Trance Mediums and New Media: Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction

By Heike Behrend, Anja Dreschke and Martin Zillinger

Ongoing debates about the “return of religion” have paid little attention to the orgiastic and enthusiastic qualities of religiosity, despite a significant increase in the use of techniques of trance and possession around the globe. Likewise, research on religion and media has neglected the fact that historically the rise of mediumship and spirit possession was closely linked to the development of new media of communication.

This innovative volume brings together a wide range of ethnographic studies on local spiritual and media practices. Recognizing that processes of globalization are shaped by mass mediation, the volume raises questions such as: How are media like photography, cinema, video, the telephone, or television integrated in seances and healing rituals? How do spirit mediums connect with these media? Why are certain technical media shunned in these contexts?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780823253821

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Trance mediums and new media : spirit possession in the age of technical reproduction / edited by Heike Behrend, Anja Dreschke, and Martin Zillinger.—First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-5380-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8232-5381-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Channeling (Spiritualism)—Congresses. 2. Mass media

and anthropology—Congresses.

3. Technology—Congresses.

4. Globalization—Congresses. I. Behrend, Heike, editor

of compilation.

BF1286.T73 2014

133.9′1—dc23

2013044139

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Trance Mediums and New Media

HEIKE BEHREND AND MARTIN ZILLINGER

On the Subject of Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media

ROSALIND C. MORRIS

Trance Mediums and New Media: The Heritage of a European Term

ERHARD SCHÜTTPELZ

Absence and the Mediation of the Audiovisual Unconscious

MARTIN ZILLINGER

New Media and Traveling Spirits: Pentecostals in the Vietnamese Diaspora and the Disaster of the Titanic

GERTRUD HÜWELMEIER

Numinous Dress/Iconic Costume: Korean Shamans Dressed for the Gods and for the Camera

LAUREL KENDALL

Rites of Reception: Mass-Mediated Trance and Public Order in Morocco

EMILIO SPADOLA

Media and Manifestation: The Aesthetics and Politics of Plenitude in Central India

CHRISTOPHER PINNEY

Media Transformations: Music, Goddess Embodiment, and Politics in Western Orissa/India

LIDIA GUZY

Transmitting Divine Grace: On the Materiality of Charismatic Mediation in Mali

DOROTHEA E. SCHULZ

Spaces of Refusal: Photophobic Spirits and the Technical Medium of Photography

HEIKE BEHREND

Look with Your Own Eyes!: Visualizations of Spirit Mediums and Their Viewing Techniques in Tanzanian Video Films

CLAUDIA BÖHME

Possession Play: On Cinema, Reenactment, and Trance in the Cologne Tribes

ANJA DRESCHKE

Trance Techniques, Cinema, and Cybernetics

UTE HOLL

Notes

Works Cited

List of Contributors

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1a–c  Ritual media: introduction with fertile landscapes and supplications (film stills)

2        Ritual media: sacrificial basket with photo (video still)

3        Camera fāt a

4        The ritual space of exchange of the camera fāt a

5        A helāl sings his laments for a client using a mobile phone

6        Medial public realms of the ritual space of exchange

7        The Mountain God arrives, May 30, 2009

8        Hyewon’s painting

9        Natives in their Superstitious Service

10      1985 Korean stamp portraying a shaman in familiar costume and pose

11      Shaman website. Streaming of moving images will appear in the black rectangle

12      Laurel Kendall receives a bundle of costume at a kut she sponsored in 2009

13      Shooting a mganga scene for the film Popobawa (2009)

14      Signboard of Dr. Manyaunyau: I am fetching bad things for you out of houses and streets, whip of witches. He treats: potency, hookworms, heart, diabetes, scrotal hernia, bad omen

15      TV asilia in Shumileta I

16      TV asilia in Shumileta II

17      German cinema guide to the film Sign of the Pagan, 1955

18      Group portrait of the First Hun Horde of Cologne, ca. 1970

19      Summer camp

20      Shaman performing a ritual during a summer camp

21      Painting of a drum and an ovoo, a Mongolian shamanistic cairn

22      Shaman cleansing my photo camera with incense before a trance ritual

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume grew out of two conferences exploring the manifold relationships between trance mediums and new technical media. The first took place in July 2008 in Siegen, Germany, and focused on the relationship in debates about modernity and modernization around 1900 between trance mediums and what was then the new analogue media. (See Hahn and Schüttpelz 2009.) The second conference, which took place one year later, in June 2009, in Cologne, extended the topic to the present and discussed new ethnographic studies that have emerged in the field of media anthropology. This volume presents the contributions of the second conference.

We would like to express our gratitude to the contributors for sharing their ideas, as well as to Maria José Alves de Abreu, Johannes Harnischfeger, and Tobias Wendl, who presented inspiring papers at the conference. We are grateful to Cora Bender for joining the conference and providing thoughtful comments on the topic as a discussant. And in particular, we thank Erhard Schüttpelz for his characteristically generous support for this project, which has been his initiative as much as ours from the start.

