Given the title of this work, you may mistakenly believe (as did at least one prior owner of the book copy I had read from, if their annotations are any indication) that this is a literal investigation into all things paranormal and society’s investment of that which goes bump in the night. In “Ghostly Matters: Hauntings and the Sociological Imagination”, Avery F. Gordon offers academics and ethnographers – those whose profession it is to unearth the secreted relationships between the signifier and the signified, the subject and object, the real and unreal - a disturbing ghost story that should leave those of us in the field who came claim these titles with both the deepest of darkest chills and, through a new method of revealing and acknowledging the ghosts we feel, the hope for something akin to redemption. (In this way, perhaps, Gordon accomplishes many of the same feats as Stephen King and Edgar Allen Poe). Like all the best ghost stories, this begins with the most innocuous of introductions: “…life is complicated”, a quote by Patricia Williams that Gordon will remind us repeatedly is “the most important theoretical statement of our time” (3). What obscures, obfuscates, thwarts and yes, haunts us and our work, she argues, is not what is seen but what isn’t, the notable absences out of the corner of our trained eye, those ghosts who may be invisible (especially to the discourse) yet still exact attention from their hidden presence. Perhaps anticipating the confusion of my book’s previous reader, Gordon patiently (and poetically) expands on her conceptualization – ghosts are those whom, through the “complicated relationship between reality and its mode of production” (11) have been relegated to that void between the s... ... middle of paper ... ... platform for silenced, and therefore considered dead, voices - is as provocative a tool for sociological/ethnographic discernment as one might imagine and, as Gordon’s work amply evinces through its case subjects remains desperately needed . It is no coincidence then that Life is complicated bookends this work – and in the words of Luce Irigiary which Gordon summons (39-40), its complications often give us reason to let the unexamined and unchallenged method lead us astray. But also, because as all the best authors of ghost stories know, working in the proximity - on behalf of - ghosts must leave the exorcist and the ethnographer changed; not only is the spirit of the unseen transformed but so is the exorcist/ethnographer. Such reflexivity and acknowledgment deserves a language in which to articulate shifts in positionality. Ghostly Matters provides that vocabulary.
In the “Interior Life”, Annie Dillard discusses the minds process of realizing the difference between imagination and reality. Dillard begins her narrative by recounting the childhood memory of an oblong shaped light that invaded her room every night, terrorizing her with the possibility of death. Beginning at the door of her bedroom this “oblong light” quickly slid across the wall, continued to the headboard of her little sister Amy’s bed and suddenly disappeared with a loud roar. Oftentimes it returned, noisily fading away just before seizing her, meanwhile Amy slept, blissfully unaware. Continuing on, Dillard describes the unforgettable discovery of the connection between the noise the oblong light made and the sound of the passing cars
The Haunting of Hill House is a gothic horror novel written by Shirley Jackson. Supernatural occurrences take place within the house revolving around Eleanor. Eleanor is a thirty-two-year-old woman who never once has felt the sense of inclusion. Eleanor seems to never recall the feeling of delight in her adult years due to the fact that she was a caretaker for her now deceased Mother; who took away most of her freedom by being incredibly restrictive. Dr. Montague, a doctor that specializes in analysis of the supernatural rents Hill House, a supposedly haunted house. During the renting period, Dr. Montague begins an experiment inviting individuals who have had involvement in abnormal events
Ghost- a vision of a dead person that is believed to appear or become visible to the living as a vague image. There have been many cases in reality where one sees the ghost of their deceased loved ones or encounter some sort of paranormal activity in their life. “Proof” by David Auburn plays around with the “Ghost story” in his play to represent identity, memory of Catherine.
... was with a man. Although the story is a ghost story first of all, it is also a comment on the Victorian society, its cruelty, "destructive pressures" and "restrictive code of behavior," that led to many tragedies. The ghost motive is unquestionably the prevailing one and can be understood in the realistic as well as the symbolic way. As symbols, the ghosts stand for the restrained love and the corrupted psyche of the woman getting mad, who cannot control her sexual desires. The ghosts themselves are not scarier than the condition of the mind of the woman who in pursuit of love becomes insane.
Kehoe, Alice Beck. The Ghost Dance; Ethnohistory and Revitalization. Chicago: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc, 1989.
Discussions about possessions interest me, or maybe it’s discussion about ghosts that interest me. I have read a few Japanese ghost stories that sent me running for the hills. It didn’t help some of those stories were animated at times, adding another creepy element beside the stories themselves. I hoped for a good, scary from reading Spirits of the Hanged. Before discussing the tale, I wanted to talk about the little prelude pertaining to Yuan Ch’an. This prelude is nice and ironic but also reminded me of The Horse Mountain Ghost (THMG). It’s practically the same thing with a different background/context. I found that pretty funny that the stories end with the creature saying, “I am a (demon, ghost, thing )” then they change into the creature they described. One last comment, the mentioning of “the worst” type of ghost being people who hanged themselves. This chapter talks about how the women are “ill-treated” which I wanted to say how obviously there should be a fairy tale or some kind of adaptation based on
The Nelly Butler hauntings is referred to as the first recorded ghost story in American history (LiBrizzi 5), and possibly the most exciting hauntings to date as there are still many unsolved mysteries. The apparition appeared on more than 30 separate occasions to over 100 witnesses in Sullivan, Maine, just over fifteen years after the American Revolution (5-6). Although the Nelly Butler apparition is one of the most convincing ghosts of all time, it was subject to suspicions of fraud. These claims turn out to be groundless as the evidence reveals the ghost to be genuine.
