Finding and Conjuring

ABSTRACT

In considering the persistent ways that haunting, as a metaphoric operation, informs our attentions to history and human experience, this article introduces this special issue by asking what qualities of knowing, reading, and understanding, and what particular histories, might be rolled into “ghostliness.” Infrastructural hauntings at once jog the fixity of certain metaphors and help us world our analytics. With the aid of a recent feature film (Session 9) that draws fear from the infrastructural ruins of a haunted hospital, I propose contrasting modes of attending to ghosts in the world and the world in ghosts--finding and conjuring, in which finding sees ghosts as something, while conjuring sees ghosts as always, inevitably, something else. With ghosts and ghostliness at hand, how might we, as anthropologists, consider the unspoken imperatives of our metaphors? How might we invite a localizing turn into our own efforts, being attentive to the ways our analytics propel ways of knowing into the world?

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropology
• ghosts
• haunting
• hospitals
• metaphor

In 2008, the Bradlee Danvers Condominium Complex in Danvers, Massachusetts, was ready for its first new residents. Built on the site of the Danvers State Hospital, demolished in 2006 save for a central tower and exterior of two wings, the condos shared the view the hospital once enjoyed. The airy hilltop on which Danvers State Insane Asylum was built in 1874 was ideal for a new vision of care. Following Thomas Kirkbride’s famous “plan,” it had farm, garden, reservoir (for daily use and hydrotherapies) and workshops, wedding architecture to ideology to promote the therapeutic qualities of open air and activity. The things that made the site ideal for such visions—expansive land, distance from the city—now made it perfect for twenty-first century homes.

The years between the hospital’s closure and the condos’ opening make this more than a story of the re-appropriation of institutional spaces for gentrified living. Prior to the 2006 demolition, the vast ruins, empty of patients since the hospital’s 1992 closure, earned the attentions of citizen activists and urban explorers. Preservationists and recreation-seekers shared both sensory remembering (Edensor 2005) and a historical moment between the end of state-run custodial systems and the social reabsorption of their iconic buildings. But where preservationists’ visual guides were the central tower and large wings, their publications full of photographs of the working hospital and descriptions of its early history as an embodiment of health as social good, urban explorers were drawn into the network of tunnels. Their websites and publications cast images with the strangeness of madness and the violence of institutions, discarded medical minutia amid structural ruin. In some moments the orientations meet. In a video, “Danvers State Tunnel Exploration 2001,” on a website covering the hospital’s history, a grainy beam of light probes walls draped with a parade of vacant limbs, perhaps hazmat suits. The claustrophobia of this netherworld of empty habitation, peopled and unpeopled, literally undermines the airy tower view.

Danvers State’s ruins were the setting for the 2002 film Session 9 (Anderson 2002), which follows an asbestos removal team, the front-line of demolition, through intensifying psychological and ghostly dramas. The film is full of disintegrating building infrastructures—pipes, wires, cords, hallways, tunnels, and medical infrastructures—equipment, beds, dripping hydrotherapy tubs, patient files. The institution’s history is described (by Mike, who tells his co-workers about abuse and overcrowding) and discovered (by Hank, who finds a cache of coins in what turns out to be the backside of the crematorium). Psychologies come undone. The foreman, Gordon, sleep deprived by a new baby, is distressed over a fight with his wife; Mike grows obsessed with reel-to-reel recordings of psychiatric sessions. As the men dismantle and enter the infrastructure, the infrastructure becomes a medium of the past. Portraying layered ruins (of building, social system, and ideology), Session 9 is also a preservation, freezing the time-space of ruin and its specific kinds of loss. The setting makes the plot richly intertextual. It is a ghost story about which we are not sure if it is a ghost story. Are the ghosts real or metaphor, figments of disturbed minds and histories or not figments at all?

Session 9 is an ideal point of entry into this special issue, not only because the film is about haunted infrastructures, but because it plays with boundaries around metaphoric and real hauntings, leading us into the relationship between infrastructures and the ways haunting is meaningful to us, scholars, anthropologists, readers of the social world. By invoking Derrida’s “hauntology,” Session 9 allows us to turn to analytics, how we “attend to ghosts” through their histories and infrastructures (institutional, economic, and intellectual). Like these essays, Session 9 turns toward ghosts, on the one hand, and ghostliness, on the other. It maps contrasting ways we tend to think with ghosts: finding and conjuring. Though these are often overlaid, for the moment let us hold them apart, imagining conjuring as assimilating ghosts to metaphor or as points of access to other things, and finding as the discovery of agentive ghosts. Finding sees ghosts as something; conjuring sees ghosts as something else, working, often, with ghostliness rather than ghosts.

