Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-196). Also available on the Internet.

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This thesis examines late Ottoman discourses on the soul and emotions as reflected by a large corpus of psychological literature under the umbrella of ilm-i ahval-i ruh (the science of the states of the soul, psychology) in relation to the rise of the rhetoric concerning the 'new man' - an imaginary 'Ottoman individual' educated in 'new schools' to be in complete harmony with Ottoman modernization. It posits that the 'new man' was subjected to a process of design as a producing unit whether in possession of a soul or not, while the conceptual framework of the 'individual' was being formulated. The secondary literature on Ottoman modernization has illustrated intellectual efforts for designing the 'new man' in relation to the formation of national identity. In doing so it has focused on the process of indoctrination and the dissemination of normative accounts. Drawing on that literature, this thesis intends to complicate the picture and look beyond the normative accounts. By approaching the debate between materialism and spiritualism as a psychological argument and revolving the story around the metaphors of 'man as machine' and 'man as animal', it aims to display the influence of the scientific and technological changes that shaped the material as well as the intellectual culture these authors experienced. In an attempt to go beyond what lies beneath the national and religious underpinnings of the imagined 'new man', this thesis maintains a tight focus on the psychological writings of four intellectuals - all of whom gave serious thought to the debate about the soul: Abdullah Cevdet, Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi, Baha Tevfik, and Mustafa Şekip Tunç. By shifting the centre of focus of the rhetoric about the 'new man' from national or religious identity formation to the pressing concerns about economic and technological progress, it shows an Ottoman entanglement with science and technology and a deeper Ottoman inquiry into the conceptual framework of the individual. Accordingly it argues that the psychological literature on the soul and emotions bears testimony to the acute concern for how to integrate individuals into the frenzy of progressive discourses in the late Ottoman Empire. This concern constituted common ground among intellectuals from different backgrounds. Yet they held different understandings of the notion of progress and often gave different answers to deeper philosophical questions pertaining to the new man's soul, emotions, will, and relations with collective units. Such complexity demonstrates that multiple trajectories were possible before national identity formation took concrete forms in a much later context, and that transnational patterns of 'constructing the subjects' through psychological studies played an equally important role.

In this dissertation, I explore the fantasies and paradoxical desires belying spiritual medium performances of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and new media practices of remediation. Forming the organizing construct of this dissertation, spiritual medium performance gives me a medium to explore fantasy as a means of suspending and manipulating audience belief. Through the use of my performance persona, Lucida Fox, I further connect the spiritual medium’s communication with the dead to the practices of remediation meant to summon the influences of obsolete media. Through Lucida, I remediate the past (Chapter 2), future (Chapter 3), and experiment with several spiritualist techniques in the present (Chapter 4). In the final chapter, I address the implications of this research on current discussions within the field of performance studies and conclude by offering future direction of this research.

This dissertation examines the cultural role of three controversial yet popular heterodox sciences of nineteenth century Spain: phrenology; animal magnetism and hypnosis; and spiritualism or spiritism. It assesses the relationship between the development of phrenology and early Catalanism, the connection of animal magnetism and hypnosis to both Catholicism and emergent medical discourse, and the flourishing of spiritism in the context of the production of a national genealogy. The project draws on myriad sources like literary works, daily newspapers, specialized journals, dissemination pamphlets, and case histories, to argue that these heterodox sciences were an integral part of the social and cultural history of the nineteenth century. It rethinks not just the relationship between science and cultural production that scholars like James Secord, Gillian Beer, and others have studied but also what we understand as nineteenth-century scientific heterodoxies, seeking to understand them as a broad socio-cultural phenomenon in the way they helped construct cultural practices of the time. Alternative Presence contends that phrenology, animal magnetism and hypnosis, and spiritism expanded rhizomatically away from the confines of canonical institutions and yet contributed to early political regionalism, practices of medical and religious healing, and national historiography. To study such mediations, I look both at these sciences’ main actors — heterogeneous individuals and groups who disseminated them — and at a series of narrative and expressive strategies visible in the discourse through which they flourished. As the term “science” evolved and gained social authority through the appearance of increasingly demarcated fields of expertise, heterodox sciences’ tessellated networks lost ground and were ultimately relegated to the sphere of pseudoscience or popular belief. However, during their lifetime they served to generate alternative ideas of the subject and the nation. Their crucial role in the nineteenth-century Spanish cultural field has been ripe for rediscovery, and this dissertation probes their imbrication with mainstream ways of imagining the paths to modernity.

