Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the enactments of epistemic authority of guides teaching spiritual leadership in contemporary Denmark, examining the frictions and contradictions performed by followers, and asking what kinds of enchantments these technological, affective and performative assemblages enact?

Paper long abstract:

In the last couple of decades, spirituality and leadership have become coupled explicitly by business and spiritual gurus (e.g. Sharmer 2010, Droiun 2018, see also Salamon 2007). In contemporary Denmark, the ideas of leadership enclosed in these couplings involve not only the leading of organisations and people, but also of the self and one's own life (Smith 2017). Here, people striving for spiritual leadership use spiritual technologies to explore themselves kinesthetically, sensorially, cognitively and emotionally and through these exploration, they enact relations with potential future selves.

The spiritual gurus and guides assisting these explorations play special parts in the enactments; they mobilise scientific and border scientific (Wolffram 2009) pieces of evidence to underpin efficacy and value of spirituality, they become overshadowed by spirits, move and talk mindfully, quote spiritual masters from indigenous traditions, affectively affect their followers by honing in on own and followers' pain, and they teach followers different spiritual techniques. This assemblage of technologies and performances underpins not simply followers' self-explorations, but also the authority of spiritual guides.

With this paper, I explore the enactments of epistemic authority and the motions of perceptions and experiences at the margins of this authority performed by followers. Motions which seemingly support the authority, yet which at close inspection emerge as full of frictions and contradictions. I ask, what kinds of enchantments are enacted through the assemblages of spiritual technologies, scientific evidence, the affective and kinesthetic performances of guides and followers, not least in the frictions and contradictions of it all?

Paper short abstract:

Based on an ethnography of 'digital detoxing' in the San Francisco Bay Area, this paper examines practices of enchantment at the intersection of technology and self.

Paper long abstract:

In the Bay Area, a community of digital detoxers gather for an annual, ritual removal of digital technology. Describing themselves as close witnesses to the unfolding story of Silicon Valley, they find that the digital world encourages transactional relationships, hierarchical and exploitative systems, and low self worth. In opposition to this, the community posit digital detoxing as a personal and spiritual critique of the digital economy, while engaging in a variety of New Age practices.

Magliocco (2015) writes that in New Age Religion, an equivalence is placed between God, mind, and psyche. The work of the soul is no longer geared towards the attainment of salvation, but towards personal enlightenment and self-realisation, where Magic becomes "a technology for human growth and potential."

As New Agers in a digital world, Digital detoxers position the spectre of digital technology as a psychospiritual threat to wellbeing. Forming an opposition between digital (disenchanted) and analog (magical) ways of being, they attempt to enchant their world through techniques that blur boundaries of the scientific, technical and religious.

This paper explores how the community enact this enchantment in a highly performative way, utilizing conceptual techniques of opposition and irony, with aesthetic techniques of appropriation and carnivalesque. It will chart how enchantment is experienced by digital detoxers as a Religious transformation towards spiritual and pyschological well-being, as well as protection from digital evils.

In turn, this paper raises questions about the value and practice of enchantment in modern society, at the intersection of technology and self.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to understand what kinds of enchantments are produced by the introduction of digital technology among the Bugkalot, and how this was regarded by the missionaries as a form of idolatry.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to understand what kinds of enchantments are produced by the introduction of digital technology among the Bugkalot. The Bugkalot demonstrate an intense desire for modern things such as televisions and cell phones even when electricity current and cellular signals are lacking in the area they live, and they are willing to sell their land to the settlers, to squander their hard-earned money or to embezzle barangay fund to obtain these things. The missionaries of the New Tribes Mission do not only condemn such desires and practices as economic irrationalities but also regard them as a form of "idolatry". The Protestant missionaries find the power modern things seem to exercise on the Bugkalot disturbing because it challenges their attempt at removing fetishes and idols and inserting iconoclasm among the Bugkalot through their proselytizing efforts. In their opinions, modern things motivate "backsliding" and lead to corruption of faith by enticing the Bugkalot to indulge in worldly pleasures and dangerous fantasies. Cell phones are particularly charged with abetting infidelity. This article seeks to understand how this technological innovation is experienced by the Bugkalot and how their agencies unsettle the Protestant configuration of the relationship between spirituality and materiality. It suggests that cell phones come to possess agency among the Bugkalot through the unique combination of three things: the convergence of multi-level media, the elicitation of a new self-reflexivity, and the capacity to free actors from spatial and temporal constraints. As such, they are the ultimate symbols and expressions of modernity.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation analyzes how ghost hunters use technical media such as audio recorders, cameras, modified radios, and measuring devices as well as sensory experiences to make something invisible visible, perceptible, and audible, and in doing so to get evidence for the existence of ghosts.

