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If you tried speaking with a dead person and they gave you a clear response, how would you react? Mediums develop their minds and bodies to communicate messages from the deceased to their living loved ones, and in Speaking with the Dead, anthropologist Matt Tomlinson describes his experiences training as a medium with a Spiritualist congregation in Canberra, Australia. The book is written in a first-person narrative style that brings "extrahuman" relationships to life, showing what it is like to learn and practice mediumship: the strategic suspension of skepticism; the wobbly first attempts; the embarrassing failures; and the moments, both unsettling and enthralling, when someone tells you that yes indeed, you've just described her grandfather who died in 1978. Speaking with the Dead brims with stories of talented mediums and Tomlinson is not interested in proving or disproving mediumship, preferring instead to illustrate how mediums bring their practices to life. In contrast to the popular image of mediums as shameless frauds, Tomlinson describes earnest and committed seekers from a wide range of backgrounds who often struggle to understand their own experiences. Their profits are therapeutic rather than financial. And they worry about endings as much as anyone else: the passing of physical lives, the closure of beloved churches. Speaking with the Dead is ultimately a book about the lively side of death, grounded in Spiritualists' conviction that life is eternal and your social network extends to the astral plane. It is a close examination of how mediumship works culturally, which is to say, how mediums and audiences work together to create senses of transcendent connection.

AbstractThe well‐worn critique of "belief" as inadequate for understanding ritual motivation and practice has become a truism in need of reevaluation. For groups who foreground the establishment of truth in ritual practice, "belief" is a useful analytic term that brings together propositions and commitment to the relationships and systems articulating those propositions. Spiritualism is a religious movement in which mediums attempt to communicate between the spirits of deceased people and their loved ones. As Spiritualist mediums see it, their main job is to provide "proof of survival"—evidence that they are really in touch with the spirit world. In doing so, they "serve Spirit," working on behalf of those in the spirit world. Drawing on Bakhtin's treatment of dialogism and architectonics, I urge a rethinking of "belief" as a never‐completed project worked on intersubjectively. This approach to belief not only makes sense for analysis of groups who insist on the importance of truth claims but also liberates the term for use outside of Christian and self‐consciously modern contexts, as Bakhtinian dialogism is grounded in a model of the utterance and interactivity in general and not in any specific utterance or pattern of interaction.

The discipline called the "anthropology of Christianity" began to gain traction in the early to mid-2000s when interested scholars focused on Christianity as an object of collaborative and comparative cross-cultural analysis. Along with several landmark works of Joel Robbins, one foundational text is Fenella Cannell's edited volume The Anthropology of Christianity, published in 2006. In her introductory essay, Cannell poses a pointed question for the volume and the discipline itself: "What difference does Christianity make?" Bracketing the question of whether "difference" can or should be defined (Green 2014), several anthropologists have taken inspiration from Cannell, including Naomi Haynes (2014) in the concluding essay to a recent special issue of Current Anthropology, and myself and Debra McDougall (2013) in an edited volume on Christian politics in Oceania. Difference, as the criterion by which continuity and transformation are evaluated, is arguably the key concept for an effective anthropological engagement with Christianity.