce (2000) points out, the medium occupied a strategic place in politics and intellectual space that allowed him to intervene in the public sphere through a combination of supernatural and technological discourses, a model legitimized by the incredible and incontrovertible evidence of the telegraph, in Argentina the role of the medium as evidence of the spiritual world was mainly focused on subverting the socio-political order. The poor and illiterate through mediumship became enlightened sages, and the woman, often a foreigner and single, became an academic or political authority. Communicational technologies, spiritual or otherwise, not only made an interlocutor physically absent, it also placed the ultimate source of transmission in an irresolvable ambiguity. Spiritism as a movement exploited this intrinsic mystery of electronic telecommunications to make possible both new media and new forms of political discourse. Gaining momentum in the later twentieth century’s woman suffrage

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Semantics of the Suffering • 51

struggles led by Eva Perón, the “Spiritual Leader of the Nation,” Argentina’s spiritism presented a unique and even subversive articulation of femininity, electricity, and technology by changing women’s physical and mental “inferiority” into a form of technological authority—a know-how often invoked in support of women’s rights, anticlerical initiatives, and other “radical” causes. The Basilio Scientific School Association (from here BSSA) is one of the largest scientific spiritism organizations in Argentina. It was founded in 1917 in Buenos Aires by French immigrants Pedro Eugenio Portal (1867–1925) and Blanca Aubretón de Lambert (1867–1920). Eugenio was a notary with weighty spiritual concerns, and Blanca was an experienced spiritual medium trained by Auguste Henri Jacob (1828– 1913), a notorious spiritual healer in post-Crimea Paris. In her encounter with Eugenio, she channeled the spirit of his father, Pedro Basilio Portal, who commanded the couple to create a school for the development of a spiritual science and the restoration of the original Christian message, referenced as “the New Idea.” Greatly influenced by Allan Kardec’s French spiritism, Basilio’s doctrine presented itself as the “true spiritism” by virtue of its scientific approach to Christianity. Every Friday in the association’s first days, with no more than forty members, Blanca would channel episodes of the real biography of Jesus of Nazareth from the spiritual realm. These biographical messages depicted Jesus not as a divinity but as a human, with brothers and sisters, a wife, and kindred. Grounding the Catholic myth, Blanca’s Jesus of Nazareth is considered to be one of many of humanity’s guides for spiritual evolution (as Buddha, Muhammad, etc.), and the institution’s archetypical-master. Since 1917, the Basilio Scientific School grew from a small group of no more than three hundred disciples to an international religion with an estimated four hundred thousand followers worldwide in the early 1970s. From there, it began a slow decay to an aging institution with an estimated active membership at a little over ten thousand in Argentina today and a few thousand more spread across the globe. This transformation began in the 1940s with a significant street campaign protesting Catholic education in public schools and demanding a nondenominational, dogmatic, or religious education based on scientific knowledge of the spiritual realm. Unlike Kardecian spiritism, the BSSA did not attempt to co-opt great scientists or political cadres but rather focused on criticizing Catholic religious education and promoting members’ direct access to mediumistic practice. Basilio’s campaign against Catholic education had great resonance among a young urban immigrant popu-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

52 • Miguel M. Algranti

lation socialized through public education and often characterized by modern anticlerical and antidogmatic principles. Directed by Hilario Fernández, a Spanish immigrant, the BSSA shared its targeted audiences with Peronismo, the main popular political party in Argentina. After Juan Domingo Perón broke his relations with the Catholic Church in 1955, the BSSA became one of most visible religious-Others to reach presidential and mainstream attention, increasing its membership exponentially. Science as a legitimizing value in modern Argentine society was transferred to the spiritual realm in a secular religion project that informed and inspired by the experience of the public school. The adhesion of the immigrant masses to the “proven faith” of Basilio was so massive that, as Gustavo Ludueña (2011) argues, it formed a popular epistemology that in many cases challenged official scientific explanations. In the last two decades, the BSSA has gone through multiple transformations of its doctrine and institutional affiliations. Strongly differentiating itself from the esoteric field (Ludueña 2009), the BSSA has become simultaneously more confessional, publicly supporting religious pluralism movements and events, and more scientific by updating the spiritual science argot and its connections with mainstream scientific themes. The BSSA constantly pushes its spiritual science to wider, more general audiences. Nevertheless, a decrease in and more discretional level of spiritual activities, the prohibition of political manifestation within the institution, and the prolongation of the term of the general spiritual director, Guido Boeri, has seen almost half of its members leave the institution to form their own associations. In Basilio’s school doctrine, there are two main, opposite dimensions that are both ontological and cosmological: el Bien (the Good), where spirits with and from Light exist, and el Error (the Wrong), where the material universe is located and fallen souls are given a chance to evolve back to pre-fallen harmony. Spirits are considered to be units and can only be incarnated in a human body where they get the chance to evolve its condition, but not all spirits are embodied. Fragments of spirits referred to as spiritual particles or spiritual fragments compose the mineral, vegetal, and animal kingdoms, and their level of spiritual evolution correlates with its level of awareness and sentience. The main difference between Good and Wrong spirits is found in the type of spiritual vibration they identify with and emit. Every spirit or particle in Basilio’s doctrine has three main attributes: love, intelligence, and freedom. The different proportions of and harmonies between these attributes give the spirit a unique constitutive vibration. Harmonious vibrations are considered to be good, and providers of spiritual Light

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Semantics of the Suffering • 53

evolve the spirit to a primordial state of divine harmony. Violent vibrations give rise to vices and behaviors that de-evolve the spirit, confining it to the material dimension for an eternal cycle of reincarnation. The culto a Dios is the main ritual in the Basilio Scientific School Association, a more formal, collective version of the practice called spiritual liberation. Even though Basilio’s doctrines understand spiritual mediumship as a human capacity, they consider the culto a Dios ritual necessary only because of humanity’s lack of “spiritual evolution” in this particular time in history. The object of this ritual is to provide orientation to disembodied spirits that regret their wrongs and want to join the cosmological group of spirits referred to only as Good. A total of six mediums participate in the ritual. One at a time, they incorporate the spiritual entities, channel the message, and receive the response from the director in charge. The director’s response should be a persuasive articulation of Basilio’s locus of spiritual knowledge concerning the problems brought by the spirit. It is from this argument that the spirit transforms its ontological condition and joins the dimension of Good.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Medium and the Picana From 2009 to 2014 I conducted an ethnographic study of the practice of spiritual mediumship at the BSSA as part of my doctoral research. My fieldwork goal was to go through the whole institutional process of acquiring the status of director espiritual (spiritual medium). This required me to attend three years of “spiritual science” school, take a written examination to achieve the role of spiritual director, and then complete a special course dedicated to the development of the medium capabilities. After this training, I continued to assist in celebrations, fiestas espirituales, and visit many friends and informants from time to time. The ethnographic situation that follows took place in November 2015 while visiting the morning culto a Dios at the main school, or “world headquarters,” in the Caballito district in Buenos Aires. It was a year marked by presidential campaigns, and, at the time, the federal district was discussing the implementation of nonlethal taser guns for police officers to carry on duty. National and international human rights organizations reaffirmed that the city government of Buenos Aires, Argentina “wants to legalize torture” with the purchase of electric pistols. This controversial technology is similar in principle to that implemented in

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

54 • Miguel M. Algranti

the 1970s by the “task groups” of the dictatorial regime of Jorge Rafael Videla, a secret police dedicated to the torture and disappearance of “radical subjects,” and was being discussed and resisted all over the local newspapers and massive media outlets. It was a Wednesday, and the morning culto a Dios was about to begin. The salon de actos espirituales (the salon for spiritual acts) was full of hermanos (brothers) rhythmically shaking their arms in order to achieve a state of mind called elevación espiritual (spiritual elevation), and the official mediums were preparing for the incorporation of the repentant spirits. The director in charge of the séance started the invocations, asking Jesus of Nazareth, the master, and Hilario Fernández, the school spiritual guide, for protection against virulent vibrations. In order to set the mood for spiritual activities, they chanted the “Creator’s Hymn,” one of the many choral compositions of Basilio’s musical repertoire. When the music stopped, the elevated audience was kept in a sudden silence, indicating a proper level of spiritual elevation. The mediums took the stage during the hymn and formed a line in front of the audience. Arms hanging relaxed and eyes shut, their body position connoted an emptiness ready to be filled by spirits. Before the first medium started to channel the message, the director in charge started guiding the audience through a collective description of the incorporated spirit. “Is there a spirit incorporated?” he asked. “Yes,” the audience responded. “How is its constitution?” he followed. “Robust,” a myriad of voices responded. “Is the spirit a man or a woman?” he continued. “A man,” the participants responded. As the spirit description progressed, the participants with visual mediumship began to lead the way with the answers, and the others confirmed their perceptions with their spiritual intuition. At the end of this section, before the medium started transmitting the message, there was a precise image of the incorporated spirit collectively projected on the body of the medium. During the message, the spirit usually recalls his last incarnation and warns about the path that took him to spiritual de-evolution, the ontological realm of Wrong. The director guiding the séance sometimes responds to the spiritual message, articulating Basilio’s spiritual science to illuminate the way of the errant soul. While the message from the spirit is narrated in a very subjective form and aims to produce sympathy for the spirit’s errant life choices, the director’s response is aimed to articulate Basilio’s own locus of spiritual knowledge to the problem, to produce a rational explanation for the suffering of the Wrong spirit in the articulation of the spiritual science.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Semantics of the Suffering • 55

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

That Wednesday, the fourth medium to incorporate a spirit was Martha, one of my usual informants. The spirit that took the body of my friend Martha was described as a young man of thin constitution, long brown hair, clean shaven, but with sideburns. When the channeling started, Martha looked tired already, and the words from the spirit seemed to cause her great pain to produce. This performance was not transmitted with big gestures or bodily shaking, as possession with other spirits did, but with subtle modulations of the voice and micro-gestures. Even these types of minimum body expression are seen as a sign of weakness in Basilio’s notion of mediumship, where somnambulism and “possession” become forbidden terms for the scientifically oriented students of Basilio schools. For a prestigious medium like Martha, even the most subtle embodiment of the spirit is perceived as a sign of a very strong entity. Then the message began: Queridos hermanos tengan cuidado Dear brothers, be cautious Yo también puse mi cuerpo y mi espíritu a disposición de una causa I once placed my body and spirit for a cause Una lucha tan bella como la hermandad de hombres y mujeres, la humanidad unida hermano! A struggle as beautiful as the brotherhood of men and women, a united humanity my brother! Pero las fuerzas del Error pueden ser implacables But the forces of Wrong can be unstoppable Y si bien aún en el encierro mi espíritu vibraba en libertad And even if locked away, my spirit vibrated with freedom El Error utilizó el sadismo y la electricidad para quebrarlo The Wrong used sadism and electricity to break it La traición hermanos, ¿puede obligarse al espíritu traicionarse a la fuerza? Treason, brothers. Can a spirit be forced to betray itself? Cuando ultrajaron mi cuerpo, ¿era la picana hablaba por mi boca? As they abused my body, was the electric prod talking through my mouth? Todavía duelen las vejaciones en mi cuerpo espiritual The vexation still hurts my spiritual body. My tortura siguió por siempre hermanos, igual que mi resentimiento My torture kept going on forever, just like my resentment.

And the director responded: Hermano, tu presencia en este salon es evidencia misma de tu condición espiritual y tu arrepentimiento My brother, your presence in this room is evidence for your spiritual condition and your regrets.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

56 • Miguel M. Algranti

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Pero no es tu espíritu el que fue quebrado por la electricidad de la tortura sino tu cuerpo But it wasn’t your spirit broken by electricity, but your body. La exposición de vibraciones tan virulentas atrae violentas influencias espirituales The exposure to virulent vibrations attracts violent spiritual influences. Y no fue tu espíritu el que traicionó sus principios, sino las vibraciones del Error del torturador It was not your spirit that betrayed its principles, but errant vibrations from the torturer. (Fieldwork, 2015)

After the ritual was over, the audience was eager to discuss the guerrillero (guerrilla) episode. The younger members, a group of four fortysomething disciples, were confused about the effects of the electric prod at the spiritual level and the status of electricity in their spiritualist beliefs. The older disciples, members with more than twenty years in the school, had different opinions on the matter. For some, electricity and fluido espiritual were the same thing; others saw electricity as a strictly material affair. Many questions were asked after the séance. Was the guerrillero spirit a traitor to its own cause? If the electric prod talked through his body during torture, how do we know it’s not the one talking now? Martha and a group of six hermanos took these questions to the spiritual research classroom, where they continued to develop the spirit. Once there, five of the senior mediums formed a circle around Martha. She remained standing in the middle with her eyes closed, and her body relaxed. One of the mediums began to weep loudly; she ascertained that the electrical vibrations from the picana were still mixed up with the spirit’s own vibrations, then she apologized and left the room. The four remaining mediums held each other’s hands, surrounding Martha, and asked Hilario Fernández, the spiritual guide of that particular school, and Jesus of Nazareth for protection against these destructive influences. José, one of the senior mediums, intuited that to counter the entanglement of the electric vibrations we would need to apply purified fluido to the genitals and limbs where the electric prod was originally used. Two of the mediums around Martha focused on her arms and legs, other concentrated in the genital area, and José imparted fluido to the forehead, the natural “chair” of the spirit. This lasted for about ten minutes. Martha, from her position in the middle, showed micro-gestures of relief and made heavy breathing noises. The electrical rhythm that preceded this purification diffused into a calm

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Semantics of the Suffering • 57

atmosphere. José started softly describing some intuited biographical information about the spirit and gently asked it for verification. The spirit’s name was Gabriel; his last incarnation was one of a young activist affiliated with the PCR, a radical communist party heavily persecuted by the secret police of the 1970s. Kidnapped at nineteen years of age, he had died of torture in the clandestine detention center known as Mansion Sere. The guerrillero spirit turned out to be an idealistic young man broken by the guilt of betraying his friends and fellow party members through electricity-impelled means. When asked about his attachment to the material dimension, he answered that he still felt the picana’s voices weakening his will, calling him a traitor. For almost two weeks after the “guerrillero episode,” Martha told me that her body hurt and was constantly subject to electrical discharges. There was a continuity of the guerrillero spirit’s punishment in the body of the medium that channeled his message, a trace of his suffering. This pain was particularly evocative to Martha, giving her flashes of his life and violent death whenever she interacted with electrical devices. She told me that when spirits actively make use of her body, she needs to rest and drink purified water for a month before incorporating another entity.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Technologies of the Ethereal Self As seen in this brief ethnographic description of the ritual, the culto a Dios comprises a complex of interwoven transformations of context, ensembles, and rearrangements of the participant’s body experiences articulated by Basilio’s corpus scriptorum. The objective of the ritual is to materialize, identify, channel, and help a set of six suffering souls. Each spirit materialization comes sequenced by a three-step system involving (a) the audience’s description of the spirit’s body, (b) the message, and (c) the response from the director of the séance. There are also two more broadly general ritual steps. The first one is the audience’s opening spiritual elevation and chanting of hymns. Conceived as an individual disposition, spiritual elevation is one of the crucial requirements for perceiving the spiritual entities, and it is not uncommon to allocate the failure of a séance to lack of elevation from the audience. The use of high-pitch choral music in the ritual through thematic hymns facilitates the spiritual elevation. The second step is the impartation of purified fluido and the purification of water at the very end of the séance. Fluido espiritual, an exclusive substance of the spiritual world, and water its material counterpart, when purified, has therapeutic ef-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

58 • Miguel M. Algranti

fects depending on the previous materializations and on the responses given by the director in charge. Both of these instances are considered to be the condition and product of the ritual, respectively. As a system, the ritual presents a high degree of recursivity and autopoiesis. That is to acknowledge, as Don Handelman (2004: 12) points to, the presence of a double movement inward and outward. It recognizes itself within itself and on the basis of this self-integrity moving outward, diving into broader cosmic and social worlds. Spiritual elevation, as the opening required for the materializations to begin, uses rhythmical movement and music to convey this inward displacement. The aesthetic recurrence of rhythmicity and its movement generate their own pocket of shared time-space. Effectively, the mediums and ritual participants momentarily exist in their own ritual reality, quite autonomous of the immediate surroundings. From this fold, symbology linked to science and technological routine is present at every step of the ritual as an outward movement. Spiritual directors (mediums) wear white or brownish lab coats depending on their position. The salon is well lit and resembles a laboratory or a classroom. The main verbs used to guide mediumship activities come from technical references: spiritual elevation as tuning, spiritual description as coding, and the message itself as a transmission. The spiritual medium’s body itself is conceived as an instrument, a thing. As a process, there is a sense of “becoming” that shows its peak during the spiritual message and later becomes the object of performance critique and doctrine articulation. The performance of spiritual messages comes from an indetermination of the place of enunciation on the one hand, and it is always presented as an “Other who speaks from my body.” On the other hand, the participants in the ritual coproduce this performance with a work of spiritual description that culminates in the identification of the spirit within a finite group of social typologies: the indigenous, the doctor, the slave, the Negro, the politician, the scientific, the religious fanatic, or, in this case, the guerrillero. The essence of spiritual liberation consists of identifying, to classify what is manifested by speaking, and educating the entity by means of spiritual science. The work of directors consists of an etiological nomination that seeks to classify the speaker’s spiritual condition or concern within a place circumscribed by the knowledge of spiritual science. Language here acts as a symbol. Moreover, the language of spiritual messages is mainly performative. Instead of using language to inform, they use language to realize. What distinguishes a spiritual message is not only that its actions match history, it’s that that

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Semantics of the Suffering • 59

its motives match the purpose of history. Words act in creating a space, extending materiality. Eloquence is then a function of materiality—the more eloquent the spirit, the more materialization achieved. Basilio’s ideas on mediumship, as with Western esoterism in general, are deeply rooted in what Paul Ricoeur called the “myth of the exiled souls” (1967: 170), that is, the ontological notion that the body is a material prison for the soul, an instrument for atonement. Spiritualism, in particular the Basilio Scientific School, actualizes this instrumental notion of the body under the footprint of nineteenth century’s telecommunications and electrical machines. The authority of science and technological imageries are not only used for legitimizing the spiritual realm but also to regain spirits as an etiological power by themselves. In this sense, we can approach mediumship practices as what Michel Foucault called a “technology of the self,” that is to say, a technique that permits individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. These technological uses of the body, evident in the aftermath of Martha’s incident with the “electric” spirit, requires a maintenance, a “taking care of yourself” principle in this particular technology of the self. As Foucault would put it, the body as an instrument for spiritual communication needs to be cleansed, returned, purified from Wrong spiritual vibrations and affinities. So, what’s the relationship between media technologies and ritual spiritual mediums? In the late sixties, the phrase “the medium is the message” was popularized by Marshall McLuhan’s sociological observation that technical mediums are extensions of our bodies, by which the pace and scale of human association and action are transformed and administrated (McLuhan 1964). My argument is that spiritual mediumship, as a practice informed by communication technologies, subverts this principle from the inside out, presenting spiritual mediums’ bodies as an extension of the world by which the pace and scale of nonhuman association and action are measured and expressed. There is a spatial dimension of the body, one which is the foundation for the instrumental approach to materiality. So, understanding Basilio’s mediumship as a technology of the self, even in its ritual form, implies acknowledging that there is an irreducible materiality to the spiritual realm. This extended materiality, usually described as a fluid (fluido) or ectoplasm from an emic perspective, develops a space for the discontinuous to emerge and be reintegrated into the world. This is especially

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

60 • Miguel M. Algranti

evident in Basilio’s culto a Dios “spiritual descriptions” where, one by one, the spirit body parts are collectively deciphered and described over the medium’s body. The words describing the spirit simultaneously work to project the image within the audience and to guide the medium’s attention through her own body as a hermeneutical tour de force. There is an effective use of the medium’s body that is constitutive for a topological space for spirits to emerge. This space, where time is unfolded for spirits to perform, is defined between the medium and the ritual participants by concerting and assembling their perceptions. Here spirit influences do not operate as a cause that mobilizes a specific action in the medium but rather open up a space in which a sensation or pain obtains a unique sense; therefore, a space that precedes the line of causality or chain of action. This eloquent spiritual science, then, is strengthened by generating perspectives or models of interpretation that serve to legitimize, maintain, and prorogate the entanglement between the sensible and the sentient experienced in the ritual. The ethereal space or fluido described in spiritual science as being composed by vibrations is the condition of possibility for the critique of spiritual research and performance. The analogy between the medium and the electric prod in this ethnographical case opens the analysis to a shared semantic dimension of suffering and connects the ritual to a broader social context. Here, both torture technology and spiritual mediumship share the place occupied by bodily pain in an economy of truth. An economy characterized by the fact that bodily pain develops epistemological ambiguities for it can neither be confirmed nor denied. For representation theory, physical pain is not transferable and can only be witnessed secondhand, and the experience of pain can only be characterized specifically as suffering when there is another to bear witness to that pain. Elaine Scarry suggests that this economy of truth is established because, “for the person in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present is that ‘having pain’ may come to be the most vibrant example of what is to have a certainty. While we may be able to indicate to others that we are in pain, we cannot know that same pain. For those that witness pain, it is so elusive that ‘hearing about pain’ may exist as the primary model of what it is to have doubt” (1985: 22). Pain does not just defy language, it destroys it; extreme pain brings about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sound and shrieks a human being makes before language is learned. What Scarry’s theory of pain (1985) calls “analogical substantiation” is a concept in which the felt attributes of

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Semantics of the Suffering • 61

pain can be attached to a referent other than the human body. For spiritualism, technology is not a means to achieve some kind of improved embodiedness; instead, it is a means by which a bodily attribute is projected into the artifact (medium) that essentially takes on the work of the body, thereby freeing the embodied person of discomfort and thus enabling him to enter a larger realm of self-extension. The ambiguities raised by the guerrillero’s spirit revolved around the place of electricity in the spiritual realm and the role of the picana over the compulsive betrayal, concerns mainly etiological and cosmological. Both the message and the further development of the spirit’s biographical information resolved these concerns by conducting a meaningful exploration of the medium’s corporality as a surface, a space where history, machines, and spirits inhabit. Physical pain caused by electrical torture within the ritual limited the spirit materialization and agency in and to the world of the living precisely because of its certainty. Like dots and dashes of Morse code, physical pain becomes meaningful against the white noise of the medium’s body. Similarly, at the ritual, the electric prod speaks by employing the mutilated body or the scars left on the spirit by torture, tracing on the body the tormented signs that cannot be erased by death. Torture and martyrdom are thus carried out as a ritual, as a staging that works with signs and symbols. Physical pain as a standard somatic marker between mediumship and torture differs not by its hermeneutic potentialities or its cosmological nature but in degrees of intensity and frequency. In both torture and spiritual pain, we can detect ways in which power—the most direct, physical effect—works to produce truthful discourses and makes subjects respond to authority. The transformative power of spiritual mediumship in the Basilio Scientific School is that gravitation that establishes a global order, bringing together diffuse forces and perceptions in one general configuration. Its mode of operation cannot be described in terms of linear causality. In this sense, the medium does not mediate with the spiritual realm but rather extends it or coproduces it. The alternation between the spiritual and the material dimension, between quintessences and shells, coded messages and noise, is the constitutive ambiguity-fluidity of the spiritual medium. It is from this assumed ambiguity that a consistent, “stable” context of meaning can be produced. The eloquence of the spirit then acts by somatic disambiguation, giving the medium’s sensibilities a collective orientation that transcends the instrumental intentions of its participants.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

62 • Miguel M. Algranti

Conclusion In 1871, when spiritism was raging throughout the world, a hundred years before the Argentinian state terror, Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91) compared the role of the poet with that of a “seer” in these eloquent words: Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens. Toutes les formes d’amour, de souffrance, de folie ; il cherche lui-même, il épuise en lui tous les poisons, pour n’en garder que les quintessences. Ineffable torture où il a besoin de toute la foi, de toute la force surhumaine, où il devient entre tous le grand malade, le grand criminel, le grand maudit,—et le suprême Savant!

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

[The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, intense, and rational derangement of all the senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, to only keep their quintessences. Inexpressible torture where he needs all the faith, all the superhuman strength, when he becomes, above all others, the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed, and the supreme Sage!] (letter to Paul Demeny, Charleville, 15 May 1871; my translation)

The quintessence or ether, the fifth substance in addition to the four elements, thought to compose the heavenly bodies and to be latent in all things, is as old and relevant as scientific discourse itself. For Modern Spiritualism, the BSSA, and cursed French poets alike, this subtle substance can be accessed by a “long, intense, and rational derangement of all the senses.” However, as Gregory Bateson advises, conventional epistemology, what we call “sanity,” recoils in fright when it realizes that “properties” are only differences and exist only in one particular context, only in one perceptual arrangement. We abstract from relationships and experiences of interaction to create “objects” and endow them with characteristics. We also fear the proposition that our character is only real in a relationship. The inexpressible torture where all forms of love, suffering, and madness distill their venoms may hide new dimensions and folds of what we call modernity. In this work I argue that the ritual practice of spiritual mediumship among the unique spiritualist strand that is the Escuela Científico Basilio cancels the distinction between the self and the world by using an interface of extended/fluid materiality that renders physical pain as a somatic marker. This “extended materiality” is informed by and constitutes a counterpart to the sociological function of media technologies

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Semantics of the Suffering • 63

as “extensions of our body,” projecting a new kind of topology that develops the space between the sensible and the sentient as a heterotopy. The spirits, dwellers of this liminal existential dimension, are prone to be developed and further materialized by spiritual research, stabilizing its somatic markers, meaning, and materiality. Taking into consideration Talal Asad’s observation that “‘agency’ is a complex, relational term, whose senses emerge within semantic and institutional networks that define and make possible particular ways of dealing with people and things” (2000), the agency of spiritual entities within Basilio’s ritual grow with the socialization of its phenomenological structures. The intersubjectivity and relational character of Basilio’s mediumship practices grant these entities a sense of agency and tactility that simultaneously develops by transcending the instrumental intentions of the ritual participants. The ethnographic case presented in this chapter shows how the ritual treatment of a torture technology such as the electric prod brought epistemological, ontological, and even etiological ambiguities that the director in charge of the séance failed to resolve. The subsequent spiritual research deepens the spirit materialization by separating the entanglement between electrical and spiritual vibrations. In this differentiation, the eloquence of mediumship and torture does not result from different cosmological contexts but from the scale and pacing of suffering as both a semantic and material frontier between them. The continuum between spirit and picana, the electric and the spiritual, subject and object found in Basilio’s practices finds in suffering (physical or else) a shared semantic materiality; materiality because it expands the reaches of the world, and semantic because the identification of pain makes the spirit intelligible, eloquent. Moreover, in Argentina, crossed by so many years of consecutive military dictators, mediumship appears as a counter-metaphor for torture, where the voices of the Desaparecidos are still present behind the shock. Miguel M. Algranti is a social anthropologist (University of Buenos Aires, 2009; PhD Universidad Nacional de las Artes, 2016). He is a founding member of the Laboratorio de Antropología Decolonial (LAD), associate professor at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA), and researcher at the Centro Argentino de Etnología Americana (CAEACONICET). His current research focuses on esoterism in Argentina, where he is working on topics of religious diversity, technology, perception, and media.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

64 • Miguel M. Algranti

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

References Albanese, Catherine L. 2006. A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Aubrée, Marion, and François Laplantine. 2009. A mesa, o livro e os espíritos: Gênese, evolução e atualidade do movimento social espírita entre França e Brasil. Maceió: EdUFAL. Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2000. “Agency and Pain: An Exploration.” Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1: 29–60. Corbett, J. Martin. 2009. “Invoking Spirits in the Material World: Spiritualism, Surrealism, and Spirituality at Work.” Management & Organizational History 4(4): 339–57. Corbetta, Juan M., and Fabiana Savall. 2012. “El espiritismo kardeciano en la Argentina.” Unpublished manuscript. Bateson, Gregory. 2006. A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Barcelona: Gedisa Press. Bianchi, Susana. 2004. Historia de las religiones en la Argentina: Las minorías religiosas. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana. Buell, Denise K. 2009. “The Afterlife Is Not Dead: Spiritualism, Postcolonial Theory, and Early Christian Studies.” Church History 78(4): 862. Blanes, Ruy, and Diana Espírito Santo. 2014. The Social Life of Spirits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bubello, Juan Pablo. 2010. Historia del esoterismo en la Argentina: Practicas representaciones y persecuciones de curanderps, espiritistas, astrólogos y otros esoteristas. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblios. Csordas, Thomas. J. 1993. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology 8(2): 135–56. ———. 2004. “Asymptote of the Ineffable: Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion.” Current Anthropology 45(2): 163–85. Eliade, Mircea. 1964. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Boston: Boston Press. Enns, Anthony. 2015. “Spiritualist Writing Machines: Telegraphy, Typtology, Typewriting.” Communication +1 4(1): Article 11. Ferrándiz, Francisco. 2004. “The Body as Wound: Possession, Malandros and Everyday Violence in Venezuela.” Critique of Anthropology 24(2): 107–33. Foucault, Michel. 1990. Tecnologías del yo y otros textos afines. España: Paidós. Frigerio, Alejandro. 2007. “Repensando el monopolio religioso del catolicismo en la Argentina.” In Ciencias sociales y religión en America Latina: Perspectivas en debate, edited by María J. Carozzi and César Cariani Cernadas, 87–116. Buenos Aires: Biblos. Frigerio, Alejandro, and Hilario Wynarczyk. 2004. “Cult Controversies and Government Control of New Religious Movements in Argentina (1985–

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Semantics of the Suffering • 65 2001).” In Regulating Religion: Case Study from around the Globe, edited by James Richardson, 253–475. New York: Kluwe Publishers. Gimeno, Juan, Juan Corbetta, and Fabiana Savall. 2010. Cuando Hablan los espíritus: Historias del movimiento kardeciano en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Dunken. Handelman, Don. 2004. “Introduction: Why Ritual in Its Own Right. How So?” Social Analysis 48(2): 1–32. Hanegraaff, Wouter J. 2016. “Esotericism Theorized: Major Trends and Approaches to the Study of Esotericism.” In Religion: Secret Religion, edited by April DeConick, 155–70. New York: Macmillan. Lewgoy, Bernardo. 2006. “Representaçoes de Ciencia e Religiao No Espiritismo kardecista antigas e novas configuraçoes.” Civitas 6(2): 151–67. Ludueña, Gustavo. 2007. “Imagen y Reconstrucción de la Identidad Social en el Espiritismo Argentino.” Diversidade religiosa, Imagens e Identidades, edited by José Ivo Follman, 87–112. Porto Alegre: Armazém Digital. ———. 2009. “Performance y Popularización de una vertiente del espiritismo argentino.” Debates do NER 10(15): 71–103. ———. 2011. “Popular Epistemologies and ‘Spiritual Science’ in Early TwentiethCentury Buenos Aires.” Handbook of Religion and the Authority of Science, edited by Jim Lewis and Olav Hammer, 603–36. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2012. “Estado y Nación en las Narrativas de Espíritus Desaparecidos durante la Dictadura Militar en Argentina, 1976–1983.” Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales (47–48): 181–216. ———. 2013. “Estudios sociales contemporáneos sobre el espiritismo argentine: Ciencia, religión e institucionalización del espíritu.” Cultura y Religión 6(1): 42–59. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Quereilhac, Soledad. 2012. “Sociedades espiritualistas en el pasaje de siglos: Entre el cenáculo y las promesas de una ciencia future (1880–1910).” Prismas: Revista de Historia Intelectual 16: 183–86. ———. 2013. “Ecos de lo oculto en el Buenos Aires de entre-siglos: Intervenciones de escritores e intelectuales en medios de prensa.” Literatura y Linguística 28: 91–106. Ricoeur, Paul. 1967. The Symbolism of Evil. Boston: Beacon Press. Rimbaud, A. 1871. Letter to Paul Demeny, Charleville, 15 May. Retrieved 19 November 2019 from https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstu dents/undergraduate/modules/en354/syllabus/seminars/rimbaud_-_let ter_may_15_1871.pdf. Sarmiento, Domingo F. 1993. Viajes por Europa, Africa y América 1845-1847 y Diario de Gastos, Edición crítica por Javier Fernández (coordinador), Colección Archivos nº 27, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Buenos Aires. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

66 • Miguel M. Algranti

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Sconce, Jeffrey. 2000. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stolow, Jeremy. 2008. “Salvation by Electricity.” In Religion: Beyond a Concept, edited by Hent de Vries, 668–86. New York: Fordham University Press. Swatos, William. H. 1990. “Spiritualism as a Religion of Science.” Social Compass 37(4): 471–82. Turner, Victor. 1968. La selva de los símbolos. Madrid: Siglo XXI Press. ———. 1985. On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Viveiros de Castro Cavalcanti, Maria Laura. 2006. “Life and Death in Kardecist Spiritism.” Religiao e Sociedade 24(1): 168–73. Walker, David. 2013. “The Humbug in American Religion.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 23(1): 30–74. Wright, Pablo, and César Ceriani Cernadas. 2018. “Introducción: Entre heterodoxias históricas y recreaciones contemporáneas.” In Periferias Sagradas en la modernidad Argentina, edited by Pablo Wright, 9–23. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblios. Zaretsky, Irving. 1973. “In the Beginning Was the Word: The Relationship of Language to Social Organization in Spiritualist Churches.” In Religious Movements in Contemporary America, edited by Irving Zaretsky and Mark Leone, 175–223. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Chapter 3

Media Technologies and the Otherworld in Late Socialist Vietnam

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Gertrud Hüwelmeier

In contemporary Vietnam, a number of religious practices and phenomena—such as various forms of spirit mediumship, voices from the beyond, spirit writing, communication with ancestors, and searching for the bodily remains of war dead with the support of clairvoyants—are closely linked to matter and to the materiality of media technologies. Cassette and video recorders, music instruments, cameras, and smartphones play a vital role in mediating the otherworld. This chapter explores how people are affected by the repeated “coming into presence” (Lambek 2010:17) of spirits through media technologies. Religious practitioners perceive the device or the equipment, such as TV or ritual music, as having agency, or force, or potency due to their ability to set others in motion. In séances during which otherworldly beings and powers appear, participants offer food, flowers, and incense as well as gifts for the spirits, such as paper votives in the shape of radios, TVs, cameras, DVD recorders, laptops, and smartphones. It is therefore safe to say that people, things, technologies, and spirits are related in particular ways and that it is this relatedness that brings them into action.1 There are many ways of “materializing” spirits, some of which take more importance in my fieldsite in Vietnam. As I will argue in this chapter, the relationship between spirit and apparatus is shaped by tools and equipment, which constitute an indispensable component in communicating with professed spirits of the dead. In some cases, technical media may empower a spirit and increase its agency, while in others, trance mediums are turned into an apparatus through the assumed potency of a spirit. As a number of different technologies seem to have

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

68 • Gertrud Hüwelmeier

an effect on people in various contexts, the question remains whether the apparatus is the source of spiritual agency or whether spiritual agency emerges as a result of the manipulation of a certain technology or device. Referring to the challenges in the introduction of this book, my chapter is engaged with questions on how matter relates to media, on processes of mediation, and whether the concept of “dark media” (Thacker 2014) is useful in exploring contact and communication between this world and the otherworld in the political and historical context of late Socialist Vietnam.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

*** Since the establishment of the communist regime in northern Vietnam, government authorities have considered popular religious practices to be superstition, a view that persisted throughout the American Vietnam War and for many years afterward. However, since the 2000s, the country has witnessed a revitalization of a variety of religious practices, a process that has been termed “re-enchantment” within scholarship (Taylor 2007). The increasing reemergence of religious practices after the introduction of economic reforms (1986) in Vietnam is regarded by some as a response to the forces of globalization and to the challenges of neoliberalism and the associated emergence of new markets (Salemink 2015). In Vietnam, specters, spirits, and ghosts are conceived as having the capacity and the power to exercise agency. In order to grasp people’s ideas about the hereafter, materiality (Houtman and Meyer 2012) and its related subfields such as art, architecture, media, technology, and the body became important fields of study in the past few years. When it comes to communication with the divine, religious practitioners need various technologies to get into contact with the otherworld. Materiality of mediation includes paper votive offerings, incense, food, and technical media. As asserted by my friends and informants, these items are necessary to attract the spirits and to set in motion their “coming into presence” and their disappearance. Ethnographic work on circulation and movement of spirits in local, transregional, and transnational contexts (Hüwelmeier and Krause 2010) and from the concealed to the unconcealed (Lambek 2010: 28) indicate religious practitioners’ imageries about the agency of otherworldly beings. However, in order to move or to appear, spirits, gods, and deities need devices, tools, or media. In Vietnam, devices such as smartphones to record the voice of the dead in soul-calling sessions seem to be fueled by the energy of spiritual entities and may become what has been called “vibrant matter”

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Media Technologies and the Otherworld in Late Socialist Vietnam • 69

(Bennett 2010). But, as recent scholarly work has shown, spirit mediumship in its various manifestations and its relationship to technical media emphasizes the prominent role of the medium. Trance mediums, in order to “make otherworldly beings and powers appear (from Latin, apparere) . . . need to make dispositions (in Latin, apparare) and take great care in preparing a setting conductive to their work of mediation” (Behrend and Zillinger 2015: 3). Hence, spirit mediumship and technical media are interconnected and cannot be separated. However, considering spiritual entities as analytically valid actors in networks of causality (Latour 2005) gives rise to problematizing issues such as the relationship between spirit and medium as well as the manipulation of various technologies and materials. The coexistence of technical media and spirits and ghosts is by no means a recent phenomenon. This intertwining arose in particular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not least due to technological inventions such as electricity and magnetism, photography, telegraphy, and radio (Connor 1999). Scholars from the field of media history have suggested that “supernatural entertainments” (Natale 2016), such as the public demonstration of the spirit communication performed by the Fox sisters in 1848, were closely connected to the evolution of the media entertainment industry. The séances as part of the rise of the spiritualist movement in Great Britain and the United States offered their audiences amusement, sensational effects, and a “confirmation of religious beliefs about the afterlife” (Natale 2016: 1). Victorian Spiritualism, the belief in ghosts, and the rise of modern media culture contributed to a growing market for leisure activities and spectacular attractions. The birth of the electric telegraph and the growth of Spiritualism in Britain and the United States shaped the way in which spiritualists made meaning vis-à-vis communication with the beyond. “The invisible channel through which professed spirits of the dead interacted with the living was often thought to be a subtle fluid analogous or closely related to electricity and this helped justify claims that spiritualism involved the ‘celestial’ or ‘spiritual’ equivalent to the electric telegraph” (Noakes 2016:138). As Schüttpelz has suggested, alongside with spiritualist practices in Europe, “highly concrete refractive media, optical lenses, and new optical instruments became the technical basis of scientific research” (Schüttpelz 2015: 59; see also Andriopoulos 2013: 1). Furthermore, industrialization and political revolution in nineteenth-century Europe, in conjunction with technology and natural sciences, generated a new occultism, a kind of “occult internationalism” (Linse 1996: 10), and led to an increase in the number of trance

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

70 • Gertrud Hüwelmeier

mediums, prophets, miracle workers, and political redeemers in Germany and other countries. In the wake of the introduction of digital technologies, a renewed interest arose around the world in ghosts and otherworldly beings such as the spirits of the dead. In contemporary Santiago de Chile, for example, people investigate abandoned buildings, such as former psychiatric clinics, by using “Ghost or Spiritboxes” which are “modified and portable AM/FM radios (or mobile phone applications)” that produce sound fractions. Some believe “that these audio remnants are manipulated by otherworldly spirits to fashion words, audible . . . through voice recorders and reproducers” (Espírito Santo 2019: 2). People and apparatuses in this case have been interpreted as components of a “force-field,” and vocal sounds as being part of “sonic atmospheres” (Eisenlohr 2018: 35). Things and bodies affect and are being affected at the same time, while the equipment is considered as having agency, with agency belonging to the apparatus. By focusing on the relationship between religious practitioners and things, and by referring to various forms of popular religious practices in today’s Vietnam, I explore the mutual constitution of ancestor veneration (1), trance mediumship (2), and spirit writing (3) with technological mediation. I do so by referring to ethnographic fieldwork in urban Hanoi, which I conducted over a period of more than ten years. In the first section, I investigate votive paper offerings as media in communication processes between the living and the dead. Within Vietnamese spiritual traditions, family ancestors can be approached by the living through altar offerings, including incense, food, cigarettes, alcohol, and the latest media technologies, such as iPhones made from paper. While food and incense are considered to attract the visual and olfactory senses of spirits to “come home” and to temporarily participate in the everyday life of the family, votive paper offerings such as refrigerators, cars, and mobile phones are thought to be indispensable things in the otherworld in order to continue a comfortable life. The second section of this text deals with lên d–ô`ng spirit mediumship, whereby mediums offer their bodies as a vessel to be inhabited by deities of the Mother Goddess religion (Ða.o Mâ˜u). Material objects such as paper votives in the shape of horses and elephants as well as food offerings are quite prominent in these performances, as they are transmitted to the otherworld via burning and smoke and thus mediate between seemingly separate worlds. In addition, spirit mediums employ technical media to enhance music, dance, voice, image, or energy. However, in the process of lên d–ô`ng becoming recognized as an Intangi-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Media Technologies and the Otherworld in Late Socialist Vietnam • 71

ble Cultural Heritage by the UNESCO, “fraud” mediums emerged, and even theater shows started to perform spirit sessions. Spirit writing, another form of trance mediumship, will be explored in the third section. The multilayered materiality of this practice includes stylus, paper, clothing, and various food offerings, while its documentation and interpretation in the case described here requires digital technologies. Only after celestial messages have been carefully interpreted can spirits’ intervention into the political life of the country become obvious. Communication with heroes of the past is entangled with matters of political power in late Socialist Vietnam, a country not only characterized by neoliberalism and a socialist market economy but also by a strong nationalism.

Ancestor Veneration Ghosts, spirits, and ancestors loom large in the everyday life of many people in Vietnam. As in other parts of the world, throughout history, and across cultures, spiritual entities have played vital roles in oral and written narratives,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

appearing as anything from figments of the imagination, divine messengers, benign or exacting ancestors, and pesky otherworldly creatures populating particular loci to disturbing figures returned from the dead bent on exacting revenge, revealing hidden crimes, continuing a love affair or simply searching for a way to pass on. (Blanco and Peeren 2013: 1)

Worshiping familial ancestors is considered a moral duty by most Vietnamese. Family members imagine that ancestors intervene in everyday life in a positive way. Most Vietnamese believe in a world of the hereafter, which is conceived as being “similar to the one in which we live in almost every detail” (Malarney 2003: 186), according to the Vietnamese proverb “trâ`n sao âm vâ.y.” Material objects are key elements in rituals of commemoration, with worshipers preparing food for the spirits and decorating the family altar with flowers and incense twice a month, according to the lunar calendar. While incense is burning, religious practitioners pray intensely, imagining that the ancestor spirit is “coming into presence” to smell the scent of incense, see lovely decorated flowers, and taste delicious fruit and food. In conjunction with various techniques of the body (Mauss 1973 [1935]) such as staring or sighing, a sensory engagement with the divine “generates particular sensibilities” (Meyer 2009: 13) that are “rooted in the experience of the body in

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

72 • Gertrud Hüwelmeier

its entirety, as a complex of culturally and historically honed sensory modalities” (Hirschkind 2006: 101). Folding one’s hands in prayer and bowing to the ancestors are characteristic bodily techniques of paying respect to the dead. On special occasions, such as on the death day of the deceased, a family will get together and carry out rituals, including the preparation of elaborate dishes that are offered to the dead and later returned as lô.c, “blessed” food to be consumed collectively by the worshipers. Family members will burn, and thereby transmit to the dead, lavish paper offerings, which were long banned in Vietnam but regained popularity after d–ổi mớ i (economic “renovation”) in the late 1980s. The paper offerings have been used for centuries in different material forms, such as clothing, to ensure a comfortable life for the deceased in the otherworld. Over the last two decades, the range of offerings has expanded to keep up with the times and now includes technologies ranging from audio, photography, and video equipment to devices capable of accessing the internet (Hüwelmeier 2016). In comparison, an ancestor who died several decades ago may have received a bicycle instead of a BMW on the occasion of the death anniversary. The artifacts can be purchased in many places, along with ritual currency made of paper. By incinerating the things during or after the ceremony of commemoration, in the streets, in temples and pagodas, in private yards and other places, people believe that these items will be transmitted to the beyond via smoke. Thus, fire and smoke are conceived as a kind of “post office,” as some of my interlocutors explained to me. By imagining the offerings as “being mailed to the otherworld,” religious practitioners have particular ideas about recipients, communication, and mobility. Mrs. Lan,2 for example, upon being informed by a soul caller that her dead father, in his lifetime a high official in the Ministry of Education, was quite busy “in the otherworld because he also had a very important job assisting a president,” purchased a votive cell phone as an offering (Nguyen Thi Hien 2006: 130). In doing so, she thought she could support him with his busy schedule in the afterlife. Since the revitalization of religion in Vietnam has gone hand in hand with economic betterment for many people over the past two decades, there is a tendency among aspiring middle-class Vietnamese to display their wealth to their ancestors, such as by transmitting a paper villa with swimming pool and guard dogs. This calls to mind the work of Nico Tassi, which he carried out with Bolivian indigenous people (cholos) in urban La Paz, as there are counterintuitive intersections between religion and economic values. On particular occasions, such as on the

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Media Technologies and the Otherworld in Late Socialist Vietnam • 73

Figure 3.1. Votive paper offering in the shape of media devices, to be presented to the ancestors. Photograph by Gertrud Hüwelmeier. Hanoi 2016. © Gertrud Hüwelmeier.

day of the Ekeko (God of plenty), miniature objects made of plastic, metal, or pulp paper are sold and later blessed by priests. Once blessed, they give rise to the desired objects themselves and are therefore “‘iconic statements’ that bring about ‘growth,’ abundance and reproduction” (Tassi 2010: 201). As Vietnam’s economy was characterized by scarcity for many decades, a majority of people in the postrenovation era (after 1986) is still burdened with financial worries, and therefore they strongly desire access to wealth and prosperity. Not least for this reason, people “invest” in purchasing and burning “spirit money” and other votive paper offerings to please the spirits. Simultaneously, a whole new paper votive industry has emerged alongside rising consumer wishes in the last twenty years.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

74 • Gertrud Hüwelmeier

After the funeral of a family member, a ceremony will take place at the newly established altar in the house of the deceased some weeks later. Relatives offer a number of objects of what they believe is necessary equipment for a continued and comfortable life in a new home in the otherworld. In many places in urban Hanoi, people may purchase kitchen facilities such as refrigerators and rice cookers made from paper, as well as other electric items such as fans, none of which existed as “real” luxury products in Vietnam prior to the era of renovation. In addition to worshiping family ancestors, most Vietnamese commemorate unknown dead who succumbed to a “bad death.” For Vietnamese, this includes those who never had a proper burial, such as war dead, and people who committed suicide. Once a year, it is said, the door of the otherworld will be opened for one day, enabling “hungry ghosts” to wander around, looking for food and other things. People leave rice and sweets in the streets, and others burn votive paper offerings such as canteens and tanks for the war dead, or toys and clothes for unborn children. Since the introduction of digital technologies, women have begun commemorating aborted fetuses by establishing online altars, as it is not possible to pray for the unredeemed souls of fetuses at the home altar due to feelings of shame linked to premarital sex. Online altars can be decorated with images of food and toys, and women thereby share experiences of loss and grief with others (Hüwelmeier forthcoming; Heathcote 2014). While paper votives in the shape of household items, villas, mobile phones, and cars are transmitted to close familial ancestors on various occasions, gods and deities require different types of offerings. In the following section, I will discuss spirits representing regional and national heroes and the materials and practices associated with trance mediumship séances.

