AAA Abstract Proposal: Summerland, Otherwise and and the Ghosts of Alternative Futures: the Limits of Multimodality in Anthropology and Spiritualism
As anthropologists work with collaborators in evoking alternatives to capitalist fascisms, they increasingly engage multimodal registers; games, design, graphic novels and soundscapes join film and text in innovative work that seeks to ground worlding in sensorial engagement and haptic experience. Here, the multimodal can support the emancipatory politics of communities where anthropologists work. But what of the politics of multimodal? Is there anything inherently emancipatory in the engagement with diverse platforms? In order to problematize the multimodal, this paper explores another moment in multimodal evocations of alternative futures–Spiritualism in the late 19th century. While “spirit rapping” may have been the first volley in the explosion of Spiritualist practice, the movement soon incorporated writing, drawing, sounds, photographs and multiple objects into its evocations of a “Beautiful Beyond” that represented not only the afterlife, but the utopian...