Spirited Histories - Technologies, Media, and Trauma in Paranormal Chile

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.

List of contents

Introduction; 1 Machines; 2 Noise; 3 Affect; 4 Aliens; 5 Play; Afterword

About the author

Diana Espírito Santo is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She is co-editor of many volumes, including The Social Life of Spirits (2013) and author of Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo (2015).

Summary

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.

Product details

• Authors: Diana Espirito Santo, Diana Espírito Santo
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.07.2022
• EAN: 9780367691813
• ISBN: 978-0-367-69181-3
• No. of pages: 240
• Series: The Anthropology of History
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Society; Social sciences, law, business > Social sciences (general); Ethnic Studies, Media Studies, Sociology, Spiritualism, Social & cultural history, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / General, Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography, Religion: general, Regional Studies, Social and cultural history, Psychological theory, systems, schools and viewpoints, Social and cultural anthropology, Regional / International studies, Psychological theory & schools of thought, Hispanic & Latino Studies, Parapsychological studies, Eclectic & Esoteric Religions & Belief Systems, Eclectic and esoteric religions and belief systems