Spirited Histories: Technologies, Media, and Trauma in Paranormal Chile

Spirited Histories explores the intersection of haunting, the paranormal, technology, media, and history, offering a sophisticated exploration of alternate histories produced by paranormal investigators and ghost tour operators in Chile. It examines the ways groups marshal the voices of the dead to generate particular micro-histories and offers a social analysis of how these technologies and apparatuses are imbued with a long history of supernatural and scientific expectations.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 27 May 2024
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Spirited Histories is a captivating exploration of the intersection of haunting, the paranormal, technology, media, and history, drawing on ethnography and critical theory. It delves into the ways in which the past is retrieved in places of trauma and death, focusing on the hauntings, ghosts, and absences that accompany collective loss and disappearance. People memorialize the dead and their stories in various ways, but what about the untold stories, or the forgotten, unnamed? This book delves into the ways groups of Chilean paranormal investigators and ghost tour operators produce alternate histories using paranormal machinery, rather than simply theatricalizing pain. It offers a fascinating look at technologies, machines, and apparatuses, imbued with a long history of supernatural and scientific expectations, and a social analysis of how certain groups of people marshal the voices of the dead to generate particular micro-histories. This book will appeal to a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, history, religious studies, and scholars of technology and new media.

Weight: 453g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367691837