As anthropologists work with collaborators in evoking alternatives to capitalist fascisms, they increasingly engage multimodal registers; games, design, graphic novels and soundscapes join film and text in innovative work that seeks to ground worlding in sensorial engagement and haptic experience. Here, the multimodal can support the emancipatory politics of communities where anthropologists work. But what of the politics of multimodal? Is there anything inherently emancipatory in the engagement with diverse platforms? In order to problematize the multimodal, this paper explores another moment in multimodal evocations of alternative futures–Spiritualism in the late 19th century. While “spirit rapping” may have been the first volley in the explosion of Spiritualist practice, the movement soon incorporated writing, drawing, sounds, photographs and multiple objects into its evocations of a “Beautiful Beyond” that represented not only the afterlife, but the utopian promise for humanity itself. For Alfred Russel Wallace, this was the “new bench of anthropology” that would engage him for the rest of his career–much to the chagrin of his skeptical contemporaries. In many ways, though, the multimodal proved inadequate to the task of evoking the hereafter, with these diverse media platforms dragged down by their obstinate corporeality and their quotidian fabrication. While our concerns are different today, comparing the fate of spirit photography, object levitation and apporting to the multimodal anthropologies of today can nevertheless help us explore the limits of multimodality in our similarly anxious age. Can the spirits we evoke be more effective than those nineteenth century ghosts?
