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

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2021
• MitwirkendeR: Algranti, Miguel M.,; Dippel, Anne,; Espírito Santo, Diana,; Hunter, Jack,; Hüwelmeier, Gertrud,; Lathrop Ligueros, Andrea,; Liera Blanes, Ruy,; Panagiotopoulos, Anastasios,; Taddei, Renzo,; Voss, Ehler,
• HerausgeberIn: Hunter, Jack,; Santo, Diana Espírito,
• Place / Publishing House: New York ;, Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (272 p.)

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 Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction On the Materiality of Unseen Things -- Part I Bodily Semantics, Metaphor, and Mediation -- Chapter 1 Organicism and Psychical Research Where Mediums and Mushrooms Meet -- Chapter 2. Semantics of the Suffering: Torture Technologies and Mediumship in Buenos Aires -- Chapter 3 Media Technologies and the Otherworld in Late Socialist Vietnam -- Chapter 4. Broken Words: Tools of Oracular Articulacy in Afro-Cuban Divination -- Part II Orders of Sound, Sight, and Measurement -- Chapter 5. Radioaficionados and UFOs: The Social Life of Radios in Chile -- Chapter 6. Hospitality and Proof: Human Mediums, Technical Media, and Controversial Knowledge in Ghost-Hunting Practices in the United States -- Chapter 7. Picturing the Unseen: Polaroid Practice and the Re-enchantment of the Western World -- Part III Mattering Invisible Powers -- Chapter 8. Specters of Climate and the Construction of Ghostly Realities in Brazil -- Chapter 9. Ontological Opportunism: Reanimating the Inanimate in Physics and Science Communication at CERN -- Chapter 10. Phantom Power, Parallax, and the Multiple Cities of Luanda: Manifestation and Materialization in Angola -- Conclusion. Mediation and Variable Communications -- Index