4 - Spirits

Summary

“Spirits” discusses the limitation of strict materialist explanations of the processes of inanition, and how hunger artists fit in alternative vitalist, naturist, eclectic, spiritualist approaches, which at the time had numerous defenders. Succi’s case, being the editor of the spiritist journal Il Correo Spiritico is a paradigmatic example of this trend. In that context of heterodoxy, hunger artists contributed towards opening the door to a psychological turn, to the progressive emergence of psychological explanations of voluntary hunger and resistance to inanition as a new field of scientific inquiry, often with a gender bias. The psychological turn gave new prominence to names such as Charles Richet and Hippolyte Bernheim, but it also had its roots in Luigi Luciani’s non-strictly materialist explanation of Succi’s resistance to inanition in Florence in 1888. The chapter brings to the fore the names of several women fasters, often treated as patients and pathologized as “fasting girls”, but in other cases appearing in the public sphere like other male professional fasters and following analogous performances. In that gendered psychological turn, terms such as willpower, inner force, hypnosis, and insanity progressively gained influence in explanations on the causes of resistance to prolonged fasting.