We would like to thank the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, the Institute for African Studies at the University of Cologne, and the Institute for Media Studies at the University of Siegen for supporting this conference. Together with the research initiative Cultural Theory and Theory of the Political Imaginary at the University of Constance, the German Research Foundation provided the financial means for convening the conference as part of the research project Trance Mediums and New Media at two Threshold of Globalization (1900 and Today). We would like to thank both institutions for their generous support. At the University of Constance, we wish particularly to thank Albrecht Koschorke and Alexander Schmitz for their helpful cooperation. We are allso indebted to the former Collaborative Research Center Media Upheavals at the University of Siegen for supporting the publication of the conference.

We are especially grateful to Mohamed Amjahid and Jiannis Giatagantzidis for helping to organize the event, to Sonja Schöpfel and David Sittler for their thoughtful and thorough assistance in the editing process of this book, and to David in particular for the creation of the index. In addition, we would like to thank Tom Lay and Helen Tartar of Fordham University Press for their nearly unending patience and for the kind and professional assistance we were given. And last but not least, we thank the two anonymous reviewers whose critical comments enabled us to improve this volume.

Introduction: Trance Mediums and New Media

Heike Behrend and Martin Zillinger

For more than two decades, scholars have discussed the return of the religious, a development that has taken place on a global level and that deeply questions the narratives of modernity and its disenchantment (De Vries and Weber 2001). Responding to the forces of globalization, the neoliberal elimination of restraints on market forces, the decline of states, and the rise of new media, political theologies have emerged that intensely counter the Western idea of the separation of church and state and the concept of religion as a private individual matter.

The return of the religious opened up an intense debate among academics of different disciplines, including philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, and political science, about the quality and substance of religion, its mediation in new technical media, and the experiences of alterity induced through new media in the context of the processes of globalization. At the same time, new light has been shed on media and mediation by dealing with religion as media (Meyer 2009; Stolow 2005). By introducing religion into the study of media and media into the study of religion, mediation comes into focus as process and form of making meaning (Morgan 2008) and therefore deepens our insight into the configuration of media as media practices (Klassen 2008), drawing from and developing further ethnographic inquiries into situated media use. (See Spitulnik 2002.)

What has been largely neglected in the debates about the return of the religious, however, is the orgiastic or enthusiastic quality that characterizes many of its practices. The use of mediumship, techniques of trance and possession, exorcism, and the invocation of spirits and otherworldly beings flourish not only among new religious movements, but also among the old monotheistic religions that center on the book. (See, for example, Behrend 2011, Bilu 2003, and Boissevain 2006.) Although in 1972, Pope Paul VI removed the authority to perform exorcism as one of the standard minor orders with which all priests were endowed at ordination, in 1999, a revised rite of exorcism was formulated, and in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI declared that every diocese should appoint an exorcist. At the same time, a pontifical university in Rome instituted a training course for exorcists that has been conducted annually (Csordas 2012). Likewise, Islamic reform movements try to promote Quranic healing practices to counter the trance elements of Sufi practices, while public performances of spirit mediumship and divination in ultraorthodox Jewish communities strive to provide an all-embracing metaphysical account of extraordinary phenomena in the borderland of scientific inquiry. By putting divination performances of autistic children publicly to test, they rearticulate traditional forms of dybbuk possession in a modernist idiom (Bilu and Goodman 1997).

Various forms of spirituality have resurfaced in healing practices all over the world and have become commodified as local traditions in festivals in order to participate in the local and the global. Paradoxically, the idioms of trance and possession have gained such an enormous importance for understanding our present time that on a superficial level, this resurgence of mediumship could be taken as a specific moment in the history of capitalistic societies, where the spirit of possession seems to have taken possession of those who increasingly attempt to escape a highly technological (post)modernity. Far from being marginal or on the verge of disappearance, since the 1980s, with the new religious revival on a global level, the power of trance circulates globally, and trance has become a transnational category (Kapchan 2007).

The term trance (from Latin trans-ire, to go across, to pass over) denotes a range of different phenomena all of which are characterized by embodiment and an experience of alterity (Crapanzano 1977a, Lewis 2003). It may culminate in the dissociation of the subject, during which the subject experiences the source of agency as an other that takes its form in the medium of the subject. Coming under the influence of or engaging with disembodied powers can take various forms and is interpreted and responded to in a variety of ways that vary according to local politics of religion, social context, and the personal circumstances of the patient (Lambek 2002). We prefer the term trance to the rather narrow alternative term spirit possession, because the latter identifies the source of this experience without taking sufficiently into account that we are dealing with an essentially unstable phenomenon with shifting interpretations. Spirits can be rather ill-defined—as, for example, the Holy Spirit, oscillating between personification as the spirit of God the Father and a more depersonalized force or power—or absent from local conceptualizations in trance cults at all, as among certain Sufi brotherhoods in Islam (Zil-linger 2010) or mystic movements in Judaism (Garb 2011).

