Purity’s Perils. Race, Republicanism, and Relevance of Magic in Contemporary France

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter I
2. Contents VII
3. Introduction
4. The Mediumistic Trial. Testing and Contesting the Thresholds of Agency, Consciousness, and Technology 3
5. Mediumistic Trials of the Long 19th Century
6. The Therapeutic Mediologies of Animal Magnetism 33
7. Quite as Powerful. The Mediumistic Controversy in the 19th Century 67
8. A Case of Quasi-Certainty. William James and the Making of the Subliminal Mind 78
9. Educating the Mediums. Albert von Schrenck-Notzing’s Work of Purification on Spiritualism 106
10. ‘S. W.’ and C. G. Jung: From Mediumship to Analytical Psychology 121
11. Mediumistic Trials of the Short 20th Century
12. The Braunau Trance Mediums and their Spiritualist Circle Between the Two World Wars. A Local Study 145
13. Passing the Examination. The Mediumistic Trial and its Double in the Writings of Jeanne Favret-Saada 209
14. The Angel in the Machine. Divining Legal Authorship in Channelled and Computer-Generated Works 236
15. The Return of the Controversy. Testing Psychics in the 1970s and its Consequences for German Parapsychology 261
16. Clairvoyance for the Security of the Republic. Gerard Croiset and the Search for Hanns Martin Schleyer (1977) 284
17. California Dreamin’. The Invention of Modern Western Shamanism as a Mediumistic Trial of the 20th Century 315
18. Mediators of Trance. María Sabina – Gordon Wasson – Bruce Conner 339
19. Psychic Spies. Cold War Science and the Military-Occult Complex 370
20. Mediumistic Trials of the 21st Century
21. The Magus of Silicon Valley. Immortality, Apocalypse, and God Making in Ray Kurzweil’s Transhumanism 397
22. Fighting the Fakers and Fooling the Fighters. Skeptics between Triumph and Agony, or: The Birth of the Skeptical Movement from the Spirit of Magic 413
23. Mediating Spirits. Sensation, Form and the Body in American Spiritualism 432
24. Mediating “Mystery”. Pentecostalism, the Media, and the Social Production of Hope and Suspicion in the Brazilian Crime Debate 475
25. “It Is Easier to Stay Out than Get Out”. A Sweat Lodge Ritual, the Entangled Ethnographer on Trial, and Irony as a Stance for Anthropological Analysis 496
26. Shamanism on Trial. Acting in a Hall of Mirrors 513
27. “I know . . . but still.” Popular Photography and the Mediation of Luck in Japan 538
28. Burdens of Proof. Obeah, Petroleum Geology, and its Mediums in Trinidad 552
29. Sufi Practices, the Masters’ Role and the Media of Legitimacy. On the Coincidence of Technical Media and Sufi Mediums 576
30. Purity’s Perils. Race, Republicanism, and Relevance of Magic in Contemporary France 605
31. Epilogue
32. “I Believe in Science Now!” Skeptics Between Hope, Fear, and Loathing in Las Vegas 627
33. List of Contributors 637
34. Name Index 643
35. Place Index 655