Department of Chicana/o Studies
By Matthew David Goodwin
Critical Mystery Studies (CMS) is the critical and interdisciplinary study of the fantastic mysteries that resist easy understanding, including aliens, ghosts, monsters, cyborgs, conspiracy theories, urban legends, folklore, secret societies, the occult, mysticism, supernatural events and beings, and the whole range of marvelous human experiences. CMS examines the role of mystery in the long traditions, histories of resistance, and cultural expressions of BIPOC communities, and at the same time, we explore how mysteries are entangled with racism, sexism, coloniality, and other systems of oppression. Studies within CMS explore the nature and meaning of mysteries, the discourses surrounding them in their specific geographical and cultural contexts, their fictional representation in fiction and film, and how mysteries have been reclaimed, reinterpreted, reappropriated, and produced by cultural creators.
Here’s a short introductory essay about teaching CMS:
By Matthew David Goodwin
Some randomly arranged topics:
Aliens, Ghosts, Monsters, Cyborgs, Cryptids, Conspiracy Theories, Miracles, the Supernatural, Urban Legends, Secret Societies, Ghost/Mystery Tourism, espionage and cryptography, extreme crime, drug experiences, sacred medicine, consciousness, meditaion, bigfoot, fairies, duendes, angels and demons, mythological creatures, necromancy, astral projection, remote viewing, clairvoyance, the occult, divination, magic, brujeria, curanderismo, faith, ritual and ceremony, paganism, the mystery of nature, the sacred, secret knowledge, mysticism, the madonna-whore duality, marianismo, Malinchismo, popular metaphysics and unpopular metaphysics, cosmic mystery, the universe, Mystery god, divinity, superstition, magical thinking.
Mottoes:
Taking the Hand of the Monster
Trust the Mystery
The term “mystery” has many meanings.
A mystery is a way to describe the unknown or a deeply unsolvable problem.
A problem/question that has not been solved/answered, and that resists understanding.
Someone must have tried to reveal the mystery, that is, mysteries need time to form (repeatedly not being solved).
Mystery can be a presence rather than just an absence.
Mystery can be the unknown or it can be the known secret.
Components of a CMS Study:
0) Academic Mystery Anxiety (AMA): AMA is the anxiety felt about the swirling blank circle at the heart of all mysteries, the thing that resists understanding, as well as the fear of judgment by our academic peers. AMA is ultimately the fear of transformation. To oppose this tendency, the work of authentic scholarship that stays true to oneself is vital.
1) Understand the Escenario: An Escenario is a complex interplay of people, events, and systems that evolve over time. The concept has an additional emphasis on the scene, the location, as well as the performative element. Some common elements: Context, Location, The Core Mystery (always one step away), Reaction of community/media/world, Reframing (storytelling), Institutions and systems involved, Mystery Hunters/Investigators, Commercialization and Tourism, Artistic depictions, Production, Reappropriation, CMS
2) Examine the Entanglements: Mysteries are often entangled with cultural expressions, and they are also entangled with systems of oppression. To be entangled indicates that the threads are woven together to that point that they become something new, and it may be impossible to see the threads. Paul Edward Montgomery Ramírez: “This connection of Mothman to disaster entangles it with the ‘Indian curse’ settler myth.”
3) Map the Web of Mystery (Intersectional and Comparative Analysis): Individual mysteries are part of a web of mysteries and human interactions. Entanglements can be, and usually are, composed of multiple and complex threads. Many mysteries share common themes and concerns across cultures and throughout human history. CMS needs to see this web and map it out if possible (conspiracy yard board).
4) Create the Mystery (Make the Monster): Mystery or Monster creation connects us to the curative fonts of creativity in our cultures, and gives us a degree of agency to work through AMA rather than react to it. CMS must break from its analysis to create new forms of mystery for the future.
Other Key Terms:
1) Genealogies of Mystery: The examination of the history and discourse of the concept of mystery, enchantment, and other key concepts. We have land of enchantment but there are others such as Lo Real Maravilloso which Alejo Carpentier describes this way: “Everything strange, everything amazing, everything that eludes established norms is marvelous” (1949).
2) Mystery-Power: Who controls the mystery? Who guides it? Who releases or liberates it? Mystery Power is not only the power of the mystery, it is the power of those who are its caretakers, and a la Foucault, it is functioning within everyone. <<This can be a space for critique if the power is oppressive, but also, we often need grounding when confronting the mysteries.>>
3) Nepantla: Liminality, the in-between, the borderlands, hybridity. Gloria Anzaldúa writes: “Transformations occur in this in-between space…la tierra entre medio”
4) LOSING YOUR SHIT! (From Jenny Rice’s Awful Archives): the moment when a CMS study goes awry because of the inherent un-foundational nature of official documentation. It is a challenge to manage but it is nearly unavoidable.
5) The Crux: The primary tension that CMS points towards can be found in its etymology. We typically mean mystery to refer to something unknown, strange, and that in fact resists being known or understood completely. At the same time, the etymology points towards a different perspective. In the mystery rites of ancient Greece, mustḗrion is “a secret rite”, and mústēs is the “initiated one” which comes from muéō, “I initiate” and múō, “I shut”. And so, the original meaning had to do with having the secret knowledge, rather than not having it, and that it is information that is known but is kept secret (so much so that if an initiate told others about the secret rites of the Eleusinian mysteries they would be killed. This worked so well that we do not actually know them). So this not only points to the relativity of the Mystery (for one person, the chupacabras is a mystery for another it is something real that happened to their abuela) but also to the spiritual and ethical element that some things called mysteries by outsiders can be an important secret ritual to an insider, especially as regards to the relationship between indigenous groups worldwide and colonizers (who initially wanted to destroy the rites, then through academia to discover and understand them). But in both instances, the repeatedly unknown and the secret ritual, we can call them a mystery, as the term has those two meanings historically and etymologically. The intention of CMS is to outline the Crux of the field rather than to normalize it.
6) Resonance: the oftentimes unconscious parallels among past and present images, stories, memes, which give an intuitive sense to the mysteries. Susan Lepselter writes in Evidence of Things Unseen: “This chapter, then, continues to describe and perform a vernacular poetics. I focus here not on the shape, history, or limits of the genre, but rather on the resonance that emerges as people create parallels between various stories and images, and as they use those parallels to theorize power. It emerges in moments of American metadiscourse about what people often call the weird stuff in the world: the inexplicable, the uncanny, the apophenias that point to a pattern and structure lying beneath the surface of things.”
7) Trace Reactivation: The examination of unknown or discounted stories and histories, often not arising from official sources, which then enables us to see the liberatory potential of the mysteries. Jodi A. Byrd writes in The Transit of Empire: “[t]he traces of indigenous savagery and “Indianness” . . . stand a priori prior to theorizations of origin, history, freedom, constraint, and difference. These traces of “Indianness” are vitally important to understanding how power and domination have been articulated and practiced by empire, and yet because they are traces, they have often remained deactivated as a point of critical inquiry as theory has transited across disciplines and schools.”