User:Wound theology/hauntology

Using this page to organize some sources before I edit the hauntology page.

Main sources

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 * [...] [T]he paper explores recent engagements with "the ghost" as a conceptual terrain in adjacent fields.
 * Timothy Morton recognizes that "a truly theoretical approach" to any subject "is not allowed to sit smugly outside the area it is examining. It must mix thoroughly within it."
 * [H]auntology describes the recognitions and resurgences that undermine the solid foundations of the present. This does not rely on a conviction that ghosts exist, or even that the past is "alive and at work [...]"
 * While Jameson is right to point out that a belief in ghosts is not a prerequisite for hauntology, it would be wrong to suggest that specters and phantoms do not figure prominently in Derrida's thinking.
 * Hauntology [with regards to the future] refer[s] to "a trace that marks the present with its absence in advance" -- the no longer and not yet
 * Derrida's interest in the haunting of being is less about dealing with "spirits from another world" than it is about uncovering a greater sensitivity to "modernity's phantoms"
 * Sociologist Michael Bell acknowledged that landscapes are "filled with ghosts. The scenes we pass through each day are inhabited, possessed, by spirits we cannot see but who's presence we nevertheless experience." At the same time he maintains that such ghosts are "fabrications, products of imagination, social constructions [...] Although we generally experience ghosts as given to us, it is we that give ghosts to places. They do not exist on their own"
 * If all ghosts are the product of our imagination, then the power of the dead over the living is greatly reduced.
 * David McNeill claims that "history as a séance, a conjuration, is as accurate a metaphor for the activities of National Heritage organisations as we are likely to find"
 * Becoming a "hauntologist" -- the noun developed here as an extension of Derrida's concept -- does not mean believing in ghosts as spirits from another world, but it does require a commitment to acting in the presence of those who are no longer in a way that admits their continued efficacy.
 * Fisher reminds us, "the OED lists one of the earliest meanings of the word 'haunt' as 'to provide with a home, house'"
 * Anthropologist Andrew Matthews records, "Through my practices of walking, looking, and wondering, I have been tracing the ghostly forms that have emerged from past encounters between people, plants, animals, and soils. These ghostly forms are traces of past cultivation, but they also provide ways of imagining and perhaps bringing into being positive environmental futures."
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 * Social scientific treatments of spirit belief and experience often dismiss such views as superstitions.
 * Fieldwork with multiple groups reveal notable themes, such as rhetorical appeals to science and religion, magical rites, the extensive use of technology to mediate evidence and experiences of ghosts, and the narrative construction of hauntings.
 * Authors argue that the inherent liminality of spirits as cultural constructs accounts for their persistence, power, and continual recurrence.
 * One potential outlet for the "neither institutionally religious nor fully irreligious" is paranormalism.
 * Belief in ghosts [and other entities] is a form of spiritual exploration not officially tied to conventional religious forms and is typically less organized than conventional religions.
 * Native Americans had the highest percentage of respondents that "absolutely" or "probably" believed in ghosts (at 72%).
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 * Since 2000, a massive and rapid body of work regarding haunting have appeared in the social sciences.