Paper long abstract:

Ghost hunting is becoming a very popular practice of ghost communication in the US and in many other parts of the world. With the help of a lot of technical media such as audio recorders, cameras, modified radios, and a variety of measuring devices, ghost hunters try to make something invisible visible, perceptible, and audible - usually ghosts that are supposed to be deceased human beings. The ghost hunter's practice is deeply based on the idea of objectivity and provability, and getting evidence for the existence of ghosts is a decisive aim of many participants. Captured voices usually count as objective evidence, and these recordings are collected, isolated, played to other ghost hunters or distributed on the internet. But even if on first glance technical media play a crucial role in getting evidence, sensory experiences, and their performance, are at least of the same importance. Based on anthropological fieldwork among ghost hunters, parapsychologist, spiritualists, and skeptics in California, I analyze the interferences between bodily practices and media practices of ghost hunters, and in so doing show how technical media, human mediums, and invisible beings cooperatively come into being. In addition I will Interpret current Ghost Hunting practices against the background of 19th century mediumism, and I will show how their practices are part of a great controversy about enchantment and disenchantment, science and religion, and the potentials of technical media and human mediums that started in the 19th century and that is still present today.

Paper short abstract:

The fundamental theme of this study are the uses, appropriations and various repercussions of the category of spirituality in the field of health. This paper os about the medical methodologies that enact spirituality in a material form.

Paper long abstract:

The fundamental theme of this study are the uses, appropriations and various repercussions of the category of spirituality in the field of health. Medical research on possible correlations between spirituality and health has increased significantly since the 1980s. Anyone willing to read the material will find conclusions such as: if you are more spiritual you will have a reduced chance of a heart attack; more spiritual people are less predisposed to developing Alzheimer's disease; the more spiritual you are, the greater your resilience to depressive states, et cetera. As one can presume, in order to establish such correlations, medical researchers employ instruments and methodologies capable of converting "spirituality" into scientific datum. That is to say, they must transform it into some kind of observable, recordable, and comparable indicator. It is in this sense that medical research, before simply describing correlations between spirituality and health, works to transform the abstract idea of spirituality into an object of concrete reality. This paper is an effort to reflect about the ways that medical researchers are trying to materialize spirituality as health matter.

Paper short abstract:

Through one patient's quest to redo her understanding of antibody-based pharmaceuticals, this paper examines how safety and efficacy of so-called "biologics" emerge in intra-action with late modern imageries of the anthropocene and local Norwegian articulations of health, nature and nation.

Paper long abstract:

The introduction of antibody-based anti-rheumatic agents in 1998 is widely accepted as having revolutionized rheumatology, a medical sub-specialty that for most of the 20th century was cast at the art of treating arthritis while its means to do so were limited. These inordinately expensive and acutely unstable pharmaceutical "objects" challenge notions of agency in medical treatment and human/non-human boundaries. Grown from human and rodent cells, they are injected into sick bodies to act on and along the innate immune cells of those bodies. Tangible materials with intangible efficacies, they are known to rheumatologists and their patients as "biologics", and surrounded with vivid imageries.

In this paper, I shall approach the so-called "biologics" as material-discursive entities, and examine how they are produced as safe and efficacious through articulations of the morpheme "bio" with pre-existing medical meanings, and with ideas of nature and health. I start from the analysis of one patient's creative efforts to re-conceptualize these medicines. Situating her process of understanding within a 150 year-old line of attempts to make sense of complex medical realities by manipulating the morpheme "bio", I then explore how articulations of that morpheme in relation to specific attitudes towards nature, health and Norwegian national identity may produce "biologics" that are cosmologically meaningful, animated and enchanted, and attuned to particular fantasies and fears of the anthropocene.