* * * *

Throughout Session 9, we are invited to consider a space rancid with dangerous histories, deinstitutionalization’s lost souls, and private dramas. Gordon confesses that he hit his wife after she spilled hot water on him, and at the end of each day calls her to apologize from a truck parked outside their house. Hank returns at night to steal the crematorium trinkets and encounters … something. The men find him days later, confused, staring out a window, devoid of memory and personality. He has been lobotomized, we learn, stabbed through the eye socket with an orbitoclast (a technique for which Danvers State was notorious) by Gordon, who attacks the crew one by one. Though sensoria invite us to suspect the supernatural, Gordon’s attacks suggest a metaphoric operation connecting his acts to the violences of the institution, conflating personal and historical trauma. The film conjures ghostliness in place of ghosts. There is comfort in this.

Much humanistic scholarship on haunting bears out a translational imperative in dealing with ghosts, a near-inevitability in making haunting over into something else. In an analytic indebted to Freud’s sense of the uncanny as psychic process and to literature scholars such as Avery Gordon (1997) who connect psychic to historical repression to show social history to be nonlinear, haunting understood as the return of the repressed allows ghosts to be metaphoric transformations of social process. The ghost is a sign of forgetting and symptomatic remembering, historical erasure, and the resurfacing of what can not belong to official memory. The Freudian uncanny hinges on maternity and domestic security, making this approach at home at home, so to speak, bringing homeliness to public spaces and entities like the nation. But when ghosts haunt infrastructures, it becomes possible to wonder if haunting is less about history than certain histories. Session 9’s decaying institutional infrastructures bring the uncanny reading into alignment with its own historical scenery.

In the reading of Marx that gave us “hauntology,” Derrida outlined the relationship between capitalism and the spectral to explain why we read ghosts in the way we do. In Specters of Marx, revisiting the commodity-as-fetish, he notices spectral imagery: “free and unattached” from its sources in labor the commodity is “autonomous and automaton,” it “levitates, it appears relieved of its body, like all ghosts, a little mad and unsettled as well, upset, ‘out of joint,’ delirious, capricious, and unpredictable” (2011:191). A thing transformed, shape-shifter with stubborn agency, it is an odd ontological object, a thing that is not itself, empty yet animated, a “prosthesis of itself” (192). “Life, Thing, Beast, Object, Commodity, Automaton—in a word, specter” (190), the commodity animates, putting “everything around it into motion” (192) making objects into relationships of value and “human producers into ghosts” (195). Transfiguration is capitalism’s “quid pro quo,” an “abnormal play of mirrors” that makes “men” unrecognizable to themselves (195). Ghostliness, in this form, is a structural condition, an economy of things, knowing, and being, the infrastructure of our material existence and the relationship between material and abstract. It is an arrangement of presence. Capitalism is its infrastructure, epitomized in the commodity and “money, or more precisely the monetary sign,” “the figure of appearance or simulacrum” (55). This system of “conjuration” establishes things as ghostly and ghosts as defined by transfiguration, both only knowable as something else.

Derrida’s argument is ultimately about text (Marx’s Capital, among other writings), leading us to ask whether Marx considered capitalism ghostly because this was how people thought of ghosts, or whether ghosts were the way they were because of how capitalism works. Though unfixing the connection of ghosts-as-we-know-them to the commodity, this circularity does not change the way transfiguration is entrenched in capitalism’s infrastructures nor relieve us of the need to ask why transfiguration is how we are drawn to know ghosts. An obvious answer might be that guided by rationality, we cannot accommodate ghosts “as they are,” but this is insufficient, locking us to logics of “belief” and “rationality” about which we know better. A different answer comes from the way knowledge in capitalism depends on a system of transfigured things. The hauntology that is capitalism fuses capitalism’s conditions of knowing to how we know ghosts and how we know things through them. “Bound to the categories of bourgeois economy” via the “artefactual body” that is the commodity, “the ghostly schema now appears indispensable” (Derrida 2011:205, 189).

