Science In The New Age: The Paranormal, Its Defenders & Debunkers,

by David J. Hess

In Science in the New Age , David Hess explores ideologies of the paranormal in the United States. He offers a map of the labyrinth of views put forward by parapsychologists and skeptical debunkers, spirit channelers and crystal healers, Hollywood poltergeist scripts, and prophets of the New Age. Adopting a cultural perspective, Hess moves beyond the question of who is right or wrong to the cultural politics of how each group constructs its own boundaries of true and false knowledge.

Hess begins by looking at each group’s unique version of knowledge, science, and religion and at its story about the other groups. Comparing the various discourses, texts, writers, and groups as cultures, he shows how skeptics, parapsychologists, and New Agers may disagree vehemently with each other, but end up sharing many rhetorical strategies, metaphors, models, values, and cultural categories. Furthermore, he argues, their shared “paraculture” has a great deal in common with the larger culture of the United States. The dialogue on the paranormal, Hess concludes, has as much to do with gender, power, and cultural values as it does with spirits, extrasensory perception, and crystal healing.

Genres: Paranormal

256 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 1993

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

David J. Hess apparently began his academic career with some interest in parapsychology and altered states of consciousness, but gained his advanced training in cultural anthropology. The result included early academic research about the culture(s) of Brazil, including the varieties of their religious and spiritist beliefs. This book represents a later career move into the area of the study of science and technology, but clearly his interest in the study of the paranormal endured.

Science in the New Age intends to be a constructive book, aiming towards some sort of meaningful dialog between persons and organizations in the New Age movements, in professional parapsychology and skeptics in the more established scientific disciplines. He begins it by discussing each group, their beliefs and self-definitions, emphasizing how self-definition involves the critique of Others to which each is contrasted or opposed.

The issue of definition is central and problematic. While, conveniently, Hess has organizations which he can refer to in terms of the parapsychologists (The Parapsychological Association) and the skeptics (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), no such organization clearly represents the New Agers. Indeed, they are only vaguely defined throughout and the book might have been better were the argument confined to skeptics and parapsychologists.

If there's prejudice in this book, a matter forthrightly discussed by the author, it is sympathy for the parapsychologists, seen as a group in between the spiritualism of the New Age and the materialism of the skeptics. It is as regards them too that Hess provides some of his most constructive advice for future dialog.