Trance Mediums, Technical Media, and Mediation

The prominence of trance and other orgiastic phenomena in the return of the religious cannot be understood without taking into account processes of globalization and localization shaped by new mass media and technologies. The existence of spirit possession as a recognized fact is established through public procedures, enacted and communicated between a patient or client, a ritual expert, and an observer, as Claude Lévi-Strauss taught us (Lévi-Strauss 1967; see Taussig 2003). Ritual procedures produce, shape, and code particular images in an ongoing process of mediation that makes subjective states observable and reportable to others. (See Kramer 2001.) Ritual practices mediate between the visible and the invisible, between inner images and their visualization in the outer, bodily movements of the possessed person, between subjective experiences and the social codification of these experiences. Lévi-Strauss insisted that the gravitational field of the ritual consists of heterogeneous claims and perspectives, including radical skepticism, that are processed in the process of mediation done by rituals. Rituals transform signs, persons, and things by establishing a referentiality of their own, as many scholars have noted (see, for example, Rappaport 1979), but this referentiality is established in an ongoing translation between the ritual medium, the clients, and the public—that is, in the process of ritual mediation.

In order to invoke the transcendental, to make otherworldly beings and powers appear (from Latin, apparere), trance mediums need to make dispositions (in Latin, apparare) and take great care in preparing a setting conducive to their work of mediation. Their equipment (Latin, apparatus) includes technical media, or what we call an apparatus in the narrow sense of a set of technical devices. It is for this reason that trance medium-ship and technical media cannot be separated. Inquiry into the first forms an interpretative key to the latter, and vice versa. They implicate each other and are implicated in each other. Apparition and apparatus are linked through ritual techniques. Despite the common parlance that ghostly apparitions carry with them the sense of unexpectedness, religious mediumship is produced—and judged—by the skillful procedures of ritual mediation, the technē of ritual work. Trance mediums bring together practitioners, acolytes, and skeptics alike, and accordingly, they need to craft a trading zone of ritual mediation. They need to account for, reconcile, and translate the different concerns, interests, and perspectives of patients and observers in ways conducive to their ritual endeavors. This volume asks what happens when the spaces of ritual mediation are restructured and expanded through technical reproduction.

By focusing on trance mediumship, perhaps one of the oldest forms of mediation and communication with the divine, as Marcel Mauss noted (Mauss[1935] 1973), the contributions to this volume not only fill a gap where the fields of religious studies and media studies overlap, they also contribute to a better general understanding of media as Kulturtechniken—techniques of culture (see Schüttpelz 2006)—and elaborate further the mutual constitution of ritual mediumship and technological mediation at different times and in different places. Trance mediumship and technological mediation are coextensive. They interact and reinforce each other. (See Hahn and Schüttpelz 2009.) This mutual imbrication goes beyond the claim that media events are fashioned from ritual occasions (Dayan and Katz 1992, Couldry 2003) and demands that we scrutinize in detail what Jacques Derrida has called the ghostly quality of mediation. Derrida suggests that mediation implies a structure that likens it to spirit—the remote dispatching of bodies that are nonbodies, nonsensible sensations, incorporeal—and produces spectralization (Derrida 2001, 61). Along these lines, various scholars have suggested that spirit mediums and technical media have provided each other with metaphors: the discourses of spirit and the imaginary of the Spiritualist movement of the long nineteenth century powerfully anticipated and shaped technical media such as photography, cinema, the telephone, and television. Spirits and their mediums served as the media a priori for the invention of these technical media: spirits were able to telesee and telehear long before television and the telephone existed. (See Behrend’s essay in this volume and Andriopoulos 2013.) In fact, spirits themselves have reflected on their extraordinary capabilities, and in 1871 in Cincinnati, for instance, claimed to have invented telegraphy and/or to have given unseen encouragement to its inventors and developers (Connor 1999, 211).

Yet the inverse holds, as well: the imaginary of spirits and Spiritualism was also strongly shaped by technical media. To commandeer the telegraph instrument placed in the center of the circle during a séance, spirits had to materialize a battery to power it (Connor 1999, ibid.). Not only in the West, but also in Uganda and other parts of the world, spirit mediums have compared themselves to and associated themselves with batteries filled with electric power or have identified themselves with radios, so-called voice boxes (Behrend 2001, 2003a). And in Morocco, women who have had visions have compared this experience to film, because it allowed them to see themselves as if from outside (Kapchan 2007, 98).

Spirits mediums also have inserted technical media directly into their ritual practices. While mediums offered their bodies as vessel or containers to be inhabited by their spirits, technical media have served as pros-theses to expand and enforce their voices, sight, image, energy, and spirituality (Behrend 2003a, 2005b). In complicated ways, as some of the contributions in this volume show, technical media have empowered the spirits, while the spirit medium was turned into an apparatus, an object, disempowered and bereft of his or her consciousness. In addition, technical media themselves have become spiritualized, a subject we will take up again below.

