Christopher Partridge ---- Haunted culture: the persistence of belief in the paranormal

Haunted culture: the persistence of belief in the paranormal Christopher Partridge While contemporary civil societies in the post-industrial West have witnessed a decline of Christian hegemony and a distaste for deference to traditional authorities, they have also experienced a widespread nurturing of the subjective life. This has, particularly since the 1960s, allowed the persistence of a ‘haunted culture’ – haunted in the sense that, while, at a relatively superficial level, the dominant discourse in the West privileges the ‘normal’ and the ‘natural’ and relegates the ‘rejected knowledge’ of the paranormal and the supernatural to the periphery of society, at a deeper, primal, gut level, there is a fascination with this shadow side of Western culture. This is reflected in, and stimulated by popular culture. Consequently, regardless of the assertions of dominant secular discourses in the West, it would appear that belief in the paranormal is not the preserve of premodern societies, but rather continues to press in upon the human spirit and to disturb the ordered rationalism that comforts the late-modern mind. Drawing on analyses of secularization and sacralisation, this study provides an overview of the theory of occulture, which, it is argued, helps us to understand this persistence of belief in paranormal phenomena in late-modern, Western societies.