Description
Book SynopsisOffers an ethnographic meditation on the “uncanny” persistence and cultural freight of conspiracy theory. Written by a cultural anthropologist with a literary background, this deeply interdisciplinary book focuses on the enduring American preoccupation with captivity in a rapidly transforming world.
Trade ReviewThis is the kind of book that takes your breath away. Susan Lepselter is among the very best writers and thinkers whose work purposefully leaks out of academia into the heady, half-formulated, and wildly resonating senses of home and the uncanny, freedom and captivity, that constitute the American ordinary now. She, alone, dwells in this evoked space with such beauty and wit.” —Kathleen Stewart, The University of Texas at Austin
""We really don’t have anything like this in terms of a focused, sympathetic, open-minded ethnographic study of UFO experiencers. . . . The author’s semiotic approach to the paranormal is immensely productive, positive, and, above all, resonant with what actually happens in history.” —Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion, Rice University
""Lepselter relates a weave of intimate alien sensibilities in out-off-the-way places which are surprisingly, profoundly, close to home. Readers can expect to share her experience of contact with complex logics of feeling, and to do so in a contemporary America they may have thought they understood.” —Debbora Battaglia, Mount Holyoke College
""An original and beautifully written study of contemporary American cultural poetics. . . . The book convincingly brings into relief the anxieties of those at the margins of American economic and civic life, their perceptions of state power, and the narrative continuities that bond them to histories of violence and expansion in the American West.”—Deirdre de la Cruz, University of Michigan