Lên đô`ng Trance Mediumship In addition to their function of attracting spirits in the context of familial ancestor worship, material objects also play a crucial role in settings where national spirits such as princes, princesses, and heroes of the past appear. A prime example of the use of objects in rituals is lên d–ô`ng trance mediumship. Lên d–ô`ng (literally “to mount the medium”) is a popular religious practice in which followers become spirit mediums for various deities. Performances honoring the deities of the Mother Goddess religion (Ða.o Mâ˜u) involve music, singing, and dance. While

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Media Technologies and the Otherworld in Late Socialist Vietnam • 75

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

in a trance state, mediums become possessed by spirits from the past (Ngo Duc Thinh 2006; Fjelstad and Nguyen Thi Hien 2006; Endres 2011). Prior to the performance, mediums carefully prepare a lavish meal for the spirits, which will later be consumed collectively by the

Figure 3.2. Votive paper offering in the shape of a horse and an elephant, to be presented to the spirits during a trance session. Photograph by Gertrud Hüwelmeier. Hanoi 2016. © Gertrud Hüwelmeier.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

76 • Gertrud Hüwelmeier

audience. After the dishes have been consecrated by the spirits, the food is considered lô.c, blessed food. In addition, mediums purchase votive paper offerings in the shape of boats, elephants, and horses as gifts for the spirits. These objects will be burned after a spirit has left the body of the medium, with the paper votive offerings being sent to the otherworld via smoke. Both spirit mediums and their devotees imagine that the objects are important bestowments to particular spirits. The votives are perceived as symbols of status and power of the heroes from the past as well as necessary equipment for traveling to various regions of the country and fighting foreign invaders. Paper votive offerings are produced by artisans and handicraft families, some of whom I visited during my fieldwork in the villages around Hanoi. By watching the production process, I realized that every object was carefully made from bamboo and paper. Artisans told me that a number of people, sometimes various families, are part of the production process. It takes a lot of time to create the many details of some of the votives, such as the tail, mane, stirrup, and harness of a horse, in order to meet the aesthetic aspirations of the customers and the spirits. Offerings are tailored to a specific deity, and the objects are selected to correspond to the spirit’s social rank, time period, and needs. Followers at the trance mediumship sessions I attended were convinced that the spirits would be delighted to see these beautiful effigies, and therefore this kind of offering may be designated “technology of enchantment” (Gell 1988). This resonates with Gell’s remarks that objects have the power to “entrap” (Gell 1996) their viewers aesthetically. Green beer cans, red Coca-Cola cans, and other consumer products will be offered during the performance according to the color associated with the dress of a particular spirit. Therefore, a spirit of the forest, for example, appearing as a young girl in the traditional costume of a member from an ethnic group in the mountains, will receive green apples as offerings, which the spirit/medium will redistribute to the audience of the séance after being blessed by the spirit. As mentioned above, offerings are returned by the spirits and considered lô.c, blessed gifts. Aside from Coca-Cola and beer cans, cookies, hand towels, rice noodles, and fruit are packed in huge plastic bags, and these will be given by the medium to the followers to be carried home and to be consumed with family or close friends. In other words, the circulation of things, food, and consumer products are necessary elements in trance mediumship rituals, as they are considered offerings that will attract the spirits and later be

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Media Technologies and the Otherworld in Late Socialist Vietnam • 77

consumed by devotees. Without these objects, it is believed, spirits will not appear. Simultaneously, the circulation of money is a crucial issue in the course of the ritual. Practitioners will decorate a plastic plate with money bills, then approach the spirit/medium and ask for healing or for advice. The spirit/medium will talk to the devotee behind a fan and will return “blessed” money from a treasure chest. While I was participating in several rituals, some followers complained that the relatives of the medium received more blessed money than others did. But in the course of the ritual, the medium distributed blessed money to the audience by throwing banknotes into the air, which were grabbed with much joy and laughter by all participants. However, without hát châ`u va˘n music (Norton 2006: 56), indispensable in lên d–ô`ng spirit mediumship, spirits will not appear. As part of a trance session, a medium will invite a group of three châ`u va˘n musicians. In the sessions in which I participated, the rhythms, pauses, and tempos as well as the variety of instruments were combined to call the spirits and move the medium into a state of trance. The medium’s actions are accompanied by music and poetry, and in a way, the sound set the spirit in motion. When I asked a Vietnamese lên d–ô`ng spirit medium in Germany whether the spirits will come into presence at the altar she had established in her house, she told me this was not possible as there were no châ`u va˘n musicians with traditional instruments in Germany. She explained that she had once tried to call the spirits by playing music on a cassette recorder, but the spirits did not appear. Only music played by traditional musicians generates a “sonic atmosphere,” which intermingles with human bodies (Eisenlohr 2018: 35; see also Espírito Santo 2019). Although lên d–ô`ng spirit mediumship was banned by the Vietnamese government for many decades, it was nonetheless practiced secretly during high socialist times. It regained new popularity after the renovation policy, and since the 2000s the number of private temples has increased, as has that of spirit mediums, and crowds of devotees have become larger. When the Vietnam Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism realized that masses of people were attracted by this kind of spirit mediumship, it changed its policies and even applied to UNESCO for official recognition of this kind of spirit mediumship as an Intangible Cultural Heritage. Against this backdrop, an increasing number of lên d–ô`ng spirit mediums paid for professional recordings of their spirit performances. Later they would watch the performances at home, some-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

78 • Gertrud Hüwelmeier

times with family members, sometimes with other mediums. While I was sitting in the living room of Mrs. Thủ y, a spirit medium in Hanoi, she told me that she had recorded some of her performances on DVD. On several occasions, when she was watching her own performances on the screen of the TV, she suddenly had the sensation that she was going to be possessed. In other words, this means that spirits are “coming into presence” without the ritual context of a spirit performance. No audience, no altar, and no offerings are required for the appearing spirit, only technical devices are necessary for the body to become possessed. It is just electricity, as the medium explained to me, meaning electromagnetic fields transmitting the spirit from the apparatus into her body. The trance lasts a few minutes, and then she feels that the spirit has left her body. This resonates with “Electric Santería” (Beliso-De Jesús 2015), where spirits, deities, and practitioners of an African-inspired, Cuban diaspora religion are enabled by digital technologies to induce unique encounters through TV, video, and other media. Similarly, as I realized during a meeting with Pentecostal Vietnamese in Berlin, church followers fell in trance by touching the screen of the TV while watching a video of a prayer healing performed in a huge football stadium in Africa (Hüwelmeier 2015: 107). After UNESCO status was granted, lên d–ô`ng spirit mediumship attracted a transnational audience, including tourists from all parts of the world and diplomats from various countries. As a result, theater directors in Hanoi became interested in staging this popular religious practice in public theater shows. According to what a theater director explained to me, an actress once became possessed by the spirits. Although she had never been officially initiated as a medium, the actress became affected and could not stop playing “her spirit role” on the theater stage. By means of new media technologies, the ritual context (temple, altar, and offerings) was displayed via computer animation on a screen within the theater. Ritual music (châ`u va˘n), played on traditional instruments, was performed by university musicians. The theater director was convinced that the occurrence was but one example demonstrating that spirits have their own life. However, as he admitted, the agency of the spirit could only be stopped by interrupting the ritual music and retrieving the actress “back to this world” (Hüwelmeier 2018). The audience, most of them tourists from China and Korea, clapped enthusiastically, and possibly traveled home to report about the Vietnamese spirit world. While lên d–ô`ng spirit mediumship goes global, other forms of trance mediumship in Vietnam are performed in a more “private” space, but nonetheless these may have vast global political implications.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Media Technologies and the Otherworld in Late Socialist Vietnam • 79

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Spirit Writing Part of the resurgence of popular religious practices in late Socialist Vietnam can be traced to spirit writing (giáng bút), a form of trance mediumship that is rarely found in today’s Vietnam. During my fieldwork in Hanoi, I came across a female spirit medium who a few years earlier began experiencing possession by the spirits of heroic political and military leaders. While in a trance state, the medium performed spirit writing, setting down on paper messages that were claimed to be transmitted by otherworldly beings. As a “technique of the body” (Mauss 1973 [1935]), écriture automatique or automatic writing in its various manifestations is not only widespread in Asian countries but also known as a technique in the literature of Dadaists and surrealists in Europe, in particular in France, as practiced by André Breton and others. Écriture automatique was considered a method of writing whereby emotions, images, and phrases should be represented uncensored. However, there were predecessors in art at the end of the nineteenth century, such as Hilma af Klint (1862– 1944), a Swedish painter influenced by occultism. She participated in séances, was a medium herself, and practiced automatic painting and writing long before the surrealists (Jones and Stoltz 2010). A recently published biography (Voss 2020) and a retrospective in the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2018–19) highlight the spiritually charged images of this female pioneer of abstract painting. Efforts to receive instructions from the beyond are related to mediation, materiality, and technology. By drawing on the use of equipment such as stylus, images, voice recorder, and smartphone in spirit writing séances in urban Hanoi, I will here explore the entanglement between spirit, apparatus, message, and interpreter. As mentioned above, in the sociocultural context of the Vietnamese spirit world, material objects, including digital media, are embedded in multilayered processes of mediation. Thus, by investigating the complex relationships between religious practitioners and religious matters such as images, apparatuses, voices, and texts, the exploration of spirit writing contributes not only to the study of popular religious practices in late Socialist Vietnam from a material perspective but also challenges conventional forms of mediumship. The presence and immediacy of otherworldly beings are perceived by the coming and going of spirits, and more specifically, their repeated “coming into presence” (Lambek 2010: 17). Lambek suggested voice as central to possession and to the spirit’s presence, as witnessed and

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

80 • Gertrud Hüwelmeier

confirmed by others. In Vietnam, spirits of war dead, for example, come into presence via the body of clairvoyants, who draw a spirit map in the course of the séance while simultaneously talking with the voice of the deceased, which is recorded by relatives (Hüwelmeier 2020; see also Kwon 2008). Thus, not only voice but also drawing and writing, the associated (old) apparatuses such as stylus and paper, and new technologies are modes of communication with spirits. Moreover, messages from the beyond become visible to the living via spirit writing. I met Mr. Thanh in Hanoi in early 2017, and he invited me to visit him at home. His living room was decorated with framed pages filled with writings transmitted as heavenly messages. He explained to me that his daughter, a university graduate from Hanoi, had been receiving celestial messages since 2011 and that on certain occasions she became possessed by the spirits of heroic political and military leaders who had successfully fought against foreign invaders. He claimed to be the only one able to decipher the messages communicated by the spirits through his daughter. Further, he also told me that the spirit of Trâ`n Hư ng Ða.o, an imperial prince, statesman, and military commander from the thirteenth century, had appeared at his home altar and announced that he would be the one to decode further messages. Mr. Thanh emphasized that spirits from the past had been waiting for many centuries to finally appear. Their “coming into presence” and their transmission of important messages regarding the well-being of the country was only possible because of the advent of new technologies (computers, the internet) in Vietnam and, as he suggested, as a result of his knowledge about decoding encrypted messages. According to Mr. Thanh, some of the spirit messages comprise notifications about the future of Vietnam, in particular admonishing the government and the Communist Party to be alert with regard to safeguarding the country. A couple of years ago he decoded a message that had been transmitted by the spirit of Hô` Chí Minh. To interpret the meaning of the communication, Mr. Thanh used technical media such as satellite photography, eventually locating certain places in Vietnam’s border zones that he identified as areas that require spiritual protection (Hüwelmeier 2019). This resonates with ethnographic work on nature and spirits in a Special Economic Zone in India, where the management, not the workers, “assumes the role of the primary caretaker of an assemblage which constitutes both industrial plants and spiritual landmarks” (Ishii 2017: 690). While power, politics, and spirits go hand in hand, for example vis-à-vis runaway slave spirits in the Afro-Cuban ritual formation of palo monte and its harnessing to the ideological

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Media Technologies and the Otherworld in Late Socialist Vietnam • 81

agenda of the Cuban State (Routon 2008: 633), in the Vietnamese case discussed here it was only due to beneficial relations between the interpreter and the authorities that spiritual landmarks were established in the areas in question to safeguard the country. Material objects in this kind of trance mediumship include framed images of the spirits’ writings, photos and videos of the appearance of spirits, and smartphones as digital media used to decipher celestial messages. As Mr. Thanh showed me on a video clip about a trance session, the medium used a felt-tip marker as a stylus and wrote the messages onto yellow cardboard. Equipped with a number of digital devices, Mr. Thanh not only recorded voices used by the medium but also the way in which the medium wrote untranslatable letters. The “translation” of those letters was made afterward by the spirit, and the recorded sighs emitted by the medium signaled that the spirit may have been thinking about the next step of translation, thus interrupting the writing process for a moment. When the appearing spirit was a historical personage from medieval times, for example, the written signs produced by the hand and stylus of the medium needed to be transposed from a mixture of classical Chinese script and the old Vietnamese script, chu˜̛ Nôm (which developed from the classical Chinese script) into the Latin characters of the modern Vietnamese language. The transposition was completed by the appearing spirit itself. Most of the messages from the spirits of the past transmitted by the spirit medium contained advice directed at governmental authorities. This type of action performed by spirit mediums can therefore be described as a “form of historicity” and “an interpretation of circumstances” (Lambek 2016: 317) or “alternative forms of history making” (Palmié and Stewart 2016: 207) and, more generally, an embodiment of ethics, morality, and political admonition. This became apparent when Mr. Thanh, during one of our encounters, pointed to an image of spirit writing on display in his living room and explained that the spirit of Nguyê˜n Bı̉ nh Khiêm (1491–1585), who was a Vietnamese administrator, educator, poet, and diviner, had come into presence one day. The spirit transmitted the message that the training of military recruits should focus on intellectual and moral education, not just on how to handle weapons. According to the message, the authorities ought to be careful in dealing with juridical and moral issues. In his interpretation of the notification, Mr. Thanh referred to a famous land dispute that had occurred shortly before the transmission of the message. The dispute had escalated when government authorities confiscated the fields of a man who had been working hard in that area for decades. Land confiscation

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

82 • Gertrud Hüwelmeier

and the severe crackdown—the arrival of police and the army and the burning down of the man’s house—were considered unjustified by the people. Research on the importance of spirit messages in Vietnam, in particular their interpretation with the support of specialists and new technologies, is only just beginning. Chung van Hoang reported about a new religious movement, the “Uncle Hô` Religion,” and its female charismatic leader who claims to receive messages in the form of spirit texts. In this group’s rituals, a Jade Buddha appears as an invisible actor and is considered by the leader and her followers to be the spirit of Hô` Chí Minh (Hoang 2016: 242). With regard to the transmission of messages, the medium writes down notifications that she receives at night, and she is able to read and understand the texts herself the next morning. Political implications of trance mediumship are not limited to Vietnam but are known throughout Asia, where the interplay between power, political conflicts, and the appearance of spirits has been observed and documented since the nineteenth century. Vietnam’s neighboring countries such as China and Taiwan have a reputation for spirit writing as a traditional way of communicating with deities and heroes (Jordan 1989; Clart 2003). In his analysis of Taiwanese mediumship in the context of a late-nineteenth-century spirit-writing cult, Philip Clart highlighted that religious groups performing spirit writing “tried to counter the perceived decline of traditional values by having the gods themselves reaffirm these values through the planchette” (Clart 2003: 157). The planchette was a tool used in Spiritism in nineteenth-century France and the United States to receive messages from other worlds. Such devices were popular in séances during the Victorian era, and advocates believed the planchette was moved by the presence of spirits. Referring to séances organized by Julien Ochorowicz, codirector of the Institut Général Psychologiques de Paris in the early twentieth century, Stolow analyzed the relationship between a scholar, his medium, a control spirit, and spirit photography. The control spirit communicated with and through the medium “by means of alphabetic rapping, automatic writing, and direct speech during the medium’s somnambulant states” (Stolow 2016: 923). To this day, there is a keen interest among both scientists and the general public in understanding “occult” forces. In the Chinese diaspora in Malaysia, spirit writing and spirit mediumship are a vibrant part of Chinese folk religious practices. Mediums specializing in possession by lottery deities played an important role in the expansion of temples in Kuala Lumpur (Lee 1986: 200), particularly since Malaysia’s independence in 1957 and the development of

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Media Technologies and the Otherworld in Late Socialist Vietnam • 83

economic prosperity. In a case of écriture automatique in Taiwan, the performance focused on the medium’s ability to provide advice shaped by divinely guided writing rather than the medium’s transformation of personalities under possession. In a particular temple, the medium’s assistants chant to invoke the patron deity, Guandi, the god of war, wealth, and literature. Expert interpretation (Lee 1986: 205) is relevant in this case as well as in various other cultural contexts. Materialization and dematerialization are very much part of the properties of the written word. As Keane has suggested, power-laden relationships across ontological differences between living humans and a world of spirits are mediated by operations on the materiality of the written sign. Different from the spoken word, the written word has other properties such as “being persistent, portable, perishable, alienable and so forth” (Keane 2013: 2). In his ethnographic work, Keane noted that in cases where there is no written word in spirit writing and spirits are not represented in iconic form (for example, on Sumba in eastern Indonesia), rituals involve practices such as entrail divination as a way of communicating with the divine world. Written words, like marks on entrails, are visible answers, comments, or demands from the beyond, from ancestors, gods, or spirits. Through the practice of spirit writing, the invisibility of the spoken word and therefore its transience is banned, simultaneously transferred to the empirical realm by processes of externalization.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion In late Socialist Vietnam, as in other countries in Southeast Asia, one can observe an intense level of communication between humans and spirits. The everyday life of many people is characterized by pronounced efforts to delight ancestors, gods, deities, and other spiritual beings, and by the transmission of messages, requests, and thanksgiving to these entities. Mediated by matter, such as the body, food, images, altars, and shrines, as well as by media technologies, the otherworld is experienced as being present in the world of the living. Music, incense, and technical media are indispensable objects in these processes of communication with the divine. In contrast to the argument in the introduction of this book regarding media that signal the absence of communication, the cases discussed here point to the existence of an animated exchange and to the circulation of forces between different worlds. Increasingly, cameras, voice recorders, and

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

84 • Gertrud Hüwelmeier

smartphones are part of trance mediumship sessions and séances where people encounter deceased relatives. Technical media enhance the authority of the medium and function as technical objects “. . . through which elements of the actors’ interests are reshaped and translated, while non-human competences are upgraded, shifted, folded, or merged” (Latour 1993: 395). The relationship between spirit and matter, including technical media, is marked by the movement between the immaterial and the material, the concealed and the unconcealed. Different from the concept of “dark media” and “its idea of the mediation of what cannot be mediated” (Thacker 2014: 134), the unconcealed can be made visible and hence is sensed and accessed by various practices of mediation. As Lambek notes, “Mediating the material and the immaterial, spirits are characterized by their coming into presence” (Lambek 2010: 28; emphasis in original). Of importance here is the spirits’ repeated appearance and withdrawal. This can be better understood using Heidegger’s concept of being, whereby unconcealment is “the disclosedness and disclosure of beings,” and thus, as Lambek suggested, “the materialization of the spirit, its coming into presence, is the unconcealment of the spirit” (ibd 2010: 29). Moreover, “the materialization of spirits entails sense perception” (Lambek 2010: 28), and this is what I have highlighted throughout the chapter. Indeed, matter and spirit are relational terms and interact with each other through media, as exemplified by the focus in Vietnamese practices on the latest technical media, such as smartphones and laptops, longed for by the living as well as by the dead. Reproduced in paper, these objects are presented to the spirits, burned, transformed into smoke, and thereby transposed to the otherworld, where they are thought to rematerialize for use in communication purposes by spiritual entities. Simultaneously, matter is persistent, such as in the form of ritual clothes or music instruments used in ceremonies, and is crucial not only for getting into contact with the beyond but also as part of the virtual spaces of trance sessions. The sense of smell is especially salient in mediating between the material and the nonmaterial, as evidenced in such cases as the one I presented, where incense plays a key role in ceremonies to communicate with the otherworld. The importance of taste and view in these exchanges is demonstrated by the fact that food is cooked with much devotion and presented to the spirits in an aesthetically pleasing manner. By ingesting “blessed food” (lô.c), devotees in a communal meal sense the presence of the spirits. Exploring ancestor veneration, trance mediumship, and spirit writing in late Socialist Vietnam opens up complex issues about presence

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Media Technologies and the Otherworld in Late Socialist Vietnam • 85

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

and immediacy, remediation and iconology, and the relationship between medium, media, and materiality. Communication between different worlds needs to be sustained by materiality, while visual, aural, and scent sensations enhance people’s experience of spirits’ presences and messages. In Vietnam, the relationship between spirits and humans is a strong one, as spiritual beings are not only hungry and must be fed on specific occasions, but they may also demand particular things before responding to worshipers’ requests in various ways. By using things and apparatuses, the intangible realm, imagined by most Vietnamese to be similar to this world, becomes palpable. Bodies and senses are shaped through popular religious practices, and a crucial part of people’s experiences with the otherworld is affected by technical equipment such as stylus, paper, and digital audio devices, cameras, and smartphones, which are thought to be charged by spiritual intervention. Spirit-human connections do not change based on the whims of one or the other but are characterized by forceful hierarchies and asymmetries. On the one hand, the superiority ascribed to spirits requires devotion, seriousness, affection, and financial “investment” on the part of religious practitioners. On the other hand, spirits may respond not only by fulfilling desires and consumer requests but also by triggering unexpected actions, such as suddenly turning noninitiated people into spirit mediums or by transforming a medium into an apparatus. Finally, they may intervene in highly sensitive political issues, thus being conceived as mediators and advisors in as-yet-unresolved geopolitical conflicts.

Gertrud Hüwelmeier is an anthropologist and senior research fellow at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She has published widely about religion, media, and materiality. In her ethnographic fieldwork, she focuses on social, religious, and economic ties among Vietnamese in postsocialist countries in Europe and in Vietnam. Recent publications include the coedited book Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets and Mobilities (2010); “Cell Phones for the Spirits,” Material Religion (2016); “Spirit Map and Medium’s Message: Searching for War Dead in Vietnam,” Journal of Material Culture (2019); “Spirit Writing in Vietnam—Political Lessons from the Beyond,” Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology (2019).

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

86 • Gertrud Hüwelmeier

Notes 1. I am grateful to Diana Espírito Santo for offering valuable insights and suggestions. My thanks go also to Birgit Meyer for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this chapter, and for inviting me to participate in the “Religious Matters in an Entangled World” research program at Utrecht University in November 2018. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Hanoi over the past years and the research project “Religion, Media, and Materiality. Spiritual Economies in Southeast Asia” was financed by the German Research Foundation (HU 1019/4-1). 2. All personal names are pseudonyms.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

References Andriopoulos, Stefan. 2013. Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media. New York: Zone Books. Behrend, H., and M. Zillinger. 2015. “Introduction: Trance Mediums & New Media.” In Trance Mediums & New Media, edited by H. Behrend, A. Dreschke, and M. Zillinger, 1–24. New York: Fordham University Press. Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha M. 2015. Electric Santeria: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion. New York: Columbia University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blanco, Maria del Pilar, and Esther Peeren (eds.) 2013. The Spectralities Reader—Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Clart, Philip. 2003. “Moral Mediums: Spirit-Writing and the Cultural Construction of Chinese Spirit-Mediumship.” Ethnologies 25: 153–89. Connor, Steven. 1999. “The Machine in the Ghost: Spiritualism, Technology and the ‘Direct Voice.’” In Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, edited by Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, 203–25. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Eisenlohr, Patrick. 2018. “Suggestions of Movement: Voice and Sonic Atmospheres in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices.” Cultural Anthropology 33(1): 32–57. Endres, Kirsten W. 2011. Performing the Divine: Mediums, Market and Modernity in Urban Vietnam. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Espírito Santo, Diana 2019. “Spectral Technologies, Sonic Motility, and the Paranormal in Chile.” Ethnography 1–20. Online first: DOI: 10.1177/146 6138119872519. Fjelstad, K., and Nguyen, T. H. (eds.). 2006. Possessed by the Spirits: Mediumship in Contemporary Vietnamese Communities. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gell, Alfred. 1988. “Technology and Magic.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(2): 6–9.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Media Technologies and the Otherworld in Late Socialist Vietnam • 87 ———. 1996. “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps.” Journal of Material Culture 1(1): 15–38. Heathcote, Anthony. 2014. “A Grief That Cannot Be Shared: Continuing Relationships with Aborted Fetuses in Contemporary Vietnam.” Thanatos 3(1): 29–45. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette-Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Hoang, Chung van. 2016. “‘Following Uncle Hô` to Save the Nation’: Empowerment, Legitimacy, and Nationalistic Aspirations in a Vietnamese New Religious Movement.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 47(2): 234–54. Houtman, Dick, and Birgit Meyer (eds.). 2012. Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality. New York: Fordham University Press. Hüwelmeier, Gertrud 2015. “New Media and Traveling Spirits: Pentecostals in the Vietnamese Diaspora and the Disaster of the Titanic.” In Trance Mediums & New Media, edited by H. Behrend, A. Dreschke, and M. Zillinger, 100–115. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2016. “Cell Phones for the Spirits: Ancestor Worship and Ritual Economy in Vietnam and its Diasporas.” Material Religion 12(3): 294–321. ———. 2018. “Trance Mediumship Takes the Stage: Reenactment and Heritagization of the Sacred in Urban Hà Nô.i.” Asian Ethnology 77(1–2): 57–78. ———. 2019. “Spirit Writing in Vietnam: Political Lessons from the Beyond.” Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 20(3): 278–93. ———. 2020. “Spirit Map and Medium’s Message: Searching for War Dead in Vietnam.” Journal of Material Culture 25(1): 76–92. ———. Forthcoming. “The Sacred Cowshed Tree in Urban Hanoi—A Home for Unredeemed Souls.” Material Religion. Hüwelmeier, Gertrud, and Kristine Krause. (eds.) 2010. Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets, and Mobilities. New York: Routledge. Ishii, Miho. 2017. “Caring for Divine Infrastructures: Nature and Spirits in a Special Economic Zone in India.” Ethnos 82(4): 690–710. Jones, Ronald, and Liv Stoltz. 2010. “Spirited Away: Occultist, Mystic and Painter; The Life and Legacy of Hilma af Klint.” Frieze Magazin 135 (October): https://frieze.com/article/spiritedaway/. Jordan, D. K. 1989. Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors: Folk Religion in a Taiwanese Village. Taipei: Caves Books. Keane, Webb. 2013. “On Spirit Writing: Materialities of Language and the Religious Work of Transduction.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(1): 1–17. Kwon, Heonik. 2008. Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lambek, Michael. 2010. “Traveling Spirits: Unconcealment and Undisplacement.” In Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets, and Mobilities, edited by G. Hüwelmeier and K. Krause, 17–35. New York: Routledge. ———. 2016. “On Being Present to History: Historicity and Brigand Spirits in Madagascar.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(1): 317–41.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

88 • Gertrud Hüwelmeier Latour, Bruno 1993. “Ethnography of a ‘High–Tech’ Case: About Aramis.” In Technological Choices: Transformation in Material Cultures since the Neolithic, edited by P. Lemonnier, 372–98. London: Routledge. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. New York: Oxford University Press. Lee, R. L. M. 1986. “Continuity and Change in Chinese Spirit Mediumship in Urban Malaysia.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 142(2/3): 198–214. Linse, Ulrich. 1996. Geisterseher und Wunderwirker: Heilssuche im Industriezeitalter. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag. Malarney, Shaun Kingsley. 2003. “Weddings and Funerals in Contemporary Vietnam.” In Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit, edited by Nguyen Van Huy and Laurel Kendall, 173–96. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mauss, Marcel. 1973 [1935]. “Techniques of the Body.” Economy and Society 2(1): 70–88. Meyer, Birgit. 2009. “Introduction: From Imagined Communities to Aesthetic Formations; Mediations, Sensational Forms, and Styles of Binding.” In Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses, edited by Birgit Meyer, 1–28. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Morgan, David. (ed). 2010. Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief. New York: Routledge. Natale, Simone. 2016. Supernatural Entertainments—Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Ngo Duc Thin. 2006. “The Mother Goddess Religion: Its History, Pantheon, and Practice.” In Possessed by the Spirits: Mediumship in Contemporary Vietnamese Communities, edited by K. Fjelstad and T. H. Nguyen, 19–30. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Nguyen Thi Hien. 2006. “‘A Bit of Spirit Favour is Equal to a Load of Mundane Gifts’: Votive Paper Offerings of Len Dong Rituals in Post-renovation Vietnam.” In Possessed by the Spirits: Mediumship in Contemporary Vietnamese Communities, edited by K. Fjelstad and T. H. Nguyen, 127–42. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Noakes, Richard. 2016. “Thoughts and Spirits by Wireless: Imagining and Building Psychic Telegraphs in America and Britain, circa 1900–1930.” History and Technology 32(2): 137–58. Norton, Barley 2006. “‘Hot-Tempered’ Women and ‘Effeminate’ Men: The Performance of Music and Vender in Vietnamese Mediumship.” In Possessed by the Spirits: Mediumship in Contemporary Vietnamese Communities, edited by K. Fjelstad and T. H. Nguyen, 55–75. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Palmié, Stephan, and Charles Stewart. 2016. “Introduction: For an Anthropology of History.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(1): 207–36.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Media Technologies and the Otherworld in Late Socialist Vietnam • 89

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Routon, Kenneth. 2008. “Conjuring the Past: Slavery and the Historical Imagination in Cuba.” American Ethnologist 35(4): 632–49. Salemink, Oscar. 2015. “Spirit Worship and Possession in Vietnam and Beyond.” In Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia, edited by Bryan S. Turner and Oscar Salemink, 231–46. New York: Routledge. Schüttpelz, E. 2015. “Trance Mediums and New Media: The Heritage of a European Term.” In Trance Mediums & New Media, edited by H. Behrend, A. Dreschke, and M. Zillinger, 56–76. New York: Fordham University Press. Sconce, Jeffrey. 2000. Haunted Media—Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stolow, Jeremy. 2016. “Mediumnic Lights, Xx Rays, and the Spirit Who Photographed Herself.” Critical Inquiry 42: 923–51. Tassi, Nico. 2010. “The ‘Postulate of Abundance’: Cholo Market and Religion in La Paz, Bolivia.” Social Anthropology 18(2): 191–209. Taylor, Philip (ed.). 2007. Modernity and Re-enchantment in Post-revolutionary Vietnam. Singapore: ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute. Thacker, Eugene. 2014. “Dark Media.” In Excommunication: Three Inquires into Media and Mediation, edited by A. Galloway, E. Thacker, and McKenzie Wark. 77–149. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Voss, Julia. 2020. Hilma af Klint: Biographie. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Chapter 4

Broken Words Tools of Oracular Articulacy in Afro-Cuban Divination Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Unidentified Flying Stereotypes What if the passengers of a crashed alien spaceship had to repair it by finding a way to communicate with the inhabitants of the planet they had crashed on? What if such a process proved to be interminable, leading both parties to learn to come to terms with each other or, at least, learn how not to come to terms with each other, something which is no less a part of planetary coexistence? There is something contradictory in the word-cum-concept of the UFO. As a term, it stands for “unidentified flying object.” But ask what comes to one’s mind by it, and the most spontaneous answer you will probably get, including from yourself, will be some kind of futuristic spaceship, hovering quietly, lit by an unknown energy; and if it lands, in all its Hollywood banality, some weird green creatures will be emerging from it. The contradiction is in the fact that this stereotypical image is anything but “unidentified”—all stereotypes can be identified in some way. Such stereotypes, landed or flying, have this double quality, a self-assured, self-proclaimed aphoristic truth that disregards accuracy. In fact, the image is so identified that it almost automatically comes to our mind as an instantaneous globalized popular vision. It could be argued that the image of God as a fatherly figure, with abundant wavy white hair and beard and penetrating dark eyes (ironically resembling Karl Marx), is a similar phenomenon. One of the most central ingredients of this diffused imaginary and confused terminology is, as the term UFO itself announces, the technological medium between us, humans, and our weird visitors: the identified flying object. The absolutely logical assumption in this pop-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Broken Words • 91

ular imaginary is that if humanity has not been able to reach places of extraterrestrial life, then, if the latter has been able to reach us, this means that our outer-space visitors must by definition be far more technologically advanced. I think that the imagery of the flying object is much more globalized and uniform—identified—than what exactly comes out of it, whether this is green or brown, more insect-like or human-like, ugly or cute, aggressive or friendly. What comes out of such an advanced technological creation is almost always not exactly human, indicating precisely that the level of technological advancement is so high that it could only be of a different kind of species, or a more evolved one, most often than not with an excessively developed brain and a relatively atrophied body (because of too much brain activity perhaps?). Alien but analogous to this alienist imagery and imaginary will be the following Afro-Cuban religious ethnography, namely, in two senses. The first analogy is that between the initial hypothetical case scenario of two different kinds of entities having to communicate for things to move on, although this proves to be interminable, making the need for communication also interminable and not necessarily successful. In such an inconclusive condition, moving on and communicating almost converge. I call such convergence, oracular articulacy. The second dimension of the analogy lies in the broader approach toward mediation. Just as the term UFO may not be accurate in its allusion to the lack of identification of the flying object, something similar holds for mediation. I argue that the dominant scholarly understanding of mediation as an a posteriori intervention in the apparently given and primordial distance between divinity and humanity has also become a stereotype that must be shaken from its safe position. How would mediation look if we did not take for granted the purportedly ontological dimensions of divinity’s distance from humanity? What if spatial distance was not the main issue, or even an issue at all? This chapter is about oracular technology but not that of conventional mediation, because, as I will argue, the means and the end are one and the same thing. More specifically, the “unseen” is not made “seen” through the mediation of oracles, but it is the starting point, a point of departure. The unseen is not mediated but itself mediates, so as broken words commence a process of amendment, striving to become phrases, as it were, which in their turn will harness “paths” (caminos). And these caminos are paths out of biographical stagnation and deviation, breakthroughs from fatalism as I have called them elsewhere (Panagiotopoulos 2017: 949). But as these caminos are harnessed, the

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

92 • Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

“tools” are not necessarily abandoned, because, from their apparent role as tools, they soon prove to become the very ground that biographies step upon. Such is their immanence (to employ a term from the introduction) that they may even become factors of stagnation and deviation once again, of inarticulacy or “excommunication” (another term appearing in the introduction). The question of mediation in the anthropology of religion is so central that if you ignored it perhaps you would have to ignore the anthropology of religion itself. In this chapter I argue that the problem commences from the fact that we tend to take for granted that the divine is somehow distant and transcendent from the human world and that mediation initiates an already problematic relation because of the primordial distance between the two. But what makes us think and argue that this distance is primordial and the starting point? Why should the choice between distance or proximity, transcendence or immanence, be the “problem”? Theories of mediation that flirt with some notion of “hybridity” already presuppose, even if implicitly, that “purity” signifies divine distance, even if this is on purely ideological or ideational terms. Thus, “hybridity” is always a perspective from the “purity” and distant point of view, no matter how much the actual impossibility of purity is stressed (see Engelke 2007; Keane 2007; Latour 2010; Meyer 2011; Robbins 2017). The debate comes full circle when purity is attributed to immanence, reversing the roles and arguing for a pure immanence (see Deleuze 2001). In any case, “hybridity” always becomes a mediating byproduct of these two extremes of purity, and, whether it addresses distance or proximity or a hybrid mixture of both, the question is always locked on the where of divinity in relation to that of humanity. Thus, the ontological question of divinity is mediated by the spatial relation it has with humanity. Perhaps there is an even more basic and fundamental issue here, of which the “problematic” mediating distance of divinity and humanity is just the epiphenomenon or the consequence. And here the implications are as much methodological as analytical. Perhaps the deeper issue is that we commence from the end product, acting as if there was an end product to start with and consequently generating a series of questions on the basis that we have an end product. In that respect, the anthropology of religion acts like theology, in the sense that if both disciplines start asking questions on the nature and measure of the distance between divinity and humanity, then what divinity is, to a large extent, is taken for granted. It remains unquestioned because if the distance is the question, then there is already an implication of two rel-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Broken Words • 93

atively ready-made and ontologically constituted points, divinity and humanity in this case. But what if this where was not a great issue of concern, either from the point of view of humanity or of divinity, that is, of their relation?

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Broken Words and Caminos I have focused on three main firsthand ethnographic avenues in my research in Havana. The first encompasses the numerous initiatory or propitiatory ceremonies of Afro-Cuban religiosity, great parts of which are open to the wider noninitiate public. The second includes the oneon-one oracular consultations to which I was invited by either the diviner or the patient-client. The third comprises the often-prolonged interviews with diviners, initiates, and patient-clients, in which more personal and biographical dimensions were brought up in depth. The events of these avenues, in their great majority, took place within private houses, lacking a high degree of institutionalization, centralization, and official public temples of cult. Regardless of avenue type, oracular utterances and some kind of divination were always present and played a central role in the events. Cuba hosts a number of polytheistic strands of religious traditions, the most popular of them being the Regla Ocha/Ifá (or Santería), the Regla Conga (or Palo Monte), and Espiritismo, at least in the eastern part of the island, as Havana is not only the geopolitical capital but a geospiritual one too. The common excess of decentralized polytheism is even more accentuated by the fact that people often adhere to, practice and participate in, and even initiate more than one of them, and many others too (such as Catholicism [official and popular], astrology, tarot cards, Oriental spiritual and philosophical traditions). As far as these three strands are concerned, along with Catholicism, they are historically rooted and have been evolving in relative autonomy and interdependence since the colonial era, presenting an image of undisrupted religious praxis. As much as this latter is synonymous with any kind of tradition, religious or otherwise, and even though undisrupted praxis does not necessarily signify a frozen form and content, in this chapter I shall argue that, despite its apparent paradox, these autonomous but interdependent strands of undisrupted religious praxis are all largely concerned with disruption. The concern, put in few words, is not to mediate spatial distance but, granted the lack of it, to amend disruption (of disrupted caminos); it is the disruption of disruption. Intense en-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

94 • Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

gagement with Afro-Cuban religiosity is not coterminous with an augmentation of “faith” or of mediating proximity of the human with the divine but precisely a disruption of mediation so that oracular articulacy may flow at ease. The various media of oracular articulacy, such as the consecrated oracles and the bodily perceptive sensibilities of mediums, are tools (mediators) so that this disruption of mediation between divinity and humanity is achieved. Divinity has always been here; if any distance occurs, this originates from the side of humans, from their own life-courses. Afro-Cuban religious experience is a complex effort to realign caminos gone astray. All three main avenues of firsthand ethnographic research highlight the importance of oracular utterances in the broad Afro-Cuban religious complex and, by extension, the importance of this oracular dimension in the wider Cuban society. Initiatory and propitiatory ceremonies abound in oracular pronouncements, not just as a confirmatory formalism of the multiple deities and spirits but also as intimate accompaniment to the events and as one of their main objectives. Initiations in Santería or Palo Monte produce oracular pronouncements that are meant to accompany the initiates for the rest of their lives, in the form of general advice, warnings, aphorisms, prohibitions, ritual attention, and everyday conduct. Ceremonies of Espiritismo are oracular events par excellence, as the spirits speak through the mediums and give personal and contingent advice to the people present. The same goes for festive ceremonies, wherein spirit possessions, either by deities such as the orichas or the mpungos, or spirits of the dead, who “mount” their “horses,” again with oracular utterances being their central activity. One-on-one consultations are by definition oracular events, but what I wish to highlight here is their extreme popularity, as they cross-cut all the aforementioned Afro-Cuban religious traditions and radically blur the already blurred divisions between “believers” and “nonbelievers,” initiates and noninitiates. I have met many people, including foreigners, who would nevertheless pay individual visits to diviners of these traditions in certain “critical” moments of their lives, even if they were not immersed in the Afro-Cuban religious and ritual environment. Part of what makes these moments critical is the person’s inability to fathom the problem and its possible solutions outside the Afro-Cuban cosmos or, at least, this cosmos being considered as a definitive “magical” boost in combination with more conventional remedies. It is in the third ethnographic avenue where one can fully appreciate the tremendous significance of divination. Through an overwhelming collection of oracular pronouncements, the span of biographical

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Broken Words • 95

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

life-courses are forged compellingly into extremely contingent and personally tailored caminos. Whether of greater or lesser significance, oracular pronouncements appear in people’s lives as the verbal filling of biographical voids. Firstly, these pronouncements express the void, as often the void itself is also a void of expression. Secondly, the expression of the void is intimately accompanied by a remedial stance in which the Afro-Cuban religious cosmos arises in the act of this oracular expressiveness. Oracular articulacy is generated in the void, which is created by broken words, which in their turn are broken (stagnated and deviated) caminos, which, coming full circle, are broken words. Oracular articulacy is the intimate circularity of words and biographical life-courses and the simultaneous emergence of the Afro-Cuban metaphysical cosmos, emerging as a vital part of it. In what remains of this section, I shall introduce a specific ethnographic vignette that vividly illustrates these broad points, and which continues in the following section to provide a fuller account. Fran lives in a humble house in the western outskirts of Havana with his wife, Vivian, and their two children. I have chosen to give an account of his case for various reasons. His biographical account has a definitive “before” and “after” moment of his active involvement in Afro-Cuban religiosity. Fran’s account also offers a vivid ethnographic illustration of the organic unity between (broken) words and caminos, the latter’s disruption being the instances par excellence for involvement in Afro-Cuban religiosity. It all started when Fran, then in his early thirties, was a teacher of geography in secondary school at the end of the 1980s: It was a normal workday, I had no preoccupations in my mind, apart from the general strained economic situation already present in those times. I went to school in a good mood, greeted my colleagues, went into classroom, first hour, second hour, all as usual. In the third hour, in the middle of the class time, it occurred. I lost my voice, completely, no warning, no sign. I was unable to pronounce a single word, apart from an unintelligible mumble that made me prefer to shut up. The director of the school told me to go home, take a good rest, and, if necessary, pay a visit to the doctor. I stayed at home, nothing, I went to the doctor, nothing. Although I came to formulate words, these could not make up a whole sentence. It was ridiculous. Without being able to really talk, I stayed at home embarrassed and self-stranded.

Fran goes on to recount how his wife took the initiative to invite some people to their home to conduct a spiritist ceremony, with the hope that this could throw some light on his phraseless incommunication

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

96 • Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

and his sudden excommunication from the outer world, his job, his wider social circle, his neighborhood, and the streets of Havana. Fran found himself becoming the center of spiritual attention by the people invited, wherein the espiritistas (spiritists) started offering messages perceived as coming from spirits of the dead. The former entered into multiple dialogues with the latter, each medium with his or her own accompanying spirits, as well as with the spirits perceived to be following and belonging to Fran himself. He highlights the appearance of a spirit of his as the source of the calamity:

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

One by one the espiritistas started describing my spirit. I lost even the few words I could speak. A tall Yoruba man with white hair was variably described. He lived and died in Africa, never visited Cuba. [People of Yoruba origin in Cuba are most often called Lucumí. Fran used and stressed intentionally the term “Yoruba.”] He was an incredibly wise man but was born mute, out of witchcraft conducted against his mother when she was pregnant with him. For this reason, he never became what was otherwise destined for him, that is, a babalawo [the high priest of the Ifá tradition of divination]. The espiritistas all agreed that I had to “give light” [dar luz] to that spirit of mine if I wanted to regain my speech and normal life. In a sense, I was giving my spirit back the capacity to talk and divine.

Fran’s calamity was linked to the calamity of a distant (in time and space) deceased Yoruba man, the former losing temporarily what the latter had lost permanently from birth. According to Fran, his speechlessness was the spirit’s way of communicating the need for redemption through provoking precisely the same incapacity. Fran comments that although the espiritistas perceived the spirit being mute, they entered into a kind of telepathic communication with it, retrieving all this pertinent biographical information. One may say that a crossroads was created between the biographical camino of Fran and the “necrographic” (see Panagiotopoulos 2017) camino of his spirit, the meeting point being the loss of words and, by consequence, the radical limitation of movement and sociability due to the embarrassingly excommunicating situation. As such, what arose was an impelling, although not automatic, “message” to overcome the excommunication through excommunication. Such critical moments as the loss of words, a sudden and unexplained calamity, physical, mental, and emotional stagnation, fatigue, loneliness, a general loss of orientation, and a feeling of having deviated from one’s desired path are the most common nodal meeting points between humans and the Afro-Cuban cosmos. It is not the previous distance between Fran and his spirit that is highlighted but the pre-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Broken Words • 97

vious inexistence of the right kind of dialogue and a sufficient degree of it. Too much distance, as well as too much proximity, is an undesired state of relationality. A dialogue needs the right kind of distance to take place. But these crossroads are not resting points of a desired secure end. They are, rather, points of departure, wherein a flow is expected to be generated, a flow of words and of one’s camino or, instead, the generation of articulacy, for both meeting entities. This is elaborated in the following section, with the emergence of two broad avenues (“tools”): oracular signs and oracular perceptions.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Signs-Deities and Perceptions-Spirits of Oracular Articulacy In common Afro-Cuban religious orthopraxis, Fran’s case seems divergent. It is through this apparent divergence that the norm will be highlighted, but, exactly because it may diverge, it will be presented as a general but not rigid norm. Fran’s wife, Vivian, invited the espiritistas because at the time she was a “developing” (desarollándose) one herself. Fran has always had a special sensitivity, a very acute “intuition” (intuición), since he was a kid. This acuteness, Fran explains, made him sense hidden aspects of people’s lives; visualize events that had occurred, were distantly occurring, or would occur; and sense what others were feeling or thinking but not directly expressing. At the same time, he had fleeting visions of human holograms not perceived by others in the vicinity. These visions were so fleeting that he never paid persistent heed to them, never shared them with anyone else, and initially did not link them to his “intuitions,” although, as he says, both things made him think that there was something peculiar in him. Such peculiarities followed Fran throughout his childhood, teenage, and adult life in a reserved and unshared manner, until the moment he lost his speech. The spiritist ceremony brought to the surface the need to attend his spirits of the dead, and most urgently the one who was directly provoking the inarticulate state. Attending one’s spirits, just as attending one’s divinities, in the Afro-Cuban religious complex, involves more often than not the creation of a material center of reference that concentrates the personal relationship of the adept with the spirit or the divinity. For spirits of the dead, common objects may be glasses of water, photographs (in case the spirit is of a known relative), objects with which the particular spirit is strongly identified, and, perhaps most emblematically and vividly, dolls. These last, often called

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

98 • Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

“materializations” (materializaciones) or “representations” (representaciones), are extremely dynamic centers of attention and interaction. In the cases of the espiritistas themselves, “materializations” augment the communicative and oracular exchange with their own spirits, apart from the general protective role that they are meant to play (for a full account, see Espírito Santo 2015). Fran’s “materialization” of his Yoruba spirit was different. After the spiritist ceremony, Fran started having vivid dreams, visions, and thoughts. In many of them, an object kept appearing: a round, artfully carved wooden pot. Fran remembered that such a vision had appeared occasionally in the past, although not as frequently or intensely. The vision became almost an obsession, and, without further consultation beyond his own and his wife’s initiative, a pot was prepared resembling the one in his visions. Fran says, I stayed for hours in front of the pot, speechless from the outside by necessity, but from the inside trying to reach out to the Yoruba spirit they had described in the spiritist ceremony. I would even lay on the floor, with my eyes closed besides the pot. Sometimes I would fall asleep. Then, one day, I dreamt him, my spirit, it was him. A tall Yoruba man with white curly hair. He was not talking, but his posture was very expressive. He was very calm and friendly, and he was showing me a wooden pot, like the one I had already prepared. Then he took the pot and placed it on his head. Suddenly, his simple white dressing changed into an elegant Yoruba costume, his neck and arms were surrounded with colorful beads, he was holding a horn and a chain. Then he took me gently by the hand. Suddenly, my clothing also transformed. I was dressed like him, although not as elegantly. He turned his head and the until-then-mute spirit told me confidently and gently: “This is our path.” It was then that I realized that my path was to become a babalawo.

When Fran woke up, he remained with this his eyes closed next to the wooden pot. In this meditative position, he tried to reach out with his thoughts to his spirit and let him know, by taking a silent oath, that he would get initiated in the Ifá divination tradition and become a babalawo. By recomposing himself from the dream and meditative state, he realized that not only did ample light come into his eyes but also, finally, meaningful and sound phrases could come out of his mouth. Now it all made more sense. The wooden pot he had almost unwittingly prepared was the receptacle (often called batea de Ifá) wherein the consecrated objects of Ifá are placed when one gets initiated. “Without knowing it, I had made a spiritual batea,” Fran exclaims. A quite exceptional path had just commenced for him.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Broken Words • 99

His Yoruba spirit would from now on appear occasionally to Fran, and, apart from accentuating the oracular sensibilities that had been latent, the spirit would teach him the contents of the oracular “signs” (signos or oddu) of Ifá. Soon after the incident, Fran visited a trusted babalawo of wide experience, and they started the relatively long and costly initiatory process into the Ifá priesthood. Up until the initiation, Fran was present at the spiritist ceremonies his wife Vivian would organize or attend to, wherein he proved to be an astute espiritista, producing impressive oracular pronouncements, both for his own family and for the rest of the people present at the ceremonies. When the proper initiation process in Ifá began, he left aside the spiritist ceremonies and dedicated himself fully to his new main objective. This was not only because becoming a babalawo was very time-consuming and intellectually demanding but also because orthodox priests of Ifá are meant to leave behind any other previous divinatory and priestly specialization of other traditions, such as Ocha, Palo Monte, and Espiritismo. Nevertheless, the Yoruba spirit was redeeming itself through Fran as the babalawo he was destined to become but never did, due to a muting witchcraft conducted against his pregnant mother. Fran never stopped developing this mediumistic relationship with his spirit, and the spirit helped him in his formation as a babalawo by teaching him content and nuances of the oracular signs. After initiation, the mediumistic relationship and all the oracular sensibilities stemming from it came to complement his divination technique as a babalawo. As said before, the Afro-Cuban religious orthodoxy views priesthood in Ifá as incompatible with other sibling ritual specializations. Here, however, I will not delve into an ethnographic explanation of why this is held as such. What I wish to highlight is that, firstly, idiosyncratic “exceptions” are almost a parallel norm to the apparently orthodox norm of Afro-Cuban religious praxis. Secondly, the seemingly exceptional complementarity and simultaneous oracular function between Ifá and Espiritismo in Fran’s case throws light onto the other side of the same coin with the first side arguing for the incompatibility between the two. Besides any other theological explanation, both complementarity and incompatibility imply the existence of important differences and similarities. This theme is extremely wide-ranging and almost constitutive of Afro-Cuban religiosity, wherein there is a constant and unresolved tension, which I like to call “counterpoint,” between “pure” and “syncretic” approaches, whether this is among sibling Afro-Cuban religious traditions, others such as Christianity or of foreign import, or nonreligious

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

100 • Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

attitudes (such as science or politics, especially Cuban socialism; see Panagiotopoulos and Espírito Santo 2019; see also Panagiotopoulos 2018). Returning to Fran’s case, in tune with the bulk of my ethnographic observations and data, it sets the broad ground of differences and similarities that constitute the nonconventional mediating features of Afro-Cuban religiosity. A vital similarity within the Afro-Cuban religious milieu is the expectation, need, desire, and achievement of oracular articulacy. This is the ignition of the flow of words, phrases, and whole biographical life-courses (caminos), especially when all these have been blocked, have stagnated, or have deviated (in order for this block not to happen in the future). The ignition of this flow is the broad element that encompasses a large part of Afro-Cuban religious praxis, and it confers the latter an extreme popularity in the wider Cuban society and beyond. Beneath this broad divinatory umbrella, two basic technologies to ignite and develop oracular articulacy exist. These are, as the title of this section suggests, signs and perceptions. My main argument is that these two elements do not mediate the distance between humanity and divinity but ignite the flow of oracular articulacy so that caminos are perceived to be in alignment with a feeling of fulfilment, that is, a state that departs from an inarticulate state of stagnation and deviation. Fran’s account so far has shown the significance of perceptions. In a retrospective fashion, he reconstructs a camino in which, since childhood, an initially latent peculiar perceptibility (his intuitions on the one hand, and his visions of human holograms on the other) secretly unfolds until it comes and crashes, so to speak, onto a sudden moment of crisis. The crisis directly affects the bodily capacity to talk, which in its turn limits Fran’s social and professional life. A series of events, commencing from that very first spiritist ceremony, culminates into a gradual unblocking of Fran’s inarticulacy through a combination of perceptive sensibilities of others (significantly of the espiritistas who introduced him to his Yoruba spirit) and his own. The latent and apparently unconnected perceptive peculiarities of intuitions and visions come to meet each other at a crossroads of crisis, and not only does their linking together lead to the unblocking of Fran’s inarticulacy but, later on, the two also feed off each other to a mutually progressive and interdependent intensification. Inarticulacy is unblocked, and articulacy is ignited and then flows in abundance. Such is the camino harnessed and supported by the perceptive opening of Fran, who, following hints, builds upon them. This gradual perceptive opening of Fran comes to meet another field of articulacy, one that has as its foundation an apparently different orac-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Broken Words • 101

ular center. This is the employment of consecrated objects that reveal an oracular sign, each one condensing a collection of myths, aphorisms, prohibitions, and general advice, as well as an ad hoc function, to detect a general “positive” (iré) or “negative” (osogbo) tendency with which the oracular signs “come” (vienen) at the time and for the purposes of the consultation. A vast oral and written tradition of transmission, recovery, recompilation, interpretation, and reinterpretation of the signos is spread throughout the whole island of Cuba, as well as outside of it. The distinctive features of the signos are that they are selected out of their totality (256 in Ifá) through a process that utilizes objects. The signos’ relatively stable content—the myths, the aphorisms, the advice—is constantly compared to the personal, and relatively more unstable and unpredictive, circumstances of the object (or subject) of the consultation, and the content is also occasionally revised. Therefore, the diviners stress the interpretative ability to throw light on personal caminos through and against the generality and relative givenness of an oracular fable or aphorism. Fran delves into his role as a diviner of Ifá. As many other babalawos do, he also emphasizes the interpretative function and ability required in his ritual craft. This becomes evident in simple consultations and not ones that are part of initiations. The latter provide signos that are meant to follow the initiate throughout his or her whole life, while the former are provisional and temporary, as they are meant to have a limited oracular reach and refer to more current and unstable affairs rather than to broad tendencies (even though some of them might be partially revealed in a simple consultation). Signos stemming from initiations have a permanent and wide reach, “past, present, and future” (pasado, presente y future), as babalawos like to say. Fran counterposes the signos in simple consultations because interpretation requires more personalization and relevance to the instance rather than a generous extension in time and content: People come to me often with specific problems in their minds. The oracle picks up the signo, and out of a fable that talks of mythical animals, the orichas [deities of the Ocha/Ifá tradition], or past events, I have to fathom what is going on in the person’s life. Who is the mythical monkey of the fable? What does it mean that the monkey is climbing a tree in my client’s circumstances? How is falling from that tree translated? Is it an accidental fall or a provoked one, a mild or fatal one? The monkey fell in the fable, my client must stay on the branch! So, it is not about blindly imitating the myth. It is about finding the complex path, fulfilling the positive sides of the signo and finding a way out of the negative ones.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

102 • Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

Fran proceeds by saying that it is particularly in this process that his Yoruba spirit aids him, in fathoming out, in translating and interpreting the mythological events and characters to the personal and, at times, elusive camino of his clients. Being extremely context-specific, providing details, or having an ability to predict things are not characteristics the signos come with, nor do they confer automatically such ability have an inherent capacity provided by way of initiation and formation in Ifá, which more than anything involves an arduous intellectual process of memorization of the signos’ contents and, then, an interpretative astuteness. This void is filled in and complemented not only by the communicative abilities of the diviner but also by his sensibilities and intuitions, Fran argues. It is precisely this sensibility, accompanied and augmented by his “developed” relationship with his spirit, that due to its alterity with the oracular function of the Ifá oracle it comes to play its complementary role. While on the one hand it might be hard to find babalawos accepting or admitting a spiritist interference in the employment of their oracle, on the other you will hardly find anyone arguing against the value of intuition in the process of interpreting the signos. This exceptional case becomes less so when one talks to other diviners, such as the santeros and the paleros, whose employment of material oracles is often accompanied by the oracular sensibilities facilitated in the presence of their spirits. Furthermore, Fran’s seemingly exceptional case reflects the popular norm of people seeking the advice, often simultaneously, of different diviners, of different traditions, in search of more accurate, cross-checked, and embracing advice. To sum up, it is not that the oracles mediate between humans and deities or spirits so that their distance is favorably minimized. Unreflexive, passive, and excessive proximity or distance can be harmful or, at least, not beneficent, providing obstacles and deviations in one’s camino. An ignition and explosion of signs and perceptions, as seen in the case of Fran, “opens up the roads” (abrir los caminos, a common liturgical phrase among adepts), harnessing their flows and directions and guiding them out of their dead-end stagnations. In a sense, deities and spirits are not mediated, but they are themselves the heuristic mediators of the flow of oracular articulacy and caminos. Deities facilitate signs, which are material and mythological windows to one’s path. Spirits facilitate perceptions, attuning the whole body to become such windows. People, like Fran, combine the two windowpaths, precisely because their complementarity resides in their alterity, under the common intention of oracular articulacy, under the same camino and the need for its unobstructed instantiation. In this sense,

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Broken Words • 103

deities and spirits are signs and perceptions respectively, visual, figurative, and aiding the fleshing out of different “techniques” of oracular articulacy. Hence, one could analytically call these two broad techniques of oracular articulacy as signs-deities and perceptions-spirits, putting the emphasis not on a strictly and given ontological status of other-than-human entities but on the ontological alterity produced when one explores the oracular outcomes stemming from the experimental and dynamic involvement of signs and perceptions in ways akin to Fran’s case. To get into a more direct dialogue with the general scopes and terminology of this present volume, there seems to arise a different perspective from that of media theorists concerning matter-divine issues. What is put under question through the Afro-Cuban ethnography is that matter (whether this is bodily and affective sensibilities or objects) mediates the divine. It could be argued that the inverse is the case, namely that the divine mediates matter. But it should be made clear that this is so if we keep in mind that matter and the divine coincide to a much larger extent than normative media theories. In other words, the divine is the oracular dimension of matter, so that unmediated matter-divine (that is, signs-deities and perceptions-spirits) heuristically mediates articulacy-caminos. Heuristic mediation here highlights a kind of harnessing that is constituting, not already constituted or bound to be constituted. We are not dealing with a representation of an immutable path, a fatalistic destiny.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

From Articulacy Back to Broken Words From my account so far it might seem that, through Afro-Cuban religiosity and divination, a path is laid down that is linear and definitive toward a “happy end.” No doubt, if there were no effort, sense, and experience of a sort of achievement toward a “happy end,” Afro-Cuban religiosity, like perhaps any other kind of religiosity, would be rendered obsolete. But both the effort and the (sense of) achievement is extremely fragmented, contingent, and unstable. There is no teleological, universal, and ultimate “happy end.” If there is anything, there are multiple endings and departures, constantly put to the test, producing various points and crossroads of articulacy and inarticulacy. Even if one undergoes initiation, this does not automatically seal a permanently secure camino. Not only are facets of oracular signs-deities themselves multiple (they too are depicted as having or being caminos; for the

