Mattering the Invisible is a collection of primarily ethnographically-derived essays focused on the ways in which various parapsychological and spiritual phenomena are “mattered,” that is, materialized, mediated, and made salient. In addition to being an interdisciplinary mix of anthropology, sociology, psychology, religious, and new media studies, Mattering also decenters the Global North context in which much research is bound, offering case studies from Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Cuba, Vietnam, and Angola. The majority of the text’s contributors are non-native English speakers whose second language is not English per se, but who nevertheless utilize a peculiar academic argot that is at times nearly indecipherable. The nonspecialist reader is left wondering what does actually “matter,” given the lavish citing of other theorists’ jargon-ladened phrases. Despite these stylistic issues, Mattering the Invisible still has much to offer religious studies scholars by exemplifying and expanding the possibilities of what constitutes material culture.

Divided into three...

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