Search

In this paper, I analyze a Chilean mining geoanalyst's narrative about large unrecognized geoglyphs he has charted in the Atacama Desert. The turns of this narrative take us through the Ancient Aliens hypothesis, but also an alterative pre-Inca migration route between the Atlantic and the Pacific thousands of years old, and in contravention to normative Andean archaeology. I argue that we need to look at alternative forms of history making that are not based on ontologically realist premises. Using Kleinberǵs notion of 'past possibles', based on Derrida's theory of historical deconstruction, I defend that in the mining expert´s narrative coexist a multiplicity of possible pasts, in oscillation between latent and manifest. I also look at the Desert itself, and its extractive industries, as well as a notion of 'extreme' in relation to temporal thinking, arguing that it is not enough to see the narrative on aliens as a result of neoliberal capitalist exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore two approaches to what lies 'unearthed' in Chile's recent violent histories. In the first instance, I explore the effort towards the obfuscation or intertitialization of knowledge by the Chilean state, regarding the Pinochet dictatorship years. The argument in the first half of the paper underlines the need to understand recent Chilean history in relation to explicit efforts at 'disappearing' history – at the purposeful obfuscation of deathly experiences and the limbo these generate. In the second half, I explore the idea that in the 'negative' space afforded by the circumstantial and historical possibilities of locales of political interest, where traumatic history is only partially understood, or not recognized, paranormal investigators expand, rather than contract, possibilities within this negative. I use negative theology, a medieval counter-orthodox current of writing about the unspeakable, to explore how, in contrast to the Chilean state from 1973 to 1990, which receded into the darkness of negation, paranormal investigators take impetus from this darkness and transform it into a version of history proper, ontologizing the negative as they proceed. Their endeavours thus become quasi-cosmogonic, in theological terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Deceit is conceived by ufology theorists as intrinsic to the behavior of UFO phenomena, often experienced as slippery and theatrical. In abduction experiences, there is what has been described as a simulacrum of medicine and science, whose content can be absurd and whose purposes are largely obscure. If we begin from the humanist perspective, we could say that these experiences produce antipodal stances—contradictory statements and affective postures that show intense paradox within a schema of play. I argue that this play has two fundamental and oscillating (or simultaneous) aspects. It is both bottom‐up, in the sense that it is a confined or segregated aspect of society, and top‐down, in the sense that it is experienced as a cosmos of aliens with unknown designs that manifest paradoxically. I argue that the terms of our analysis in the social sciences must reflect the fact that, in this simultaneity of opposites, these extraordinary and sometimes traumatic experiences are neither subjective nor objective but lie in a sort of "hermeneutical" middle ground that recognizes the deeply ironic and recursive nature of UFO phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade in Chile, an increasing amount of paranormal investigation companies have carried out ghost tours in patrimonial and historical places, using diverse technologies to penetrate into the history of sites. We ethnographically and analytically explore two related questions. First, we ask what paranormal instrumentation does to collective memory and to history. We argue that these 'registers' of the paranormal create 'affective atmospheres', namely from the forms of indeterminacy embedded in the functioning and performance of the apparatuses. Our argument is that these machines are mechanisms for the creation of a new history, one that is apprehended affectively. Second, in the context of an explosion of adherence in Chile to forms of new media, we employ the notion of 'dark media' to illustrate that online material posted by paranormal researchers appears to escape any form of mediational understanding, feeding at once the public's perceptive and affective dispositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on a year of fieldwork with ufologists, contactees, abductees, and skeptics in Chile, using methods including ethnography, media and website analysis, and in-depth interviews. Our argument is that the "UFO" serves as, what Galison would call, a theory machine, a multiplicity generating not simply heterogeneous interpretive frameworks through which to understand anomalous flying phenomena, in different ideological spheres, but thresholds of evidence as well. We take evidence here, not as given but as an ethnographic category. In particular, the UFO as a theory machine in the Chilean context, and the different stakes of evidence found within it, yields a theory of possibility and impossibility, which we have called evidence-as-possibility. This is not confined to matters of the existence of UFOs, but also spatial differences in which one conceives of such manifestations. We pit materialist understandings of evidence against ones that regard alien contact as something interior and embodied. But we also forego this division and explore how different, apparently contradictory facets of the evidence-as-possibility theory actually work together, such that each condition or event creates its own spatial configurations for UFOs. Finally, we explore "absurd" moments in which this theory machine collapses or goes into overdrive, escaping this spectrum of possibility altogether. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objects are fundamental components of cosmology in Afro-Cuban religions; they serve to represent, pay homage to, and feed a constellation of covetous spirits. In a moral universe of practitioners materiality allures and potentially corrupts; it grounds personal and collective ritual agency; mediates thoughts-feelings; materializes the immaterial; and invariably transcends all these dichotomies and becomes gods, parts of people, concepts. In this article I wish to understand "things" as continuous with the unfolding of selfhood, but more contentiously, with and as affects. Drawing on my long-time research with practitioners of Cuban Creole espiritismo in Havana, for whom "representation" objects are essential to the development of spirits, muertos, and thus extended selves, I argue that the dolls and figurines that mediums regularly fabricate and care for are less "representational" than they are affective forms themselves. Dolls are not symbols for feelings-for-spirits made material or registers of affective perception towards one's muertos; in a very real sense they are affects that may grow roots and bloom. In the ethnography I will describe these relations as a system of affectively invested selfhood, one that encompasses the very muertos in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores perceived changes in patterns of consciousness in relation to possession phenomena among a sector of urban practitioners of the Brazilian religion of Umbanda, and argues that these perceptions have been accompanied by the emergence of a more individualist approach to religious selfhood which aims to lay claim to a particular vision of Umbanda. These Umbandists understand their spirit universe in ontologically plastic terms, relativizing spirit identities much like Umbanda’s founders. The increasing emphasis given to conscious forms of possession tallies with a relatively new attention to the self and its awareness of tradition, thought to be lacking in previous generations. This article also defends that we can produce an anthropological understanding of possession as having cosmogonic rather than just expressive effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that in Cuban Creole espiritismo practices, ritually generated 'knowledge' has ontological, rather than just epistemological, effects, independent of the role of cognition. I will show that knowledge is experienced as a fluid, moving 'substance' external to the body that can accumulate, weigh down, hang suspended, and dissipate; it is also responsive to mediums' descriptive speech, becoming an object of vision-knowledge at the same time that it is seen and spoken of collectively. I will also show that the circulation of knowledge 'substances' should be seen not as metaphorical but as tied to processes of making people, and ask whether knowledge can figure not just as something intersubjective or relational but as something substantive, even physiological. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]