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

104 • Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

significance and multiple dimensions of caminos, see also Holbraad 2012), sometimes hidden, and constantly influenced by interchangeable “positive” and “negative” tendencies, but idiosyncrasy and instability are particularly revealed and forged through perceptions-spirits. If signs-deities push toward relative stability and permanence, perceptions-spirits would push toward more instability and openness. These are broad tendencies and can be counterbalanced by internal antithetical forces, also considering that the common denominator of oracular articulacy is vested with a generous and diffused “gift” (don) of “long sight” (vista larga), which all kinds of diviners should ideally possess and which cannot be strictly pinpointed to a particular function of the body (not even literal sight), a particular material, a particular initiation, or a particular oracular tradition. Diviners of all Afro-Cuban tradition and besides purist exclamations of oracular exclusives, have a deep attraction to whatever “tool” might lead to oracular articulacy, whether this is considered to belong to another sibling Afro-Cuban tradition, a personally discovered one, or any other oracular technique and tradition acknowledged as originally a foreign import, in terms of both time and space (the most archetypically valorized being ancient African divination, whatever this means for each one). Here, we can fully appreciate the intricacies and significance of the concept of “tool.” Tools are constitutive of the process of amendment and create and proliferate a chain of multiple tools, an ample and interconnected toolbox, as it were. The perceptive sensibilities of Fran (first tool) created an image of a wooden pot (second tool). The image created an actual, although not properly consecrated, wooden pot (third tool). The perceptive sensibilities of the espiritistas (fourth tool) gave rise to Fran’s Yoruba spirit (fifth tool). Fran’s spirit, by linking the wooden pot with the “path to Ifá,” eventually led to initiation in Ifá and the reception of all the consecrated paraphernalia of a babalawo, including this time an actually consecrated wooden pot (sixth tool). The received oracle, working together with the perceptive sensibilities, led to a proliferation of oracular utterances, consecration of objects, consultations, and initiations. Clients-patients of the diviners are, in principle, even more open, as they show less faithfulness to strict delimitations among traditions and are more eager to forge their camino as favorably as possible, independently of ritual affiliations and compromises stemming from them. Besides the relative solidification of different techniques of oracular articulacy into specific entities and traditions, an ample black hole of attraction, so to speak, is ready to devour all additional and comple-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Broken Words • 105

mentary oracular particles, previously hovering independently into the vast and unknown outer space of divination and magical intervention. The openness of the mediating techniques and tools of oracular articulacy is accompanied by the strict desire to harness a flowing and desirable camino. Mediation is not a realistic compromise of an ideal or ideological unmediated excess but an excessive unleashing of oracular articulacy that puts these caminos into “directed motion” (see Holbraad 2012: 144–72). It is the absoluteness of this hungry desire that feeds the relativeness, in the sense of openness, of its approach, of its methodology. This “hunger for words,” as I have called it elsewhere (Panagiotopoulos 2018: 476), is multiplied and perpetuated, not only because hidden aspects always lurk, ready to be discovered, but also because new instances of inarticulacy crop up, creating constant efforts to get back on the track of articulacy. As it will be shortly elaborated, there is a spiral circularity of words, mattering, people, divinity, spirits, articulacy, and caminos. “Life puts obstacles in your path, the religion [la religión; meaning Afro-Cuban religiosity in general] helps you get rid of them.” This was exclaimed by Dorka, a Cuban friend of mine, who, although not initiated in any Afro-Cuban religious tradition, “has and does her little things” (tener or hacer mis cositas; playfully and blurringly revealing that, although one may not be fully immersed into Afro-Cuban religiosity, there still might be some kind of not so obvious contact with it). This is such a definitively common-sense exclamation among AfroCuban religious practitioners, irrespective of the degree of involvement, that it could be taken as a building block of Afro-Cuban religiosity. I think that there are three main broad themes interconnected and condensed in such a common proposition. Firstly, life is a depicted as a “path” wherein there is no absolute and ultimate destiny able to be revealed or harnessed once and for all by “the religion.” Life is inherently and potentially full of “obstacles” and ad hoc efforts to overcome them. Secondly, “life” and “religion” are intimately linked, there is no radical distinction between the “profane” and the “sacred,” one responds to the other, and, to a certain extent, one is the other. Thirdly, and this is what will be developed in the remainder of this chapter, the passage from inarticulacy to articulacy is not linear but viciously circular. The circularity between “life” and “religion” is cemented by the fact that there is no encompassing and fixed state of inarticulacy and articulacy. The passage from one to the other by means of signs-deities and perceptions-spirits is multiple and constant. Once it is accepted

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

106 • Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

that these two broad “tools” may transform multiple inarticulacies into articulacies, one is led by default to acknowledge that the other way around holds too. Fran gradually converted a state of inarticulacy into articulacy by accepting, in the first place, that what provoked the former would itself be ritually manipulated to unleash the latter (a Yoruba spirit needing ritual attention to the point of leading to Ifá initiation). The “idiom” of deities and spirits could be said to be that which instantiates this homeopathic transformation. To paraphrase the saying in English: “set a thief to catch a thief.” Here, the police and the thief prove to be the same person. What activates one side (the guardian) or the other (the afflicter) is interchangeable and dependent on the ritual and oracular manipulation thereof. Fran’s progressive and even arduous and complex recovery of articulacy, as presented in the above ethnographic account, must be constantly checked, and realized through the periodic oracular confirmation and propitiatory actions of various signs-deities and perceptions-signs. To “live one’s sign” (vivir el signo), to “develop the dead” (desarollar los muertos), to “make the deity” (hacer el oricha or el santo), to “receive protections” (recibir protecciones), among others, are different, complementary, and cumulative active stances of constantly trying to keep a camino on track and avoid an equally constant possibility of derailment. The never-ending sacrificial appetite of both deities and spirits, unattended and neglected entities, forgotten or undiscovered aspects of signs, human error in interpretation of the signs or the perceptions, trickery or vindictiveness from both humans and entities—all of these are factors of the vicious circle between articulacy and inarticulacy. A common phenomenon is one of spirits perceived and detected as “errant” (errantes) or “sent” (enviados), and who are meant to obstruct one’s camino. These are obstacles external to the ritual obligations emerging from the oracular dialogues between one’s own deities and spirits. The most (in)famous term and potentially the most harmful practice that embraces these additional factors is that of “witchcraft” (brujería). Furthermore, there is a widespread notion that once you become aware of your particular relationality and mutual interdependence with the various entities, whether one’s own, errant, or sent, the peril of being afflicted in case of neglect increases. All these factors and dimensions, among others, enhance this vicious circularity that constitutes Afro-Cuban religiosity and divination as the epicenter of a complex and dynamic field of articulacy and pathbreaking and path-amending instantiation of caminos.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Broken Words • 107

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion The circularity between articulacy and inarticulacy, and between the flowing and the blocking of caminos, does not occur in order to mediate the distance between humanity and divinity or spirits. People start following hints from signs and perceptions and they stretch them, so to speak, to such an extent that they become integral parts of such circularity. In tune with the general arguments of the editors of this present volume, the “sacred,” the “paranormal,” the “other-than-human” is not mediated through matter or language. The concreteness elaborated through the oracular “media,” material and mythological signs and perceptual sensibilities, harnesses whole biographical paths and is circular, not linearly conducive to a purportedly distant (or proximate) “metaphysical” cosmos. The “tools” that are meant to unleash articulacy and redirect caminos are the means and the end, entities of which their ontological constitution happens in the very act of constantly and circularly amending and breaking these caminos. This volume’s central concept, that of mattering, does much better justice than one-dimensional, linear, and representational notions of materiality and materialization. Matter is semiotic in the sense that it constantly strives to constitute what it proposes to constitute. This means that the success is neither wholly granted nor wholly doomed. It is the partial successes and failures, including all the forceful intentions, efforts, and desires just as much as desperations, confusions, and fears, that mediate a purist notion of matter. The body, in all its perceptual, affective, tangible, imaginative, interpretative capacities and incapacities, emerges as a central “material” and as highly paradigmatic of a nondualist kind of mediation. Notions of participation, contact, vibrancy, and entanglement become central here (as also evinced in this volume in general), as much as motion and articulacy do (in the present chapter, more particularly). The extra qualities propelled by matter are neither simply out there, inherent to materiality, nor just inside here, an arbitrary fiction of the mind. Matter does not mediate spirit, just as matter is not separated from spirit by a physical distance to be subsequently mediated. Mediation, out of the trodden path of its conventional history, is a camino wherein what is ignited is a kind of motion and articulacy that explodes the cemented distinction between matter and spirit, spatial distance and proximity into a thousand pieces, not by bringing spirit close but precisely by molding matter in ways that these distinctions do not matter.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

108 • Anastasios Panagiotopoulos

Anastasios Panagiotopoulos is a senior researcher at the Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropología (Project reference number: UID/ ANT/04038/2019)—Universidade Nova de Lisboa, with FCT project reference number: DL 57/2016/CP1349/CT0008. He has conducted research in Cuba and currently in the Iberian Peninsula on Afro-Cuban divination and religiosity. He has published various peer-reviewed journal articles and is the coeditor of Articulate Necrographies: Comparative Perspectives on the Voices and Silences of the Dead (Berghahn Books, 2019).

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

References Deleuze, Gilles. 2001. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. New York: Zone Books. Espírito Santo, Diana. 2015. Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Engelke, Matthew. 2007. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley: University of California Press. Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Keane, Webb. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press. Latour, Bruno. 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Meyer, Brigit. 2011. “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies and the Question of the Medium.” Social Anthropology 19(1): 23–39. Panagiotopoulos, Anastasios. 2017. “When Biographies Cross Necrographies: The Exchange of ‘Affinity’ in Cuba.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 82(5): 946–70. ———. 2018. “Food-for-Words: Sacrificial Counterpoint and Oracular Articulacy in Cuba.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8(3): 474–87. Panagiotopoulos, Anastasios, and Diana Espírito Santo. 2019. “Afro-Cuban Counterpoint: Religious and Political Encompassments.” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 24(3): 727–45. Robbins, Joel. 2017. “Keeping God’s Distance: Sacrifice, Possession, and the Problem of Religious Mediation.” American Ethnologist 44(3): 464–75.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Part II

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Orders of Sound, Sight, and Measurement

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Chapter 5

Radioaficionados and UFOs The Social Life of Radios in Chile Diana Espírito Santo

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

“Enchanted Listening”: The Beginnings of Friendship Octavio Ortiz’s story begins in June 1984 when, by chance, he received an intriguing communication by radio from the south of Chile, the Austral zone—from Aysén. An avid radio aficionado, Octavio kept an eleven-meter radio, citizens band, on the nightstand of the room he shared with his wife Cristina. In conversation, he tells me that back then there were no cell phones, and he used the apparatus to communicate with Cristina, to tell her he was on his way home, for instance, or was running late. He had another one in his car for this effect. These were never, of course, private conversations, because there were countless other stations using the same eleven-meter frequency (27 MHz to be exact) that listened in inadvertently. And indeed, this was the appeal. Octavio says he has “friends” in a radius of thousands of kilometers in both Chile and in neighboring countries; friends he has only heard, never seen. They know each other only by voice. One night, when Octavio and his wife were reading in bed close to 1:00 A.M., what sounded like an urgent appeal came in. Ortiz describes this in his book Friendship (2009: 27–34): “Attention, attention . . . a request for the Lucero station to listen for a communication, in the frequency of eleven meters.” Lucero was the name of Octavio’s station. Both Octavio and Cristina perked up their ears. The same station in distress also attempted to contact Iquique, in the north of Chile, but no one answered there. Getting up from bed to respond to what could be an emergency, Octavio answered, “Attentive to the Austral south, good evening. This is Octavio from Estación Lucero.” A voice, straightaway: “I’m Hector, from the Mitahues lighthouse,” located in the southern

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

112 • Diana Espírito Santo

province of Aysén. Octavio asked whether everything was alright, and Hector answered, “Everything’s fine,” but, as Octavio comments in his book, Hector’s voice was vacant, somehow, as if something or someone wasn’t allowing him to speak (Ortiz 2009: 28). When he did, Hector requested a different frequency (28 MHz), and began to tell Octavio of what was happening to him and his crew at that moment. Only later did Octavio understand that Hector was a marine captain involved in military exercises. Indeed, he should not even have been on a “public” frequency. “There’s something strange on the horizon, in front of the sea. There’s a giant orange ball that lights up and turns off in intermittent form. It’s detained there, very low, and it’s not moving for the moment. Octavio, the truth is we’re scared, because we’re in the presence of an object we haven’t identified . . .” (Ortiz 2009: 30). Moments pass by, and Octavio then listens in on a conversation between Hector and Robert, the captain of another boat nearby. It becomes evident that there are multiple witnesses to this event, on different vessels. Hector complains vociferously to Robert that all his apparatuses are blocked and that he cannot transmit at eleven meters. Robert exclaims that he is suffering from the same failures. All the electronic controls on his vessel have suddenly become inert, useless (Ortiz 2009: 32). Then, Hector suddenly exclaims, “This thing is moving! It’s going to pass on top of us!” (Ortiz 2009: 32). Octavio reports that communication is suddenly interrupted but does not entirely cut out. The radio needle of Octavio’s eleven-meter suddenly goes wild, and then there is static, accompanied by what he describes as a whistle. Octavio, his wife, and their three girls listen anxiously for a good while longer. Hector then comes on and explains that “the thing” had hovered above them, passed them, but had left terrible burns on the hands and faces of his crew. “Octavio, please believe me, I’m not crazy!” (Ortiz 2009: 33, 34). This disquieting radio contact inaugurated for the Ortiz family a series of broader radial contacts with life-changing effects, one stream of which in particular will be the subject of this chapter. I will describe its basis briefly here. After Hector’s punctual communication, another voice came through on the radio—Alberto, the captain of a fishing boat called Mytilus II. Alberto had also witnessed the UFO flying over Hector’s boat and had advised Hector him to keep things quiet for his own sake. According to Alberto, in the following days, Hector was removed from his post (Ortiz 2009: 38), much to the horror of the Ortizes. The Ortiz family developed a close radial friendship with Alberto, a seafood fisherman, over the next few months. And it was through Alberto’s introduction that the Ortizes came to know Ariel in early 1985. Ariel

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Radioaficionados and UFOs • 113

was a member of a group that called itself and its radio station (as well as the island they allegedly bought in Chiloé) “Friendship,” which at first seemed to be “religious” by virtue of the inhabitants’ many erudite references to the Bible and its messages. In the beginning the conversations with Ariel were long and friendly, and Ariel himself seemed calm and knowledgeable and spoke with an American or a German accent. After some time, Ariel demonstrated an undeniable clairvoyance to Octavio and his family. Not only was he exhibiting knowledge of daily events that had not happened yet, but, more impressively, he detected typhus in an ailing Octavio, more than a thousand kilometers away, when Octavio’s doctors were struggling to diagnose his sickness. And on 17 August 1985 there was an event that signaled a point of no return for Octavio, as well as for the broader ufological community. While thousands of people witnessed a strange object float through Santiago toward the Andes and come to a standstill somewhere in Peñalolen close to the mountains, with news cameras following it, Ariel called by radio to Cristina and Octavio, asking them to look outside their daughter’s room. Octavio recalls seeing a large disk-shaped object just hovering there, at an arm’s length from their roof. Ariel then told him that “it was them” in the craft, which effected several n-degree turns to prove this while in communication with Octavio. The Friendship group—described by Alberto as comprised of individuals all tall and with a young appearance, Nordic-looking, and with impressive mastery of all manner of sciences—thus became associated with ufological lore in Chile. Ernesto de la Fuente, a now deceased television camara man, was also to become central to this lore, as someone who not only iterated this community´s “magic”, but their mystical knowledge. The location of Friendship Island itself is unknown by those who “believe” in it, and those who do not deny that such an island exists. However, the island was visited by Ernesto, who describes a long journey by boat through winding canals and passages. Most importantly, he explains that he was the subject of an instantaneous cure for the advanced cancer he said he was suffering from at that time, a cure effected in Friendship by the Friendship community itself. He claims his memory was “erased” upon leaving. These startling claims—Octavio’s extended communication with the Friendship “aliens” and Ernesto’s depiction of his cure (remembered years later)—have proved contentious in the popular media. In 2001, Ernesto de la Fuente published an extensive document online detailing his contact with the group, which included a description of paranormal “exercises” he spent months effecting over radio with Ariel. The popular controversy around Friendship’s extra-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

114 • Diana Espírito Santo

terrestrial nature has constituted one of the primary scaffolds of current Chilean ufology. This chapter is an attempt to make sense, anthropologically, of the Friendship communications and their effects in the ufological domain in Chile. It employs ethnographic data on the wider ufological community in Chile, interviews with Octavio Ortiz and experts who have a wide mediatic presence, as well as media analysis. But it is not an attempt to prove or disprove the occurrences, least of all of alleged sightings or communications with UFOs or aliens. Rather, it takes a rudimentary technology—the ham radio—as key to pragmatically unraveling its effects. There are multiple ways in which one can apply a conceptual analysis in this case, including the so-called “boundarywork” (Gieryn 1983) by experts in the field, which implies a commitment to continual forms of defending knowledge stakes, depending on perspectives (see Hess 1993). But as noted by Battaglia (2005) among other scholars, this is not one field or movement but rather what Tumminia (2007) might call a “quasi”-field, one dominated by widely discrepant interests and claims, some of them couched in languages with quite different assumptions. We are best off looking at the social role of technology (Ingold 1993)—what Sneath et al. (2009: 6) call the “social and material means by which particular imaginings are generated.” Imagination here is not defined as some mental capacity by which people make sense of their world, informed by a “holistic backdrop of meanings” (Sneath et al. 2009: 11). On the contrary, we should focus on the “concrete processes by which imaginative effects are engendered” (2009: 11). This is not about internal processes. Certain ontological understandings of the world may be outcomes rather than conditions of the technologies themselves. As the authors say, “technologies ‘afford’ imaginings in ways that, though hardly random, are nevertheless essentially unpredictable and often quite unintended” (2009: 22). Radio, as seen by Bessire and Fisher (2013: 370), “is often prefigured as a technology that enables hearing what is otherwise unavailable to the human ear”—it allows a transformation of a spectrum of indistinct electromagnetic frequencies into something audible. And yet Bessire and Fisher question the association between the radio and simplistic ideological effects, based, among other things, on the intentionality of the voice. The radio “field” has force; it is a “vibrant, complex field of mediation” that is never contained within its social context (2013: 364). What the authors, and I, argue is that technology, and radio in this particular case, is not linearly causal. The social and imaginative effects it unleashes can be thought of “diffractively,” following Karen Barad

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Radioaficionados and UFOs • 115

(2007, 2014), who borrows the term from physics. Just as light (or water, or sound) diffracts from objects, for instance, creating refractions that bend and curl and create secondary sources of waves, so the radio can create unexpected diffractions, associated with voices, events, agents, and affects, generating cascading and overlapping phenomena through this diffraction, that confirm or disconfirm phenomena. The point of this is to look at reality as a product of intra-actions, rather than interactions, which assumes an object and subject. One aspect of these radio diffractions is a certain “enchantment.” In a recent article, Stoichita and Mori (2017) detail what they describe as three different “postures of listening.” The idea is that sound here is not taken for granted—in places such as Papua New Guinea, or among certain Amazonian indigenous communities, sound is material; it can be incited, captured, associated with invisible beings (2017: 3). Listening, as opposed to hearing, implies awareness. Alternatives of listening are “distinct ways of using a given item of sensory information by the same being to construct different kinds of listening objects” (2017: 4), objects that open the way to “specific relational possibilities” (2017: 4). The first “posture” is what the authors call “indexical”—inferences built about the physical state of the world from sounds heard. These can be wrong, or indeed faked. The second alternative is “structural listening,” the mode used, for instance, in understanding language (2017: 6). This implies the abstraction of relevant patterns from auditory data. And the third, most importantly for the argument, is what they call “enchanted listening.” Implied in this posture is a “split between sounds and their physical causes” (2017: 7). Sounds seem to form an “autonomous realm” that stands apart from ordinary causes and forms its own universe of animation. This does not imply a supernatural understanding of the world, necessarily. Indeed, in the case of ham operators, one could argue that receivers on the other end of the radios exist in what in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would be understood as an “ether” of sorts. There is an enchanted experience when operating a citizens band radio in which one can traverse great distances and hear “voices” on the other end. Stoichita and Mori call “enchanted listening the fact of experiencing a properly auditory ontology,” sounds being grasped as a “world of their own” (2017: 9). This can apply to animistic ontologies in the Amazon, where invisible beings can be “heard” through the sound of water or movement, or to radio voices, but it is essentially relational. In this chapter, I look at what Abrahamsson et al. (2015) call semiotic relationality, in this specific case of ham radio operations in Chile, especially those relating to supposed extraterrestrials.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

116 • Diana Espírito Santo

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Extraterrestrial Communications Language, contrary to sight, has barely been studied in relation to ufological encounters, with the exception of the manifold abduction narratives that often included telepathic communications with extraterrestrials both on and off the extraterrestrial sphere. Language, that is, in a form other than symbols. David Samuels argues that Nikola Tesla, working from his laboratory in Colorado in 1899, had received “radio waves from space,” which he concluded were radio signals broadcast from Mars (2005: 108). He is cited as saying in 1923 that he “caught signals,” which he interpreted as “meaning 1-2-3-4,” and that he believed “Martians used numbers for communication because numbers are universal” (Tesla, quoted in Samuels 2005: 109). This same logic of mathematics would have appeal among the astronomers working on NASA’s first unmanned space flights, among them Carl Sagan, a long-time believer in extraterrestrial intelligence but a notorious skeptic of UFO encounters on earth. According to George Basalla, Sagan persuaded NASA to allow him to compose an interstellar message to existing intelligences in outer space to send with the Pioneer 10 mission, which would follow a trajectory taking it beyond the solar system (2006: 113). The message was embedded in a plaque, carefully designed by Sagan’s wife Linda, which included basic scientific information thought intelligible to advanced extraterrestrials (a schematic representation of hydrogen), the position of the sun mapped out by “pulsars” (spinning neutron stars), and two nude messengers (a man and a woman, the man with arm raised in a posture of goodwill) (2006: 114–16). Sagan likened the message included in Pioneer 10 to a message in a bottle, but he hoped it would be one day retrieved. Skeptics criticized the obscurity of the message’s content. However, as Basalla says, the “question was not whether extraterrestrial technological civilizations exist, but what is the best way to communicate with them” (2006: 117). Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 were also equipped with messages in case of contact. Sagan devised a series of communications that included photographs and music from all over the world (2006: 117). After these launches, the Cassini spacecraft too was inscribed with six hundred thousand signatures gathered from eighty-one countries (2006: 118). But before the space age even began, radio waves were the more likely conveyer of communications to outer space. Indeed, as Carl Sagan pointed out in the 1970s, “humans unintentionally had been broadcasting radio and television messages into space since the early years of the twentieth century” (Basalla 2006: 123), some of which would

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Radioaficionados and UFOs • 117

bounce back to earth after many years. In his book Haunted Media, Jeffrey Sconce notes that David Todd, a professor from Amherst University suggested in 1909 to send men to a position ten miles above the earth’s atmosphere in balloons. The idea was to put them in a place where they could receive radio waves incoming from other planets (2000: 97). This idea anticipates NASA’s SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program, which was funded by the US government for a short amount of time and has been running on private donations since the 1990s, and which also monitors radio waves from space. In the early twenties, speculation was again fueled by Guglielmo Marconi, who publicly claimed to have received mysterious transmissions, possibly from space (Sconce 2000: 97). Mars appeared once more in the public imaginary as the most likely candidate with which earthlings could exchange radio signals. But Sconce also notes how this was an era ripe with a “fantasy of contacting ghostly consciousness via wireless,” and where the radio emerged as a “form of electronically disembodied consciousness, calling to earth across the void of space or through the void of eternity” (2000: 93). Radio fishing was, at first, a very masculine pursuit. Boys assembled their sets and concentrated on receiving signals from as far away as possible, often eavesdropping on the navy (2000: 100). Indeed, it became central to a “boy’s radio fiction centered on invention, exploration, and investigation” (2000: 101). Sconce argues that this “pioneering” aspect of radio made extraterrestrial contact a major aspect of a masculine culture of wireless during this period (2000: 100), leading to, among other things, a male-centered science fiction that mixed radio technology with alien and saucer encounters. In the 1920s, then, according to Sconce, the radio wave “stood as the world’s most intrepid explorer, ready to rise through the ether and across the void of space to contact our telecasting brethren” (2000: 103). Of course, the exponential rise of radio broadcasting and proliferations of stations brought to an end this first aspirational journey for most “explorers.” And by the 1930s, by the time of the famous Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast, which created a general panic about invaders from Mars in the United States, the public was well primed to the notion that radio was a connective social force with far-reaching consequences that should be “believed.” Radio here, in 1938, served an “indexical” quality in the minds of listeners in real time, following Stoichita and Mori. But it was also “enchanted,” not because of its fabricated nature but because it “connected to the latent and affective emotions circulating in American society at the time,” in which ideas about real aliens coalesced (Thursby 2018: 13). Thursby notes that there was

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

118 • Diana Espírito Santo

a “magical quality” to radio, a “liveness.” Like the telegraph before it, radio made possible an imagination of disembodied consciousness, lost far in ethereal space, waiting to be captured by the radio signal, irrespective of the large physical distance between transmitter and receiver. Both technologies in effect suggested that “whole other worlds existed invisibly alongside our own material realm or at the edges of a new frontier in space” (Sconce 2000: 123). Chile is a good place to think about these characteristics of the vast ethereal because it is so geographically immense, unpopulated, separated by both one the earth’s tallest mountain ranges on the side and the Pacific on the other, and until recently, mostly incommunicable. Operating a ham radio is a different thing to hearing radio broadcasts. But it resembles the early pursuits of the radio explorers in the 1920s who listened out for, and responded to, communications from the “beyond”— be it from outer space, somewhere in the sea, or a region located far from the signal emitter. The radio, as Orozco (2016) recognizes, is also an instrument through which to construct a certain citizenship. But in this specific case, what is constructed is less a citizenship based on an idea of radio audiences and the reach of certain programs (say, with political content) than a kinship—in which the unseen “others” become brothers (or “friends”) in a vast network of airwaves. It is perhaps no coincidence that the emitters from the “Friendship” island called themselves as such. The emergence of this language and experience of kinship appears to have an independent character from historical contexts—such as the fall of the Chilean dictatorship in 1990 and the rise of neoliberal reforms, and to some extent it is even exempt from processes of globalization. We could see radioaficionados, especially those in 1980s Chile, as inhabiting what Helmreich has called an “immersive soundscape” (2007) within their particular radial activities, creating a certain pace of life, a structure of voice and of listening, a space-time unique to their environment of transmission. But the fallout of these communications in what we can call a “suspended” realm can and should be understood within and related to the socioeconomic, historical, and mediatic contexts in which they occur and in which they have clear ramifications and ripples.

Octavio and Material Semiotics In a book about the “messiness” of social science and our need to correspond with methods that highlight uncertainty and flux, John Law

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Radioaficionados and UFOs • 119

claims that “realities are not secure but instead they have to be practiced” (2004: 15). There is no such thing as simply one reality. As Annemarie Mol shows in her ethnography of a Dutch hospital (2002), atherosclerosis is not one thing but many, a disease constructed out of the multiple perspectives (and instrumentation) in which it is conceived. Reality must be enacted in order to come to be, and social science methods need to be flexible enough to not desire certainty, to not reach a particular conclusion, and to know that, as researchers, we have no privileged insight into social reality (2002: 9). Indeed, reality is ephemeral and obscure in some cases, such as the one being dealt with in this chapter. Law argues that we need to create metaphors and images “for what is impossible or barely possible, unthinkable or almost unthinkable” (2004: 6). The method he is proposing is not one, but it will be slow and uncertain, and it will lead to no clear answers. Indeed, one of the ways I will be understanding the “Friendship effect” in this section (and in the chapter more broadly) is by attending to a “performative understanding of technoscientific” (Barad 2007: 90) practices, especially ones related to the radio. This is encompassed by Barad’s notion of “diffraction” whereby “subject and object do not preexist as such, but emerge through intra-actions” and where “knowing is a material practice of engagement as part of the world in its differential becoming,” giving rise to all manner of material entanglements (2007: 89). Barad’s thesis is that matter does not exist prior to the entangled relationships that come to constitute it. Knowing, measuring, thinking, listening, and communicating are all material practices of intraacting within and as part of the world (2007: 90). They are performances that bring certain realities into being. Apparatuses themselves may be thought of as “material-discursive phenomena” (2007: 208), implicated in an “ever-changing agential reality.” While Barad may have been thinking about apparatuses in the context of a scientific laboratory, for instance, that intra-act with each other, producing particular phenomena, we can also think of ham radios in this regard. We can argue that materialization through the radio—the making of identities, attributes, subjects, phenomena more generally— “needs to be understood in terms of the dynamics of intra-activity” (2007: 208). Indeed, far from being mediators, “apparatuses are the material conditions of possibility and impossibility of mattering” (2007: 148; original emphasis). To paraphrase John Law, speaking of the “method assemblage,” we could think of the radio operated by the Chilean radioaficionados as condensing and manifesting a version of reality, distinguishing signals from noise, detecting and amplifying par-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

120 • Diana Espírito Santo

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

ticular patterns, “which then return to the flux, for the moment rendered real” (2004: 117). Essentially, this is because communication requires the presence of at least two radio stations at a single frequency. Both Barad’s and Law’s theories are evocative not just for their content but for the metaphoric images they evoke, with corresponding conceptual implications. The notion of diffraction of “waves”—be they of light, or water, or indeed radio waves and voices—placed in motion (sent into the air) by the apparatuses of the radioaficionados and bounced off by others, creating new waves, is of particular relevance here. We could think of this diffraction, or interference, of radio signals and messages in nonrepresentational ways; ways that do not assume the “object” out there but reconstruct it, phenomenally, in the continual moment of occurrence and also in the after-fact, and importantly, collectively. The object is in effect inferred from these overlapping ripples whose control belongs exclusively to no single entity, but which are initiated by the radio device. I would like us to think about these considerations while reading Octavio Ortiz’s story, and to some extent Ernesto’s, which follows it. First, consider how the citizens band works in Chile, in the words of Octavio (personal communication 2019). The eleven-meter citizens band radio is one that can transmit from where it is—if it has a good antenna—to about eighty kilometers around it. After eighty kilometers of radius the signal is lost, and reappears again close to two thousand kilometers away, in a total form. It can get to the United States, to Mexico, to Italy. The reason for this is that the signal goes up into the ionosphere in the first instance. And from that roof, it can transmit the eighty kilometers of circumference. But then it jumps, shocks, and jumps again, and will fall at more than two thousand kilometers away. Then you can hear clearly again. So, I can communicate perfectly with the south of Chile, but not Valparaíso [a city by the coast, about 150 kilometers from Santiago]. In case of emergency, an operator can create bridges. So, if I need to communicate with a radio in Rancagua [a suburban city, about one hundred kilometers from the capital], I can speak to someone in Arica [a city in the very north of Chile], and he can do me the favor of passing on my message. These are “bridges” in citizens band, abbreviated by the term “QTC.” But you need to be authorized to have these kinds of radios. You need to pass a course and get a certificate.

“Friendships” among radioaficcionados are in effect made up of various contacts through these bridges to an invisible and distant reality, bridges that are mediated, strengthening the notion here that reality is constructed intersubjectively, and between apparatuses. “We didn’t see

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Radioaficionados and UFOs • 121

them in person, we didn’t know each other, only our respective voices, and the names of our radios,” Octavio said. Bridges—QTCs—are created by differences in connection qualities between radio operators, due to their location, which require operators to organismically relate to and network with others in the immediate vicinity. It is a particular regime of information unto itself, run by amateurs and with an essential stop-and-go quality, where gaps in the technical system forge social connections in the wider system. Indeed, this regime of information-by-bridge could also be used to describe Chilean ufology more generally, which relies on experts connecting the dots in various caseby-case phenomena. The first communications with the communicators from Friendship Island took a similar nature to all others. They were people, like everyone else. The conversations were small talk at first. Then, Octavio and Cristina understood that Ariel and his companions were not “run-ofthe-mill” people. “They were like scientists. They told us they were trying to fix the ozone layer,” Octavio said. There were others on these calls. But Ariel would answer to no one but the Ortiz family and their close friends. Cristina says that she still has no idea “who” they are or were—if they were what other ufologists, as well as public opinion, made of them later on: extraterrestrials. She says that “the truth was that back then we didn’t give it the importance it has now, outside our own enchantment with the Friendship community. They taught us a lot. But now others give it an importance that we didn’t attribute to them, then.” The enchantment, of a more public object, came with varying moments of recognition. First: the “encounter,” which was not just a personal event for Octavio and his family but indeed a social and technological one, on varying interconnected and self-propelling levels. The August 1985 events—the appearance of the flying saucer above their house—came with a change in register for the Ortizes in relation to their communications with Friendship. The interactions intensified, as if they had started anew. It was a national event. In Canal 13, Octavio recounts in his book, Don Francisco, Chile’s best-known television host (who then immigrated to Miami), interrupted his program Sábado Gigante for a live feed of the strange flying object (Ortiz 2009: 50). Radio channels took up broadcasts of the event. Cristina takes the microphone of Octavio’s radio (2009: 49, all transcriptions have been translated to English by myself). Cristina: (very anxious) Hello Ariel, Friendship Station, hello Ariel . . . Lucero here. We are looking, we are looking. This is incredible. . . . What is this, Ariel? . . . Please, what’s going on?

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

122 • Diana Espírito Santo Ariel: (with a sweet voice and a foreign accent) Hello, hello Lucero. Revise the Apocalypse. Remember this day because it indicates the beginning of a new era for humanity.

Octavio recounts that at that moment, and during the next couple of hours that the craft was stationary, there was total chaos on the citizens band lines. Everyone wanted to speak to “them,” to know, for sure, whether they were manning the craft. Octavio mentions other stations that he knew were “on air” at that moment—Topógrafa, Centauro, Huasco, among others. Once the television crews were emitting the live feed, some of the radioaficionados could then see what they were talking about frenetically; others could not. For some it was pure illusion. At one point, in the midst of all the media coverage on the one end and the ham radio users’ frenzy on the other, Ariel warned Octavio about planes getting too close to them (ibid: 53).

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ariel: . . . Magnetic. There is a magnetic field. Don’t let them get close.

There was some hustle among the operators of the various stations listening in at this moment, who found themselves powerless to alert civil or military authorities. Suddenly, Octavio announced to the rest of the radio stations online at that time that television was emitting a live image of a “non-identified object.” “They seem to be suggesting that it was something sent by the Air Force, or an air balloon” (2009: 55). But several were floating hypotheses. The ham operators from their station were also tuning in to live media broadcasts and their images, watched by thousands of people in Chile, among them, according to Octavio, meteorologists, astronomers, pilots, and air traffic controllers, who all witnessed several strange objects roaming through the skies that day and broadcast their opinions. For six hours, television, radio, and eleven-meter radio aficionados were all engaged in a speculative conversation around an unknown aerial phenomena, with Octavio more “directly” involved than others. Thus, Friendship, from an essentially enchanted auditory soundscape, became one with visible dimensions, even if speculative. However the state authorities persisted in their denial that what was seen that day was a UFO, Octavio and his family were now convinced of a more formal unusualness to Ariel and his colleagues, all known by biblical names—Rafael, Ismael, Gabriel, and so on. From then, the level of bizarre in their radial communication took a step up. Octavio once asked Ariel why he had chosen them, and not another family, for their extensive communications. Certainly there were more intelligent,

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Radioaficionados and UFOs • 123

knowledgeable people. “He answered: We didn’t choose you for your intelligence. We chose you because we need genetic information that only you have. And we could take it at any moment, but we don’t, because we respect you.” Octavio says that he gave them permission at that moment to “take” whatever information from his body they needed, but, as a condition, they said that he should quit smoking. And he did, for fourteen years. He has no idea if and when they did take the genetic sample. “They knew things,” Octavio said in conversation with me.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

They would say, “We are from outside this planet, but we belong to the same humanity.” They knew a lot about the Bible. And they would see us when we were talking to them. Ariel would say, “Cristina, do you have a Bible near you? Turn to Saint John, chapter 3, verses 5 to 7, and you will find the answer to your problem.” Cristina would flip through it but not find the page. And Ariel would say, “No, Cristina, go back, you’ve passed the page.” It would be two in the morning, and suddenly Ariel would refer to Claudita, my youngest. And we would discover that she had been hiding in a corner of the room, behind a door or something.

One day, in the late 1980s, Octavio and his family were invited to go to Friendship in Chiloé. They all drove south to the port where a boat—the Mytilus II—was waiting. But both Cristina and Octavio had an ominous feeling. What if they couldn’t return? So they turned back to Santiago. In part, this was caused by what Octavio calls Ariel’s frightening prediction on the radio, thirty minutes before it happened in January 1986, of the explosion of the Challenger shuttle in the United States, in which all seven crew members lost their lives. The launch was broadcast live internationally, and also its result; but the accuracy of the prediction signaled that Friendship had a kind of “power,” which was awesome but also intimidating to Octavio at that moment. In the mid-nineties, after some twelve or so years since contact was first initiated with Friendship, Ariel signaled the end of their radial relationship. The air was becoming too crowded, the military was “listening in and recording them,” according to Octavio. Now they would initiate contact in other ways, including telepathy. While Cristina doubts that they are still “with them,” Octavio thinks otherwise. He often sees lights in the skies and orbs around his house. It is tempting to begin with a look inside the suspended “immersive” space-time of Octavio, his family, and the other ham operators online in the first instance with Friendship, which presents itself in a more closed-off, hermetic way. There is a particular language of ama-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

124 • Diana Espírito Santo

teur radio users; there is understanding of space as constituted by gaps of communication, filled in proxy by other communications, bridges. There is a particular enclosed rhythm to the “soundscape” (Helmreich 2007) produced and consumed by radioaficionados, a tempo of its own, a “noise” discernable only by those immersed in this technological sphere and savvy in its machinations. One needs to have learned how to operate the radio—to have taken a certificated course. As Stoichita and Mori (2017) would argue, there is a “posture of listening.” One first listens indexically and structurally; messages have very specific meanings tied to the purposes of the communication. But, if we follow Helmreich in his ethnographic observations of the environment inside the submarine Alvin, underwater soundscapes, at four thousand meters, are very different from those on the surface. Sound is registered by bones in the skull, which allow vibrational motion to be rendered intelligible as resonances (Helmriech 2007: 624). Moreover sound is conducted to the inner ear directly, making it impossible for the hearer to distinguish between right and left and create a “stereo-image” (ibid). Inside the submarine, sound needs to be translated into useful data— across different media—what Helmreich calls “transduction.” While we are clearly not underwater in the Chilean ethnographic example, one possible analogy here is that the experience soundscapes can themselves come to change according to the devices, technologies, intentions, concepts, and atmospheres associated with the communicative drama. According to Barad, “apparatuses,” here read as radio, “are not inscription devices.” But neither are they to be understood as simply “technologies of the social” (2007: 169). Rather, apparatuses are “dynamic (re)configurations of the world through which bodies are intra-actively materialized” (emphasis in original, 2007: 169–70). Indeed, something happened to mark a transition to what became an “enchanted” mode of listening; it marked the beginning of a particular ambiguity as well as an affective and bodily disposition that would dominate from a specific moment on. The conversations would thus be more attentive, more sober, and would tolerate somewhat of a mysterious tone. To that effect we can probably ask, what “object” or “subject” was made evident, obvious, visible, during the 1985 “crisis,” with its multiplicity of actors and their different ontological assumptions? If we take Mol’s concept of “body multiple” (2002), which she uses to describe the fact that body manifests in different ways to different forms of practice, we could rudimentarily take into consideration here what Otsuki et al. (2019) have

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Radioaficionados and UFOs • 125

described as the “world multiple.” Indeed, “worlding” is a term they use to understand how different stagings, or performances of a world, engender not only a sense for what is natural but who and what matters in a particular form of life (2019: 7): “Worldings may conjure an aura of totality, but they are practices that are always partial and incomplete on their own” (2019: 7). Conversely, worldings may also generate the conditions for more than one world to exist at the same time. They are “unstable in their form and effects, and open to critique, resignification, and transformation” (2019: 7). And it is not only human beings who enact these worldings but also nonhumans, as well as science and technological instruments. We can again take up the exercise of understanding the seeing of “diffraction” in a social setting, and specifically the concept of intra-action. The radio, in this ethnographic and otherwise documented context, is absolutely central to the “worlding” of certain agents in this scenario, and by itself it creates certain conditions by excluding others. There are multiple ripples, intra-acting with each other, sending other ripples back: not only before but particularly during and after the sighting. The crowds of radioaficionados in the “system” listening in at the same time become synchronous to the existence of the phenomena itself. The physical apparatus of the radio, in conjunction with others during the hours of the sighting, is crucial here. While there was inherent indeterminacy—by all—as to what was occurring and by whom, we could say that there was “observation” through the multiple perspectives of each operator, their access (or not) to the visual aspect of the occurrence and to the conversation at hand. Indeed, there is a distributed form of what Barad would call “performance” of the UFO-as-Friendship, as Octavio’s radio was widely heard by all the radioaficionados online at that moment. There is no separation here between words and things (2007: 137), characteristic of representationalist analyses. Barad says that “reality is composed not of things-in-themselves or things-behindphenomena but of things- in-phenomena” (2007: 140). Reality needs to be materialized in dynamic processes of intra-activity, seen, among other things, through the simultaneity of the ham radio operators’ chaotic communications, the visuality of “something out there,” and the news cameras’ live feed of these objects, which became an object of contemplation also to the operators. In this sense, the hermetic soundscape of the ham radios came to feed off a wider array of diffractions already set in motion in Chilean televisual media, and began to reverberate with a certain set of ideas.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

126 • Diana Espírito Santo

Discussion: Friendship through the Media We could ask, then, how Friendship became a wider-known phenomenon. Televisual and print media became catalytic for the massive coming into existence of Friendship in the public domain, by virtue, among other things, of the various frictions and “controversies” (Latour 2005) it provoked. These were frictions between versions of events, and between the possibilities and explanations involved in such events. There were and still are interpretations that, in the absence of the physical “object,” become imperative to its understanding, and they move and mobilize the object. According to Strathern,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The effect of any interpretative intent is to then make those things seem to move subsequently, that is, as a result of attention to them. Discrimination and distinction, connection and relationship, all make the object of attention move. . . . The act of interpretation is understood as bringing entities, human or abstract, into play with one another.” (2002: 94)

Ernesto’s case has been the subject of far more scrutiny and interpretation than Octavio’s, among other reasons because of his claim of being cured of advanced cancer. Ernesto worked initially in documentary filmmaking and television in Chile, as well as in the United States. When he returned from New York in 1983 and found no work, he bought a small farm in Chiloé and moved there with his family. Because of “life’s necessities,” he bought an eleven-meter radio station and began communicating closely with other stations in the vicinity, including Friendship. One time Friendship called Ernesto and asked to meet him. His description, in the document published online in 2001, was of healthy, tall people, with “dark blond hair, clear eyes, and skin toasted by the sun.” But what he remembers most is “the peace irradiated by their presence.” In particular, Ernesto comments that they used principles different from ours. For instance, their mathematical calculations were based on the number six, not ten. “In history, anthropology, paleontology, astronomy, physics, etc., their knowledge was incredible, but sometimes contradictory to ours.” This led Ernesto to have long radio-based conversations with various members of Friendship, including Ariel, Gabriel, and Ismael. Ernesto began to do small favors for them, such as driving people from bus or train stations to a dock, where the Mytilus II would take them to Friendship. This was the way he met Octavio Ortiz and his family, although they returned to Santiago, as mentioned, without boarding. One day in 1989, after he had moved back to Santiago, Ernesto went to a bronco-pulmonary

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Radioaficionados and UFOs • 127

specialist who diagnosed him with advanced lung cancer, at forty-nine years of age. The same night, over the radio, Friendship spoke to him on the radio. They knew what was happening to him. “Maybe there is still time,” they told Ernesto. In the next few days, he traveled to Chiloé by bus, and the Mytilus II with its captain, Alberto, was waiting for him at the port he knew well. About two days later, they arrived at the island of Friendship. He describes the living and working quarters of Friendship as being located inside a large mountain, and that people dressed in white suits and had computers. He was handed a white plastic bracelet that acted as a watch and a walkie-talkie. All life was governed by computation inside, and the temperature was a stable twenty degrees Celsius. The construction was multileveled; there were three large greenhouses and a pool, as well as salons with satellite television and other “commodities he would never have dreamed of.” Ernesto does not remember being in a clinic or a hospital there; he has no recollection of the process of his “cure.” Critically, before leaving the island, “something” was done to his brain so that it couldn’t remember. When he left the island he felt like a different person, and his cancer was clear. The press in Chile is especially good at mobilizing “objects” of public speculation and creating complexities around these objects. Raúl Núñez, a well-known Spanish-Chilean ufologist with connections to the press, describes in a 2019 interview the point at which the Friendship “case” became known to the wider public. He says the case was not well known at all in Chile. He was living in Barcelona then, where he edited a newspaper on UFOs, and he was sent the tapes of the 1985 event (the same one recorded by Ortiz) by a radioaficionado, probably somebody who had been listening in or even participating in the frenzy and who had managed to record the hours of conversation between Ariel and the ham operators. He kept them in his drawer for two years. Then, a friend and investigator of paranormal claims who had a television program—Josep Guijarro—asked him if he had anything he could use from South America for his show. He gave him all the tapes he had, and the investigator “went crazy over them.” He wrote a piece for a magazine in Spain, with transcriptions of recordings included, and two months later, ufologists in Chile took up “Friendship” as an issue of sensational investigation. According to Nuñez, Octavio Ortiz never forgave the Spanish press, and has refused to be interviewed by Nuñez or any other “Spanish” journalist, including Guijarro who had “discovered” and published Ernesto’s fabulous claims. But Raúl Nuñez has his own theories about Friendship. According to him, Friendship arises out of a kind of “magical realism” implicit in a

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

128 • Diana Espírito Santo

wider Chilean consciousness. “This is a magical country, full of fantastic creatures and earthquakes. Since we’re little we’re taught all these fears.” He speculates that “belief” in the Friendship extraterrestrials comes from this magical tendency. Around the same time that Ernesto de la Fuente was being “cured,” a book about “Friendship” was published (50 Years of Amicizia) by an Italian author in Pescara, Italy, Stefano Breccia, whose events, according to the author, “occurred” in the early 1950s. According to Nuñez, he swears that in it are descriptions and black-and-white photographs of tall, blond, “Nordic”-looking individuals such as those described by Ernesto. This recalls a blog called “Isla Friendship” that in 2010 published an analysis of a 1989 book by a Canary Islands–based author titled San Borondón: Conexión Extraterrestre en Canarias, also based on the idea of a mysterious disappearing island and its technology-savvy extraterrestrial inhabitants. They too had subterranean living quarters, as Ernesto describes in his account, and were engaged in all manner of “scientific” experiments. It is quite possible, Nuñez says in our interview, that Ernesto de la Fuente was “inspired” in his visions by these other antecedent cases, although he stopped short of saying that he imagined them. Indeed, Nuñez is not the first to question Ernesto’s state of mind. An anonymous interlocutor of ours mentioned that Ernesto had endured several traumatic events, including the suicide of a family member, and had covered violent wars such as Vietnam in the early 1970s as a camera operator. “That has to mess with your head,” says this interlocutor. Nuñez asks, “Where is the evidence of Ernesto’s first cancer, the one cured by Friendship? Where is the x-ray of his lungs? Let’s start there. But he hasn’t showed us anything.” Hugo Camus, the director of the Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena (CEFAA), a small organism of the General Direction of Civil Aeronautics (DGAC) that has existed since 1997, dismisses this case almost entirely: “They proved it was a farce!” He refers to the “catching” by a national television channel of an imposter, somewhere in Santiago, who was pretending to be both him and one of the Friendship alien inhabitants on a ham radio, in order to scam the nation. This dismissal is not simply a reaction to the so-called “farce.” It also seems motivated by the idea that aliens cannot possibly be among us, mediated by such rudimentary technology as the radio. In any case, Ernesto’s story was a further turning point for the Friendship saga. In the late 1980s, the popular Chilean magazine Conozca Más, published a feature piece on what they called “the mysterious extraterrestrials of Chiloé.” This, among other things, set the stage in mass print media for Friendship as a possible alien group, whether or not it

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Radioaficionados and UFOs • 129

was believed by readership. The association was set in motion. One of the people who have been most instrumental in bringing Friendship to the mass media is Rodrigo Fuenzalida, a sociologist, hypnotherapist, and active ufologist in his forties, and once a very close friend of the Ortiz family. He has also interviewed Ernesto extensively, both before and after his “visit.” Fuenzalida was a collaborator on the founding of the popular TVN series, OVNI, launched in 1999, of which Friendship constituted the thirteenth chapter and in which Ernesto de la Fuente figures as the main character (due in part to the presenter’s—Patricio Bañados—thirty-year acquaintance with him). But Fuenzalida, while an avid ufologist with his own personal experiences, is also skeptical of the notion that the community on the island of Friendship is extraterrestrial. He appears often on morning shows where he is asked about his investigations. His belief—while not stating explicitly that they are not alien—is that it is more of a “scientific” group that has established some kind of laboratory or center for training. Indeed, this is a widespread belief among some Chilean ufologists: that they may be North American and are experimenting with technologies known only to them. Others, in a more conspiratorial nature, link Chile to escaped Nazis during World War II (a historical fact) and say that the island is a Nazi haven for supertechnology developed during Hitler’s time and beyond. The “technological” imaginary here is essential in both kinds of narratives.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion Law argues, “The absent hinterlands of the real are re-crafted—and then they are there, patterned and patterning, resonating for the next enactment of the real” (2004: 116). Friendship as alien, Friendship as a property of the distorted, disturbed mind, Friendship as scientific human community (American or Nazi), and Friendship as a giant hoax: what Law calls “out-thereness” or, conversely, “absence” fosters “all the possible repetitions of similarity and difference, the patterns that have been set humming and jangling in all the other and endless enactments” (2004: 116). These repetitions, and essentially diffractions, were set into play by the ham radio operations of two people—Octavio and Ernesto—and have been reverberating ever since. Diana Espírito Santo, PhD UCL, 2009, has worked variously on spirit possession and mediation in Cuba, with Afro-Cuban espiritismo, in Brazil, with African-inspired Umbanda, and more recently in Chile,

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

130 • Diana Espírito Santo

where she is currently examining ontologies of evidence and technologies in parapsychology movements, paranormal investigation, and ufology. She has published many articles, is writing her third monograph, and has coedited four volumes, including The Social Life of Spirits (University of Chicago Press) with Ruy Blanes. She currently works as associate professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

References Abrahamsson S., F. Bertoni, and A. Mol. 2015. “Living with Omega-3: New Materialism and Enduring Concerns.” Environment and Planning D 33: 4–19. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2014. “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart.” Parallax 20(3): 168–87. Basalla, George. 2006. Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Battaglia, Debbora. 2005. “Insiders’ Voices in Outerspaces.” In E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces, edited by Debbora Battaglia, 1–37. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bessire, Lucas, and Daniel Fisher. 2013. “The Anthropology of Radio Fields.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 363–78. De la Fuente, Ernesto. 2001. “Isla Friendship: Conexión OVNI.” Retrieved 19 April 2019 from https://isla-friendship-conexion-ovni.webnode.cl/. Geppert, Alexander. 2012. “Extraterrestrial Encounters: UFOs, Science and the Quest for Transcendence, 1947–72.” History and Technology 28(3): 335–62. Gieryn, Thomas. 1983. “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists.” American Sociological Review 48(6): 781–95. Helmreich, Stefan. 2007. “An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography.” American Ethnologist 34(4): 621–41. Hess, David. 1993. Science in the New Age: The Paranormal, Its Defenders, and Debunkers. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Hynek, Allen J., and Jacques Vallées. 1975. The Edge of Reality: A Progress Report on the Unidentified Flying Objects. Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Ingold, Tim. 1993. “Epilogue: Technology, Language, Intelligence: A Reconsideration of Basic Concepts.” In Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution, edited by K. Gibson and Tim Ingold, 449–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Radioaficionados and UFOs • 131 Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Otsuki, Grant Jun, Shiho Satsuka, Keiichi Omura, and Atsuro Morita. 2019. “Introduction.” In The World Multiple: The Quotidian Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds, edited by Keiichi Omura, Grant Jun Otsuki, Shiho Satsuka, and Atsuro Morita, 1–18. London: Routledge. Orozco, Santiago Rengifo. 2016. “Radios y ciudadanías, posibles construcciones desde las ciberculturas.” Miradas 14: 53–60. Ortiz, Octavio. 2009. Friendship: ¿Evidencias de contacto extraterrestre? Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Samuels, David. 2005. “Alien Tongues.” In E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces, edited by Debbora Battaglia, 94–129. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sconce, Jeffrey. 2000. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sneath, David, Martin Holbraad, and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2009. “Technologies of the Imagination: An Introduction.” Ethnos 74(1): 5–30. Stoichita, Victor A., and Bernd Brabec de Mori. 2017. “Postures of Listening: An Ontology of Sonic Percepts from an Anthropological Perspective.” Terrain online. Retrieved [19 November, 2018] from http://journals.openedition.org/terrain/16418. Strathern, Marilyn. 2002. “On Space and Depth.” In Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, edited by John Law and Annemarie Mol, 88– 115. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thursby, Laura. 2018. “Alien Imaginaries: Tracing the Extraterrestrial in America.” PhD thesis, Trent University, Canada. Tumminia, Diana G. 2007. “Introduction.” In Alien Worlds: Social and Religious Dimensions of Extraterrestrial Contact, xix–xlii. New York: Syracuse University Press.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Chapter 6

Hospitality and Proof Human Mediums, Technical Media, and Controversial Knowledge in Ghost-Hunting Practices in the United States

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ehler Voss

This volume testifies to the unresolved contradictions built into both the possible solutions to the problem of the paranormal and into the controversy itself. Scientific and theoretical approaches to the field usually do not seem able to resolve the contradictions of mediumistic controversies but rather add contradictions of their own. Furthermore, they tend to forget that the core of the controversy, or rather controversies, lies in practical negotiations and negotiations about practical exigencies. That is why an ethnographic approach shows time and again how local actors use all the theoretical resources of academic life and academic reasoning available to them, and that theoretical distinctions are bound to appear highly convincing in discussions but deeply flawed on the ground. This does not mean that the theoretical controversy is particularly different from practical controversies—on the contrary, it is just one practical way of dealing with the controversies about mediumship and a strand of the controversy itself. But practical mediumism is not about resolving theoretical questions or theoretical contradictions. In fact, it may even thrive on those contradictions. Based on anthropological fieldwork in California, where I followed the controversies surrounding the testing of paranormal claims and ended up among a deeply intertwined network of parapsychologists, spiritualists, ghost hunters, and skeptics,1 I will present in this chapter a seemingly banal case of mediumism that remains “basic” in many senses of the term: touching the base of modern mediumism and es-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Hospitality and Proof • 133

pecially spiritualism, and being nothing but basic. But even this basic case is controversial on the ground, and necessarily so. By focusing on a banal but controversial case, I will ask the complementary question: is there an equally banal basis for our theoretical controversies?

