Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Haunted Ground: Journeys Through Paranormal America

2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/preternature.2.2.0276

2161-2196

Joseph P. Laycock,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

In Haunted America, Darryl Caterine offers a reflexive description of his travels across the continental United States visiting sites associated with paranormal cultures. The text is framed as a kind of picaresque describing visits to Lily Dale, a Spiritualist community in New York State, a UFOlogy convention in Roswell, New Mexico, and a convention of the American Society of Dowsers in Killington, Vermont. While his investigation of three communities constitutes the heart of the book, Caterine also describes stops in such places as Point Pleasant, West Virginia, home of a creature known as the Mothman, the 2008 X Conference on UFOs in Washington, D.C., and the birthplace of Joseph Smith in Vermont.As a scholar of American religious history, Caterine draws on the work of historians such as Catherine Albanese, author of A Republic of Mind and Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), to argue that the so-called paranormal is an important component of America's cultural legacy. The paranormal, he argues, is “an integral part of what it means to be a modern American” (xix). It is not the sole concern of the cultural fringe, but a public discourse in which most Americans are more or less conversant. He frames the American response to the paranormal using Freud's notion of “the uncanny”: it is eerie because it is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.Caterine is not shy in describing his own experiences of the uncanny. Haunted Ground is as much a work of reflexive anthropology as it is history, drawing on copious field notes made with a tape recorder while driving across the country. Caterine describes his participant observation with the various communities he studied, including his attempt to serve as a medium in Lily Dale, volunteering for an experiment in “neuro-linguistic programming” with an alleged former CIA employee at Roswell, and learning to dowse in Vermont. He is quite forthcoming about his feelings during these processes: he describes the vulnerability he felt while engaged in séances, his rising anxiety while discussing alien conspiracy theories with abductees, and his sense of disorientation when discussing alternative views of prehistoric America near Stone Age ruins in Vermont. Despite the peripatetic nature of Caterine's research, he was able to form relationships with these communities over a period of years in order to provide the sort of anthropological “thick description” offered here.This approach—“anthropology as history”—yields a number of useful insights and connections that would likely not have been noticed by traditional historians. For instance, Caterine frames his experience of attending a Spiritualist camp in terms of Victor Turner's work on communitas, drawing particularly on the notion of the loss of individuality during pilgrimage. He suggests that the decline of Spiritualism in the nineteenth century may have been as much due to the séance's ability to break down personal defenses and compromise one's sense of individual autonomy as it did with the exposure of frauds and hucksters. Similarly, Caterine observed discussions of “exo-politics” or political movements relating to government policies toward extraterrestrials.Scholarship sometimes assumes that people who hold paranormal beliefs regard ideas such as UFOs as a private affair and compartmentalize these beliefs from “public” discourses such as politics. Caterine's fieldwork suggests that UFOlogists may not make such distinctions. After working with dowsers in Vermont, Caterine concludes that dowsing is connected both to an American tradition of “pastoralism,” which celebrates agricultural life, and to anxieties about a secular apocalypse in which the forces of modern technology will collapse.Caterine's most interesting discovery is that much of American paranormal culture is anchored on a constructed motif of Native Americanism. Spiritualists frequently claim to encounter the ghosts of Native Americans during séances. Likewise, the Vermont dowsers incorporate elements of Native American tradition and language into their rituals, and claim to be drawn to sites left behind by the prehistoric inhabitants of New England. And for their part, UFOlogists point to Native American art as evidence for ancient alien visitors; indeed, Caterine even goes so far as to suggest that there are some important similarities between the ways that accounts of alien abductions are framed and the “captivity narratives” of abduction by Native Americans that were eagerly consumed by Puritan readers. Following the work of literary critic Renée Bergland, Caterine suggests that at a profound level, American identity is wrought by a paradox: while celebrating the nation's noble birth and its lofty ideals, these were brought about on the back of the displacement and subsequent genocide of the country's indigenous people. Caterine suggests that the paranormal represents one outlet through which Americans have sublimated this uncomfortable paradox.One problem that “haunts” Haunted Ground is that of categories: what is it, exactly, that unites Spiritualists, UFOlogists, and dowsers? This same category problem manifests itself in much of the scholarship on “the paranormal.” Here, Caterine's approach is reflexive. He questions many of the conventional categories into which scholars situate these traditions, including “metaphysical religion,” “new religious movements,” and “the occult.” Not only do these categories stigmatize the subject, cropping them out of the larger picture of American culture, but Caterine also argues that the act of labeling actually distorts the subject. Scholars, he argues, are “unwittingly destroying in the process of naming the very things they are trying to name” (xix).Caterine's own approach to the category problem draws on the early twentieth-century writer Charles Fort. Fort researched and cataloged anomalous phenomena and events that defied the paradigms of both religion and science. This research paved the way for a general definition of the paranormal as phenomena that fall outside any ordinary understanding of the world. While Caterine occasionally uses the term “ephemera” to describe the subject of his study, he advocates the term “Nature” (with a capital N) to describe the “cosmic enigma” behind Spiritualism, UFOlogy, and dowsing. In line with Fort, “Nature” indicates neither a religious nor a scientific paradigm, but something betwixt and between. Caterine's idea of Nature is related to the phenomenology of religion, a discipline that sought to discover a common experience behind religious phenomena. It also resonates with the idea of “Nature” as used by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and by the Transcendentalists. This confluence of meanings is frustratingly vague, and this is precisely the point. “Nature” is only as a placeholder for what Caterine calls the “je ne sais quoi that both motivates and is illuminated by” his subjects (x).Whatever “Nature” is, Caterine is convinced by his travels that Americans have a special fascination with it. For him, this likely dates back to Europe's initial encounter with what was—to them, at least—a new world. Throughout the text, he refers to America as “Nature's Nation.” The locations he visited function as pilgrimage sites where Americans can experience Nature firsthand. He compares them to sites such as Jerusalem, Mecca, and Bodh Gaya, noting that places such as Roswell are the only locations where Americans can encounter the miraculous on their own soil.Haunted Ground is an audacious book, both for exploring a subject that has been largely ignored by American historians and for employing a research methodology and writing style that leaves the author rather exposed. Caterine's work clearly demonstrates the importance of ethnography for understanding the paranormal, both historically and in contemporary culture. This reconnaissance of paranormal America raises difficult questions that will no doubt fuel further scholarship on America's fascination with the mysterious.