The approach to scientific knowledge take by Emily Martin, in her body of work on medical and popular culture formulations of body and mind (1987, 1994, 2007), offers a more user-friendly way of thinking about this, linking metaphoric formulations of bodies (in reproduction, immunity, and mania) to the ways capitalism makes value. Similarly, we imagine (and use) ghosts the way we do because our economy tells us what they (and things in general) are, offering the infrastructure for knowing ghosts as things and things as ghostly. This is slightly different from the observations that ghosts and other malign entities share witchy affinities with capitalism (Comaroff, Comaroff, and Moore 1999; Shaw 2002). Seeing ghosts as points of access to other meanings is an effect of the “indispensable” transfigurations of capital, the weirdness of the commodity.

Of course, metaphors are bountifully promiscuous. While my point is not to police “haunting” or its world-rambling, thinking about how we untether and re-tether our analytics to the world marks what may be unmarked, namely, operations that excise critical tools from the scenes in which they are imbued with power. We don’t bring ghosts into our schemes of knowing; we inhabit worlds of things and ideas already steeped in “ghostly schema.” When we work in the ruinous conditions of late capitalism, as we turn our analytic gaze upon that domain as though that domain has not made our lens of analysis, are we truly readers of a film like Session 9, or readers of psychiatry with Session 9, or do we carry forward a myth? There is nothing wrong with working within the mythic, but something may be lost in disavowing that aspect of what we do, and something gained in bringing it back to the world.

While his co-workers look for Hank, Mike plays the recordings. In them, a psychiatrist invites a patient Mary Hobbes with dissociative identity disorder to bring out her alters, a girl called The Princess and a boy named Billy, to describe the night Mary murdered her family. As Mike approaches the eponymous ninth session, Gordon’s violent eruptions suggest something may have been released from this magnetic prison. What, we wonder, is being conjured?

Is it any surprise that ghosts use infrastructures the way we do? People have long sought ghosts (or vice versa) via media technologies, including twentieth century parapsychologist Konstantin Raudive (1971), whose spirits preferred radio to tape and had preferred channels (in Sconce 2000). In the nineteenth century, wired and wireless technologies created metaphoric chains through disembodiment, severing voices from bodies, analogizing technological quests for spirits to psychoanalysis, both efforts to elicit “voices from the void,” and providing models for social change by disembodying consciousness from the social and physical constraints of the material body (Sconce 2000:89, 45). Twentieth-century technologies inspired the fantasies they mediated. Haunted televisions, videocassettes, and the internet condensed anxieties of connectivity in an industry of films spawned by Poltergeist, Ringu, and Paranormal, often positing infrastructural hauntings as unhomely conduits of threat into the security of home (Sconce 2000). Media infrastructures also reorganized the terms of the uncanny, highlighting different stakes of home and homeliness. In India, pulp novels about haunted computers bring global regimes into domestic scenes, taming them by transforming systems of rationalization into signs of their own limits (Mukharji Forthcoming), while “high-rise horror” films use domestic surveillance equipment to portray home as displacing, not threatened, amid disorientations of globalization (Ghosh 2014). Modernity’s infrastructures show transfiguration to be many things because modernity is many things (Mukharji Forthcoming).

Rather than always expressing “discontent with modernity and dealing with its deformities” as “occult economies” (Comaroff et al. 1999:284), some uses of haunting may be in the service of capitalist economies and their objects (Parish 2015). Likewise, if infrastructures are signs of progress, they are so in the terms in which progress is imagined. In colonial infrastructures, as well as anti- and post-colonial re-appropriations, the affiliation of haunting with global economies cross-cuts regimes of value with systems of violence based on difference. Infrastructural spectacles, as much as everydayness, can fix qualities of ghostliness to ideologies of time in ways that map onto people and places, materializing progress as topography according to specific logics of rule. When the world is remade by colonial ideologies that condense past and present, preservation and progress (Larkin 2008), ghosts may less interrupt modernity than assimilate the version of it they occupy. In Niger, ghosts who take to roads when their homes are obliterated by machineries of progress are “mysterious and rootless creatures,” taking on roads’ “dangerous modernity” as future-looking things of progress yet products of violent pasts (Masquelier 2002:840). Such stories establish the moral stakes of modernity and its terms, the forms of value that undergird economic progress.

Colonialism, like global modernity, brings expansive, often homogenizing, formations of power but multiple conditions and stakes, generating analytics at once far-reaching and wildly transfigured. At stake are the diverse ways infrastructures—bearers of progress, rule, extraction, calcifications of difference, domestications of threat, and condensations of value—participate in the ghostly schema that transforms things into other things, ghosts into ghostliness. In this, mediating technologies do many things, fragmenting things into pieces, mapping landscapes, and arranging people. But they converge around a sense: imaginations that hinge on the possibility that things are not what they seem are indebted to structures that not only assume, but assign to certain arrangements an affect of unease.

