RELC200:
Gods, Ghosts & Monsters
Liminal, Loathing & Leveling-Up: The Biological Inevitability of Monstrosity
“Having worn out their welcome in religion, natural history and travelers’ tales, the monsters settled into their new abode of human psychology.” (Asma, 2009)
Monstrosity has always been a means of understanding the unknown. Stephen Asma argues that humanity has consistently constructed and attributed monstrosity to biology, resulting in ideology, fear, entertainment, evolution and ultimately, perceptions of progress. That the monstrous is all too necessary. He does this in laying out his argument over three distinct time periods. A theological period where monstrosity is characterized by fear, an evolutionary period where it becomes understood through method, and finally through a technological period of absorption. Within these distinct periods Asma frames his discussion through a series of structuralist binaries, where liminal ambiguity provides a convenient home for the biological necessity he proposes.
These binaries help to define liminal spaces of fear, but also delineate between the objectification of monsters and the behavior of monstrosity. They provide the necessary guardrails between repulsion and attraction, the sacred and the profane, us and them, internal and external, freedom and oppression, the known and the unknown. Our societal and cultural fascination with monstrosity is attributed to the liminal, to thresholds, to transgression and deviance. Horror is attributed to the distance from the known. And biological protection comes from the psychological safety that we ourselves are not monstrous. For Asma, the biology of monstrosity is always a human construct, however uncanny or supernatural.
But whereas Asma frames his argument as one of necessity, that we have relied upon the role of monsters for evolutionary advantage and biological understanding, we can argue that monstrosity is also inevitable. That humanity has always constructed monsters and attributed monstrosity to biology, but there is an inevitability to humans evolving their own biology, creating cultures where monstrous absorption becomes normalized in the spirit of technological and societal progress. Where Asma attributes monstrosity to biological necessity, he stops short of an argument of inevitability. His hypothesis being if we absorb and transcend the biologically monstrous, then there is less to fear in an increasingly uncertain secular world of external and societal monstrosity. That we no longer need monsters to make sense of the world if we’ve normalized and absorbed the monsters within ourselves. When we as humans inevitably play God.
Fundamental binaries of good and bad, reason and superstition, the sacred and the profane, illusion and reality, fear and hope, and ultimately Man and God strongly characterize this first theological period. But it’s also an era where Asma asserts that monsters are believed to be metaphysically real. They are part of the natural world, and evidence of their presence is the same as evidence of God, but also of man’s hubris. They balance God’s righteous demonstrations of superior power, something we can only defeat through the salvation of trust, worship and ritual.
We see this in Greek tragedy and Homeric tradition as the phantasmagorical miasma which hovers around a corpse, becomes contagious, and fosters retribution, most memorably in Aeschylus’ Orestia, with its literal furies and inter-generational monstrosity. This miasma is chemical and biological, but it’s also elemental and manifests itself into the actions of the polluted. The Greek ‘psyche’, Asma argues, is broad in scope and more aligned with the concept of unique human psychology rather than inner cognitive self, but both concern themselves with a soul. However, that reading only extends to humans. The biology of animals is closely aligned with the ritual of foretelling the future, and when that biological, ritual sacrifice produces deviance, it is correlated with bad omens. Monsters are the protagonists of trouble ahead.
Later in the theological era, Asma contends that “the message of medieval monsterology is that the causes and cures of monsters are spiritual in nature. Human pride may bring them out, but they are metaphysically real. Heroism of the pagan variety will not conquer the monsters. Only submission to Gods and humility will beat back the enemy” (Asma, 2009). Both Christians and Muslims held deep-rooted fears of the monstrous unknown, and whereas Aeschylus’s tales are ones of indefinite resolution, Alexander’s tales are ones of containment. If the unknown and unnamed were seen as the antitheses of civilization, then the releasing of these forces heralded the apocalypse. Containment, first as Alexander’s ‘gates’ but later as boundaries and thresholds in cartography begin to associate the notion of ‘monster’ with the national idea of ‘foreign’. The designation of infidel nations, and monstrous races onto which we project our worst fears not only allows us to hold the unknown at a distance, but also casts an omnipresent threat of chaos and end times upon the heads of Christians. It’s us and them. As Asma explains “the cursed sons of Cain will finally burst forth from the gates, and the realm of the reprobate will be emptied into the geographic world” (Asma, 2009). This fear becomes a biological reality but also a political necessity and effective means of societal control.
This use of monstrous distance and containment continues through the second of Asma’s distinct phases, that of evolutionary necessity, where enlightened binaries of angst and optimism, labelled and unclassified, known and unknowable, repulsion and attraction, internal and external, natural and fabricated appear. Monsters begin to be understood through documented empirical method, curiosity and enquiry rather than seen as creations of a whimsical divinity or explained as repercussions and consequence of proud or sinful behavior. They are seen as organic, logical, and inclusive parts of the world, even if they still foster fear, repulsion and deviance. Our classification of them eases our anxiety, and our curiosity towards them through entertainment remains as strong as ever.