Various advocates for nationalist projects and reform movements in the monotheistic religions have accused trance mediumship of preventing self-knowledge and self-improvement and therefore have fought trance mediumship as an obstacle on the way to progress. (See, for example, Behrend 2013, Crapanzano 1973, Gilsenan 1990, Kendall 1985, Meyer 1999, Morris 2000, Sanchez 2001, Spadola 2008, and Taussig 1987.) But since the early 1980s, ethnographic reports abound of nation-states instead endorsing trance mediumship in their quest for origins. As several essays in this volume testify, trance mediums have become heritage transmitters (Kendall, in this volume) vis à vis national and international publics, archaized and, at the same time, renewed by a globalizing commodity economy, as Rosalind Morris aptly puts it in her contribution here. (See also the essays by Guzy and Spadola in this volume.) Not only was trance medium-ship reinterpreted as the essence of (national) traditions, but also, trance mediums modernized themselves through various alliances with technical media that allowed them to become more responsible actors within various religious formations.

Thus, the return of the orgiastic via the human body and new technical media in the return of the religious not only opens up important questions about the construction of return, presence, immediacy, and alterity. (Again, see the contribution of Rosalind Morris in this volume.) It also makes us inquire into the formation of subjectivities in the present. Mediumship, trance, and possession provide possibilities for a subject to be not self-identical, to be an Other, divided or even manifold, forgetful and irresponsible—possibilities that operate against the ideal of a unified and sovereign individual. Do practices of trance and possession facilitate an escape from responsibility and from a subjectivity that constantly attempts to master itself? Does the domination of technology encourage this form of irresponsibility, as some philosophers have suggested (Derrida 1994, 50–51)? What sorts of subjectivities and objectifications are produced when, for example, spirit mediums who by definition suffer a loss of consciousness and cannot remember what they do and say in the state of possession are enabled to watch themselves in a video when in a trance?

For example, nowadays in Senegalese rab spirit-possession rituals, as Andras Zempleni has observed, each congregation has its own cameraman who records all the sessions, and when the chief priestess orders a break, the film is screened for the participants to watch and comment on their trances and the ways they become an Other (Zempleni 2012). While mediumship has tended to theatricalize forgetting, the new possibilities of recording the possession ritual by writing, photography, and video give mediums the chance to view their own performances and to enter into a mediated feedback loop that may promote critical self-awareness and transform them from an object into a more judgmental, self-responsible subject. Under which circumstances do technical media strengthen the state of a trance and promote the escape of responsibility, and when do they counteract and create more self-reflective, responsible subjectivities? (See the essays by Guzy, Pinney, and Zillinger in this volume.)

As Matthew Engelke remarks, the media turners in the study of religion have often used the resurgence of the religious as a rhetorical launching pad to criticize the post-Enlightenment modernist metanarrative (Engelke 2010, 377) without substantiating their claim that the religious to which there supposedly was a return actually ever had been abandoned and without elaborating the modality of the return to it, now as an object of critical attention. It is important to stress that the relationship between trance mediums and new media should not be understood as the persistence of premodern thought in early Western modernity. Such an interpretation would fall prey to the purification work of modernity by insisting on a clear-cut differentiation between technology (science), religion (discourse), and social worlds (society). (See Latour 1993.) It fails to take into account that debates about the modernization of technological media have always triggered debates about the modernization of trance mediums and vice versa—debates that characterized the introduction of new technologies in the nineteenth century just as much as they have in the twentieth and twenty-first. (See the Schüttpelz essay in this volume.)

As this volume shows, these controversies proceed in different and unforeseeable ways worldwide. Conceiving of these interlinked processes uncritically as the return of the religious may willy-nilly reinforce what Johannes Fabian calls the allochronie that divides the allegedly modern from the premodern world (Fabian 1983). Narratives of modernity claim an unfolding of progressive events along the vector of technological developments—and more often than not, these claims go hand in hand with modernization movements in spiritual matters, as well. (See Keane 2007.) All narratives of modernization differentiate between places that are included in and places that are excluded from this development. (See Degele and Dries 2005.) Therefore, neither the persistence nor the return of an undifferentiated, premodern past impinges on the teleology of modernization narratives. (See Koschorke 2010, cited in Schüttpelz 2013, 52.) In a way, spirits themselves provide a critique of this teleological narrative of modernity because they haunt and disturb the linearity of time and history as a chain of successive events by bringing in presences from other times and spaces. They provide the possibility of uncoevalness, of the coexistence and interaction of different temporalities. They dissolve the boundaries between the past and the present, allowing even the reversal of temporalities, and they permit temporal loops that may recapture what has been lost. (See Derrida 1995.)

