ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Speaking Between Worlds: Translating Mediumistic Experience into Science

• In Event: Possessed, “Crippled”, Uncombustible: Bodies at the Limit of Technologies and Genders

English Abstract

Much has been written about famous mediums, particularly those studied by the English Society for Psychical Research (SPR), such as Eusapia Palladino, Leonora Piper, Hélène Smith, and others. Scholars have examined their lives, their public séances, their success and influence in the public sphere, and the experiments conducted with them in great detail. Regarding the latter, research has tended to focus either on their tricks or on how these experiments contributed to the theoretical developments of the male scientists who studied them, without paying attention to their active role as co-constructors of that knowledge. If images of a certain ‘passive’ femininity were at stake in psychical research, mediums’ bodies also functioned as sites of agency and co-construction of the phenomena. Facts were grounded in their material experiences, performances and descriptions, and they often also played an active role in formulating explanatory hypotheses themselves.

This paper examines female mediums in their role as go-betweens. Go-Betweens were individuals who moved between two or more different cultures, able to translate knowledge from one setting into another. In the context of global history, such figures —traders, diplomats, or cultural intermediaries— have been studied as agents who bridge distinct worlds. In our microhistorical approach, mediums occupied a comparable mediating role in the construction of psychical knowledge. Through the works of two psychical researchers who studied clairvoyance —the French researcher Eugène Osty and the Spanish Marquis of Santa Cara— this paper explores how both relied extensively on the descriptions and interpretive contributions of their epistemic subjects.

Author

• Mónica Balltondre, Institute of History of Science. Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona