a number of anthropologists have argued, spirals of skepticism themselves enchant magic, the occult, and the paranormal.12 Indeed, the number of contestants who complain in interviews, blogs, or biographies that others cheat seems only to have increased viewership. One of the show’s experts even recounted how, during the first season, a contestant arranged to take her turn at a test last, to gain time to glean information from the crew. Another former contestant countered similar judgments against him, claiming in a number of forums that the show's editors manipulated video cuts to make the contestants look like charlatans. To trick people into believing that someone else has tried to trick them seems indeed to incite involvement, to have further developed into a rewarding spiral upon which to capitalize.
COLD WAR CONTACTS
Technologies to intuit “the shadow of a quickly hidden smile” compete across specific tangles of institutional relations and geopolitical interests, in conflict even as they connect. Relations of conflicted connection—and connection across conflict—are difficult to articulate even under the best of conditions. For decades anthropologists and historians have tried to follow social networks and circuits for ideas and techniques across geopolitical borders, through boardrooms and shipping lanes, mapping points where goods and bodies, words and images, government structures and corporate franchises touch ground across borders.13 Despite their work, relations across borders are rendered subversive and unpatriotic—or invisible, incoherent to the story of a nation. To account for affiliations across borders that involve people or things tagged as belonging to a geopolitical opponent is even more problematic.14
Barriers and broadcast points built or maintained during the Cold War retained force even after walls came down. Some barriers transcend any particular conflict: State Department rules forbid diplomatic staff to fraternize with locals and refuse security clearance to people who maintain too many foreign contacts. Such practices aim to regulate borders by delimiting not just spaces, but also channels for communication, constraining certain kinds of contact in ways that affect the imagination of possible social bonds, that project the purposes of communication or imagine its futility. As Vincent Rafael has argued regarding communication during military conflicts, “war bears some relationship to the movement of translation that leads not to the privileging of meaning but to the emergence of the untranslatable … translation in a time of war intensifies the experience of untranslatability” (2007, 8; see also Galison 2012).
All the same, even at the height of the Cold War, science fiction writers fashioned characters who breached Cold War walls—and not to manipulate minds or wills, but to share discoveries, usually discoveries to do precisely with breaches in conventional barriers to communication or to travel. Soviet science fiction writers especially sowed texts with footnotes to foreign publications, sending scientist protagonists to conferences in New York or Tokyo.15 Science fiction heroes sought contact beyond the bounds of planet—never mind the the bounds of nation. In real life, Soviets aspired to this future in ways that fewer Americans cottoned to; the USSR educated not only the most literate population, but among the most multilingual, who read and listened to media in more languages than did most Americans. In regard to telepathy science alone, Soviets commanded more detail about experiments conducted in the West than was true the other way around (Ostrander and Schroeder 1970, 9). Late Soviet newspapers followed the labs of Dr. Rhine at Duke University and the exploits of Dutch psychic detective Gerard Croiset. Soviet citizens understood paranormal science much as they did film, literature, and theater: as simultaneously cosmopolitan and homegrown.
With this in mind, consider the insights of communications scholar John Peters, who has masterfully argued that European anxieties about communicative contact took shape as new media confronted people with new problems, which we projected onto more familiar ways to communicate: “[L]ost letters, wrong numbers, dubious signals from the dead, downed wires and missed deliveries have since come to describe the vexations of face-to-face converse as well. Communication as a person-to-person activity became thinkable only in the shadow of mediated communication. Mass communication came first” (1999, 6). Peters rightly suggests that dreams for perfect communitas came into being mainly when means and materials for communicating multiplied: “The history of thinking about our mutual ties, as well as the history of modes for connections, from writing to the development of electrical media, shows that the quest for consummation with others is motivated by the experience of blockage and breakdown” (268).
Communicative infelicities and broken contacts are ubiquitous. For this book, the next question to ask is: Whose experiences of breakdown, of downed wires or radio static, do we have in mind? Experiences differ less because of inherent qualities in either people or in media and more because states and localities differently organize relations among media, differently politicize genres and situations for communication, and differently rank and separate those who can broadcast, publish, and stand at the microphone from those whose access to channels is more limited. Channels for speaking, writing, and acting are historically configured not only by the material affordances of media, but also through divisions of labor and authority, separations in time and space. The sound of static only partly defines an experience of failed radio contact. A person trying to tune a shortwave radio in mid-twentieth-century Perm’ encountered disturbance differently than did the person in Omaha. The static may have sounded different through jamming, for one thing. Moreover, ideologies about media in each place, similar in some ways, differed (Gershon 2010). They differed increasingly—or claimed to—by mirroring and reversing relations imagined on the other side of the so-called Iron Curtain, the cold war a spectacular display of what Gregory Bateson (1936) called symmetrical schismogenesis: the process of differentiation through competitive and dyadic mirroring (in his case, to exaggerate the differences among genders).
Certainly local experiences and events also determine access to media and affect ideologies about them. World War II, for example, destroyed Soviet infrastructure and communications in ways that most Americans cannot imagine. The sheer number of dead compounded a loss akin to that of post–Civil War America, under devastation of which spiritualism found a welcome among those who were missing kin. A twenty-first-century Russian documentary titled Telepatija opens with such loss, with specific mortalities from that war, not vague superpower paranoia, including a woman recounting her mother’s intuition that her father had not been killed at the front, as a telegram had informed the family. Years later the state released the records—indeed, her father had died not during the war, but in a prison camp in 1947.
So rather than assuming a generalized historicism under which to explain modern worries about contact, this book both contrasts and connects specific events, texts, situations, and institutions, following them across state borders when that is where they point. From archives and ethnography it tracks how, for example, accusations of radio jamming or book burning paralleled expressions of longing for romantic communion and fantasies for telepathic connection or interstellar contact. In the end, neither U.S. nor post-Soviet anxieties and dreams about communication and contact can be understood purely in local terms, in relation only to local ideologies or media ecologies. Anxieties about communicative intuition, about one’s own capacities to read through what we are taught are barriers of radical alterity, run up and down scales: worries about courtship (American men puzzling over e-mails from Siberian brides) morph into myths of diplomacy (Can the president divine the mind of a counterpart?). In the laboratory, on the stage, in broadcasts to outer space, and “in the heart,”16 people draw from other situations and scales, from story and from experience, in efforts to make and break channels to communicate—or even to intuit more subtle rays of contact, as thought, as feeling, as impulse.
Several anthropologists have argued that inclinations to imagine the thoughts of others are not universal—that some peoples simply regard the minds of others as opaque. Others counter that to avoid claims about others’ thoughts need not indicate belief that they are unknowable. Linguistic anthropologist Niko Besnier (1992), building on Schieffelin (1990), argued that where he did fieldwork, people avoided bald conjectures about others’ inner states—but they also devised covert ways, through prosody, tempo,
