Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T06:24:17.208Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2015

Martha Lincoln*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Bruce Lincoln
Affiliation:
University of Chicago

Abstract

While cross-disciplinary analysis of ghosts and haunting has burgeoned in recent decades, much of this scholarship presumes the figure of the ghost as a less than literal apparition. We propose that writers such as Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon, who make use of the ghostly as a trope, are in fact describing a phenomenon we term secondary haunting, distinct from accounts of unquiet spirits who address the living directly with specific demands for redress: a visceral and often frightening experience we term primary haunting. Drawing on a contemporary account of the ghosts of a massacre in a Vietnamese village, we explore the complex interaction of primary and secondary haunting, the different kinds of memory work they engage in and the different moral communities they mobilize.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Abraham, Nicolas and Torok, Maria. 1994. The Shell and the Kernel, Volume I. Rand, Nicholas T., trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Heller-Roazen, Daniel, trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Anderson, Melanie. 2013. Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.Google Scholar
Andriopoulos, Stefan. 2013. Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Bassett, Rev. P. S. 1856. A Visit to a Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child. American Baptist, 12 Feb.: n.p.Google Scholar
Bell, Michael Mayerfeld 1997. The Ghosts of Place. Theory and Society 26: 813–36.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. 1999 [1929]. Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia. Livingstone, Rodney, trans. In Livingstone, Rodney, eds., Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934. Cambridge: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 207–21.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. 2003 [1940]. On the Concept of History. Jephcott, Edmund, trans. In Jephcott, Edmund, general ed., Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940. Cambridge: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 389400.Google Scholar
Blanes, Ruy and Santo, Diana Espirito, eds. 2013. The Social Life of Spirits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Blazan, Sladja, ed. 2007. Ghosts, Stories, Histories: Ghost Stories and Alternative Histories. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar
Bloch, Maurice. 1971. Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages and Kinship Organization in Madagascar. London: Berkeley Square House.Google Scholar
Bloch, Maurice and Parry, Jonathan, eds. 1982. Death and the Regeneration of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bosworth, Joseph and Northcote Toller, T.. 1966. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Britzolakis, Christina. 1999. Phantasmagoria: Walter Benjamin and the Poetics of Urban Modernism. In Buse, Peter and Stott, Andrew, eds., Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History. Houndmills: Macmillan, 7291.Google Scholar
Buse, Peter and Stott, Andrew, eds. 1999. Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History. Houndmills: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Buyandelger, Manduhai. 2013. Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bynum, Leon James. 2010. Toni Morrison and the Translation of History in Margaret Garner. Doletiana: Revista de Traducció Literatura/Arts 3: 114.Google Scholar
Cadière, Léopold. 1955–1957. Croyances et pratiques religieuses des Vietnamiéns. 3 vols. Saigon: Publications de la Société des Études Indochinoises.Google Scholar
Cameron, Emilie. 2008. Indigenous Spectrality and the Politics of Postcolonial Ghost Stories. Cultural Geographies 15: 383–93.Google Scholar
Captured Documents (CDEC). 1966. NIC Interrogation Report of Nguyen Van Phuong—Re: Vietcong Weapons Depot in Cambodia, Sept. 1966. Fol. 2471, box 0164, Vietnam Archive Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. At: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=F034601642471 (accessed 2 May 2014).Google Scholar
Captured Documents (CDEC). 1967. Report of Members of the Vietcong Underground, 13 July 1967. Fol. 1642, box 0158, Vietnam Archive Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. At: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=F034601581642 (accessed 2 May 2014).Google Scholar
Carpenter, Lynette and Kolmar, Wendy K., eds. 1991. Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.Google Scholar
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. 1982. Dictée. New York: Tanam.Google Scholar
Chanda, Nayan. 1986. Brother Enemy: The War after the War. San Francisco: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
Cho, Grace M. 2008. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Cros, Michèle and Bonhomme, Julien, eds. 2008. Déjouer la mort en Afrique: or, orphelins, fantômes, trophées et fêtiches. Paris: Harmattan.Google Scholar
