2013 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

ANTHROPOLOGY I Jesus College Annual Report 2013 17
There was the group, certainly, but also the
sociologists who had infiltrated, and the
media which got hold of the story and
accelerated the rhythm of events to a crisis.
Rather than being “mental” events, produced
in the heads of the group members, they were
‘social’ events prompted by interactions
between different groups with different
beliefs and aims.
Perhaps the most significant interaction
was between the interests and ideas which
motivated the group around the medium and
the focus of the investigation introduced by
the social scientists who entered the group.
This interaction could be described as a
misunderstanding between a concern with
“prophecy” on the part of one party, and
“prediction” on the part of the other. The
social scientists took the notion of prophecy
to be a prediction – in this case a prediction
concerning a future event, a world disaster
and the arrival of flying saucers.
This view, however, misses what
concerned the group’s medium, who was
more interested in the disappearance of
previously secure forms of measurement
which hitherto had allowed prediction of the
future. The forms which had become
(temporarily) uncertain were clear from her
messages and concerned a variety of
scientific discoveries and technical
inventions. In essence, the messages
concerned space travel (still technically in the
future), involving transformed concepts of
distance; continental drift, involving
disturbed certainties about place; and nuclear
warfare, involving the dissolution of the
boundaries of the defensible self in what
came to be called ‘mutually assured
destruction’.
The medium was therefore working in an
environment in which the parameters of
distance, place and the bounded self had
become uncertain; where the notion of
prediction – which assumes stable and
unquestioned categories of measurement –
ceased to operate. The medium glimpsed
what we might call a new world condition,
with new threats and new possibilities of
participation. She articulated, moreover, an
account of these threats and possibilities in
the language available to her, offering an
version that made sense to her group.
Indeed, what she had to say was sufficiently
well understood to make sense to the media,
as well as to the social scientists, who could
work with spirit messages from outer space
as if they were perfectly familiar with such
notions. The medium was dealing not with
the future but the present, improvising a
seriesof solutions, drawing on elements
available from what is known as the
American tradition of ‘Metaphysical’ religion
– a mix of Christian, occult, philosophical