If the monstrous in the theological era is characterized by fear, then the evolutionary era seeks to manage and ultimately eradicate that fear through documented reason and observation. Management of the unknown becomes more common through scientific enquiry, which increasingly develops in binary opposition against organized religious belief. Explanations of nature versus those of the whimsical divine lead to greater understandings of lineage, adaptation, our place in time, biological evolution, and the environmental circumstances in the world which produce these kinds of internal and external notions of the monstrous. The liminal spaces of uncertainty are different, but still present.
Asma argues that we still process and manage our uncertain understanding of the monstrous through curiosity, but that this splits into two distinct observational approaches. Curiosity for entertainment and commercial gain, and curiosity for scientific understanding. He characterizes these thoughts as efforts toward ‘eradicating the fantastic’ (Asma, 2009), and outlines a more objective zoology through amassed collections, specimens and taxonomies being brought back from elsewhere in the world as travel also becomes more prevalent and possible. This ‘bringing back’ from foreign lands leads Bacon to call for scientific societies to democratize and share this knowledge and information in the spirit of managing the unknown through experimental observation, classification and labelling, a process which still happens today.
So as humans start to master and control their own understanding of the natural world, they start to pull away from other animals (and each other) in faculty. Asma aligns this thought with knowledge deriving specifically from systemic, experimental, controlled observation, rather than from scripture and classical tradition. The very notion of divine influence as a creative force is questioned. Rational thought begins to master and overcome the theologically monstrous, with Asma continuing that “the savants of this era believed that a universal rationality operated below the surface of idiosyncratic cultural bias and could be accessed through careful empirical analysis and mathematics” (Asma, 2009). Access to knowledge no longer needed to be channeled exclusively through God.
Observation fueled by fascination and curiosity in managing that which is ‘not us’ still needed to exercise caution around the gullibility of humans for invented myths and monsters, with the main combative technique being the rational naming and grouping of species which helped move from bestiaries to encyclopedic categorization. The fantastic begins to fade away as science separates empirical understanding from the stories we tell ourselves. Asma argues that despite this, we still seek entertainment through the exotic and deviant, and continue to have a ‘strong taste for the abnormal’ (Asma, 2009), irrespective of how disguised as science it may be.
So in the evolutionary era there’s an intense fascination with the observed as a means of managing and mastering the unknown, of that which is not us, which leads to the very rejection of a designing force in nature. The liminal spaces in which the monstrous thrives begin to shrink. But if there’s no consciously divine craftsmanship at work, we still struggle to make sense of the world around us, and increasingly within us. To solve for this, and in moving into the more recent technological era, we choose to absorb the monstrous within ourselves, expand our observation to entire societies, and join with the objects we make to control our fears.
Modern monstrosity in the technological era concerns itself more with human vulnerability. If the natural world has been mastered and managed, and categorization has run its course, then our primary source of the unknown becomes the behavior of those who are not us. The monstrous turns inward upon itself, which we see in early examples of gothic literature, and also thrives today in modern horror movies. But where Asma sees this inward trajectory as consequence of evolutionary understanding running its course, we can go further in proposing that there’s an inevitable culture of incremental boundary pushing which leads not only to more normalization of the previously monstrous, but more and more extreme versions of it. It creates a separation of past and future monstrosity, with the present the liminal voltage propelling narrative forward and seeking resolution. Asma outlines the lineage of cinematic terror through divine means in the seventies, through slasher films in the eighties, and through to the torture porn of modern horror in the early twenty-first century. And he equates sin as a through line in inviting the wrath of others, and perhaps even as simple observers of this entertainment, we’re complicit in that monstrosity. The monstrous is sanitized and held at a safe celluloid distance from which we still willingly watch through our fingers. Here the movies fill the present liminal vacuum of the godless, where flesh is expendable, synthetic blood spills cheap, and fear is commoditized.
So while the monstrous is still weaponized for entertainment, Asma also discusses a broader societal strain in acts of terrorism, mass murder, and the atrocities we reap upon ourselves. Asma doesn’t explicitly say this, but to continue his thought about eras of the monstrous running their course, when categorization and management of the monstrous expends itself, monstrosity again inevitably turns inward upon itself, and this time we exact wrath upon each other. If in the evolutionary era we observed empirically, here our modern, technological observations turn to criticism, judgment, and blame.
Asma concludes with an exploration of biotechnology, where humans play God with their own kind through genetic manipulation, cosmetic correction, and how the monstrous is now a simple matter of choice. As Asma calls it, ‘the all too human urge to escape aging and death’ (Asma, 2009). Here we reconstruct ourselves into the image of the uncanny, where the body becomes more plastic and open to manipulation than ever before. If God is a watch maker, we no longer have to keep time in the clock we’re born into. We deliberately, consciously absorb the monstrous within ourselves, eliminate it surgically, course-correct our own biology, cure disease and transcend the process of aging. By absorbing the monstrous within our own bodies, it’s easier to control it over an external force. But of course, if there’s no differentiation, then we’ve become the monsters ourselves.
