Psychic Investigators: Anthropology, Modern Spiritualism, and Credible Witnessing in the Late Victorian Age

This short, readable, and well-researched book is full of interesting episodes and provides an important contribution to the history of science. In Psychic Investigators, Sera-Shriar offers new takes on both the history of anthropology and on the history of nineteenth-century spiritualism in Britain by bringing them together. He is clear that his interest is in what these Victorian studies of spiritualism can tell us about the development of anthropology, arguing that “when studying late Victorian anthropology’s engagement with spiritualism and psychical research the emphasis should not be on its relationship to a crisis of faith, but instead to a crisis of evidence” (6). Despite this circumscribed reading of his sources, however, this book has much to offer those interested in the broader crisis of faith, in the history of spiritualism, in the role of gender in science, and even in glimpses of day-to-day life in late nineteenth-century London. Following what he calls a “microhistorical tradition” (11), he shows us four prominent British anthropologists—Alfred Russel Wallace, Edward Burnett Tylor, Andrew Lang, and Edward Clodd—as they studied spiritualism and even conducted “fieldwork” at séances, trying to collect evidence that would prove or disprove the reality of spirits. His careful work in the archives comparing notebooks with publications shows the deep concern with which they approached this problem. Psychic Investigators helps explain why the crisis of faith was also a crisis of epistemology, one that reverberated throughout the sciences, Victorian social hierarchies, and even (e.g., in anthropological schema) the empire.