Looking for Ghosts

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Sandra is in her late forties and works during the week as an employee in a debt-collection agency. Five years ago, she went ghost hunting for the first time. A friend had advised her to look for a hobby after a series of horrible events—including the murder of her fiancé, the loss of her unborn child, and the loss of the job at which she had spent fifteen years, all in the span of three months—caused her to spend a year and a half in her house suffering from depression. Besides Disneyland, she was interested only in ghost-hunting shows, which she avidly followed on TV. Following that interest, she found a nearby ghost-hunting group via the internet. Over the course of the five years since she has been a part of the group, she has taken over the leadership of it, and it has since grown to become one of the largest in the United States with several hundred members, as she proudly says. Today, on average, she spends every other weekend on one or more “paranormal investigations.” The following report is from one of these investigations. I’d like to invite all of the spirits that are here in this home tonight that are associated with the Moats family, this house, or any of the items in the house to come forward and communicate with us. We mean you no harm or disrespect. We are not here to ask you to leave. We are just here to find out more about you, communicate; we will be asking questions throughout the night. Feel free to ask us questions, get our attention. We have a lot of equipment with us; nothing will harm you, so feel free to affect the equipment we have out. It will be explained to you as we go along the night what each thing does, or just talk to us, tap us on the shoulder, there will be a bell in certain places to ring. But just feel free to come forward and let us know that you are here and communicate. In doing this investigation, we ask that only spirits that are here for a greater good come forward and that we all are surrounded on all sides by the light and the power of God and that no dark entities should cross these boundaries.

After Sandra speaks these sentences, the ten people present separate into two groups. Sandra had already divided the groups in advance, and I follow her with three others to the third floor of an unfurnished and incompletely renovated mansion in Northern California. Those

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

134 • Ehler Voss

who weren’t familiar with the house had been given a tour earlier. A woman from the local historical society, who wore a baseball cap with the words “Ghost Host” on it, had explained, “The house was built in 1869 by William Moats, a native of Ohio; he first lived in Oregon before he came down here a little later to run a farm—and there we go . . . making a long story short.” One of the future plans was to convert the house into a museum. While the host led us through the house, Sandra repeatedly indicated that she was already being touched by the spirits, and she always demonstratively stepped aside to avoid touching them. Nevertheless, this seemed to express a certain anticipation of further contact. Once on the upper level of the house, we choose one of the empty rooms and sit in a circle. Sandra removes her announced equipment from her backpack and positions it in a semicircle around herself. She uses mainly various digital audio recorders and sets up a “REM Pod,” a cylindrical device with an antenna that flashes colorfully every now and then. Another participant wears glasses with an integrated red light camera and puts her mobile phone, which is running an application called “Ghost Radar,” in front of her. I have a video camera with me. Sandra suggests that we should conduct an “EVP session” first. EVP stands for “Electronic Voice Phenomena.” She explains briefly how it works: in turn, everyone asks a question, followed by a break of little less than ten seconds to give the spirits the opportunity to answer. After this is done, the recording is played back to hear the spirits’ answers. Sandra speaks into the recorder: “Starting first EVP session upstairs, third floor, Moats Mansion, Saturday June 13, in the room with the flag on the floor in the corner.” The person on my right asks the first question: “What’s your favorite room in the house?” Short break, then me: “Hi, my name is Ehler, what’s your name?” Sandra points the recorder at the person on my left: “Hello, it’s Shirley, I am back, and I would really, really appreciate it if you would communicate with us tonight. We . . . we come here and we have the utmost respect, and we’d really like for you to communicate with us tonight.” The next, a forty-year-old dentist: “I am wondering if you are an adult or a child.” Sandra says briefly, “Stomach,” to indicate that hers made a noise. The next participant: “Hi my name is Amy, I’ve been here before a couple of times. Can you please tell me why you keep setting the device off that’s in the doorway?” Sandra asks if anyone has just felt the ground shake, but nobody is able to confirm it. Then it’s her turn: “Hi, this is Sandra, I am sure you know me by now, I’ve been here too many times to count, and I brought more friends tonight to come and talk to you

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Hospitality and Proof • 135

and communicate. So if you are here, can you light up the green light on that device in the doorway again?” We wait for a moment, but nothing happens. Then she says, again in the direction of the spirits: “All right, I am gonna play that back and see if we can hear your answers now, so feel free to come forward and sit and listen for your voice when I play it back, and also, if you weren’t able to answer the questions in the first time around feel free to answer them again as they are played back again over the speaker because I do have other recorders recording to be able to pick up your voice, right?” Before she plays back the recording, she thanks the spirits and says to us participants that during the session it sounded and felt like someone was sitting on the floor next to her. When the recording is played back at a slower speed, Sandra recognizes a long, breathed “Hi” right at the beginning, which has settled over Sandra’s speech. This is taken note of with surprise and enthusiasm and played back several times. Then there is another sound recognized as a voice. Sandra plays the sequence several times. “Something’s coming up,” she hears, “it’s a female and it’s a whole sentence.” Sandra asks my neighbor to the right what she thinks. In her ear the voice says, “It’s something here.” Sandra disagrees—she hears “coming up” at the end. Sandra plays it again, and my neighbor now suggests that the voice says, “There’s a man coming up.” Sandra lets it all slide and keeps playing the tape. Since there is no understandable answer to the first question, we continue with my question about the name of the spirit. Sandra is not sure whether it is John, Joe, or Jay, but she is sure that a name can be heard. Something clearly discernible can be heard when the tape is played back slowly in response to the dentist’s question about whether it is a child or an adult. Sandra and the dentist instantly recognize “I’m an adult” as the answer. Even though the last two answers are not particularly clear, Sandra sums up after the first session: “Boy, they were chatty, chatty, chatty, . . . they answered a lot of questions. And the first one sounded female to me, the second one sounded like a small boy, and obviously there is an adult here that sounded male. It sounds like at least three people here.” Before we move on to the next EVP session, one of the participants asks Sandra whether we need to explain any of the equipment to the spirits. And so she explains to the spirits how they can make themselves noticeable through the technical devices: “Well, the equipment that is in the door, obviously, if you touch the antenna you can light up the lights.” When during her explanation the light of the device called REM Pod turned off, she noticed with a kind of amusement that “they”

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

136 • Ehler Voss

were now stopping to affect the devices, and continued: “Any of these flashlights that are on the ground, or up here, you can just twist them a little bit, and turn them on. And that device that Amy has, you can just go up to use it to communicate and talk, you can kick the ball, throw the ball, do whatever, none of this will harm you, all the devices with the little red and orange lights on the floor—those are recorders, just to help us hear your voice if you are not able to speak loud enough for us to hear your voice, a disembodied voice, we can hear you loud, we can hear you on the recorder, sometimes I can hear you, Nancy can hear you.” At the end, after about seven hours of investigation, when everyone is packing their bags, Sandra recapitulates some of the highlights of the evening, plays some of the recordings, and states, “We got a lot of evidence tonight!” I came across Sandra via the internet, right at the beginning of my fieldwork, and through her I got in contact with members of the local ghost-hunting scene—a loose network of individuals, couples, and groups of friends who are constantly gathering in new constellations of different sizes (in my experience from at least two to as many as fifty people, in rare cases) to search for the ghosts present in selected places. Sandra uses the term “ghosts” synonymously with the term “spirits,” which both refer to deceased people. The chosen places are usually— but not necessarily—historical buildings, such as old restaurants, hotels, or castles. It is not unusual, as in the case of the Moats family mansion, for these buildings to have been converted into museums. The owners or persons responsible for these buildings often advertise ghost hunting themselves. They may offer guided tours or rent the places out by the hour or night to such ghost-hunting groups, as they did in our case. The income is used mostly to maintain or restore the buildings. According to Sandra, the ninety dollars each of us paid will go entirely to the historical society. She herself earned nothing that evening. In contrast, another museum in the area is very cautious and wants to keep such activities hidden from the public. Therefore, the operators ask ghost-hunting groups not to announce their investigations publicly on the internet or elsewhere. These haunted houses, or haunted places (usually described as “one of the most haunted places in the world,” or at least “in the United States”), are partly canonized in books, and there are real classics among these places.2 Most of the people from the scene know them, visit them regularly, or have them right at the top of their to-go list. As a result, people who are strangers to each other can often talk about the local spirits as if they were mutual friends.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Hospitality and Proof • 137

Surveys in the United States show a strong belief in the existence of so-called paranormal phenomena. For example, YouGov found in 2019 that 45 percent of Americans believe in the existence of ghosts, 46 percent in the existence of other supernatural beings, 45 percent in demons, and 13 percent in vampires (Ballard 2019). The Chapman University Survey of American Fears from 2018 shows that 57.7 percent of Americans believe places can be haunted by spirits (Chapman University 2018), and a Gallup survey from 2005 found, without much difference from surveys from 1990 and 2001, that 37 percent believe that houses can be haunted, 32 percent that ghosts or the spirits of dead people can come back in certain places and situations, and 21 percent that people can communicate mentally with someone who has died (Moore 2005). Even if many ghost-hunting veterans say that the Hollywood film Ghostbusters from 1984, which originated from a spiritualistic environment,3 was an initial impetus to deal with this topic, today’s broad ghost-hunting movement in the United States and beyond is mainly associated with the spread of the ghost-hunting television shows (Bader, Baker, and Mencken 2017; Fitch 2013), especially the popular reality TV show Ghost Hunters, produced by the Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS) of New England, which was founded in 2004 and is also well known beyond the active ghost-hunting scene.4 Most of the people outside the scene whom I told about my research knew of these shows, had seen some of them themselves, or at least had teenage or adult offspring who watch them regularly. Various technical media are used in ghost hunting. These include, first and foremost, the audio recorders already described, “spirit boxes,” or modified radios that change frequencies continuously and very quickly so that sounds or words can be heard for a brief moment among the constant noise. The idea is to give the spirits the opportunity to manipulate these frequencies and thus generate meaningful responses. The spirits can also formulate meaningful answers via apps that produce random sounds from a pool of phonemes. Popular among ghost-hunting groups are also flashlights, which the spirits can use to answer yes-or-no questions by switching on and off as with spirit rappings. There are also devices that indicate the presence of ghosts, such as devices that measure electromagnetic fields. The deflection of the pointer on these devices is interpreted as an indication that ghosts could be present. Another technique is the use of laser grid pens, which project colored grids onto walls. The presence of ghosts is supposed to be detected by disturbances in the gratings or the absence of light. And

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

138 • Ehler Voss

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

there are devices that measure the temperature to detect “cold spots,” which likewise indicates the presence of ghosts. Ghost hunters will often combine approaches: communication with the spirits through the body and measuring their presence with technology. The presence of ghosts may be felt in the form of bodily sensations such as nausea, pain, or cold. Indeed, people often take over the role of receiver instead of using technology. They will listen to voices without the aid of technical devices or will receive other subtle perceptions or messages. In some cases, however, spirits also make themselves noticeable by making noises, moving objects, or destroying or disabling technical devices. Discharging batteries is also very popular. Communication with spirits via audio recorders was not invented by American ghost hunters. Friedrich Jürgenson, who while playing his tape recordings of bird song in Stockholm in 1959 heard a short trumpet solo and then a male voice speak in Norwegian about “nocturnal bird voices,” became famous for this method of communicating with “the other side.” Shortly afterward, he was also addressed by his name in German (Jürgenson 1967: 12–35). From then on, he devoted himself to communicating with the deceased using various audio recorders, eventually inspiring the likes of Konstantin Raudive (1969, 1973), Hans Bender (1970), and many others to research and collect tape voices. Ernst Senkowski (1989) later called this “instrumental transcommunication” (ITC), a term he used until his death in 2015, even though the term “electronic voice phenomena” (EVP) became more popular in English-speaking countries.

Looking for Localization The practice of ghost hunting is accompanied by a strong critical commentary. Parapsychologists—who usually see themselves as researchers of the unexplored and as advisors to people in crisis, and who, if they are not already convinced of the existence of so-called paranormal phenomena, are at least open to believe in them—usually view the ghost-hunting groups very critically and strive for “boundary work” aimed at exclusion (Gieryn 1983). In company with skeptics, they accuse the ghost hunters of being unscientific. Ghost-hunting investigations are therefore “scientific investigations without science” (Radford 2010), i.e., “pseudoscience” (Farha 2014; Hines 2003; Nees 2015), and critics make fun of high-tech ghost hunters and their “technomysticism” that is considered “a fusion of scientific method and spiri-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Hospitality and Proof  •  139

tual belief,” an “often weird, methodological hybrid” (Potts 2004: 211). For many parapsychologists, the assumed unscientifc approach of many ghost-hunting groups, which they see revealed in the naïve belief in ghosts and technology as well as in the lack of methodological criticism, combined with the pronounced media presence, discredits the entire serious parapsychology community and serves to reinforce the already precarious and threatened status of this research by inadvertently supporting the skeptics (cf. Kundu 2011; Mayer 2010, 2012; Mayer and Anton 2011). Larry, a parapsychologist from the San Francisco Bay Area whom Sandra sometimes calls one of her teachers, also distinguishes himself from the ghost-hunting groups, which often consist of laypersons who have nothing to do with scientifc research. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that they work in the dark, whereas the frst commandment for science is, lights on! While this kind of criticism on the part of parapsychology is usually still based on the possibility that such phenomena exist—either caused by ghosts or by an unspecifed force within the human being, as the poltergeist hypothesis states—and that they can actually be subjected to scientifc inquiry, captured, and proven by the scientifc method, people who identify themselves as skeptics usually seek to completely reject the ghost or poltergeist hypothesis. They attribute the feeling and seeing of ghosts or their actions, among other things, to such phenomena as infrasound (Tandy and Lawrence 1998), magnetic felds (Cook and Persinger 2001), or psychological suggestion (Wiseman 2011). Such debates refect a transatlantic controversy that has been going on since the beginning of the nineteenth century about the capacities of human mediums and technical media. It is a controversy—positioned between science and religion, seriousness and play, authenticity and fction—in which opposing approaches have been pitted against one another from the beginning and that, despite powerful attempts at domestication by modern psychologies and natural sciences trying to transfer the forces that cause mediumism into the inner realm of the human being, has not yet been resolved. Erhard Schüttpelz (2015a) argues that this controversy over mediumism began with the duel between the physician Franz Anton Mesmer and the exorcist Johann Joseph Gaßner at the end of the eighteenth century, as a result of which the modern use of the term “medium” takes shape for both human mediums and technical media. Mesmer saw himself as an Enlightenment fgure and used the term “fuidum” to describe a universal and all-pervading force that can cause illnesses in people’s bodies if its fow is interrupted. Such illnesses can be cured by bringing these disruptions

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

140 • Ehler Voss

of the fluidum back into flow through the intervention of a healer or various technical devices and magnets. For Mesmer, there was only one disease and one cure (Schott 1982). During treatments, Mesmer’s patients showed much the same symptoms as the large number of followers of Gaßner, who was at the time very famous as an exorcist. In a kind of media campaign, a circle of Enlightenment figures pitted Mesmer against Gaßner. With Mesmer’s concept of the fluid, there was no need for demons anymore; secularism was played off against religiosity and the Church (Ego 1991). This controversy about Mesmer and Gaßner has produced many interpretations: it has been played down as a mere triviality without great cultural-historical significance; the commonalities of Mesmer and Gaßner, and thus historical continuity, have been emphasized; Mesmer has been interpreted as the winner of the Mesmer-Gaßner debate and as the forerunner of a new epoch, or the other way around (Baier 2015). For Schüttpelz, the debate between Mesmer and Gaßner is a suitable heuristic mark for understanding the handling of trance practices in the following centuries precisely because of these different and contrary interpretations. Regardless of the historical continuity and common forerunners of Mesmer and Gaßner, the debate can be understood as the starting point of a major public trial of mediumism, which sought to locate the agency in trance practices and attempted to institutionalize the various responses to them. Schüttpelz takes a perspective that also contributes to the understanding of today’s ghost-hunting practices, following the actor network theory (cf. Latour 2015), which understands the world as a constantly reassembling network of heterogeneous human and nonhuman entities, none of which has control over the course of the process of action. Every observed object is seen to be impure and controversial at its core, and therefore, even at the very beginning of the debate, all the different and contradictory answers were already available. This means that it is not so much the controversy that needs to be explained, but the stabilization of a specific response or interpretation. Schüttpelz applies the concept of “boundary objects” from the work of Susan Leigh Star (Star and Griesemer 1989) to mediumism. Mediumism thus appears as an object that was robust enough to remain stable between different contexts and claims while remaining underdetermined enough to satisfy quite different practical and theoretical claims. After the Mesmer-Gaßner debate, mediumism received many small and local interpretations that ascribed the trance-like states of mediumism to a range of internal or external sources, which are only very roughly defined by terms such as mesmerism, somnambulism, hysteria,

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Hospitality and Proof • 141

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

hypnosis, spiritualism, and later also psychical research and parapsychology. The core of the controversy—the localization of the mediumistic agency—can be explained by the concept of the medium. The medium is something that is in the middle and cannot be attributed to either one or the other. It is betwixt and between and thus indifferent. Technical media and human mediums have the same characteristics of indifference and always refer to other mediums. The common clear distinction between animated human mediums and inanimate technical media is thus the result of a work of purification, because the two are inseparably connected with each other. Actor-network theory extends the spiritualist slogan that everyone is a medium by the slogan that also everything is a medium, which has led some of its interpreters to speak of an actor-media theory (Thielmann and Schüttpelz 2013). From such a perspective, things, bodies, and signs interact in any practice, whereby each of the human and nonhuman actors, or rather each medium, involved has an irreducible agency of its own by which it evades the complete control of another participating medium. Each medium in a network of this kind adds its own dynamic to the course of the situation to varying degrees. Thus, from the perspective of the media network, technical media and human mediums each prove to be semiautonomous. Thus, the idea of pure self-writers, which function as pure mediums of passage and only mediate what is to be mediated without being involved in the result themselves, fails (cf. Kassung 2015). All media are therefore always co-creators, and as with the ghost photography of Albert von Schrenck-Notzing in the 1920s, for example, the technical media employed serve not only to depict ghosts but also—and above all—to conjure them (Voss 2013).

Looking for Evidence This brings us back to the debate about ghost hunters and their media practices. “We got a lot of evidence tonight!” is a summary Sandra often gives after such evenings. For this purpose, the participants often remember what the spirits said and sometimes play the voices back again. However, what Sandra considers evidence is always under suspicion. So she explained to the dentist on that evening, “I did the playbacks live so that nobody later on can say I edited the recordings. . . . It’s one thing to put it on your computer and get your evidence. But for the people that are here . . . as proof.” But the aforementioned criticism of ghost-hunting practices in the form of polemics against the pseudo-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

142 • Ehler Voss

scientific, fully armed, high-tech ghost hunters and their naïve belief in technology misses the point, at least among the people I hung out with. To understand why, a look at the actor-media network of ghost hunters helps. The main actors involved in the séances and necessary for a successful ghost communication are the place, the humans, the ghosts, and the technical equipment brought by the ghost hunters. All these actors must be prepared in a certain way to make the practice successful, and many of these preparations are carried out as the situation develops, which applies not only to ghost hunting but also to all other nonscientific as well as scientific practices (cf. Pinch 2008; Schaffer 1994; Schüttpelz 2015b). The place in this case is a historical site that is suitable because many ghosts are assumed to be present here, based on many years of experience. To get in contact with ghosts, Sandra opens a virtual protected space where only good ghosts appear, “that are here for a greater good . . ., and that we all are surrounded on all sides by the light and the power of God and that no dark entities should cross these boundaries.” Humans also need a certain degree of preparation. Hearing and understanding the voices, I am told again and again, is a skill one learns over time: it requires a certain training. It is important, because a lot depends on the mediumistic skills of the participants on ghost hunts and paranormal investigations. Many also receive training from television shows. For example, I was very surprised when in the course of the evening I realized that the dentist from my group was taking part in such an event for the first time. He had almost no questions about the procedure, the equipment, or the authenticity of what was found there. From the beginning, he asked his questions to the spirits in terms, content, and style that indicated he had been participating in such events for years, but it turned out that he had just been watching the shows for years. The charisma of the ghost hunters results from their ability to achieve results, that is, to establish and convincingly demonstrate ghost contact. The protagonists of the television shows have become national and international stars who can make a living from ghost hunting (cf. Kelli Sayed 2011). Even on the local level, many leaders of ghost-hunting groups have a certain celebrity status. Sandra is a good example and is recognized by many as an authority in the field. She is attributed special abilities, and she herself is very dedicated to demonstrating these abilities. During my first investigation with Sandra, she put me in her own group with the promise to show me her practices, as well as to ensure that I had a more interesting evening than I would have with the

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Hospitality and Proof • 143

other group, because in her presence much more spirit activity usually occurs. Her self-perception was reflected in how others perceived her. I would be lucky to be with Sandra; “She always gives the best results,” some participants told me independently. Even that night during the EVP session, she not only demonstrated that she feels the presence of the spirits, she also repeatedly pointed out during the walk through the mansion at the beginning of the investigation that she was being touched by spirits who obviously couldn’t wait to make contact with her. Sandra’s abilities also make her the final authority in judging the nature and content of the voices heard through EVP. As can be seen from the example above, although she herself has to listen several times and is often hesitant, she frequently ignores others’ suggestions and defines what the ghost itself has said. This also corresponds to her selfimage: as she says in an interview, she is there to introduce and train the group, to understand what is being said, even if it is a tightrope walk, because there is always the danger that the participants hear the voices only because she suggested them. That is why she tries, as far as possible, to slow down the recordings and play them repeatedly, so that the participants can really hear the voices for themselves. This brings us to the other entities involved, the technical devices. Many ghost hunters do not see technical media, especially tape recorders, solely as objective self-writing machines. Sandra explained to me that she carries with her many different tape recorders and often operates several of them at the same time, because each machine has its own characteristics and therefore one of them might give better results than others will. She sometimes noticed this when she listened to the different recorders afterward. This could be due to the device itself or to an interaction between recorders and ghosts, when some ghosts might get along better with some recorders than with others. But neither the special character of each tape recorder nor the interaction of ghosts and recorders is solely relevant; the interaction between humans and recorders is also important, since the abilities of technical media are linked to the (mediumistic) abilities of humans. Not only does one have to train one’s hearing in order to recognize meaningful answers in the sounds, there are also ritual leaders who decide on the meaning of what is heard in controversial cases. In addition and even more crucial, the results of recording with technical media and of playing these recordings are understood to be dependent on the person holding the device in his or her hand. The greater a person’s mediumistic abilities, the better the results. When the results of the different groups are compared in the evening, the success is always related to the leaders of the small

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

144 • Ehler Voss

groups. As with Sandra, good results are the consequence of the leader’s special ability. But the matter is even more complicated, because the responsibility for good results lies not only with the people but also with the spirits, who need certain abilities and training. Jürgenson (1967: 247), one of the pioneers of ghost communication through audio recorders, was keen to emphasize the achievements of his assistants in the afterlife, who also had to learn how to use the technical equipment in order to facilitate communication. And so Sandra, as shown above, is also always trying to give clues to the spirits and show them how they can make themselves noticeable, for example, by letting the spirits know that they can make themselves audible even through the (slowly played) recordings: “It will be explained to you as we go along the night what each thing does.” However, not only can the contact be mediated by technical media, it can also be mediated directly by humans. The spirits are attributed a life of their own here, but sometimes they do not want to communicate, sometimes they cannot, or perhaps they are too shy or have other reasons. In any case, they can hardly be forced to do anything; one can ask, appeal, or even command, but there is no guarantee that the spirits will follow. While the interference between the realm of the dead and the realm of the living is actually desired, it can also have a flip side, which is expressed by the possibility that the spirits go too far and damage or destroy technical devices or even attack participants’ bodies. When Sandra talks about her experiences with ghosts, she usually mentions not just batteries discharging—which is a common thing— but also scratches or other kinds of marks that the ghosts have left on her skin, which she likes to show photos of. The ability to generate a large amount of evidence, i.e., to get a lot of words or sentences from the spirits, makes Sandra a star and a leader, on the one hand, but at the same time also serves to bring this leadership role into question. Even though Sandra’s authority is widely accepted, her way of locating the mediumistic agency is partly contested. Martha and Abbey, both in their early forties, have long been involved in Sandra’s ghost hunts. But the two friends got to a point where they didn’t want anything to do with her anymore. For them, what Sandra is doing is “not enough” and is “too boring.” They say they are no longer interested in proving the existence of ghosts weekend after weekend. They already know that there are ghosts, and they don’t need to verify it every time anew. They would much rather “work” with the spirits,

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Hospitality and Proof • 145

that is, learn from them or teach or help them. Their investigations are therefore often aimed more at identifying the spirits more clearly, asking about their history, and often explaining to the spirits in which situation they find themselves as spirits. It often turns out that the local spirits can not only plunge unsuspecting people into a crisis but also often find themselves in crisis, i.e., they were murdered, had suffered from diseases, or were treated unfairly, which torments them to this day. Ghost hunters can help such spirits find peace by helping them to leave their current place and to reach “other levels” in the “other world.” Martha and Abbey, who finally split off from Sandra’s group, don’t question Sandra’s ability to produce good results, but they interpret her apparent success rate differently. In their view, it serves as evidence that it is Sandra’s own “psychokinetic” abilities that produce so many results. Since Sandra wished so much to be a medium, Martha and Abbey suggested that she herself was producing the results—consciously or unconsciously. According to the ghost hunters described here, technical media cannot solve the problem of objectivity; technical media are not self-writing machines through which the invisible is made visible, independently of human beings. Instead, the functioning of technical media and the results they produce depend on the capabilities of those who use them. Since ghost hunters in their media practices generally treat technical media and human mediums symmetrically, “success” in technical ghost communication becomes a question of a fragile cooperative interplay among bodies, signs, and visible and invisible things. The other common criticism of ghost hunting mentioned above, which is usually voiced by parapsychologists and so-called skeptics, is the matter of “scientific investigations without science.” Such a claim also ignores Sandra’s self-image and the character of her practices. If the evening ends with the triumphant sentence, “We got a lot of evidence tonight,” then this does not mean proof in a scientific sense. Sandra, who intensely turned her attention to the realm of the dead after the sudden deaths of her fiancé and unborn child, is not interested in finding out how mediumistic communication works or what it means for a cosmology. There is no sophisticated cosmological order in which what has been experienced is classified and confirmed. And it’s not even about accumulating knowledge of the nature of a somehow different and foreign world or about a place and its history, as is often described in the case of other “ghost tours” (e.g. Edwards 2019; Hanks 2015; Miles 2015). There is no science and no theology associated with it. This would also

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

146 • Ehler Voss

explain, among other things, why Sandra only very vaguely answers questions about how all the equipment she has with her works. Nevertheless, doubt is somehow omnipresent in ghost hunting, and Sandra, too, regularly warns the participants to question all perception and points out that not every breeze is a paranormal phenomenon and that sometimes one hears on the tape one’s own stomach rumbling. Michele Hanks, following the publication of her excellent ethnographic work on ghost hunters in England (2015), thinks that the English ghost hunters with whom she spent time leave the question of the ontological status of the spirits open and avoid any clear answers to that question. She explains, “Unlike scientists who solve their motivating research question and must then move on to new challenges, doubting the reality of the paranormal, the legitimacy of their work, and their own evidence allowed paranormal investigators to remain focused on it. By preventing investigators from establishing clear knowledge claims about ghosts, doubt ultimately necessitated the continued practices of paranormal investigating and allowed for the amassing of paranormal experiences” (Hanks 2016a: 820). Hanks interprets doubt functionally: it leads, on the one hand, to not having to end the practices of sensation and, on the other hand, to being able to carry out spiritual contacts in a secular society without having to risk one’s reputation too much—a function that is also performed by maintaining a sense of humor, through which one can express a distance from the object of investigation and present oneself as superior (Hanks 2016b). These functions of doubt are clearly in evidence among ghost hunters. But to explain the omnipresence of doubt solely by its function and to attribute it to the specific conditions of modern, supposedly secular societies, while simultaneously trying to limit that doubt solely to the ontological status of the existence or nonexistence of spirits, is somewhat incomplete and ignores the fundamental qualities of each medium and each mediumistic séance. On the one hand, as seen in the case of Sandra, there are significantly more facets than the question of whether ghosts or other paranormal phenomena exist or not. On the other hand, focusing solely on the function of doubt fails to recognize the indifference of mediumism in general and the only existing fact that doubt lies at the heart of mediality (cf. Voss 2014). This indifference also makes it difficult for scientists to meet the ideal invoked by Hanks of the “fact finders,” who solve their motivating research question “and then move on to new challenges.” Parapsychology, which has been spinning around the question of mediumism for more than a hundred years, can tell a thing or two about it.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Hospitality and Proof • 147

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Looking for Presence But Sandra is not interested in determining any ontology. Thus, the conclusion Michele Hanks draws from her fieldwork does not correspond to Sandra’s practices. Although the dentist may relegate ontology to limbo during his first investigation—which, however, did not prevent him from participating in a seemingly serious way—for Sandra, the ontological status of ghosts is not a matter of debate. Although she is also concerned with locating the agency and always takes into account the possibility of a non-ghostly cause of any perception, the spirits are always available as possible actors, because Sandra does not question the existence of the spirits. And as she once told me, her ghost contacts reach back to her childhood. Doubts, about whether an experience was actually a real contact or if it had another, “natural,” i.e., physical, cause, or whether it was due to imagination, do not arise to question her basic ontological assumption. Even Martha and Abbey, when they criticize Sandra’s investigations for being boring because they know that ghosts exist and don’t have to test it every weekend, misjudge that Sandra’s practices are not about testing whether ghosts exist or not but rather are about her desire to “work” with ghosts. Sandra is not aiming for evidence of the existence of the spirits but for evidence of their presence. She is aiming to prove presence and thus is looking for sensation in the double sense of the word: experience and spectacle. The sense of banality often associated with mediumistic contact, which seems to be less about the content than about the communication itself, becomes understandable. Usually names or preferences are asked, or the spirits are simply asked to show themselves somehow. As Sandra put it in her greeting of the spirits cited above, “Just feel free to come forward and let us know that you are here and communicate.” Sandra is looking for presence as an opportunity to act in presence: inviting, addressing, being polite, making guests feel comfortable, caring for their wishes—in a word, being a good host. Sandra calls this “a lot of evidence,” but of course hospitality is not about scientific evidence at all. A famous dictum says that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In this case, one would have to conclude that an immersion in the evidence of presence is not about documenting and presenting evidence. It is about an experience of being in the presence of others, of being-with, of helping and being helped, of mutual assistance. Discussions about the proof of presence are not proof that these discussions are about proof at all, at least not for all participants. Proof

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

148 • Ehler Voss

may be a goal only for some but a means to another end for others. And the same goes for talking about proof. Indeed, this is what Malinowski (1923) called “phatic communion”— and what Gísli Pálsson detected as a central element in Nurit BirdDavid’s reconsideration of the term “animism” (Bird-David 1999: S83), and what Paul Manning (2018:74–77) applied to spiritualism—which is about hospitality and acknowledging the reciprocity of interaction for its own sake. It may seem to be a “degree zero” of communication, and a “degree below zero” of dealing with the question of proof. But after two hundred years of controversies about mediumism, taking the degree zero of interaction with spirits for granted remains a controversial threshold. Sandra’s behavior is about initiating, incorporating, and personifying that threshold for others: for the living and the dead. This kind of mediumism can prosper only when all people present are hospitable enough. And one may say that this attitude has a long history—it is the history of modern spiritualism. Of course, spiritualists have tried to convince their opponents time and again that there was sufficient scientific proof of the existence of spirits and of their communication with the living. But looking more carefully at the interactions between spiritualists and skeptics (ever since the Fox sisters) shows that the supreme goal of spiritualists, even in trials of proof, lay in convincing nonspiritualists to come into contact with the spirits and to become as hospitable as spiritualists. In other words, they acted like good hosts convincing skeptics to become good hosts themselves. In this sense, Sandra’s behavior and her banal controversies on the ground are emblematic of the basic actions—and misunderstandings— of modern spiritualism. We can see that our theoretical controversies about mediumism have a very banal basis. As academics, we often assume that when people talk about proof and evidence, they are discussing criteria of proof and that academics may join them by corroborating scientific arguments. We should take the perplexity that emerges more seriously than we do. And we should take more seriously the interaction in which people like Sandra politely but stubbornly stress their concerns for a friendly situation, and that these concerns override any insistence on accumulating evidence. The hospitality toward proof-seekers is part of modern spiritualism, but the proof of hospitality is at the core of modern spiritualism. Observing Sandra’s work, it is comforting to know that more than 250 years after Emanuel Swedenborg’s “Arcana Coelestia,” the practice of hospitality still outweighs any other goal.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Hospitality and Proof • 149

Ehler Voss is currently visiting professor for anthropology at the University of Bremen, Germany. His research focuses on the interferences between media, medicine, and religion in the past and present. He has done anthropological fieldwork mainly in Germany and the United States and received his PhD from the University of Leipzig with an ethnographic study of mediumistic healing in Germany. He is chair of the Association for Anthropology and Medicine (AGEM); editor of Curare: Journal of Medical Anthropology; and coeditor of boasblogs.org. His last publication was the edited volume Mediality on Trial: Testing and Contesting Trance and other Media Techniques (2020) (Series: Okkulte Moderne) published by De Gruyter.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. From 2014 to 2015, I spent a year in California conducting fieldwork, followed by several shorter visits over the next three years. I would like to thank the ghost-hunters described in this chapter as well as the Department of Communication at Stanford University for their hospitality during my stay in California and the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the proof of its generosity by funding the fieldwork. I am also very grateful to the editors of this volume and Erhard Schüttpelz for their helpful comments. All names of the actors described are pseudonyms. 2. For California, see among others Auerbach and Martin 2011 and Dwyer 2009, 2010. But in other regions there are also such travel guides; see among others the book series America’s Haunted Road Trip, which deals with individual states as well as cities like New York and New Orleans. 3. The spiritualistic background of the family of screenwriter and actor Dan Aykroyd as a source of inspiration for the film becomes clear in the book by his father Peter Aykroyd (2009). 4. Further reality ghost-hunting shows in the United States include Ghost Hunter (Syfy, since 2004), Paranormal State (A&E Network, 2007–11), Ghost Adventures (Travel Channel, since 2008), Ghost Hunters Academy (Syfy, 2009–19), Ghost Lab (Discovery Channel, 2009–11), Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files (Syfy, 2010–12), and Haunted Encounters (Biography Channel, since 2012).

References Auerbach, Loyd, and Annette Martin. 2011. Ghost Detectives’ Guide to Haunted San Francisco. Fresno, CA: Quill Driver Books. Aykroyd, Peter. 2009. A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Séances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters. New York: Rodale.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

150 • Ehler Voss Bader, Christopher D., Joseph O. Baker, and F. Carson Mencken. 2017. Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture. New York: New York University Press. Baier, Karl. 2015. “Mesmer versus Gaßner: Eine Kontroverse der 1770er Jahre und ihre Interpretationen.” In Von der Dämonologie zum Unbewussten: Die Transformation der Anthropologie um 1800, edited by Maren Sziede and Helmut Zander, 47–84. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Ballard, Jamie. 2019. “45% of Americans Believe That Ghosts and Demons Exist,” YouGov, retrieved 29 November 2019 from https://today.yougov .com/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2019/10/21/paranormal-beliefs-gho sts-demons-poll. Bender, Hans. 1970. “Zur Analyse außergewöhnlicher Stimmphänomene auf Tonband.” Zeitschrift für Parapsychologie und Grenzgebiete der Psychologie 12: 226–38. Bird-David, Nurit. 1999. “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40 (Suppl.): S67–S91. Chapman University. 2018. “Paranormal America 2018: Chapman University Survey of American Fears,” The Voice of Wilkinson, Chapman University, retrieved 29 November 2019 from https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/ 2018/10/16/paranormal-america-2018/. Cook, Charles M., and Michael A. Persinger. 2001. “Geophysical Variables and Behavior: XCII. Experimental Elicitation of the Experience of a Sentient Being by Right Hemispheric, Weak Magnetic Fields: Interaction with Temporal Lobe Sensitivity.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 92(2): 447–8. Dwyer, Jeff. 2009. Ghost Hunter’s Guide to California’s Gold Rush Country. Gretna, LA: Pelican. ———. 2010. Ghost Hunter’s Guide to Monterey and California’s Central Coast. Gretna, LA: Pelican. Edwards, Alicia. 2019. “‘Do the Ghosts Roam Along the Corridors Here at Ordsall Hall?’ Paranormal Media, Haunted Heritage, and Investing Historical Capital.” Journal of Popular Culture 52(6): 1312–33. Ego, Anneliese. 1991. “Animalischer Magnetismus” oder “Aufklärung”: Eine mentalitätsgeschichtliche Studie zum Konflikt um ein Heilkonzept im 18. Jahrhundert. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Farha, Bryan (ed.). 2014. Pseudoscience and Deception: The Smoke and Mirrors of Paranormal Claims. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Fitch, Marc E. 2013. Paranormal Nation: Why America Needs Ghosts, UFOs, and Bigfoot. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Gieryn, Thomas F. 1983. “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists.” American Sociological Review 48(6): 781–95. Hanks, Michele. 2015. Haunted Heritage: The Cultural Politics of Ghost Tourism, Populism, and the Past. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Hospitality and Proof • 151 ———. 2016a. “Between Electricity and Spirit: Paranormal Investigation and the Creation of Doubt in England.” American Anthropologist 118(4): 811–23. ———. 2016b. “Redefining Rationality: Paranormal Investigators’ Humour in England.” Ethnos 81(2): 262–89. Hines, Terence. 2003. Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Amherst, NY: Prometheus. Jürgenson, Friedrich. 1967. Sprechfunk mit Verstorbenen: Eine dem Atomzeitalter gemäße Form der praktischen technisch-physikalischen Kontaktherstellung mit dem Jenseits. Freiburg im Breisgau: Hermann Bauer. Kassung, Christian. 2015. “Self-Writing Machines: Technology and the Question of the Self.” Communication +1 4: Article 5. Kelli Sayed, Deonna. 2011. Paranormal Obsession: America’s Fascination with Ghosts and Hauntings, Spooks and Spirits. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn. Kundu, Michael. 2011. “The Paradox of Contemporary Paranormal Research.” Soul Searchers. Retrieved 29 November 2019 from https://soulsearchers .spheresoflight.com.au/the-paradox-of-contemporary-paranormal-research/. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1923. “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages.” In The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, edited by Charles Kay Ogden and Ivor A. Richards, 296–336. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Manning, Paul. 2018. “Spiritualist Signal and Theosophic Noise.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 28(1): 67–92. Mayer, Gerhard. 2010. “Die Geisterjäger kommen: Phänomenologie der Ghost Hunting Groups.” Zeitschrift für Anomalistik, 10(1–2): 17–48. ———. 2012. “Ghost Hunting als Freizeitbeschäftigung: Über die gegenwärtige Welle von Spukuntersuchungen durch Geisterjägergruppen.” Grenzgebiete der Wissenschaft 61(3): 195–221. Mayer, Gerhard, and Andreas Anton. 2011. “‘Think You Have a Poltergeist? Or Is It the Pipes?’ Ghost Hunting Groups in den USA und in Deutschland.” Retrieved 29 November 2019 from http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/35/ 35783/1.html. Miles, Tiya. 2015. Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Moore, David W. 2005. “Three of Four Americans Believe in Paranormal,” Gallup, retrieved 29 November 2019 from https://news.gallup.com/poll/ 16915/three-four-americans-believe-paranormal.aspx. Nees, Michael. 2015. “Hearing Ghost Voices Relies on Pseudoscience and Fallibility of Human Perception.” The Conversation. Retrieved 29 November 2019 from https://theconversation.com/hearing-ghost-voices-relies-onpseudoscience-and-fallibility-of-human-perception-48160.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

152 • Ehler Voss Pinch, Trevor. 2008. “Technology and Institutions. Living in a Material World.” Theory and Society 37: 461–483. Potts, John. 2004. “Ghost Hunting in the Twenty-First Century.” In From Shaman to Scientist: Essays on Humanity’s Search for Spirits, edited by James Houran, 211–32. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Radford, Benjamin. 2010. “Ghost-Hunting Mistakes: Science and Pseudoscience in Ghost Investigations.” Skeptical Inquirer. Retrieved 29 November 2019 from https://skepticalinquirer.org/2010/11/ghost_hunting_mistakes/. Raudive, Konstantin. 1969. Unhörbares wird hörbar: Auf den Spuren einer Geisterwelt. Remagen: Otto Reichl. ———. 1972. Überleben wir den Tod? Neue Experimente mit dem Stimmenphänomen. Remagen: Otto Reichl. Schaffer, Simon. 1994. From Physics to Anthropology—and Back Again. Cambridge, MA: Prickly Pear. Schott, Heinz. 1982. “Die Mitteilung des Lebensfeuers: Zum therapeutischen Konzept von Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815).” Medizinhistorisches Journal 17(3): 195–214. Schüttpelz, Erhard. 2015a. “Trance Mediums and New Media: The Heritage of a European Term.” In Trance Mediums and New Media: Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction, edited by Heike Behrend, Anja Dreschke, and Martin Zillinger, 56–76. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2015b. “Skill, Deixis, Medien.” In Mediale Anthropologie, edited by Christiane Voss and Lorenz Engell, 153–82. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink. Senkowski, Ernst. 1989. Instrumentelle Transkommunikation: Ergebnisse und Probleme der medial-technischen Verwirklichung audio-visueller Kontakte mit autonom erscheinenden intelligenten Strukturen unbekannter Seinsbereiche. Frankfurt am Main: R. G. Fischer Star, Susan, and James Griesemer. 1989. “Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39.” Social Studies of Science 19(3): 387–420. Tandy, Vic, and Tony R. Lawrence. 1998. “The Ghost in the Machine.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 62: 360–64. Thielmann, Tristan, and Erhard Schüttpelz (eds.). 2013. Akteur-Medien-Theorie. Bielefeld: transcript. Voss, Ehler. 2013. “Die Erziehung der Medien: Reinigungsarbeiten am Spiritismus bei Albert von Schrenck-Notzing.” Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 1: 81–94. ———. 2014. “A Sprout of Doubt: The Debate on the Medium’s Agency in Mediumism, Media Studies, and Anthropology.” In Tradition and the Popular in Asia and Europe, edited by Judith Schlehe and Evamaria Müller, 205–24. Bielefeld: transcript. Wiseman, Richard. 2011. Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There. London: Macmillian.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Chapter 7

Picturing the Unseen Polaroid Practice and the Re-enchantment of the Western World Andrea Lathrop Ligueros

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction Photography, Tom Gunning argues, holds a special place in the Western world, mainly due to the indexical physical traces the world leaves in the photographic plate, conflating the conceivable with the visible (2015: 18). This capacity of photography to open up a “realm of visual certainty” (2015: 18), however, soon exceeded the limits of the “physical realm.” Though perceived as an instrument of positivism during the nineteenth century, photography also lent itself particularly well to that of the supernatural and the occult. The spiritualist movement, whose origin is often associated to the American Fox sisters—Leah, Margaret, and Kate—and their capacity to communicate with the dead through “rappings” that evoked those of the telegraph, coincided with an era in which scientific knowledge and new technological developments were at their height. Before the arrival of modern technologies such as the telegraph, electricity, and photography, the record of spirit phenomena depended on writing or drawing, often creating imperfect and inadequate accounts (Harvey 2013: 51). This changed, however, with the arrival of new communicating and registering media and Spiritualists’ eagerness to “embrace . . . new developments in technology, such as cameras, as a means of demonstrating the validity of their revelations and offering proof of the reality of spiritual forces and the survival of the soul” (Wojcik 2009: 110). It is in this line, then, that photography burst into the spiritual movement, enabling the materi-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

154 • Andrea Lathrop Ligueros

alization of spirits to be visually captured on the photographic plate while also mediating the realm of the spirits with that of the living. At the same time, photography’s capacity to visualize and materialize the bodies and faces of spirits contested other spiritualist practices, such as those utilizing the telegraph and wireless, which, although mediating the world of the living and that of the dead, did it in a disembodied, “invisible” way. The material and embodied capacity of photography to empirically make things visible, however, has not been the case with all photographic media. The “transformation of atoms into bits” (Negroponte 1995: 4), for example, brought about by digitalization resulted in an increased perception of photographic “immateriality” and of “digital disconnection,” which certain photographic practices have served to “remedy.” This is the case with Polaroid, a photographic technology that despite predictions of its disappearance—Peter Buse noted in 2007 that “Polaroid was approaching extinction” (2007: 35)—the medium is more popular than it ever was during the 2000s. How do we explain the prevalence of technologies such as Polaroid when other forms of instant photography, such as digital,1 are not only widely available but far cheaper and easier to use? Is it purely technostalgia (Braun 2009: 140), or does it say something more about people’s expectations of photographic mediation and, perhaps, technologies in general? This chapter will focus on the mediating relationship that media technologies establish with the body. It will draw on the disembodied practices of the telegraph and the wireless in opposition to the embodied nature of analog photography, which will be analyzed through the case study of Ted Serios’s thoughtographs, and ethnographic accounts collected while conducting fieldwork with the London Polaroid community. This chapter argues that as much as nineteenth-century electronic communication technologies and their capability of connecting to another realm have been seen as a response to modernity’s increasingly unsettling model of the subject—which followed Freud’s theory of the unconscious, repression, and trauma (Sconce 2000: 90)—the contemporary practice of Polaroid can also be seen as answering people’s anxieties about disembodied and disenchanted photographic practices that make practitioners feel detached from the “real” (understood here as material) world. Hence, the “digital disconnection” practitioners resist through the use of Polaroid reveal that the meanings attributed to Polaroid photography have shifted, with the very characteristics that once defined it—speed, instantaneity, and the “seamless” appearance that Edwin Land, Polaroid’s creator, wanted to achieve through the me-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Picturing the Unseen • 155

dium—being revalued in the light of digital media’s promises of immediacy and transparency. Lastly, this chapter argues against an assumed “modern” desire of transparency when it comes to technology and proposes that the continued use of Polaroid photography corresponds to a desire to reinstate the body into the aesthetic experience.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Disembodied Media When Edwin Land announced his intention of achieving a “seamless” camera that appeared to be transparent—that is, it would vanish in the act of mediation—he was fulfilling what has been described as the longterm “dream of mass mediation in the age of electronification” (Morris 2002: 383): that of “pure” transmission without a medium. This was already present in the medium of the telegraph and has been augmented with every new media technology since then (Blanchette 2011: 1043). This intention of eliminating all traces of mediation can be explained through what Patrick Eisenlohr calls media technology’s “promise of transparency,” whereby “in successful acts of mediation what is being mediated appears to be fully and solely present, while the mediating apparatus with the social relations and institutions it is embedded in withdraws into absence” (2011: 44). This capacity of media to “erase themselves in the act of mediation” (Krämer in Eisenlohr 2011: 44), and which has been sought thereafter with every new media technology, has been enabled by technology’s mediating capacity, that is, its ability “to organize new relations between human beings and reality” (Verbeek 2012: 392). Nonetheless, as Meyer indicates, this capacity of media to mediate our relationship with the world is a paradoxical one, where the more important the object is to us, the more invisible it becomes (2011a: 25). Writing about the relationship between electronic media and the body, Jeffrey Sconce notes that it was the instantaneous exchange of messages in the absence of a physical body, enabled by the telegraph, that influenced the widespread belief in “disembodied communication” (2000: 21). This “disembodied communication,” which in practice meant that one person could communicate with another without physically being there (telepresence), was enabled by the media’s affordances, and conceptually brought with it the notion that the telegraph had the potential to create a direct line to “other worlds” through which people could interact and engage. In this regard, Sconce notes the way the telegraph was met with excitement and enthusiasm as an

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

156 • Andrea Lathrop Ligueros

opportunity to access a realm that had no geographical boundaries and until then seemed unknowable and inaccessible. Even so, the disembodied communication brought about by the telegraph soon extended into other, newer technologies that also proved suitable for electronic telepresence. Albeit in a different reception to the enthusiasm greeting the telegraphic format, the practices of EVP (electronic voice phenomena), in which the voices of the dead can be accessed either by the user “fishing” in the radio waves or by the spirits embedding sounds directly into the medium, was seen as one of the many responses to modernity’s increasingly unsettling model of the subject. Even if their messages were often bleak, the Raudive voices2 did speak of an immortal essence that transcends the alienating models of Darwin, Freud, Sartre, and all other demystifying assaults on the transcendental dimension of the human psyche. (Sconce 2000: 90)

Ironically, then, the EVP practices that people carried out with the intention of connecting with the dead only amplified the feeling of isolation and alienation that the same medium was trying to overcome, increasing the “dissociative relationships among body, mind, space, and time” (Sconce 2000: 7) that promise to liberate the subject from the constraints of the body. This unsettling feeling brought by the use of EVP or other disembodied media, however, soon changed when photography found “other” bodies to materialize.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Photographic Materializations Inasmuch as the telegraph and wireless communication technologies lent themselves to be shaped by a desire to connect, photographic technologies were no exception when it came to communicating with “other realms.” Emerging from a similar context to that of the wireless, though many years prior, “spirit photography” (as it was named) came about in a context in which the effects of modernity’s industrialization were starting to be felt by the subject, carrying feelings of isolation and loss. “Spirit photography fulfilled a human yearning for tangible proof of an afterlife and a visual connection with deceased loved ones at a time when the catastrophe of war and the prevalence of infant mortality left so many people attempting to cope with grief and loss” (Wojcik 2009: 112). Its emergence thus came to inform the already existing practices of the nineteenth-century “death culture” (Sterne 2003: 291), those practices related to bereaving, preserving, and connecting with

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Picturing the Unseen • 157

those who once lived through materiality.3 By materializing spirits, energy, or thoughts into photographic plates, photography was believed to have the capacity to make visible what would otherwise have remained hidden or invisible to the eye (Chéroux 2004: 118)—namely the faces of those who had perished in the war—while also documenting and validating those experiences. Speaking about the visibilizing capability of the medium, Lady Doyle, wife of the acclaimed author and avid spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, observed that, “the sensitive photographic plate can register so much more than the retina of the human eye” (Doyle in Jolly 2006: 109). Lady Doyle’s consideration concerning the registering capacity of photography echoes that of Walter Benjamin, who, writing around the same time (1931), noted, “Another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: ‘other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious” (1999: 510). For Benjamin, the photographic medium introduced new dispositions to body, perception, time, and space and revealed the optical unconscious: that which “cannot be silenced” (1999: 510), the contingency invisible to the naked eye. Furthermore, the ability of photography for making things visible worked in conjunction with its documenting capacity, establishing photography’s “truth claim” (Gunning 2008). According to photographic theorist Tom Gunning, the photographic image maintains a physical link with its referent—what Barthes termed as the “have-been-there” of photography (2000). The light that engraves the surface of the image has thus informed chemical photography relation with “the real” and is at the core of why photography has been seen as a factual document ever since. Following this argument, photography’s capacity to materialize the body of spirits was also met with the belief that somehow the spirits’ bodies had entered the camera and imprinted their energy on the photographic plate; the image revealing their physical trace and, therefore, existence. Accordingly, contrary to the case of the telegraph and other electronic communication technologies in which the “other realm” emerged through dematerialized and decorporealized manifestations (vibrations emerging from the phonograph or faraway voices available to be “fished” by the wireless), photographic manifestations were fully corporealized. Spirit photography depended on the body of a sensitive medium, usually female, though with photography that medium soon became the sensitive apparatus. Through the materialization of “extras” or “vital energy”—that is, floating subjects appearing in photographic

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

158 • Andrea Lathrop Ligueros

Figure 7.1. Light paint. Photograph by Andrea Lathrop, 2016. © Andrea Lathrop.

plates and the energy or the soul, also known as “ectoplasm,” also materializing in the same way—both the human medium and the medium of the camera performed a fundamental role in mediating the material world of the living with the immaterial world of the spirits. The camera, then, had a double role, one of enabling the medium to channel the spirits and another of materializing the spirits into physical form. Moreover, this corporealized experience enabled by the photographic medium was enhanced by the phenomenon of ectoplasmic manifestations, in which “the [human] medium herself becomes a sort of camera, her spiritual negativity bodying forth a positive image, as the human behaves like an uncanny photomat, dispensing images from their ori-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Picturing the Unseen • 159

fices” (Gunning 2015: 30). Consequently, the fantasies of telepresence and electronic disembodiment, of the subject being liberated from the constraints of the body, which was prominent in the case of the telegraph, EVP, and later the radio and TV technologies (Sconce 2000), was reversed with the emergence of photography and the need of the human medium and the media apparatus that enabled the bodies of “extras” to materialize. Thus, the bereaved subject, in the process of connecting to the electronic elsewhere, shifted from a disembodied aesthetic experience4—what Susan Buck-Morss terms anaesthetics5 (1992: 19)—present in the electronic technologies of the telegraph and wireless, to a corpothetics6 (Pinney 2011: 158), that is, a sensory corporeal involvement that restores the body to the aesthetic photographic experience.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Case of Ted Serios’s Thoughtographs Nowhere was the materialized manifestation of the invisible more prevalent than in the case of the crystallization of thoughts onto the photographic plate. This was part of what was known as “psychic photography,” which, according to the Handbook of Parapsychology (1977), corresponds to “the projection of mental images on film or photographic plates by allegedly paranormal means” (Fischer 2004: 141), and which represented another foray into the capacities of the photographic medium. Arguably, the most acclaimed case of the transfer of thoughts into photography was that of Ted Serios, “a poorly educated, unemployed Chicago bellhop in his early forties, who was alleged to be able to project photographic images onto Polaroid film by simply staring into the camera lens with intense concentration” (Eisenbud 1967: 13). The images that Serios produced “appear to derive mainly from objects at varying distances from him in the real world that he somehow gets information about” (Eisenbud 1967: 224) but that he had never actually witnessed. Later, Serios’s images became known as thoughtographs. The thoughtograph, a concept created by Japanese scientist Tomokichi Fukurai at the beginning of the twentieth century, describes the materialization of thoughts into the photographic surface, first manifested by Serios in 1954, though the phenomenon became known through an account written by Pauline Oehler, then the vice president of the Illinois Society for Psychic Research, in 1962. In a report written by Oehler, she described one of Serios’s sessions:

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

160 • Andrea Lathrop Ligueros

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Sunday afternoon, June 10, Mr. Serios again came to our house. . . He held the camera in such position that each exposure of the series normally would have shown a portion of the picture and the frame, wall, pole-lamp and part of the door in the background—all on the west wall—as well as a good portion of his upper torso. It was not considered necessary to have the camera examined and sealed as on the previous occasion, since Mr. Serios had no access to it and it had been used between times for conventional pictures. . . . During these preliminary minutes he places himself into a light hypnotic state. He gazes directly into the lens which is about two feet away from his eyes. He believes this is the best distance for obtaining successful pictures. For each exposure he was seated facing us, holding the camera upright against his crossed knee, thumb and index finger of his left hand holding the cardboard cylinder against the lens, the rosary in his right hand, right index finger on the shutter lever. . . . Reiterating his determination to catch a dinosaur, he snapped the second shot. It shows a peculiar . . . Admittedly, interpretation of such ambiguous photos is as subjective as the Rorschach test. Nevertheless, the point must be stressed: irrespective of interpretation, even these shots seem proof of a paranormal occurrence. (Oehler 1962 in Grünfelder 2016: 34)

Following Oehler’s lead (and after some convincing), American psychiatrist Jule Eisenbud agreed to meet Ted Serios in order to approach the thoughtographic phenomenon scientifically. Between 1964 and 1966, Eisenbud relentlessly tried to research Serios methodically, often devising “tests”7 for him to demonstrate his ability to produce thoughtographs; these tests included presenting him to several scientific colleagues at the University of Colorado, where he worked, and inviting them to register and cross-examine Serios’s process. For Eisenbud, “what Ted was doing, was the beautiful, smoothly functioning fusion of the cognitive and physical powers latent in all of us” (1967: 37), with the resulting images being manifestations of Serios’s unconscious, which incidentally happened to be channeled through a Polaroid Land camera. “The fact that he is still largely dependent on a camera . . . may thus be of no greater significance than a pianist’s not being able to perform without the stool he lugs around with him” (1967: 223), Eisenbud argued about the role of the camera in Serios’s materializations. However, the use of the Polaroid camera in Serios’s thoughtographs was not as incidental as he believed. According to Ted Serios’s personal account, he had doubts about the veracity of these images (such as the possibility of tampering with either the thirty-five-millimeter negative before shooting or, later, while the image was being developed), and wondered whether he was taking them while asleep. To tackle what he felt made him liable to suspicion, he purchased a Polaroid Land

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Picturing the Unseen • 161

Figure 7.2. 8 × 10 Polaroid chemical experiment. Photograph by Andrea Lathrop, 2017. © Andrea Lathrop.

camera, which, thanks to its self-containing development and its instant results, eliminated the possibility of corrupting the image or the photographic process. Besides the “factual” evidence provided by Polaroid—which Polaroid’s vice president, Stanford Calderwood, corroborated in a commu-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

162 • Andrea Lathrop Ligueros

nication sent to Oehler (see Oehler 1962 in Grünfelder 2016: 37)— Serios’s use of the Polaroid camera, described in detail in Oehler’s account above, relative to the body configurations and its relation to the camera, suggests that there was something else that the Polaroid camera enabled. In the several reports made by Eisenbud and his university colleagues, Ted’s body disposition was noted in detail. The trance-like state Serios experienced—of “intense concentration, with eyes open, lips compressed, and quite a noticeable tension in his muscular system” (Eisenbud 1967: 25)—in conjunction with the holding of the Polaroid camera, which connected to his head (and mind) through the use of the “gismo” (a half-inch cut section of plastic tube originally used to carry the chemical fixing agent for Polaroid images), indicated that his relationship with the camera was one of indivisibility. My suggestion here is that rather than Serios’s thoughtographs being the result of decorporealized, mind-over-matter, mediating experience, as Eisenbud believed, it was, in fact, a case in which mind and matter, through the mediating role of the camera and the contingency of the event, “push[ed] the boundaries of human perception and experience” (Jolly 2006: 20). This vision of Serios and his camera as one single entity suggests that the relationship between subject and object, of camera and cameraman, is not one of instrumentality but, as Espírito Santo and Hunter suggest in the conclusion of this volume, “the point of contact.” Speaking about the collective engagement where a network of humans and nonhumans is in place (Latour 1999; Larsen 2008), anthropologist Christopher Pinney defines the relationship between culture and technology as “the hybrid zone of the technical practice, the experimental, and materially embedded space of the ‘collective actant’ of the camera and the operator, where the human and non-human are folded into one another” (Pinney 2010: 167). Following Pinney’s argument, it appears that rather than Serios’s thoughtographic phenomenon being the product of “mind over matter,” it is the case in which mind and matter, as a hybrid assemblage of human and nonhuman actants, has the power to produce the images. With this in mind, Serios’s relation to the Polaroid camera functions similarly to contemporary pianist Glenn Gould’s relation to his stool8: he could not play without it.