Asma’s comprehensive chronology of monstrosity compiles a wonderful taxonomy of our deepest fears. But whereas he articulates this biological history through a distinct series of course-running, expendable waves which crash against each other over time, he stops short of drawing a holistic through line of inevitability from then to now. That the process of normalization over time is a natural part of our understanding of the world, but also the deterministic overcoming of fear. That this normalization is unavoidable on the path of human progress and understanding. That while Asma talks of the necessity of the monstrous in helping us understand ourselves and the world around us, he doesn’t go as far as to state that it was always thus and always will be. That liminal vacuums grow and shrink as the monstrous gets absorbed by its surrounding binaries, but that humans will inevitably seek out more and more creative ways to gouge out those spaces of the unknown.
If Asma sees the monstrous as a biological necessity, we can also see it as inevitability. The monstrous isn’t just something we need to survive and overcome fear out of evolutionary need, but human progress itself and the march of technology in particular, is highly dependent upon the inevitability of absorbing, weaponizing, and conquering that which we will always seek to create. Eradication of the monstrous is inevitable, but it’s only a temporary stop on a dangerously infinite journey.
References:
Asma, S. (2009). On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. (New York: Oxford University Press).
When The Gods Speak With Their Mouths Full
“Emphasis on elevated modes of religious conduct and discourse has overshadowed the less lofty aspects of religious experiences” (Rose, 2018, para. 1)
Food has always been a bridge between the human and the divine, with ritual offering, sacrifice, and the consumption of the blessed body foundational to the fostering of connection between us and Them. But the fluidity and diversity in the micro practices which go into the preparation of this food, and the reflected ethnographic conclusions we draw from such observations are at the root of Elizabeth Perez’s studies of Lucumíc tradition, and are alive and well today on the south side of Chicago. Perez not only illuminates these marginalized rituals of preparation but seeks to amplify their reclamation after centuries of European colonial corruption, with the kitchen the primary site of worship and ritual in the micro practice, but a critical site of restoration in the macro practice.
Perez makes a comprehensive argument that worship, irrespective of tradition but with particular emphasis within West African and Santoria-focused cultures is an inherently sensorial experience. One where taste has been universally marginalized by monotheistic traditions. In observing, illuminating, and publicizing the micro practices which infuse the preparation of food in these rituals, from butchery to baking and plucking to poaching, Perez explores how these behaviors season practitioners into inter-generational ritualized habituation, and how ultimately hunger, thirst and the pleasures of food are important shared traits between humans and the divine, with the tongue serving as a critical liminal threshold (Perez, 2016, p. 55).
But in revealing these intimate, private practices, do we diminish their value? Is the very ethnographic observation of difference still inherently a technique of the colonial reinforcement of difference? What might the ethical implications be of such work in making a very private ritual public to non-practitioners? To what extent are scholars authorized to conduct such work?
While Perez is incredibly respectful in her embedded observations, ultimately, she’s still articulating a discussion of difference. We as co-observers in our reading of her work draw more of a qualitative distinction than she does herself, but it is still Perez who is framing the edges of this comparison, and we are complicit in this observation. It aspires to a divine exploration of universality, but it’s still us and them. Perez offers diversity of faith as ethnographically fascinating, but still positions it as unusual, and in opposition to the established practices of monotheistic ritual.
Anthropologies of religion are like historiographies of events. These aren’t just about rites of passage but help to surface differing portrayals of what religious belief can even be in different cultures. In the case of Lucumí, these traditions don’t require a textual basis, or fixed venues of worship such as churches or synagogues, but they also don’t require predominantly male leadership, with women in many more authoritative, powerful roles (Finver, 2020). These traditions can involve phenomena such as spirit possession and other experiences where the division of contact between the divine and the human is ritually eroded. In her observations of the Ilé Loroye home temple, a place of worship for a community of black Chicagoans who, as adults embraced Lucumí, an adaptation of West African Santoria created under Spanish rule in Cuba, Perez explores the choreography of cooking as a means of drawing closer to God and communing with the departed.
Within this choreography, Perez observes rhythmic movements internalized by its practitioners (Perez, 2016, p. 93), and how the creation of the intimate spaces of kitchen and preparation create an aura of quiet storytelling which has often been marginalized within the history of religious scholarship. Whereas in monotheistic religions we tend to focus on larger transformational macro practice rites of privileged passage such as baptism, confirmation, marriage or eucharistic ceremonies, Perez seeks to illuminate what’s happening in the everyday micro practices performed by everyone in the preparation of what we’ll consume in bringing ourselves closer to a larger organizing force. That Lucumí tradition explicitly does not seek to stake its transformative power upon the macro practice of public rites of passage. That these Caribbean traditions of mediumship, of accessing not just the divine but the spirits of those who’ve died, as she says, those still ‘available’ to practitioners (Finver, 2020), take root in The United States through migration and immigration, settling into distinct communities predicated upon the continued expansion of the religious freedom on which the country was founded.
But whereas practitioners in Ilé Loroye may think of West African tradition as the source of their belief, they very often also treat Cuba as a site of pilgrimage (Finver, 2020). Importantly, these connections to source seek to purify the tradition of its colonial corruptions and reclaim orisha worship from those who would seek to eliminate it or characterize it as primitive. As such, many of these micro practices have deliberately remained secretive, private, and hidden from observation and the uninitiated. Perez discusses how the micro practices of choreographed food preparation, even the ritual of informal discussion, are more consequential than we may initially observe. In doing so she frames her discussion of micro and private and macro as public. To what extent is it ethically appropriate for her to break the delineation between these two frameworks for a tradition of which she is not a practitioner?
