What is Anomalology? — Part 2
Part 2: Anomalies and Frames
“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.” —Walter Benjamin
We never encounter anomalies in isolation. We always encounter them as part of larger structures and mechanisms.
More specifically, several elements shape experiences we call anomalous, directly affecting their potential framing, interpretation, significance, and integration: the witness, the place, the account, and the observer.
The witness is the person who experienced the event and often becomes suspect before the event is fully heard or understood. Various factors affect not only how they experience an event, but also how they remember it, and if or how they retell it.
The place is the setting where the event occurred: a road, a sofa, an open field, a store, or an empty hallway that only later gains significance. Place should never be dismissed as only circumstantial or incidental to the event.
The account is the witness’s narrative of the event. It changes with retelling, as memory, language, audience, fear, and time impose their own revisions. Yet its inconsistencies may reveal what a merely perfect record could not: the pressure the event continued to exert upon the witness.
The observer is the person who receives the witness’s account and who interprets their account through their own knowledge, experience, role, and institutional affiliation, including families, houses of worship, courts, physicians, scholars, police, employers, archivists, and so forth. The observer determines which interpretations become publicly credible or institutionally actionable, including how it will be named or labeled: grief, delusion, folklore, trauma, fantasy, revelation, pathology, error, or evidence.
In all, the classification of anomalous experiences is never neutral.
Calling an experience a dream may comfort the witness, but it may also unintentionally silence them or suggest their experience was insignificant. Calling it a visitation may help preserve meaning, or smuggle in too much of it. Calling it illness or disease may open a path toward care, or become a method of misdiagnosis or exclusion. Calling it supernatural or paranormal often only trades one obscurity for another.
Anomalology, then, begins by asking what each naming of an event permits us to see, and what it obliges us to ignore, hide, or keep invisible to ourselves and others. And cloaked in that invisibility or exclusion may indeed include distress, error, grief, trauma, or the unresolved. But it should not be mistaken for nothing.
What is Anomalology?
By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.