What has been archaized as survivals and premodern practices since the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, localized on the peripheries of modernity, and personified by women, strangers, and children has gained new ground in the trading zones of globalization. As several contributions to this volume testify, more often than not, trance mediumship advances claims to a shared modernity and, as a modernizing strategy, evolves along nationalizing, folklorizing, and missionizing practices that expand and circulate in networks of migration and in transnational media networks. (See the essays by Kendall, Pinney, and Morris in this volume.) Yet we should not forget that there may also be disentanglement, rejection, and withdrawal from global media, arising from either long traditions of visual discretion and the ordering of public and private or from the very experience of being transfixed as the Other in ongoing tropes of visibility (Behrend 2013b).

Old and New Media

When we explore histories of media practices in different parts of the world, we have to keep in mind that it is some particular (new) medium as it has already evolved that determines our perspective on older media. Media, Niklas Luhmann wrote, open up the perspective on the world (Luhmann 1996). Yet this opening at the same time closes the access to the media’s own historicity. Media are always already there and not only create their cultural milieus, but also reorganize our senses and our perceptions before we can attempt to understand them. Through media, we constantly are being caught in our own traps (Innis 1951, cited in Hagen 2002, 220). For instance, by creating the illusion of presence, photographs hide the fact that the medium itself has fundamentally shaped the habit of looking that we employ to establish an event’s veracity (Baer 2005, 3). Against this background, the question of the relationship between old and new media, between, for example, the (old) human body as a medium and (new) technical media, presents itself in all its epistemological astuteness and unsolvability.

When a new medium is introduced, a highly contradictory process begins: on the one hand, the new medium may be celebrated as radically new, as something that has not been there before. Often this newness is grasped in positive terms celebrating the new possibilities and capabilities that are imagined to go along with the new medium. Yet the creative possibilities of the new, as Walter Benjamin suggested, are mostly discovered slowly, through old forms, old instruments, and old structures that are fundamentally injured by the appearance of new things, but that, under the pressure of the new, emerging media, are themselves transformed and sometimes driven into a last euphoric flourishing (Benjamin [1931] 1980). At the same time, old media are also reinterpreted and absorb attributes that have been ascribed to the new medium and thereby lose or gain new assets. Thus, the question of what is new and what is old, what disappears and what endures, needs to be explored in the open-ended histories of media and mediumship.

By giving this volume the title Trance Mediums and New Media, we attempt to problematize the new. We do not address only digitally based information and communication technologies as new media, but instead endeavor to open up the question of what exactly is new in new and old media. As Erhard Schüttpelz shows in his contribution, Western media theory itself is haunted by the figure of the return of old media. The lack of agency ascribed to personal mediums migrated into mass psychology, and the suggestion of suggestibility and contagion became the shared interpretive basis for media effects in Europe, the United States, and beyond. The allochronism that has been ascribed to European and non-European trance mediums—the archaization of trance practices, their irreconcilability with the European understanding of modernism from the late nineteenth century on—made every mass-medial hypnotization appear potentially archaic. Schüttpelz describes how each of the new mass media (cinema, radio, even television) loomed as the figure of a return of the archaic in the cloak of modern technology and contemporary social forms—including, and in a special manner, in the emergence of media theory in the writings of Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan.

Therefore, the different essays collected in this volume not only problematize the relationship between the new and the old, but also open up a space in which the diverse and contradictory temporalities and spaces created by media and mediumship and their insertion into not necessarily uninterrupted and sequential histories may provide more satisfactory—though more complicated—answers to the question of what constitutes new media.

(De)Materialization and (De)Spiritualization

As some anthropologists have come to realize, in some areas of Africa during colonial times it was not only the forces of the wilderness (thunder, rivers, rain), people (the living, as well as the dead) and sudden, terrifying events (epidemics such as smallpox or the plague), but also Western technology (airplanes, bulldozers, tanks, locomotives, bicycles) that were spiritualized and as spirits inserted into new local cults of affliction (Beattie and Middleton 1969). As Elizabeth Colson and John Beattie observed, in complex processes, personal mediums were forced by the spirits of Western technologies to embody those spirits mimetically in rituals of spirit possession. When embodied, the spirits of airplanes and locomotives regained materiality until their presence resolved again into an absence.

Visual media such as the camera or film images also could become spiritualized and oscillate between the immaterial and the material. The spiritualization of technical media seems to have been one way to accommodate the foreign and strange and to negotiate their presence without, however, disempowering them. Instead, transforming the materiality of technical media into spirits (re)gained another form of power—the kind of power with which spirit mediums were able to deal in their rituals. In 1954, as Elizabeth Colson reported, the new spirit of an airplane made its appearance. When a plane flew over a village, a woman became possessed by it. In dreams or visions, the spirit informed her how it wished to materialize: accompanied by drum rhythms, songs, dance steps, dressed in a certain way with paraphernalia and with the plants required for healing (Colson 1969, 79). Mediumship in such contexts thus is a theater in which the technical media of colonial power are translated into spirits and made to oscillate between spirituality and materiality.