One-Step Photography Polaroid photography, arguably one of the most iconic photographic media and brands of the twentieth century, can be widely seen today on

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Picturing the Unseen • 163

both social media and the high street. Though it went bankrupt twice during the first decade of the 2000s, eventually halting its production of film in 2008, in 2010 production was “unofficially” restarted by two Polaroid “enthusiasts” who simply couldn’t let it go (Kaps 2016). Mostly known for simplifying the photographic process, turning Kodak’s “You take the pictures, we do the rest” into “one-step photography,” Polaroid’s photography defined the amateur photographic market, becoming the “widest selling camera in history . . . [with] 46.3 percent of American households contain[ing] a self-developing camera [by 1983]” (Buse 2007: 33). However, Polaroid offered more than simple family photography. For many years it was the medium of choice for artists such as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Lucas Samaras, among others, who saw in Polaroid the perfect balance between photography and painting (Bonanos 2012: 98); for erotic photography, due to the absence of a mediator, that is, a lab technician that could see the images; and for police and forensics, due to the capability to register evidence instantly. Founded in 1937 by college dropout and inventor Edwin Land, the Polaroid Corporation, for the first years of its life, dedicated itself to the manufacturing of lens polarizers (hence its name), which were widely used by the American army during World War II. The story goes, once the war had ended, Land was taking a walk during a holiday with his daughter who suddenly became upset at the possibility of not being able to see the pictures straightaway. After returning from that walk, Land, it is said, started to envision what ten years later would become known as “one-step photography.” But the camera presented in 1947 to the American Optical Society was not what one might envision when thinking of Polaroid’s instant photography. The Polaroid Land camera originally weighed one pound and took 8 × 10 sepia-toned images that, after they were exposed and manually “pulled out” of the camera, needed to be coated to prevent the image from disappearing. It was the first of many steps the Polaroid Corporation undertook to make instant film possible. Following the launch of the Land Camera, Polaroid continued to produce and manufacture new camera models, making them smaller and more user friendly. In 1963 the corporation released Polacolor, their first color film, and two years later “the Swinger,” their first inexpensive plastic body camera, which proved to be a huge success. However, it was in 1972, with the launch of the SX-70, that Polaroid became what it is known for today: instant hassle-free photography. Featuring a chrome-finished plastic body covered in cowhide leather, a folding mechanism that allowed people to fit the camera in their pock-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

164 • Andrea Lathrop Ligueros

ets (a request made specifically by Land), and a developing speed of one minute, the SX-70 was the epitome of the corporation’s technological prowess. In an interview given to Time magazine concerning the launch of the new Polaroid camera, Edwin Land noted that the SX-70 would allow practitioners to experience instant photography with “no garbage, no imbibing time and [a] small-size camera” (Land 1972)— specifications Land made in a memo sent to Polaroid’s development department, improving what he felt were the main issues with the previous models. However, with the SX-70, the Polaroid Corporation was introducing not only a highly innovative camera, being the only SLR (single-lens reflex) folding camera ever made and one of the few SLR instant cameras in existence even today, but also a whole new way of experiencing photography that came with its film. Integral film, identifiable for its white frame that today is synonymous with instant photography, took over a decade to develop and multiple millions (some accounts estimated this to exceed $1 billion) in investment (Bonanos 2012). With Polaroid technology, Edwin Land originally intended to ease the photographic process and enable anyone to become a photographer (Land 1972), mainly by presenting the technology as an alternative to Kodak’s developing system. However, the technical and material characteristics of the SX-70 altered the way in which the photographic practice was experienced. With its developing speed, Polaroid collapsed the distance between the taking of the image and the experience of it. This collapsing of time and space enabled the practice to be experienced as both image-making and social practice (Buse 2016), ultimately changing the experience for the photographer and the photographed into a much more intimate encounter. The capacity for seeing the image “straightaway,” as Land’s daughter had requested many years prior, created a sense of unmediated photography, especially when paired with Land’s personal request for the engineers to manufacture a camera lens that would look absolutely natural—“one should see one’s subject as if just gazing at it seamlessly. One should not have the experience of looking through a machine” (Bonanos 2012: 93, emphasis in original), generating “no sense of anything between the photographer and subject” (2012: 93). In a conference presentation given in London in 2017, Steve Herchen, Polaroid’s chemist, argued that integral film continues to be one of the most complex man-made products ever made, with “hundreds of chemical reactions taking place in a choreographed sequence” (Adam 2017: 42). It was the invention of this particular film that made Land’s “one-step” photography possible—eliminating the waiting time and

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Picturing the Unseen • 165

the need for a human mediator, taking photography to its “degree zero” (Buse 2007)—and ultimately led Polaroid photography to be rendered as “instant photography.”9 During the 1990s, however, with Edwin Land no longer leading the corporation, a decline in funding for the research and development department, a series of miscalculated investments, and the massification of digital photography, the corporation saw a decrease in its sales, and Polaroid soon fell into an assumed “obsolescence.”10 This languishing state of Polaroid, however, lasted until Florian Kaps and André Bosmann decided to purchase the last factory and create the Impossible Project.11

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Embodied Photography While the case of Ted Serios’s thoughtographs and spirit photography suggests an embodied aesthetic experience when it comes to photography, this has not been the case with all photographic technologies. Since the advent of digital technologies that intended to “unburdened [themselves] from the shackles of matter” (Blanchette 2011: 1042), there has been an increased perception of photography as a disembodied practice that has somehow created a feeling of disconnection from “the real.” This was something that I observed while carrying out fieldwork with the London Polaroid community.12 During the time spent with Polaroid practitioners, I interviewed several of them (some longtime practitioners, others new to the practice) about their use of Polaroid. According to most, rather than being related to the image itself, Polaroid’s appeal was in the process of making these images, that is, of operating and handling the camera itself and how this reinstated something they felt digital photography had curtailed: the material, physical relation with the medium. Ralph, a Polaroid practitioner and administrator of the Facebook group I was embedded in during 2016–17, said that he felt the continued use of Polaroid could be explained in the following way: Everybody thinks that it is a yearning, that it is nostalgia, but it is not that. Let’s face it, there are certain things that you don’t do that you used to do, maybe it is nostalgia . . . anyway, you used to turn to the back of the record to look at the album artwork, these days you just download anything. But who listens to albums anymore? How do you listen to an album? Now they just listen to individual songs. People actually want to listen to an album. Now, there is this thing about really casual easiness, just being able to skip a track or being able to take twenty pictures.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

166 • Andrea Lathrop Ligueros

On a similar note, when I asked Florian Kaps (who, together with André Bosman saved the last Polaroid factory in the Netherlands back in 2008) why he felt people use Polaroid despite other easier and instant technologies being widely available, he told me, It seems to be very confusing, but at the end of the day, I think it’s super, super easy. It’s because digital is always behind a glass, it doesn’t produce any real things, and people love things they can touch, smell.

The sense of “reality” expressed by Kaps—linked to the possibility to hear, hold, touch, and even smell the image—rather than being related to simulation or the hyperreal13 (Baudrillard 1994), suggests that there is a pervasive perception of digital technologies as immaterial (and therefore unreal); that they have been somehow detached from the body. This perception of immateriality was further emphasized by Kelly, a professional photographer working with Polaroid along with other photographic technologies, such as wet collodion plates, cyanotypes, and digital. For Kelly, the use of Polaroid today could be explained in the following way:

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

[With Polaroid] they [people] can make a photograph rather than [just] take it. There is an element of hand-making, of engineering, making your own camera. You can really get involved in creating something that no one else has created before.

Following my interlocutors’ accounts, the use of Polaroid today indicates that rather than it being related to discourses about nostalgia for a pre-digital time or an anti-digital sentiment (as the dominant media discourse maintains14), it is in fact connected to the sensuous bodily involvement that the camera enables. The embodied use of Polaroid— the opening, unfolding, holding, touching; the smell; the warming of the image; and the overall feeling of the medium15—reveals a desire to be mediated by the media rather than the media disappearing into the background. This desire for media to materialize in the act of mediation goes against more common assumptions about media transparency, whereby “the audiences often feel more connected to an event when it is mediated, but that successful mediation requires the simultaneous erasure of the signs of mediation” (Blackman 2016: 38), and in correspondence with the disembodied expectations first proposed by the telegraph. By emphasizing the processual character, seen in Kelly’s difference between the making as opposed to the taking, Polaroid practitioners

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Picturing the Unseen • 167

challenge Edwin Land’s intention of producing a “seamless” photographic medium that vanishes in the act of mediation. The shift in the value attributed to Polaroid, from seamless to mediated media, suggests that media technology’s meanings are not static but in flux and change according to the context in which they unfold—and, similar to the case of EVP that was used to overcome profound loss and trauma (Sconce 2000: 91), are currently used to overcome the immaterial and disembodied character digital photographic practices seemingly produce.16 Another case in which Polaroid was used due to mediating and materializing capacities was the case of Bayside Catholic Marians and their use of Polaroid in registering apparitions. While documenting a group of “Baysiders” (Bayside Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, New York, Virgin Mary apparition followers) during the 1980s, Daniel Wojcik noticed the group’s preference for Polaroid cameras for capturing the supernatural phenomena. Although used in order to dissipate any foul play assumptions, Wojcik’s observations regarding Baysiders’ use of Polaroid suggest that besides the instantaneous results, Polaroid lent itself particularly well due to its evident, rather than discrete, mediating capacities. Documenting one of these outings, he noted,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The sound of clicking and fluttering camera shutters and then the whirlbuzz of film being ejected from hundreds of Polaroid cameras could be heard all over the apparition site. (Wojcik 2009: 123)

Rather than the mattering—making material thoughts, bodies, or the supernatural—that was happening through a seamless and transparent connection with the medium, the case described by Wojcik evidences that the spirits appeared in conjunction with it, that is, through the tangible sensational forms, the wiring noises, that the medium enabled (Meyer 2011b: 60). Furthermore, the case of Marian apparitions registered by Polaroid indicate, once more, that the role of technology in the perception of the world is not one of incidental instrumentality but one in which “human beings and their world are products of mediation, not its starting point” (Verbeek 2012: 393). Thus, as much as photographic plates lend themselves to materializing the bodies of “extras,” and the Polaroid camera enabled Ted Serios’s thoughtographs and the channeling of Marian apparitions, current Polaroid practitioners’ insistence on working with the medium as opposed to through it (as if it were transparent) re-corporealizes photography in an era when the materiality of the image and media are perceived as increasingly “unreal” and immaterial.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

168 • Andrea Lathrop Ligueros

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion: Re-enchanting the Western World The capability of Polaroid photography to materialize and corporealize, as the case of Serios and the views expressed by my interlocutors respectively reflect, indicates “the ability [of objects] to make things happen, to produce effects” (Bennett 2010: 5), but also the capacity of photography to mediate our experience with the world (Smith and Sliwinski 2017) and reveal that which otherwise would remain hidden. Accordingly, the mediated process of taking a Polaroid image by embracing the corporeal and material dimension of the medium—only perceptible when put in relation to that of the digital expectations of immediacy—“fixes” what one of my interlocutors defined as the “digital disconnection,” or, rather, the perception of detachment present in digital photography. This disconnection, I argue, is a consequence of the tropes of transparency pushed by electronic media, as well as a rationalist’s anaesthetics, a consequence of what Max Weber defined as “the disenchantment of the Western world” (Weber 1963). Produced by processes of rationalization and secularization that resulted from the “scientific method,” disenchantment resulted in an erasure of mysteries, whereby “religious and magical understandings of the world become at best charming, at worst, ignorant and backwards” (Jenkins 2000: 15). This explains why the spiritual manifestations enabled by electronic media technologies (such as the telegraph and the wireless) “aligned [themselves] with principles of ‘electrical science,’ rather than being considered as a supernatural connection to another world or realm, so as to distinguish mediumship from the ‘superstitious’ forms of mystical belief” (Sconce 2000: 28). This suggests, as Jolly notes, that “spiritualists were modernists. They understood the phenomena they witnessed, and believed in, to be part of the same unfolding story of progress as science and technology” (2006: 143). Still, and despite disenchantment’s position as the fate of the world, as Jenkins notes, this has only served to “open up new vistas of possible (re) enchantment” (Jenkins 2000: 29). With Jenkins’s possibility of re-enchantment in mind, I assert a final argument here: that Polaroid practice, through its bodily and sensuous involvement, can work as a way for people to challenge what they feel as “digital disconnection” and re-enchant the Western world in the process (Jenkins 2000: 22). This argument had been previously advanced by Braun in relation to the theremin’s “revival” and its performative character, whereby a reawakened interest in the 1990s corresponded

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Picturing the Unseen • 169

to an intention to “remystify the Western world” (Braun 2009: 147), enabled by the material and body configurations of the instrument. Created during the 1920s by Russian inventor Lev Termen, the theremin is an instrument that “reacts to every movement in its immediate surroundings. Players not only have to stand completely still, but also have to refrain from nervous breathing or any other signs of stage fright” (Braun 2009: 141). The corporeal configuration it demands from the users, seen in the body and spatial consciousness while being played, distance it from other musical instruments (both analog and digital) and links it to the 1960s “performative turn,” an art movement that sought to propose the body as place and medium of artistic expression (Guasch 2000: 81). By bringing the body once again into the realm of music, which in the 1990s was heading toward an increased dematerialization, theremin practitioners sought to subvert the modernist rationalization that encompassed every form of art (Cascardi 1992: 17). The case of the theremin thus demonstrates how, as in the case of Polaroid, practitioners seek a medium that “appears” in the act of mediation rather than a “vanishing mediator” (Sterne 2003). Hence, the corporeal dispositions enabled by the mediating role of Polaroid, which distances it from other apparently “transparent” (and therefore disembodied) media technologies, “conjures up, and [is] rooted in, understandings of experiences of the world in which there is more to life than material, the visible or the explainable” (Jenkins 2000: 29); an argument that is particularly relevant in the case of Ted Serios. Moreover, the materiality of the Polaroid image, that is, its physical quality, its current developing speed (which surpasses the first advertised “pictures in a minute”17), and its less-than-perfect results, undermines the rationalization of time and space pushed by modernity (Jenkins 2000: 28), ultimately subverting disenchantment. This is not to suggest that within Polaroid’s current use no romanticism or capitalistic logic is operating—reducing the use of the medium to the nostalgia industry or technostalgia (Braun 2009: 140) (what Jenkins terms as “disenchanted enchantment”)—but rather that within a certain group of practitioners, Polaroid has worked as a way of reconnecting with the “real” (understood as the material) following what they perceived as a “digital disconnection.” Thus, despite Jule Eisenbud’s assertion that “all the king’s philosophers and all the king’s men cannot put body and mind together again” (Eisenbud 1967: 325), the practice of Polaroid demonstrates that in the act of mediation, mind and matter cannot be conceived without the body.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

170 • Andrea Lathrop Ligueros

The alteration in the perception of technologies is crucial here. As previously noted, when Edwin Land first envisioned one-step photography (and following the tendencies of other technologies like the telegraph), he foresaw a technology that was supposed to perform transparently to the user. However, as my interlocutors’ accounts reveal, Polaroid’s value today lies precisely in its “appearance” in the act of mediation rather than in its disappearance. This shift in the meaning assigned to Polaroid technology is also evident in the case of the theremin. The instrument initially sought to free music from the constraints of the human hand and enjoyed a revival because, in the eyes of practitioners, it represented a corporeal involvement that other instruments, arguably newer digital ones, had intended to erase. What the shift in the meanings of both these technologies suggest is that when considering the role of media technologies, there is a fundamental difference between media technologies’ imagination and their practice (Sterne 2003: 281). This is in line with Sconce, who noted that despite electronic communication technologies being presented through “narratives of disembodiment, teleportation, and anthropomorphization” (Sconce 2000: 10), they changed with the social and political context. This last argument resonates with that of Birgit Meyer, who, while observing the vital role of media technologies in religious experiences, noted that “the ‘appearance’ and ‘disappearance’ of media is socially produced and depends on authorized perspectives on what media are and do, or are not supposed to do, in broader practices of mediation” (2011b: 63). Through the case of Polaroid photography, then, we are able to draw three main conclusions. (1) Media technologies, rather than being purely instrumental material forms, have a fundamental role in shaping human perception. (2) The meanings of media technologies are not static but change according to context and in relation to other media technologies, in this particular case, the digital. (3) Despite transparency being hailed as the “liberation of information from matter” (Blanchette 2011: 1043), the continued use of Polaroid suggests that there is more to be said about the mediating role of technology and what its mediation facilitates and enables. That being said, to finalize this chapter I will like to bring attention once again to the expectations users have toward technologies and what these suggest. Despite the telegraph and wireless technologies advancing expectations of telepresence and immediacy of communication or mediation without a body, and digital technologies promising transparent and immediate mediation, the insistence of users on technologies that demand a greater corporeal engagement indicate that transparency

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Picturing the Unseen • 171

and immediacy can no longer be seen to exclusively inform the Western technological paradigm. Andrea Lathrop is a doctor in material culture anthropology at University College London. Her research focuses on the current Polaroid practice and how it’s produced, consumed, and circulated in a context in which the formal infrastructures are no longer in place. By problematizing the widespread assumption of technological obsolescence, as well as the digital and analog divide, her research proposes that analog and digital technologies operate in integrative manners and suggests that obsolescence is not a stable category but a variable one. Her research interests are material culture, technological obsolescence, informal infrastructures, and residual practices.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. Here I am considering instant photography as a photographic media that, as digital, can also be seen and experienced straightaway. 2. Raudive voices refers to the work of Latvian philosopher and professor of Oxford, Konstantin Raudive, in researching electronic voice phenomena. Over his life it is said that he recorded hundreds of hours of voices, first, by using a tape recorder and later, using the radio. His work was published in English as Break Through: Electronic Communication with the Dead May be Possible (1971). 3. The Victorian era (roughly from the mid-1800s to the beginning of the nineteenth century) was known to be a “relic culture” characterized by the relationship between body, death, material objects, and grief (Lutz 2011: 130). For example, during this period, it was common for people to carry with them relics containing the hair of their loved ones or those who have died. 4. Following Susan Buck-Morss, here I understand “aesthetic experience” as “the sensory experience of perception” in which the body mediates through the sense (Buck-Morss 1992: 6). 5. Buck-Morss defines this decorporalized aesthetics as anaesthetics and explains it as the nineteenth century’s crisis in perception, and a consequence of the rational model of the Enlightenment and Kantian aesthetic experience where the “‘aesthetic” judgement [is] robbed of its senses” (1992: 9). 6. By drawing in Buck-Morss’s concepts of aesthetics and “anaesthetics,” Christopher Pinney offers the concept of “corpothetics” to define “the bodily engagement people have with artworks” (2001: 158). 7. Among the “tests” Eisenbud devised to prove Serios’s ability was stripping his clothing to make sure that there were no concealed elements, providing sealed Polaroid cameras and brand new packs of film, using several Pola-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

172 • Andrea Lathrop Ligueros

8.

9.

10.

11.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

roid cameras from different owners (and previously checked by a professional), among other experiments that aimed to “train” Serios capacities. Among these techniques was the hiding of “target” images that Serios was asked to produce, covering the lens of the camera with masking tape, other people holding and triggering the camera while Serios concentrated in an image, etc. All of these experiments had various results, and none of the observers ever managed to prove that the images Serios produced were fake. Glenn Gould was a Canadian pianist and interpreter believed to be one of the most prolific of the twentieth century. Besides being known for his interpretations of Bach, he was also known for some “eccentricities,” among them, always carrying a piano chair his father had built for him to every concert. The notion of “instant photography” was not supported by either Edwin Land or the Polaroid Corporation. For them, Polaroid was “one-step photography.” Despite this, people and the media refer to it as instant photography, which in the end proved stronger than Polaroid’s intended motto. I use quotation marks in order to indicate the fluctuating nature of the obsolete, which in the case of Polaroid indicate that the technology never really “disappeared” but lingered in the margins of mainstream photographic practices. Florian Kaps, André Bosman, and Marwan Saba decided to name the new film-producing company the Impossible Project in honor of Edwin Land’s famous quote: “Don’t do anything that someone else can do. Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.” The London Polaroid community is a group of Polaroid practitioners I worked with during 2016–17. The group started as an online Polaroiddedicated Facebook group that later got together offline. Besides online interactions (exchanging images, tips, etc.), the group members also carried out “Polawalks,” attended to Polaroid-related exhibitions, etc. I use the concept of “community” following their way of referring to their group (hence, an emic concept). Understood as that which “threatens the difference between the “true” and the “false,” the “real” and the “imaginary’” (Baudrillard 1994: 3). For example, The Guardian’s, “Why Do Millennials Insist on Living in the Past?” (Cosslett 2017). Polaroid’s chemical formula is highly susceptible to temperature, hence if the environment’s temperature is too low, images will have issues developing, which is why practitioners put them under their armpits to keep them warm. Alternatively, if it is too warm and sunny, they keep them away from light. This is not to say that digital photography is, in fact, less material or mediated but to express the way technologies alter users’ perception. Due to the change in the film formula, today Polaroid images can take up to fifteen minutes to fully develop, though in the first years of the Impossible

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Picturing the Unseen • 173 Project images took up to forty-five minutes to develop. This instant relativity (in relation to digital photography that is actually instant) led author Peter Buse to refer to Polaroid pictures as “delayed photography” (2007: 38).

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

References Adam, Rhiannon. 2017. Polaroid: The Missing Manual. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Barthes, Roland. 2000. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Penguin Vintage. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. “Little History of Photography.” In Selected Writings. Vol. 2: 1927–1934, 507–30. Boston: Harvard University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blackman, Lisa. 2016. “Affect, Mediation and Subjectivity-as-Encounter: Finding the Feeling of the Foundling.” Journal of Curatorial Studies 5(1): 33–55. Blanchette, Jean-François. 2011. “A Material History of Bits.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology 62(6): 1042–57. Bonanos, Christopher. 2012. Instant: The Story of Polaroid. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Braude, Stephen E. 2004. “The Thoughtographs of Ted Serios.” In The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, edited by Clement Chéroux, 155– 69. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Braun, Hans-Joachim. 2009. “Pulled Out of Thin Air? The Revival of the Theremin.” In Sound Souvenirs; Audio Technologies; Memory and Cultural Practices, edited by Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck, 139–51. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1992. “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered.” October 62: 3–41. Buse, Peter. 2016. The Camera Does the Rest: How Polaroid Changed Photography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2007. “Photography Degree Zero: Cultural History of the Polaroid Image.” New Formations 62: 29–44. Cascardi, Anthony. 1992. The Modern Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chéroux, C., A. Fischer, P. Apraxine, and W. M. A. Fischer. 2004 (eds.). The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult. New Haven: Yale University Press. Chéroux, Clément. 2004. “Photographs of Fluids.” In The Perfect Medium, 114–38. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cosslett, Rhiannon Lucy. 2017. “Why Do Millennials Insist on Living in the Past?” The Guardian. 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ 2017/sep/26/millennials-living-in-the-past-polaroids.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

174 • Andrea Lathrop Ligueros Eisenbud, Jule. 1967. The World of Ted Serios: “Thoughtographic” Studies of an Extraordinary Mind. London: Jonathan Cape. Eisenlohr, Patrick. 2011. “The Anthropology of Media and the Question of Ethnic and Religious Pluralism.” Social Anthropology 19(1): 40–55. Fischer, Andreas. 2004. “La Lune Au Front.” In The Perfect Medium, 139–54. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Grünfelder, Romeo (ed.). 2016. Ted Serios Serien. Berlin: Lehmans Media. Guasch, Anna María. 2000. El arte último del siglo XX del posminimalismo a lo multicultural. Madrid: Alianza Forma. Gunning, Tom. 2008. “What’s the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs.” In Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, edited by Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, 23–40. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2015. “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny.” In Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from the Silent Cinema to the Digital Era, edited by Murray Leeder, 17–38. London: Bloomsbury Press. Harvey, John. 2013. “The Ghost in the Machine: Spirit and Technology. In The Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures, edited by Olu Jenzen and Sally R. Munt, 50–54. London: Routledge. Jenkins, Richard. 2000. “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium.” Max Weber Studies 1(1): 11–32. Jolly, Martyn. 2006. Faces of the Living Dead. Brooklyn, NY: Mark Batty Publisher. Kaps, Florian. 2016. Polaroid: The Magic Material. London: Frances Lincoln. Larsen, Jonas. 2008. “Practices and Flows of Digital Photography: An Ethnographic Framework.” Mobilities 3 (1): 141–60. Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Life. 1972. “Dr. Land’s Latest Bit of Magic.” Life Magazine, October 1972. Lutz, Deborah. 2011. “The Dead Still Among Us: Victorian Secular Relics, Hair Jewelry, and Death Culture.” Victorian Literature and Culture 39: 127–42. Meyer, Birgit. 2011a. “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies and the Question of the Medium.” Social Anthropology 19(1): 23–39. ———. 2011b. “Medium.” Material Religion 7(1): 58–64. Morris, Rosalind C. 2002. “A Room with a Voice: Mediation and Mediumship in Thailand’s Information Age.” In Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, 383–98. Berkeley: University of California Press. Negroponte, Nicholas. 1995. Being Digital. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Oehler, Pauline. 2016. “The Psychic Photography of Ted Serios”. In Ted Serios, edited by Romeo Grünfelder, 27–42. Berlin: Lehmans Media. Pinney, Christopher. 2010. “Cameraworks as Technical Practice in Colonial India.” In Material Powers, edited by Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce, 145– 70. Oxon: Routledge.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Picturing the Unseen • 175

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

———. 2011. Photography and Anthropology. London: Reaktion. Sconce, Jeffrey. 2000. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, Shawn Michelle, and Sharon Sliwinski. 2017. “Introduction.” In Photography and the Optical Unconscious, edited by Shawn Michelle Smith and Sharon Sliwinski, 1–31. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Verbeek, Peter Paul. 2012. “Expanding Mediation Theory.” Foundations of Science 17(4): 391–95. Weber, Max. 1963. The Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon Press. Wojcik, Daniel. 2009. “Spirits, Apparitions, and Traditions of Supernatural Photography.” Visual Resources 25(1): 109–36.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Part III

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Mattering Invisible Powers

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Chapter 8

Specters of Climate and the Construction of Ghostly Realities in Brazil

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Renzo Taddei

This chapter describes the works of a Brazilian institution that offers governments and private companies the service of changing the conditions of the atmosphere. They do it through the actions of a powerful spirit who identifies himself as Chief Coral Snake, during ritual sessions of mediumship, in the context of the spiritualist tradition known in Brazil by the name Umbanda. The individuals associated with these ritual practices created an organization called the Chief Coral Snake Foundation. What is particularly interesting about this group is that they do not limit their activities to the more common practices of consultation with spirit guides and healing, as seen in the tens of thousands of Umbanda centers spread across Brazil. While its work providing private spiritual guidance and healing keeps Umbanda activities out of public debates in the country, the Chief Coral Snake Foundation is frequently mentioned by the national press due to its connection to powerful clients. With respect to the question of mattering the paranormal, the central dimension of interest is the fact that the organization systematically asks professional meteorologists for help in the technical aspects of changing the atmospheric states in order to fulfill requests made by important public agents. My analysis will address the question of how intangible things are mattered, and to what effects. In this particular ethnographic case, the first intangible thing to be discussed, and to which an enormous amount of effort and energy is required to make it exist, refers to what we call weather and climate. The second refers to the efficacy of political action. And the third refers to the ontological status of spirits and mediumship.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

180 • Renzo Taddei

This specific configuration of elements in how the narrative is constructed—the presentation of matters of science as things that can be more phantasmagorical than the matters of the spirit—is intended to contrast with the general tendency, in anthropology, to dematerialize the phenomena of spirituality and turn it into allegory or something inevitably attached to “belief.” I intend to demonstrate that, from the perspective of my placement in the ethnographic reality to be discussed, this tendency gains the contours of a refusal to face the reality encountered in fieldwork, particularly in what concerns its “excess” (De la Cadena and Blaser 2018). Before beginning the description of the ethnographic case, and in line with the contemporary agenda of decolonizing the social sciences, let me state who I am and in what condition I am placed inside of the ethnographic context of the research. The narrative will be weaved as a net of intersecting lines, and I am conscious that some degree of rationalization will inevitably be employed, even if unintendedly, in the approach of an organic meshwork of lines of becoming that is too complex for my understanding. I am a white man in my late forties. I am writing these words in a middle-class neighborhood in the largest, wealthiest, and most scientifically inclined city of Brazil, São Paulo, with its high concentration of universities and industrial research units. It is Friday night, and I can hear from my home office the drums of the spiritualist cult that is taking place around the corner. There are more than ten ritual centers in the neighborhood, and in all of them spirits of deceased individuals incorporate in the bodies of mediums, to offer emotional comfort, to advise, and to heal. It can be safely said that thousands of events of communication between the spirits of the deceased and the living occur every single day, in this city alone. This is as recurrent, predictable, and replicable as Newton’s falling bodies. I grew up in a world full of spirits. The communication between the spirits of the dead and the living has been part of my experience of reality since before adolescence, and this was not a product of bodily experience. I am not a medium. I was raised in a family that attended public discussions of the book The Gospel According to Spiritism (Kardec 1987 [1864]), in which incorporated spirits would comment on the passage of the book under analysis. I learned that the spirits are quite different from one another, and that different groups of people engage with different groups of spirits for diverse ends and in diverse manners. This was part of Brazilian cultural diversity.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Specters of Climate and the Construction of Ghostly Realities in Brazil • 181

In the national census of 2010 (IBGE 2011), 4 million individuals declared being espíritas; another 1.2 million individuals declared being associated to Umbanda and Candomblé. These numbers dramatically underestimate the demography of spiritualistic practices in the country. Religious affiliation is something fluid in Brazil, and a considerable amount of people who systematically attend meetings at spiritist centers socially identify themselves as Catholics. Before turning to the social sciences, I graduated as an engineer. Kardecism has always been popular among the educated middle classes, so I found no antipathies between the realms of technique and spirit. In retrospect, it seems to me that the world was compartmentalized in ways that enabled individuals to be both spiritualists and professionals in technical and scientific fields (even if not at exactly the same time), without much friction—as long as the proper boundaries were respected. Many years later, I finished my doctoral studies in the United States with a dissertation in environmental anthropology that discussed conflicts associated to scientific climate predictions in the rural semiarid northeast region of Brazil. For that, I engaged in ethnographic research among meteorologists in Brazil and in the United States, and also among individuals who issued rain forecasts based on their “traditional” knowledge of the local environment—people known locally as “rain prophets” (Taddei 2012a). A great deal of my work addressed to what extent the inherent uncertainties of climate were connected to the inherent uncertainties of politics (Taddei 2012b). Climate change was becoming a big theme in the social sciences in the early 2000s, and I therefore continued my work with climate scientists. Back in Brazil, as a university professor in Rio de Janeiro, one day I read in a local newspaper that the mayor had a formal contract with the Chief Coral Snake Foundation in which the latter produced dry weather for the famous Copacabana beach New Year’s Eve firework spectacle. I did not know about the existence of the foundation. I checked their website. There I found documentation indicating that it had contracts in the past with the governments of the states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, the city of São Paulo, and the governments of the state and the city of Rio de Janeiro, and with many private companies, the most remarkable one being the entertainment giant Artplan, the producer of the Rock in Rio concerts. The owner of the company, Roberto Medina, mentioned the foundation in his autobiography (Neves 2006: 185–86). To me, all that sounded surreal—not for what the foundation

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

182 • Renzo Taddei

does but for the potential political implications that a publicized association between such officials and an institution of that nature might have. Proper boundaries were being crossed. That was just the tip of the iceberg. Some months later a meteorologist I befriended during my research in Northeast Brazil published a note on a social network denouncing the foundation as a fraud. He explained that “everybody knows they have professional meteorologists working for them.” His comments didn’t make much sense to me, given that I knew meteorologists don’t know how to change the conditions of the atmosphere, and therefore I could not see why the foundation would be interested in help from science. And yet, in a few seconds, Google not only confirmed the fact, but it also provided me with their names.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Encountering Ghostly Atmospheres Kardecism is positivistic. Engineering is positivistic. The atmosphere is not. I remember one particular meeting early in my doctoral dissertation fieldwork in which climate scientists presented their computer models for atmospheric phenomena that typically take place in the skies of northeastern South America and the equatorial Atlantic. The quality of the models was tested using hindsight techniques: they loaded the models with data of the conditions of the oceans and atmosphere at a point in the past, ran their models, and then compared the results with what actually happened. The idea is to see whether the model can predict what has already happened. It shocked me to see a climate scientist effusively commemorate that one particular model had a positive statistical correlation between what was predicted and past reality of 0.6; all other ones had correlations that barely reached 0.5. I whispered in the ear of a meteorologist with whom I had the opportunity to interact for a longer period of time: “You are kidding me that the best that models can do is to get it right six times out of ten!” The guy then explained to me that it is a bit more than 60 percent—the correlations don’t go from 0 to 1, but from -1 to 1. “The worst that can happen is that the model forecasts exactly the opposite of reality. That would be the -1. So 0.6 means something like 73 percent of chances of getting it right.” As an anthropologist, I had been invited to join a research project coordinated by climate scientists and water engineers. The goal of the project was to integrate computer simulation models of climate with water management models so as to make water management more effi-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Specters of Climate and the Construction of Ghostly Realities in Brazil • 183

cient in places where climate predictability is good. Northeast Brazil is one of these places, and the reason for the high predictability is that local climate patterns seem to be highly correlated with the phenomenon known as El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a cyclical variation in the surface temperature of the Pacific Ocean around the line of the equator. It was understood in the early 1980s, modeled in the late 1980s, and effectively predicted in the early 1990s (Agrawala et al. 2001). Data from atmospheric circulation and oceanic patterns across the planet pointed to the fact that the El Niño affected climate patterns around the entire planet, particularly in areas with a high concentration of poverty: Northeast Brazil, the Horn of Africa, and Southeast Asia. A surge of expectation filled the world of meteorology: climate science would finally contribute at large to the reduction of collective suffering brought about by climate variation. The El Niño of 1997–98 was then predicted; the information was spread around the planet by a large network of climate agencies, coordinated by the World Meteorological Organization. The El Niño then hit the global climate hard. When impacts were measured, it became clear that losses and suffering were comparable to the 1993 event. The availability of climate forecasts was not enough for reducing the impacts of predicted events (Broad et al. 2002). Meteorology leaders concluded that they needed to understand how people receive and interpret climate information. Institutions were created with that goal. In the research project I was invited to join, what was experienced on a global scale was reproduced in a much smaller one, a few years later: when the water engineers traveled to Northeast Brazil to present their enhanced climate-hydrological model to local technicians, they were surprised with the immediate rejection of the novelty. At specific circumstances, the confidence of the model reached 95 percent; one year of failure, and nineteen of success, in which the aggregate efficiency gains would easily surpass the losses in a twenty-year period. The resistance of technicians was unrelenting. And 95 percent is much better than 73 percent. Someone then suggested a social scientist should be sent to the region to try to understand the motives for such unreasonable behavior. That is when I got involved. Learning to navigate the world of the climate sciences is harder than learning a foreign language. It requires a thorough deconstruction of some of the most basic phenomenological intuitions about reality and a reconstruction of them over new grounds. And these new grounds were, at first, phantasmagorical. There is no big leap from the secondary school science classes to what one finds in schools of engineering: you have a problem, then you design a strategy for using well-established

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

184 • Renzo Taddei

applications of math, physics, and chemistry in logical, rational ways, and you solve the problem. Looking retrospectively, it seems that one of the most important elements in how engineering education crafts a certain kind of personality is that one approaches technical problems with confidence. Overconfidence, perhaps. If you don’t get a solution, the problem is not solved, and you keep working. Overtly or in subliminal ways, one is bombarded with the message that all problems are intrinsically solvable. It is a question of time. Perhaps the right technological tool is still not available, but it will be, eventually. And then I encountered an atmosphere that is unpredictable. Atmospheric systems are nonlinear and extraordinarily complex. One hears some of the most brilliant minds in academia saying that “the climate will never be predictable in deterministic ways; it is not a question of adding more research,” and feels that even poetry is more solid than that—at least that is what one gets from literary criticism. The more I worked in the field, the more climate vanished from touch. The most immediate diagnosis of the problem of why people resist climate forecasts is that meteorological jargon conflicts with everyday usage of language. In Brazil, most people use the words climate and weather as synonyms. It seems that this happens across most of the planet. Well, these are very different things for the atmospheric sciences: weather is what you can perceive; climate you cannot perceive. Weather is the immediate atmospheric phenomena, such as rain, the temperature of the atmosphere, its pressure, humidity, etc. A weather forecast is something you can evaluate with your senses. It may tell you that chances of rain are very high (say, 90 percent) for your area tomorrow, and tomorrow you will see what happens. (Even there, things are not so easy. I will come back to this example and problematize it later in my argument). Climate, on the other hand, refers to long-term patterns in the atmosphere. It is a statistical construction, and it is done through computer models; as such, we cannot perceive it with our senses. By “we,” I don’t mean laypeople—I mean humans. The extension and complexity of the sociotechnical networks that generate the data required by computer models is astonishing: millions of pluviometers around the planet; hundreds of thousands of digital meteorological stations on the ground; hundreds of sophisticated buoys, packed with sensors, at specific strategic locations at sea; airplanes and ships collecting and transmitting meteorologically relevant data in real time, all the time; the same for meteorological balloons; thousands of satellite photos, in different formats, produced every second; hundreds of thousands of meteoro-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Specters of Climate and the Construction of Ghostly Realities in Brazil • 185

logical radars distributed around the surface of the planet. The nature of data produced by satellites, by radars, or by ocean buoys is quite different, and a herculean job of creating commensurability between different data sources is required. Another grueling task lies in standardization, since different national institutions often produce data in different and incompatible formats. And then, you can only transform all of that into climate if you have a long historical record of these measurements—long enough so that you, with the help of statistics, can find patterns inside of the database. If you identify patterns longer than two weeks, you are talking about climate. You can then say things like, “The rainy season of 2004 was dryer than the historical average in the state of Ceará,” or, “The last four years were the hottest on record in terms of average temperature of the surface of the planet.” Without this planet-wide heterogeneous sociotechnical network functioning properly, meteorological climate simply doesn’t exist as something to which people can relate. In late January 2004, a short-lived but extremely intense atmospheric system called a cyclonic vortex stopped over Northeast Brazil for about two weeks. It rained so much that over a dozen dams and hundreds of bridges were destroyed by overflowing rivers. It was the rainiest month of January ever recorded (Alves et al. 2004). At the exact same time, a group of international meteorologists were assembled in a conference room in the capital city Fortaleza to issue the forecast for the upcoming rainy season. The forecast presented to the media a few days later pointed to a “high probability of rains below the historical total average.” Most locals see this form of language use as an evasive way of saying that a drought has been forecast. In any case, the forecast was announced under pouring rains, and rural radio hosts could not avoid making jokes about it. A few days later, the rains stopped, and the cyclonic vortex disappeared. Five months later, the local meteorological agency announced that, according to precipitation data collected throughout the rainy season, discounting the exceptional rains of January, it rained around a third less than the historical average. The forecast was right. And yet, for the absolute majority of people, 2004 was a year of devastating rains. The two things seem incompatible, but meteorology will say they are not, because they are actually two different things. The meteorological agency referred to the total precipitation for the entire season, and that is climate, not weather. No one can perceive climate with the human senses. When the World Meteorological Organization announced that the previous four years (2015–18) were the hottest on record (WMO

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

186 • Renzo Taddei

2019), it did not expect that individuals would have epidermic memories of that. But since they rarely explain to audiences what they are talking about, people simply think in terms of weather-related memories, as people did in Ceará in 2004, and that is why scientific information about climate too often sounds counterintuitive or confusing. Climate is just like viruses or radioactivity: you can perceive it only indirectly, and the dominant forms of conceptualizing it in Western epistemologies necessarily require that people believe in specialists. The problem is that, given the rather uncollaborative nature of the atmosphere, very often specialists get confused too. Thinking about how the challenges of atmospheric sciences made it rather different from the kind of science taught at school, it occurred to me that most science education is fundamentally religious. Given that it is impossible to cover the whole curriculum having children empirically testing everything that is discussed, students are exposed in secondary education to a certain message about the nature of reality, of science, and of the scientist. Science experiments and projects are handpicked so as to construct a perception that reality is patterned, symmetrical, and predictable; science is, at the same time, the code for decoding reality and a kind of elite club; and, the scientist is someone with special powers and capacities, and who can always be trusted. As a consequence, one should believe in things that cannot be seen—since they exist in a dimension that cannot be accessed without technical mediation, or simply because the individual will not have access to the social circumstances where material proof of such ideas are produced. People are trained to identify the “scientific” stamp in things and then join a massive choreography of acting accordingly, and that enables the jobs of public agencies related to health, environmental governance, sanitation, and a number of other sectors to be accomplished. That is part of the social organization of large social realities. It also produces in the average citizen the right mindset for building things that are “mechanical,” like houses and cars. But it generates a certain disposition to feel uncomfortable when dealing with meteorology. The atmosphere seems to be a counterexample for all that was described above: it may be patterned, but it is very hard to understand what the patterns are, given that there seem to be innumerous different ones happening at the same time at different scales; meteorology seems rather less “muscular” than other sciences, in what concerns public performances of efficacy; and meteorologists seem to have enjoyed less prominence in public perception throughout the history of this particular science—it is rather quite the opposite: no other technical or

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Specters of Climate and the Construction of Ghostly Realities in Brazil • 187

scientific profession is victim to more ridicule and humor than that of meteorologists (see Taddei 2012b). The global effort to provide political support for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is changing the scenario when the topic is climate change—that is, when the temporal scale jumps to decades and centuries—but it is not changing the issues involved in getting people to understand and use interannual (also called seasonal) climate forecasts. During fieldwork I realized that there were problems with weather forecasts too, and they are not different in nature. In some parts of the planet, meteorology has the incentive (time, money, and human resources) to develop better and more sophisticated computer models. For other, marginal areas, models may simply be imported from somewhere else and therefore lack specific geographical customization. The main problem that may arise is that the results from the computer simulations refer to a reality that is different from the one perceived by the local people. Sometimes the grid of the model, that is, its spatial resolution, is just too large. Models with grids of ten kilometers by ten kilometers have a unit of prediction that is ten to twenty times larger than the average size of cumulus clouds (Collins et al. 2013; many countries use models that have larger grids). That means that it is perfectly possible that a storm is taking place at one side of the grid and no rains are falling on the other side. When the model is not customized to take into consideration local topography, the existence of (unaccounted for) mountains often reduces the efficacy of forecasts. So, even when the atmospheric phenomenon in question is, in principle, something that can produce an overlap between what technical machines simulate and what people perceive, too often this overlap is very imperfect and difficult to reproduce. Now, going back to the hydrologists who rejected having climate forecasts connected to their water management models: after a few months of fieldwork, the reason for that became clear. Some of the technicians told me that the “political system,” that is, the network of relations that connected the governor, the federal government, the local environmental agencies, local politicians in the state assembly, the media, and the mysterious agent called “public opinion,” simply would not accept technical justifications for failures that caused water crises (Broad et al. 2007). In the beginning of my narrative, I mentioned that the reliability of the model at specific circumstances reached 95 percent. Yes, they said, but then in the one year that the model fails, the governor would be pressed to punish someone, and that person would inevitably be the head of the water agency. There is no way the media and local pol-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

188 • Renzo Taddei

iticians would accept the idea that the system now optimizes management in the long term, and short-term crises are quickly compensated for over the following years. Many small-scale farmers work with such small budgets and with a shortage of resources that one water crisis may simply ruin them. The technical method employed for preventing political crisis at all costs was to retain water in the reservoirs. It minimized efficiency, while also minimizing the chances of political trouble. Part of the water would inevitably be lost to evaporation. That was the moment when I became aware of the fact that I should address the issue of the political aspects of climate forecasting. And yet, through interviews, observation, and analysis of media materials, the behavior of politicians seemed rather less predictable than how water technicians modeled it. The main controversy around climate forecasts, with respect to the preferences of newspaper editors, had to do with the fact that a group of local farmers, publicly known as “rain prophets,” issued forecasts for the rainy season that often contradicted the scientific ones. My analysis showed me that governors manipulated the polysemy associated with folklore and rural life, and also with science, strategically, according to the political struggles of the moment (Taddei 2012b). There were documented situations in which the governor praised science and attacked the “backwardness” of rural traditional knowledge. One of these situations took place in 1992, when a drought forecast motivated the purchase and distribution of special seeds that required less rain. Later, with the scientific data that documented that the small reduction in harvest did not reflect the dramatic reduction in precipitation, the governor announced to the media that “science had finally won the war against religion.” A few years later, with a different governor and with less money available for drought contingency actions, the forecast of a drought led local farmers to pressure the governor to declare a situation of emergency, which would guarantee the flow of resources to the interior. The governor reacted publicly by questioning the reliability of meteorology and said that they should all wait for the Day of Saint Joseph (19 March) instead. According to the local tradition, if rains did not start until 19 March, this would indicate that a drought is taking place. It became clear to me that uncertainty was one of the most important resources of local political life—as long as politicians could manipulate it. It seems that this often applies to other situations as well. Churchill is quoted as having said that “politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.”

