Hauntology: Theorizing the Spectral in Psychological Anthropology

Abstract Recent writing in anthropology, particularly of Southeast Asia, suggests a “spectral” turn within ethnographic theorizing, influenced by Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx and wide‐ranging writing on ghosts, haunting, and spectrality within cultural studies. This article argues that “haunting” and “hauntology” have a critical place within psychological anthropology and theories of subjectivity. The article provides a personal genealogy of how the author has come to use this concept for reflections on over 20 years of work in Indonesia. And it makes four suggestions for theorizing hauntology in psychological anthropology. It suggests first, that hauntology requires that we address the complex processes through which traumatic dimensions of contested historical experience are simultaneously kept hidden and made visible, and second that such accounts must address the complex relations between individual psychological experience and the political, which in turn requires a conception of the barred self and its haunting. Third, it suggests that we address questions of why outbreaks of ghosts appear when they do and what kinds of social and psychological responses they provoke. The article concludes with a brief exploration of the possibilities of a “hauntological ethics.”