LINCOLN TowardCriticalHauntology 2015

Toward a Critical Hauntology: Bare Afterlife and the Ghosts of Ba Chúc
Author(s): MARTHA LINCOLN and BRUCE LINCOLN

Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 57, No. 1 (JANUARY 2015), pp.
191-220
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43908338
Accessed: 06-11-2023 21:40 +00:00
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Comparative Studies in Society and History
This content downloaded from 176.41.181.5 on Mon, 06 Nov 2023 21:40:45 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 15;57(1): 191-220.
0010-4175/14 © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2014
doi : 1 0. 1 0 1 7/SOO 1 04 1 75 1 4000644
Toward a Critical Hauntology: Bare

Afterlife and the Ghosts of Ba Chúc
MARTHA LINCOLN
University of California, Berkeley
BRUCE LINCOLN
University of Chicago
A specter is haunting the academy: the figure of the ghostly, the phantasmic,
and the unquiet dead. Over the last fifteen years, a large and rapidly growing
number of works in diverse disciplines - sociology,1 psychoanalysis,2 literary
criticism,3 folklore,4 cultural studies,5 postcolonial studies,6 race and gender
studies,7 geography,8 media studies, and communication and rhetoric9 - have
sought to reinterpret stories of haunting as the return of traumatic memory.
Within such work, ghosts manifest not as terrifying revenants, but as
welcome, if disquieting spurs to consciousness and calls for political action.
Most immediately, this interdisciplinary interest in ghosts was sparked by
Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx (1993), a curious book that combines a pro-
fession of faith (i.e., the messianic spirit of Marxism still holds promise,
Acknowledgments: We wish to thank Lauren Berlant, Shawn McHale, Nguyên-võ Thu-hiromg,

Nguyen Phuomg Tháo, Bac Hoai Tran, and Priscilla Wald for their assistance and critiques.
Thanks go also to an individual who wished to remain anonymous for their generous contribution
of one of our images (figure 3) from the memorial at Ba Chúc. Research and preparation were sup-
ported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Training Grant T32-AA014125.
1 Gordon 2008[1997]; Bell 1997; Cho 2008.

2 Davis 2007; Schwab 2010; Frosh 2013.
Carpenter and Kolmar 1991; Luckhurst 2002; Blazan 2007; Griffiths and Evans 2009; Rich-
ardson 2009; Redding 2011; Anderson 2013.
4 Motz 1998; Valk 2006.
Rabate 1993; Buse and Stott 1999; Lloyd 2005; Etkind 2009; Pilar Blanco and Peeren 2010;
2013.
6 O' Riley 2007; Cameron 2008.
Young 2006; Parham 2009.
Pile 2005; Edensor 2005; 2008; Holloway and Kneale 2008.
Foss and Domenici 2001; Gunn 2004; Andriopoulos 2013.
191
192 LINCOLN AND LINCOLN
deserves fidelity, and terrifies the world's rulers, even after the fall of Mar
states and orthodoxies); an audacious claim of successorship (deconstructio
the radicalization of Marx's messianism, as well as his critical spirit); and a
prising observation (spirits, spooks, and haunting loom large in Marx's
ings).10 In the course of his discussion, Derrida playfully introduced the
"hauntology" - in punning contrast to a more rigid, concrete, and self-se
ontology - to describe a concern with apparitions, visions, and representa
that mediate the sensuous and the non-sensuous, visibility and invisibility, p
ence and absence, reality and not-yet-reality, being and non-being. The t
has proved useful, as have some of Derrida's observations on spectral phen
ena, although he based the great majority of his ideas concerning ghosts p
on a single literary source: Act I of Shakespeare's Hamlet. In this essay,
suggest a typology of hauntings to clarify the types and uses of ghosts
loom large in current scholarship, suggesting the need for a "critical hau
ogy." We begin with a review of the theoretical literature that has been pa
ularly influential. We then introduce a distinction between what we ter
primary and secondary haunting via case studies in Vietnam, where haunt
has ample local precedent and bears political, moral, and religious signif
cance.11 Finally, we explore the interaction between the two types of hau
at the site of a civilian massacre in South Vietnam, a village troubled by
afterlife of grievous mass death. Appendix I provides our English transla
of a media source on these latter events.
Prominent among the earlier works that helped shape the new hauntology
are Freud's essays on mourning and melancholia (1917), the uncanny (1919),
and his broader emphasis on the return of the repressed; Marx's theory of alien-
ation and the phantasmatic way human labor reappears in commodities and
surplus value (1977 [1867]); Durkheim's view of spiritual beings as collective
representations (1995 [1912]); Mauss' interest in the spirit of the gift (1967
[1925]) and the social nature of mourning rituals (1921); and Maurice Halb-
wachs's attention to collective memory (1992 [1925]). For all these theoreti-
cians, and others as well, the borderland between corporeal existence and
some other dimension (equally real but less material) has proven an irresistible,
if elusive, arena for speculation.
These lines of theory converge in Walter Benjamin's seminal essay "On
the Concept of History" (2003 [1940]), which integrated most of the works
just cited, made them speak to the crisis of fascism's advance, and in doing
so developed a position that continues to resonate well beyond that immediate
10 Derrida 1994. An earlier version of this text was first presented as the keynote address at a
1993 conference on the theme "Whither Marxism?"
Hauntological language has also crept into American language reterencing the conîlict in
Vietnam. For example, in 2002, the U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam described the legacy of Agent
Orange as the last "significant ghost" remaining in the postwar period (see Fox 2007).
TOWARD A CRITICAL HAUNTOLOGY 1 93
context.12 In its ñiller development, the "spectral turn" in scholarship (L

hurst 2002: 527) is informed less by Derrida than by Benjamin, particul
in his sense that the potential for encounters between the living and the
remains ever open; that such confrontations erupt at moments of crisis
may imply profound consequences; that the living have only partial con
over these meetings but bear weighty responsibility for what comes of t
and that the stakes of this are high for the living and dead alike. Benjamin
vocation of the past as a political and moral resource for present claims -
one perpetually threatened by oblivion - resounds in many hauntological t
Three of his theses are particularly relevant:
III: The chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between majo
minor ones acts in accord with the following truth: nothing that has ever hap
should be regarded as lost to history... (2003 [1940]: 390).
V: The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image
flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again... (ibid.).
VI: Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it "the way it r
was." It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger....
only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is f
convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And
enemy has never ceased to be victorious (ibid.: 391, his emphasis).
Although practitioners of the new hauntology generally take their lead from
essay of Benjamin's, they depart from it in several ways. Most obviousl
nowhere did Benjamin speak directly of ghosts, phantoms, or haunting, o
of remembrance, the past , the dead , and - on one occasion - the image of
slaved ancestors ,13 These authors' citations of Benjamin therefore draw rh
ical power from their literalization of a figure whose presence in the the
only implicit, although they do take recourse to another essay in which B
min made brief mention of "ghostly signals."14 Recoding Benjamin's conc
for the fate of the dead and the way they are remembered (or forgotten)
interest in spectral phenomena extends Benjamin's language in the directi
metaphor and expands his argument toward metaphysics. Although the im
cations of his essay are far-reaching and its intentions are explicitly mess
Benjamin was most immediately concerned with the politics and morali
12 Benjamin's notion of the modern "phantasmagoria" is also relevant, on which see Britz
1999.
"Remembrance" figures in Addendum B of the essay, "the past" in theses II, III, IV, V, VI
XIV, XVI, and XVII; "the dead," in theses VI, IX; "the image of enslaved ancestors" in Thesis
The closest Benjamin comes to a description of a haunting, ghostly presence comes in Th
"Doesn't a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we
isn't there an echo of now silent ones? Don't the women we court have sisters they no longe
ognize? If so, there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Th
coming was expected on earth" (2003 f 19401: 390).
14 Benjamin 1999 [1929]: 211. Gordon 2008 [1997] devotes considerable attention to this
of Benjamin's in her closing chapter, where she tends to equate the "ghostly signals" he me
just once, in passing, with his more fully developed idea of "profane illumination."
historic memory. Accordingly, the very few concrete examples he cited

Social Democrats erasing the memory of Blanqui and Robespierre's embr
of the Roman Republic15 - involve actual human subjects on both sides
the rupture effected by time and mortality.
In contrast, contemporary hauntologists have primarily concerned th
selves with literary representations and figures of the imaginary. Thus, alth
Avery Gordon writes as a sociologist, her Ghostly Matters (2008 [1997])
work possibly more influential than Derrida 's, rests its argument on a
reading of two novels. In Gordon's view, analysis of these works of fict
permits one to reach beyond the accounts normally offered by social scien
who, as a point of disciplinary principle and practice, tend to ignor
less-than-empirically-verifiable "ghostly signals" (like the faint scar
freed slave, felt ever so slightly and hidden from sight) that hint at pa
horrors and the systems that produced them. Accordingly, she grounds he
cussion in literary texts that treat histories of mass violence and disposses
Luisa Valenzuela's Como en la Guerra (1977), à propos of state terror and
disappearance of Argentinians during the Dirty War, and Toni Morrison
Beloved (1987), à propos of slavery and its ongoing effects in the e
Reconstruction.
Gordon thus creates space for consideration of things non-material or

