Dissertation

Twenty-First Century American Ghost Hunting: A Late Modern Enchantment

Abstract:

My dissertation uses twenty-first century American ghost hunting as a model for exploring enchantment in late modernity. It explores how ghost hunting’s scientism, its empirical and experiential nature, its relationship to electronic media, and its relationship to a marketplace of spirituality reveal its modern nature and the ways in which it can shed light on what we can expect to find when we examine other late modern enchanted worldviews. The dissertation ultimately argues that, contrary to what Max Weber predicted, the modern world has not become disenchanted. Rather, through the interplay of disenchantment and re-enchantment, it has become differently enchanted.

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