By focusing on the mutual constitution of trance mediums and new technical media, we are interested in matter and spirit as relational terms, in the various configurations of interdependence and interaction of the two terms and in the processes of spiritualizing and materializing through media. Mediating the material and the immaterial, spirits are characterized by their coming into presence and leaving it again, that is, by their materializing and dematerializing.

In fact, it is this form of movement, from the immaterial to the material and back again, from the latent to the manifest to the latent, and from the concealed to the unconcealed and back that is at stake when thinking about spirit mediumship and technical media. (See Lambek 2010, 28.) While in some parts of Africa technical media were spiritualized and rematerialized by their mediums, in Hanoi, for instance, a whole industry has been established for creating offerings of modern consumer goods and media made out of paper for the spirits of the dead. As Gertrud Hüwelmeier suggests, in Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, not only the living, but also the spirits of the dead long for the latest media, such as mobile phones and computer laptops (Hüwelmeier 2013). As sacrificial offerings reproduced in paper, they are burned, transformed into smoke to please and appease the spirits of the dead. Here the mutuality of the relationship between spirits and media is transposed to the order of gifts and sacrifices mediating between the material and the immaterial, between this world and the next and past and present.

The spirits in Vietnam consume the media of their interaction with the human world. However, the contributions to this volume also provide ample examples of more persistent materialities of mediation. As Bruno Latour remarked and popularized in the slogan technology is society made durable (Latour 1991), the persistence of certain things and inscriptions has to be taken into account. Certain expectations are invoked by and enmeshed with things and inscriptions that are produced, circulated, and kept by trance mediums, their followers, and their critics.

Mediated Publics

With the help of cheaply reproducible small media such as photography and video cameras, trance mediums have not only produced, stored, exchanged, and consumed recordings of their rituals and ceremonies, but also have addressed new publics in national arenas, as well as along the transnational circuits of migration. Worldwide, trance mediums use photos and films in order to build and foster networks of clients and potential partners for cooperation. For the mediums, creating demand of their ritual capabilities is crucial for their standing with their clients and fellow trance adepts, on the one hand, and with the spirits, on the other. The circulation of the signs, persons, and things that they can generate and that can be used as resources for their practices indicates their success as a medium, which is increasingly a function of their transnational networks, as Michael Lambek emphasizes (Lambek 2010, 26).

It thus is not only the practices of trance mediumship that are changing with new means of mediation, but also the self-representations and public perception of the practices of trance mediums. The claims made for these practices differ greatly, depending on whether they are carried out in public spaces (be it in the streets or the mass media), in the intimate spaces of various social (media) networks, in rites of passage such as weddings or rituals for a delimited public, or performed in (or as a public) secret, as are, for example, the publicly condemned veneration of Sabbath spirits in Morocco, during which the recording and circulation of images is tightly controlled. (See Welte 1990.)

Whereas the transition between public and intimate spaces is constantly negotiated, an abrupt translation of concealed practices into the public domain is likely to cause scandals and sometimes violent struggles. (See Zillinger 2008 and Behrend in this volume.) Consequently, the staging of trance mediumship, its going public, is a sensitive issue. The public circulation, consumption, and (re)production of images depicting trances, spirit possession, and/or ritual efficacy can cause controversies. These occur as much within a religious community (see, for example, Daswani 2010) and between competing ritual experts and religious groups (see the essays by Guzy and Pinney this volume) as with a skeptical public or representatives of state power. As Hüwelmeier shows in her contribution, for example, throughout the last decades, religious practices of all kinds have been regarded as superstitious by the Communist Party and the government in Vietnam. However, due to processes of globalization and the country’s integration into the global market economy, a growing number of people have been participating in spirit mediumship, soul calling, divination, and faith healing. While Vietnamese living abroad take part in these processes of religious revitalization, mainly by using and circulating modern media in public spaces such as the Lorelei Cliff on the Rhine River in Germany, in Hanoi, members of Vietnamese Pentecostal churches gather in underground congregations, restricted to the private sphere of house churches due to repression and persecution by local authorities.