“To understand Black Atlantic religions, one must grasp not only their ethics and aesthetics but also their synaesthetics – the somatic and emotional dimensions of practitioners’ everyday experience.” (Perez, 2016, p. 9)
Perez argues that it’s important for scholars to look at the details. The small gestures, the way in which a knife is used, the nature of how feathers are removed, or the dance of multiple participation. It’s here that sensorial experience gets prioritized in seeking to make these rituals connect directly and distinctly to the divine, a series of practices much less mediated by the need for texts, leadership, or the specific customs of western monotheism. Perez explores the reshaping of this sensorial experience which happens when observationally embedded within such a community. That this effort is messy, olfactory, visual, and tactile. It’s human.
In also including observation that Black Atlantic tradition does not follow established hierarchies of gender or sexual orientation norms we see in other traditions, Perez explains how women have an immense amount of power as diviners, dancers, herbalists and specialists (Finver, 2020). And how this power also extends to homosexuals as being important religious actors within these traditions (Perez, 2016, p. 120). These kitchens aren’t just run by women, but very often by gay men, and the articulation of this difference, in many ways an inversion of what we see in Catholicism, Islam, Judaism and other western forms of Christianity, is drawn as distinct and ethnographically valuable.
Ultimately, Perez connects her discussion back to the need for the Gods to eat. That they crave the sight of objects and the feel of hands, lips and fingertips (Perez, 2018). But whereas we may be familiar with the bovine offerings of Prometheus or the ritual consumption of the Body of Christ every Sunday morning, we still hold the details of this oral consumption at a distance, and it is this space which Perez seeks to illuminate, and specifically how Lucumíc tradition prioritizes and celebrates these micro moments. That it’s more than just the ceremonial endeavor of culinary preparation seeking to connect with the cosmologically uncanny or supernatural.
Perez argues that the study of edible things and their consumption has been marginalized in histories of worship in favor of objects, symbols, icons, acts and architecture. She draws on histories of gastronomic suspicion, which have cast the tongue as an organ of indulgence rather than as a liminal threshold between human and divine, with taste very much at the bottom of the classical sensorial hierarchy (Perez, 2018). Where the experiences of the palette are too transitory and trifling to ever be connected to any serious understanding of the universal. And explicitly how African traditions have been portrayed as captive to these fleeting passions and depicted as savage consumers of the forbidden, often characterized in the cannibalism of the boiling explorer in the cauldron (Perez, 2018). That the tactile, sensorial nature of these culinary traditions and rituals have only served to amplify the sense of difference and hierarchy between subjectively rightful and wrongful methods of worship. As such, African deities have often had to prove their validity to western observers, and in many ways these rituals enact the same thing, irrespective of cultural difference. That it is food which bridges the gap between humans and the divine, and that hunger, thirst and the pleasures of food are traits which are shared by both gods and humans. Food isn’t just the bridge between us and them, it’s also the bridge between here and the hereafter. To feed the Gods is to make them real, to make them like us, to bring back the dead, and they respond to our requests when their bellies and mouths are full. Their satisfaction is the root of our rituals of worship, with the tongue and tastebuds serving as critical thresholds. By illuminating the careful practices of preparation in ensuring this satisfaction, Perez illustrates that such colonial differences are inherently ripe for dismantling.
But is there an ethical conflict in Perez’s work illuminating what goes on behind the closed doors of Ilé Loroye? In shrinking the liminal space of micro practice and macro practice through publication, does she dilute its authority and influence? Ultimately, it’s a discussion of if we see this as a celebration of the strength of religious diversity, or a reinforcement of its difference. The dismantling of previous colonial constructs, frameworks of difference, and reclamation of the suppressed is admirable, but in these observations, there is a cost. That the private and intimate is no longer either. That the democratization of our awareness of micro practice is in itself a means of destroying it. That in sanitizing and normalizing difference, this balance remains highly delicate, something Perez handles with sensitivity in her observations.
Sensorial practices of worship are how we’ve always connected to the divine, and Perez’s reclamation of the liminal threshold of the tongue and the choreography of the kitchen, with specific connection to the Black Atlantic experience illuminates an important fluidity and diversity in what it means to believe. However, in doing so, her very observation changes these practices, and the observer effect is precarious, stirring the pot on these previously intimate, private spaces of worship.
References:
Finver, S.H. (2020). Kitchens and Constructions of Religious Subjectivity in Black Atlantic Traditions. An interview with Elizabeth Perez. The Religious Studies Project. [Audio File]. Retrieved from https://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/kitchens-and-constructions-of-religious-subjectivity-in-black-atlantic-traditions/
Perez, E. (2016). Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions. (New York: NYU Press).
Perez, E. (2018). Soul Food and Black Atlantic Religion. YouTube.com. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOveS4vzCZ8
Rose, K. S. (2018). Religion in the Kitchen Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions. Reading Religion. Retrieved from https://readingreligion.org/books/religion-kitchen.
