Susan Lepselter, "The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, and UFOs in the American Uncanny" (U Michigan Press, 2016)

New Books in Sociology · May 6, 2019 · 53m

When we talk about stories of alien abduction in the United States, we often do so through a framework of belief vs. disbelief. Do I think this story is true, or do I think it’s false? Anthropologist Susan Lepselter asks what happens when we instead listen to “UFO talk” ethnographically, understanding it as a form of vernacular American poetics that must be made sense of within specific cultural and political contexts. In The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, and UFOs in the American Uncanny (University of Michigan Press, 2016), Lepselter draws on years of interviews with…