Several contributions to this volume show that the mutual constitution of trance mediums and new media today is rooted in and shaped by the ways in which technical media and trance mediums were mutually constituted in the past. As Erhard Schüttpelz elucidates in this volume, around 1900, the transatlantic debate about the practices of mediums had been made possible because it served as a boundary object (Star and Griesemer 1989), or, to use another concept that we have been employing from the field of the social study of science, a trading zone for different claims and interests (Galison 1997). This trading zone extended over the Atlantic and included the colonial encounter with different belief systems, different forms of religious mediation, and different activities by mediums. In his illuminating analysis of a contest between French magicians and North African trance experts staged by the French colonial administration in the middle of the nineteenth century, Graham Jones recounts the competing claims to modernity, scientific knowledge, and ritual/magical efficacy that were brought to bear in and negotiated around magical fairs, world expositions, and cultural performances in Algeria and France (Graham Jones 2010). Not unlike the heritage transmitters of today, religious brotherhoods were eager to stage their ritual skills for Europeans at home and—during extended travels—in Europe. To be sure, the French colonial masters had an interest in demonstrating the superiority of French culture by denouncing the skills of the brotherhoods as trickery. The latter, however, used these events to enhance their local prestige and soon attracted a European audience on their own terms. Members of French esoteric movements—Mesmerists, Spiritists, and Occultists—hailed them as veritable scientific marvels and aggressively challenged allegations of trickery (ibid, 68).

The encounter between magical skills and ritual techniques took place in a trading zone that centered on the question of agency, as Schüttpelz and Jones show in their analyses of the practices and claims of mediums in Europe and North Africa, respectively. All parties were able to ascribe agency according to their interests and cosmologies: illusionists to the subjective skills of the performer, who then ceases to be a medium, while magical agency is transferred to the psyche of the one who suffers its effect, as Rosalind Morris aptly remarks (Morris 2000, 234); Mesmerists, who attributed agency to cosmological forces, revealed through the instrumental, scientific ability of the medium to detect, prove, and lead these forces for treatment of patients; and Spiritists and Occultists, who credited the spirits of the dead or extra-European spirits with agency. Sometimes, it was the technical media themselves, for example, the camera, to which agency was attributed in attracting the spirits, whose presence then was imprinted on the photographs that resulted. Historically and still today, for the different actors and the wider public, the meanings attributed to the practices of mediums were negotiated in various spaces—scientific laboratories, churches, private homes and entertainment businesses—to advance specific agendas, but also to explore new opportunities and arenas for action.

In his essay, Emilio Spadola, too, puts in historical perspective the emergence of trance as a transnational category (Kapchan 2007). He shows that underclass rituals have become a sign of Morocco’s capacity for ‘modernity’. In tune with the Sharifian politics of the Moroccan king, those possessed by spirits were turned into possessors of culture as a market value, controlled and fostered by the ruling elite. In Morocco, the staging of spirit mediumship ensured a social order based on the hierarchical control of the masses. The proliferation of trance as a rite of reception across a mass-mediated social and political space, Spadola argues, has its roots in the new technological systems at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as railroads and telegraphy, and is closely tied to the techniques and processes that made the nation imaginable. The orgiastic, however, does not return on stage in Moroccan cultural politics as it does in other nation-states. As Ernest Gellner emphasized early on in his work, in the Islamic world, the figure of return is claimed by reform movements advocating a return to the original message of the Prophet, imagined as a puritan, scripturalist, unitarian, mediation-free, sober Islam of the High Tradition distinguished from the beliefs of the untutored rural and urban masses and transcending nationalism (Gellner 1997, 82). Whether claiming underclass trance practices as a cultural heritage and as upper-class entertainment, as analyzed by Spadola, successfully will uphold l’exception marocaine and whether it will suffice (along with political terror) to keep the political aspirations of the growing Islamic reform movement at bay remains to be seen. The scandal of ecstasy that used to be invoked by nationalist modernizers against the French protectorate (Spadola 2008) has become a political issue in recent years again precisely through the circulation of film clips on the World Wide Web, which exposed possession performances directed at the delimited public of the ritual to national and international audiences.

If trance mediums ever were mere objects of an ethnographic gaze, today, they increasingly use technical media to become agents of their own representation, as Laurel Kendall shows in her essay. Korean shamans deploy all available media, and in particular the Internet, to reach out to potential clients. Paradoxically, she argues, their increasing visibility enables them to pursue their practices in a discreet, highly controlled, and visually effective way, appealing to and connecting with potential clients through new media, but actually performing out of sight of the general public. Drawing on a tradition of pictorial representations reaching back into the eighteenth century, shamans employ the shamanic robe—itself a mediatic device to transmit a deity—to make themselves legible as shamans in media representations. To be sure, self-declared cybershamans also present themselves in the emblematic costume in order to partake in a proliferating folklore business. But overall, these new, virtual spaces of mediumship transmit a new importance to the haptic experience of the garment and the overall sensory order of the ritual. In fact, the expanding public of Korean shamanism reemphasizes the ritual intimacy of actual performances of kut, which build a shaman’s reputation: the promise of a sensory ritual experience makes traditional shamanism modern. (Compare Sant Cassia 2000.)

