Exploring how technological apparatuses “capture” invisible worlds, this book looks at how spirits, UFOs, discarnate entities, spectral energies, atmospheric forces and particles are mattered into existence by human minds. Technological and scientific discourse has always been central to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spiritualist quest for legitimacy, but as this book shows, machines, people, and invisible beings are much more ontologically entangled in their definitions and constitution than we would expect. The book shows this entanglement through a series of contemporary case studies where the realm of the invisible arises through technological engagement, and where the paranormal intertwines with modern technology.
Table of Content
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: On the Materiality of Unseen Things
Diana Espirito Santo and Jack Hunter
PART I: BODILY SEMANTICS, METAPHOR & MEDIATION
Chapter 1. Organicism and Mechanism in Psychical Research: Reflections on the Mattering of Spirit Mediumship
Jack Hunter
Chapter 2. Semantics of the Suffering: Torture Technologies and Mediumship in Buenos Aires
Miguel Algranti
Chapter 3. New Media Technologies and the Otherworld in Postsocialist Vietnam
Gertrud Hüwelmeier
Chapter 4. Broken Words: Tools of Oracular Articulacy in Afro-Cuban Divination
Anastasios Panagiotopoulos
PART II: ORDERS OF SOUND, SIGHT, & 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 in the United States
Ehler Voss
Chapter 7. Picturing the Unseen: The Role of Polaroid Media in the Remystification of the Western World
Andrea Lathrop Ligueros
PART III: MATTERING INVISIBLE POWERS
Chapter 8. Specters of Climate and the Construction of Ghostly Realities in Brazil
Renzo Taddei
Chapter 9. Iktomi’s Realm: Reanimating the Inanimate in Western Science
Anne Dippel
Chapter 10. Phantom Power: Prophecy, Triangulation and Materialization in Angola
Ruy Blanes
Conclusion: Mediation and Variable Communications
Diana Espírito Santo & Jack Hunter
Index
About the author
Jack Hunter is an Honorary Research Fellow with the Religious Experience Research Centre and a tutor with the Sophia Centre, both at University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He is the author of Spirits, Gods and Magic (2020, August Night Press) and Engaging the Anomalous (2018, August Night Press).
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