Interview by Diego Maria Malara
Diego Maria Malara (DMM): You are known as the author of many publications on Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban religion. Focusing on widely researched and recognizable religious traditions, your work has explored classic anthropological concerns with spirits, persons, bodies and materiality — from often decidedly innovative angles. Do you see your new book as a departure from previous research or as its natural continuation? And what did you want to achieve by focusing on this new topic?
Diana Espirito Santo (DES): My suspicion is that for anyone who changes fields there are always continuities, whether they´re explicit or not. In my case the continuities run not simply in ethnographic or heuristic ways – through a focus on materiality, technologies, and spirits and the effects of their existence in a given world – but more importantly conceptually and theoretically. In my work on Afro-American religion I worked on calibrating notions of the person as extended into things, in Cuba, for example. I worked heuristically through several models that spoke to local truths as told to me by my interlocutors. In Brazil I worked theoretically through the idea that there is no unitary notion of the cosmos of spirit entities, but it is experienced in differential gradations of proximity and distance, with implications with how see the “identity” part of the spirit. I focus on ontological plasticity, which is a concept that traverses ethnography and into theory. In this book I ask how history, even temporality, can be thought of plastically, in ways that are non-sequential or unfinished, even a-causal. This may seem radically different, but it´s not. I ask how spirits-cum-micro-histories emerge collaboratively through the work of paranormalists: how we can think that assemblages of people and machines and affects and data can generate “bits” of history – voices, presences – and in so doing, allow for history to emerge as plural, fluid, emergent, rather than based on models of ontological realism, as something “done”. In this sense, my projects have always contained the preoccupation of attending to the multiplicity of voices, as well as forms of knowing that are often discarded, or disqualified, as per Stephan Palmié, by our regimes of knowledge.
DMM: In many ways, with its focus on ghosts and its granular reading of how the specters of painful histories are differently appropriated, refashioned, and contested by the state and other social actors, your book reminded me of Kwon’s ‘Ghost of War in Vietnam’. Your treatment of the unattended wounds of Chilean history, though, seems to head in slightly different directions. It centers trauma analytically, and pays attention to the various registers — more or less public and ‘speakable’ — through which trauma manifests and conceals itself as micro and macro-histories unfold. It’s also clear that you find Freud and Derrida (inter alia) somewhat ill-equipped for making sense of the ethnographic problems you examine. Can you tell us something more about your theoretical choices, their rationales, and how your perspective complements classic theories?
DES: I think my theoretical perspective speaks much more to the anthropology of history and its current academic interlocutors than it does to the hauntology literature. In my opinion, the sociology and anthropology of haunting have not shown the ability to “flatten” the ontological field and to understand how ghosts are produced or worked into being (this independently of whether they exist or not). The assumption is that one must explain why people feel the need to believe in and reproduce their representations in some form. This is extremely essentialist. They are always reflections of something else, something more “real”. Sometimes these explanations are truly sophisticated, traversing domains of psychoanalysis and history, for instance, and producing complex depictions of specters through time, that take on life in the present. But at the core of these is still the tendency to structure them within an epistemological frame. This is, how people “see”, “feel”, “understand” what does not exist. My understanding is that we do not need to be concerned with the existence or non-existence of the paranormal. We do need to trace its effects, and in so doing, pragmatically “bring” this paranormality into being conceptually. This is our job as anthropologists. I have found pivotal inspiration in Don Handelman, for whom social forms are temporal forms. His work has opened multiple conceptual possibilities for understanding not simply how social and ritual events may have a variable relationship with their social environment (not necessarily causal or direct) – and thus exhibit more or less “depth” – but also how these social forms are also temporal ones, ones with different dynamics, and in my ethnography, how we can gloss historical possibles. In this sense I have also relied on certain historians – Kleinberg, Hartog, Koselleck, who speak of multiple temporalities, sediments of time, past possibles. These are controversial for the discipline of history itself. My opinion is that anthropology we need to look outside of the borders of our discipline in order to avoid self-reference and ultimately stasis; we need to look for conceptual inspiration from different languages. Handelman´s models are based on dynamics, a disciplinarily transversal concept that I think should be a fundamental heuristic in anthropology.
DMM: One of the virtues of the book is that it seeks to go beyond dominant understandings of mediation in the anthropology of religion, which are relentlessly preoccupied with immanence and transcendence as well as with the visibility and invisibility of the medium. (To me, at times, these preoccupations seem to echo distinctively protestant concerns). Can you give us a more concrete sense of how mediation operates in the contexts you examined, and how it prompted you to push past established frameworks?