Ritual Efficacies, Intensities, and New Magic in the Age of Technical Reproduction

As the contributions to this volume attempt to show, technical media restructure agency in ritual settings and function as technical objects … through which elements of the actors’ interests are reshaped and translated, while nonhuman competences are upgraded, shifted, folded, or merged (Latour 1993, 22). By making media practices appear and disappear, the ritual experts and actors frame their actions in particular ways and account for ritual efficacy by stressing the ritual distribution, circulation, and delegation of agency between spirits and humans—that is, by emphasizing their work of ritual mediation. As Rosalind Morris has suggested, instead of proving the nonefficacy and impotence of magical techniques by converting bodily and ritual practices into representational knowledge and meaning, modern mass media brought about a reinvestment in the power of appearances and produced new forms of magic.

Although in the context of technical mediation, spirit mediumship has been imagined as a sign of pastness and as a representation of tradition, modernity in fact also produced a new fusion of media and magic. Mass mediation seems not to have entailed a destruction of auras so much as it has incited a reformed sense of magic. Spirit mediums provide the exemplary instance of a technology of the uncanny, newly enhanced and indeed revivified by technology itself (Morris 2000, 195). Through their alliances with technical media such as photography and video, trance mediums have not only been modernized, but have also become the bearers of strange new powers. Through media chains and networks into which they have placed their own bodies, they have gained new efficacies, new capacities to diagnose, harm and kill, protect, and even cure at a distance. In Thailand, where there is a public sermon, individuals will often link themselves, via threads of cotton, to the monk who is delivering it, or, if that is not possible, to the amplifier through which his voice is being broadcast. Some people bind themselves in this manner to television sets on which services are being broadcast (Morris 2000, 133).

Just as the number of mediatic robes worn by the Korean shaman adds to the ritual efficacy of the performance of kut, the number of technical mediators may add to the efficacy of ritual mediation work. In Morocco, Martin Zillinger encountered potent seers who used technical media in order to shape, increase, expand, and stabilize their magical activities through time and space, not unlike those Kendall encountered in Korea. Their mediation work aimed at enlisting spirits and other otherworldly beings, clients, experts, and observers to create a community of ritual cooperation, and increasingly, they did so in expanding transnational networks. Verbal techniques (song), material techniques (the use of incense), and ritual techniques (music, dance instruction) served to transpose an often disordered, painful encounter with transcendent forces into a ritual process. Whereas in many readings, technical media in the religious sphere are perceived as part of the transcendental, operating beyond mediation and promising an unmediated experience of another world or some kind of divine presence (see Meyer 2009), Zillinger argues that the ritual unfolds its efficacy precisely by emphasizing the mediation and the media employed: vestments, photos, and cell phones are held up to a VHS video camera and comment on the ritual work in the absence of a client, who may see and reexperience the ritual treatment in the future. Technical mediation, therefore, is constitutive of the ritual’s efficacy, and the fact that media appear is neither a result of their disturbing inappropriate-ness to the work of ritual mediation (as Meyer indicates, Meyer 2011, 32), nor does it interfere with what Zé de Abreu has aptly called the ritual’s affective directness (De Abreu 2009). And in western Uganda, to give another example of the manifold ways in which spiritual intensity and efficacy can be produced, Catholics developed a complex technology to concentrate and intensify the powers of the Holy Spirit. By loading objects, rosaries, crucifixes, and Bibles with the Holy Spirit and by combining these objects with songs and prayers, Catholics attempted to intensify the Holy Spirit’s power for exorcising satanic spirits and for healing (Behrend 2011, 115).

The transmission of efficacious healing and protecting powers and the production of new fields of intensities occur via complex media chains and networks, not unlike the transmission of electric current. In fact, in Thailand, as well as in many parts of Africa, the medium of electricity provides images for the flow (and blockage) of spirituality and for various practices that attempt to concentrate and intensify spiritual power. Yet these media chains and newly created fields of intensities—including the human body—are seen as highly fragile, prone to ruptures and discontinuities that endangered the flow of the powers that they conduct.

Media produce visualizations that are themselves mystery-mongering processes whose main source of mystery is their being taken for granted (see Taussig 1999, 190), and new video industries have exploited the visualizations of spirits and occult forces to provide the raw material for new magic and new secrets. Therefore it is hardly surprising to find trance mediums involved in film production, as Claudia Böhme recounts from Tanzania. Employed as actors, waganga spirit mediums play the role of diviners who appropriate technical media on-screen and transform television into African TV, which allows their clients to telesee into their past and future lives. The videos dissolve not only the weak boundary between acting and possession as actors succumb to possession from time to time (see the Dreschke essay in this volume), but they also visualize the poiesis of the past into the present of film time. By inserting divinatory knowledge as a TV film into a video, they provide the technical medium of television with a new sense of magic while at the same time asserting that spirits and their mediums everywhere in the world have always practiced teleseeing and telehearing, long before TV had been invented.

Once again, spirits and media thus enter into a circular relationship in which they provide each other with more reality and credibility. The arrival of the video medium in Tanzania created a new arena for the representation and negotiation of spirit mediumship in the public sphere, providing another valid example for the renewal of medium practices in the course of their archaization as traditional. In her essay, Böhme explores how technical media are put on display

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