"ghostly" by definition: the affective, the dead and not-quite-gone, the
sensed but not seen. Behind the characters in these novels, inspiring and
evoked by them, stand others: real humans who suffered pain and injustice,
died in terrible circumstances, and were consigned to oblivion, but somehow
lingered in memory, scandal, and rumor. As these ambiguous entities come
to light, first in the experience, research, and imagination of authors, then on
the pages those authors write, they reach and affect living human subjects,
who are moved to acknowledge, mourn, regret, and possibly take action.
Working from these novels, Gordon introduces a trope of haunting as a
means to encompass disparate liberatory projects that invoke the historic imag-
ination to compel a reckoning with violence, suffering, and injustice. To do this,
however, she implicitly disarticulates ghosts from haunting, such that it is she
as author, and not the returned dead, who seeks to startle, frighten, challenge,
terrify, and obsess those she hails, from whom she demands more than mere
attention. And toward this end, she works with materials supplied her by
other authors.16 Only at the end of multiple mediations (memoirists, court
15 Benjamin 2003 [1940]: theses XII and XIV, respectively.

Thus, to take the most obvious case, the figure of "Beloved" in Toni Morrison's novel is based
on Mary Garner, the two-year-old child whose mother cut her throat in 1 856 rather than see her
returned to slavery. The subsequent trial of Margaret Garner was widely reported, both in the main-
stream press and abolitionists' pamphlets, most of which were quite forgotten until Toni Morrison
read one that quoted Garner directly (Bassett 1856), which prompted the research that led her to
write Beloved. See further Weisenburger 1998; and Bynum 2010.
TOWARD A CRITICAL HAUNTOLOGY I95
reporters, activists, researchers, novelists, hauntologists) do the dead appe

the protagonists of a disquieting story told by others, not agentive revenan
Ghosts qua ghosts thus tend to recede in Gordon's account, replaced b
"ghostly" signals, matters, and traces. Regrettably, she never considers indi
uals or social groups who experience haunting as something consistent w
and rooted in, their cosmology, ontology, and psychology (the latter ter
used in the etymologically precise sense: "theory of the soul").17 Rather,
panding on Benjamin, she redefines the experience of being "haunted" as
call to fight on behalf of the dead against those who sought to erase the
(2008: 65-67).
Perhaps the most successful hauntological study to date is Grace M. Ch
Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten
(2008), which goes beyond Gordon in ways. Wishing to extend the metap
of haunting to intimate familial experience, she opens with an epigraph th
states "What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by
secrets of others" (Abraham and Torok 1994, cited in Cho 2008: 1). H
auto-ethnographic cultural history focuses on the figure of the yanggong
or Korean camptown prostitute/GI war bride: Cho's mother, a Korean nati
who married an American GI, is her story's starting point. Seeking meth
capable of breaking silence, unveiling secrets, and producing catharsis, C
assumes a role that goes well beyond that of historian, psychoanalyst, or de
tive, writing to "call forth the ghosts" (2008: 24).
Drawing on her own family's half-secret history and on novels that featu
similar dynamics,18 Cho argues that the sexual labor of Korean women h
been a crucial, if unspoken - and until recently, unspeakable - element of r
tions between Koreans and occupying powers, which provided the wherew
for many Koreans to emigrate to and assimilate in the United States. Th
deeply shaming episodes were repressed - not forgotten, but never discu
openly. In such form, the occluded past was an "unhappy wind" or a "ho
in the consciousness of diasporic individuals and families (ibid.:
Drawing on Abraham and Torok's (1994: 165-205) idea of "the transgenera
tional phantom" to explore the way family secrets are transmitted to child
and grandchildren while remaining unacknowledged, Cho treats the figure
the yanggongju as just such a figure: "a spectral agency acting on and inter
ing with various unconscious forces" (2008: 17).
In contrast to Gordon, Derrida, and most other practitioners of the ne
hauntology, who theorize based on their readings of texts, Cho puts perso
encounters with residues of the past at the center of her discussion. Even
17 See Langford 2013: 15: "Whereas for Gordon, ghosts are literary traces of slavery, para
itary terror, or gendered violence, in this book ghosts are ethnographic figures, slamming do
cracking branches, causing illness, and demanding clothes and cigarettes."
These include Cha 1982; Keller 2002; and Jeong-mo 1998.
in Cho's vocabulary, the terms "ghost," "specter," "phantom," and "haunting"

serve as evocative tropes of troubled memory work; their meanings in non-
metaphoric discourse do not enter her analysis.
ii
Initiatives in the new hauntology thus typically base themselves on a scant and
idiosyncratic evidentiary foundation, developing the trope of haunting without
considering how ghosts are theorized by those who take them as something
other than metaphor. Here, the standard English terminology provides a conve-
nient, if arbitrary, starting point for further discussion. Thus, as indicated by
their etymologies, the terms ghost 19 and spirit10 both denote the intangible sub-
stance - moving air in the form of breath - that vivifies the body during life,
but separates from it at death, at which moment bodily matter turns into a
corpse, while the essential life-force persists as disembodied "spirit."
Most religions theorize spiritual existence as no less real than the material,
albeit less tangible, concrete, and mundane. It is regularly posited, however,
that some unfortunate spirits fail to complete their transit to disincarnate post-
mortem existence. As a result, they are caught in a nebulous liminal state, main-
taining some shred of materiality that renders them partially perceptible (e.g.,
audible but not visible; visible but not tangible; visible only to some; visible
but transparent; visible to the eye, but not captured on mirrors or film) and
endows them with the capacity to interact with select persons in the world
they imperfectly departed. This is to say that ghosts are commonly theorized
as possessing an ontological status that is ambiguous, even contradictory, min-
imally - but emphatically - substantial and real. To the extent that hauntology
denies ghosts ontologie status and recodes the unquiet dead as persisting in
texts, memory, and uneasy silences rather than spirit, it locates them inside
the consciousness of those they "visit," rather than on the borders of the phys-
ical and metaphysical, thereby rationalizing, simplifying, and perhaps also dis-
torting aspects of the phenomena it claims as its object of study.
19 The word "ghost" is derived from Old English gãst, which denotes 1. the breath (in which
sense, it was used to translate Latin halitus and spiramen ); and 2. the spirit, soul, ghost (in
which sense it was used to translate Latin spiritus, animus, and anima); Bosworth and Toller
1966: 362. Ultimately, this and related nouns in West Germanic languages (Old Saxon gēst , Old
Frisian gãst , Old High German geist) are built on a proto-Germanic verbal root *ghois~, *gheis-
that describes the ability to inspire fear, as in Gothic usgaisjan, usgeisnan , "to terrify," and Old
Norse geisa, "to rage" (compare with the English "ghastly"). See further, Onions 1996: 396;
Feist 1939: 531-32; and Pokorny 1959: 427.
The English word "spirit" is derived from Latin spiritus , which denotes 1. breathing; 2. the
breath of a god, inspiration; 3. the breath of life, life. The Latin noun is formed from the verb
spiro , spirare , "to breathe" (Lewis and Short 1962: 1743; Ernout and Meillet 1951: 1134; Walde
and Hofmann 1972, 2: 575-76). See also Onions (1996: 854-55), which gives the following def-
initions: "A. breath of life; B. vital principle; C. intelligent incorporeal being; D. vital power; E.
liquid of the nature of an essence."
There are, however, other approaches that take non-metaphoric r