 * This interest was sparked by Derrida's Specters of Marx (1993) which contains a reading of the historiography of Marx through a lens provided by Shakespeare's Hamlet
 * Primary haunting and secondary haunting are contrasted through a series of case studies in Vietnam
 * The "spectral turn" in scholarship is informed less by Derrida and more by Benjamin, though Benjamin's usage of the ghost is only implict
 * For Avery Gordon, she, as the author, and not the returned dead, seeks to startle, frighten, and challenge.
 * Gordon redefines the experience of being "haunted" as a call to fight on behalf of the dead against those who sought to erase them.
 * Initiatives in the "new" hauntology do not generally consider how ghosts are theorized by those who take them as something other than metaphor.
 * Kwon and Gustafsson eschew the signature features of the "new hauntology" -- high-stakes theorizing, rhetorical bravado, the exercise of considerable creative license
 * In these authors, ghostly subjects appear as fully extant and active animate beings
 * Primary haunting: the haunted recognize the reality and autonomy of metaphysical entities in relatively uncritical and un-self=conscious fashion. The apparitions of primary haunting are narrow and specific in whom they seek out and address. The experience of the haunting is immediate and intense.
 * Secondary haunting: recognizes its "entities" in textual residues of horrific historic events, or as tropes for collective intrapsychic states such as trauma, grief, regret, repression, guilt, and sense of responsibility. It engages a wider audience whose relation to the deceased is less intimate and who bear less personal responsibility. It is mediated by an author or researcher and through texts they reproduce.
 * The contrast between the 'secondary haunting' of Ba Chúc, in which the skulls of the dead and memorabilia is displayed in contrast to traditional Vietnamese burial customs, and the 'primary haunting' of Ba Chúc, located at the Grievous Tree which is said to have taken the lives of people.
 * The "spectral turn" in scholarship is informed less by Derrida and more by Benjamin, though Benjamin's usage of the ghost is only implict
 * For Avery Gordon, she, as the author, and not the returned dead, seeks to startle, frighten, and challenge.
 * Gordon redefines the experience of being "haunted" as a call to fight on behalf of the dead against those who sought to erase them.
 * Initiatives in the "new" hauntology do not generally consider how ghosts are theorized by those who take them as something other than metaphor.
 * Kwon and Gustafsson eschew the signature features of the "new hauntology" -- high-stakes theorizing, rhetorical bravado, the exercise of considerable creative license
 * In these authors, ghostly subjects appear as fully extant and active animate beings
 * Primary haunting: the haunted recognize the reality and autonomy of metaphysical entities in relatively uncritical and un-self=conscious fashion. The apparitions of primary haunting are narrow and specific in whom they seek out and address. The experience of the haunting is immediate and intense.
 * Secondary haunting: recognizes its "entities" in textual residues of horrific historic events, or as tropes for collective intrapsychic states such as trauma, grief, regret, repression, guilt, and sense of responsibility. It engages a wider audience whose relation to the deceased is less intimate and who bear less personal responsibility. It is mediated by an author or researcher and through texts they reproduce.
 * The contrast between the 'secondary haunting' of Ba Chúc, in which the skulls of the dead and memorabilia is displayed in contrast to traditional Vietnamese burial customs, and the 'primary haunting' of Ba Chúc, located at the Grievous Tree which is said to have taken the lives of people.