Cuevas, Bryan J., ed. 2008. Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cuevas, Bryan J. and Stone, Jacqueline I., eds. 2007. The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.Google Scholar
Davis, Colin. 2007. Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead. New York: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Davis, Erik. 2012. Khmer Spirits, Chinese Bodies: Chinese Spirit Mediums and Spirit Possession Rituals in Contemporary Cambodia. In Reuter, Thomas A. and Horstmann, Alexander, eds., Faith in the Future: Understanding the Revitalization of Religions and Cultural Traditions in Asia. Leiden: Brill, 177–96.Google Scholar
DeCaroli, Robert. 2004. Haunting the Buddha: Indian Popular Religions and the Formation of Buddhism. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Delaplace, Grégory. 2009. L'Invention des morts: sépultures, fantômes et photographie en Mongolie contemporaine. Paris: Centre d'Études mongoles et sibériennes, École pratique des hautes études.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1994 [1993]. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Kamuf, Peggy, trans. New York: Routledge. (First published in French.)Google Scholar
Durkheim, Émile. 1995 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Fields, Karen, trans. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Eberhardt, Nancy. 2006. Imagining the Course of Life: Self-Transformation in a Shan Buddhist Community. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.Google Scholar
Edensor, Tim. 2005. The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins: Ordering and Disordering Memory in Excessive Space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23: 829–49.Google Scholar
Edensor, Tim. 2008. Mundane Hauntings: Commuting through the Phantasmagoric Working-Class Spaces of Manchester, England. Cultural Geographies 15: 313–33.Google Scholar
Elliott, David W. D., ed. 1981. The Third Indochina Conflict. Boulder: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Emerson, Gloria. 1971. Villagers Say Saigon Perils Their Lives. New York Times, 10 Jan: 1.Google Scholar
Endres, K. and Lauser, A.. 2011. Engaging the Spirit World: Popular Beliefs and Practices in Modern Southeast Asia. New York: Berghahn.Google Scholar
Ernout, A. and Meillet, A.. 1951. Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue latine. Paris: Librairie C., Klincksieck.Google Scholar
Etkind, Alexander. 2009. Post-Soviet Hauntology: Cultural Memory of the Soviet Terror. Constellations 16: 182200.Google Scholar
Feist, Sigmund. 1939. Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der gotischen Sprache. Leiden: E. J. Brill.Google Scholar
Feuchtwang, Stephen. 2010. The Anthropology of Religion, Charisma, and Ghosts: Chinese Lessons for Adequate Theory. Berlin: W. de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Fortes, Meyer. 1987. Religion, Morality, and the Person: Essays on Tallensi Religion. Goody, Jack, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Foss, Karen A. and Domenici, Kathy L.. 2001. Haunting Argentina: Synecdoche in the Protests of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Quarterly Journal of Speech 87: 237–58.Google Scholar
Fox, Diane. 2007. ‘One Significant Ghost’—Agent Orange: Narratives of Trauma, Survival, and Responsibility. PhD diss., Anthropology, University of Washington.Google Scholar
Franco, Francisco. 2009. Muertos, fantasmas y héroes: el culto a los muertos milagrosos en Venezuela. Merida: Universidad de los Andes.Google Scholar
Frazer, Sir James George. 1933–1936. The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion. 3 vols. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Freed, Ruth S. and Freed, Stanley A., 1993. Ghosts: Life and Death in North India. New York: American Museum of Natural History.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. 1957 [1917]. Mourning and Melancholia. In Strachey, J., ed. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 237–58.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. 1985 [1919]. The Uncanny. In Dickson, Albert, ed., Art and Literature: Jensen's ‘Gradiva,’ Leonardo Da Vinci, and Other Works. Vol. 14 of the Penguin Freud Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 335–76.Google Scholar
Frosh, Stephen. 2013. Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Gia đình và Xã hội (Family and society). 2008. Vụ thảm sát của Pôn Pốt trên đất Việt Nam (Pol Pot's massacre on Vietnamese soil). At: http://danso.giadinh.net.vn/xa-hoi/vu-tham-sat-cua-pon-pot-tren-dat-viet-nam-20081024111151765.htm (accessed 2 May 2014).Google Scholar
Gordon, Avery F. 2008 [1997]. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. 2d ed.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Avery F. 2011. Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity. Borderlands 10, 2: 121.Google Scholar
Griffiths, Kate and Evans, David. 2009. Haunting Presences: Ghosts in French Literature and Culture. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.Google Scholar
Gunn, Joshua. 2004. Mourning Speech: Haunting and the Spectral Voices of Nine-eleven. Text and Performance Quarterly 24: 91114.Google Scholar
