Do you believe in ghosts? The question is constantly asked, from the scary stories to be told during the vigils of summer camps to the media stories of paranormal events that mobilize the crowds. It serves to divide the world into two categories: on one side there are the credulous and on the other, the skeptics; those who believe in it and those who do not believe it.
Yet, when we question the witnesses of these events, things always seem more complicated: those who believe in ghosts constantly evoke their doubts while the unbelievers sometimes let themselves be taken… In short, the question of belief seems very far to exhaust the subject — especially since the people involved rarely speak of believing in ghosts or not, but more often evoke the fact of “feeling” their presence, or even of “being afraid of it”.
What if, instead of wondering who believes in it and how, we try to find out what is going on? This is the bet launched by number 69 of the anthropology journal Terrain: the various contributors to the issue have focused on the modalities of encounters with ghosts, in various societies and at different times. They described, as precisely as possible, how the dead return, and how these manifestations affect the living who attend them. If ghosts are things that happen, what can we learn from these appearances?
The appearance as an event
The appearance of ghosts is always an event — even when it causes no surprise, in the manner of the anthropologist Christophe Pons’s Icelandic interlocutors who explain to him that “there are deaths in the houses as there are trays with fruits”. Even when the existence of ghosts is obvious, perfectly accepted, their appearance constitutes a rupture. It is an event in the sense that the ordinary categories of perception and intelligibility do not fully account for these situations; we can not immediately give them a meaning.
Wherever they manifest themselves, the ghosts do not leave to the living the leisure to believe in them or not: they create a disturbance, an upheaval with which one must now do. It is no coincidence that many of our current communications technologies have been preceded or followed by attempts to communicate with the afterlife — from Thomas Edison to the ghost hunters on YouTube. The discrepancy between the usual sensible experience and that put into play in the spectral manifestations characterizes these events.
Lead the investigation
The first effect of these appearances is then to trigger an inquiry process, to understand what is happening and, above all, to find a solution. When, on February 1938, inhuman cries broke out from a house in the Bethnal Green district of London, locked doors were opened for no reason and the furniture turned upside down, everyone questioned the meaning. these inexplicable phenomena: the inhabitants of the house but also the journalist of the Evening Standard mandated to cover these news items or the growing crowd who gather every night to try to see something. The survey also mobilizes Dr. Nandor Fodor, a famous member of the International Institute for Psychical Research, who will leave many reports on this subject — the ghosts have indeed aroused at the turn of the twentieth century in Europe multiple technological devices and learned societies whose purpose was to study “scientifically” the existence of these supernatural beings.
But the appearance of a ghost is first and foremost an event because it forces one to take action, to do something. It forces the living who attend the return of the dead to recompose their daily lives and their relationships: in Bethnal Green, one of the house’s inhabitants, Mrs. Harrison, was finally forced to leave. She had been identified as the source of the disturbances — although the investigators do not quite decide on the nature of her responsibility. Had she fabricated the paranormal phenomena from scratch, or was she the object of the post-mortem resentment of the old cripple she had cared for? For the protagonists of this story, the question ultimately matters little: Mrs. Harrison left the house, and the phenomena ceased immediately.
This example shows that the appearance of ghosts constitutes a test: there is a before and after the encounter, for the living with whom they are manifested.
What ghosts make appear
Studying the various forms of these apparitions is of great anthropological interest. Indeed, the ghosts are not satisfied to appear: by their modes of presence, as by the solutions that the living implement to solve these problematic situations, the ghosts inform us about the political, social and religious contexts in which they take place.
They thus reveal several issues that are sometimes difficult to formulate otherwise — because they are linked to conflictual or violent events that create a traumatic past in the present. But ghosts are not only “ghosts”: by their very presence, they also open possibilities for the future. Thus, in his work on the Vietnamese village of Cam Re, which was at the center of the wars of Vietnam (1945–1975), Heonik Kwon evokes, in his contribution to the issue, these “invisible neighbors” who constitute the dead. Villagers rub shoulders daily with the ghosts of a French officer, shy and hungry American soldiers, or those of Vietnamese youth from all over the country to die far from home. These orphaned deaths, left without burial and of which no one cultivates the memory, tend to wander in the village and to “hang out in the streets”. Faced with these unjust deaths, the villagers began to perform acts of hospitality towards their “invisible neighbors”, offering them food and drink. These ritual offerings are marked by the hope of reciprocity: that someone does the same thing to their own displaced deaths.
Taking seriously ghost appearances and the stories of these encounters, because ghosts are particularly suited to narration — is, above all, a way of taking seriously the various ways in which the living are affected by their deaths.