The Restless Heart: Quantifying Paranormal Pursuit in American Society
“The restlessness and the longing, like the longing that is in the whistle of a faraway train. Except that the longing isn't really in the whistle—it is in you.” (DeJong, 1955)
Restlessness defines those who seek the truth. Those with the intense curiosity to devote their lives to the belief that something unknown and perhaps unknowable, is out there. Those for whom the paranormal is simply, the normal. These experiences are overwhelmingly positive for those who choose to pursue them, and create community, strong feelings of unity, and connect issues of faith with emotions of uncanny presence. For those that experience them, they experience them as real.
When it comes to explorations of ghosts and communing with the hereafter, the cryptozoological hunt for forest creatures long lost to history, or the abduction encounters of an alien race, we need to draw upon clear distinctions between what is happening, and the causal conclusions we derive from our observations. We are less interested in the subjective conversation surrounding the reality of ghosts, monsters or aliens, but rather people’s lived experience of that which goes bump in the night, and what effect it has upon us as humans. It’s effects over the reality of the experience itself. It’s the sociological observation and quantification of such phenomena amongst Americans which serves as the central premise of Bader, Baker and Mencken’s research into the paranormal (Bader et al., 2017).
Like those of more traditional faith, their research concerns a fundamental questioning of why we believe, and they attempt to extract insight into this through the sociological methods of direct observation, qualitative surveying, existing demographic data, field interviews at communal gatherings, and analytical measures of sociodemographic and religious belief. In several instances, they directly join the hunt for evidence that the truth is out there.
There are a number of case studies they lean on for their observations, primarily interviews with those claiming to have been abducted by aliens or otherwise having communicated with the non-terrestrial (Bader et al., 2017, p. 107), as well as direct experience of those looking for Bigfoot in remote areas of the West Coast (Bader et al., 2017, p. 132), and those seeking to receive signs from the departed as evidence that death is not the end (Bader et al., 2017, p. 81). Bader, Baker and Mencken then correlate these observations with existing data sets conducted through surveys over a number of years, and draw their sociological conclusions as to what might cause some to believe, and others to be skeptical.
They primarily lean on data from three waves of the Baylor Religion Survey in 2005, 2011 and 2014 (Bader et al., 2017, p. 241), and two waves of the Chapman University Survey of American Fears in 2014 and 2015 (Bader et al., 2017, p. 241). These surveys were primarily conducted through random dialing phone sampling, with no prior screening for religious belief, and sized at around fifteen hundred participants each. Comparisons of demographic elements such as gender, marriage, active religious practice and political persuasion are correlated with varying degrees of belief intensity in paranormal experiences. There is a quantitative rigor applied to the methodology, but in their combination of these findings with their own qualitative observations, they fall short in drawing causation where at best there is tenuous correlation. In many ways, their own research echoes the interpretive elasticity of those they are observing, in attempting to find evidence for that which they already believe.
Issues of non-replicability, post-hoc theorizing, the inappropriate use of statistics, opaque documentation of materials and data, and lack of peer review are all evidence of challenges in evaluating not just the research of those observed, but their own research itself. We’re unaware of undisclosed flexibility in their data collection, where, just like the paranormal hunters, such analysis allows anything to be presented as significant, and there are numerous examples throughout their research where they draw more generalized conclusions about the American population overall.
With such latitude in observation and collection, we can ‘discover’ just about anything, and the research draws upon behavior of hypothesizing after the results are known, describing a result derived from data exploration as though it had been predicted all along. That we are looking for confirmation of an existing paranormal belief, rather than starting from a place of validating something’s absence.
Replication in paranormal research is acknowledged by Bader, Baker and Mencken as inherently challenging, given the highly speculative and subjective nature of the observed evidence, and we have to adjust our thinking of what it means to have a successful replication at all. Finding a fresh footprint in the woods isn’t nearly the same thing as a grainy 35mm film of a large mammal walking between the trees.
In particular, Bader, Baker and Mencken lean on a discussion of how technology and the democratization of the tools of information distribution have only broadened these questionable research practices, and driven more distance and division between those willing to put the effort into their own research, and scientific method aimed at empirical, iterative, cumulative learning. Authoritative group voice is given to individual anecdotes, and we conclude that if enough people on the internet agree, then it must be true. This is a division which grows stronger each year, and is reflective of larger sociological trends of those who choose to believe the perspectives and evidence of science, and those who don’t. For many, the combination of these sentiments and a global pandemic has been a fatal cocktail.
But confirmation bias is strong in both the research of the paranormal hunters, and in Bader, Baker and Mencken’s work. The search for evidence which will confirm a pre-existing belief or theory, while ignoring or down playing data which counters those beliefs. Hindsight bias, where researchers transform evidence which might have countered a theory into evidence which ultimately supports the researchers’ position is also present, as well as selective deletion of outliers in order to influence or artificially inflate statistical relationships is here too. This is most apparent in their extrapolation of a sample size of around fifteen hundred participants into conclusive, statistically significant behaviors for what the more than two hundred million adult Americans think about the paranormal. At best it’s weakly correlated. At worst it asserts causation where there is none.
