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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.