Gustafsson, Mai Lan. 2009. War and Shadows: The Haunting of Vietnam. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992 [1925]. On Collective Memory. Coser, Lewis A., trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (First published in French.)Google Scholar
Hertz, Robert. 1960 [1907]. A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death. In Death and the Right Hand. Needham, Rodney and Needham, Claudia, trans. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 2786. (First published in French.)Google Scholar
Hinton, Alex L. 2008. Truth, Representation and the Politics of Memory after Genocide. In Kent, Alexandra and Chandler, David, eds., People of Virtue: Reconfiguring Religion, Power and Moral Order in Cambodia Today. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 6281.Google Scholar
Hodgkinson, Terry. 2011. Ba Chuc and Sam Mountain, Deep in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. At: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei9W8hW29GQ (accessed 3 June 2013).Google Scholar
Holloway, Julian and Kneale, James. 2008. Locating Haunting: A Ghost-Hunter's Guide. Cultural Geographies 15: 297312.Google Scholar
Holt, John Clifford. 2007. Gone But Not Departed: The Dead among the Living in Contemporary Buddhist Sri Lanka. In Cuevas, Bryan and Stone, Jacqueline, eds., The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations. Honolulu: University of Hawaìi Press, 326–44.Google Scholar
Holt, John Clifford. 2012. Caring for the Dead Ritually in Cambodia. Southeast Asian Studies 1, 1: 375.Google Scholar
Horton, Robin. 1993. Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion, and Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hughes, Rachel. 2003. Memory and Sovereignty in Post-1979 Cambodia: Choeung Ek and Local Cambodian Memorials. In Cook, Susan E., ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New Perspectives. New Brunswick: Transaction, 269–92.Google Scholar
Jeong-mo, Yun. 1998. The Rainy Spell and Other Korean Stories. Suh Goppi, J., trans. New York: M. E. Sharpe and UNESCO Publishing.Google Scholar
Keller, Nora Okja. 2002. Fox Girl. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Kiernan, Ben. 2002. Introduction: Conflict in Cambodia, 1945–2002. Critical Asian Studies 34, 4: 483–95.Google Scholar
Klima, Alan. 2002. The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Kwon, Heonik. 2006. After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kwon, Heonik. 2008. Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
LaFleur, William R. 1989. Hungry Ghosts and Hungry People: Somaticity and Rationality in Medieval Japan. In Feher, Michael, ed., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One. New York, Zone Publications, 270303.Google Scholar
Langford, Jean M. 2013. Consoling Ghosts: Stories of Medicine and Mourning from Southeast Asians in Exile. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Leighton, Marian Kirsch. 1978. Perspectives on the Vietnam-Cambodia Border Conflict. Asian Survey 18: 448–57.Google Scholar
Lewis, Charlton T. and Short, Charles. 1962. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Lloyd, David. 2005. The Indigent Sublime: Specters of Irish Hunger. Representations 92: 152–85.Google Scholar
Lopatin, Ivan Alexis. 1960. The Cult of the Dead among the Natives of the Amur Basin. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Luckhurst, Roger. 2002. The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the ‘Spectral Turn.’ Textual Practice 16: 527–46.Google Scholar
Malarney, Shaun Kingsley. 2001. “The Fatherland Remembers Your Sacrifice”: Commemorating War Dead in North Vietnam. In Ho Tai, Hue-Tam, ed., The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 4676.Google Scholar
Malarney, Shaun Kingsley. 2002. Culture, Ritual and Revolution in Vietnam. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.Google Scholar
Malarney, Shaun Kingsley. 2007. Festivals and the Dynamics of the Exceptional Dead in Northern Vietnam. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 38, 3: 515–40.Google Scholar
Malinowski, Bronislaw 1916. Baloma: The Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 46: 353430.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. 1977 [1867]. Capital, Volume I. Fowkes, Ben, trans. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Materials on Special Forces in Vietnam. n.d. From the Center for Military History and the National Archives: 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), 1st Special Forces Outline History of Company D, 1962–1970. Fol. 09, box 03, Glenn Helm Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. At: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=1070309027 (accessed 2 May 2014).Google Scholar
Mauss, Marcel. 1921. L'expression obligatoire des sentiments. Journal de psychologie 18: 425–34.Google Scholar
Mauss, Marcel. 1967 [1925]. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Cunnison, Ian, trans. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Migozzi, Jacques. 1973. Cambodge: Faits et problèmes de population. Paris: CNRS.Google Scholar