* * * *

Session 9 and “Tunnel Exploration” chart a certain mytho-topography of knowledge: organized spatially as illicit movement, strange habitation, and uninvited entry, drawing us into knowledge at the points at which things are no longer what they were and creatures do not know themselves. This is a shared map. In the introduction to an influential edited volume, Ann Stoler defines haunting as an inhabiting that is also a specific kind of movement, intrusion and exit, the “crash[ing] through” and “reced[ing]” of “relations” from “easy purview” (2006:4). Unbeholden to any particular genealogy, she describes entities that are neither fully themselves nor aware of what/who they are: “To be haunted is to be frequented by and possessed by a force that not always bares its proper name” (Stoler 2006:4). Spatialized, this is a logic of doorways. Thresholds of presence and visibility are especially fraught. Presence is binarily imagined, and things that defy that binary do something (reveal, unsettle, etc.). This common mytho-topography of haunting is often invoked as though it has no historic, discursive, or cultural home. [It can also be a recipe for power. Colonial mythographies from India are lavish with metaphors linking haunting to marginalized and impoverished people, rendering their social threat as “necromancy” (c.f. Mayo 1928) and infusing visions of (supposed) social justice with a sensory urgency founded in the uncanny shudder. Haunting-as-hermeneutic can also be political discourse. Certain people can made to stand in the doorway, to provoke unease].

Hauntology’s mythographies (a term borrowed from Masquelier) can be unsettled. In her work on Sierra Leone and “memories of the slave trade,” Rosalind Shaw (2002) pluralizes the mechanisms of the relationship of haunting to technological, colonial, and economic projects, relationships that involve different materialities and transfigurations. Some of these are direct: the slave trade made spirits; spirit entities—ghosts, witches, shape-shifters—are memories; through ritual, ghosts become ways of living with the past. At the same time, slavery’s “witch-like” modernity is predicated on the “exchange of human life,” such that the transformation of people from kin into commodities generated hauntings that involve consumption, kidnapping, and shape-shifting (Shaw 2002:17). Shape-shifting here is not just a metaphoric potentiality; people accused of being shape-shifters were sold into slavery while slavery made people into objects to be bought and sold (Shaw 2002). Pluralizing transfiguration without disavowing the ways ghosts demand interpretation, Shaw’s repertoire of shape-shifting attends to the ways histories make malign spirits as well as directives for knowing them. It complicates universalizing and dislocated definitions of haunting as an analytic that are amputated from the conditions that make it so.

Haunting’s mythographies have everything to do with the pasts they are used to access. Their particularities can lead us out of epistemic murk by asking us to re-anchor metaphors in the world, to be wary of too readily bringing ghostliness to ghosts. As they challenge its uniformity, they remind us that conjuring is not the only way ghosts involve the past, and the past not the only concern of spirits (Stevenson 2014; Taneja 2018). They challenge the boundaries around materiality, visibility, naming, and presence that organize definitions of “haunting.” For describing junctures of context and analytic so easily eclipsed, Shaw’s words are useful: “past and present interfuse, shape, and mutually fashion each other, such that memories form a prism through which the present is configured even as present experience reconfigures those memories” making memory “work both forward and backward” (2002:265). Hermeneutics of haunting may do something similar.

Urban explorers may revel in the way hospital ruins signify spaces of abuse, but preservationists note that ruins signal a lost civic spirit, the virtue of infrastructure as social good. More broadly, hospitals occupy a juncture that complicates common mythographies of haunting. Agglomerations of multiple systems and histories, like other signs of progress, they embody contrast: violence and cure, life and death. In impoverished and marginalized places they may signify both progress and its obstacles. While writing on non-western early-modern hospitals cautions us about automatically assimilating hospitals with western modernity (Speziale 2012), hospitals are, in the Foucaultian formulation (1980), iconic of the instantiation of modern power, and they can embody a different kind of power, of unevenly distributed resources.

The articles in this collection gather in haunted hospitals, asking us to consider differences between knowing ghosts and knowing things through ghosts. Two authors (Chabrol, Towghi) describe persisting ways hospitals represent colonialism through ideologies of progress; two (Krauss, Kehr) portray clinics whose efforts are critical of earlier models, including colonial ones. And one (Varma and Varley) seeks to map time and space in ghosts’ terms.