and experiences of haunting more seriously. Giving attention to such m
and the culturally specific beliefs that render them credible seems a n
precondition to any serious discussion of haunting, metaphoric or not. H
thropological research has long played the leading role in a literature r
from Tylor (1871) through Frazer (1933-1936), Malinowski (1916),
Hertz (1960 [1907]), and Meyer Fortes (1987) to Robin Horton (1
Sharp (1993), Maurice Bloch (1971; Bloch and Parry 1982), and oth
Most of the older research along these lines treats African and Melane
amples, reflecting the legacy of colonialism and a romantic fascinati
"the primitive."
More recently, however, some splendid anthropological
religious-historical studies have treated spectral phenomena in Asia, w
Confucian and Buddhist traditions, among others, supply elaborate sup
cosmologies.22 We begin with a particularly revealing example: the vir
idemic of unsettled, intrusive, and angry ghosts23 afflicting postwar V
as reported by anthropologists Heonik Kwon (2006; 2008) and Mai Lan
tafsson (2009). In Vietnam, as these and other authors have demonstr
belief in the presence of place-bound ghosts and their agency ha
highly prevalent in the era ushered in by the market reforms
mid-1980s. Ghost beliefs and stories, while discontinuous with the of
sanctioned worldview of socialism, remain a robust resource for expres
litical as well as spiritual sentiments in postwar, post-market reform Viet
As a matter of principle, both Kwon and Gustafsson eschew the signat
tures of the new hauntology - high-stakes theorizing, rhetorical brava
the exercise of considerable creative license - in the project of r
"ghosts" into many social and textual locations. Instead, they in
placing their ethnographic observations, field notes, and informants' te
at center stage.
21 Inter alia , Lopatin 1960; Thomas 2000; Pons 2002; Cros and Bonhomme 2008; Fra
and Blanes and Espirito Santo 2013.
See, inter alia , LaFleur 1989; Freed and Freed 1993; Klima 2002; DeCaroli 2004; Eb
2006; Cuevas and Stone 2007; Holt 2007; 2012; Cuevas 2008; Delaplace 2009; Feuchtwa
Endres and Lauser 2011; Davis 2012; Langford 2013; and Buyandelger 2013.
In Vietnamese, ghosts are commonly referred to as con ma. The Sino- Vietnamese t
hôn and cô hôn dã quý reference "wandering souls," or ghosts of those who died ho
alone; the term hon, whose primary meaning is "soul" or "spirit," may also reference a
Though in Vietnam "supernatural" beliefs are genetically associated with poor, rura
cated, and female persons, formally educated persons with official positions also enjoy r
stories of the supernatural. During fieldwork in Hà Noi in 2009-2010, a scientist friend c
Martha Lincoln with her accounts of a reputedly omniscient Nha Trang fortuneteller as we s
laboratory. Equally materially minded friends liked to share stories of body-finding ge
family members who experienced ghostly possession (bi ma nhâp vào ), America
undead grandmothers, and other personifications of the uncanny.
igS LINCOLN AND LINCOLN
In contrast to the hauntological texts we have previously discussed, these

authors employ an unnervingly naturalistic idiom in their accounts of ghosts.
Ghostly subjects appear as fully extant and active animate beings25 that con-
front the living in direct, non-mediated, and even menacing fashion. They
are, moreover, numerous in postwar Vietnam due to the legacy of mass anon-
ymous death inflicted during decades of anticolonial and civil conflict. For
when an individual suffers what is culturally defined as a "bad death" or
"death in the street" (chêt âuáng) - an abrupt or unexpected death, away
from home and family, when one is young and childless, and/or dying in
such a way that the body is mutilated or incomplete - the funerary rituals
cannot be performed that would ordinarily transform the deceased into an an-
cestor (tô tiên ) with whom the survivors could then maintain respectful and mu-
tually beneficial relations.26 Lost and disconnected, the spirits of those who
have not received such treatment become unquiet, angry ghosts (con ma),
leading what can best be described as a "bare afterlife." Much like the homo
sacer, Versuchungspersonen , overcomatose, neomorts, and concentration
camp inmates discussed by Agamben (1998), so too do these ghosts inhabit
an interstitial space between life and death, inspiring dread and guilt in those
to whom they are socially proximate. There is, however, a slight, but ontolog-
ically significant difference in the specific place they occupy: whereas those
Agamben associates with "bare life" have not yet fully departed the land of
the living, ghosts, phantoms, specters, et al. are understood as having not yet
fully entered the realm of the dead.
Further compounding the postwar difficulties of families unable to recover
and bury their dead, the Vietnamese state's understanding of secularization as a
necessary part of modernization initially led them to stigmatize cultural knowl-
edge and practice that addressed the problem of how to placate angry ghosts,
consigning such elements of folk religion to the category of superstition (mê
tin di âoan ), associated with the feminine, the antisocial, the ignorant, and
the uncivilized.
Both Kwon and Gustafsson relate a set of emotionally compelling ghost
stories they collected in postwar, post-market-transition Vietnam. The follow-
ing account of the experiences of an American veteran, Sam, who settled in
Hanoi in the mid-1990s, serves as an example:
Within a few weeks of moving to Hanoi, Sam's girlfriend told him about something of
which he was unaware: Sam talked in his sleep and shook so violently that the entire bed
25 The question of whether ghosts are understood to retain some small degree of materiality
admits no easy resolution insofar as ghosts mediate and corrode the conventional binary opposition
of life and death, being and non-being, matter and spirit.
Malarney 2001: 59; Kwon 2008: 85-90; Gustafsson 2009: 55-64. An account ot how these
categories functioned in Vietnam prior to the Second Indochina War can be found in Cadière ( 1 955-
1957: 3: 60-65). Malarney (2007) engages a separate type of ancestral figure - war martyrs and
other heroes of the state - in Vietnam's socialist and post-reform periods.
moved. The woman was terrified, primarily because the violent and enraged stat
he made during these episodes were in Vietnamese. Sam had a rudimentary kno
of Vietnamese, certainly good enough to communicate with his girlfriend and
workers, but the fluency of his speech at night was astounding. Sam asked her
him, which she did on several occasions. The invective heard flowing from
mouth was that of a native Vietnamese, utterly disturbing in its bald rage. "Gi
me, give it to me, give it to me," he screamed in Vietnamese. "Motherfuck
give it to me or I will eat your mother's soul."
Back in 1968, as he was being flown out of Khe Sanh by helicopter, one of
friends put into his hand the blood-spattered identity card of a Vietcong fighte
been killed inside the lines of the American base. Such markers of identification were
supposed to be turned over to the authorities so they could keep accurate count of
enemy casualties, but sometimes they were kept by U.S. soldiers as souvenirs. Sam
kept it as a reminder of his time in Vietnam, even bringing it with him when he
moved there years later. It was clear to Sam and his girlfriend that the problems he'd
been having at night came from that dead Vietcong: he wanted his papers back and
would continue to torment Sam until he got them (Gustafsson 2009: 47-48).
As Gustafsson recounts, Sam consulted a Vietnamese medium, who success-

fully divined the identity of the ghost who addressed him:
"He is Hoc Van Nguyen. I see he is running at the wire at the big American Base. Others
are running with him and shouting. He is shooting, always shooting. He falls over some-
thing. There is a loud explosion - so loud! - and then he is dead. His throat is open and
he sees his own blood pouring. An American comes and pulls him roughly to another
place with many other killed Vietnamese. He goes through his pockets and takes
what is there. He [Hoc] is put in a hole with the others and covered with a bulldozer."
[The diviner] relayed these details very slowly, as if they pained her to do so. Sam was
fascinated and held the identity card he was given in 1968 just before he was flown out
of Vietnam. The name on the card had been scratched out - only the number remained
and place of birth. "Is that him?" he asked, holding the card out in front of her covered
face. "Yes," she replied. "He is very angry" (ibid.: 90).
After these revelations, rectification followed. At the diviner's instruction, Sam

located the dead soldier's mother, paid her a visit, told her what he knew of her
son's death and whereabouts, gave her the identity card ("all that is left of him
now in the world"), and made offerings at the family's altar, after which she
gave him forgiveness. Thereafter, he sent funds to her on a monthly basis
and remained free from ghostly visitations (ibid.: 87-91, 142).
Although this story is atypical in some ways - especially with respect to
the deceased spirit's possession of a stranger and a non- Vietnamese person
rather than a close kinsperson responsible for its funerary rituals - for the
most part it is quite conventional.27 Its particulars underscore the immediacy,
specificity, and intensity typical of recent anthropological accounts of ghosts,
as well as the locally specific character of Vietnamese ghosts. The haunting
27 Thus, for instance, the angry ghosts {con ma) who cause spirit possession regularly exhibit
"bizarre behaviors, such as the screaming of obscenities, jerky body movements, nonsensical
speech" (Malarney 2002: 96).
involves a confrontation between two individuated su

