ABSTRACT
Where we have strong emotions, we’re liable to fool ourselves. Carl Sagan
Nearly all academic examinations of the paranormal rely on one key assumption: there are certain beliefs and related experiences that fall outside the normative cultural spectrum.1 That is, after all, why we label them paranormal or anomalous. Yet in the race to identify and contextualise ‘paranormal cultures’, academics have often neglected to examine the social role of disbelief and its impact on popular conceptions of the paranormal or anomalous. As the folklorist Bill Ellis states, we suffer from the occasional tendency as ‘institutional experts’ to harbour faith in the idea that all anomalous experiences must have simple, rational explanations (2003: 148, 153). In the cultural battle over normative belief and experience, the role of the disbeliever is unsurprisingly situated in binary opposition to that of believer, and often associated with the morefamiliar titles of ‘sceptic’, ‘rationalist’, ‘debunker’ or ‘scientist’. Such terms are hardly interchangeable, yet they all encompass the kind of adversarial role proponents of disbelief (unwittingly or not) play within public discourse on the paranormal.