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Specters of Climate and the Construction of Ghostly Realities in Brazil • 189

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Scientific Apparitions Rubens Junqueira Villela graduated with a degree in meteorology from Florida State University in 1957. He was the first Brazilian scientist to go on a research expedition to the Antarctic continent. He has a diploma from the Society of the South Pole in his living room: “I was the first Brazilian to set foot on the geographical South Pole.” He became a professor of meteorology at the University of São Paulo in 1974. In the 1980s, he also worked as meteorologist for the newspaper The State of São Paulo. He retired from the university in 2000. One day, he received a phone call to the newsroom from a person who asked him what needed to be done to stop a cold front coming from Argentina before it entered Brazil. He thought it was a joke. The person identified himself as Osmar Santos and said that he belonged to an organization that could manipulate the atmosphere through spiritualistic rituals. Santos was working at the request of an association of businesspersons of Rio Grande do Sul. But in order to accomplish that, he needed scientific advice, and the national weather service was not responding to his requests. Villela reports that, out of sheer curiosity, he decided to become involved. He told Santos that, according to basic meteorological principles, an increase in local atmospheric pressure would dissipate clouds and weaken the cold front. “Unbelievably,” Villela says, “the next day pressure over the state of Rio Grande do Sul increased, and the cold front stopped.” Santos would call again a number of times. Villela became a regular contributor to the organization, the Chief Coral Snake Foundation. Villela, at some point, participated fully in the rituals, and interacted directly with the spirit of the Chief. He described the ritual to me: there were flowers, candles, and images of Catholic saints and other important Umbanda spiritual guides. People all dressed in white. Drums were played, and specific songs, called pontos, were sung. “I didn’t like all that at first,” Villela told me. “But with time, I came to understand that most of what happens there makes reference to nature, and to rural life.” He then started singing one of the songs. “It makes reference to a farm gate . . . it makes me remember my childhood at my grandfather’s farm.” In the orthodox ritual, after the initial songs and the preparation of the room, a number of individuals begin dancing in a large semicircle, and some of them go into trance. Inside of the circle, a group of mediums incorporates the spiritual guides and starts receiving the attendees individually. This is when the consultation and healing practices take

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

190 • Renzo Taddei

place. It is here that the work with the Chief differs. The ritual is not public, there are no attendees. The spirit of the Chief incorporates into the body of Santos’s wife, Adelaide Scrittori, and the meteorologicalspiritual “operation” is conducted after the Chief discusses it with Santos, who reports to the spirit the technical advice obtained from professional meteorologists. Santos brings to the ritual large maps of the area where the operation will take place. The Chief draws on the map what needs to be done for the operation to be carried out. At the times when Villela participated in the ritual, the Chief addressed him directly. “He is very assertive and serious. I saw him getting a pencil and drawing lines and arrows on a map, just like we do in synoptic meteorology, and he did it with mastery.” As a professor, Villela taught synoptic meteorology at the university. Some of the most important meteorologists in Brazil learned synoptic meteorology from him. I asked Villela whether he had witnessed the results of the operations, besides the one he had described when talking about his first contact with Santos. He was effusive in his positive answer: innumerous times. In one of our interviews, he described one interaction with the Chief and Santos:

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Villela: I have seen that . . . they hold the cold front at the entrance to Rio de Janeiro. . . . It’s just like in Rock in Rio, it was incredible—an enormous cold front reaching the area, and they held it. They asked me: what should I do to block this cold front? Then I said, first, you need to strengthen the northeast winds, to hold the front; then you also have to change the western high trough, slowing down its movement . . .

In 1987, the Brazilian Meteorological Society denounced the foundation to the Regional Council of Engineering and Architecture (CREA), the agency that provides the government-required license for engineers, architects, agronomists, and meteorologists. The foundation was accused of the “illegal practice of meteorology.” The process was sent to council member Anthero da Costa Santiago, an agronomist. In his report to the council, he surprisingly refers to spirits in contact with the living and their activities as a fact of reality, and yet, one that is outside of the scope of meteorology. He mentions Kardec’s ideas and says that, in spite of the fact that good spirits work incessantly to help humans, the latter often cannot understand or recognize it. And he then makes reference to the Regional Council of Medicine, which, after years of unfruitful conflict against mediumistic healing practices in Brazil, simply gave up and “lowered their guard, preferring to ignore spiritist activities, in the face of evidence perceived by them and by the people”

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Specters of Climate and the Construction of Ghostly Realities in Brazil • 191

(CREA 1987). He then suggested that the process should be archived, and it was (Taddei 2014).

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Intervening in the Atmosphere I had heard about spiritual manipulations of the atmosphere for the first time several years earlier. I was in Miami for the screening of a documentary on water that I helped produce. Before the screening, during the cocktail reception that preceded it, I was introduced to a Tibetan lama who was there as a representative of the Dalai Lama. The latter is featured in the film but could not attend the screening in person. During the conversation, a woman who worked at the University of Miami said that she had known the lama for a long time, and every time a hurricane headed toward Florida, she contacted and asked him to pray and change its path. Everyone laughed, except the lama and the woman; a few seconds of embarrassment followed. The lama then obligingly said that he believed he did not have such powers, but that he had seen one of his teachers climb to the top of a mountain and stop a storm. Many years later, a colleague organized a collective meditation session in a park in the city of Belo Horizonte, with the participation of a Buddhist monk from Thailand. She commented to the monk that she was afraid that rain could fall. He mentioned that in Thailand, some people can manipulate the weather. Knowing my interest in the topic, she wrote to me that same day, and I asked her to inquire further with him about it. He was not willing to discuss the issue at length; the fact that a “scientist” (myself) was interested did not help the least to motivate the monk to describe it. “Science will never understand this, it is only concerned with numbers. I can describe Paris to you, but if you don’t go there, you will never know it,” he said. The little he said afterward was that a colleague from the Dhammakaya tradition could do it, and it was done with the collaboration of the deva, spiritual beings that participate in the phenomena of nature. Sacred texts of both the Hindu and the Buddhist traditions refer, although differently, to these beings. Reading the message with that description immediately brought to my mind that evoking spiritual entities linked to natural phenomena in order to manipulate them is how Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa describes the main work of the shamans of his Amazonian people (Kopenawa and Albert 2013); the xapiri, the entities mentioned by Kopenawa, have no relation to the deva, but the homology is astounding.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

192 • Renzo Taddei

After hearing me discuss this issue during a presentation, a grad student approached me and suggested I looked at a channeled book called Elemental Spirits (Baccelli and Garcia 2005). One of the chapters describes a group of spirits working to increase the humidity of the atmosphere, forming clouds, and later manipulating the air pressure between the clouds and the city of Uberaba in order to move them in the right direction. In one of the interviews I had with professor Villela, I asked him how exactly the spirit of the Chief changes the conditions of the atmosphere. His answer was that Scrittori had told him that the spiritual world is very organized, and that there are enormous teams of spirits who take care of humidity, others that handle temperature, still others pressure, and so on. He then handed me photocopies of the section “Action of Spirits in the Production of the Phenomena of Nature” of Kardec’s The Spirit’s Book (1996 [1857]: 257–58), the pages bearing the letterhead of the foundation. The book is composed of answers spirits provided to questions posed by Kardec, who tested their validity by having the same questions asked to different spirits, in different countries. I reproduce below two answers that are particularly relevant:

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

[Q:] 539. In the production of certain phenomena, of storms, for example, is it a single spirit that acts, or a mass of spirits? [A:] A mass of spirits; or, rather, innumerable masses of spirits. [Q:] 540. Do the spirits who exert an action over the phenomena of nature act with knowledge and intention, in virtue of their freewill, or from an instinctive and unreasoning impulse? [A:] Some act in the one way, others in the other. To employ a comparison: figure to yourself the myriads of animalcule that build up islands and archipelagos in the midst of the sea; do you believe that there can be, in this process, no providential intention, and that this transformation of the surface of the globe is not necessary to the general harmony? Yet all this is accomplished by animals of the lowest degree, in providing for their bodily wants, and without any consciousness of their being instruments of God. In the same way, spirits of the most rudimentary degrees are useful to the general whole; while preparing to live, and prior to their having the full consciousness of their action and freewill, they are made to concur in the development of the various departments of nature, in the production of the phenomena of which they are the unwitting agents. They begin by executing the orders of their superiors; subsequently, when their intelligence is more developed, they command in their turn, and direct the processes of the material world; still later, again, they are able to direct the things of the moral world. It is thus that everything in nature

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Specters of Climate and the Construction of Ghostly Realities in Brazil • 193 is linked together, from the primitive atom to the archangel, who himself began at the atom; an admirable law of harmony, which your mind is, as yet, too narrow to seize in its generality.

There is too much to chew on in this last answer; what seems important for us here is the idea that what we call “consciousness” is just one possible mode of existence for spirits, among innumerous other alternatives. One outcome from this is that the existence of a spiritual dimension in natural phenomena does not, in the majority of cases (but not all of them), contradict the mechanistic understandings of natural reality employed by science. More importantly, what these words suggest is that what Descola (2013) termed the “naturalistic ontological regime” (that of the materialistic Western sciences), does not exist alongside, or have equal ontological status with, what he called the “animistic ontological regime” (that of most contemporary “hunter-gatherers,” and also of a number of spiritualistic traditions found in the West); rather, naturalism is a subset of the animistic ontological regime, which is larger and contains the former. That explains why it never occurred to the spirit of the Chief that scientific information was incompatible with his spiritual-meteorological work; at the same time, naturalists strongly believe animism is utterly incompatible with science. It also explains why animists of all walks of life tend to see naturalists as people who have some form of perceptive impairment.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

On What Makes Spirits Invisible Right after Villela described the ritual in which he instructed the spirit of the Chief about what to do to keep the skies dry above the place where Rock in Rio would take place, he said, “All I know is that you looked at the radar image and could see a small island of dry weather.” I jumped from my seat: “This can be tested!” The professor looked at me with pity. I insisted: “You are telling me that the Chief makes lower probability events happen systematically. You are also saying that technical equipment can detect the effects of the operations. Why wouldn’t it be possible to test this statistically?” “I have suggested it to my colleagues many times, and they are always dismissive, saying that whatever the foundation claims as the result of their activities is due to the atmosphere’s natural variability,” he replied. He also explained to me that the scale of action of the activities of the foundation is often so

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

194 • Renzo Taddei

small that it doesn’t change the measurement of technical equipment. The largest “city of rock” ever built for the Rock in Rio festival, in 2019, is just 0.3 percent of the meteorological grid size used by mainstream meteorological models. It is the same size, in area, of the stretch of sand of Copacabana beach. So rains can be moved a few kilometers and it will not affect the meteorological measurements. It seems that the Chief operates in a blind corner of meteorology. I had also seen meteorologists “cleaning” data collected in circumstances where they believed it could not be trusted, so outlier data was simply erased or ignored. One example referred to data from pluviometers distributed across the state of Ceará, during the period of my doctoral fieldwork. Volunteer farmers read the pluviometers (that is, the height of the column of water collected from rains) daily, and then called the meteorological agency and reported the readings. One meteorologist explained to me that weekly data was reliable but daily data was not. “The daily data tells us that Mondays are rainier than any other day of the week. We hypothesized that some people just don’t do the reading on Sunday, and then report the total reading of two days on Monday.” It sounds plausible and rational. It is also an example of how the expectation of the “normal” affects how data is evaluated and accepted or discarded. Villela’s rather cold reaction to my excitement made me see that I, deep down, still used positivistic mental models to deal with both the material and the spiritual realities. Neither the atmosphere nor the Chief would collaborate. “Natural atmospheric variability” is the trickster figure in the life of meteorologists. It gets meteorologists in trouble when it fools their models, and it gets them out of trouble when they evoke the inherent chaotic nature of the atmosphere to justify their lack of success. Of course, in the latter case, it is only efficacious in very specific, technical circumstances. Meteorology is a challenging field: there will always be someone accusing it of not getting it right, particularly in situations where the physical reality is understood in positivistic terms. And it is often in such positivistic circumstances that the budgets for funding meteorological activity are negotiated. The idea of statistically testing the effect of spirits over matter is just a reincarnation of the attempts to reduce spirituality to something that is commensurable with laboratory science; parapsychology has been doing it for over a century. Positive results that are statistically significant have been produced, and it has not changed an inch the position of parapsychology as a marginal science, or of psi phenomena as paranormal. Accusing mainstream science of being “unscientifically” resistant

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Specters of Climate and the Construction of Ghostly Realities in Brazil • 195

to accepting findings of inductive experiments that contradict ontological orthodoxy is as old as Victorian spiritualism. In England, Alfred Russel Wallace, the coauthor, with Darwin, of the theory of natural selection, is one of the scientists who accused colleagues at the end of the nineteenth century of being antiscientific, in adopting a refractory attitude toward the evidence that in the absolute majority of spiritualistic séances no fraud had been detected (Doyle 2011). In fact, it is sociologically relevant to discuss what exactly is the “science” that is constructed against spiritualism, given that science has so many different incarnations. Let me evoke a book by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called The Differend (1988). In it, Lyotard discusses the situation in which the part that has control over the communicative situation sets the stage for interaction in a way that frames the discourse of the other as incoherent or impossible. One example is a Greek teacher in classical Greece who taught law to a young student and said that the student should only pay for the classes if he had succeeded in at least one legal case. The student then lost all cases; the teacher demanded payment, and they went to court. The student won the case against the teacher, and the teacher then said that the conditions for the payment were now fulfilled. Or the case of Holocaust revisionist Robert Faurisson, who claimed that he had never encountered a credible witness of the existence of the gas chambers—Faurisson’s argument was organized in a way that a credible witness would have necessarily died. It seems that something of that sort marks the relationship between mainstream science and spiritualism. Mainstream science demands that the world is reduced to something that is necessarily commensurable to its rules of engagement. When parapsychologists do the possible and the impossible to achieve that, mainstream science presents itself in new, ever more conservative clothes in order to make the dialogue impossible. Clearly, by the standards of judgment used to qualify the results of parapsychology, a number of scientific disciplines where phenomena are not fully controllable or predictable— meteorology and psychiatry being two prominent ones—would simply not pass the test. Meteorology and psychiatry are perhaps the two most important scientific disciplines of the contemporary times. As Bruno Latour has stated, the environment is not just another branch of politics, as it has been for around five decades. Because of the seriousness of the climate crisis, it became the very condition of existence of politics (and everything else; see Latour 2017). And we need meteorology to access the climate situation and document how our actions fare in relation to it.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

196 • Renzo Taddei

Whether it fulfills the requirements of the most conservative understanding of what is or is not scientific is simply not important at this point. In what concerns psychiatry, it is interesting to remember how some of the most preeminent scholars of religion predicted its future by the end of the nineteenth century: both Edward Tylor in England and Émile Durkheim in France were certain that science would replace religion, which would naturally disappear. Over a century later, it is clear that there has been no moment in history with as much religion as the present day—and also with as much science. They were dead wrong, and their failure lies in their myopic search for a reality that replicated their own worlds—in this case, the idea that the value of something lies in its capacity to provide information about reality. Clearly that is not the main point of religion. Religion, in its core, is in the business of dealing with suffering. Science, in its restricted frame of reference that needs to reduce everything to matter, advanced much in the effort of keeping organisms alive, but very little in what concerns the subjective experience of suffering. We advance toward the third decade of the twenty-first century immersed in a planetary epidemic of mental illness and psychic suffering, and statistics point to the fact that it is more prevalent inside of academia than outside. In the United States and Europe, the climate crisis has climbed to be one of the most frequently mentioned causes for pathological anxiety. The prescription of non-guilt-inducing spirituality has been gaining popularity as a therapeutic strategy for dealing with mental illness inside of psychiatry. That is why spirits do not cooperate with submitting their actions to laboratory experiments and statistical tests: as Kardec and Arthur Conan Doyle say repeatedly in their work, the spirits who are in the position of saying meaningful things about the spiritual world and its relation to the world of the living (and not all of them are) often are busy doing things more important than playing the epistemological games of science: there is just too much suffering in the world. Against the framework of what De la Cadena and Blaser (2018) named “political ontology”—a field of political imagination and action in which irreducible excess is not annihilated—it could be said that in naturalistic renderings of spirituality, whenever an attitude of the assumption of a “transcendental not-knowing” (Goldman 2016) is not present, a form of ontological refusal (Taddei 2018) often takes its place. Hope comes from the fact that, in the field of philosophy and its interbreeding with anthropology, the concept of “animism” has been revisited and evoked as a key dimension of the search for new forms

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Specters of Climate and the Construction of Ghostly Realities in Brazil • 197

of living (see Haraway 2016; Ingold 2006; Latour 2017; Stengers 2012; Tsing 2015; Harvey 2005), and it occurs in a context in which the concept of care (De la Cadena and Blaser 2018; Haraway 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) becomes more important than that of knowing. Renzo Taddei teaches anthropology and science and technology studies at the Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil. He has earned his doctoral degree in anthropology from Columbia University. Dr. Taddei has served as visiting scholar at Yale University, Duke University, and the University of the Republic, in Uruguay. He is a research associate at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University. Dr. Taddei has written on the variety of ways in which humans interact with the atmosphere, climate and climate change, environmental conflicts, and traditional environmental knowledge in South America.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

References Agrawala, Shardul, Kenneth Broad, and David H. Guston. 2001. “Integrating Climate Forecasts and Societal Decision Making: Challenges to an Emergent Boundary Organization.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 26(4): 454–77. Alves, José Maria Brabo, José Nilson B. Campos, Flaviano Fernandes Ferreira, and Ticiana M. C. Studart. 2004. “As chuvas de janeiro/2004 no Nordeste do Brasil, suas características atmosféricas e seus impactos nos recursos hídricos da região.” In Anais do V Simpósio de Recursos Hídricos do Nordeste. São Luiz, MA: ABRH. Baccelli, Carlos, and Paulino Garcia. 2005. Espíritos Elementais. Uberaba: LEEPP. Broad, Kenneth, Alexander Pfaff, and Michael H. Glantz. 2002. “Effective and Equitable Dissemination of Seasonal-to-Interannual Climate Forecasts: Policy Implications from the Peruvian Fishery during El Niño 1997–98.” Climatic Change 54(4): 415–38. Broad, Kenneth, Alexander Pfaff, Renzo Taddei, A. Sankarasubramanian, Upmanu Lall, and Franciso de Assis de Souza Filho. 2007. “Climate, Stream Flow Prediction and Water Management in Northeast Brazil: Societal Trends and Forecast Value.” Climatic Change 84(2): 217–39. Collins, Sarah N., Robert S. James, Pallav Ray, Katherine Chen, Angie Lassman and James Brownlee. 2013. “Grids in Numerical Weather and Climate Models.” In Climate Change and Regional/Local Responses, edited by Yuanzhi Zhang and Pallav Ray. IntechOpen, Retrieved 10 November 2019 from https://www .intechopen.com/books/climate-change-and-regional-local-responses/ grids-in-numerical-weather-and-climate-models.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

198 • Renzo Taddei Conselho Regional de Engenharia e Arquitetura (CREA). 1987. Processo SF1883/87, folhas 57/58. De la Cadena, Marisol, and Mario Blaser. 2018. A World of Many Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Doyle, Arthur Conan. 2011 [1926]. The History of Spiritualism. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldman, Márcio. 2016. “Cosmopolíticas, etno-ontologías y otras epistemologías: La antropología como teoría etnográfica.” Cuadernos de Antropología Social 44: 27–35. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harvey, Graham. 2005. Animism: Respecting the Living World. Adelaide: Wakefield Press. Ingold, Tim. 2006. “Rethinking the Animate, Re-animating Thought.” Ethnos 71(1): 9–20. Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE). 2011. Censo Demográfico 2010: Características da população e dos domicílios; Resultados do universo. Rio de Janeiro: IBGE. Kardec, Allan. 1859. “Spiritism and Science.” The Spiritist Review—Journal of Psychological Studies (June): retrieved 14 November 2019 from https:// www.kardecpedia.com/en/study-guide/893/the-spiritist-review-journalof-psychological-studies-1859/4551/june/spiritism-and-science ———. 1987 [1864]. The Gospel According to Spiritism. London: The Headquarters Publishing Co Ltd. ———. 1996 [1857]. The Spirits’ Book. São Paulo: FEB. ———. 2011 [1859]. What Is Spiritism? Cleveland, OH: Edicei of America, LLC. Kopenawa, Davi, and Bruce Albert. 2013. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1988. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Neves, Marcos Eduardo. 2006. Vendedor de Sonhos: A Vida e a Obra de Roberto Medina. São Paulo: Editora Melhoramentos. Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stengers, Isabelle. 2012. “Reclaiming Animism.” E-flux Journal 36: retrieved 14 November 2019 from https://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61245/recla iming-animism/. Taddei, Renzo. 2012a. “Social Participation and the Politics of Climate in Northeast Brazil.” In Environment and Citizenship in Latin America: Natures, Subjects and Struggles, edited by Alex Latta and Hannah Wittman, 77–93. New York: Berghahn Books.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Specters of Climate and the Construction of Ghostly Realities in Brazil • 199

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

———. 2012b. “The Politics of Uncertainty and the Fate of Forecasters.” Ethics, Policy & Environment 15(2): 252–67. ———. 2014. “Alter Geoengineering.” The Thousand Names of Gaia Conference. Rio de Janeiro, 16 September 2014. Retrieved 13 November 2019 from https://thethousandnamesofgaia.wordpress.com/the-conferences-texts. ———. 2018. “O dia em que virei índio—a identificacão ontológica com o outro como metamorfose descolonizadora.” Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros 69: 289–306. Tsing, Anna L. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. World Meteorological Organization (WMO). 2019. “WMO Confirms Past 4 Years Were Warmest on Record.” Press release, 6 February. Retrieved 10 November 2019 from https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/wmoconfirms-past-4-years-were-warmest-record.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Chapter 9

Ontological Opportunism Reanimating the Inanimate in Physics and Science Communication at CERN Anne Dippel

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

We Are All Made Out of Stardust “Mostly void—partially stars,” reads the quip on John’s t-shirt.* In its ironic innocence, it seems to make a bold statement for physics, especially when worn on the chest of a physicist based at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). In this specific context, those four short words are more than a witty slogan. As a physicist’s object of fashion, they turn into a totemist embodiment of a cosmopolitical worldview (Stengers 2010). Carrying it, the wearer disseminates a statement. The meaning refers to the composition of atoms, being mostly void composites of elements created in the stellar explosion. When studied, their properties seem to be either particle-like or wavelike, depending on the conditions of observation. Moreover, these words open the door to a complex and contradictory technoscientific cosmology. Worn by a living being, the t-shirt is, on the one hand, challenging and defending at the same time the contradictory concept of modern natural science, founded on a clear separation of the inanimate from the animate. On the other hand, the animist conceptions underline the ontological understanding of science at its most fundamental level. The claim that science is infused with magical thought, animist concepts, and has “never been modern” (Latour 1993) has been a long-standing given in anthropology as well as science and technology

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ontological Opportunism • 201

studies (Nader 1996; Latour 1993; Jones 2017). However, this claim has not been empirically analyzed. Specifically, how and why concepts of animatedness seem so important to many physicists at the psychological level, pervading everyday communication among physicists and taking a vital role in the culture of communicating science, has not received much attention. In this chapter, I aim to investigate this phenomenon, bringing to the fore the complexity of internal debates about and attitudes toward studying nature in a scientific institution. Consequently, this text is not a piece of systematic ethnography but rather an account that tries to understand—based on ethnographic and historiographic episodes—how scientists, indigenous cosmologists, and philosophers engage with the world in an animist fashion. In essence, my ethnographic investigation of the contemporary state of high-energy physics shows how animist conceptions are reinforced by digital media technologies, causing a “virtualization of cosmology.”1 I show that animist understandings of nature emerge from digital media and are activated in a syncretistic narrative when scientists talk about physics or communicate with those outside of the physics community. I argue that physical scientists take an ontological and opportunist stance when communicating and claiming to have the final say about the cosmos, and that they justify this based on their perceived superiority of reasoning, coding, measurement, and mathematics. Furthermore, I elaborate how the disciplinary knowledge of anthropology and STS interferes with physical knowledge. Anthropologists are using science as contrasting capital “Other” to theorize about seemingly partial perspectives of non-Western, indigenous cosmologies. I will delineate how these interferences resonate with the anthropological and STS approaches of new materialism and new animism that, in turn, allow an understanding of how things and their meaning are made at CERN and hence situate the shift within Western cosmology in times of the Anthropocene from a modernist rationale toward an inclusive and relational understanding of the world we are living in.

The Master Narrative Told by a Master of Narration Although over fifty, John still airs the aura of a physicist in his twenties. It is late summer in 2017. The grand scenery of Mont Blanc, stretching behind his back and prolonging the cafeteria patio, accentuates his self-confident manner, especially here on his territory. He is one of the gatekeepers of the ATLAS project, responsible for outreach activities,

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

202 • Anne Dippel

an evangelist for rationality among the greater population. “I come from a third world country, you know, where people still question evolutionary theory,” he declares ironically. Most of the time, especially when it comes to high energies, the American who found his home between France and Switzerland looks at me with a dose of skepticism that tends to accompany a natural scientist in the “mecca” of European high-end research in physics, whose daily task is to repeatedly explain the most complicated phenomena in the simplest of ways. Since I encountered him for the first time in 2014, I have never managed to rid myself of the divided feeling that he has for me: on the one hand, he tries to control my presence in his function as a member of the science communication team that manages the public image of one of the detectors at CERN; on the other hand, he sees me as one of the humanities acolytes who will potentially pass on his outreach theories. If he could, he would rather do physics. Trained in rhetoric and stage experience, from guided CERN tours to TED Talks, John now sets out to explain the Big Bang Theory to me, which seems to be at the same time a traumatic and a dream-like narrative of physicists. This is the place where collective symbols are woven into semantics in order for them to be translated for a broader public, attesting to the material-semiotic entanglements of knowledge created in physics. This is the narrative I have been told since starting my research in 2013 and have been retold by John today: according to physics, cosmos emerged out of a singularity, a mathematical point of no dimension, no space and time; a point of decision, an elusive entity of energy, which exploded and expanded with the speed of light about thirteen billion light-years ago. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built precisely to help us understand the matter emerging from this energetic intensity. “From the point we call the singularity, everything emerges—space, time, and light. According to the theory of matter and antimatter, there must have been an asymmetry in the beginning. But where did mass form in the first place?” He pauses for a while, building up the narrative tension: “Now, the Higgs field explains this as a theory. It explains these phenomena. It tells us how matter came to be.” While he continues to clarify, a thought flashes through my mind: isn’t the Higgs field the cause of mass and the physical placeholder for animatedness, something that permeates all and accounts for matter in the first place (Ingold 2006; Barad 2007; Bennet 2009; Kirby 2011)? I ponder whether I should share these thoughts with my conversation partner but decide to keep them to myself. I do not feel intimate enough to expose the concepts of my field. Besides, John is not tuned to dialogue at the

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ontological Opportunism • 203

moment; he is on a mission to send information, not receive it. Science communication reminds me sometimes of a secular form of missionary engagement with those outside of the realms of physics. Unfortunately, I cannot record this conversation. It is too loud in the cafeteria, during the well-deserved lunch break filled with the murmur of chitchat and the humming that arrives on a summer breeze. It is quite windy today. I turn to a more classic ethnographical toolset and start to take notes in my field diary instead. After what seems an endless pause, during which John chews on a piece of meat while his eyes express doubt in my capacity to understand what he has just explained, he continues enthusiastically, elaborating on how the LHC discovery of the Higgs particle proves the theory experimental physics betted on when building the ATLAS detector. Some physicists draw a sharp line between those who understand physics because they studied physics and lay people who understand best through analogies and metaphors. As a professional educator, he makes another pause in search of signs of understanding, even enchantment on my face, or any potential sign of astonishment—perhaps a “gradient” of understanding. But my poker face says nothing—blank and unmoved it mirrors his, like that of a psychoanalyst. It seems to me as if he expects admiration for the story of physics he is telling me. He, an expert, the chair of the ATLAS particle physics outreach group, the grail keeper of positivism. He, who knows measurement and mathematics, standing firmly on the fundament of falsification and reproduction. Gatekeeper of the one truth, not many; and a truth based on measurement and metrics, numbers, mathematics, obtained by theoretical and experimental engagement with the world. “Popper is built into us,” John says, insisting on the scientific concept of testing the truth by discarding invalid theories and proving things ex negativo through exclusion. “I like your t-shirt,” I say before we part. John replies, “Yes, isn’t it fascinating? We are all made out of particles older than our solar system.” Science communication is an impersonated form of totemism, I think, in order to gain some distance from my interlocutor and the situation. It is somewhat ironic to see a living physicist proudly admitting to being made out of inanimate stardust, all the while representing a discipline thought of as the epitome of hard science, looking exclusively into the nonliving matter. Even if the particles themselves are thought of as inanimate, they are turned into animated matter by those who investigate their behavior within strictly confined experimental settings, depending on computer simulations. As I stroll back to my guest desk at one of the main office buildings, passing by the statue of

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

204 • Anne Dippel

Shiva performing a cosmic dance of creation, I think of how enchanted and religious science is (Dippel 2017). Claude Lévi-Strauss’s words resound in my head; religion must be considered as the humanization of natural laws, and magic the naturalization of human action (Styers 2004: 7). I wonder whether physics’ animatedness is somehow related with a certain Freudian “fort/da”—presence of physics’ objects—reinforced by digital media (Ong 1992). As I observed in many situations, stretching from the control room to dialogues within chat groups and to public presentations, the everyday language of physics turns things, and more specifically objects, into living beings, regardless of whether they are codes, particles, or experimental setups. Although physics is by definition of its subject devoted to inanimate nature, it seems humans, including physicists, cannot resist the temptation to bring inanimate nature alive. In the past few years of this research, I have regularly encountered rhetorics of animatedness in the everyday use of digital devices. Despite that, I put aside a heap of data collected on the topic, marking it as “not significant enough.” Recently, I decided to reconsider my initial approach with the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, who states that the differentiation between the symbolic and the actual use of a language must be considered obsolete, as language is a human mode of experiencing the world (Gadamer 1990: 108). We live by metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Rhetorics, narratives, and language shape our world and generate different frames and shades of truth. In times when truth is simulated and mediated through computers, the insight into how we symbolize the world becomes even more crucial. Nature on the quantum level should make it reasonable enough to rethink the idea of physics as the practice of studying inanimate “objects-as-such,” turning it into a science concerned with objects that “come-into-being” (Ingold 2006: 10). Leaving aside the esoteric literature accompanying quantum mechanics since its emergence at the end of the nineteenth century—even the most rational physicists such as Erwin Schrödinger and Robert Oppenheimer found comfort in reading the Bhagavad Gita—questions still resounds: Why do physicists as gatekeepers of rational science based on falsification often seem to find psychological comfort in esotericism, animism, and transcendental justification of their work? And why do they especially do so in light of not being condemned to “shut up and calculate,” as the physicist David Mermin once summarized postwar physics practice with the aim to end speculative thoughts emerging out of quantum mechanics? Can physics be solely understood as a “culture

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Ontological Opportunism • 205

of no culture” (Traweek 1988: 179), the high temple of objectivity that does not know any other objects than those “as such”? Based on the above assumptions, the answer to this last question of course is no— especially when physics is engaging with “others” in a global world, “objects-as-such” are turning into “relational objects.” As animate beings, humans mirror not only their environment but also themselves in everything surrounding them. Semantics and metaphors create meaning, especially when it comes to communicating science. Still, modern dualisms are often anchored in the contemporary culture of physics, and some of the stereotypes about physicists’ reductional positivism are used by anthropologists and scholars of science and technology to promote their visions of the world as complexity in the making. This comes as no surprise, given the structural similarities between physics and anthropology: both are disciplines that can easily be described as interfering knowledge systems, in which objects, concepts, and ideas are brought to harmonious resonance. In what follows, I seek to probe the assumptions that reanimation of the inanimate must be read as a contemporary phenomenon in physics practice and communication, rooting in a globalized science and localized truths mediated by digitality.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Science as a Counterpart to Animistic Concepts of Nature As French sociologist Bruno Latour pointed out, above all science has never been modern (1993). It has tried to veil its origin, emerging within a three-cornered constellation alongside magic and religion (Nader 1996; see also Pels 2003; Jones 2017). Instead of understanding science as evolutionary success evolving out of magic, witchcraft, and religion (Frazer 1900; Tylor 1873; Malinowski 1954; Mauss 1972), it must be seen as part of a triangle that frames humankind’s desire to master nature while also acknowledging its indispensable mastery over all of us. Although Latour takes on board inherent animisms in science, he never probes deeper into the matter and does not investigate his field in an empirical case study. Instead, he incorporates within his neoliberal theory of actor-networks cryptoanimisms that enable hierarchies to function, while leveling the value of actors disregarding responsibilities and embedding discursive powers in things and beings alike (Lossin 2019).

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

206 • Anne Dippel

In contrast to Latour, British anthropologist Tim Ingold argues in his famous article “Re-thinking the Animate, Re-animating Thought,”

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

We know it from ethnography, that people do not universally discriminate between the categories of living and non-living things. This is because, for many people, life is not an attribute of things at all. That is to say, it does not emanate from a world that already exists, populated by objects-as-such, but is rather immanent in the very process of that world’s continual generation or coming-into-being. (Ingold 2006:10)

An intriguing and convincing argument, exemplified by many ethnographies of non-Western societies and meticulously elaborated in Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics (2014), rests on the construction of a stable exception to the rule of animacy in humankind’s manifold visions of cosmology: science must be seen as the Other other, the stronghold of inanimateness, the dark lord of natural control without a reason but reason as such. It seems to be the only cosmology populated with objects-as-such that stay inanimate, although they continuously come into being based on expansion and evolution of matter or through the act of human will in experiments such as those situated at the LHC. Similarly to other critical thinkers decentering Western cosmology of science and reason, Ingold holds on to the trick, first installed by science itself. He is making his case about “gerundive” and intra-active cosmologies (Haraway 2013; Barad 2007) by referring implicitly to science as an unmarked Other, solidifying science’s naivety and blindness toward its animate relativities within its cosmology. The internal anthropological debate on how to situate scientific perspectives is complicated even more when reflected upon by means of empirical data gathered within a scientific subculture, for example within physics. Many researchers have emphasized the relational constellation between science and animism, but few have empirically analyzed science itself (for an exception see Borck 2014). The current investigation is important because scientific disciplines are residuals of objectivist and rational promises in a world ever blurrier and more complex. I want to take a closer look at physics, drawing on empirical data collected over the past seven years at CERN. I am using this data to explore its relationship to animism in order to show how the categories of the inanimate and animate come together when communicating physics, and how physicists turn their mundane objects into animated tools (Lemonnier 2012). Studying these relations helps to understand the rise of new materialism and new animism in the humanities and

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Ontological Opportunism • 207

social sciences as well. While new materialism emphasizes the agential qualities of matter itself (Barad 2007), new animism sheds light on the common practice of animating the inanimate (Bird-David 1999; Harvey 2005; Voss 2014; Espírito Santo et al. 2013). Both include nonhuman actors and forces of all kinds in the equation trying to explain how humans make sense of material-semiotic worlds. The animate in Western science and cosmology is intricately intertwined with digital media technologies. Although the ubiquity of digital media in experimental physics is highly significant to the above argument, it needs to be put into the background in this chapter. In a nutshell: while photography turned life into objects of death (Barthes 1980), digitality is electrifying things, turning objects into animated creatures, neither dead nor alive, as if each one of us was holding a Frankenstein-device (Ong 1992; Shelley 2017 [1818]).

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Fundamental Ambiguities The ontology of modern physics is based on fundamental ambiguities. Physicists try to find particles that otherwise behave as waves. Matter, at the basis of its smallest constituents, might be seen as the “bricks of the cosmos,” as one informant explains, while for others these constituents are considered as “wave packages.” Since then, physical sciences have to deal with an ambiguous concept of particles (Falkenburg 2007). In the case of physics, the ambiguity of “nature” is mastered through more than just empirical observations and repetitive measurements. After all, “nature does not care whether it is named wave or particle. These are human words,” as Mia, a PhD student, says when I ask her about the ideological connotations of seeing the elementary entities either as a wave or as a particle. But as we are living in this world by and through metaphors, the question of master narratives and how we are building analogies (Jones 2017) based on and with collective symbols is of utmost importance. For example, Georg, a PhD student explains, “In IT terms, nature is the framework that allows us to study particles and interactions. Interactions can be described as relations that can change over time. Particles act upon each other—without an electron, you would not have an electromagnetic field. In this case, the actor is connected with the framework. But here metaphors reach an end. An electron has no hand and no intention.” We lead this discussion in a chat group, an organization that actually serves lunch. Georg’s colleague Rob intervenes: “I find ‘acting upon’ too ‘active.’ Particles carry

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

208 • Anne Dippel

forces, and particles are exposed to forces and force fields. In this case, an interaction happens.” Mia, founder of the lunch chat group, sums up: “You could also say that CERN researchers ask the following questions: Where are we coming from? What are we made of? And where are we going?” How do you communicate scientific uncertainties in your community—and how do you translate these uncertainties to “laypeople” all over the world? Scientists, it turns out, approach the world with ontological opportunism. Depending on whom they communicate with, they draw their conclusions from the respective mind set of their interlocutors on how to relate to their interaction partners, and how to engage with nature. Natural language, used to explain the entanglement of particles, introduces animating qualities. In their everyday talk, physicists and laypeople alike attribute agency, intentional behavior, or a sensual apparatus to potentially inanimate entities, be it for outreach purposes or in everyday exchanges about the detector, sometimes jokingly described as a “living being.” Physicists engage with their detectors, calling them “baby,” placing little “helpers” and “luck bringers” to ensure positive outcomes of their experiments. They talk about their tools, and even about the objects they are dealing with, as if they were animated, considering them as vital actors. This opens an ontological Pandora’s box. Does our animated perspectivism fail to understand what is going on, or does “Western science” fail to acknowledge in its very conception the animism of all things, while humans unconsciously tend to treat things as animated objects? Yet again we end up entangled in scholastic confusions, in which “nature” is on the side of Averroes, Giordano Bruno, and Baruch Spinoza. Humans are concerning this topic on a philosophical betting ground, and any position always reminds us of the existential gamble humans engage in when opting for cosmological visions of a world they are part of. The whole setup of science as such with an undisputable, intangible observer, participating and engaging or not, is highly suspect. Physics and anthropology (as well as most magical cosmologies) share a common understanding that observation affects the observed. Both disciplines have to deal with a “world” (or a nature-culture) that “kicks back” (Barad 2007: 112), in the first case by behaving (pseudo) randomly, in the latter by objecting any definitions of what objectivity is. Why, I wonder, did Bronisław Malinowski, a trained physicist, not take the findings of quantum mechanics into account in his theoretical reflections?

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Ontological Opportunism • 209

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Tale of Two Johns In this section, I will delineate how physicists engage with their field and relate to each other by leading the reader through the CERN site and recalling a meeting with the science communication expert and physicist John. The section shows the complexity of everyday practice in physics. Some physicists deal with their topic from an experimental point of view, while others engage with physics theoretically or by coding. Depending on the respective frame of what doing physics entails when talking about physics, physicists shift their mode of engagement, adapting to the situation and their interlocutors. No matter what professional talents CERN physicists contribute to understanding physics at the research site, the engagement with physics through humor and play can be observed as an everyday practice, no matter whom they are interacting with (Dippel 2017, 2019). I decided to see John again during my latest research trip in early March 2018. It is always good to find out what is going on. I walk down the gray linoleum corridors, passing Prussian blue painted doors. Pipes are transporting gas in the pipeline. I am not sure whether they are currently filled with anything. At least, in theory, it’s the fuel running the experiments flowing through them, and in practice I’m given the feeling of being caught in a gigantic experimental system, or the digestive tract of a cyborg creature out of E. M. Forster’s novel The Machine Stops (2013 [1909]), as if the most ancient part of CERN would be the ur-mother of European laboratories. Today the offices are mostly stuffed with desks and humans behind computers. Back in the day, it is said that it even gave a home to more experimental systems. Physicists are nostalgic about the fact that Albert Einstein walked down these halls. Maybe that is why no one tried to renovate the building. It feels as if the magic touch of geniuses and Nobel laureates of all tempers and temperaments enlightened all of those who are working here today; as if the ghost of Enrico Fermi strolled along the pathways of knowledge, finding no rest in these technoscientific environments, a steady reminder of the atomic factory he built around the transuranic element Pu-239, the matter of bombs. I pass the big common room, a place where the members sometimes meet as if it were a “church,” as several interlocutors told me as we walked along the corridor. It was here that Fabiola Gianotti, the current director-general, back then spokesperson of the ATLAS detector group, announced the detection of the Higgs boson in front of her most

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

210 • Anne Dippel

important colleagues, including Peter Higgs and François Englert, after the end of run 1 of the LHC in 2012. I recall again what I learned in the narratives of last years, words collected in the field: the inner fabric of the cosmos remains a conundrum. Although four forces have been located, they cannot be described according to one coherent model. The current standard model is the closest approximation to nature that we have and stands on the stage of the LHC to be tested. As in other cosmologies, humans do not invent what is to be observed. Nature, according to physics, can be described as a relationship of space, time, and matter, as well as forces that connect or disrupt what materially exists. Based on mathematically formulated models, a condensed symbolic notation helps to explain nature, and itself produces assumptions about the very nature tested in experiments. At the heart of this conception of nature lives symmetry, although it gets broken often enough. When physicists started to work on the standard model, the physical calculations needed a field that gives matter mass. The Higgs field produces exactly this kind of mass, transforming energy into mass and therefore creating matter in the first place, and us in the end. I think of the t-shirt John was wearing last summer during our meeting (“Mostly void—partially stars”). The particle itself has never been seen, but patterns of other particles decaying have been observed, which must be considered the signature of the Higgs particle (Cohen-Tanoudji and Spiro 2013). The Higgs particle can be imagined as a sign of the presence of the Higgs field. Its presence, appearing at very high energies that can only be produced in the proton-proton collisions of the LHC, is consolidating the hypothesis of the existence of the field. It takes millions of repetitions to get the coveted “5 sigma,” the gold standard of statistical proof in high-energy physics. After the “God particle,” as Leon Lederman (1993) called the boson, had been found, the existence of the multibillion-euro-project LHC could finally be justified. The Higgs particle has taken a special position in the standard model of elementary particles. When we met in 2016, I asked John, “Are these particles synthetic particles?” He gave me that specific look, then relaxed, harking back on his job to do outreach properly. “I mean, aren’t there natural counterparts in the cosmos to those you produce ‘artificial’?” He nods and elaborates: “Astrophysics observes similar particles to our own. To us, there is no difference between these produced and the ‘natural’ ones. Both behave similarly, whether here in the lab or up in the sky.” Sign interpretations are ontologically dirty, writes Donna Haraway, the feminist philosopher of science, referring to the physiology of semi-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ontological Opportunism • 211

otics (1997: 127). So are proton-proton collision experiments with their ontological dependency on computer-simulated processes of purification; taming the random through probability calculations. Despite this, for physicists, there is nothing dirty or ambiguous about their particles. They are proven through decades of experimental work. So has been the Higgs boson. As a scalar boson, the Higgs is not only part of the particle scale—a potent taxonomic device of material origins—but it also “embodies” a transatomic and transcosmic aspect of matter. The Higgs boson, currently not an autochthonous inhabitant of our solar system, must therefore be considered neither artificial nor natural. It is naturally “a kin to PU239, to transgenic, transpacific, and transported creatures of all kinds” (Haraway 1997: 62). Pointing toward the Higgs field that permeates all things like an invisible ether, it is a signifier of the connectedness and interrelatedness of all matter and being in what we call cosmos. Most office doors are adorned with funny comics or sayings, embodiments of the ludic culture of physics. One poster states, “Without engineers, science is just philosophy.” Another one shows a man shoveling snow, encapsulated in a crystal snowball, ranting in French, “For God’s sake, I would really like to know what kind of an idiot is shaking this ball.” After another labyrinth-like narrow gangway, I leave the building and cross the backyard. I am quite proud to be able to finally find my way through all the corridor mazes. In a small building, the size of a container rather than a house, the outreach office gives home to John and his two colleagues. I am greeting John, having knocked at his door. He is delighted to see me. Again, I feel a sense of control as soon as we engage in a discussion about my current research stay. John, who once said to me, “We are physicists. We can do anything,” is preparing a STEM outreach conference talk, in which he is about to share his magical experience of doing physics education on sacred ground, working together with the Lakota-Sioux cosmologists at Standing Rock. This collaboration emerged following a virtual visit John made to a physics class at Taos Pueblo High School, and it has been a fruitful ongoing mission for John to spread the knowledge of high-energy physics among people from his home. John explains quickly in an excited manner how he engaged in interdisciplinary collaboration, bridging art, science, and education to bring Native American culture and Western physics together. Still enchanted by the sacred indigenous lands of Standing Rock, he tells me about his visit over the summer, how he met a Lakota cosmologist, “the other John,” and how this affected his vision on physics and indigenous sci-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

212 • Anne Dippel

ence itself. “Let me share the slides with you.” He refers to Gregory Cajete, who wrote a book on native science, explaining the natural laws of interdependence in Lakota cosmology (2000). “The other John and I have learned so much from each other during the workshop. First, we discussed the Lakota cosmology. On another day, I explained the basics of particle physics and Western cosmology. The students learned to build a tipi, and we shared our thoughts.” On his slides, I read that science is dependent on the “culture/worldview/paradigm” of the definer. We see the world through particular “human goggles.” Is this still the same Popperian John I met last summer, I wonder? John continues: “So, I explained the Feynman diagrams2; how we visualize particles through images instead of long formulas.” John tells me how he showed photographs from the quark-gluon plasma in the bubble chambers of the Gargamelle experiment to illustrate his point. He also explains how he raised the interest of the “other John”—that’s what they called each other. Lakota John got very excited as he looked at the Feynman diagrams of the Physics John. He studied them for some time and then recognized the “spider-god” in the trickster particles appearing as exchange particles in the old bubble chamber images. “Then, he started to draw Lakota symbols, comparing our two diagrams.” For Lakota John, the elusive particles were manifestations of Iktomi, the spider-trickster god of Sioux cosmology, belonging to the category of the creator gods. According to the Lakota cosmology, John explains, Iktomi is represented as a spider-god weaving his worldwide web around the globe. The internet represents the return of Iktomi, the god of technology, to the earth. I can hardly believe my eyes and ears as I listen to John. I was puzzled, but I did not say a word. There he was, the falsification John who explained to me with nuisance, back in 2014 when we first met, the logic of physics, and lectured me on objectivity. John, who used to elaborate on how imprecise hermeneutic sciences are because they lack mathematics and are bound to words instead. Now, that very same John equates particles with tricksters. After all, their appearance is unforeseen and they can just be understood as signs of something else. I tend to think of particles as forces of différance. I ask myself ironically whether John indeed did physics while in the Lakota land or perhaps had a meeting with a Peyote cactus instead? If only Donna Haraway could be here right now to witness this. In John’s eyes, particles turn into tricksters, even if only for outreach communication. I agree, that’s how you could describe them, as tricksters, I am telling him, “I would have never dared, considering it as an imposition of my dearest concepts of thought onto a field, just because I can.” I ask him, “Have

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ontological Opportunism • 213

you ever heard of the philosophy of Donna Haraway?” John shakes his head. I continue: “The concept of the trickster has been one of the most important outcomes of science and technology studies in the last decades, alongside her idea of cyborgs and simians. It describes ambiguous entities, oscillating between two states—such as organism and machine, or—in this case—one could say wave and particle. Initially, I thought of the particles as tricksters, but I would have never considered that a physicist would acknowledge those similarities.” John’s interest in feminist philosophy of science stays rather modest. He continues to talk about outreach possibilities and further objectivities. Then, he declares that there is a difference, of course, between native science and Western science, guiding me through his PowerPoint presentation. John elaborates that indigenous science rests on subjective observation but centers around the natural and human relevance, considering cultural implications and thus having a subjective element. Western science, on the other hand, is based on measurement, theoretical prediction, methodology, and objectivity. Sure, he sees some common threads, such as the drive to understand and communicate nature to future generations, or the understanding that observation affects that which is observed, or even the appreciation of data. At the end, “what else is the daily observation of nature, but passing on empirical knowledge from generation to generation? Still, there is a difference,” says John. “Western science is objective, and native science is, due to its embeddedness in a religious worldview, subjective.” I am a bit calmer now. I almost believed that John had been convinced to drop his Western conception of science as the holy grail of objectivity thanks to Lakota John, just like Carlos Castaneda did in his narrative of the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan (Castaneda 1968). Back home on the CERN site, he fits his experience into the perspective of his job. As a gifted science communicator, he is practicing ontological opportunism every day when it comes to spreading the word of high-energy physics.

Ambiguous Entities Ambiguous particles, neither seen nor unseen, proven, and methodologically predicted through theoretical reasoning, emerge out of the daily business of the LHC. When two cosmological worldviews come together, the spider-god Iktomi jumps from one cosmological system into another, turning into a particle, animating the inanimate, back and forth. He is a shapeshifter just like the entities of the quantum world.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

214 • Anne Dippel

Both can be seen as tricksters, proving the sharp analyses of Donna Haraway’s work on ambiguous entities in the technoscientific world, from cyborgs over coyote tricksters to coevolved dogs and all kind of creatures from the Anthropocene to the Chthulucene (1991, 2016). How come these entanglements between feminist STS, physics communication, and Lakota cosmology become visible these days? Are all three symptoms of cosmological virtualization? New materialism follows these readings of material-semiotic objects, first explored by Donna Haraway, herself a white Western scientist born in the USA. It situates objects in a defined chronotopos, focuses on partial connections, and unblinds diffractions instead of fabricating shiny representation of what Western science calls nature. Of course, given the language of agency attributed to creatures of all kinds questioning fundamentally that “objects-as-such” even exist, the concepts of technoscientific ambiguity by Donna Haraway embrace a conscious concept of animism. While the wall between object and subject is being torn down in a world of agential realism, the material animism of high-energy physics still lives in denial. Or, physicists exercise in ontological opportunism to have the final say on how to make sense of nature. The ambiguity of entities is a lesson emerging not just out of the subatomic world investigated at CERN. Ambiguity is the core aspect of an animist worldview (Ingold 2006). Also in our Newtonian reality embedded in processualism and based on sociocultural conventions, seeing objects is an uncertain enterprise. We can never be sure of what we see. Without referring to the hidden cultural variables of seeing things as such, leaving aside our physiological apparatus, we are always prone to animate whatever we see. This problem has been most famously illustrated by Wittgenstein through the ambiguous image of the rabbit-duck, thinking about the difference between “seeing as” and “seeing that” (1953). Physicists always critically and carefully study their data, making sure that nothing is missed out or read into it (Dorigo 2011). In the story of the two Johns, those reproducible practices of dealing with experiments are related to the transgenerational observation of Iktomi, an ambiguous god, neither good nor bad. Even if the measurement gives a promise of certainty as to what is seen, physicists cannot be entirely sure of what they are looking at, because “in our gravitational world,” the observed can appear either as a wave—if decelerated—or as a particle, in the moment of acceleration. Nature needs to be conjured up—either from within the cave below the Jura Mountains or in the visions of Lakota and their natural ob-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ontological Opportunism • 215

servations of the Dakota prairie. Even if Western physics consciously refuses to be associated with pagan animism, the many cosmological overlaps place it closer to animism than ever before. Physics John and Lakota John experienced many intersections between their usually very remote cosmological views based on very different teleologies and rationales. While Lakota John sees the manifestation of Iktomi, the spider-god, in the world of physics, Physics John perceives natural science as the next evolutionary step of natural observation, thus reinstalling his superiority upon his return at CERN. The particle imagery on the detector visualizations and the Feynman diagrams, symbolizing particle decays, seem to closely resemble Lakota diagrams and their cosmological concepts. These pictographic symbols both fall into the same media category. The images allow us to describe dynamic processes or abstract representations of objects that are not existing “as such” but concerning other objects fitted into a hierarchy. Pictographic diagrams from both cosmologies share a basic commonality, both being media of condensed information storage, decipherable only in relation to the greater cosmological system. Both must be seen in alliance with Donna Haraway’s reasoning about semiotics as a trope and a model at the same time (1997). In this tale of complexity and contradictions, science as a universal pratice and Lakota indigenous science approach each other, both trying to keep up their distinction, while at the same time paradoxically trying to show that their methods and their goals are essentially identical in that they relate to their respective concepts of truth. While the physical scientist clings to ideals of objectivist modes of falsifying hypotheses, the native science generates tropes and stories, ironic narratives, and jokey “über-readings” of techno-scientific knowledge productions, marking the unmarked epistemological system of objectivity and incorporating it into Lakota Sioux cosmology. In comparing the diagrammatic visions of both cultures as a form of abstracting notations of natural observation, Lakota John and Physics John managed to symmetrize the two cosmologies during a workshop with children, easily connecting both visions. Both—not only Western physics—encompass subjectivities, both can relate to the figure of Iktomi, the shape-shifting trickster god spinning his worldwide web. It does not seem to be a coincidence for Lakota John that the www protocol has been invented at CERN to understand the trickster behavior of particles. And on sacred land, all this makes total sense for Physics John. The worldwide web and the particles are manifestations of the same god, who controls human visions of the cosmos and is seen as

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

216 • Anne Dippel

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

the creator and master of contemporary communication technologies by Lakota John. The worldwide web is seen as a gift by many native cultures, allowing them to connect for political causes, to voice their concerns, and to disseminate ideas like never before. And like Iktomi, who is ambiguous at heart (Melody 1977), media technology like the internet is representing the good and the bad in humankind. The worldwide web may be seen as a gift and a curse at the same time. It makes perfect sense for a particle to be ambiguous and elusive, deluding the observational traps set up by human observers. Technology, according to British anthropologist Alfred Gell, must be understood within the framework of magical ideas, “in providing the orienting framework within which technical activity takes place. Technical innovations occur, not as the result of attempts to supply wants, but in the course of attempts to realize technical feats heretofore considered ‘magical’” (Gell 1988: 8). For Lakota John, high-energy physics shows Iktomi’s work: the trickster god weaves humans into his magic web of perception. With a feminist STS framework, this all makes perfect sense. The two Johns form a dialectical synthesis, proving higher-order concepts of trickster ontologies and natural scientific epistemology at the lower level of empirical, technoscientific observations of “nature,” though using divergent filters of different cultural imaginaries and modes of reasoning. Digital times reverse long-standing dichotomies of the West and the rest, at least when it comes to the cosmology of matter: be it within anthropological debates or within the practices of physics, dichotomies dissolve into ultimately relational dynamics.