the other ghostly - that is initially unintelligible to
comprehensible as the ex-Marine is led to acknowled
the terrible nature of its plight, and his own responsi
of its suffering. Finally, the situation moves toward re
of the documents and his gesture toward the well be
family. Gustafsson does not reinterpret this ghost as
lective memory, or repressed secret, but reproduces the
selves, who understood the thing manifesting its
spiritual being with a personal identity that spoke dir
cific threats and demands.28
in
Although the Vietnamese examples share some features with the mat
treated in the hauntological literature, the two are sufficiently differe
we distinguish between two ideal-typical scenarios that we term prima
secondary haunting. We note five crucial differences. First, individuals af
by primary haunting recognize the reality and autonomy of metaphysi
ties (i.e., those theorized as spiritual and minimally material beings) in r
ly uncritical and unselfconscious fashion. Secondary haunting recogn
"entities" in the sedimented textual residues of horrific historic events or
natively, as tropes for collective intrapsychic states and experiences, in
trauma, grief, regret, repression, guilt, and a sense of responsibility f
wrongs suffered by victims whose memory pains - or ought to pain
survivors.
Second, the ghostly apparitions of primary haunting are narrow an
cific in whom they seek out and address. Typically, they confront eith
who caused their violent and untimely death, close relatives who have
seen to their burial and funerary honors, or strangers who happen to l
the place where their bodies have been provisionally and unsatisf
buried.29 Secondary haunting involves a much wider set of unquiet s
(slaves, desaparecidos , yanggongjus , or Holocaust victims, for examp
engages a much wider audience whose relation to the deceased is less in
and who bear less personal responsibility for wrongs committed and/or t
of rectification.
28 In Vietnam, though formal recognition of ghost beliefs was foreclosed by socialist s

in the 1960s and 1970s, by the late 1990s a state-approved national center allowed spirit m
psychics, and soul callers to assist the public by finding the remains of thousands of civ
combatants lost in wartime and thereby preventing their conversion to angry ghosts (Sch
Endres 2011).
Note that what might be called the "ghost protocols" of primary haunting permit, even encour-
age, one to interpret virtually any misfortune as the manifest demands of a deceased family member
who has not properly been put to rest.
TOWARD A CRITICAL HAUNTOLOGY 201
Third, in primary haunting, the encounter between th

ceased and the person who experiences its apparition/vis
and intense. Secondary haunting is mediated by a resear
texts they rely on and produce. They - and not the gho
and tell the story of sufferings past, but they do so as
speaks on behalf of the dead, not as one caught on the bor
Fourth, the two types of haunting differ in the kind
pursue. The ghosts of primary haunting seek to set right th
toric accidents, or crimes that have kept them from achie
(culturally defined) proper afterlife where they will
Secondary haunting aims at broader forms of repair: th
consciousness, the mobilization of outrage, and the
group - perhaps even society as a whole - to remembran
might prefer to forget, while accepting responsibility for t
ing their recurrence. Secondary hauntings do not seek clo
structive episodes; rather, they keep memory of tho
means to transform the moral and political climate of the
Finally, the ghosts of primary haunting initially appear a
who not only prompt existential dread, but also threaten
psychic and physical harm. To save themselves the haunte
their fear with compassion as they come to understand an
ever caused the ghost to be trapped between life and death
ing, initial bafflement, amnesia, and denial give way to co
subsequent hypervigilance. Here, fear takes the form of h
others inflicted on the dead in the past, not dread at what
are or might do in the present.
Although the new hauntology bears some relation to t
beliefs traditionally associated with ghosts and apparition
directly engage such phenomena, advance new interpret
them, or integrate them into its theorization. Rather, the
is best understood as an initiative that adopts the discou
describe its own operation. Should it fulfill its ambitions
of this sort would represent the moment when and the m
repressed crimes and traumas break through ignorance,
ness, defensiveness, shame, and denial to galvanize a pre
public. To put it differently, it represents the extension
to its Utopian extreme. Such an extension is made possibl
essary) by certain aspects of (post-)modernity, specifically
ity of communications media to reach and mobilize a lar
that can potentially be constituted as a community of c
But given that those hailed lack a direct connection to t
for example, kinship, class, national, or religious identit
dread for their own lives, health, and sanity should t
demands, those interpellated by secondary haunting

their own discretion. As Avery Gordon observes, ha
and "something to be done": "The ghost demand
present wavers. Something will happen" (Gordo
demands for redress become vague and diffuse
again" - then haunting threatens to become intermin
iv
Hauntologists did not invent the project of secondary haunting, which als
flourishes in other contexts. Consider an example from the Vietnamese di
spora, a speech that anthropologist Nguyên-võ Thu-huong recently delive
on the anniversary of the fall of Sài Gòn.
The dead could be my grandfather, who was tortured and tossed outside to die whimp
ing for water within 48 hours of his arrest by the French Security Police in 1946 at
beginning of the First Indochina War. The dead could be your grandfather, who die
starved, ill, or stuffed down a well, in a re-education camp in the years after 1975
the end of the Second Indochina War, also known as the Vietnam War. The d
could be your aunt, who was raped and thrown overboard that rickety boat trying
cross the Eastern Sea in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, following the Third Ind
china War. (...)
To those whose business it is to foreclose on the past for [the sake of] national unity,
for the global world and its economy, may they live under that curse uttered by Oedipus,
Antigone's father. When the ruler of Thebes asks him to return from exile to die and be
buried in the soil of his country, blessing it, Oedipus vengefully swears: "My ghost to
haunt thy country without end."
I want to speak that curse on this day of all days, may the dead "for ever" haunt coun-
tries - the U.S. or Vietnam, so that their history will be "for ever" disturbed, unclosed.
And I want to speak that curse to us all, so that we may remain open to the straying
fragments from the past. May we be haunted, without end (2014).
The danger Nguyên-võ Thu-huong addresses in these remarks is not so much

the plight of the dead, but the complacency of the living, who wish to move on,
feel good, profit, and let bygones be bygones. Against those temptations, she
raises the specter of the war dead, whom she asks to torment their survivors,
kinfolk, and others "forever . . . without end." Here, as in secondary haunting
generally, the ghost becomes an exceptional moral agent who serves as a cons-
tant goad to the living, while permanently deferring their redemption.
Through its cultivation of hauntology, a community of progressive schol-
ars has not so much re-theorized haunting as it has initiated processes of sec-
ondary haunting. Others also undertake such initiatives, as this example
shows, and they have long been favored by states and churches in their memo-
rial and martyrological projects. As our reading of Nguyên-võ suggests, sec-
ondary haunting can also interact in complex ways with the primary sort, as
happens at Ba Chúc, a Mekong Delta village where, on 18 April 1978, two de-
tachments of Khmer Rouge soldiers crossed the Vietnam-Cambodia border
and massacred over three thousand civilians, leaving only two survivors
Figure 1 Ba Chúc and Surrounding Region. (Geo-referenced country and province

ESRI; HERE; DeLorme; Mapmylndia; GDAM; Natural Earth. Graphical representatio
Astle.)
(figure l).30 This episode was only one among a number of Khmer Rouge as-
saults on civilians during Vietnam-Cambodia border conflicts between 1975
and 1979.31 It was, however, far the largest.
Although Vietnamese sources typically treat the Ba Chúc massacre as a
senseless atrocity, historic circumstances suggest that to imagine it as inexpli-
cable is disingenuous. Indeed, this episode was framed by conflicts at nested
scales, from the intra-national to the international.32 As Morris (1999)
argues, hostilities between Vietnam and Cambodia were partially a proxy for
Sino-Soviet struggles in Asia. North Vietnam's "tilt" towards the Soviets
versus Cambodia's alliance with China and, tacitly, the United States
30 According to at least one account in the Vietnamese press, three people, not two, survived the
massacre (Thanh Niên 2010).
In 1977 and 1978, Khmer Rouge forces also carried out attacks on Vietnamese villages and
towns in An Giang, Dông Tháp, and Tây Ninh provinces (O'Dowd 2007: 35-36).
More broadly on the Cambodian- Vietnamese conflict, see Elliot 1981; Chanda 1986;
Nguyen-võ Thu-Huomg 1992; Morris 1999; and Westad and Quinn-Judge 2006.
(Kiernan 2002: 488) raised the stakes between the two communist regim
did a long history of border conflicts, racialized ressentiment, and mutu
trust. The border and the Cambodian countryside had also served as an
clared front of the Second Indochina War from the late 1960s, when "bo
in the Vietnam conflict [treated] Cambodia as a theatre of their ground
war" (ibid.: 485). Both sides carried out multiple campaigns of ethnic cl
against their respective minority populations, causing mass exodus by r
and setting precedent for military targeting of civilians.33
In Châu Dôc province, these events took place against a restive
ground: the village of Ba Chúc was a strategic base for U.S. Special
and their Khmer Krom Kampuchea collaborators as of 1966; cland
Viet Cong34 organizing also allegedly took place in the village.35 Alleg
that South Vietnamese military commanders were forcing villagers t
minefields planted by the Viet Cong in Ba Chúc were reported
media, suggesting the contested and volatile dynamics at play in the
at that time, Ba Chúc had the second-worst rating of the American H
Evaluation Survey, which measured the degree of the South Vietname
ernment's control (Emerson 1971).36 By the time of the massacre, the dy
of Vietnam's internal civil conflict were entangled with the conflict wit
bodia: in the late 1970s, Vietnamese groups opposed to Hanoi were org
in the strategic Parrot's Beak region and allegedly collaborating with C
dian forces, threatening to destabilize the border from inside (Leighton
449). When, during a cease-fire, Vietnam refused to recognize its adver
sovereignty or accept any of Cambodia's demands, the Khmer Rouge c
out the Ba Chúc massacre in response (O'Dowd 2007).
In 1 984, six years after these bloody events, the Vietnamese govern
established a memorial site in Ba Chúc to house the "Remnants of Pol P
Genocidal Crimes" (Khu chúng tich toi äc diet chůng Pon Pot).37 Its f
33 Kiernan 2002: 485; Migozzi 1973: 44-46.