DES: Concepts of mediation, like some others in anthropology, can become really stagnant, and as such inapplicable to specific ethnographies. My view is that we have to rethink it every time we apply it. We cannot presume a single mediational model and then apply it. Mediation theories tend toassume that people are people, and things are things, that people want to establish a connection through things to elsewhere (to a transcendent being, or even to layers of history), or from person to person, and that this connection is laden with messages or semiotic intentions that traverse from point A to point B, to grossly simplify. But this is problematic not simply in the history of spiritualist technologies, which is arguably what current paranormal technologies are based on, where communication was not always about meaning, or transformation, or knowledge, but also in my own ethnography, where the notion of representation, and thus mediation, is irrelevant because the mediational process is highly indeterminate. Paranormal investigators, I argue in the book, are agents of time; they “charge” their environments with the raw materials (say, electromagnetic energy) – interfering with them – in order to obtain differences, and in those differences, results – voices, images, changes in barometric pressures, and so on. A much closer look at the apparatuses in question and their functioning as part of a constellation of actants – and not simply media, or vehicles of mediation – is needed. We can make a couple of observations. First, not all can be categorized as mediation. And second, my opinion here is that mediation theory assumes an unproblematic communicational prerogative, or intent, or imperative, ipso facto, and this is not applicable to paranormal machines, analyzed in my book. Modernism assumes that because machines, or bodies for that matter, breach gaps, and that, as John Peters says, meaning is separate from media, and content from form (1999), that communication can be fraught with difficulties, static, interference. But, as Eugene Thacker argues, what happens in cases where communication becomes an impossibility, and mediation becomes “dark”? Where there is nothing to mediate, or when what is mediated does not communicate? In the book I explore Thacker´s notion of “dark media” (2014) – the media that paradoxically negate mediation itself because there is an absence of communicability or representation. In my ethnography mediation is variably opaque and transparent, but more importantly, it is cosmogonic (creative of worlds) rather than representational. This notion of making, or creating, or sustaining realities has tended to be central in all my work.
DMM: To raise a question that you yourself evoke in the book, albeit in a slightly different fashion, what is it about technology that makes it such an apt vehicle for spectral manifestations?
DES: Technologies have a long history with spectral manifestations, as you might know. In early forms of spiritualism in the mid-nineteenth century, mediums were referred to in technological terms – transistors, even – and machines were designed or even devised to mediate to the other “side”, for instance, the spiritual telegraph. Scholars like Sconce and Stolow show us that there was a sort of logical application of what was known in science in terms of electromagnetic energy and electricity, as well as new forms of reproduction such as photography and phonography, to the field of spirit mediumship, and later, to parapsychology´s notions of telepathy, for instance. The idea was that there a mediating principle – an ether, or universal fluid – that could be marshaled to “connect” disparate worlds. In my ethnography (and book) this does not work in exactly these terms. Instead, what I do is take new materialisms theory, assemblage theory, and other models that propose a look at collections or collectivities of actants who produce more than the sum of their parts. So technologies in this book are parts of assemblages of “things” – which include people, but also affects, archival data, personal biographies, actions – that generate what Handelman would call social forms, which are also temporal. I argue that the “deeper” these social forms are, the more self-organized and emergent their dynamics, and more indeterminate the result. So, if we go back to the notions of history I talked about earlier, we can heuristically see that there is not one history but a multitude of possible historical spaces, or levels, or layers, that can come to the surface, or alternately, be generated in situ. This is of a different order to normative treatments of technologies, I think, especially in relation to invisible or spectral processes. In these treatments, technologies can reify beliefs, but they don´t do anything that exceeds their functions. Perhaps we could think about this new mode as a techno-human ecology (Coeckelberg 2013) whereby the various actants of this ecology are vitalized, augmented, transformed by a specific goal, by their co-functioning. This does not reduce either to human end, on the one hand, or the technological end, on the other.
DMM: Your chapter on aliens is really captivating. I was particularly intrigued by the claim that your argument is less about theories of ancient extra-terrestrial life and activity “than about the nature of the theorizing itself, and its will for an expansion of space-time consideration, a loosening of the grip of historical science” (p. 114). Could you elaborate on how this chapter fits with, and extends, your overarching argument on historicity, temporality and technology?
DES: I think the Aliens chapter brings together my thesis in a nice way, because it is, at the same time, such an extreme version of what I ultimately argue in the book. We have someone in the desert in the north of Chile seeing geoglyphs on the ground that do not fit with the historiography of Andean peoples, and developing different lines of historical hypotheses which involve extraterrestrial interventions (the “route of Orion”); we also have a contactee whose alien contacts are us in the future, from a galaxy that we will colonize in the future but that they consider their past. This contactee emphasizes parallel universes, or historical “tracks”, through which one event happened multiple times. This is a complete overhaul of historical models of sequential time, needless to say. But the difficulty is how to conceptualize this anthropologically without falling into certain sociologizing traps; by keeping the kind of conceptual and theoretical openness that I advocate. For this, as in other chapters, I relied on sources both from anthropology and from without.
CaMP Anthropology 