Debbora Battaglia

Debbora Battaglia's elegant introduction prepares readers for a fascinating journey into the lives of E.T. and UFO believers. The collection is a groundbreaking study of persons whose everyday lives and consciousness are shaped by reference to an alien "other" with deep cultural and historical roots. Working to de-exoticize the idea of the alien, and demonstrating the range and depth of the "E.T. effect" in popular culture, the collection engages a broad range of sites and historical moments when the idea of extreme difference in the forms of human life is a focal point of both hopefulness and anxiety for publics. In this respect, its themes promise to be eternally relevant. We travel with erudite authors from alien abduction experiencers, to a new religious movement that forms around the belief that humans are clones of extraterrestrial scientists, to early 19th century spiritualists' exchanges with illustrious anthropological linguists, to Nobel scientists whose alien familiars are part of their experimental process, to the search for alien sources of mysterious illnesses. Overall, a brilliant contribution studies in the social play of alterity, across time and space.… (altro)

It is demoralizing when the editor of the collection of essays is herself such a horrible writer. If there is an inelegant obtuse way to put something, Debbora Battaglia will find it. Here are some examples: "This is an "endgame" insofar as subjectivity becomes so absorbed in technoscience that its difference from information is a matter of indifference to its subjects."
or how about : The theme of hope as an experiential and analytic category, both situated and contingent, is theorized in a reflexive anthropological thought piece by Vincent C that could be a post script to Carruci's ethnography
Notice the fondness for jargon and the extensive citing of sources you haven't read. She is fond of language that is freighted with clumsy academic terms like "interrelationality" when perhaps "relations" would have sufficed.
What is frightening is that as you would think any anthropologist would know this isn't language being used to communicate but to indicate just how smart and how much she is a member of an elite group. Jargon being the badge of inclusion.
That said there were a few good essays in particular Susan Lepselters comments on the poetry of the uncanny and Christopher Roth's explanation of the impact of abduction scenarios creating a developmental psychology of the hybrid, or children that have been conceiving carrying both human and alien DNA. One abductee complained of having to visit these orbiting hatcheries because the aliens couldn't handle the human children.… (altro)