Voice and agency in Spiritualist mediumship: or, who speaks when spirits speak?

Summary

Spiritualist mediums navigate a complex relationship with agency, simultaneously claiming and denying responsibility for their expressions, such as words, healing, and art. They attribute their messages and healing energy to the spirit world while also recognizing their role in conveying these expressions. This duality has persisted historically, evolving from imitative speech to a more conversational style. Understanding how agency is foregrounded and backgrounded reveals how mediums shape audience perceptions of their unique voice.

Study at a glance

Abstract

In Spiritualism, mediums ritually foreground and background their agency and that of people in the spirit world in the same act. Spiritualist mediums take responsibility for the expressions they produce for audiences: the words they formulate or convey, the healing they transmit, and the writings and paintings their hands bring into the world. Yet they deny responsibility at the same time by attributing it to people in the spirit world; the signs mediums receive in their minds and bodies and the messages and healing energy they attempt to transmit are said to come from sources other than themselves. The pattern of foregrounding and backgrounding agency is historically durable even as the voice of the medium has changed from being imitative of spirit speakers’ qualities to being casually conversational and not imitative. Attending to the ways agency moves metaphorically in relation to mediums’ expressive actions gives insight into the ways mediums cultivate audiences’ senses that they are not really the ones speaking, yet no one else could speak the way they do.

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