Scales of Materiality: Emergence and the Exceeding of Technology in Paranormal Chile

Abstract In this paper, I will analyze the technological apparatuses with which paranormal investigators work in Chile in ways that bind them to their bodies and surpass them. I will analyze various case studies from this field to show that the technological apparatuses must be understood as something other than merely machines or “matter”—that an account that seeks to take our interlocutors “seriously” must engage also with the specifics of the spirit worlds brought into being through the apparatuses. We are thus dealing with different emergent scales of techno-materiality, some of which appear to have a life of their own. In this case, spirits “come into view” through apparatuses that “exceed their materiality” (to paraphrase Jane Bennett (2010)). I will take recourse to Don Handelman (2021) to show that technologies in paranormal Chile open up ontological possibilities for reading the historical environment itself, unofficial and obscure stories alluded to by the apparatuses and gauged through the experience of temporal forms. In this sense, the skill is the experts’ open-ended discernment. There are, in all of this, then, various scales of emergence: self, spirit, moment, and history.