A Sociological Perspective on ‘Becoming’ A
Spirit Medium in Britain
Hannah Gilbert,
Ph.D.
Introduction
Psychical research and parapsychology have
accumulated an impressive body of research into Western
spirit mediumship. Since 1848, when the Fox sisters’
earliest demonstrations spawned a quick succession of
spirit mediums, a number of researchers have sought to
use the latest scientific techniques in order to
evaluate whether such phenomena provided evidence for
life after death. There was, from the offset, a
recognisable split between supporters and debunkers, a
dichotomy which still resonates in the contemporary
field of mediumship research. For some, experiments
seemed unable to prove how mediums were able to provide
such phenomena unless they were what they claimed to be.
For others, fraud was prevalent, and numerous reports
detail the various mundane methods employed in public
demonstrations and smaller sized séances. In the pursuit
of acceptable proof, mediums have been tried and tested
time and time again, in the field as well as in the
controlled settings of a laboratory (see Cerullo, 1982;
Gauld, 1982). Some may argue that we should be done with
mediumship, that the debunkers have effectively done
their work. But spirit mediumship persists. If anything,
recent times have seen a notable rise in both the
frequency and consumption of spirit communication.
Spirit mediumship is obviously an attractive enterprise,
for it offers us a chance to reconnect with those we
have loved and lost, and proposes a promise of evidence
for post-mortem survival.
From the search for proof to accounts of
experience
The ongoing
prevalence of spirit mediumship surely begs its
consideration as an important and necessary topic of
research. Indeed, psychical researchers and
parapsychologists are still investigating mediumship,
and they make convincing cases as to why such research
is so important. More recently, however, there is
emerging a new crop of researchers who come from a
somewhat different perspective: the agnostic social
scientist. The research agenda here is often less
concerned with whether or not mediumship is something we
can objectively validate one way or the other, and more
focused on the social dynamics of spirit mediumship both
as individual spiritual experiences, and as a social
performance that is meaningful to its public consumers,
and a society within which it operates more generally. A
number of researchers, often using an historical
approach, have investigated the relationship between
spirit mediumship and society, focusing on areas such as
bereavement, class, gender and politics (e.g. Barrow,
1986; Bourke, 2007; Carroll, 2000; Hazelgrove, 2000;
McMullin, 2004; Owen, 1990). In 2003, I started a PhD at
the University of York in order to explore the ways in
which contemporary British spirit mediums represent and
experience their spirit contacts. I used three specific
data sets: participant observations of public
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demonstrations; semi structured interviews with
mediums; and medium autobiographies. These data sets
were thought to compliment the social reality of spirit
mediumship in everyday life: in the ways in which
mediums present spirit contacts to their audiences, as
well as through a discussion about such experiences with
mediums in a one-on-one interview, or through readings
of their autobiographies (Gilbert, 2008).
The
main focus of this research was to explore spirit
mediumship as a social phenomena that is located both as
a series of private experiences reported by a number of
individuals, and the use of such experiences in public
performances. Because of such, my interests were not
concerned with whether or not mediums could
scientifically prove that they were in contact with a
real, interactive spirit world, but rather it treated
the spirit world as something that is sociological real
and meaningful to these individuals and their audiences.
As McClenon (1994) has argued:
“Sociologists and
anthropologists are often unable to determine if their
informants are lying or have reconstructed their
memories of events… If observers believe that a
particular event occurred, than that event is
sociologically real. It affects those who believe in
it.” (McClenon, 1994: xi)
The move away from
issues concerning scientific validity may seem to ignore
what many researchers could argue is of crucial concern
to mediumship research, but there are weaknesses to an
approach that focuses primarily on this question.
Information about the characteristics and personalities
of spirit mediums has, for a long time, been under
examined. While researchers such as Fontana (2003) argue
that accounts from similar individuals – i.e.
individuals who ascribe to a particular religious
framework – are liked to be heavily biased and
potentially unreliable, their accounts are nevertheless
indicative of the belief systems of particular social
groups, and give insight into personal means of making
sense of their experiences and the world around them. To
treat accounts as ‘sociologically real’ does not
necessarily infer that we must consider them
uncritically, but it does encourage us to give attention
to beliefs that are sociologically real and meaningful
for people, and not discard them as unimportant or in
some way contaminated because of personal bias.
Particularly for mediums, an affiliation with particular
religious or spiritual frameworks reflects a process of
meaning making and experience: rarely, it seems, do
mediums enter in to such affiliations without a
succession of meaningful experiences that encourage them
to question their notions of reality. There are a number
of social processes and experiences that influence
individuals who become mediums, and it these social
processes and experiences, and their relevance, that is
of interest to agnostic social scientists. Looking into
individuals’ backgrounds and gathering data about their
life experiences, is an important part of understanding
spirit mediumship sociologically. If we consider the
experiences surrounding spirit mediumship as
sociologically real, then we may be able to gain insight
into this phenomena as something that ‘affects those who
believe in it’, who do not necessarily operate in
accordance with scientific experiments but do so in a
number of specific social and private situations
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