![]() However, this article shows that the actual phatic channels proposed by Spiritualism consisted almost entirely of mediating chains of human spirits who stood between the bereaved seance guests and the spirits of the dear departed called “strangers.” While the “strangers” were, like the seance guests, departed white people, the authoritative “control spirits” were frequently exotic others such as “Indians” from the American imaginary of the Frontier. ![]() Recent media studies research on 19th-century Spiritualism has foregrounded the technological metaphors that suffuse Spiritualist models of the seance. Taking coordination to be a vulnerable achievement, I address recent work that elaborates on the ways that linguistic anthropology segments communication to explore how a particular medium offers its own distinctive forms of authorship, circulation, storage, and audiences. Anthropologists studying media have been modifying the analytical tools that linguistic anthropologists have developed for language to uncover when and how media are understood to provide the possibilities for social change and when they are not. People experience a communicative channel as new when it enables people to circulate knowledge in new ways, to call forth new publics, to occupy new communicative roles, to engage in new forms of politics and control-in short, new social practices. How is the newness of new media constructed? Rejecting technological determinism, linguistic anthropologists understand that newness emerges when previous strategies for coordinating social interactions are challenged by a communicative channel. Those who answer their call extend their ambivalent hospitality, maintaining mutu- ally constitutive relationships through which both the living and the dead are carried forth. When the dead are animated by digital media, they invite their loved ones to fill them, expanding into many versions to which shifting attachments can form. They are sparsely outlined, evoked rather than depicted. Their material- izations are partial and fragmentary, cohering around a database of elements rather than a cohesive, narrative identity. This mode of mediation is iterative, bringing forth the multiplicity of the dead. These media bring the dead to presence through forms of animation, understood not only in the narrow technical sense as a media genre but more broadly as a mode of mediation that vivifies in particular ways. ![]() Today, diverse digital media are being used to maintain and even deepen intimate relationships with deceased loved ones. Recent theorizations of animation offer intriguing possibilities for recognizing and attending to the sociality of a range of entities, including the dead. ![]()
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