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From: [log in to unmask] [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Sara [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, April 02, 2011 3:50 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [Sar] AAA panel CFP - Science, Medicine, and the Paranormal
(Apologies for cross-posting)
AAA Panel CFP: Science, Medicine, and the Paranormal
Though the paranormal has long been an object of popular imagination,
modern science and medicine establish legitimacy in the rejection of
phenomena beyond the physical, sensory, and observable. Religious
systems have a more ambiguous connection to “normal” and “occult”
rationalities, often striving both for legitimacy in the modern world
and for claims of speaking to the spiritual experiences and
aspirations of the populace. A resurgence in alternative explanatory
models may result in overt competition, syncretism, or a complex
process of pluralism and conflict. As these systems collide,
intersect, and meld, the potential emerges for new and evolving forms
of subjectivity and experience, unexpected forms and hierarchies of
knowledge, the re-emergence of forgotten legacies, and the
reconsideration of the boundaries inscribed between superstition,
fact, and knowledge.
This panel seeks to seriously examine the intersections of science,
medicine, and the paranormal within human experience; this may include
discussions of UFOs and extraterrestrial life, ghosts and hauntings,
demonic possession and exorcism, vampirism and immortality, monsters
and species transformation, or magic and sorcery. Topics may include
technologies of the paranormal, professionalization of occult
practices, scientific methodologies applied to unorthodox evidence,
the supernatural in medical pluralism, the paranormal in new media and
virtual worlds, or scientific attempts to locate spirituality in the
brain. Inherent in these topics is the study of ridicule as a
political form of social interaction. How does derision relegate
certain claims to obscurity? In what ways are shame and mockery tools
of scientific boundary-maintenance?
The panel also addresses historical connections between divergent
explanatory models, including the “traces, tidemarks and legacies” of
the paranormal within scientific and medical practices. New studies in
the history of science have illustrated the historical intertwinings
of alchemy and nascent science; this prompts the reconsideration of
both past and present, from Newton to the Ethernet. To what degree do
the current incarnations of scientific and medical fields retain
concealed traces of the occult, and when do they become manifest?
Topics may include discredited narratives that remain under the
surface of everyday discourse, the reemergence of connections that
have been concealed, or hauntings and the social lives of ancestral
ghosts (both familial and academic).
Finally, the panel explores anthropology's own relationship to the
paranormal. How do we interpret our own changing relationship to
different kinds of evidence, attributions of “belief” versus
“knowledge,” reverberations of anthropology's preoccupations with
“witchcraft,” and the ambiguities of distal causality? What are
anthropology's disciplinary and ethical responsibilities towards the
people who espouse discredited forms of knowledge?
Please send abstracts (250 words) by APRIL 11 to both Sara
Bergstresser ([log in to unmask]) and Erick Castellanos
([log in to unmask]). Deadline for panel submission is April 15.
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