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Paper short abstract

How can anthropology more resonantly engage worlds shaped by preternatural experience? Through autoethnographic reflection on spirit mediumship, this paper adapts reverie—an attentional practice with mediumistic roots—as a tool for attuning to realities that lie beyond stabilized ontologies.

Paper long abstract

How might anthropology engage more resonantly with worlds in which extraordinary, extrasensory, and otherworldly experiences are organizing forces of social life—especially when such moments destabilize distinctions between subject and object, presence and absence, the visible and the unseen? By autoethnographically reflecting on my practice of spirit mediumship, this paper adapts reverie—a disciplined practice of attentiveness with deep mediumistic roots—into an ethnographic tool of attunement for engaging realities that exceed ordinary analytic frames. Mediumship, as a mode of relation, does not depart from the real; it reconfigures how reality is sensed, inhabited, and borne. Because such experiences reorganize reality rather than negate it, they expose a methodological tension within anthropology: while ethnography has long registered reverie-like states in the field, it has tended to discipline these capacities away from method. By interweaving mediumistic practice with ethnography, my work reclaims reverie as a methodological resource for anthropologists working with spectral states, presences, and affects—one that, through practice, may open shared experiential registers rather than reinforce our analytic distance from interlocutors who claim access to preternatural phenomena. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard and Alexander Nemerov, I advance ethnographic reverie as an attentional practice oriented toward impressions, atmospheres, and immaterial or historical forces acting without full declaration. Reverie does not seek explanation or proof; it remains with emergence, accompanying experiences as they arrive, linger, recur, or refuse resolution. In doing so, reverie enables ethnography to inhabit zones of ontological overlap, aligning method with worlds whose boundaries are never fully settled.