The People's Liberation Armed Forces, popularly known as the Viet Cong (Viêt Nam
Sán, or "Vietnamese Communists"), were a guerrilla force that fought against the Army of
public of Vietnam (ARVN) in South Vietnam with the support of the North Vietname
(NVA).
35 Materials on Special Forces in Vietnam n.d.; Captured Documents 1966; 1967.
As Ronald Moreau, one of the American volunteers in the region who resigned in pr
the program later wrote (2004), these events were compelled by an intensifying U.S. -led
against terrain and, ultimately, villagers who were believed to be collaborating with North Vie
ese and Viet Cong forces. Martha Lincoln will present a more extensive discussion of this h
a separate article.
The memorial was formally established by Decision 92 of the Ministry of Culture and
mation (1980), a document that registered seventeen places of national cultural, political, h
or touristic significance (Thu viên Pháp luât 2014). We lack concrete data regarding the mo
the establishment of the Ba Chúc memorial, but can cite a recent news feature, which claimed
intended "[t]o teach hatred of, vigilance against, and denunciation of the evil crimes of
genocidal clique to the Vietnamese people and the people of the world" ( Gia âinh và Xã h
include a commemorative stele, an information center, a lotus pond, a

vilion, Tam Bùu and Phi Lai pagodas (where villagers were exe
masse), and a visitor center displaying maps, photographs, and para
including weapons or replicas of weapons used by the Khmer Rouge
center of the memorial stands a set of vitrines containing the skulls
skeletal remains of 1,700 massacre victims lacking identification
their categorization by gender and age (figure 2). Although a similar m
was subsequently built at the Cambodian Killing Fields,38 the display
at Ba Chúc was unprecedented and it remains unparalleled in Vietnam
as well as interpretive materials emphasize the brutally atavistic death
Khmer Rouge inflicted on these victims (commenting, for example, th
of shooting people, they tortured them as if it were "a thousand year
Figure 2 Display of Skulls at the Ba Chúc Memorial (Pháp luât & Xã hôi 201 1
38 On the Memorial Stupa of Choeung Ek, established in 1988, see Hughes 2003;
2004; and Sion 2011.
"Ba Chue and Sam Mountain, Deep into the Mekong Delta of Vietnam" (Hodgkin
At: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei9W8hW29GQ (accessed 3 June 2013).
Although the literature regarding this monument is limited, trave

weblogs and journalists' analyses remark on the chilling concretizat
history at Ba Chúc's "skull pagoda." Given the ongoing political contest
surrounding the massacre40 and the state's complex situation with respe
its own socialist past, the representational politics on display at Ba
shows how the vestiges of "bare afterlife" can be mobilized to affect vie
viscerally and arouse a sense of ongoing, indeed unending, moral responsi
that is perhaps partially discharged by offerings made at the site (figu
Clearly, the broader intent of this display is to impress visitors with the
of the carnage and to prompt powerful emotions including sorrow, reg
anger, and pity. Following Verdery (1999), one understands that these
bodies have politically consequential afterlives, and the display of unbu
bones at the Ba Chúc memorial provides a metaphor for the unsettled hi
and politics of the region, rekindling the bitter sentiments that have long in
ed Vietnamese and Cambodian relations. The site constitutes an instance of
state-sponsored secondary haunting, insofar as it orchestrates a jarring confron-
tation between the general public and a mass of unquiet, impersonal dead. In-
sisting that the traumas of the latter be remembered and honored, it implicitly
urges that these horrors can best be rectified by ensuring such things never
happen again.41
Here, however, the project advanced by the memorial produces certain
contradictions, for its display of skeletal remains contravenes widely held Viet-
namese conventions regarding the treatment of the dead. Thus, in exhibiting
these skulls, the authorities flagrantly transgress common funerary customs
that require proper and timely cremation or burial, privacy and discretion in
the placement of dead bodies, offerings at the burial site, individualized treat-
ment of the deceased, and the loving attention of surviving kin. By presenting
an impersonal aggregation of mortuary remains and photographs of violated
bodies alongside interpretive materials and symbols of the state, the vitrines
place the dead in a political (and pedagogical) initiative that stands in tension
with religious rituals and their associated beliefs, traditions, and etiquette.42
40 For example, rumors circulating on Vietnamese diasporic sites dispute the government's claim
that the Khmer Rouge were the perpetrators, preferring to blame the Vietnamese military (for failure
to respond swiftly) or state (for being behind the massacre in the first place and falsely attributing it
to the Khmer Rouge). See: http://www.quehuongngaymai.com/forums/showthread.php7170457-T
%E 1 %BB%99i-%C3%8 1 c-T%E 1 %BA%A 1 i-Ba-Ch%C3%B Ac (accessed 18 Sept. 2014). Note
the similar disputes that attend the Choeung Ek stupa, as discussed by Hinton 2008: 73-76.
41 The memorial says little regarding the events of spring 1978 that led up to the massacre (least
of all Vietnamese diplomatic or military failures), offering no explanation for the Cambodian action,
save savage aggression.
42 The memorial site does accommodate the performance of some rituals on behalf of the dead,
including the offerings of incense depicted in figure 3, and a death anniversary ( ngàygiô ) ceremony
held each year under sponsorship of the state.
Figure 3 Incense Offerings at Phi Lai Pagoda, Ba Chúc Memorial (photographer ano
request).
In addition, the memorial site's presentation of the victims' remains trans-

forms individuals who had livelihoods, families, and histories into nameless
figures of permanent dehumanization and pathos. Either via photographs that
show the circumstances of their murder or arrested in death as skeletal assem-
blages, the victims of Ba Chúc are presented not as kinfolk or citizens, but as
graphically violated bodies.43 This advances a number of political contentions.
Most overtly, the dead are presented as incontrovertible evidence of the mass
murder of civilians (including women, children, and the elderly) and of the bru-
tality of the Khmer Rouge. As such, they concretize the veracity of a historical
and juridical claim. And having been construed as evidence in an unsettled case
of extraordinary importance, the dead and their physical remains can never be
relinquished or destroyed until they have served the full ends of justice.
43 Unlike the official memorials erected for the "heroic dead" of revolution and war - which typ-
ically feature state symbols and pronouncements (see Malarney 2001) and the socialist-realist mon-
uments that depict civilians in poses of resistance (see Kwon 2006: 141-42), the victims of Ba Chúc
are depicted as they died, abject and anonymous. The images displayed in Ba Chúc are also unlike
the representation of Som Lai massacre victims at the museum in Quâng Ngãi, where numerous dec-
orous portraits of the living as well as images of atrocities depict the slain.
The memorial thus converts bodies into forensic evidence, consti

call to remember and see justice done, enrolling the victims into a p
terlife as permanent subjects of grievous death. At the same time, t
that the spirits associated with these bodies will find no rest. Rather, t
as ghosts who were created through the collaboration of the Cambod
(which killed these people) and the Vietnamese state (which deprive
proper burial). And if their bones inhabit the memorial's vitrines, th
now congregate elsewhere in Ba Chúc at a site of primary haunting
This is the "grievous" banyan tree {cây âa oan hôri) of Ba Chúc, t
the Vietnamese newspaper Pháp luât & Xã hoi (Law & society) d
article in 2011. As villagers interviewed for the article explaine
the worst atrocities perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge took place at
of this tree, including mass executions (figure 4). In the wor
informant:
For men and youths, they forced them to kneel at the roots of the tree, then str
the head with a hoe. With the women they raped them, then poked tree br
their vaginas. They even forced many people to put their heads on the r
tree and shattered people's heads, grabbing the feet of little children an
against the roots of the tree, crushing their heads. . . . Their evil, there is
could write it, uncle. Because so many people lost their lives at the roots of
Figure 4 Atrocities at the Foot of the Banyan Tree in Ba Chúc {Pháp luât & Xã h
people {bà con)44 believe this tree is inhabited by the souls of those who were vict
injustice. Therefore, no one dares to trespass.45
These events, villagers averred, had caused the infusion of spiritual ma

