Redefining Rationality: Paranormal Investigators' Humour in England

Abstract

In contemporary England, amateur paranormal investigators are actively engaged in attempts to produce objective knowledge about the ghostly and paranormal. Their project requires them to balance subjective, personal encounters with objective, technologically mediated ones. In doing so, they struggle to align their project with dominant understandings of rationality. Drawing on an ethnographic study of knowledge production among paranormal investigators, I explore paranormal investigators' use of humour and argue that they rely on humorous performances to align themselves with a powerful, hegemonic notion of rationality. Through their humour, they do not contest the scope of rationality; rather, they locate themselves as central to it.

‘Edgy’ politics and European anthropology in 2016

“…For example, Krishnan shows how middle‐class women in India privately joke about sexual violence to separate their personal lives from the pressures of public respectability (Krishnan ). Hanks looks at how paranormal investigators negotiate the edges of irrational and normative rationality through humour that allows investigators to pre‐emptively align themselves and their groups with hegemonic forms of rationality (Hanks ). And Winkler‐Reid () looks at how ‘bitching’ practices among girls in a London school allows us to rethink many of the philosophical assumptions we have about friendship, showing how emic ideas of persons in this context play with agonistic tropes of the authentic individual as much as do intimacies and solidarities.…”

Between Electricity and Spirit: Paranormal Investigation and the Creation of Doubt in England

“…In the 19th‐century Spiritualist Movement, one of the historical antecedents to contemporary paranormal investigating, mediums such as Margaret and Kate Fox famously oscillated between confidence that they were conduits to the spirit world and fear that they were frauds who fabricated their experiences with spirits (Owen ). The ethnographic (Evans‐Pritchard ; Jones ; Lévi‐Strauss ; McIntosh ; Morris ) and historical (Owen , ) records are replete with people who vigorously question and even doubt their own beliefs or encounters with spirits, magic, or witchcraft as well as with skeptics who seek to instill doubt by challenging the spiritual foundation of these beliefs (Hanks ; Jones ; Lachapelle ).…”

“…They often dismissed individuals who accepted the reality of ghosts or the paranormal as matters of faith, calling them “believers,” a term meant to suggest naïve, uncritical acceptance of the reality of ghosts. As Bruno Latour (), among others (Kapferer ; Styers ), has noted, belief is often seen as the antithesis of rationality, and paranormal investigators were deeply committed to researching the paranormal in a rational, scientific fashion (Hanks ). They desired empirical proof of the paranormal, which would firmly locate the paranormal into the domain of other natural processes.…”