Dr Carlos Alvarado has produced a blog post which discusses the large quantity of psychical research written in languages other than English, 'All Our Past is Not in English'.
Dr Carlos Alvarado has produced a blog post which discusses the large quantity of psychical research written in languages other than English, 'All Our Past is Not in English'.
He notes that English-language publications which rely solely on English-language sources often give an incomplete picture:
'These works tend to emphasize developments in the English-language world—such as the work of the Society for Psychical Research and of J.B. Rhine and associates—to the neglect of developments in other countries. No one would deny the importance of this work. What I decry here is that reliance on these sources produces an incomplete view of the development of the discipline. But what is worse is that some seem to have accepted these incomplete views as the whole canon, and feel no need even to qualify the obvious incompleteness of their writings.'An example of such distortion is that it is sometimes assumed that what was very important in a country was equally important all around. It may be questioned, to give two examples, that the important work of Frederic W.H. Myers and of J.B. Rhine had the same impact in places other than the UK and the US.'
It must be borne in mind that psychical research has always been an international enterprise. Alvarado remarks that the situation is changing to an extent, though with historians rather than psychical researchers making the running, and he provides a number of suggestions that would further help to remedy the situation
The article can be found here:
https://carlossalvarado.wordpress.com/2016/07/11/all-our-past-is-not-in-english/
(Posted 12 July 2016)