Paper short abstract:

While particles move, digital media and abstract mathematical tools generate an enchanted cosmology. Based on long-term ethnographic research, the paper investigates the mobilization of animistic imaginaries and enchanted technologies in everyday knowledge production of high-energy physics at CERN.

Paper long abstract:

Since the differentiation between modern science, witchcraft and magic (Tylor 1871, Frazer 1922), physics has been declared stronghold of rationalist science, serving as gatekeeper of modern dualisms (Latour 1993). Already through the detection of quantum mechanics, and its inherent "spooky action at a distance" (Einstein/Podolsky/Rosen 1935), as well as its proximity to ´"quantum mysticism" (Zyga 2009, Wigner 1961), physical knowledge has been chased by its revenants, belief and disbelief.

Exposing itself to trials of pareidolia (Guthrie 1993) by a wider public, it has repeatedly saved itself by obeying Popper's logic of falsification (1935). With the ongoing mathematical development of theoretical physics in the second half of the 20th century, and the in silico translation of experimental physics on the subatomic level, the discipline has become open to esoteric and animistic perceptions of enchanted nature.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic material collected at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), I am arguing that physicists re-negotiate the domains of agency and materiality, medium and substance, by testing the so called standard model with the help of media technologies. Physicists are studying the inanimate matter of an inadvertently animated cosmos through research practice (De Castro 2004, Ingold 2006).

Taking examples of everyday research and coding practices, I am showing how physicists turn their mundane tools (Lemmonier 2012) into technologies of enchantment (Gell 1992). As witnesses and creators of a world that is coming into being, they choose animist conceptions as heuristic instruments (Borck 2014).

Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores the atmospheric entanglements between Pentecostal prayer techniques and technologies in Ghana. It highlights Pentecostals' situated and relational engagement with "technology affordances" and points to some analytical limitations of the "religion as media" paradigm.

Paper long abstract:

The recent media turn in the anthropology of religion has reinvigorated research about religion and technology by identifying these domains ontologically through the notion of mediation (religion as media). In this article, I unpack mediation and propose an alternative set of concepts to tackle this issue, theoretical tools that allow me to recognize the atmospheric quality (Gibson, Hasse, Eisenlohr) of Christian charismatic faith and presence in Ghana. Charismatic atmospheres persistently dissolve the boundaries of discernible - organic and mechanical -mediators into the ecological medium while unleashing from it special affordances. I examine ethnographically what different technologies afford to three distinctive prayer methods and the atmospheres they engender: corporate revivals, meditation, and impartation. I conclude by arguing that religious atmospheres provide a specific solution to the question of immediacy or, as I prefer, transcendence, in material religion.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I will attempt to understand recent fieldwork in Chile with paranormal investigators in terms of assemblages of things. I will ask what kinds of cosmologies the technological performance of spirits and their histories engenders for participants.

Paper long abstract:

The assumption that matter, or indeed technologies, are inert, passive, or mechanistic is no longer viable as a starting point of analysis, at least according to recent anthropology. Bennett´s Vibrant Matter (2010) places vibrancy as a consequence or product of assemblages or conglomerates of things (and people). Bennett´s focus, as also Mol´s (2002) and Law´s (1997), is on how things come together for a designated amount of time to create certain ontological conditions for existence - we could say, to create cosmologies. The human element in this equation is, while important, merely circumstantial. In this paper I will attempt to understand recent fieldwork in Chile with paranormal investigators and other actors in para-patrimonial tourism along these lines. Technologies - such as thermographic cameras, electromagnetic field readers, radiation detection devices, ghost boxes (which capture electronic voice phenomena) - are not simply devices that "register" a certain reality underneath the surface. In the exploration of haunted houses and other sites, my interlocutors expect that the paranormal itself surfaces in conjunction with these materials. I will ask what kinds of cosmologies the technological performance of spirits and their histories engenders for participants, and apply an analytical frame that sees the vibrancy (or enchantment) of a particular ghostly moment as a result of the articulations of an assemblage of heterogeneous actants - technical and material, visible and invisible, and human and not.