Conclusion Pondering on the tale of two Johns, I have concluded that physical particles can be situated at the core of the technoscientific body, exemplifying that Western science must be treated as a located practice with universalist appeal producing material-semiotic objects, animating and sorting things into powerful taxonomies. Western science is superseding the dialectics of object and subject. It turns the equality of actors into a universe of animated creatures that might be seen as offspring of technoscientific capitalism (Haraway 1997), but which have a life of their own. Particles are changing the “culture of no culture,” of “extreme objectivity” (Traweek 1988: 162). They turn the unmarked modality of knowledge called science into a marked chronotopos, where women, cosmopol-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ontological Opportunism • 217

itans, and nerds find refuge side by side, fleeing from the world of selfmade entrepreneurs by engaging in a collaborative enterprise. I learned that particles can be considered tricksters even by physicists. Furthermore, these entities can be considered as “stem cells of the techno-scientific body” (Haraway 1997: 129). Humans today are made out of stardust of the cosmic system, their world being animated by invisible fields. Turning the time-bound entity of a Homo sapiens mammal into a cosmic body, scientists morph the origin of space, time, and matter with the ephemeral complex being that we are. The deadly entity of life and the infinity of subatomic matter form relationalities that need to be carefully analyzed to understand the current shift in Western scientific cosmology. While acknowledging the technical constructions behind it, science searches for connections to the Big Bang totem that has resulted in the world as we know it today. This ominous concept of singularity is the riddle that physicists turned into the answer in their master narrative of Western cosmology. Despite the constant acts of purification, scientific knowledge is contradictory. Truth is colored by storytelling frames (Mol 2002), it involves human and nonhuman actors, and it depends on media technology. Physicists, engaging with many worlds within different cultural contexts, adapt their narratives as a function of these worlds and contexts, a phenomenon I call “ontological opportunism.” Whether or not they are conscious of their narrative ingratiation when upgrading technical conversations within their community or when downgrading them outside of this community in discussion with laypeople, the line between animism and realism slowly dissolves in the digital era of the Anthropocene. Many physicists continue to adhere to a worldview in which they are more than modest witnesses to phenomena they refer to as nature— but these are rioting, untamed objects. In the world of the late twentieth century, ethnographically accompanied by Sharon Traweek (1988) and Karin Knorr-Cetina (1999), these objects were tamed, and physics seemed to be the epitome of a “culture of no culture.” But in the digital era of the LHC, the virtuality of particles unravel their ambiguous ontological state. Due to the central epistemological status of computer simulations in contemporary science, particles today have been transformed into material-semiotic objects, easily recognizable as tricksters for Lakota Sioux cosmologists and feminist anthropologists of STS alike. Western science has come a long way from its origins in attempting to understand divine rivers, nymphae, and music that is the witness to godliness, harmonious mathematical patterns detected from

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

218 • Anne Dippel

philosophers in Asia Minor, from Pythagoras to Leibniz and beyond. It has subjected nature to arithmetic, geometry, statistics calculating correlations, computers modeling simulations and detecting the imaginary within the reality of physics. Secular physics does not need to consider any gods and spirits anymore. It is the mathematical formulae that “miraculously” translate nature into an abstract system of signs. Whether mathematics must be considered as transcendental, obfuscating, or clarifying nature remains yet another puzzle in the ambiguous concept of cosmos. This process brought about a change in the self-representation of physicists. Robert Boyle (Shapin and Shaffer 1985), the seventeenthcentury experimental physicist, has little in common with the twentyfirst-century sorcerers of the code collaborating in their experimental control rooms. Despite the clear difference, they share a similar dream of objectivity. Enchanted technology and animated matter have had a major impact on physics, turning the “culture of no culture,” with its ideal of a world where nation, race, class, and gender do not matter, into a nerd culture of cosmopolitans, with diversity departments and discussions on race, gender, and sexuality, and above all transforming the researchers themselves into an endangered species of rational universalist cosmopolitans in a world of renationalization and fragmented identity politics. Who else tames nature and claims to be able to do anything but a Promethean tribe of natural philosophers turned into science through the use of technology and the deployment of mathematics? At the same time, as I have witnessed, the adherents of rational science imagine a world in which dry science is comparable to the enchanted world of witches and magicians, as in Harry Potter novels, or gods and monsters, as in science fiction. In the computer age, the god(s) seem to manifest themselves in the technical images and mathematically predicted signatures of physical experiments. Physicists’ digital tools seem to augment ambiguity—a topic that still needs to be further explored. Anne Dippel is a assistant professor at the Department for Cultural Anthropology/Cultural History of Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena (Germany). She has held fellowships, and has taught and researched in Germany and abroad, including as visiting assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as researcher at the Cluster of Excellence “Image Knowledge Gestalt” (HU Berlin), as fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Media Cultures of Computer Simulation (MECS) at Lüneburg University, and as lecturer at the De-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Ontological Opportunism • 219

partment for Ethnology at the University of Heidelberg. For the purposes of her current research, she has been an associated member of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) from 2015 to 2017. Notes *This article will be published with slight changes in the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, Vol. 30, Issue 1. 1. I want to thank Sonia Fizek, Ursula Rao, Karl-Andrew Woltin, and Cornelius Borck for commenting on an early draft of this chapter. Borck aptly coined this phrase to reflect the findings I present in this final version. 2. Representations of mathematical descriptions of subatomic particles in pictorial form.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

References Barthes, Roland. 1980. Le chambre claire: Note sur la photographie. Paris: Gallimard, Le Seuil. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennet, Jane. 2009. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bird-David, Nurit 1999. “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40(1): 567–91. Borck, Cornelius. 2014. “How to Do Voodoo with Functional Neuroimaging.” EspacesTemps.net, 9 December. Retrieved 10 January 2019 from https:// www.espacestemps.net/en/articles/neuroimaging/. Cajete, Gregory. 2000. Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. Foreword by Leroy Little Bear. Santa Fe: Clear Light Books. Castaneda, Carlos. 1968. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cohen-Tannoudji, Gilles, and Michael Spiro. 2013. Le boson et le chapeau mexican. Paris: Folio. Dippel, Anne, 2017. “Das Big Data Game: Zur spielerischen Konstitution kollaborativer Wissensproduktion in der Hochenergiephysik am CERN.” NTM, Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine 4: 485–517. ———. 2019. “Ludopian Visions: On the Speculative Potential of Games in Times of Algorithmic Work and Play.” In Playing Utopia. Futures in Digital Games, edited by Benjamin Beil, Gundolf S. Freyermuth, and Hanns Christian Schmidt, 235–52. Bielefeld: transcript. Dorigo, Tommaso. 2011. “Should You Get Excited by Your Data? Let the LookElsewhere Effect Decide.” Compact Muon Solenoid. Retrieved 10 December 2018 from http://cms.web.cern.ch/news/should-you-get-excitedyour-data-let-look-elsewhere-effect-decide.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

220 • Anne Dippel Espírito Santo, Diana, Katerina Kerestetzi, and Anastasios Panagiotopoulos. 2013. “Human Substances and Ontological Transformations in the AfricanInspired Ritual Complex of Palo Monte in Cuba.” Critical African Studies 5(3): 195–219. Falkenburg, Brigitte. 2007. Particle Metaphysics: A Critical Account of Subatomic Reality. Berlin: Springer. Forster, E. M. 2013 [1909]. The Machine Stops. New York: FKM Books. Frazer, James George. 1900. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1990. Gesammelte Werke. Bd. 1 (Hermeneutik I. Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Gell, Alfred. 1988. “Technology and Magic.” Anthropology Today 4(2): 6–9. Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. ———. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©Meets_Onco Mouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge. ———. 2013. “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far.” In ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media & Technology 3. doi:10.7264/ N3KH0K81. ———. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harvey, Graham. 2005. Animism: Respecting the Living World. London: Hurst & Co. Ingold, Tim. 2006. “Rethinking the Animate, Re-animating Thought.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 71(1): 9–20. Jones, Graham. 2017. Magic’s Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kirby, Vicky. 2011. Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Knorr-Cetina, Karin. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lederman, Leon. 1993. The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? New York: Dell Publishing. Lemonnier, Pierre. 2012. Mundane Objects: Materiality and Non-verbal Communication. San Francisco: Left Coast Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books. Lossin, R. H. 2019. “Neoliberalism for Polite Company: Bruno Latour’s PseudoMaterialist Coup.” Salvage 7: 131–55.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ontological Opportunism • 221 Malinowski, Bronisław. 1954. Magic, Science and Religion; And Other Essays. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books. Melody, Michael Edward. 1977. “Maka’s Story: A Study of Lakota Cosmogony.” Journal of American Folklore 90(356): 149–67. Mauss, Marcel. 1972. A General Theory of Magic. London: Routledge. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nader, Laura. 1996. Naked Science. Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge. New York: Routledge. Ong, Walter J. 1992. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge. Pels, Peter. 2003. “Introduction: Magic and Modernity.” In Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment, edited by Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels, 241–71. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Shapin, John, and Simon Schaffer. 1985. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shelley, Mary J. 2017 [1818]. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Annotated for Scientists, Engineers and Creators of all Kind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stengers, Isabelle. 2010. Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Styers, Randall. 2004. Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Traweek, Sharon. 1988. Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High-Energy Physics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tylor, Edward Burnett. 1873. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. London: Murray. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2014. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-structural Anthropology. Minneapolis: Univocal. Voss, Ehler. 2014. “A Sprout of Doubt: The Debate on the Mediums’ Agency in Mediumism, Media Studies, and Anthropology.” In Religion, Tradition and the Popular: Transcultural Views from Asia and Europe, edited by Judith Schlehe and Evamaria Sandkühler, 205–24. Bielefeld: transcript. Wittgenstein, Ludwig.1953. Philosophical Investigations. London: Macmillan.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Chapter 10

Phantom Power, Parallax, and the Multiple Cities of Luanda Manifestation and Materialization in Angola

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ruy Liera Blanes

In this chapter I engage in a discussion on sight and its “emergence” in the urban spiritual and political topography of Luanda, Angola. I begin with an ethnographic account of sorcery (ndoki) in the neighborhoods of Luanda, Angola, and explore the role of in/visibility in its manufacture, arguing that the “form” of sorcery emerges from processes of connection and triangulation—a geometry that is understood as a form of mattering of the invisible, which I speculatively call “phantom power”—in the otherwise polyhedral spectrum of the local spirituality. Subsequently, I shift the ethnographic scale in order to elaborate a semiotic account of the urban form of Luanda, in order to contextualize ndoki and its ethnic (Bakongo) envelope. I argue that this parallactic move—a shift in positionality and perspective—is necessary for the account of the issue of in/visibility in Luanda and its social and political consequences. This allows us to perceive sorcery not as a self-contained occult realm but rather as one of the many faces of Luanda’s polyhedral, multilayered topography.

Preamble: From Symptom to “Thing” May 11. “I’ve been a little feverish for a few days now. I feel unwell, or rather I feel sad.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Phantom Power, Parallax, and the Multiple Cities of Luanda • 223 Where do these mysterious influences come from that change our happiness into despondency and our confidence into distress? You might say that the air, the invisible air, is full of unknowable Powers, from whose mysterious closeness we suffer. I wake up full of joy, with songs welling up in my throat. Why? I go down to the water; and suddenly, after a short walk, I come back disheartened, as if some misfortune were awaiting me at home.” (Maupassant 2005 [1887])

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

In one of the two short stories he published under the title of Le Horla (more precisely the second, published in 1887), the famous French writer Guy de Maupassant writes a diary. On 8 May, the first entry in the diary, the unnamed narrator shares his immeasurable happiness, certainly stemming from his identification with the “place,” his place of birth, somewhere along the river Seine. As readers, we vicariously associate ourselves with this sense of happiness, but eventually, after 11 May, we get carried away by the unfolding chaos and are infected by a sense of tragedy. Something haunts Maupassant, in the form of premonition, nightmare. We do not know what it is, but we “know” it through its effects on the author. This “thing” begins to concretize in the symptoms that Maupassant describes, through a series of consultations with physicians, imaginary theogonists (the famous doctor Herman Herestauss), and other specialists, including a monk, who notes, Do we see the hundred-thousandth part of what exists? Look, here is the wind, which is the strongest force in nature, which knocks men down, destroys buildings, uproots trees, whips the sea up into mountains of water, destroys cliffs, and throws great ships onto the shoals; here is the wind that kills, whistles, groans, howls—have you ever seen it, and can you see it? Yet it exists. (Maupassant 2005 [1887])

Finally, toward the end of the diary, we learn that it was the destructive being called Horla: It is he, the Horla, who is haunting me, making me think these mad thoughts! He is inside me, he is becoming my soul; I will kill him! (Maupassant 2005 [1887])

Ndoki: Triangulations and Phantom Power in Angola In my research on religious movements in Angola, I observed similar “Maupassant” thought processes among the Bakongo communities living in the neighborhood of Palanca in Luanda (Blanes 2017).1 Stories of people who began suffering certain unexplained physical symptoms, or

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

224 • Ruy Liera Blanes

were haunted in dreams, and sought, in religious and spiritual specialists (feiticeiros or sorcerers, Christian pastors, healers, etc.), a diagnostic in order to identify it. The process of diagnosis is the establishment of a heuristics to approach and handle an “event”—usually but not exclusively framed within a process of sickness and healing. While the majority of the Bakongo are Christian,2 such issues usually emerged in the framework of sorcery (ndoki in Kikongo, or feitiçaria in Portuguese) and its effects in the complex, plural local spiritual landscape—which I described elsewhere as “spiritual supermarket” (Eriksen, Blanes, and MacCarthy 2019). Within this framework, a commonsensical understanding in Angola is that ndoki is another name for “evil spirits,” their presence, and/or their effect. As I will argue below, this understanding belongs to a hegemonic, prevailing “vision” regarding ndoki and the Bakongo communities in Luanda. But for the Bakongo themselves, ndoki is usually framed as a system of knowledge and power that is closely connected to tradition, in the sense that it refers to knowledge transmitted within the kanda or lineage concerning the “agency of things and places”; it is an “ancestral property” connected to the “spirit” of such things and places, usually identified as trees, forests, mountains, rivers, and so on. Here, we perceive an instance of “location” of spirit in the materiality of landscape—a location to the extent that, as the landscape changes (e.g. from rural to urban), so does ndoki (Bortolami 2012; Pereira 2015; Blanes 2017). Subsequently, the collective “problem” with ndoki in Angola— illustrated, for instance, in governmental, anti-witchcraft campaigns, in particular regarding cases of child sorcery accusations (see Soares 2016)—is not the issue of knowledge possession but rather its use. For instance, in stories concerning ndoki there is a recurrent association of ndoki with the idea of ingestion, as something that is introduced inside the body: something (e.g. an object, a food, a powder) that undergoes a process of “concealment” toward a mechanism of internal operation inside a victim’s body. On the other hand, it becomes identifiable as ndoki inasmuch as it unfolds unto an external symptom manifested by the victim of ndoki. Historically, this has led to the negative association (on behalf of Catholic authors, unsurprisingly) of ndoki with acts and processes of “poisoning.” The interesting issue here, I think, is how the work of ndoki implies, in the same act, a triple movement of ingestion, internal operation, and external symptomatology—from interior swelling to outward expansion, as Morten Nielsen described for the case of spirit-human relations in Mozambique (2012). It works through the swinging movement of internalization and externalization.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Phantom Power, Parallax, and the Multiple Cities of Luanda • 225

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

For this chapter, I focus on the second part of the movement, externalization: the process of presentification through which certain symptoms and manifestations become materialized into entities and specific forms of being. In this sense, ndoki is no different from many other religious and spiritual movements that embody a history of parameterization for this process of presentification of the spirit, either in its beatific or demonic version (Johnson 2014). As Paul Christopher Johnson (2014) reminds us, there is a production of wisdom, technique, and specialization that emerges from the work of navigating spiritual indeterminacy and establishing “legitimate” or “fake” manifestation (also see below). In the specific case of ndoki, this presentification does not necessarily entail a physical regurgitation, but more an identification of its effect in some form of materialization, of mattering. Take, for instance, a story I heard in Palanca in January 2013 from Alberto (pseudonym), an elder Bakongo journalist and politician living in Luanda, which I recount here: Alberto once dreamt that a person he knew, a local teacher, was attacking him. So he decided to summon him for a makanguilu [public, communal meeting], but the man refused to participate. He again dreamed of the man, this time spreading some sort of powder in his bathroom. The teacher eventually showed up again in real life; on that occasion Alberto decided to follow him, and found him spreading some powder in his backyard. When he surprised the teacher, he was confused and left in a hurry. Later Alberto dreamt of him once again, this time he saw the man tied to an imdondeiro [baobab tree]. The next day, he again summoned the man for a makanguilu, but to no avail. Eventually, the teacher grew seriously ill, with kidney or liver problems. Alberto then decided to pray for him, and some time later the man sought him, begging for forgiveness, explaining that it was all an act of the devil (something related to an aunt of his who had died). . . . He asked to be accepted as a friend again; Alberto accepted, although his wife wasn’t very pleased. (Fieldwork diary, 2013)

From personal dream to the public realm, the suspicion and further identification of ndoki is similarly enabled through a negotiation of terms, in its more literal sense, that is also a delineation of parameters: a process of anamnesis that identifies cause and cure by naming intent, perpetrator, and weapon. Such cases highlight how, in religious and spiritual contexts, language and texts incorporate a duality of sorts: they can fixate and canonize “reality” (see e.g. Engelke 2007; Kirsch 2008), but they can also destabilize it (see e.g. Déléage 2018; Sarró

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

226 • Ruy Liera Blanes

2018). Ndoki thus embodies a process of triangulation—what Knut Rio (2002), in his study of witchcraft in Vanuatu (Melanesia), called the “absent third person,” an element that remotely intermediates between the cause and effect of sorcery through the establishment of a triadic relationship. From this perspective, if one becomes aware of the effects of ndoki (illness, death, and bad luck), the process of diagnosis is inevitably about mattering, about bringing the cause (or causer) into being in the social space. Thus, the focus becomes the relationship, the space of connection that conveys meaning and possibilities of action for the actors involved in the process. As with the technologies of the paranormal that Espírito Santo and Hunter discuss in the introduction to this volume, it is through the connection that ndoki gains “ontological shape.” As we see with the case of Alberto, this triangular shape is more of a spectrum that intersects multiple cosmologies—ndoki, Christian faith, parapsychology, and so on. Other authors working on Bakongo spirituality report similar technological and mediatic instances of “capturing,” “revealing,” and “translating” the invisible through connections and triangulations. Katrien Pype (2014), for instance, has described how photo and video footage captured and testified miracles of spirit healing among Pentecostal churches in Kinshasa, DR Congo. In turn, Ramon Sarró (2018) has recently published about Mandombe, the popular prophetic scripture “revealed” by David Wabeladio Payi in the Lower Congo in the late 1970s, which translates spiritual knowledge through dream and prayer into a “geometrical generative system” that has materialized into alphabet, art, mathematics, and other semiotic systems. In this respect, ndoki should not be perceived as a self-contained system, but rather distributed within plural and polyhedral visible and invisible realms. My suggestion is that this polygonality takes form, or materializes, through what we could call, for the sake of speculation, “phantom power.” Those familiar with music recording recognize this expression: phantom power is a DC power supplier that flows through cables and allows microphones to work and thus amplify sound. This usually happens within small boxes that act as adaptors between the microphone itself and the amplifiers. From this description, you can probably tell that—even as an amateur musician with some recording experience—I have some difficulty grasping the “location” from which the phantom power emerges, as though it were some kind of psychophony. Just like with our everyday wireless technologies, I don’t fully understand how they work, but I continue to admire and enjoy their effects. But the point might be precisely that: somewhere between the boxes and the

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Phantom Power, Parallax, and the Multiple Cities of Luanda • 227

cables, phantom power is an invisible technology of mattering, of translation from the unseen (or unheard) into the seen (or heard) by way of connection and triangulation. This location of manifestation resonates with Jeremy Stolow’s “in” in his book Deus in Machina (Stolow 2013): the acknowledgment of technology as part of the process of spirituality, not as a separate entity. Both become part of the same conflated, mediatized space of transmission and communication. As Birgit Meyer argues, they become immediatized sensational forms (Meyer 2015). In other words, phantom power expresses the afflatus, or divine impulse, behind the process of mattering. It is in this respect that phantom power is machinic, while being at the same time sensorial. It is, to invoke Ehler Voss’s work on communication with spirits in the United States (see chapter 6 in this volume), a “ghost hunter,” a technology that intersects with the body— just as ndoki with the Bakongo in Angola do, or the Horla with the suffering Guy de Maupassant—but is at the same time subject of bodily intervention by way of inquiry and diagnosis. Thus, there is a condition of mutual constitution in the technomediation between body and external agentive being.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Parallax, Perspective, and Truth One further point I would like to make has to do with the visual and spatial component of the mattering capacities of phantom power. In her contribution to this volume, Diana Espírito Santo describes a case—the public sighting of a UFO in Santiago de Chile in 1985—in which, despite the obvious ocular component of the event, its evidential quality required a multiplication of sensorial mediations and identifications (e.g. radios) in order to become persistent among Chilean radio amateur enthusiasts at the time. Above, I stressed the importance of diagnostic identification in the process of mattering the invisible. This identification—the phantom power effect—occurs through triangulations, through tests, the production of testimony, in order to acquire a visible (polygonal) shape. While in many cases the process is framed within arguments of evidence (Keane 2009; Pype 2014), in others it remains within a level of spectrality beyond the spectacular (de Boeck 2011), i.e., of the “underneath of things” (Ferme 2001, in de Boeck 2011: 278). Here, the image of the “back of the mirror” (2011: 278) becomes powerful: the place beyond the spectacle, that which requires an intervention in order to be recognized, acknowledged, understood.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

228 • Ruy Liera Blanes

Usually, in testimonial processes, sight often becomes the conductor of truth (Bloch 2008), that which allows for deduction and posterior generalization. This in turn provokes the emergence of Manichean either/or statements concerning, e.g., invisible agency and the paranormal. However, as this volume (and others—see Espírito Santo and Blanes 2013) argues, sight is encompassed within a more overarching sensorial spectrum through which the identification of invisible agency occurs. As Christopher Pinney would put it, it is sight through a “prosthetic eye” (2009), where the event and the theory of the event participate in the same experiential operation. The narrator of The Horla would certainly attest to this. What I would like to add to this point is how sight—be it in its restrictive or more encompassing definition—implies a positionality and intentionality whereby it becomes political, and these processes of identification and mattering are no longer neutral but morally and ideologically charged. Neither are they individual diagnostics, but instead distributed, socially established sights. Perhaps the best illustration for this argument is the theme of occultation, a classic trope in anthropologies of Africa (Sarró 2020), both in political and religious terms. From this perspective, it is somewhat commonplace to argue for the agency of the occult in Africa. For instance, Jean-François Bayart (1989) also showed us how, from a Cameroonian perspective, politics works in the “belly,” through acts of hoarding, accumulation, and consumption that ultimately provoke a deflection of the acts of political governance from the gaze of the citizens. Here, inspired by this literature, I propose to shift the focus into the problem of the occult as a “different sight,” one that may or may not be accessible through parallactic moves that emerge through and within political endeavors. But, as Filip de Boeck shows us in his depiction of Kinshasa as the “invisible city” (2004), which he also described as a site of “spectral politics” (2011), the political is necessarily entangled with topography and temporality. In de Boeck’s ethnography, we learn how during the Kabila cabinet, concurrent with the policy of visibility that operated a major lifting of its central neighborhoods in the years prior to the 2011 election, there stood a somewhat ghostly topography of promised and expected sites of urban modernization and renewed lifestyles as part of the global ecumene (2011: 274). Through such analogies, de Boeck draws our attention to what he describes as the (im)material infrastructure of the urban space, one that enables an “urban politics of the possible” (2004: 226), where material infrastructure is invested with memory and projection, with present and possi-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Phantom Power, Parallax, and the Multiple Cities of Luanda • 229

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

ble aesthetics. This, in many ways, resonates with what Abdoumaliq Simone called “the city yet to come” (2004), which is concurrent and simultaneous to the “city that is still there,” through what he called the “infrastructural movement” (2015): the production of statements, lines of articulation, and procedures that enable the urban transformation. From this rationale, several different physical and social architectures emerge: visible, invisible, expected, suggested, and oblique—all depending on your parallactic position in Luanda. Thus, as Bjørn Bertelsen has recently argued, in southern African cities such as Maputo (or Luanda, for this sake), such architectures, and their dispute, are what makes for the “becoming” of the political (2016). This is where, for instance, ndoki is no longer a simple knowledge but one socially distributed in the architectures of Angola and Luanda, where it comes to represent a “negative” form of spirituality as it embodies a retrograde, superstitious, and ultimately dangerous version of “Angolan-ness,” conflicting with other, more modern, secular, and positivistic versions (Blanes and Paxe 2015; Blanes 2017; Eriksen, Blanes, and MacCarthy 2019). This perspective emerges recurrently in local Angolan media, which often publish stories with similar shock value as this one from June 2015: A 57-year-old man was beaten to death by his wife, daughter and son-inlaw in the municipality of Cacuaco, on the outskirts of Luanda, accused by these family members of practicing witchcraft, the National Police reported yesterday. After the fatal attacks, the suspects set fire to the man’s body—a crime that, according to the authorities, has been growing and which is part of the popular belief in the occult. The two women are already in custody, under the guard of the National Police, who are looking for the third suspect, the victim’s son-in-law. During the month of May, another crime shocked society, with the detention in Luanda of a man, HIV positive, accused of repeatedly raping his stepson, a minor, following “instructions” from a sorcerer in order to “get rich,” as he himself recognized.3

More often than not, such narratives are complemented with statements by public officials condemning the incivility of such beliefs and behaviors (see also Eriksen, Blanes, and MacCarthy 2019). In this respect, despite its invisible component, ndoki becomes clearly symbolic, iconic, semantic in the public sphere of Luanda and Angola.4 Subsequently, “internal” narratives of ndoki such as those from Alberto above are not mere normative representations but are inserted within a constant triangulation that is taking place concurrently, at a different scale than the first diagnostic triangulation I began this text with. This

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

230 • Ruy Liera Blanes

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

is how ndoki becomes polyhedral, with multiple sides being drawn and redrawn. More on this below. Thus, I argue that a linear approach to spiritual manifestation is insufficient, and we need our own ethnographic triangulation, because the linear visual perspective can be obscured, refracted, or superimposed. This in turn implies that identifications may have less to do with whole ontological or cosmological sets and more to do with a way of seeing in contexts of multiplicity and shift, as Annemarie Mol (2002) would put it. Perspective is built within historical frameworks and in inter-relational terms, so, more than identification as a way of stabilizing and determining the nature of invisible agency, we could talk about it as a “parallactic movement” inasmuch as it brings into motion the problems of time, space, and their refraction. By parallax I am technically referring to, as per the standard dictionary definition, “the effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions, e.g. through the viewfinder and the lens of a camera.” Subsequently, through such parallaxes, perspectives and points of view do not just occur as stable cosmological statements in the ontological plane but also and inasmuch as they are empirically grounded in a particular topography and historicity that renders them as situated and provisional. A change of position changes a perspective but does not necessarily eliminate its prior version or condition. This brings us back to a classic anthropological problem: the apparent inevitability of thinking of visual and aesthetic sociality through binaries—visibility versus invisibility, revelation versus occultation,

Figure 10.1. Visual representation of a parallactic movement. Designed by Ruy Blanes. © Ruy Blanes.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Phantom Power, Parallax, and the Multiple Cities of Luanda • 231

etc.—and the idea of the linearity of perspective, which in turn seems to be the cause of the binary inevitability. Here, I would like to go back to Marilyn Strathern’s discussion of perspectivalism as a case in point (2011). Strathern invoked the notion of perspectivalism in the framework of an epistemology of comparison, to refer to the “singularity of viewpoint” that is allegedly characteristic of Euro-American ways of thinking, in which we develop languages of fragmentation and construct discrete entities in order to understand the world—the idea of “choosing one’s own stance” within a plurality of viewpoints (2011: 91–92). Within this framework, she leans toward Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s (1992) notion of perspectivism—Amerindian, but also discussed in Inner Asia (Pedersen, Empson, and Humphrey 2007) and Siberia (Willerslev 2004)—to account for a possible Melanesian “plurality of perspectives” that stems from an ontological multiplicity.5 This concern, we presume, follows from Strathern’s previous deconstruction of linear models of comparison in Partial Connections (1991) to acknowledge the world as “one and multiply enacted,” which we can really only grasp through noncommensurable evocation, instead of objectifying representation: what she eventually called “analogies between domains” (1991: xiv). But what happens when the perspective is obscured, refracted, or superimposed? What if the singularity or plurality of viewpoint has less to do with cultural ontologies (or indigenous cosmologies) and more with a way of seeing through multiplicity and divergence? Here, perhaps, a stereoscopic approach makes more sense, one that allows us to account for the possibility of concurring perspectives (“stereograms”) within a realm of mobility that is both topographical—one gains different perspectives by shifting positions6—and temporalizing—one accumulates or superimposes perspectives through memory and expectation. From a methodological point of view, this shifting perspective can be called a “parallactic movement,” inasmuch as it brings into motion the problems of time, space, and their refraction—which the classic notion of perspective does not seem to encompass. In a certain sense, this also implies the problem of “subject positionality” in ethnographic practice: the explicit acknowledgment of the anthropologist’s place within the micropolitics of the ethnographic procedure (see e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 2006: 10). However, I prefer to use the concept of parallax because of its encompassing component, as it inserts the ethnographer’s place within other positionalities in which the subjective, the personal, and the collective concur, converge, or diverge, within what we describe below as the “spatialities of

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

232 • Ruy Liera Blanes

contentious politics” (Leitner et al. 2008). From this perspective, the kind of parallax that I am entertaining belongs to a form of “political positionality” that is engaged in a constant polyhedral process of occultation and revelation of polyhedral agencies. Empirically speaking, the parallactic move and the multiplication of stereograms refers to how ndoki, as a theory and diagnostic on human and spiritual agency, has multiplied its own perspectives in recent decades, due to the sociopolitical shifts it has experienced (Bortolami 2012). From a historical perspective, one such shift has been its encounter with other theologies, namely Christian (Protestant, Catholic), which has enabled its progressive insertion within a “pantheon logic” where its power competes with other spiritual powers (for instance, Alberto’s Christian prayer). Pastor Nunes, a Bakongo elder who is the leader of the EKWESA, a prophetic Christian movement that originated in the DR Congo, once explained to me that ndoki has been around for a long time, and in fact it can be found in the Bible. He reminded me of the nyenye, night wizards who fly in the dark and travel to Europe as if they flew on an airplane (the body is in Africa, but the spirit is not). The nyenye have the mission of contaminating people with evil spirits. Nunes also mentioned the matebo, or ghost with humanlike figure—in fact, he is physically a man, who gives you the arrepios (goose bumps) when he is near you, and can disappear in a split second. All this black magic, this wisdom, said Nunes, does not help. For him, in the church of the Holy Spirit, they struggle and win the souls of those who are contaminated. However, as he stated, “As nossas informações não são carnais” (Our information does not come from the body), we treat people affected by ndoki by fighting against it. “As Jesus Christ says, ‘your faith has saved you.’” Another, more recent shift, has been what we could call the ndoki’s “exodus”: while traditionally associated to rural landscapes, due to the Angolan civil war (1975–2002) ndoki has been forced to move and migrate toward the city, along with its Bakongo participants, and thus multiply its scope and realm (Pereira 2015; Soares 2016 Eriksen, Blanes, and MacCarthy 2019). As we can apprehend from Pastor Nunes’s explanations above, this has placed ndoki within a logic of interaction and competition in the local landscape, both in the spiritual realm and in the social sphere of Luanda, navigating between positive and negative delineations. Neves, a good friend from Luanda, a Bakongo belonging to the Tokoist Church (a Christian prophetic movement) (Blanes 2014), reinforced this argument to me in this way:

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Phantom Power, Parallax, and the Multiple Cities of Luanda • 233 There is a spiritual complexity in the Bakongo universe, where for instance ndoki, usually portrayed as a negative fetishism, is actually more a form of knowledge, of life management, with the same epistemological weight as, for instance, education in Western societies. From this perspective, political authority also implies a mastery of the occult, a knowledge of its internal organization. In this particular point, the relevance of healing becomes paramount. (Fieldwork diary, 2013)

Thus, what’s interesting is that, despite ndoki’s multiplying perspectives, throughout time it has become what we could call a “spiritual refugee” in the city of Luanda, silently incorporating the bad public press, its status as “tradition,” its healing capacities, and its role in complex, tense local ethnopolitics of the Bakongo in Angola (see e.g. Mabeko-Tali 1995; Sarró, Blanes, and Viegas 2008). To grasp this more concretely, we need a parallactic move toward the spatial and semiotic realm of ndoki’s refuges: the neighborhood of Palanca. In what follows I will perform this urban navigation and explore the stereograms that make ndoki manifest.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Palanca, the City and the City On the popular Ilha de Luanda (a land strip that almost encircles the Luanda Bay, thus technically not an island as the Portuguese name “ilha” would suggest) once stood the famous Hotel Panorama, built in the 1960s in tropical modernist design and quickly becoming a landmark of late colonial Angola, until it was later abandoned during the Angolan civil war and slowly began a process of ruination.7 The Panorama’s panorama was precisely the Bay of Luanda, which has been undergoing in the past years a major overhaul, inserted in the project of the New Luanda—an urban transformation process, also referred to as the “Dubaization of Luanda” (Moreira 2012), fueled by the postwar booming extractive (diamond, oil) economy of the country and signaling a new, southern Atlantic lifestyle (see Oliveira 2015 Schubert 2017). This image of New Angola is a remnant of the post-independence, Marxist-Leninist revolutionary moment (Malaquias 2007), when the MPLA used a liberationist utopia (Pepetela 1992) to promote ideological and historiographical ruptures with the colonial regime and engage in an educational and philosophical apologetics towards a “modern” Angolan nationhood and citizenship (see e.g. Blanes and Paxe 2015). Today, as several authors have noted, the Marxist-Leninist agenda has been overtaken by a political pragmatics that is very much capitalist

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

234 • Ruy Liera Blanes

(Oliveira 2015. However, as Jon Schubert (2017) describes, the “master narrative” of the New Angola persists in the official spiel, alongside tropes of “progress,” “peace” and “national reconciliation,” which in turn have converged in what Schubert sees as antimemory and antipolitical impositions (see also Péclard 2012 on the “depoliticizing” mechanics of this process). The result of this is a movement of top-down imposition of a project for Luanda that puts its citizens in the position of unwilling subjects of topographical design, in frequent process of demobilization in order to pave the way for the New Luanda (Moreira and Cardoso 2014; Gastrow 2017; Blanes 2019b). These vertical edifications, as seen from the Panorama, have the particularity of deflecting our sight through their mirror sheathing. Our gaze focuses on the brightness of the mirrored sunshine and makes it harder to focus on what surrounds the skyscrapers. Simultaneously, the vertical edification of the New Luanda also attempts an obscuring of the concomitant development of slum settlement neighborhoods, the musseques (“red sands,” in the local Kimbundu language) that emerged throughout the process of Luanda’s earlier urban growth of the 1940s–60s due to the constant flow of migrations into the city. If in a first moment these musseques were part of the colonial urban planning scheme, designed to address and manage rural migration (e.g. the neighborhoods of Palanca or Cazenga), during the civil war period the musseques mushroomed beyond the limits of the “old city,” eventually redefining the city’s metropolitan extension (Bettencourt 2011; Viegas 2015). However, the musseques are also and simultaneously interstitial within the other Luandas, emerging or persisting in more central parts of the city that were not designed by the colonial Luanda and have not yet been engulfed by the New Luanda (e.g. the neighborhoods of Prenda or Catambor). From this perspective, in Luanda the concept of musseque goes beyond the idea of geographical display, and could be better understood as a process—a process of reaction and adaptation to an urban geography, relying on kinship and economic networks (Rodrigues 2007), more often than not outside the radar of official rule. This is the case, for instance, of the Palanca, a predominantly Bakongo neighborhood that, despite its original design in the late colonial period as a peri-urban neighborhood—a fact that explains its grid design—experienced a process of intense occupation since the 1980s (see e.g. Lukombo 2011; Pereira 2015). The Palanca is often described by its residents as “the Republic of Palanca,” in reference to the idea of it being for a long time self-governed, beyond government control and authority. It is often described as an “open-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Phantom Power, Parallax, and the Multiple Cities of Luanda • 235

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 10.2. Composition of the Hotel Panorama as seen from Luanda Bay, the Luanda skyline, and the perspective from behind the Luanda skyline. Photographs by Ruy Blanes, 2007–15. © Ruy Blanes.

air market,” the place where, as one resident put it to me once, “anything can be bought or sold”—from the latest iPhone to visas to travel to the United States. The burgeoning condition of “the neighborhood that never stops”8 dwells, however, in a dual condition: an exogenous construction of the Palanca as a “criminal” neighborhood due to its informal economy, as well as to its association with spiritual entrepreneurship and witchcraft practices, and an endogenous struggle for recognition as a space of creativity and entrepreneurship. “It’s the place where modernity in Luanda began,” elder Mabuíla, who owns a famous garage in the north corner of the neighborhood, told me back in 2013. The Palanca exemplifies what several authors have recognized as the “informal Luanda,” mainly in terms of its circulations and economic exchanges—which are alternatives to the capitalist economy that makes Luanda “the most expensive capital in the world” (see e.g.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

236 • Ruy Liera Blanes

Cain 2014). This idea of informal economy encapsulates a complex variety of activities, which include, among others, open-air markets, domestic enterprises, backyard sales, and individual exchanges. It is perhaps this informality why these red sands neighborhoods have been recurrently objects of aesthetic adjectivations such as “informal,” “clandestine,” “illegal,” “provisional,” “disorganized,” etc.—an ideologically informed visual rhetoric that emerges from within the imagination of the government-sponsored New Angola (Schubert 2017). Claudia Gastrow referred to these narratives as forms of “aesthetic dissent” within the politics of development and redevelopment in the city (2017). In this respect, the musseques often appear as “dead ends,” as it were, spaces with no horizon and unworthy of any kind of investment (moral, political, financial, etc.). However, as architect Ana Milheiro (2011) suggested, we can indeed move beyond the obligatory injunction of musseques as “spaces of disorder” or of “social anomy,” instead seeing them as “territories of freedom” (2011, 308), where precisely due to the absence of governance, new “republics” emerge.9 More recently, Claudia Gastrow (2015) has provocatively raised the question of why musseques cannot be themselves considered spaces of heritage, representative of material and social configurations that have become in many ways “emblematic” of a certain Luandan lifestyle that does not conform with the New Angola. Today, as we will see below, there is a continued operative distinction between the New Luanda (also commonly referred to as the “asphalt city”) and the Luanda of the musseques, which often becomes political, precisely through the Manichean binary configuration that it entails—the new/old, good/bad Luanda, etc. However, rather than dwelling on the binary rhetoric, I prefer to follow Claudia Gastrow’s suggestion of the “aesthetics of dissent” (2017), the construction endeavors that become catalysts for contesting political statements concerning the city and the nation. This dissent emerges precisely from a parallactic move, a change of position and perspective from externalizing to internalizing views of Luandan musseques such as the Palanca. Subsequently, the parallax unfolds a superposition of images unto the same space. The effect is one very much like China Miéville’s famous sci-fi novel The City & The City (2009). The book tells the story of a criminal investigation that takes place in a city called Besz´el, which, in a certain way, “reminds” us of a Balkan city, and is at the same time “twin” of another, more modern and advanced city called Ul Qoma. These two cities occupy more or less the same physical space, but their citizens and their authorities “live separately,” for reasons that we do

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Phantom Power, Parallax, and the Multiple Cities of Luanda • 237

not know, but who do so both through voluntary education whereby they learn not to “see” the other city and through coercive authoritarian vigilance (which punishes and makes disappear those who look the other way or go to the other side without being through a mobility control process). Miéville’s setting is thus two cities that are superimposed but at the same time separate, and with spaces of intersection from which an idea of “transgression” and “illegality” is managed, and where a refracted (Tomás 2012) visual logic predominates, that is, with two points of view on the same space that diverge and do not intersect, creating different topographies of the same geography, so to speak. From this perspective, Luanda can also be understood as “multiple cities,” a polyhedral urban form in which spiritual operations such as that of ndoki impose and are subject to processes of mattering, internalization, and externalization. While often these cities appear as elusive (Nutall and Mbembe 2008) or phantasmagorical (Pitcher and Moorman 2015), they define each other through infrastructural, aesthetic, and semiotic interlocutions (Blanes 2019a). From this perspective, one could say that ndoki is one of the cities that compose Luanda, delineated by a set of internalizing and externalizing triangulations. Sometimes, these delimitations become physically visible in the urban topography, and sometimes they can only be perceived through parallactic moves in order to unveil the inherent relationalities that compose them.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion and Occlusion The stories of The Horla and the feiticeiros of Luanda can be understood as stories of mattering the invisible, of attempting to grasp, to seize what is “out there.” In this text, I have argued that the “out there” that we find in Luanda is a polyhedral form, of which we come to know certain sides, depending on the parallactic movements we perform in our trajectory as ethnographers of/in the city. In this respect, through ndoki we briefly materialize one of the “cities” that conform the polyhedral Luanda—from the New Luanda to the Luanda of the musseques and to the Luanda of the Bakongo—one that creates problems and simultaneously devises solutions for its inhabitants. Ruy Llera Blanes is a social anthropologist (PhD, University of Lisbon, 2007). He is associate professor at the School of Global Studies of the University of Gothenburg. His current research site is Angola, where

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

238 • Ruy Liera Blanes

he is working on the topics of politics, religion, social movements, environment, and landscape. He is the author of A Prophetic Trajectory (Berghahn Books, 2014), and also coeditor, with Diana Espírito Santo, of The Social Life of Spirits (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. The term “Bakongo” refers to the ethnic group that occupies the regions of northern Angola and Lower Congo, descending from the former Kingdom of Kongo. They are often associated with ideas of foreignness, traditionalism and informality/illegality (see e.g. Mabeko-Tali 1995; Sarró, Blanes, and Viegas 2008; Pereira 2015). Since the late colonial period (1950s–70s), they have observed a steady flow of migration toward Luanda and have established themselves in several neighborhoods of the city, Palanca being one of the most notorious (see below). 2. While historically the Bakongo have been Christian since the sixteenth century, they have also maintained active traditional local cosmology (e.g. MacGaffey 1983; Thornton 1998), to the extent that spirituality cannot be understood beyond this articulation. 3. Agência Lusa, Família mata homem por suspeita de feitiçaria,” RedeAngola, retrieved on 12 June 2020 from http://m.redeangola.info/familiamata-homem-por-suspeita-de-feiticaria/ (my translation). 4. These other versions cannot be dissociated from the history of governmentality in postindependence Angola (1975–). Here, the protagonist is necessarily the MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola)—the political party that has ruled the country since its independence in 1975. It emerged as one of the main liberationist guerrilla movements in the late colonial period, and after independence defeated the other main protagonists (the UNITA and the FNLA) in the civil war that ensued, becoming the only party in power in the almost fifty years of Angolan independence. Ideologically it began as a Marxist-Leninist party, close to the Soviet bloc, but after 1990 declared itself a social democratic movement. Critics of the regime, however, classify it as an authoritarian, nepotistic state and a dictatorship (see Blanes 2019b). 5. Viveiros de Castro described perspectivism as a “cosmology [that] imagines a universe peopled by different types of subjective agencies, human as well as nonhuman, each endowed with the same generic type of soul, that is, the same set of cognitive and volitional capacities. The possession of a similar soul implies the possession of similar concepts, which determine that all subjects see things in the same way” (2004: 6). It is precisely this last argument that I critically address here. 6. In fact, I am thinking of mobility in a broad sense in order to encompass not only small-scale bodily movement but also human circulation, interaction, and exchange at a global scale, and to account not only for plurality and

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Phantom Power, Parallax, and the Multiple Cities of Luanda • 239 coexistence but also for transforming perspectives. From this perspective, the regional angle that emerges in perspectivist theory (Amerindian, Inner Asian, etc.) becomes somewhat irrelevant. 7. Edward Siddons, “Mónica de Miranda’s Best Photograph: A Ruined Hotel in Angola,” interview, The Guardian, 13 July 2017, retrieved 30 June 2020 from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jul/13/mon ica-de-miranda-photography-angola-panorama-exhibition-interview 8. Domingos Bento and Ampe Rogério, “Palanca, o bairro que não pára,” RedeAngola, 6 March 2015, retrieved 30 May 2016 from http://m.redean gola.info/especiais/reportagem-palanca-editando/. 9. One iconic, notorious example of this has been the recent explosion of the musical and dance genre kuduro (“hard arse”), which emerged as a marginal subculture of the musseque youths but has recently become mainstream and institutionalized in Angolan culture (Tomás 2014). See below.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

References Bayart, Jean-François. 1989. L’État en Afrique: La Politique du Ventre. Paris: Fayard. Bertelsen, Bjørn E. 2016. Violent Becomings: State Formation, Sociality, and Power in Mozambique. New York: Berghahn Books. Bettencourt, Andrea. 2011. “Os Musseques de Luanda: Qualificação e Reabilitação de Áreas Urbanas Críticas.” Master’s thesis, architecture, Technical University of Lisbon. Blanes, Ruy, and Abel Paxe. 2015. “Atheist Political Cultures in Angola.” Social Analysis 59(2): 62–80. Blanes, Ruy Llera. 2014. A Prophetic Trajectory: Ideologies of Place, Time and Belonging in an Angolan Religious Movement. New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 2017. “The Ndoki Index: Sorcery, Economy and Invisible Operations in the Angolan Urban Sphere.” In Pentecostalism and Witchcraft: Spiritual Warfare in Melanesia and Africa, edited by Knut Rio, Michelle MacCarthy, and Ruy Blanes, 93–114. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2019a. “Scaffolding Heritage: Transient Architectures and Temporalizing Formations in Luanda.” In Sense and Essence: Heritage and the Cultural Production of the Real, edited by Birgit Meyer and Mattijs van de Port, 158–81. New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 2019b. “Places of No History in Angola.” In Atlantic Perspectives: Places, Spirits and Heritage, edited by Markus Balkenhol, Ruy Blanes, and Ramon Sarró, 215–32. New York: Berghahn Books. Bloch, Maurice. 2008. “Truth and Sight: Generalizing without Universalizing.” JRAI (N.S.): S22–S32. Boeck, Filip de. 2004. Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City. With MarieFrançoise Plissart. Ghent: Ludion.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

240 • Ruy Liera Blanes ———. 2011. “Inhabiting Ocular Ground: Kinshasa’s Future in the Light of Congo’s Spectral Urban Politics.” Cultural Anthropology 26(2): 263–86. Bortolami, Gabriele. 2012. “I Bakongo: Società, Tradizione e Cambiamento in Angola.” PhD diss., social anthropology, Università di Sassari 1. Cain, Allan. 2014. “African Urban Fantasies: Past Lessons and Emerging Realities.” Environment and Urbanization 26(1): 1–7. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 1999. “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony.” American Ethnologist 26(2): 279–303. ———. 2006. “Portraits by the Ethnographer as a Young Man: The Photography of Isaac Schapera in ‘Old Botswana.’” Anthropology Today 22(1): 9–16. Déléage, Pierre. 2018. “Pseudographies.” L’Homme 227–28: 49–68. Engelke, Matthew. 2007. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eriksen, Annelin, Ruy Llera Blanes, and Michelle MacCarthy. 2019. Going to Pentecost: An Experimental Approach to Studies in Pentecostalism. New York: Berghahn Books. Espírito Santo, Diana, and Ruy Llera Blanes (eds). 2013. The Social Life of Spirits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ferme, Mariane. 2001. The Underneath of Things: Violence, History, and the Everyday in Sierra Leone. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gastrow, Claudia. 2015. “Thinking Futures through The Slum.” The Avery Review 9. Retrieved 21 December 2016 from http://www.averyreview.com/ issues/9/thinking-futures. ———. 2017. “Aesthetic Dissent: Urban Redevelopment and Political Belonging in Luanda.” Antipode 49(2): 377–96. Johnson, Paul Christopher. 2014. “Introduction: Spirits and Things in the Making of the Atlantic World.” In Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions, edited by Paul C. Johnson, 1–22. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keane, Webb. 2009. “The Evidence of the Senses and the Materiality of Religion.” In The Objects of Evidence: Anthropological Approaches to the Production of Knowledge, edited by Matthew Engelke, 105–21. Oxford: Wiley. Kirsch, Thomas. 2008. Spirits and Letters: Reading, Writing and Charisma in African Christianity. New York: Berghahn Books. Leitner, Helga, et al. 2008. “The Spatialities of Contentious Politics.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33(2): 157–72. Lukombo, João. 2011. “Crescimento da População em Angola: Um Olhar sobre a Situação e Dinâmica Populacional da Cidade de Luanda.” Revista de Estudos Demográficos 49: 53–68. Mabeko-Tali, Jean-Michel. 1995. “La Chasse aux Zaïrois a Luanda.” Politique Africaine 57 (1995): 71–84. MacGaffey, Wyatt. 1983. Modern Kongo Prophets. Religion in a Plural Society. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Phantom Power, Parallax, and the Multiple Cities of Luanda • 241 Maupassant, Guy de. 2005 [1887]. The Horla. Brooklyn & New York: Melville House (ebook). Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Meyer, Birgit. 2011. “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies and the Question of the Medium.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 19(1): 23–39. ———. 2015. Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana. Berkeley: University of California Press. Milheiro, Ana. 2011. “A Cidade Moderna/Ameaçada.” In A Cidade Popular: África/Brasil. VV.AA. Lisbon: Trienal de Arquitectura. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moreira, Paulo. 2012. “A Cumplicidade de Lisboa na Dubaização de Luanda, encontro do Grupo de História Global de Espaços.” Paper presented at the conference Aspirações Urbanas na Pós-Colonialidade, Porto. Moreira, Paulo, and Ricardo Cardoso. 2014. “Spatial Practices and Arbitrary Detentions in Luanda, Angola.” Architecture and Culture 2(1): 116–29. Nielsen, Morten. 2012. “Interior Swelling: On the Expansive Effects of Ancestral Interventions in Maputo, Mozambique.” Common Knowledge 18(3): 433–50. Nutall, Sarah, and Achille Mbembe (eds.). 2008. The Elusive Metropolis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Oliveira, Ricardo Soares de. 2015. Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola since the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Péclard, Didier. 2012. “The ‘Depoliticizing Machine’: Church and State in Angola since Independence.” In Religion and Politics in a Global Society: Comparative Perspectives from the Portuguese-Speaking World, edited by Paul Christopher Manuel, 139–60. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Pedersen, Morten Axel, Rebecca Empson, and Caroline Humphrey. 2007. “Editorial Introduction: Inner Asian Perspectivisms.” Inner Asia 9 (2): 141–52. Pereira, Luena. 2015. Os Bakongo de Angola: Etnicidade, Religião e Parentesco num Bairro de Luanda. Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa. Pinney, Christopher. 2009. “The Prosthetic Eye: Photography as Cure and Poison.” In The Objects of Evidence: Anthropological Approaches to the Production of Knowledge, edited by Matthew Engelke, 31–43. Oxford: Wiley. Pitcher, Anne, and Marissa Moorman. 2015. “City Building in Post-conflict, Post-socialist Luanda: Burying the Past with Phantasmagorias of the Future.” In African Cities Reader III: Land, Property and Value, edited by Edgar Pieterse and Ntone Edjabe, 123–35. Cape Town: African Centre for Cities and Chimurenga Magazine. Pype, Katrien. 2014. The Making of the Pentecostal Melodrama. Religion, Media, and Gender in Kinshasa. New York: Berghahn Books. Rio, Knut. 2002. “The Sorcerer as an Absented Third Person: Formations of Fear and Anger in Vanuatu.” Social Analysis 46(3): 129–54.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

