Redefining Rationality: Paranormal Investigators' Humour in England

ABSTRACT

In contemporary England, amateur paranormal investigators are actively engaged in attempts to produce objective knowledge about the ghostly and paranormal. Their project requires them to balance subjective, personal encounters with objective, technologically mediated ones. In doing so, they struggle to align their project with dominant understandings of rationality. Drawing on an ethnographic study of knowledge production among paranormal investigators, I explore paranormal investigators' use of humour and argue that they rely on humorous performances to align themselves with a powerful, hegemonic notion of rationality. Through their humour, they do not contest the scope of rationality; rather, they locate themselves as central to it.

KEYWORDS:

• Humour
• rationality
• popular science
• knowledge
• paranormal investigators

Notes

1. He did not specify which programme he watched. There are several television programmes that are aired regularly in the UK, such as Most Haunted, Ghost Hunters International, and T.A.P.S. I am not at all sure that he was referencing a specific scene in a particular programme. Most people who are involved, even tangentially, in pursuing or critiquing paranormal investigation are able to conjure stereotypical scenes such as these. To be fair, such imaginings do bear a strong resemblance to some segments of paranormal television programmes; however, in most shows, the presenters and crew typically acknowledge the possibility that ‘environmental factors,’ like wind or creaky floorboards, might contribute to sounds.

2. This is not to say that sceptics do not refute these understandings and valuations of ‘open-mindedness’. In much the way that investigators reinterpret the term sceptic, sceptics alleged that investigators' definition of open-mindedness is a misnomer.

3. The Flying Dutchman is a famous ghost ship that is unable to dock. It has been present in folklore since the eighteenth century. Novels, poems, and operas often depicted stories about it. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century sightings, it is typically depicted as a collection of eerie lights moving in the form of a ship.

4. Indeed, it is also possible and perhaps likely that my presence constituted another other. While I am fairly certain that most of my interlocutors did not perceive me as hostile or demeaning, I, nonetheless, was an anthropologist and not an investigator.