Toward a Critical Hauntology: Bare Afterlife and the Ghosts of Ba Chúc

Abstract

A specter is haunting the academy: the figure of the ghostly, the phantasmic, and the unquiet dead. Over the last fifteen years, a large and rapidly growing number of works in diverse disciplines-sociology, 1 psychoanalysis, 2 literary criticism, 3 folklore, 4 cultural studies, 5 postcolonial studies, 6 race and gender studies, 7 geography, 8 media studies, and communication and rhetoric 9 -have sought to reinterpret stories of haunting as the return of traumatic memory. Within such work, ghosts manifest not as terrifying revenants, but as welcome, if disquieting spurs to consciousness and calls for political action.Most immediately, this interdisciplinary interest in ghosts was sparked by Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx (1993), a curious book that combines a profession of faith (i.e., the messianic spirit of Marxism still holds promise, 1

Necrosociality: isolated death and unclaimed cremains in Japan

“…Rather, as one resident put it, pointing at others sitting on the street half‐asleep, half‐drunk, ‘Kotobuki is a town of ghosts ( yūrei no machi )’, where the living were already deemed muenbotoke . The very fact that muenbotoke were normalized seemed to have prompted people to take redemptive actions, similar to what Martha and Bruce Lincoln (: 200‐1) called ‘secondary haunting’. Examining the haunting of the Khmer Rouge massacre victims in a southern Vietnamese village, Lincoln and Lincoln distinguished ‘secondary haunting’, which mobilizes a moral community with a shared sense of responsibility for the sufferings of the dead, from ‘primary haunting’, which involves an unmediated and intense interaction between the living and the dead during which the latter demand immediate redress and appeasement.…”

“…Meanwhile, the treatment of dead bodies constitutes an integral part of the daily reproduction of structural violence, as in the removal of coffins from budget‐strapped Guatemalan public cemeteries (O'Neill ), or in the nonchalance displayed by impoverished Brazilian mothers towards their dying infants and the inverted fetishism of their deaths (Scheper‐Hughes ). Bones and skeletons appear at the centre of projects redrawing the boundaries of the state and the nation (Verdery ) and redressing massacres and wars (Kwon ; Lincoln & Lincoln ; Nelson ; Wagner ). Contestation over material engagement with the dead also extends to ritual practices surrounding mortuary objects such as dolls (Schattschneider ), gravestone inscriptions and ancestral effigies (Mueggler ; ), and gifts for the deceased (Langford ).…”

Relational Affliction: Reconceptualizing “Mass Hysteria”

“…It is significant that in Derrida's definition of the logic of haunting he refers to the ghost of the dead King in Shakespeare's Hamlet as an exemplary figure, for in doing so we discover that the tradition of haunting he works with originates in the Western cultural and historical context (Lincoln and Lincoln , 192). While the English verb “to haunt” is of uncertain origin, it can be traced to both the French hante and the Middle English haunte , meaning to practice an action or to frequent a place habitually (OED ) .…”

“…While the English verb “to haunt” is of uncertain origin, it can be traced to both the French hante and the Middle English haunte , meaning to practice an action or to frequent a place habitually (OED ) . While the English term reveals the logic of haunting as return, scholars have demonstrated there are different styles and cosmologies of haunting, and thus multiple “hauntologies.” As Lincoln and Lincoln write, those engaging hauntology, particularly in literary fields, generally develop “the trope of haunting without considering how ghosts are theorized by those who take them as something other than metaphor” (, 196). While hauntology is a generative approach, this article does not engage ghosts and haunting as a metaphor for the “secret, the hidden, the unspoken, and the unspeakable as qualities of subjectivity” (Good , 519), precisely because it aims to suspend a psychoanalytic theory of the subject that informs anthropological and psychiatric conceptualizations of “mass hysteria” in order to explore the possibility for reconceptualization in dialogue with a Nepali analytic of haunting.…”

Asocial memories, ‘poisonous knowledge’, and haunting in Mongolia

“…33This is in addition to the more direct meaning of the manifestations of the Uheer , which are uncanny, ‘ambiguous’, and ‘partially perceptible’ (Lincoln & Lincoln : 196).…”