Diana Espirito Santo – författare

Despite its powerful influence on Cuban culture, Espiritismo has often been overlooked by scholars. Developing the Dead is the first in-depth exploration of contemporary Espiritismo in Cuba. Based on extensive fieldwork among religious practitioners and their clients in Havana, this book makes the surprising claim that Spiritist practices are fundamentally a project of developing the self.

When mediums cultivate relationships between the living and the dead, argues Diana Espírito Santo, they develop, learn, sense, dream, and connect to multiple spirits (muertos), expanding the borders of the self. This understanding of selfhood is radically different from Enlightenment ideas of an autonomous, bounded self and holds fascinating implications for prophecy, healing, and self-consciousness. Developing the Dead shows how Espiritismo’s self-making process permeates all aspects of life, not only for its own practitioners but also for those of other Afro-Cuban religions.

Spirited Histories combines ethnography with critical theory to provide a sophisticated exploration of the intersection of haunting and the paranormal with technology, media, and history. Retrieving the past in places of trauma and death can take on many facets. One of these is an attention to hauntings, ghosts, and absences that go with the collective experience of loss and disappearance. People memorialize the dead and their stories in myriad ways. But what about the untold stories, or the forgotten, unnamed? This book explores the ways groups of Chilean paranormal investigators and ghost tour operators produce alternate histories using paranormal machinery, rather than simply theatricalizing pain. It offers a look at technologies, machines, and apparatuses – themselves imbued with a long history of supernatural and scientific expectations – and a social analysis of how certain groups of people marshal the voices of the dead to generate particular micro-histories. This fascinating volume will be of interest to a range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, history, religious studies, and scholars of technology and new media.

Spirited Histories combines ethnography with critical theory to provide a sophisticated exploration of the intersection of haunting and the paranormal with technology, media, and history. Retrieving the past in places of trauma and death can take on many facets. One of these is an attention to hauntings, ghosts, and absences that go with the collective experience of loss and disappearance. People memorialize the dead and their stories in myriad ways. But what about the untold stories, or the forgotten, unnamed? This book explores the ways groups of Chilean paranormal investigators and ghost tour operators produce alternate histories using paranormal machinery, rather than simply theatricalizing pain. It offers a look at technologies, machines, and apparatuses – themselves imbued with a long history of supernatural and scientific expectations – and a social analysis of how certain groups of people marshal the voices of the dead to generate particular micro-histories. This fascinating volume will be of interest to a range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, history, religious studies, and scholars of technology and new media.

This book offers an ethnographic and conceptual analysis of contemporary UFO phenomena, focusing specifically on Chilean ufology and the ufological “absurd”, nonsensical instances for their experiencers in which there is no conceptual way out. It asks how anthropology can come to terms with what is not said, what is not known, what is in the dark, or even with what both “is” and “is not”. The work draws on three years of participant observation with empirical ufologists, amateur sky watchers, and contactees of varying kinds in Chile. The chapters mobilize three main bodies of literature to elucidate the ufological absurd: negative theology, anthropology of play and deceit, and the physics of dark matter. They explore notions of parallax, paradox, and trickster anthropology. The author takes UFO phenomena, specifically the absurd aspects, as a heuristic with which to posit a conversation between domains; a conversation which highlights darknesses, finiteness, and the limits of representation and media in anthropology, one that could perhaps signal the route to a new language. Consideration is given to how not-knowing can be a space of extreme productiveness for the discipline. The argument put forward is that only by doing an anthropology that looks outside of itself for conceptual inspiration can we come to terms with the non-representable, the un-conceptualizable, the fully paradoxical. This innovative book will be of particular interest to scholars of anthropological theory and religion.

This book offers an ethnographic and conceptual analysis of contemporary UFO phenomena, focusing specifically on Chilean ufology and the ufological “absurd”, nonsensical instances for their experiencers in which there is no conceptual way out. It asks how anthropology can come to terms with what is not said, what is not known, what is in the dark, or even with what both “is” and “is not”. The work draws on three years of participant observation with empirical ufologists, amateur sky watchers, and contactees of varying kinds in Chile. The chapters mobilize three main bodies of literature to elucidate the ufological absurd: negative theology, anthropology of play and deceit, and the physics of dark matter. They explore notions of parallax, paradox, and trickster anthropology. The author takes UFO phenomena, specifically the absurd aspects, as a heuristic with which to posit a conversation between domains; a conversation which highlights darknesses, finiteness, and the limits of representation and media in anthropology, one that could perhaps signal the route to a new language. Consideration is given to how not-knowing can be a space of extreme productiveness for the discipline. The argument put forward is that only by doing an anthropology that looks outside of itself for conceptual inspiration can we come to terms with the non-representable, the un-conceptualizable, the fully paradoxical. This innovative book will be of particular interest to scholars of anthropological theory and religion.

When approaching the multiplicity of the spiritual experiences of healing, ethnographers are often presented with ideas of the existence of “other” worlds that may intersect with the so-called “material” or “physical” worlds. This book proposes a sensory ethnography of healing with a focus on ethnographic knowing as embedded in an embodied epistemology of healing. Epistemological embodiment signals that personal scholarly experience of the “unknown”—be it in the form of trance, or as the embodiment of an “other”—shapes the concepts of healing, body, trance, self, and matter by which ethnographers craft out analysis.