into the tree along with the blood of the casualties: the residue of unjust, gr
ous deaths (chét oan).46 As a result, the tree assumed not just symbolic sta
a reminder of atrocity, but an ominous quality: "Because of so many pe
losing their lives at the roots of this tree, people believe this tree is a pl
grievous sacrifice, and no one dares to trespass" (ibid.: 2011). Further, a
tree stood near a main traffic artery, the numerous fatalities that occur
that road were construed as signs, and consequences, of the ghosts' conti
anguish and anger (figure 5). Kwon describes the metaphysical logic impl
in the pattern of fatal accidents at the tree's foot:
The Vietnamese express the transformation of ghosts with the concept giài oan , 'the
eration from grievance,' which alternatively can be called giài nguc, meaning 'op
prison' or 'break the prison.' The idea is that a history of tragic death binds the s
the dead to the mortal drama of death and captivates it to the place of death, thus en
dering a negative condition in the afterlife. The tragic or violent transition to death
into an environment of confinement after death. The most commonly cited exam
the incarceration in post-mortem nguc is where road accidents recur. In these plac
existing afterlife prisoners repeat their tragic history of death, which appears in the
of repeated road accidents in reality. This results in more new fateful inmates in the
and thus makes the site an increasingly solid prison (2008: 128).
Responding to such perceptions, local authories proposed utilitarian s

tions to the problem posed by the tree, which villagers considered inadeq
and inappropriate to the ongoing spiritual dangers. As one man sta
"[0]ur local [authorities] gave us permission {dia phuomg chúng toi
phép) to remove the tree for free, but no one dares to accept."
At Ba Chúc, two different loci thus preserve memories of those who
here in 1978: one man-made and state-sponsored, the other a natural arti
that looms large in the collective imaginary. Although the two coexist, they
ticipate in different cosmologies and styles of haunting, the ethical implic
and assumptions of which are quite opposite. Thus, where the spirits resid
the tree, consistent with the logic of primary haunting, afflict village resid
demanding they discharge their responsibility to create peace and rest f
dead, the memorial pursues the project of secondary haunting, transform
44 Contrasted to other relatively neutral terms for referencing people in an area ( nguài d
phuomg ), people in general {nguài ta), the masses {nhân dân ) or neighbors {ho hàng läng g
the term bà con is polysémie, evincing kinship, community, and neighborly relations.
Appendix 1 reproduces the text from which we have excerpted this individual's commen
According to one source, those killed at the tree s toot were fourteen individuals who
taken refuge in the interior cave of the banyan {Già dinh và Xã hôi 2008).
Figure 5 The Grievous Tree of Ba Chúc ( Pháp luât & Xã
the dead into a discursive instrument with which to

possible from their state of complacent forgetfiilness t
brance, vigilance, and resolve.
Considering the situation at Ba Chúc along with th
materials we have previously mentioned permits on
rize the relation between primary and secondary hau
crisis in the status of those dead who have been una
peace that proper burial and funerary rites would n
move toward a resolution of that troubled and trou
haunting, however, takes place when a single spirit (o
and terrifies a small number of the living, transform
dead alone suffer disquiet into one where the liv
anxiety and anguish, and are prompted to take mora
and dead can share a righteous peace.
Secondary haunting, in contrast, is much broade
process in which living authors recount to large aud
fered by the victims of brutal regimes, not with th
to rest, but to mobilize a moral community to prev
future. Rather than seeking specific redress from spe
specific sufferings of specific dead, secondary haunti

whom it hails in an interminable state of arousal, rem
lance. Accordingly, it defers resolution of the immed
Utopian horizon.
For heuristic reasons, we have tended to stress th
primary and secondary haunting, and it is analytica
is also useful, however, to note what the two for
ghosts (whether in metaphoric generality or semi-co
arouse strong emotions (terror, dread, shame, and rem
living and dead, while advancing ends that are perso
and moral, analytic and pragmatic. We would also un
of coupling a serious and sympathetic awarenes
ghosts, of whatever sort, with a strategic use of their
ing, humility, and compassion among the living, espe
ful and the complicit. Drawn from analysis of both
forms of haunting, these are methodological points of
plorations in what we have termed critical hauntolog
APPENDIX 1: THE SAD TALE OF A BANYAN TREE

SOULS OF VICTIMS OF INJUSTICE IN AN GIANG47
There is a colossal banyan tree on the Té highway that goes past Ha Tien (Kien
Giang province). The local people assert that though the ghosts of genocide
{bóng ma diet chůng) trace far back, almost every year the tree has taken the
lives of several people.
That's the reason people (bà con) call the tree by many terms like "tree of
the souls of victims of injustice" (cây oan hôn' "haunted tree" (cây ma äm'
and "killer tree" (cây sát nhân).
Traveling to Ba Chúc village (Tri Ton district, An Giang province), people
often remember the barbarous massacre, in which three thousand people were
killed by the army of Pol Pot. More than thirty years have passed but evidence
of the genocide is still readily apparent in this region, which has graves contain-
ing 1,159 skeletons, and the Ba Le and Cay Da caves where Pol Pot's army
threw grenades killing hundreds of people. These don't just testify to the evil
savagery; they are also the remnants of crime in Ba Chúc which continue to
obsess (là nói ám ânh) the local people.
The Tomb of Ba Chúc

Below the enormous grave lie the bones and skulls of 1,159 people of Ba Chúc,
from newborns to old people over seventy years old who were genocidally
47 From our translation of Pháp luât & Xã hôi (20 1 1 ). Pháp Luât & Xã Hôi, or Law & Society, is
a daily newspaper owned by the Hanoi Department of Justice.
murdered by primitive means such as a hoe-strike to th

dren to the air then killing them with bayonets. ... Bef
the "killer tree" that takes people's lives, Mr. Nguyen
old, described how his wife, his four children and hi
by Pol Pot's army, which dragged them to Vinh Thon
in the head with a hoe. Mr. Be recalled the horror:
time when the people in Ba Chúc and the whole count
organized the second anniversary of Reunification D
army, without reason, poured over eight provinces
and attacked An Giang many times. Because of the su
the mass murder had happened, the people and the arm
with that in time. That was why Ba Chúc remained o
from 4 April until 30 April 1978, as Pol Pot's mass bu
village in a 'sea of blood.'"
Mr. Be quietly lit incense as a sacrifice for the un
dead in the grave, his wife and children included, who
ly not intact. Many people are just left with a box co
crushed and broken skull. Mr. Be sadly said: "After
tacked and driven back, the massacre left corpses ev
corpses lying in disorder, corpses in the fields, in th
pagoda, the Phi Lai pagoda ... and many corpses l
below the roots of the grievous tree ( cây âa oan hôn
Leaving Ba Chúc cemetery, we followed Mr. Be to
"grievous tree." On the road, Mr. Be made the po
belief that the tree has deities and spirits of victim
than link , có oan hôn ) living in it, no one "dares dis
pass that colossal tree, all the interprovincial tru
respect, burn incense, and make an offering of fruit an
tree, praying for their journeys to be safe. "The tr
prayers ( linh)'" Mr. Be says shyly: "I listened to
went to an old man who told me again, this banyan t
of a giant old Dipterocarpus (< dâu ) tree. After that, th
possibly because the tree had sucked all the nutrients
wilted and died. When Pol Pot's army attacked Ba Chú
just the witness of the mass executions, but it was cl
mass evil of the many corpses at its roots."
We've seen many giant old trees connected with ext
as a banyan tree in the shape of an antique tomb ov
headless general (vi tuómg) in Cam Ranh (Khanh Hoa
old Terminalia catappa (cây bang ) trees with leaves
faithful and loyal fighters on the penitentiary islan
Tau province), or a three-rooted tree on the top of
(Xuan Loc, Dong Nai province), which is famed as
mountain god, and tens of thousands of people every year go on pilgrim