The word “ghost” originates from the Aged English word “gast,” and its synonyms are “soul, spirit [good or bad spirit], existence, breath,” and “demon” (etymonline.com). In the book, The Woman Warrior, that is, ironically, subtitled as Memoirs of a Girlhood Amid Ghosts, the author, Maxine Hong Kingston, uses the word “ghost” as a metaphor to typify her confusion concerning discovering a difference amid reality and unreality – the difference that divides her American present that prefers and her Chinese past that her mother, Valiant Orchid, filters into her mind across talk-stories that steadily daunt her to cross her established bounds. Ghosts, in the book, change reliant on point of view. Anybody whose deeds deviates from what is satisfactory in one area is a ghost according to the associates of that society. To Chinese people, like Valiant Orchid, Americans are ghosts. On the supplementary hand, Chinese are ghosts according to Chinese-Americans (including Kingston, who finds her past loaded alongside frightening Chinese ghosts). For Kingston, Ghosts, however, are not always scary; in fact, a little of them enthuse...
ghost come back to life, a random woman who came to fulfill the needs. of the protagonists, and the view of, does it really matter? These possibilities will be discussed throughout the duration of this essay. and it will be left to you to decide what you think. In the support of Beloved actually being the baby ghost re-born, you could use the fact.
Throughout the course of the novella, the ghosts seemingly blend in with the humans that occupy the building. Throughout the story, the ghosts are referred to as mere children who are nothing but distractions for the workers and the families of the workers. Yet at the end of the day, when Patri goes to the roof to, in essence, say her last goodbyes, there seems to be this diversity within the Ghosts that was not previously introduced. The narrator, for the first time, lets the characters of the book, Carmen Larrain, Javier Vinas, Elise, and Roberto, make their statements about the various ghosts such as the “female hare”, “the watchmaker”, “the dwarves”, and “Japanese Ghosts”(page 123-125). Their perspectives and stories add a different dimension to the plot because previously, the narrator introduced the ghosts as an all male entity of sorts, which seemed unified in their immature intentions. Yet with these various stories, gender and ethnicity are applied to the ghosts, which changes Patri’s perspective. Now she sees the ghosts as a seemingly diverse population that is accepting of all types of
The definition of the “ghost” is a shadow which wandering among or haunting other people. The villagers called her aunt a ghost because they are scared of her behavior. The life that they know had been attacked. Kingston uses the harsh responses of the villagers indirectly exposes her aunt ‘s challenge to the society.
For many years, people have debated whether or not spirits are real. Some people get scared at the fact that there might be something unknown lurking in their house in the middle of the night making their footsteps known to everyone in it. Maybe that person feels watched upon or feel some kind of presence in their home, or even sees shadows moving their way through rooms. Different people around the world have their own opinions based on religion and experiences when talking about angels, demons, and the spirits that have life after death. New technology is getting closer to detecting these energies happening in the world today. The history of haunting dates back many years, and more people want to get involved because of the new technology.
Building on the post-phenomenological work of Rose and Wiley (2006: 475), spiritual landscapes concern the tension between absence and presence – the performance, creation and perception of something unseen but profoundly felt. The spiritual - the excessive, ineffable, ghostly presence, or haunting – is not confined to religious experience; but rather the spiritual, denotes the non-material virtual world, which Dewsbury and Cloke (2009) argue, is constitutive of a mixture of representative and non-representative registers. Through this, spiritual landscapes foreground the different ways otherworldly senses of spirit are staged and allowed to act through certain performances and architectures of potential, and highlight how spiritual presences ‘produce actual bodily dispositions, leaving marks in the landscape of existence, and affective memories, or traces within the body’ (Dewsbury and Cloke, 2009:
a dull grey colour as if it had lost the will to live and stopped
In Turn of the Screw by Henry James, there is a question of whether the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are real. They seem to only appear to the governess and she is the only one who admits to seeing them. F. W. H. Myers recognized apparitions as "a manifestation of persistent personal energy, --or an indication that some kind of force is being exercised after death which is in some way connected to a person previously known on earth." (P. 141) This fits the story perfectly for the ghosts appear to be nothing, just a "manifestation." The governess swears that Miles and Flora see the ghosts too, but that they refuse to admit it. She says, "whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw more-- things terrible and unguessable and that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse in the past." (P.53) They are scared or intimidated. Some of the places the governess appears show many parallels to the sightings of the ghosts as well. The governess sees Quint in the glass door and up on the tower, a place where Mrs. Grose notices the governess. And the governess sees Miss Jessel sitting at her desk. She recalls, "In the presence of what I saw I reeled back upon resistance. Seated at my own table in the clear noonday light I saw a person" (P. 59) These reflections of herself upon the ghosts portray an idea that she is a ghost or it is in her conscious and Bly is driving her mad.