Specifically, replication allows us to build confidence in our findings, and helps us to understand how generalizable certain findings are. Without replication, we cannot generalize. In looking at the external validity, the extent to which the results translate to other populations outside of those observed, Bader, Baker and Mencken apply the same spurious correlations and convenience sampling to those they are researching, instead of applying a more rigorous proportionate stratified random sampling approach, where the respondents more accurately match those same proportions in the population. They discuss this extrapolation a little in their methodology, but ultimately infer that their findings are universal. That their research generalizes more broadly, when there’s no evidence to suggest it does.
However, this is not to discount the lived experience of the ghost hunters, alien abductees, or those seeking evidence of the Sasquatch. These beliefs are real, even if the data suggests a high degree of skepticality, and it’s this common sense which leads us away from the uncertainty of scientific method, and towards beliefs which fit in with the narrative patchwork of things we already understand as true. Combined with the cynical commercialism of pseudoscientific claims, anecdotes are empowered to trump evidence, and confirmation (rather than falsification) is given undue weight.
Creating the impression of scientific validity or controversy where none actually exists lacks the deductive, replicative and corrective mechanisms for uncovering that which we know to be true. Paranormal research trades on ambiguity, anecdotal evidence, unrepresentative sample sizes, and the belief that cryptozoology is simply that which is yet to be found. Yet despite all of this, the researchers’ subjects and observations experience all of this as very, very real.
Bader, Baker and Mencken draw a number of causal conclusions from their research, initially around gender, with women more likely to believe in enlightenment-related paranormal topics than men, aligned with stronger belief in predictive experiences such as astrology, prophetic dreams and horoscopes, whereas men are more likely to express belief in discovery-related subjects such as direct evidence of Bigfoot or UFOs ((Bader et al., 2017, p. 233). On a broader scale, those from economically marginalized backgrounds gravitate towards stronger paranormal belief too (Bader et al., 2017, p. 234).
In terms of correlation with existing religious belief, those who are not religious at all and those with deep faith (in terms of biblical literacy and regular service attendance) exhibit the lowest levels of paranormal belief. Those in the liminal space of moderate religiosity appear to have the strongest belief in the paranormal. Those with deep religious belief also tend to have stronger emotions of supernatural evil forces such as demons, speaking in tongues, or hearing the voice of Satan.
More broadly, more than half of Americans have at least one such belief in paranormal experience, although there is high variability in the number of these beliefs based on sociological factors such as education level or income (Bader et al., 2017, p. 236).
So how might we explain such widespread paranormal belief and interest in the American population? Is it merely reflective of our cultural, foundational identity system of religious freedom and collective assertion that all are welcome to believe what inspires them best? Is it a restless curiosity inherent in American identity to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no man has gone before? Or is it a belief that something unknown and unknowable is always out there in the wilderness to motivate us into learning more about ourselves? That by doing the work of developing our own hypotheses, gathering our own evidence, and drawing our own conclusions, we are more empowered in our learning journey because we’ve done the work ourselves.
The very idea that something unknowable is being revealed is common in both religious and paranormal belief, with David Bryce Yaden’s work exploring our fascination with these subjective experiences at scale across communities and cultures (McDaniel, 2016). Getting comfortable with the study of such subjectivity and anecdotal evidence is challenging for many, and there is clear delineation in societies across lines of gender, education level, economic status and existing religious practice in Bader, Baker and Mencken’s work which seeks to illuminate and quantify these differences. The ritual of the paranormal hunt, be it tracking footprints in the mud or listening for bumps in the night, service the limbic discharges bio-genetic structuralists observe for attempts at maximizing the sense of security and comprehension which comes from the equilibrium of such revelation (McDaniel, 2022).
But it’s a distinctly American restlessness which characterizes the manifest pursuit of the unknown, and the seeking out of the avatars and apparitions which may or may not reveal grander truths about the world. In this, we deviate from scientific method, and take such observations into our own hands, empowering ourselves and those with the same perspectives to do the work together. And in that work, we find meaning, purpose, and a greater connection to that which is not us.
So while Bader, Baker and Mencken’s causal conclusions are questionable, they accurately reflect behaviors which provide positive meaning for those who choose to pursue evidence of the paranormal. In drawing correlations across sociological aspects of gender, race, religious belief, educational background, and economic status, they attempt to generalize the ritual behavior of such restless pursuits and normalize our comfort level with the subjectively skeptical.
Inadvertently illuminating deviance from scientific method, they draw upon observations and direct lived experience of overwhelmingly positive feelings of unity, presence and community, irrespective of the degree to which we believe in the paranormal itself. And in doing so, they reflect larger acceptance that the unknown, unknowable, and uncomfortable is simply part of what makes life so rich.
Not everything in our lived experience can be explained, and if it can, then it can be explained away. But our relentless, restless pursuit of a resolved limbic uncanny, our elastic expansion of faith beyond established religion and scientific method, our willing inhabitation of the limbic spaces of the paranormal and cryptozoology, and our attempts to make sense of the beyond are in themselves of enormous sociological value.
References:
Bader, C., Baker, J., and Mencken, F. (2017). Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture. (New York: New York University Press).