kowtow and pray, seeking fortune and healing. . . . But when we saw this "
ous banyan tree" with our own eyes, we must say that our surprise rea
maximum. The tree is over 30 meters tall; its circumference is spanne
four people hugging it, its roots wind and twine tightly over each othe
layers and deep layers of clinging moss, such that anyone lookin
would believe the tree is a thousand years old.
Below the roots of the trees are small altars, lit incense, and joss pap
in total disorder. But the strange thing that we discuss isn't anything we
described. It is that such a tall, large tree obstructs the road, but can
chopped down to avoid causing accidents for pedestrians. "No one dare
disturb this 'grievous tree' at all; even if we gave them gold they wou
dare to touch it" - Mr. Be affirmed.
Below the roots of the banyan, we also met Mr. Le Van Due, former
of the organizing board of Tam Bůu-Phi Lai pagoda (where Pol Pot's arm
tacked with firearms, tossing grenades and killing hundreds of people,
was consecrated as a national site in 1980). Mr. Due trembled when he
us describe why the banyan tree had taken many lives, but the locality
cut it down. Mr. Due's story made us feel as if we lived through those fr
days in Ba Chúc, when the invading army dragged children, women, m
youths to the area surrounding the tree to slaughter them.
For men and youths, they forced them to kneel at the roots of the tr
then struck them in the head with a hoe. With the women they raped the
poked tree branches into their vaginas. They even forced many people
their heads on the rough tree roots and shattered people's heads, grab
the feet of little children and hitting them into the roots of the tree, c
their heads.... "Their evil, there is no pen that could write it, uncle" -
Due, again dropping his voice: "Because so many people lost their
the roots of this tree, women and children believe this tree is inhabi
the souls of those who were victims of injustice. Therefore, no one dares t
pass. But perhaps the presence of the banyan tree is like the accusato
dence of their evil massacre."
To prove what he was saying, Mr. Due remembered an old story: "After
pushing out the massacring army and removing the corpses, the citizens of
Ba Chúc put their hands to rebuilding the countryside. Faced with the way
the banyan tree obstructed the highway, there were people who wanted to
cut it down, but after reflection, they decided not to.
Speaking with us about the matter of the "grievous banyan tree," Mr.
Thach Van Loi, vice-head of the People's Committee of Ba Chúc, bared his
heart. Hearing about the tree, many people think this superstition. But faced
with so many cases from many years in the past, no one has ever dared
disturb the roots of the tree that keep the traces of the evil of the massacring
army. "Given how many accidents the tree has caused to motorists, the regional
government gave us permission to remove it, but no one dares to accep

Mr. Loi.
When looking at some images about the colossal banyan tree in Ba Chúc,
Mr. Minh Hung, landlord of barns of giant and old trees in District 2, Ho Chi
Minh City, estimated that if it could be chopped down, then moved into the city,
the value of the tree would be at least 300 million dong (about US$14,000).
Except for the cost of the cutting and conveyance, which would be about 50
million dong and any extra expense, the profit in this trade affair must be at
least 200 million. However profitable the affair might be, Mr. Hung clucked
his tongue and said: "My grandparents had a saying, 'A banyan {cây äa)
ghost - a bombax ceiba {cây gąo) ghost,' you should not disturb it or else
you'll get into trouble" {Ong bà minh có câu "Quý cây ãa - ma cây gao , "
âùng có dai mà rá vào mà ôm hoa).
So, no one dares to touch the "grievous banyan." Despite the devastating
accidents it causes, the tree continues to lie in wait, inflicting death sentences on
motorists. "An unlucky person lost his life, a colleague of mine - a teacher
named Mai Van Cam, who was a teacher at the Le Tri Basic School of Ba
Chúc) - Tran Van Duoc (herself a teacher at Ba Chúc Middle School) sadly re-
membered: "The accident happened at night, around 7:30 on 24 December
2010, as he was headed home on the road from school. We don't know if he
was incited by ghosts {ma xui quý khiên) to crash into the roots of the tree,
but he died on the spot."
In the process of speaking with many people of Ba Chúc to learn more
about the "killer banyan tree," we heard many - especially those who had
dead loved ones whose lives had been taken {thân nhân tra thành nguái
thiên co) by the banyan tree - express the view that the administration of Tri
Ton or the province of An Giang generally, needs to take corrective measures
so that this grievous tree will not continue to cause terrible traffic accidents.
"If we confirm that the banyan tree is the remnant of an evil that can't be
cut down, then why don't we move the tree to an appropriate position in the
cemetery complex. If we did that, we would help cleanse the haunting that
has stalked pedestrians and the local population for so long," an old man
named Dang said. "The technology of moving the tree roots away wouldn't
be hard, if we are determined enough to do so. Or we could surround the
area of the tree roots with many railings with fluorescent reflector lamps, so
that motorists they know to avoid it.... So the banyan tree will create fewer
sad stories."
REFERENCES
Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. 1994. The Shell and the Ke
T. Rand, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and B
Roazen, trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Anderson, Melanie. 2013. Speciality in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Kno