Moreau, Ronald. 2004. A Letter from Ronald Moreau in Islamabad. Newsweek Magazine, 28 Sept. At: http://gloriaemerson.com/memories_gloria.html (accessed 13 May 2014).Google Scholar
Morris, Stephen J. 1999. Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia: Political Culture and Causes of War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved: A Novel. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Motz, Marilyn. 1998. The Practice of Belief. Journal of American Folklore 111: 339–55.Google Scholar
Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương. 1992. Khmer-Viet Relations and the Third Indochina Conflict. Jefferson: McFarland.Google Scholar
Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương. 2014. 30-4 [30-4 is a reference to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975: the author is using the Vietnamese format for dates]. At: https://www.facebook.com/VietTide/posts/549931228460317?fref=nf (accessed 1 May 2014).Google Scholar
O'Dowd, Edward C. 2007. Chinese Military Strategy in the Third Indochina War: The Last Maoist War. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Onions, C. T. 1996. Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
O'Riley, Michael F. 2007. Postcolonial Haunting: Anxiety, Affect, and the Situated Encounter. Postcolonial Text 3: 115.Google Scholar
Parham, Marisa. 2009. Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pháp luật and Xã hội (Law & Society). 2011. Chuyện buồn về cây đa oan hồn ở An Giang (Sad story of a grievous banyan tree in An Giang). At: http://phapluatxahoi.vn/20111002060436547p1001c1049/chuyen-buon-ve-cay-da-oan-hon-o-an-giang.htm (accessed 27 Mar. 2013).Google Scholar
Pilar Blanco, Maria del and Peeren, Esther, eds. 2010. Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Pilar Blanco, Maria del and Peeren, Esther, eds. 2013. The Spectralities Reader. London: Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar
Pile, Steve. 2005. Spectral Cities: Where the Repressed Returns and other Short Stories. In Hillier, Jean and Rooksbury, Emma, eds., Habitus: A Sense of Place. Aldershot: Ashgate, 235–57.Google Scholar
Pokorny, Julius. 1959. Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Bern: Francke Verlag.Google Scholar
Pons, Christophe. 2002. Le spectre et le voyant: les échanges entre morts et vivants en Islande. Paris: Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne.Google Scholar
Rabaté, Jean-Michel. 1993. La pénultième est morte: Spectrographies de la modernité. Paris: Editions Champ Vallon.Google Scholar
Redding, Arthur F. 2011. Haints: American Ghosts, Millennial Passions, and Contemporary Gothic Fictions. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
Richardson, Judith. 2009. Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Schlecker, Markus and Endres, Kirsten W.. 2011. Psychic Experience, Truth, and Visuality in Post-War Vietnam. Social Analysis 55, 1: 122.Google Scholar
Schwab, Gabriele. 2010. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Sharp, Lesley A. 1993. The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits, Identity, and Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Sion, Brigitte. 2011. Conflicting Sites of Memory in Post-Genocide Cambodia. Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights 2: 121.Google Scholar
Thanh Niên (Youth). 2010. Longing for Retribution … But Is It Coming? At: http://www.thanhniennews.com/2010/pages/20120217-longing-for-retribution--but-is-it-coming.aspx (accessed 25 Oct. 2013).Google Scholar
Thomas, Louis-Vincent. 2000. Les chairs de la mort: corps, mort, Afrique. Paris: Sonofi-Synthélabo.Google Scholar
Thư viện Pháp luật (Law Library). 2014. Quyết Định 92-VHTT (Decision 92 of the Ministry of Culture and Information). At: http://thuvienphapluat.vn/archive/Quyet-dinh/Quyet-dinh92-VHTT-QD-xep-hang-17-di-tich-lich-su-van-hoa-vb44178t17.aspx (accessed 28 Apr. 2014).Google Scholar
Tylor, Edward B. 1871. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. London: J. Murray.Google Scholar
Valenzuela, Luisa 1977. Como en la Guerra. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana.Google Scholar
Valk, Udo. 2006. Ghostly Possession and Real Estate: The Dead in Contemporary Estonian Folklore. Journal of Folklore Research 43: 3151.Google Scholar
Verdery, Katherine. 1999. The Politics of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Walde, A. and Hofmann, J. B.. 1972. Lateinisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.Google Scholar
Weisenburger, Steven. 1998. Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child Murder from the Old South. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Westad, Odd Arne and Quinn-Judge, Sophie. 2006. The Third Indochina War: Conflict between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972–79. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Williams, Paul. 2004. Witnessing Genocide: Vigilance and Remembrance at Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 18: 234–54.Google Scholar
Young, Harshini Bhana. 2006. Haunting Capital: Memory, Text and the Black Diasporic Body. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press.Google Scholar