All Tomorrow's Cultures

In 1866, Alfred Russel Wallace sent a breathless letter to his friend and colleague, Thomas Huxley, inviting Huxley to join him in exploring a “new branch of anthropology”: Spiritualism. Based on the explosive growth in seances in Europe and North America, Spiritualism conjured a world beyond the grave where the dead continued to learn and improve themselves while enjoying each’s ghostly society. When the dead deigned to visit the living, it was typically to help and to advise: “this haunting could teach the living how to build a more perfect society in the here-and-now” (Forbes 2016: 445). So, for Wallace, this really was a new direction for the field–an inquiry into the unseen and, simultaneously, into a future that awaited humanity, both in the afterlife and in the perfection of human life on this planet.   To give away the ending, Wallace was not successful in establishing his “new branch of anthropology.” Huxley wasn’t buying it, and other anthropological...