ABSTRACT
The past, the present, and the future are always interlaced in a historicist project. Handelman observes that anthropology has been encompassed, in the Dumontian style, by history but that anthropology and history are not necessarily separable in as much as social practice “produces microhistories of living, just as these microhistories shape the lives of others”. New “technologies for erasing distance and new forms of mechanized inscription and reproduction” impacted spiritualist and spiritualist-derived paradigms irremediably. Indeed, it is clearly not just voices, images, or sounds that make their appearance, regardless of whether they are explicitly called. One solution would be to invoke the theoretical powers of the “new materialist” movement, and its call for a certain vitalism. It is more like an assemblage of co-acting elements that obtains “results,” whether the skeptic sees these as valid or not.