Titel: Att möta andevärlden – En studie om trosuppfattningar bland svenska medium.I denna studie undersöks svenska professionella mediums trosuppfattningar rörande frågor omsjälen, livet efter döden, gudsbegreppet och moralens konsekvenser. Vidare undersöks vaddessa trosuppfattningar grundats i, hur väl de stämmer överens med varandra samt om depåverkats av de narrativ som visas i populärkultur med ockulta inslag. Resultatet av studienvisade att det fanns ett antal gemensamma faktorer hos informanterna. Dessa var främst tron påatt livet fortsätter efter döden, att människan har en själ och att denna själ är en del av en störrekraft som inte sällan refereras till som Gud eller Gudsenergin. Vad som skilde informanternaåt var främst religionstillhörighet, synen på reinkarnation samt tron på guider och andra väseni universum. Förhållandet till populärkultur varierade också mellan informanterna, mensamtliga var eniga om att populärkultur med ockulta inslag oftast inte stämmer överens medderas egna trosuppfattningar.

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Access to abstract restricted until May 2015 / Introduction to spiritualism and historiography -- Finding the limits of gender equality in a progressive movement -- A case study of a male medium -- Intellectual freedom : a license to criticize and an invitation to heterodoxy. / Access to thesis restricted until May 2015 / Department of History

"Spirited Media" analyzes distributed structures of authorship in the reform literature of the nineteenth-century United States. The literature that emerged out of reform movements like abolitionism often was a product of complex negotiations between speech and print, involving multiple people working across media in relationships that were sometimes collaborative, sometimes cooperative, and sometimes antagonistic. The cultural authority of print and individual authorship, often unquestioned in studies that focus on major or canonical figures of the nineteenth century, has tended to obscure some of this complexity. Moving from phonography, to Josiah Henson and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to spiritualism, to Sojourner Truth and Walt Whitman, I consider four cases in which reporters, amanuenses, spirit mediums, and poets revived and remediated the voices of abolitionists, fugitive slaves, and figures from American history. By separating publication into events—speech, inscription, revision, and print—I show that "authorship" consisted of a series of interactions over time and across media, but that in the case of reform, the stakes for proving that authorship was a clear and indisputable characteristic of print were high. For abolitionist, African American, and spiritualist speakers and writers, authority depended on authorship, which in turn depended on the transparency of the print or the medium, or the perception of a direct relationship between speaker and reader. Like authorship, this transparency was constructed by a variety of social actors for whom the author was a key site of empowerment. It was authorized by appeals to revelation and race, two constructs often sidelined in media histories, yet central to discussions of society and politics in nineteenth-century America. Thinking of authorship as a distributed phenomenon disrupts models of the unitary subject and original genius, calling attention instead to uncanny acts of reading and writing in nineteenth-century literature. This dissertation argues that we should think about the transformative power of U.S. literature as located in revelation, not just creation, and in congregating people, not just representing them. / text

The paranormal industry in Edinburgh has become a thriving niche within the country's tourist market. While ghost walks have been explored in anthropology from the perspective of spectacle, this thesis investigates and analyses the cultural framework which has furthered the success of the industry. Namely, the ways in which the paranormal industry have appropriated the beliefs and practices of an overarching ghost culture: a community of believers, investigators, mediums, and all those who actively attempt to engage with the paranormal. The increased visibility of the paranormal within popular culture has spurred a wide interest in the unknown and unexplained. Ghost hunting television shows and the prevalence of ghost stories has inspired the desire for unique experiences, and for audiences to contextualise the supernatural within their own lives. The paranormal industry has grown to accommodate this intense, active enthusiasm for all things spectral, and belief has become a commodity. This burgeoning fascination in ghosts has become an important aspect of how Scotland is sold as a destination. While commercial paranormal industries exist in other cities around the world, the historical perception of Scotland as other has created a precedent for the connection between Scottish national identity and the spectral. This thesis further investigates the ways in which the tourist industry continues to solidify the connection between Scottish heritage and the paranormal.