242 • Ruy Liera Blanes Rodrigues, Cristina Udelsmann. 2007. “From Family Solidarity to Social Classes: Urban Stratification in Angola (Luanda and Ondjiva).” Journal of Southern African Studies 33 (2): 235–50. Sarró, Ramon. 2018. “Between Writing and Art: The Invention of Mandombe.” Terrain. Anthropologie & Sciences Humaines, no. 70. ———. 2020. “How to Do Things with Secrets. Secrecy and Historical Imagination among the Baga of Guinea.” Ethnos (online first). Sarró, Ramon, Ruy Blanes, and Fátima Viegas. 2008. “La guerre dans la paix: Ethnicité et angolanité dans l’Église kimbanguiste de Luanda.” Politique africaine 110(2): 84–101. Schubert, Jon. 2017. Working the System: A Political Ethnography of the New Angola. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Simone, Abdoumaliq. 2004. For the City Yet to Come. Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Soares, Pedro Pestana. 2016. “Um estudo etnográfico sobre o acolhimento e reintegração social de crianças acusadas de feitiçaria em Angola.” Masters Thesis in Social Anthropology, Lisbon: ISCTE. Stolow, Jeremy (ed.). 2013. Deus in Machina. Religion, Technology, the Things in Between. Fordham University Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1991. Partial Connections. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press. ———. 2011. “Binary License.” Common Knowledge 17(1): 87–103. Suhr, Christian, and Rane Willerslev. 2012. “Can Film Show the Invisible? The Work of Montage in Ethnographic Filmmaking.” Current Anthropology 53(3): 282–301. Thornton, John. 1998. The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684-1706. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tomás, António. 2012. “Refracted Governmentality: Space, Politics and Social Structure in Contemporary Luanda.” PhD thesis, anthropology, Columbia University. ———. 2014. “Becoming Famous: Kuduro, Politics and the Performance of Social Visibility.” Critical Interventions 8 (2): 261–75. Viegas, Sílvia 2015. “Luanda, Cidade (Im)Previsível? Governação e Transformação Urbana e Habitacional: Paradigmas de Intervenção e Resistências no Novo Milénio.” PhD thesis, architecture, University of Lisbon. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1992. From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2004. “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation.” Tipití 2 (1): 3-22. Willerslev, Rane. 2004. “Not Animal, Not Not-Animal: Hunting, Imitation and Empathetic Knowledge among the Siberian Yukaghirs.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 10: 629–52.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Conclusion Mediation and Variable Communications

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Diana Espírito Santo and Jack Hunter

In this conclusion, we will show, through an examination of the contributions to this volume, that contact with the paranormal, through technologies and other physical materials and organisms, does not necessarily have a communicational, or propositional, dimension. Indeed, it may make more sense to think in terms of forces, fields, ontological contiguities, extensions, spectra, and assemblages than it does to think in terms of discrete entities divided into “sender” and “receiver,” subject and object, or imagination and reality. In a sense we are arguing along the lines of Charles Fort, the influential twentieth-century cataloguer of anomalies, who proposed what he called philosophical “intermediatism” as a framework for interpreting the “damned facts” that he collected from newspaper reports and scientific journals (Fort 2008). Jeffrey Kripal summarizes Fort’s position, writing that “whatever such phenomena are (or are not), they cannot be mapped onto the cognitive grids of the pairs mental/material, real/unreal, subjective/ objective, and so on” (2014: 259). Instead, the intermediatist perspective is open to constant change and shifting possibilities in the frames of immanence and transcendence, or indeed of ex-communicability. This conclusion will also, therefore, provide a critique of mediation theories in the anthropology of religion, which, from this perspective, set far too uniform a structure for these “points” of contact. What is communication when we speak of mediational processes in paranormal domains, or, indeed, in scientific ones? Does this relationship imply that communication is propositional—occurring in the mind of one entity and then transferred via physical or material processes to another—but that the content of the communication may change? Gregory Bateson did not seem to think so. In Mind and Nature (2002 [1985]) he asks, “Is there a line or sort of bag of which we can say that ‘inside’

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

244 • Conclusion

that line or interface is ‘me’ and ‘outside’ is the environment or some other person?” (2002 [1985]: 123). In Steps towards an Ecology of Mind, Bateson further argues that “the mental world—the mind—the world of information processing—is not limited by the skin” (2000: 460). That means, according to his framework, that scholars should move away from an analysis based on the existence of discrete “minds” toward one where attention is paid to the mutuality of interactions that compose a conceptual-perceptual ecosystem. What Bateson calls “Mind,” which he contrasts to “mind,” constitutes this larger system of interacting forces, which work both inside and outside of physical bodies. What we could take from this is a consideration of Mind as a larger dynamic cosmology in which both matter and entities become salient through points of differentiation and contestation. Communication here makes boundaries, it defines borders between entities; it is not conditioned or created by them. Relations make things, people, entities, and technologies. Diana Espírito Santo’s chapter demonstrates this with a material semiotic analysis of how radio, as Chilean radioaficionados’ main method of contacting the “alien” Friendship community, forms “diffractions”—interferences of waves that are both literal and metaphoric. The “object”—observed remotely, and up close during the 1985 UFO sightings—is constructed from these diffractions, which are also bridges between radio operators. But this chapter raises a question that is pertinent to this concluding chapter on mediation. There may be no “one reality” to which communication establishes bridges or one single form of mediation itself through which communication takes symbolic referential significance. This perspective shifts significantly the boundaries of “communication” as we currently understand it. What else, then, can communication and mediation mean? For a clear answer to this question, we need to go back in time. Philosopher Stephan Gregory has divided the occult practices of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into what he has called the “contact paradigm” and the “code paradigm” (2015). Under “contact” he categorizes the very physical practices of Johann Gassner, an Austrian Catholic priest who practiced extraordinary faith “cures” in the 1770s, and his contemporary Anton Mesmer, the German physician who introduced therapies with “animal magnetism.” The practices of both men, says Gregory, “despite their ideological opposition, rely on the same principle of operation, on the same ‘operating system,’ namely a paradigm of transmission by contact” (2015: 17). Gregory begins his article with the observation that some communications appear more unlikely than others do—the “supernatural” kind. These imply a certain ambi-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion • 245

guity, which is productive (2015: 1). In “normal” communicative communication, the media tends to be invisible (or as invisible as possible), whereas in “supernatural” forms, there is a kind of “communication theory: an explicit or implicit hypothesis on the possibility of transmission” (2015: 1) built into the experience itself. Gregory argues that for both Gassner and Mesmer, communication can be conceived as “a principle of pure contiguity, as a way of establishing a material contact” (2015: 1). Gassner’s cures involved gestures, convulsions, seizures, and noises on the part of patients, and of the priest himself, a kind of theater that required enormous amounts of energy. With the exception of a theology in which the agency of the devil is thought to reside inside the patients’ bodies, Mesmer’s cures involved much of the same. There is an imbalance in physiology that both men addressed. However, while Mesmer “naturalized” the language of his magnetisms, positing scientific explanations in the form of electrical forces, fluids, and currents, which brought his patients into some sort of order, Gassner seemed to rely more “on the unleashing of forces than on the rearrangement of order” (2015: 5). The symbolic efficacy, says Gregory, does not depend on a reconstruction of semantics but rather on its dissolution (2015: 5): “Dealing with the devil is less about information than about force” (2015: 8). There was no significative function in Gassner’s incantations or actions (2015: 12). This dichotomy of the naturalization of spirits through scientific language (and corresponding notions of evidence) versus the force of contact or communion is highlighted in Ehler Voss’s chapter in this volume (who also contrasts Mesmer and Gassner for the purposes of his argument). He contends that parapsychology and paranormal research have always been subject to forms of boundary work, and have undergone purification processes that seek to clearly delineate the proper from the improper practitioner, machine, and result. But in essence it is presence, not evidence, that is arduously sought and ascertained. Existence is taken for granted and is not necessarily subjected to reiterated doubt or skepticism. Sandra, Voss’s main interlocutor, looks for experience and spectacle in her experimental ghost tours. Hospitality is a key index factor here; one has to be a gracious host to the “other side.” Paranormal researchers, just like the spiritualist mediums of the nineteenth century, should thus not necessarily be subject to the “truth-conditions” of proof, not least because the process is itself a network of relations in motion. The application of function or evidence in this context seems to miss the point. There are other, perhaps more important, dimensions of communication than the content of the communication itself.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

246 • Conclusion

Often the affective or physical natures of communication, or rather, of contact, are most relevant to practices that aim at the evocation of invisibles. But our natural tendency as researchers, and perhaps also practitioners, is to assume what John D. Peters calls “the interiority of the self and the sign as an empty vessel to be filled with ideational content” (1999: 63–64). Indeed, the idea of communication itself is underlined by Western philosophy, beginning with Saint Augustine, and then later with John Locke (Peters 1999: 63–64). It is no wonder, then, that spiritual practices born with industrialization and modernization also reflect this imperative. As Peters says, the “spiritualist movement has always explored the troubles and utopias of communication across gaps” (1999: 101). In the beginning of the Spiritualist movement, notes Erik Davis, spirits did not seem to have evinced “much insight”; the mere delivery of information from the spiritual world was sufficient to establish the divine reality of the spiritual telegraph itself, the content of the communications was not quite as important. As the New England Spiritualist Association declared in 1854, “Spirits do communicate with man—that is creed.” The medium really was the message (2015: 59). Aviva Briefel (2017) even describes the first spiritualist manifestations as “pointless” and “useless.” Such early manifestations included, for instance, the animation of furniture and other household items, table-turning, and other anomalous movements. “Regular activities like stoking a fire or sitting in a parlor chair become impossible when tongs rebel and items of furniture act like animals” (2017: 214). A few years after the movement gained momentum, the mediums of the Spiritualist stage, on both sides of the Atlantic, became international superstars, and the spirits they channeled gained very particular, often charismatic, voices. Furthermore, they were increasingly asked to provide conclusive evidence (of more than the levitation of furniture). Superior spirits enlightened by “evolution” and Ascended Masters from the East certainly had a voice in the elaboration of texts—the first helped Allan Kardec in France to establish his scientific Spiritism, and the second group assisted the Russian-born Madame Blavatsky in London to draft the texts of what would eventually become the bible of theosophy, The Secret Doctrine (1888). This is not to say that individualized spirits bearing particular messages dissolve the “alchemy” of which Andrew Jackson Davis and John Murray Spear spoke (discussed in our introduction). We remind readers that in both Davis’s and Spears’s spiritualist cosmologies, machines were understood to be both a part of nature and to be capable of refining coarse matter into finer matter, providing an alchemical moral transformation for society. But,

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion • 247

as highly mediumistic characters who staged public demonstrations, both Kardec and Blavatsky were certainly more mediational than were the early Spiritualists described in the introduction. As the movement developed, human mediums came to be understood primarily as mediums of information, so much so that they were likened to “telegraphs.” However, even as Spiritualism’s fame grew, the logic of the spiritualists was not one of simple mediation. Even spirit photography, as described by Simone Natale (2016), was thought of not so much as the capacity to bear photographic witness to what was visible to the eye. Rather, these images revealed invisibilities, intangibilities, and were “presented as the result of photography’s purported unsettling and uncanny faculty to detect the images of spirits who were among the living but went undetected by human senses” (2016: 135). The medium of photography had agency in and of itself. What Natale argues is that the “circulation of superimposition in multiple technological and cultural contexts framed it as a body of technologies and knowledge that wavered between realism and fantasy, stasis and movement, fiction and belief” (2016: 136). Of course, cases of fraud were plenty. Andrea Lathrop’s chapter discusses an interesting case of embodied mediation with regard to the psychic Ted Serios’s so-called “thoughtographs” in the 1960s. Analog photographic techniques, such as Polaroid, were and still are thoroughly embodied practices, in contrast to more recent digital photography. Lathrop argues that contemporary Londoners’ return to the use of Polaroid betrays a concern about and rejection of the proliferation of “disenchanted” forms of mediation, such as digital photography. Polaroid reinstates the body somehow, devaluing in some sense the transparency and immediacy of modern media, so desired, and so taken for granted. Spirit photography, invented in the late nineteenth century, marked a major turning point in the spiritualist quest to materialize the invisible, occupying a space that claimed technical and scientific visibility and credibility. But the camera itself was also a channel for mediumship, she argues, or for thought itself. Such was the case with Ted Serios and his thought materializations. He was, in a sense, indivisible from his camera; it was thus more than a medium. What we are arguing through these last examples is that the object— the camera, the bodies of mediums, and the recipients of the spirits’ effects—vary substantially in their properties as “things” of mediation proper. The same can be said of the apparatuses of paranormal investigators, such as those used for electronic voice communication with spirits of the dead, as well as radios and televisions. Indeed, in some

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

248 • Conclusion

cases there is an understanding that spirit presence can only manifest when certain factors are working in concert, and even so it does not always make sense. But ambiguities can also generate meanings, or rather, meanings without a significative content. In her ethnography of UFO enthusiasts in the United States, for example, Susan Lepselter (2016) claims that alien encounters often lead to feelings of betweenness: sensations of captivity and release that have no proper signification but which spur all manner of perceptions of alien technology (2016: 50– 51). In a poetic way that captures these fleeting sensations-cum-beliefs, Lepselter explains that

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

aliens possessed technology so advanced it seemed to be magic. They were invading the natural borders of our bodies and our land. But human powers also wanted the wonders of alien technology to use in our wars. (2016: 51)

Imaginaries of alien technologies, of alien craft debris, and of the fears, wonders, and utopias these invoke shape the experience of UFOs. The idea of the Freudian “uncanny,” something repressed that inevitably reappears in other shapes, which Lepselter uses to match up to what her interlocutors suggest about form and repetition (2016: 23), points to the need to look at communication, or contact, in its essentially affective, often unconscious, and even socially distributed dimensions. Affect theorists know this well (Brenan 2004; Navaro-Yashin 2012; Stewart 2007). Ben Anderson proposes a notion of “affective atmospheres” (2009), atmospheres that create intensities in a particular space, sociality, and object, but which transcend the sense-experience of particular persons and do not belong to objects themselves. This is also an in-betweenness, a point of contact that defies the communication of symbols or meanings. Atmospheres can be a-objective, and a-subjective. The experience of the paranormal is often a profoundly affective experience, categorizable in neither term, even if it involves the manipulation of things and post facto meaning-making. Bodies can also become surfaces of mediation; surfaces that only express, but do not embody, an “other,” doing so affectively and somatically. There is also an “in-betweenness” to this form of incorporation. In Miguel Algranti’s exposition of the Basilio School in Buenos Aires, he describes what he calls the “shared semantics of suffering” between human and spirit bodies. Through “spiritual science,” members of the Basilio are encouraged not simply to channel messages but also to channel pain, such as the male spirit (the guerrillero), described by Algranti, who came with intense suffering because he had been tor-

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion • 249

tured for political reasons with an electric cattle prod. The medium’s body shook as if she were also being electrocuted, and afterward she felt the aftershocks of the electricity in her body. The medium’s body is, in effect, a topological space for the appearance of spirits, a space where their history can unfold in all its horrors of physical pain. This means that not only is communication affective at its core, at least in certain circumstances, but also that the somatic element of experience (its physical aspect) can also constitute a form of communication, albeit with no linguistic content. At the same time, the transference of bodily trauma and pain from an “other” to a human body is as communicative as it can get. The medium’s body is the “expressive surface” for Argentina’s dictatorship and its atrocities, as Algranti argues, rendering them legible, and comprehensible in the present day. If we return again to Bateson’s concept of Mind, we can see, Erik Davis argues, that this “immanent mind is an ecology of information that permeates the material world” (2015: 158), obtaining ontological distinctions through the relations its actors constantly enact, some of which are more transgressive than others. In the realms of science, this means (among other things) that we need to posit ethnographic theories, in particular milieus, of how key distinctions are made (if at all): between material and immaterial, bodies and spirits, things and nonthings, technologies and animations, science and its opposites, discourse and reality, and so on. It is to this last point that the chapters of both Renzo Taddei and Anne Dippel have something substantial to say. Taddei’s contribution looks at climate science, at atmospheric systems and how intangible and nonlinear the process of climate prediction is. In contrast to weather, Taddei points out, climate is imperceptible. It refers to long-term patterns in the atmosphere that are not immediately observable, not like the sensory experience of wind or rain or sun. The computer models used to make sense of the climate are sophisticated and highly heterogeneous in their inputs and functioning. The sheer amount of data computed is insurmountable, but it still only leads to predictions. Therefore, even in the realm of climate science, “one should believe in things that cannot be seen.” Taddei juxtaposes this to the startling meteorological predictions of the Chief Coral Snake Foundation, a religious group that works with the spirit of an indigenous chief whom members claim can “intervene” in atmospheric processes. “Naturalism” is not, therefore, incoherent in any sense with “animism.” However, meteorologists still work within the confines of a particular ontology, with freak atmospheric conditions functioning as their “tricksters.” This is a story as old as time, Taddei

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

250 • Conclusion

suggests. The trickster comes up again in Anne Dippel’s chapter, which focuses on CERN’s physicists and their apparent enchantment of certain particles, such as the Higgs boson. Science has always been infused with magical thought, she says at the outset. Her argument is that particle physicists both “animate” science through everyday linguistic practices and employ “animism” as a framework for developing a more intuitive grasp of complex theories and concepts. The idea is that Western cosmology is only one of many. Dippel’s chapter seems to imply that imagination is fundamental to both particle physics and animism. Imagination serves to help visualize that which we cannot naturally see or even fully understand. There is yet more ambiguity here, however. The Higgs particle, for instance, cannot be classed as either artificial or natural—it is somewhere in between, subatomically, and everywhere at once. The work of scientific reification here becomes paramount. Even within modern occultism there are distinctive differences in understanding “things” as things, or indeed, spirits as “spirits.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, these too required reifications. One discipline that positions itself squarely in a positivist camp is modern parapsychology, the heir of British psychical research at the turn of the nineteenth century. Psychical research emerged precisely from the move away from metaphysical concerns with spiritual beings and into the domains of tangibility and evidence—supernatural explanation simply did not figure for the early psychical researchers. It remained essentially ambiguous in its explanations of matter, spirit, and causality, however, perhaps explaining its appeal. One example is the notion of “ideoplasty,” a term employed by the early psychical researchers to reject claims of spirits and explain the extraordinary psychophysical formations that they observed and photographed in mediumistic séances, such as bright lights or materializations of human forms (Sommer 2012: 26). It refers to the material aspect of thought, or imagination, which is at once an extremely dualist notion and a conceptual collapse of the mind-matter divide. But this “biopsychic” vitalism—as outlined in Jack Hunter’s chapter in this volume, was a far cry from what would eventually emerge as the experimental focus and ideals of parapsychology. In the 1930s, American psychologist J. B. Rhine explicitly moved away from the kind of anecdotal evidence collected by the psychical researchers, and rejected the use of extraordinary individuals, such as mediums and psychics, as sources of data. Instead, Rhine took parapsychology into the realms of statistics and experiments, which were carried out with lay people (often students) in his laboratory at Duke University. The important thing to note here is that Rhine, like others

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion • 251

that would follow, rejected the “forces” theories of his predecessors. Alvarado argues that this “rejection of forces by many parapsychologists may also be related to the rise of concepts of non-locality that do not postulate a transmission mechanism” (2006: 152), which emerged from fields such as quantum physics. In any case, Rhine’s experiments showed clearly that time, space, and the physical characteristics of the target were irrelevant to ESP and PK test performance (2006: 151). Something was communicating at a distance; except it wasn’t a distance, it was immediate. Mind was influencing matter; except that it wasn’t mind as we know it or matter as we know it; neither history/ future, with apparent evidence for pre- and retro-cognition, but something far more pliable and fluid, unknown, and unexplainable. Even today, parapsychologists, while generally agreeing on the basic facts of “psi”—that it exists, as demonstrated by laboratory experiments with statistically significant data—are at odds to agree on an explanation for why it exists, or indeed of what it actually is. The approach that came to epitomize parapsychological research after Rhine, despite its extraordinary subject matter, was essentially reductionist in nature. Experimental parapsychologists sought to break the paranormal down into its constituent parts in order to understand it. What they found were small but statistically significant effects, which they labelled ESP (extrasensory perception) and PK (psychokinesis). But in bringing the paranormal into the laboratory, parapsychology lost sight of the wider context and dynamics of paranormal experiences as they occur in the real world. Jack Hunter’s chapter in this volume, however, demonstrates that there was also a parallel strand within psychical research and parapsychology that adopted a more organic and holistic perspective. Early researchers such as Charles Richet and Hans Driesch, for example, drew on their understanding of cellular biology and embryology to make sense of the paranormal in relation to other natural and normal processes, of which paranormal manifestations were a “superextension.” Hunter’s chapter calls for a reappraisal of holistic, organismic, and ecological perspectives for making sense of parapsychological phenomena. Mediumship development, for instance, is described in terms of a process of nurturing and birthing spirits through the physical body of the medium, and séances (including the experiences and phenomena that occur within them) are interpreted as complex systems that cannot be reduced to any of their constituent parts. What does this all say about media, and mediation? Perhaps we can take a cue from Maria José de Abreu, in a recent article (2019), where she conceptualizes media as a “rhythmic middle.” Looking at the role

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

252 • Conclusion

of radio, especially in its transmission in 1950s Portugal of a War of the Worlds–type broadcast, which resonated with the dictatorial regime’s rhetorical reliance on both the “miracle” of Fatima and the fear of Communist invasion, Abreu overcomes the instrumentalist view of media by focusing on the “middle” aspects of transmissions. The questions of possibility, ambiguity, and the “if” are always present in any consideration of alien invasion (be it extraterrestrial or Soviet), notwithstanding the various moments in which broadcasters interrupted the program to convey its fictitious nature. There was a “continuum across difference, the structural relay, which produced not just a circuit of transmission but the transmission of a circuit; a circulation between worlds” (2019: 662). Here, communication was subjugated to something else; a collective kind of affective disposition, which indeed produced all kinds of rumors, sightings, and fears. The anthropology of religion has only partly embraced notions of indeterminacy in relation to media and objects. For instance, Reinhardt shows in his ethnography of Pentecostals in Ghana that media can be “prosthetic extensions of the senses” (2014: 317). “Soaking in tapes” means allowing the Word—through audiovisual means—to literally be soaked into the body of believers, where spoken words connect and transform people’s spiritual maturations in a way that is nonmetaphorical. This goes some way to dissolving the notion, as Meyer argues (2013: 5), that “cultural communication is organized along horizontal and vertical axes, among people, and between people and the sacred via particular media.” Meyer defends that “mediation and immediacy do not belong to two opposing realms, but are intertwined” (2011: 26–25), such that the content of that mediated is shaped by the means of transmission, that is, by the media of communication. In her chapter on Vietnamese spirit contact and the objects and votives mediating them, Gertrud Hüwelmeier follows, to our mind, Birgit Meyer’s understanding of religion as mediation (2011). Ancestors in Hanoi are approached respectfully through altar offerings, which include food and cigarettes. A particular bodily posture is crucial during these acts—one that is solemn, bowed. Votive offerings, such as cars, mobile phones, and refrigerators, made from paper and subsequently set alight, are thought to be indispensible for the afterlife. Smoke and fire are considered the “post office” of this offering, according to Hüwelmeier. There is a whole “economy” of consumables and objects and gifts without which the spirit world does not communicate or bestow blessings on descendants. Often technical devices or digital technologies are what allows for spirit mediation, or possession, to occur. In contrast to

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion • 253

those instances where media is “dark” or “ex-communicative,” these cases point to what she calls an “animated exchange” between worlds, but one shaped and facilitated by the means of communication. Indeed, Hüwelmeier’s chapter reminds us that not all places, or scholars of those places, defy mediation as a useful paradigm. Perhaps we are best off looking at “theologies of mediation” (Eisenlohr 2012), whereby certain objects mediate “other worlds” to an extent that is more or less transparent, while others remain flat, “dark” as Thacker puts it (2014), conveying an immanence, or “pure continuum” (2014: 135), which makes divisions between “worlds” (people, sacred) difficult to gauge. Indeed, Anastasios Panagiotopoulos proposes as much in his contribution to this book. He argues that mediation is not an “a posteriori intervention in the apparently given and primordial distance between divinity and humanity.” His stance is at opposite ends to that of Hüwelmeier, demonstrating the importance of accounting for conceptual differences within the ethnography itself. The “invisibles,” the entities of Afro-Cuban religion, are not mediated from a position of humanity but enter themselves into mediational processes of mending “broken words,” or correcting life-paths. But they also oscillate between inarticulacy—sending the initiate back to the diviner to gauge the cause, to find words for oracular paths—and absolute clear communication, through possession, for instance. He asks, why do we assume an a priori distance between the transcendent and the immanent? We cannot commence from an endpoint, he suggests. To illustrate, an example: In an article on spirits and technology in Indonesia, Nils Bubandt (2016) follows the story of an Islamic school leader who harnesses the power of modern technology—video recordings—to show that his exorcism is real. He shows Bubandt a video of himself cleansing a male patient possessed with a particular jin, a spirit causing affliction (2016: 105). But it was what could not be seen in the video that was most revealing: According to Kyai Muzakkin, he himself was not the actual exorcist. Rather, the exorcism had been performed by the one thousand spirits that he claimed had crowded around the patient during the event. It was they who had engaged what turned out to be the female spirit who had possessed Muhaimin and who had caused him to viciously attack and attempt to strangle his wife a week earlier . . . the spirits did the actual, though invisible, work of exorcism. The video we were uploading to YouTube that evening was, in a sense, not what it seemed. It did not portray a healer performing a cleansing ritual on a patient. It was filmed proof of the thousand invisible spirits who insistently and effectively exorcised

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

254 • Conclusion

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

and converted another spirit. But one had to know it to see it. Mata batin, it is called: “eyes to see the invisible.” (2016: 105)

What exactly is being mediated here, or indeed communicated? The one thousand spirits Muzakkin speaks of? Muzakkin himself in a performance of his unique cosmologies? Or something less mediatable, so to speak? Bubandt explains that modern media bolsters the reality of spirits by the way tele-technologies are linked to market opportunities (2016: 107). But, however his main interlocutor wants to “prove” their reality through sight-based means, we can say that in this case what is really being mediated is perhaps the idea of noncommunicability, or at least partial communicability. Invisibility is taken as a proof of existence (accessible only through certain kinds of “sights”—ultimate inaccessibility to most). Thacker, for instance, citing where Graham Harman says that we as scholars need to show “how two objects can be absolutely hidden from each other and capable of affecting one another” (Harman 2005: 16, in Galloway et al. 2014: 115), explains that “objects exist in this contradictory movement of givenness and withdrawal. Even in their most intimate, phenomenal interaction with us as subjects, objects still maintain some reservoir of inaccessibility—in short, for every object there is an inaccessible more-than-object” (ibid). This would fit with Bubandt’s audiovisual exorcistic material from the field. It also fits with Thacker’s analysis of the Japanese horror film genre. Some Japanese horror films portray media as technologies that behave in unorthodox ways, says Thacker (2014: 91). For instance, in the bestselling novel Ring and its subsequent film adaptation, the video image, the tape, is the ultimate point of contact between natural and supernatural worlds. The videotape itself, however, is “imbued with vitalistic and supernatural properties, contagiously passing from one person to another” (2014: 92), much like a virus. Bad things happen to those who watch, or participate in this mediation. But Thacker also highlights a scene where a mysterious figure crosses the threshold of the screen and emerges from the television into someone’s living room, with obviously ominous results. “In such moments, it is less the media object that is the source of horror, and more the fact of mediation itself that is horrific, a mediation that strangely seems to work all too well” (2014: 92). In the film Pulse, to use another example, webcams and chatrooms become portals to the dead (2014: 92). Paranormal investigators who work by rewiring the circuitry of televisions (removing the signal) know well that the dead can “appear” in anomalous images on screens,

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Conclusion • 255

a phenomenon called instrumental transcommunication. In both of these examples, media appears to passively mediate ghosts (2014: 92). What happens, though, when thought itself becomes haunted, or rather, when thought itself becomes “the point of mediation between the natural and supernatural” (2014: 94)? Thacker discusses a manga horror film called Uzumaki, where a seaside town becomes obsessed with the geometric shape of a spiral. People contort their bodies into spirals; spirals begin to form everywhere in eerie ways—from the noodles in a bowl of soup to strangely shaped grass on the hillside (2014: 94). Thacker says,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

In all these examples, we see the communications diagram at work, though in anomalous ways. Media shift from the connection of two points in a single reality, to an enigmatic and ambivalent connection with an unnamed “beyond.” We begin with “media” in the colloquial sense of technological devices, and we end up the mediation as equivalent to thought itself and being itself. J-horror takes up the communications diagram and stretches it to its extreme point, provoking us to wonder where mediation ends and something outside mediation begins. (2014: 95)

As with Bubandt’s example above, Thacker argues that media no longer functions to make the inaccessible accessible; or at least that is no longer its only function. “Instead, media reveal inaccessibility in and of itself—they make accessible the inaccessible—in its inaccessibility” (2014: 96). Ruy Blanes’s chapter on Angolan witchcraft and parallax can finally shed light on this last point: how media often reveals the inaccessible, the dark, and the hidden. But it does so by providing a perspective on perspectives; through a conceptual look at the play of light and dark, of visibility and invisibility, of polyhedral forms of manifestation and of the “presentification” of ndoki. Sorcery is not one thing but many; it is reflected on many surfaces and topographies, not simply the human body or soul. Ndoki gains shape, ontological consistency, through processes of revealing and identifying cause, effect, and the “absent third”—the space of connection that enables action and meaning. The various “sides” of this triangle can connect and incorporate multiple cosmologies, geometrically expanding and unconstrained. This polygonality materializes what he calls “phantom power”: an emergent, half-understood effect that arises from the interaction of the multiplicity of perspectives involved. Blanes proposes to look at the occult here as a “different sight,” from which several different physical and social architectures emerge, only some of which are visible. Positionality

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

256 • Conclusion

in this “sight” is imperative to what is “seen”—a parallactic position. Blanes’s shift of the argument about mediation to one of perspective (parallax) sheds a new light on the notion of mattering, and on paranormal or spiritual media itself. In this view, we are wrong to take the easy route of seeing spiritual mediation as a linear affair. Instead, a kaleidoscopic multiplicity reigns; one whereby each shift of perspective simultaneously reveals and conceals, disclosing space-times in each shift that may superimpose indefinitely, “mattering” the invisible through parallactic movements. Media, under this paradigm, are not necessarily positioned as the “enablers” of parallax. What is interesting about this final chapter is the proposition that perspective itself is a form of mediation.

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Diana Espírito Santo, PhD UCL, 2009, has worked variously on spirit possession and mediation in Cuba, with Afro-Cuban espiritismo, in Brazil, with African-inspired Umbanda, and more recently in Chile, where she is currently examining ontologies of evidence and technologies in parapsychology movements, paranormal investigation, and ufology. She has published many articles, is writing her third monograph, and has coedited four volumes, including The Social Life of Spirits (University of Chicago Press) with Ruy Blanes. She currently works as associate professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Jack Hunter, PhD, is an honorary research fellow with the Religious Experience Research Centre and a tutor with the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture, both at University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He is also a research fellow with the Parapsychology Foundation and a professional member of the Parapsychological Association. He is the author of Manifesting Spirits (2020), Spirits, Gods and Magic (2020), and Engaging the Anomalous (2018); coeditor of Talking With the Spirits (2014); and editor of Strange Dimensions (2015), Damned Facts (2016), and Greening the Paranormal (2019).

References Abreu, Maria José. 2019. “Medium Theory; Or the War of the Words at Regular Intervals.” Current Anthropology. 60 (5): 656–73. Alvarado, Carlos. 2006. “Human Radiations: concepts of force in Mesmerism, Spiritualism and Psychical Research.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 70(3): 884: 138–62.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion • 257 Anderson, Ben. 2009. “Affective Atmospheres.” Emotion, Space and Society 2: 77–81. Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2002 [1985]. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Bantam. Blavatsky, Helena P. 1888. The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy. London: Theosophical Publishing Society. Brenan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Briefel, Aviva. 2017. “‘Freaks of Furniture’: The Useless Energy of Haunted Things.” Victorian Studies 59(2): 209–34. Bubandt, Nils. 2016. “Spirits as Technology: Tech-Gnosis and the Ambivalent Politics of the Invisible World in Indonesia.” Contemporary Islam 81(3): 535–64. Davis, Erik. 2015. TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. Foreword by Eugene Thacker. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Eisenlohr, Patrick. 2012. “Media and Religious Diversity.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 37–55. Fort, Charles. 2008. The Books of the Damned: The Collected Works of Charles Fort. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher. Galloway, Alexander, Eugene Thacker, and Mark Wark (eds.). 2014. Excommunication: Three Inquires into Media and Mediation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gregory, Stephan. 2015. “Media in Action: From Exorcism to Mesmerism.” Communication +1 4(1): Article 3. Retrieved [October 21, 2018] from https:// scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol4/iss1/3/. Kripal, Jeffrey J. 2014. Comparing Religions: Coming to Terms. Oxford: WileyBlackwell. Lepselter, Susan. 2016. The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity and UFOs in the American Uncanny. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Meyer, Birgit. 2011. “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies and the Question of the Medium.” Social Anthropology 19(1): 23–39. ———. 2013. “Material Mediations and Religious Practices of World-Making.” In Religion across Media: From Early Antiquity to Late Modernity, edited by K. Lundby, 1–19. New York: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers. Natale, Simone. 2016. Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media. University Park: Penn State University Press. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2012. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Post-war Polity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Peters, John D. 1999. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

258 • Conclusion

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Reinhardt, Bruno. 2014. “Soaking in Tapes: The Haptic Voice of Global Pentecostal Pedagogy in Ghana.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(2): 315–36. Sommer, Andreas. 2012. “Psychical Research and the Origins of American Psychology: Hugo Munsterberg, William James and Eusapia Palladino.” History of the Human Sciences 25(2): 23–44. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thacker, Eugene. 2014. “Dark Media.” In Excommunication: Three Inquires into Media and Mediation, edited by Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and Mark Wark, 77–150. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Index

actor network theory, the, 140–41 actor-network crytoanimisms, 205 actor-media theory, 141–42 Afro-Cuban cosmos, 94–96 Afro-Cuban divination, 90, 103 Afro-Cuban religiosity, 93–95, 100 Afro-cuban religious ethnography, 91, 253 Algranti, Miguel, 248 Alvarado, Carlos, 32 anaesthetics, 159, 168, 171n5 “analogical substantiation”, 60 Anderson, Ben, 248 Angola, 222–24, 227, 229 New Angola, 233, 236 Angolan civil war, 232–234 “animal magnetism”, 32, 244 animatedness, 201–2 rhetorical in everyday use of digital devices, 204 animism, 193, 196, 204, 208, 214–15, 217, 249 new animism, 201, 206–7 material animism, 214 pagan animism, 215 “animistic ontological regime”, 193 apparatus(es), 47, 67–68, 70, 78–80, 85, 112, 119–20, 124 Argentina, 46–47, 49–53, 63, 249 Asad, Talal, 63 Asociación Escuela Científica Basilio, 46 El Bien, and el Error, 52 Guido Boeri (Spiritual Director), 52

Pedro Eugenio Portal (founder), 51 See Basilio Scientific School Association, The “the New Idea”, 51 ATLAS detector, 203, 209 project, the, 201 atmospheric sciences, 184, 186 Aysén [Chilean southern province], 111–12 babalawo [the high priest of the Ifá tradition of divination], 96, 98–99, 104 Bakongo, 223–27, 232–34, 237, 2238n1–2 Barad, Karen, 114, 119, 124–25 notion of diffraction, 115, 119–20, 125 Basalla, George, 116 Basilio Scientific School Association, The (BSSA), 47, 51–53, 62 batea de Ifá, 98. See Ifá Bateson, Gregory, 62, 243–44 Benjamin, Walter, 157 Bergandi, Donato, 30 Bessire, Lucas, 114 Bird-David, Nurit, 27, 148 birth, 36–37, 42 Blanes, Ruy, 255 Blavatsky, Madame, 246–47 Brain, Robert M., 34 Braun, Hans-Joaquim, 168 Brazil, 179–85, 189–90 Brazilian Meterological Society, 190 Bristol, 25–26, 36, 40,4a2 Bristol Spirit lodge, 25, 37, 42

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

260 • Index Bubandt, Nil, 253–55 Buenos Aires, 49–51, 53, 248

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Cabot, Zayin, 40 California, 132–33, 149n1–2 calving, metaphor of, 36 caminos [paths], 91, 93–95, 100–7 Candomblé, 181 ceremony, spiritist 95, 97–98, 100 Chief Coral Snake (Umbanda’s spirit in Brazil), 179, 193 Foundation, 179, 181, 189, 249 Chile, 70, 111, 113–15, 118, 120, 122, 126–27, 129–30, 227 Chiloé, 113, 123, 126–27 Clark, Brett, 30 Clements, Frederic, 30 Copacabana beach, 181, 194 corpothetics, 159, 171n5 Cuba, 93, 96, 101, 108 culto a Dios, 46, 53–54, 57, 60 See also spiritual liberation “dark media”, 68, 84, 253 Dawkins, Richard, 31 “death culture”, 156 Desaparecidos, 63 Descartes, René, 42 diffraction, 115, 119–20, 125. See Barad, Karen. 244 “digital disconnection”, 154, 168–69 Dippel, Anne, 249 director, espiritual, 53 disambiguation, somatic, 47, 61 disembodied aesthetic experience, 159 conciousness, 117–18 communication, 155–56 expectations, 166, 170 media, 155 practices, 154, 165 spirits, 53 voice, 136 divination, 83, 90, 93–94, 96, 98–99, 103–6, 108

diviner(s), 93–94, 102 santeros, paleros, 102 Driesch, Hans, 33, 35–36, 251 ecocentric perspective, 40 ecologies, 41 ecosystem, 30–31, 39–40, 42. See organic principles conceptual-perceptual ecosystem, 244 ectoplasm, 33–34, 59, 158 ectoplasmic materializations 34–35, 158 Eisenbud, Jule, 159–69, 162, 169, 171n7 Ekeko (God of plenty), 73 EKWESA (prophetic Christian movement from Congo), 232 eloquence (of mediumship), 47, 59, 61, 63 Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) sessions, 134–35, 138, 143, 156, 159, 167 enchanment, 115, 121 “disenchanted-enchantment”, 169 re-enchantment, 153, 168 entity manifestation, 36 environmental anthropology, 181 esotericism, 204 esoterism, Western, 48–49, 59 Espiritismo, 93–94, 99 espiritistas (spiritists), 96–98, 100, 104 Espírito Santo, Diana, 86n1, 227, 244 European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), 200, 250 “extended materiality”, 59, 62 extension of our bodies, 47; extension of the world, 59; selfextension, 61 extraterrestrial communications, 116 feiticeiros, 224, 237 Fichman, Martin, 34 Fischer, Daniel, 114

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Index • 261

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

fluido espiritual, 57, 60 Fort, Charles, 243 Foster, John Bellamy, 30 Foucalt, Michel, 47, 59 Fox sisters, 69, 148, 153 Friendship [community and allegedly island in Chiloé], 113, 119, 121–23, 125–29, 244 Ariel,112–13, 121–23, 126–27 as aliens, 116–18 as a scientific community, 128–29 as imposters, 128 Mytilus II, the, 123, 125–26 media coverage, 126–36 “Friendship” [Octavio Ortiz’s book on the homonymous group], 111 “functional entities”, 38 Fuente, Ernesto de la, 113, 126, 128–29 Gadamer, Hans-George, 204 Gaia hypothesis, 31, 37–38 See Lovelock, James Gaßner, Johann Joseph, 139–40 Gassner, Johann, 244–45 “give light”, 96 Gilbert, Scott, 29 ghost-hunting, 132–33, 136–42, 145–46 criticism, 139, 141, 145 doubt, the function of, 146 “ghost radar”, 134 ghost tour(s), 145, 246 Gregory, Stephan, 244 guerrillero, (spirit within Basilio’s social typology), 56–58 Gunning, Tom, 153, 157, 159 Haraway, Donna, 210, 212–14 Hanks, Michele, 145–47 Hanoi 75–76, 78–80, 86, 252 Hardy, Alister, 28–29, 34, 40 Religious Experience Researche Centre, 28

hat chau van [Vietnamese]music, 77 Havana, 93, 95–96 Helmreich, Stefan, 118, 124 Higgs boson, 209, 211 Higgs particles, 203, 210, 250 as tricksters, 212 Higgs field, 202, 210 as a physical placeholder for inanimatedness, 202 Higgs, Peter, 210 Hoang, Chung van, 82 hospitality, 147–48, 245 Huwelmeier, Gertrude, 252 Hume, David, 28, 35 Hunter, Jack, 250–51 Ifá, 93, 96, 98–99, 101–2, 104 Ihamba spirit, 36 Iktomi (creator god of Sioux cosmology), 212–16 Ingold, Tim, 114, 202, 204, 206, 214 “intermediatism”, philosophical, 243 intra-act, 119 intra-action, concept of, 125 intra-actions, 115, 119, intra-active cosmologies, 206 bodies are intra-actively materialized, 124 intra-activity, 119 Japanese horror films, 254 Jesus of Nazareth, 51, 54, 56 See Basilio Scientific School Association Jürgenson, Friedrich, 138, 144 Jung, Carl, 38, 42 Kardec, Allan, 47, 51, 190, 192, 246–47 Kardecism, 181–82 Kean, Webb, 83 Kier, Nicolás, 49 Klint, Wilma af, 79

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

262 • Index

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Lakota-Sioux cosmology, 211–17 Lambek, Michael, 68, 79, 81, 84 Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the, 202, 206, 210 Latour, Bruno, 200–1, 205–6 Lathrop, Andrea, 247 Law, John, 118–19, 129 len dong, [Vietnamese] spirit mediumship, 70, 74, 77–78 LeShan, Lawrence, 38 liminal being, 38–39 liminal existential dimension, 63 London, 164, 246 London Polaroid Community, 154, 165 Lovelock, James, 31, 37 loss of words, 96 Lucero station, 111. See Octavio Ortiz Lucumí, 96, See babalawo Ludueña, Gustavo, 50, 52 Luanda, 222–25, 229, 232– 237 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 195 mainstream science, 195 manifesting spirits, 26 Margulis, Lynn, 37 materiality, semantic 63, 207 materialize the invisible, 247 matter (the invisible), 29 how matter relates to media, 68 inanimate matter, 32, 200, 203–8, 213 “matter the paranormal”, 32 matter-divine issues, 103 mind and matter, 35, 38, 42, 162, 169 matter is semiotic, 107 nature of matter, 43 physical matter of the medium’s body, 42 spirit and matter relationship, 84, 107 technology as complex arrangements of matter, 41

the otherworld mediated by matter, 83 “vibrant matter”, 68 mattering, 105, 107, 119, 167, 177, 179, 222, 225–28, 237, 256 Maupassant, Guy de, 223, 227 Horla, the, 223, 227–28, 237 McLuhan, Marshall, 59 mediation [between humanity and divinity], 23, 69, 79, 84–85, 91, 94, 105, 107 heuristic mediation, 103 materiality of mediation, 68 models of technical intermediation, 49 technological mediation, 70 the question of mediation in anthropology, 92 theories of mediation, 92 mediumism, controversy of, 132, 139–41 mediumistic skills, 142–43 mediums: Blanca Aubretón de Lambert, 51 Edith Turner, 36 Eileen J. Garrett, 39 Eva Carrière, 33 mediums, human, 132, 139, 141, 145 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 32, 139–40, 244 “mesmeric fluid”, 32; “fluidum”, 139 meta-communication, 27 metaphor(s), 23, 119, 203–5, 207 counter-metaphor for torture, 63 metaphor of birth, 36 techonological metaphor, 27 Meyer, Birgit, 68, 71, 86n1, 227, 252 Mori, Bernd Brabec de, 115, 117 Mother Goddess religion [Ðao Mâu] 70, 74 mushroom, 25 mycelium, 37–38 mycelial network, 38 mycelial threads, 42

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Index • 263 “myth of the exiles souls”, 59

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

NASA, 116–17 Natale, Simone, 247 nature spirits, 27 deva, Dhammakaya tradition, 191 devara (southern Indian spirit), 27 Xapiri (Yanomami entities), 191 ndoki (Bakongo sorcery in Luanda), 222–27, 229–230, 232–233, 237 as a city that compose Luanda, 237 embodies a process of triangulation, 226, 229 “exodus”, 232 as a form of knowledge transmitted, 224, 229, 233 Palanca neighborhood, 233–36, 238n1, n8 as spiritual refugee, 233 an issue of use of knowledge, 224 New England Spiritualist Association, 246 Nunes, Pastor, 232 nurturing, process of, 27, 42, 251 occult, the, 153, 228–29, 233, 255 “occult” forces, 82 “occult internationalism”, 69 literature, 49 practices, 244 occultism, 69, 79, 250 Odum, Eugene, 39 Oehler, Pauline, 159–60, 162 offerings, votive paper, 70, 72–74, 76, 252 oracular articulacy, 90–91, 94–95, 97, 100, 102–105 oracular pronouncements, 94–95, 99 oracular signs and oracular perceptions, 97, 100 organic principles, 36, 42: growth; process; birthing; symbiosis, 37; ecosystem, 39 organism, 25

organism and mechanism, 29–32 “holism-reductionism” debate, 30 “emergentism-reductionism” debate, 30 living organism; artificial mechanism, 28 organism, philosophy of, 35 Ortiz, Octavio, 111, 114, 120, 126–27 otherworldy beings, 67–71, 79 Otsuki, Grant Jun, 124 “world multiple”; “worlding”, 125 Paley, William (Reverend), 28 Palo Monte, 80, 93–94 Panagiotopoulos, Anastasios, 253 parallax, 222, 227, 230–32, 236 “parallactic movement”, 230–31, 237 paranormal, 28, 42, 179, 194, 226, 228, 243 green/ecological dimension to, 28 “paranormal investigations”, 133, 142 related to biology and ecology, 28–29 related to physical research, 25, 32 paranormal phenomena in the United States, 137–38, 146 the problem of paranormal, 132 parapsychology, 32, 43, 130, 139, 141, 146, 159, 194–95, 226, 245, 250–51 Perón, Eva, 51 Perón, Juan Domingo, 52 Peronismo, 52 Peters, John D., 146 picana, 53, 55–56, 61 electric prod, 55–56, 60, 63 planchette, 82 phantom power, 222–23, 226–27, 255 poligonality, 226 polyhedral process of ocultation, 232 mattering capacities, 227

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

264 • Index photography, 69, 72, 153, 159, 162–65, 167–68, 170 burst into the spiritual movement, 153 ghost, 141 “one-step photography”, 163, 170 “psychic photography”, 159 satellite, 80 spirit, 156–57, 165, 247 physics, 200–18 and anthropology, 208 high-energy, 201, 210–11, 213–14, 216 Polaroid (Company, camera and film), 163–65 Bayside Catholic Marian apparitions case, 167 contemporary practice, 153–55, 159–70 Edwin Land (Polaroid’s creator), 154–55, 163–65, 170, 172n9 Ted Serios case, 159–60, 169, 247 thoughtographs, 159–60, 162, 165, 167 , 247 poltergeist hypothesis, 139 possession (spirit) 27, 55, 79, 82, 83, 94 Nayaka spirit posession in India, 27 Orichas and mpungos, 94 “postures of listening”, 115, 124 psychical research, 250–51 “psychokinetic” abilities, 145 “psychoid”, 38, 42 See Jung, Carl quantum mechanics, 204, 208, 213 radio 111–28, 159 eleven meter citizens band radio, 111, 115, 120, 126 ham radio, 114–15, 118–19, 122, 125, 128 ham radio operators, 125 radio fishing as a masculine pursuit, 117

radio as an instrument to construct kinship, 118 radio made extraterrestrial contact, 117 radio and telegraph, 118 radio waves, 116–17, 120, 156 radioaficionado(s), (Chilean), 111, 118–19, 122, 124–25, 244. See Ortiz, Octavio. See Fuente, Ernesto de la. “rain prophets”, 181, 188 relational personhood, 27 religion, 48–49, 51–52, 70, 72, 92, 105 anthropology of, 92, 252 Cuban diaspora religion, 78 Mother Goddess religion, 74 Uncle Ho religion, 82 religious affiliation in Brazil, 181 religious traditions, 93–94, 99 Palo Monte, 93–94 Regla Conga, 93 Regla Ocha/Ifá, 93 Santería, 93–94 “Electric Santería”, 78 Regional Council of Engineering and Arquitecture (CREA), (Brazilian agency), 190 REM pod, 134–35 “remystify the western world”, intention to, 169 Rhine, Joseph Banks, 250 Richet, Charles, 33–36, 251 Rimbaud, Jean Nicolas Arthur, 62 Rio Grande do Sul, 181, 189 Rio de Janeiro, 181, 190 Rock in Rio concerts, 181, 190, 193–94 rural traditional knowledge, 188 Sagan, Carl, 116 Santería, 93–94 Orichas, 94 Sao Paulo, 180–81, 189 Sarkar, Sahotra, 29

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Index • 265 science, communication, 200, 203, 205–6, 209 as a form of totemism, 203 ontological opportunism from scientists, 208, 213 syncretistic narratives, 201 science and animism, 206–8 intertwined with digital media technologies, 207 fundamental ambiguities, 207 science as a counterpart to animistic concepts of nature, 205 scientific approach to Christianity, 51 Schüttpelz, Erhard, 139–42, 149n1 Sconce, Jeffrey, 117–18, 155–56, 159, 167–68, 170 seancé (spiritual), 25–26, 36, 40, 42, 54, 56–57, 63 Vietnamese spiritual seancés 67, 74, 76 spirit writing seancés 79, 82, 84 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program, 117 semantics of the suffering, 46–47, 49 Sheldrake, Rupert, 29–30, 34 “habits” of nature, 35 “morphogenetic fields”, 34 organicist philosophy, 29 sight, 111,116, 228, 234 sighting, 125 UFO, 227 signos (signs: oddu of Ifá ), 99–102 Sjöstedt-H, Peter, 35 skeptic(s), 116, 138–39, 145, 148 skepticism, 48, 202, 245 sorcery, 222, 255. See ndoki soul caller, 72 sound, 111, 115, 124, 135, 167 spirit control, 38–39 spirit communication, 27 spirit mediumship, 35, 41, 47, 67, 69–70, 77–78, 82 “spirit money”, 74

spirit writing, 67, 70–71, 79–83, 85 Chinese diaspora in Malaysia, 82 écriture automatique in Taiwan, 83 Spiritism, 49–50, 62, 82 Argentina’s spiritism, 51 French spiritism, 47, 51 scientific, 246 spirits of the dead, 67, 69–70, 94, 96–97, 137, 180, 247 “Spiritual Leader of the Nation”, 51 See Eva Perón spiritual elevation, 57 spiritual liberation, 53, 58 spiritual manipulations of the atmosphere, 190 spiritual-metereological work, 193 spiritualism, modern, 47–48, 62, 148 Statements, Paul, 38 Stoichita, Victor A., 115, 117, 124 Stolow, Jeremy, 227 Strathern, Marilyn, 231 symbiosis, 35, 37–38, 42 symbiotic relantionship, 38, 42 Taddei, Renzo, 249 Tassi, Nico, 72 telegraphy, 47–48, 50, 69 teleology, evolutionary, 34 teleological ontology of vegetation, 30 technical devices, 78, 135, 138, 140, 143, 252 technical media (related to materiality of mediation), 67–70, 80, 83–84 and human mediums, 132, 137, 139, 141, 143–45 technique of the body, 71–72, 79 See spirit writing technology of ritual, 46 “technology of the self”, 59 “technomyticism”, 138 technostalgia, 154 telepresence, 155–156, 159

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,

266 • Index theremin, 169 theosophy, 246 torture technologies, 46–47 tool(s), 48, 67–69, 90, 92, 97, 104–7 mediums as tools, 94 trance mediums, 67, 69 trance mediumship, 70–71, 74, 76, 78–79, 81–82, 84–85 trance practices, 140 trance state, 25, 75, 79, 140, 162, 189 Turner, Edith, 36 Turner, Victor, 46

Copyright © 2021. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

UFO(s), 111, 114, 116, 122, 127, 227, 244 UFO-as-Friendship, 125 ufologists, Fuenzalida, Rodrigo, 129 Núñez, Raúl, 127–28 Umbanda, 179, 181, 189 United States, 117, 120, 123, 126, 132–33, 136–37, 149, 181 unseen, the, 91, 118, 153, 213, 227 Uvani (entity), 39

Vietnamese spiritual traditions, 70. See votive paper Offerings Villela, Rubens Junqueira, 189–90, 192–93 vitalism, 32–33 “biopsychic” vitalism, 250 Voss, Ehler, 227, 245 Wallas, Alfred Russel, 34, 195 Walker, David, 48 “Watchmaker” argument, 28 weather, manipulate the, 191 Western cosmology, 201, 206, 212, 217 Western physics, 200, 211, 215 and native American culture, 211 and indigenous science, 211–13 Yoruba, 96, 98

veneration, ancestor, 70–72, 85 Victorian era, 82; Victorian spiritualism, 69, 195 Vietnam, 67–74, 78–80, 83, 85 American Vietnam war, 68 “blessed” food (loc), 72, 76, 84 communication with heroes of the past, 71, 74, 82 Ho Chí Minh, spirit of, 80, 82 late Socialist Vietnam, 67–68, 71, 83 popular religious practices, 68, 70, 74, 78–79, 85 postrenovation era, 73–74 Ritual music (chau a van), 67, 78 urban Hanoi, 70, 74, 79 (see also Hanoi) war dead, 67, 74 war dead spirits, 80

Mattering the Invisible : Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral, edited by Diana Espírito Santo, and Jack Hunter,