DeJong, M. (1955). The Little Cow and The Turtle. Harper & Brothers.
McDaniel, J. (2016). Interview with Prof. David Yaden [Video file]. Retrieved from https://canvas.upenn.edu/courses/1626582/pages/interview-with-prof-david-yaden?module_item_id=22445989
McDaniel, J. (2022). Lecture 9.3 Limbic Discharges & Ritual. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://canvas.upenn.edu/courses/1626582/pages/lecture-9-dot-3-limbic-discharges-and-ritual?module_item_id=22446019
It’s Not You, It’s Me: The Encyclopedic Unknowable of Yōkai
“People live in ignorance. Constantly turning a blind eye. Those that let go of their past, have no future.”
Kawahime, the River Princess in ‘The Great Yōkai War’(Takashi Miike, 2005)
How do we rationalize the unknowable? Not only the unseen natural forces which act upon us as humans, but those supernatural forces which thrive in the shadows, go bump in the night, and haunt our dreams and deepest fears?
Michael Dylan Foster’s research into the Japanese phenomena of yōkai offers a political, cultural, and economic approach to answering these questions, placing these uncanny, liminal experiences into several distinctly delineated historical periods. He broadly defines yōkai as literal and figurative shapeshifters who thrive in the natural world but are supernatural themselves. Inexplicable occurrences and unknowable phenomena which have been part of the cultural imagination for as long as history has been recorded. As such, they’re challenging to define because like us, they’re always changing. They’re mutable, have expansive natures of meaning, and encompass a broad spectrum of forms from the concrete and tangible ‘monster’ to the more amorphous ideas and abstract manifestations of numinous apparition.
Yōkai evolve from the notion of bakemono (Foster, 2009, p. 5) the ability to change form, and emerge from an event, a feeling or question we have about our lived experience (Foster & Davisson, 2021). That itch of curiosity we have to make sense of something strange. In this space we learn to identify these feelings and subsequently name them. For example, that unknowable feeling of someone watching us, that feeling that there’s eyes in the walls, manifests itself as the yōkai Mokumokuren (Foster, 2009, p. 66), a creature who exists as a screen with hundreds of eyes. Perhaps the modern Mokumokuren lurks in our omnipresent digital cameras. Or the idea that specific times and places are infested with demons, as we see in Dante’s Inferno, Alexander’s Gates, or early cartography. Frightening, chaotic masses of strange creatures from which we must flee at all costs. That there are undifferentiated and unnamed hordes of the monstrous unknown waiting for us not just in the shadows or under the bed, but in specific parts of the world. Spaces of disorder which must be contained and ultimately conquered. The ‘night procession of a hundred demons’ or Hyakki Yagyō (Foster, 2009, p. 56) articulates Foster’s notion of the terrifying ‘pandemonium’ of the unknown inherent in the culture of yōkai and our deeply rooted biological, neurological fears of the unknowable (Foster & Davisson, 2021).
Foster situates his argument beginning in the Edo period (1603 – 1868), where Japanese culture begins to flourish in parallel with the rise of urbanization and an increase in national literacy. As in naturalist pursuits in western cultures during the same period, the labeling, naming, and differentiating of individual species of yōkai helps us move from the fear of pandemonium to the order of parade. And as with western encyclopedic collection and documentation of species, there exists an incredible abundance and variation of yōkai, of which, just like the natural world, there are hundreds of regional variants.
This encyclopedic mode creates a more rigorous processing, organization, and expression of these collected experiences, framing them as a natural history initiative. Ideas, pictures, and stories were collected, and then classified, organized, illustrated, and described in detail. In doing this, we not only tell stories about the origins of yōkai but introduce a ludic method of playing with them ourselves (Foster, 2009, p. 48-49), of expanding them and treating them with elastic interpretation. We have fun with them, adding to the pantheon with our own thoughts and explanations. This process is playful, light-hearted, creative, and expresses information in a way which makes the encyclopedic classification of these experiences more accessible to a culture rising in literacy. It’s a human application of play onto the supernatural experience of the unknown and feared.
The most notable compiler of yōkai during the Edo period is Toriyama Sekien (1712 – 1788), who creates the large series of Hyakki Yagyō catalogs which collect, but also play with these cultural variations (Foster, 2009, p. 156). This conscious blending of the encyclopedic collection and the ludic modes of expression are still present in modern day Japanese culture in card games such as Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh!, where statistics, strengths, sources of energy, and weaknesses are collected alongside illustrations of various states of development, natural environment, and weaponized form. Sekien is the first to substantially document yōkai as cultural phenomenon and created an early system for making sense of the unknowable which still exists today.
