2013 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

18 ANTHROPOLOGY I Jesus College Annual Report 2013
and therapeutic ideas. She was creating a
compelling moral vision, with a description
of certain vital features of the contemporary
world, and offering her followers the
prospect of playing some sort of valuable role
in that world – of being potentially of service
to their fellow creatures in a time of crisis.
We might notice two things about this
encounter. First, ideas of flying saucers and
spacemen may become compelling under
this kind of condition without having to be
‘real’ in the positive sense of actually being
present. When the parameters of
measurement (by which we normally
establish what being present means)
temporarily become unclear, it is not evident
what ‘real’ might mean. We might suppose
that the material conditions of the time are
then conducive to the appearance of
imaginary objects. There is a great deal more
that could be said on this and the forms of
existence of paranormal phenomena.
Moreover, the medium’s grasp of the
implications for ordinary people of
international political events, scientific and
technological advances, and the potential for
meaningful moral action, was vastly more
sophisticated and outward looking than the
social scientists’ understanding. The social
scientists ignored the wider situation and
tried simply to pin the group’s vision of a new
world order to a supposed mental condition
that self-compensated for disappointed
hopes by avoiding facing the truth. Again, it
would be possible to go a good deal further
with this line of argument.
Why make an academic study of flying
saucers? A re-reading of the kind I propose
gives us clues as to how to tackle other
anomalous social phenomena. This
perspective is open to further elaboration,
both in developing a sociology of groups
organized around prophecies or secrets (they
are legion, including the promises offered
by some scientific research), and an
examination of the various overlapping
presuppositions held by the different parties
engaged in the generation of these kinds of
events. This allows a review of a wide variety
of social events which belong to nobody, but
which develop in a series of unanticipated
patterns. The study of flying saucers is an
example of this.
One last remark: these phenomena are not
in any sense new or recent, and the longerterm
continuities can be traced conveniently
by reading novels. When Prophecy Fails led to a
novel by Alison Lurie, Imaginary Friends
(1967), which was in fact where I first
encountered the study and the materials it
contains. But Lurie was also playing with
earlier accounts, drawing on Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s description of Mesmerism in
The Blithedale Romance (1854) and, in
particular, on Henry James’ use of
Spiritualism in The Bostonians (1888). Lurie
even borrows the name of James’ young
heroine for her medium to make the point.
These novels sketch a history of engagement
with the Metaphysical, and flying saucers are
simply one in a long sequence of continuing
phenomena.
Timothy Jenkins has just published Of Flying
Saucers and Social Scientists: a re-reading of When
Prophecy Fails and of Cognitive Dissonance,
Palgrave Macmillan 2013.