Talking with the dead: Spirit mediumship, affect and embodiment in Stoke‐on‐Trent

Abstract

While Spiritualism has attracted much attention in other disciplines, geographers have largely ignored it. However, we agree with Holloway (2006 Enchanted spaces: the s eance, affect, and geographies of religion Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96, pp. 182-7) that Spiritualism presents conceptual challenges that make it worthy of more attention. As Holloway suggests, the themes of affect, embodiment and materiality are particularly helpful in exploring religious experiences. The focus of this paper is on the practice and experience of spirit mediumship in a Spiritualist setting. In mediumship, a specific challenge is to materialise and embody spirit such that spirit communication feels personal and rings true. For us, this suggests that mediumship is routinely successful both because it can produce accurate messages, which are judged empirically, and also because it produces what we call affectual truths, which are judged tacitly on whether they feel right or not. To account for this, we introduce the idea of intermediumship to describe interactions in the space in-between the medium and the congregation. It is through this space in-between that the affects associated with mediumship emerge, are experienced and are verified. Rather than seeing spirit communication as somehow enchanted or extraordinary, we assert that talking with the dead is predicated on the ordinariness of the experience: that is, that talking with the dead is emblematic of affect and embodiment in everyday life.

Uttering geographies: Speech acts, felicity conditions and modes of existence

“…That there are different modes of veridiction at work is evident, for example, in the ways that the dead, or those who came before, talk and are talked to. This may happen in quite different ways in the mountains of Jamaica, in urban Cuba (Bilby, 1983; Wirtz, 2007), or in Stoke-on-Trent, but in each case these utterances bring these beings into the world, transform spaces and can have powerful effects on those who engage them and judge what they hear and feel according, perhaps, to what Bartolini et al (2018: 172) call ‘affectual truth’. Attending to such utterances, and understanding them in terms of speech acts, felicity conditions and modes of existence, can open the geographies of speech to multiple ways of making worlds – to many ‘uttering geographies’ – while remaining attentive to ontological distinctions between regimes of enunciation which recognize their different illocutionary effects and the differential effectiveness with which utterances are performed.…”

Qualitative methods I: On current conventions in interview research

“…For example, in some cases, respondents used the buildings around them to organise the accounts they developed for the interviewer. Others have explored how objects, such as photographs, can enliven interviews (Bartolini et al, 2018). These approaches fit with human geography’s current enthusiasm for materiality.…”

Sonic spaces, spiritual bodies: The affective experience of the roots reggae soundsystem

“…Whereas research was once dominated by the study of organised religions and the institutionalised praxis of religiosity, it has since given way to the exploration of more individualised interpretations and experiences of belief. This embrace of the “disruptive and unpredictable salience of the spiritual” (Dwyer, , p. 758; see also Kong, ; Bartolini et al., , ) is enshrined in Dewsbury and Cloke's () notion of a “spiritual landscape” and has yielded exploration of the everyday ways in which the spiritual becomes manifest – ways that often go beyond or reside outside of the formal prescriptions of religious spaces (Mills, ; Williams, ; Wigley, ; see also Holloway & Valins, ). Complementing this is an avenue of research that has adopted post‐phenomenological approaches to exploring the sensuous experience of the sacred by locating spirituality within the body (e.g., Holloway, , ; Maddrell, ; see also Kong, ).…”