Foster continues this argument through the Meiji period (1868 – 1912), which further aligns Japanese culture with the increasing arrival of outsiders into Japan, broader scientific discovery, continued rise in literacy, and the introduction of different cultures other than their own (Foster, 2009, p. 77-78). The Edo period had essentially been a culture preserved over two hundred years with very little outside influence, but as scientific thinking brought in new ways of approaching the supernatural, Japan began to compare itself to the west, and adapted its understanding of the unknowable as well. In doing this, the rise of scientific method began to declare yōkai as shinkei, a pathology of nervous disorder brought about by supernatural experiences (Foster & Davisson, 2021). In making sense of yōkai, and attributing their existence to mental disorder, there are distinct efforts to undo previous cultural mythology in the yokaigaku work of Inoue Enryō (Foster, 2009, p. 113-114). In defining yōkai he seeks to destroy them, to position them as relics of a primitive past with no place in a modern Japan, and in explaining them as astral phenomena, tricks of the mind, currents of the weather, or simply our mind misbehaving, he aligns perceptions of yōkai with mental illness and attempts to undo centuries of folklore (Foster & Davisson, 2021).
Yanagita Kunio opposes this approach, believing yōkai to be the very heart of Japanese culture, that which made them uniquely Japanese. If yōkai were to be lost, something important to Japanese cultural identity would also disappear, something critical in an age of increasing globalization and national dilution (Foster, 2009, p. 147 & 152-153). In doing this, Kunio creates the Minzokugaku, a comprehensive gathering of folklore which sought to gather and preserve all the stories which were swiftly fading during the Meiji period, and collects them into the Tono Monogatori, the Japanese version of what westerners understand of their own euro-centric cultures through Grimm’s fairy tales (Foster 2009, p.139-142). This perpetual push and pull, give and take between those which would seek progress, and those which would preserve the past characterizes not only our understanding of yōkai, but also our understanding of ourselves.
New yōkai are being born all the time through modern means of literature and movies, but also in our more modern unknown spaces of the internet. If the natural world is increasingly known, yōkai have moved to liminal spaces elsewhere, and thrive today in the darker reaches of the web, in digital corners equally as terrifying as the forests of hundreds of years ago (Foster & Davisson, 2021). They live in those shadows of life where we don’t know the answers, but also in reaches where we can be satisfied with the ambiguities of existence. Where our desire to simply know that they’re there is comfort enough. It’s in these moments where we are at peace with the unknowable, and where yōkai are born. But in conquering the natural world, relentless human curiosity still relies upon significant motivation towards the unknown. We need the unknown to make sense of our lives, and as such, yōkai help us maintain our curiosities and gives form to our fears. But it’s the unknown which gives us life, hope, and a reason to believe. Yōkai don’t explain these feelings, but they do give us a sense of ease in being able to label and give our feelings a name. They give the unknown form and function.
As such, are monsters unknowable? If we are to believe that our definition of known and unknown is constantly expanding and diverging, then the unknowable becomes essential. What becomes known is elastic, as scientific method but also our own comfort levels change over time, with the liminal spaces occupied by creatures such as yōkai expanding and contracting with individual experience. Through all of this however, the unknown is a constant, something we need to feed our curiosity. What’s understood, labelled, and classified only serves to create further liminal vacuums, which get filled in swiftly by the shadows of the unknown. When our natural world is understood completely, and our curiosity is exhaustively satisfied, we still create new spaces of electronic uncertainty with which to terrify ourselves. It’s a process that makes us uniquely human.
We attempt to ‘know’ through methodologies such as bio-genetic structuralism, scientific method, psychoanalysis, coherent arguments of political cause and effect, divine interpretations of God’s wrath, and our historical readings of the uncanny and supernatural, but the constant is that the monstrous and unknowable is within us. It’s us who empower the unknowable to thrive, and us who give the monstrous life. It’s us who give the divine their power through worship and ritual, and us who think we hear the bumps in the dark. Without us, and our hunger for the unknown, there is no belief system where monsters exist. They need us in order to be.
The nature of how things become known is driven by scientific method, philosophy, and literature just as much as it is by societal, economic, and historical moments, but there will always be these spaces of shadow within the world and especially within ourselves. Total encyclopedic illumination is something we strive for, but always fall short on. It’s a noble, but futile goal. To suggest that our belief in monsters can be understood with any degree of confidence is to suggest there is an aspirational moment where fear, curiosity and ambiguity no longer exist. When the unknowable is removed from our experience, we are no longer human.
Our modern experience seeks to catalog and describe everything that’s ever been, and everything that ever will be. We have access to every piece of recorded human experience in our pockets and at our fingertips, available at any time. Everything today is so comprehensively, exhaustively managed and known. But the concept of what’s known is an individual, not a collective experience. We cannot apply an encyclopedic understanding of what’s known to different societies, communities, and cultures equally, and as such, curiosity and ambiguity is compounded, not resolved through these extensive, thorough methods. If curiosity is the root of our relationship with the unknown, we have to believe that the unknown cannot be universally correlated to individual cultures, political, economic, or historic events. We can draw distinctions between the weird and wonderful to societal developments, but we cannot draw an argument of causation for these events where monsters thrive, expressly because our cultural differences are multi-layered, diverse, elastic, and ever-expanding. If monsters are unknowable because they only exist through our lived experience, and if we ourselves are unknowable, then so are they.
References:
Foster, M.D. (2009). Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yōkai. (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Foster, M.D. & Davisson, Z. (2021). Supernatural Beings: Yōkai Past & Present with Michael Dylan Foster and Zack Davisson. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3lpA83gKjU.
The Great Yōkai War. Directed by Takashi Miike, Kadokawa Pictures. 2005.