In her article on iatrogenic disease in Cameroonian hospitals, Chabrol highlights how hospitals are persistently colonial spaces by bringing biological material of the past into the present. The sheer force of life’s regeneration makes disease ghostly. Microbes that stay on hospital matter embody colonial ineptitude and violence, undermining “biomedical promise” by “expos[ing] patients to financial ruin and also, occasionally, to social and biological harm” (Chabrol, this issue). Viral disease is a “revisitation” of the past; microbes condense past, present, and future in “the kind of ruination that is still active”. By contrast, new things (medical techniques) evoke the past in Baluchistan, Pakistan, rendering the hospital itself a colonial haunting (Towghi, this issue). Haunting here works as a symbolic operation in women’s critiques of biomedicine, envisioned against the knowledge practices of traditional midwives, that pose the hospital as symbolic of colonial medicine through the imagined newness of its techniques.

Hauntings also intercede in hospitals’ visions of themselves as places of redress for restrictive pasts. As Krauss shows, Mexican abortion clinics represent progressive laws and expanded care, yet everyday violences summon the era of illegal abortion. Exceeding the linear time of law, speech acts “conjure” patients as guilty by transfiguring past illegalities into present immoralities. Moralizing is a form of violence that adheres to spaces of care rather than personnel, allowing “haunting” to highlight the structural violence of progressive projects. Similarly, in Kehr’s article, the Avicenne Hospital in France serves minoritized French citizens in an effort to redress colonial pasts, not in spite of its origin as a “Franco-Muslim Hospital” but through reflection on it. Yet as practitioners distance themselves from racializing colonial projects and envision an “alter-politics,” they re-instantiate the past. In a spectrum of conjuring, hospitals figure less as haunted infrastructures than as mediating infrastructures of haunting, retaining the past in their structures, at times implicating contemporary ethical claims.

In the remaining article, such structures are interceded by actual ghosts. Drawing on Anand Taneja’s “jinnealogy” (2018), Varma and Varley attend to jinn in hospitals in Pakistan and Indian-occupied Kashmir, theorizing with jinn and unsettle “hauntology” as an architecture of modern institutions. In so doing, they remain close to the worldviews of their interlocutors, to the ways ghosts “signal” fear in unstable life conditions. In “multidimensional and multi-temporal spaces”, jinn are not just signs of “the” past, but of how pasts take form, how “failed pasts become socially, spatially, and infrastructurally fixed”.

As hospitals reorient us to our analytics for knowing haunting, they bring us closer to possible counterpoints to conjuring. The contrasts between these papers urge us to hold apart the questions, how do we know ghosts, and how do we know things through ghosts? As we encounter metaphoric and actual ghosts in metaphoric and actual machines, we should ask how these questions do and do not connect. Do we know things through ghosts in the way we do because of the way we know ghosts? Or do we know ghosts the way we do because of the way we use them to know things?

* * * *

There is something about Session 9 I have not yet mentioned. If you have seen it you must be wondering, where is Simon?

At the end of the film, we learn that Gordon has been lobotomizing his friends just as Mike reaches the final session in the tapes of Mary Hobbes. In earlier sessions, Mary Hobbes’ alter Billy described a third alter, Simon. Simon refuses to speak until the final session. When we hear his voice, it is not, like the others, Mary’s voice ventriloquizing. It is someone else.

Though a new voice for Mike, it is not so for us. We heard it at the beginning, calling Gordon’s name as he entered the building. We heard it later, urging Gordon into violence. When we finally learn Gordon’s story (he did not hit his wife, but murdered her and their baby) we realize it was Simon who goaded him on.

Simon’s arrival marks a radical shift in the film’s ontology. Initially, we hear Simon as a voice in Gordon’s head. When the same voice sounds in tapes recorded decades earlier, we discover its independence. We can no longer think of Simon as internal to any one character. The chilling possibility that the tapes might be releasing Simon is impossible in the film’s narrative logic (we have already heard Simon speaking to Gordon). If we thought Mike was conjuring something through the tapes, we were wrong. Simon was already there. The film ends with voiceover. The doctor asks, “Where do you live, Simon?” And Simon answers, “I live in the weak and wounded.”

In its final minutes, the film wrenches us from the comfort of conjuring, of transfigural explanations (ghosts as metaphors of the past or figments of disturbed minds) by introducing an agentive spirit, another character who was there all along.

Simon represents a reading I am calling finding. Finding is familiar to anthropologists, who are compelled to take seriously the ghosts people know as well as the ways people know them. Finding turns us toward these things and away from the imagined parameters of “rationality” and “belief,” old straw men too simple to anchor most realities.

