How can experimental and installation ethnography tell stories? How might experimental and installation ethnography aid us in interpreting anew the signs of particular events so as to grasp them and present them, particularly to get to the "ghost story," the likes of which may be embedded in the flickering of a moment?
This text asks us to ask who is participating and engaging, including those who may not be here anymore but still their ghosts haunt and ask us to negate dispossessions and dehumanizations. It suggests that we take on collective responsibility for transforming the "shadow of a life into an undiminished life whose shadows touch softly in the spirit of a peaceful reconciliation" (208). There needs to be meaning and depth that unites collaborators, embedded in a purpose that strives to acknowledge subjugated knowledge.
To begin, Avery Gordon proclaims “that life is complicated may seems a banal expression to the obvious, but it is nonetheless, a profound theoretical statement—perhaps the most important theoretical statement of our time” (3). It is these complications, especially those that are seemingly invisible, that Gordon explores in her book titled “Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.” These complications are, of course, met with contradictions. For Gordon, however, it is these very frictions and tensions that are cause for analytical importance.
First, she describes some of her own hauntings. She writes of her journey to a conference with an abstract in hand only to be distracted by a photograph. Rather, only to be haunted by a photograph. She traces her encounter with Sabina Spielrein, a key but often forgotten figure in the psychoanalytical movement. It’s Spielrein’s absence in a photo that leads Gordon on a detour to theorizing exclusions and absences. For Gordon, “a dead women was not at a conference she was supposed to attend—requires attention to what is not seen, but is nonetheless powerful real” (42).
"that life is complicated may seem a banal expression to the obvious, but it is nonetheless, a profound theoretical statement—perhaps the most important theoretical statement of our time” (3). "a paradigmatic way in which life is more complicated than those of us who study it have usually granted. Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither premodern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it.
In terms of characterizing ethnographic places, and really space/place more generally, Gordon’s conceptualization of haunting actually shifts the way we think about temporality in a given space. Haunting, for Gordon, is simultaneously in the past, present, and future.. And isn’t linear, but is really repetitive. Gordon’s work thinks about repetitions and she talks about how ghosts tend to return to familiar places. I think shifting the way we think about time in relation to space could really open up possibilities for us to think about ethnographic sites.
Bielo, James S. 2013. “Promises of Place: A Future of U.S. Comparative Ethnography.” North American Dialogue, 16 (1): 1-11. doi:10.1111/nad.12000
James Bielo is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Miami University. His ethnographic work focuses on the contemporary United States, specializing in Linguistic Anthropology, Ethnographic Methods, Anthropological Theory and the Anthropology of Global Christianity.
North American Dialogue (NAD) is the peer-reviewed publication of the Society for the Anthropology of North America. They publish research that fosters dialogue about North America and its far-reaching effects. NAD is a forum for North Americanist scholars, activists, and practitioners to disclose findings, raise issues, describe fieldwork, and offer political and theoretical analyses in a timely fashion.
That place is a promising concept for future studies of late modernity in the United States.