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 * Scholars adopting a genealogical approach have shown that "secular anthropology" is the product of a highly Christian intellectual legacy
 * Joel Kahn, in the context of his own 'ontological crisis' as a secular Jew, proposed a 'gnostic scholarship' that looks to the religion of the other as a source of radical subjective displacement
 * Based on the author's fieldwork among Catholic devotees of Padre Pio, the author proposes a form of 'embodied surrender' as a prerequisite for an intersubjective engagement with the ontologically other worlds of our informants.
 * Evans-Pritchard noted that "the majority of anthropologists are indifferent, if not hostile, to religion"
 * Radical contextualism: religious phenomena becomes interpreted in terms of biological, psychological, and/or social constructions
 * "The other in this case does not simply refer to 'cultural' others but also the 'not-self' including the 'other beings' that animate differing ontologies [...] such works enjoin us to be willing to be displaced by the spirit worlds of their informants."
 * The 'classical' approach to the beliefs of others in anthropology has been to recognise the reality of the beliefs of their informants, while contriving to ifnore or discredit their ontological claims.
 * Evans-Pritchard: "Witches, as Azande conceive of them cannot exist."
 * Meneses et al. propose a "methodological faith"
 * Fountian advocates for an active engagement with theology in a post-secular anthropology, an "un-repression of theology, the active embrace of an anthro-theology" as a "key site for future theoretical, methodological, and epistemological research within the discipline"
 * Joel advocates for a 'gnostic diplomacy' -- Gnosis presents a third way between faith and reason, an epistemology that is "beyond belief"
 * Anthropologists have historically privileged the systemic analysis of categories of beliefs over practice
 * Mitchell argues that focusing on th edoctrines or categories of religion has skewed our understading of religions: 'A focus on performance takes us away from the search for a categorical logic, or 'truth.'"
 * "In the crypt I believe I was engaging in an intense dialogue between myself and the saint even though he remained resolutely mute."
 * Kneeling, and prostration more generally, is an embodied form of surrender and submission that is remarkably challening for the archetype modern subject. Kneeling is a gesture that dramatically subverts the triump of the naturalist modern secular subject.
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 * Christenson is told that by reading the words of the ancient K'iche', he has "[made] them live again by speaking their words" -- k'astajisaj, "to cause to have life"
 * Many Maya communities possesses wooden chests containing antiques said to contain the k'ux, the heart or soul of one's ancestor
 * Books in these chests are not read as to speak such ancient words it to literally awaken the dead
 * The Maya priest (aj q'ijab') don Vicente de León Abac of Momostenango would purify and bless the xeroxed copy of the Popol Vuh "by waving copal incense smoke over it and asking forgiveness of the ancestors who had written the original for disturbing them."
 * "When I asked why he did this, he replied that to read the thoughts of ancient ancestors is to make their spirits present in the room and give them a living voice."
 * "The authors of the manuscript described the text as an ilb'al (instrument of sight) by which the reader may “envision” the thoughts and actions of the gods and sacred ancestors from the beginning of time and into the future."
 * "This passage is written in present progressive tense, suggesting that the narrator sees it before him as he writes. This is consistent with the way stories are told in contemporary Quiché households. The storyteller invites the listener to imagine the setting of his tale, and nearly always tells the story as if it were happening right then, even if it happened in the distant or mythic past."
 * Frances A. Yates and Peter French argued that Dee's scientific endeavors were fostered by his occultism. Nicholas H. Clulee further claims that Dee's practice of experimental science was not novel, following a genealogy "back to Roger Bacon," with a prominent magical dimension.
 * "The effort to find a dividing line between magic and genuine science -- a crossroads where magic either transforms itself into science or is left behind and true science taken up -- is, in regard to Dee, mistaken because it pushes a later conceptual distinction between magic and science involved a narrowed definition of legitimate science, back onto Dee, for whom it is inappropriate."
 * "This passage is written in present progressive tense, suggesting that the narrator sees it before him as he writes. This is consistent with the way stories are told in contemporary Quiché households. The storyteller invites the listener to imagine the setting of his tale, and nearly always tells the story as if it were happening right then, even if it happened in the distant or mythic past."
 * Frances A. Yates and Peter French argued that Dee's scientific endeavors were fostered by his occultism. Nicholas H. Clulee further claims that Dee's practice of experimental science was not novel, following a genealogy "back to Roger Bacon," with a prominent magical dimension.
 * "The effort to find a dividing line between magic and genuine science -- a crossroads where magic either transforms itself into science or is left behind and true science taken up -- is, in regard to Dee, mistaken because it pushes a later conceptual distinction between magic and science involved a narrowed definition of legitimate science, back onto Dee, for whom it is inappropriate."
 * Frances A. Yates and Peter French argued that Dee's scientific endeavors were fostered by his occultism. Nicholas H. Clulee further claims that Dee's practice of experimental science was not novel, following a genealogy "back to Roger Bacon," with a prominent magical dimension.
 * "The effort to find a dividing line between magic and genuine science -- a crossroads where magic either transforms itself into science or is left behind and true science taken up -- is, in regard to Dee, mistaken because it pushes a later conceptual distinction between magic and science involved a narrowed definition of legitimate science, back onto Dee, for whom it is inappropriate."
 * "The effort to find a dividing line between magic and genuine science -- a crossroads where magic either transforms itself into science or is left behind and true science taken up -- is, in regard to Dee, mistaken because it pushes a later conceptual distinction between magic and science involved a narrowed definition of legitimate science, back onto Dee, for whom it is inappropriate."

Decolonizing methods

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 * Leigh Kathryn Jenco questions the use of Eurocentric methodologies in conducting cross-cultural research within and about Chinese traditions
 * Jenco proposes a "methods-centered approach" that actively seeks to incorporate non-Western research methodologies