But finding does not come easily. In one sense, Simon is a disappointment. He makes a psychological exploration of working class New England masculinity into just another ghost story. Simon is also a narrative hiccup. His appearance has no connection to the characters or to Danvers State. Is Simon everywhere? Does he just hang out in Danvers? He follows Gordon home, so he is not confined to the hospital, though he may be drawn to it for all the weak and wounded. Do the hospital and its history—all those lobotomies—matter at all? If he had a clear narrative role, it might demand his interpretive transformation into a ghost in the machine. Simon’s messy place in the diagetics makes him exceed Derrida’s “ghostly schema.” He only incidentally part of the ruins, offering no particular lesson about the past.

Another film inhabits the same real and mythic geographies. In The Witch (Eggers 2016), a seventeenth century Massachusetts family is expelled from society for religious violation. On their new homestead, happenings portend curses: the baby is taken, a son disgorges an apple from his mouth then dies, daughter Thomasin experiences fits that suggest she is bewitched. The film tempts us with conjuring (viewers steeped in conjural explanations recognize Thomasin’s symptoms as psychological effects) but scares with finding. A demon appears, having entered a goat, Black Phillip, and, offering Thomasin all she desires, directs her to sign a ledger. She then sheds her clothes, follows him into the woods and, with a coven of nude witches, rises into the air. Aesthetically, something feels wrong. Like Simon, Black Phillip is too earnest, too silly. Challenging less our rationality than our interpretive expectations, these spirits do not return something to us. They just show up. They may shapeshift, but they are what they are. Director Robert Eggers described The Witch as an experiment with the “inherited nightmare” of early American conventions of fear (Robinson and Eggers 2016). This experiment seems doomed to alienate because, masters of transfiguration, we are primed to know better: Salem’s witches were wrongly accused women; fits are somatized reactions to social repression.

New England has a long relationship to finding and conjuring. Its colonial interrogations of demons gave us the legal category “spectral evidence” and its rebuttal as a founding concept (segments of The Witch’s script came from similar seventeenth century trials). The Yankee Protestantism that made capitalism an ethic was founded on trade in enslaved humans. Eastern Massachusetts’ tourist industry emphasizes the spooky over the unjust, luring visitors to Salem (not Danvers, formerly Salem Village) for ghost tours and witchy experiences. New England was home to much of the table rapping, ghostly photography, and spiritualist conjuring that used new technologies to access spirits. An ethnographic way of knowing that attends to history might suggest a local quality to these films’ analytics. Is it an accident that I, too, live in this landscape?

Ethnography claims, sometimes accomplishes, the ability to find, to examine, if not evade, the translational qualities that dog our efforts. It can work in and through the different ways that finding and conjuring, ghosts and ghostliness, knowing ghosts and knowing things through ghosts co-occur, allowing us to worry the possibility that it is “the ghostly schema” that invites confusion in the first place, tricking us into imagining that ghosts and ghostliness have something to say to each other. The alienation involved in the conjural turn away from fear (so as to investigate it) renders weird the way we know ghosts. Perhaps what we find enticing or useful about ghost stories is not their ghosts but their ghostliness, their apparent point of entry to other things. Can we leave room, too, for the tricks spirits play, and the tricks they don’t play, for the ways they make us aware of analytic hubris, the possibility that our stories about stories are just another version of the same story?

Simons and Black Philips, interrupting the mechanics of metaphor, remind us that our analytic expectations come from somewhere and ask us to consider entities and feelings that figure less smoothly in those habits. Rather than the uncanny chill, might there be a sense of familiarity or disappointment to attend to? Why must things that aren’t what they are feel odd (surely that is not necessarily an uneasy arrangement)? For Derrida, “thinking never has done with the conjuring impulse,” our “critical problematization” wards off “other choices,” “it fears them as it does itself” (2011:207). What does it find fearful? Perhaps the diagetical awkwardness of a flying witch, ghosts that aren’t ghostly, things too self-contained to suit the always-also-something-else nature of the spectrality we expect, or, more radically, always-also-something-else things that are anything but creepy, that remind us that, in our ghostly work we may impose creepiness on people and things in the world. And, of “itself,” perhaps our thinking fears the infrastructures of a critique that cannot but make things over, ripping things to pieces by conjuring them. If we can sustain that fear, even enter it, then a haunted infrastructure is a particular thing to study—it is the study of our own ways of understanding.

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Notes on contributors

Sarah Pinto

Sarah Pinto is professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, and author of Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India (2008) and Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India (2014).