University of Tennessee Press.
Andriopoulos, Stefan. 2013. Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothi
and Optical Media. New York: Zone Books.
Bassett, Rev. P. S. 1856. A Visit to a Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child. Am
Baptist , 12 Feb.: n.p.
Bell, Michael Mayerfeld 1997. The Ghosts of Place. Theory and Society 26: 8
Benjamin, Walter. 1999 [1929]. Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European
gentsia. Rodney Livingstone, trans. In Rodney Livingstone, eds., Walter Ben
Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1934. Cambridge: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 207-21.
Benjamin, Walter. 2003 [1940]. On the Concept of History. Edmund Jephcott, t
Edmund Jephcott, general ed., Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4
1940. Cambridge: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 389-400.
Blanes, Ruy and Diana Espirito Santo, eds. 2013. The Social Life of Spirits. C
University of Chicago Press.
Blazan, Sladja, ed. 2007. Ghosts, Stories, Histories: Ghost Stories and Alte
Histories. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.
Bloch, Maurice. 1971. Placing the Dead: Tombs, Ancestral Villages and K
Organization in Madagascar. London: Berkeley Square House.
Bloch, Maurice and Jonathan Parry, eds. 1982. Death and the Regeneration
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bosworth, Joseph and T. Northcote Toller. 1966. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. O
Clarendon Press.
Britzolakis, Christina. 1999. Phantasmagoria: Walter Benjamin and the Poetics of Urban
Modernism. In Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, eds., Ghosts : Deconstruction, Psycho-
analysis, History. Houndmills: Macmillan, 72-91.
Buse, Peter and Andrew Stott, eds. 1999. Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis,
History. Houndmills: Macmillan.
Buyandelger, Manduhai. 2013. Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary
Mongolia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bynum, Leon James. 2010. Toni Morrison and the Translation of History in Margaret
Garner. Doletiana: Revista de Traducció Literatura/Arts 3: 1-14.
Cadière, Leopold. 1955-1957. Croyances et pratiques religieuses des Vietnamiens. 3
vols. Saigon: Publications de la Société des Études Indochinoises.
Cameron, Emilie. 2008. Indigenous Spectrality and the Politics of Postcolonial Ghost
Stories. Cultural Geographies 15: 383-93.
Captured Documents (CDEC). 1966. NIC Interrogation Report of Nguyen Van Phuong
- Re: Vietcong Weapons Depot in Cambodia, Sept. 1966. Fol. 2471, box
0164, Vietnam Archive Collection, Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech Univer-
sity. At: http://www. vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=F03460 1 64247 1
(accessed 2 May 2014).
Captured Documents (CDEC). 1967. Report of Members of the Vietcong Underground,
13 July 1967. Fol. 1642, box 0158, Vietnam Archive Collection, Vietnam Center and
Archive, Texas Tech University. At: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.
php?item=F03460 158 1642 (accessed 2 May 2014).
Carpenter, Lynette and Wendy K. Kolmar, eds. 1991. Haunting the House oj Fiction:
Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women. Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press.
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. 1982. Dictée. New York: Tanam.
2I6 LINCOLN AND LINCOLN
Chanda, Nayan. 1986. Brother Enemy: The War after the War. San Francisco: H
Brace Jovanovich.
Cho, Grace M. 2008. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgot-
ten War . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cros, Michèle and Julien Bonhomme, eds. 2008. Déjouer la mort en Afrique: or, orphe-
lins, fantômes, trophées et fétiches. Paris: Harmattan.
Cuevas, Bryan J., ed. 2008. Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of
Death and the Afterlife in Tibet. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cuevas, Bryan J. and Jacqueline I. Stone, eds. 2007. The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Dis-
courses, Representations. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
Davis, Colin. 2007. Haunted Subjects : Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return
of the Dead. New York: Palgrave.
Davis, Erik. 2012. Khmer Spirits, Chinese Bodies: Chinese Spirit Mediums and Spirit
Possession Rituals in Contemporary Cambodia. In Thomas A. Reuter and Alexander
Horstmann, eds., Faith in the Future: Understanding the Revitalization of Religions
and Cultural Traditions in Asia. Leiden: Brill, 177-96.
DeCaroli, Robert. 2004. Haunting the Buddha: Indian Popular Religions and the For-
mation of Buddhism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Delaplace, Grégory. 2009. L'Invention des morts: sépultures, fantômes et photographie
en Mongolie contemporaine. Paris: Centre d'Études mongoles et sibériennes, École
pratique des hautes études.
Derrida, Jacques. 1994 [1993]. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning and the New International. Peggy Kamuf, trans. New York: Routledge.
(First published in French.)
Durkheim, Émile. 1995 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Karen Fields,
trans. New York: Free Press.
Eberhardt, Nancy. 2006. Imagining the Course of Life: Self-Transformation in a Shan
Buddhist Community. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
Edensor, Tim. 2005. The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins: Ordering and Disordering Memory
in Excessive Space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23: 829-49.
Edensor, Tim. 2008. Mundane Hauntings: Commuting through the Phantasmagoric
Working-Class Spaces of Manchester, England. Cultural Geographies 15: 313-33.
Elliott, David W. D., ed. 1981. The Third Indochina Conflict. Boulder: Westview Press.
Emerson, Gloria. 1971. Villagers Say Saigon Perils Their Lives. New York Times , 10
Jan: 1.
Endres, K. and A. Lauser. 2011. Engaging the Spirit World: Popular Beliefs and Prac-
tices in Modern Southeast Asia. New York: Berghahn.
Ernout, A. and A. Meillet. 1951. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine. Paris:
Librairie C., Klincksieck.
Etkind, Alexander. 2009. Post-Soviet Hauntology: Cultural Memory of the Soviet
Terror. Constellations 16: 182-200.
Feist, Sigmund. 1939. Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der gotischen Sprache. Leiden: E. J.
Brill.
Feuchtwang, Stephen. 2010. The Anthropology of Religion, Charisma, and Ghosts:
Chinese Lessons for Adequate Theory. Berlin: W. de Gruyter.
Fortes, Meyer. 1987. Religion, Morality, and the Person: Essays on Tallensi Religion.
Jack Goody, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foss, Karen A. and Kathy L. Domenici. 2001. Haunting Argentina: Synecdoche in
the Protests of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Quarterly Journal of Speech 87:
237-58.
Fox, Diane. 2007. 'One Significant Ghost' - Agent Orange: Narratives of Traum
vival, and Responsibility. PhD diss., Anthropology, University of Washington
Franco, Francisco. 2009. Muertos, fantasmas y héroes: el culto a los muertos mi
en Venezuela. Merida: Universidad de los Andes.
Frazer, Sir James George. 1933-1936. The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion. 3
vols. London: Macmillan.
Freed, Ruth S. and Stanley A. Freed, 1993. Ghosts: Life and Death in North India.
New York: American Museum of Natural History.
Freud, Sigmund. 1957 [1917]. Mourning and Melancholia. In Strachey, J., ed. The Stan-
dard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , Volume XIV
(1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsy-
chology and Other Works. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-
analysis, 237-58.
Freud, Sigmund. 1985 [1919]. The Uncanny. In Albert Dickson, ed., Art and Literature:
Jensens 'Gradiva, ' Leonardo Da Vinci, and Other Works. Vol. 14 of the Penguin
Freud Library. Harmonds worth: Penguin, 335-76.
Frosh, Stephen. 2013. Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Già dình và Xã hôi (Family and society). 2008. Vu thâm sát cûa Pôn Pôt trên dat Viet
Nam (Pol Pot's massacre on Vietnamese soil). At: http://danso.giadinh.net.vn/xa-hoi/
vu-tham-sat-cua-pon-pot-tren-dat-viet-nam-2008 1 024 111151765 .htm (accessed 2
May 2014).
Gordon, Avery F. 2008 [1997]. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imag-
ination. 2d ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gordon, Avery F. 2011. Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity. Borderlands 10, 2:
1-21.
Griffiths, Kate and David Evans. 2009. Haunting Presences: Ghosts in French Litera-
ture and Culture. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Gunn, Joshua. 2004. Mourning Speech: Haunting and the Spectral Voices of Nine-
eleven. Text and Performance Quarterly 24: 91-114.
Gustafsson, Mai Lan. 2009. War and Shadows: lhe Haunting oj Vietnam. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992 [1925]. On Collective Memory. Lewis A. Coser, trans.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (First published in French.)
Hertz, Robert. 1960 [1907]. A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representa-
tion of Death. In Death and the Right Hand. Rodney Needham and Claudia Needham,
trans. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 27-86. (First published in French.)
Hinton, Alex L. 2008. Truth, Representation and the Politics of Memory after Genocide.
In Alexandra Kent and David Chandler, eds., People of Virtue: Reconfiguring Reli-
gion, Power and Moral Order in Cambodia Today. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute
of Asian Studies, 62-8 1 .
Hodgkinson, Terry. 2011. Ba Chuc and Sam Mountain, Deep in the Mekong Delta of
Vietnam. At: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei9W8hW29GQ (accessed 3 June
2013).
Holloway, Julian and James Kneale. 2008. Locating Haunting: A Ghost-Hunter's Guide.
Cultural Geographies 15: 297-312.
Holt, John Clifford. 2007. Gone But Not Departed: The Dead among the Living in Con-
temporary Buddhist Sri Lanka. In Bryan Cuevas and Jacqueline Stone, eds., The Bud-
dhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 326-44.
2I8 LINCOLN AND LINCOLN
Holt, John Clifford. 2012. Caring for the Dead Ritually in Cambodia. Southeast
Studies 1,1: 3-75.
Horton, Robin. 1993. Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Ma
ligion, and Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hughes, Rachel. 2003. Memory and Sovereignty in Post- 1979 Cambodia: Cho
and Local Cambodian Memorials. In Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambo
Rwanda: New Perspectives. New Brunswick: Transaction, 269-92.
Jeong-mo, Yun. 1998. The Rainy Spell and Other Korean Stories. J. Suh Goppi,
New York: M. E. Sharpe and UNESCO Publishing.
Keller, Nora Okja. 2002. Fox Girl. New York: Penguin.
Kiernan, Ben. 2002. Introduction: Conflict in Cambodia, 1945-2002. Critic
Studies 34, 4: 483-95.
Klima, Alan. 2002. The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange w
Dead in Thailand. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kwon, Heonik. 2006. After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation i
and My Lai. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kwon, Heonik. 2008. Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge Un
Press.
LaFleur, William R. 1989. Hungry Ghosts and Hungry People: Somaticity and R
ity in Medieval Japan. In Michael Feher, ed., Fragments for a History of the
Body, Part One. New York, Zone Publications, 270-303.
Langford, Jean M. 2013. Consoling Ghosts : Stories of Medicine and Mournin
Southeast Asians in Exile. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Leighton, Marian Kirsch. 1978. Perspectives on the Vietnam-Cambodia Bord
flict. Asian Survey 18: 448-57.
Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. 1962. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Cla
Press.
Lloyd, David. 2005. The Indigent Sublime: Specters of Irish Hunger. Represe
92: 152-85.
Lopatin, Ivan Alexis. 1960. The Cult of the Dead among the Natives of the Amur Basin.
The Hague: Mouton.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2002. The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the 'Spec-
tral Turn.' Textual Practice 16: 527-46.
Malarney, Shaun Kingsley. 2001. "The Fatherland Remembers Your Sacrifice": Com-
memorating War Dead in North Vietnam. In Hue-Tam Ho Tai, ed., The Country of
Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam. Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 46-76.
Malarney, Shaun Kingsley. 2002. Culture, Ritual and Revolution in Vietnam. Honolulu:
University of Hawai'i Press.
Malarney, Shaun Kingsley. 2007. Festivals and the Dynamics of the Exceptional Dead in
Northern Vietnam. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 38, 3: 515-40.
Malinowski, Bronisław 1916. Baloma: The Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 46: 353-430.
Marx, Karl. 1977 [1867]. Capital, Volume I. Ben Fowkes, trans. New York: Vintage
Books.
Materials on Special Forces in Vietnam, n.d. From the Center for Military History and
the National Archives: 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), 1st Special Forces
Outline History of Company D, 1962-1970. Fol. 09, box 03, Glenn Helm Collection,
Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. At: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/
virtualarchive/items.php?item= 1070309027 (accessed 2 May 2014).
Mauss, Marcel. 1921. L'expression obligatoire des sentiments. Journal de psyc

18: 425-34.
Mauss, Marcel. 1967 [1925]. The Gift: Forms and Functions oj Exchange in Archaic
Societies. Ian Cunnison, trans. New York: W. W. Norton.
Migozzi, Jacques. 1973. Cambodge: Faits et problèmes de population. Pans: CNRS.
Moreau, Ronald. 2004. A Letter from Ronald Moreau in Islamabad. Newsweek Maga-
zine , 28 Sept. At: http://gloriaemerson.com/memories_gloria.html (accessed 13 May
2014).
Morris, Stephen J. 1999. Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia: Political Culture and Causes
of War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved : A Novel. New York: Knopf.
Motz, Marilyn. 1998. The Practice of Belief. Journal of American Folklore 1 1 1 : 339-55.
Nguyên- võ Thu-huong. 1992. Khmer-Viet Relations and the Third Indochina Conflict.
Jefferson: McFarland.
Nguyên- võ Thu-huong. 2014. 30-4 [30-4 is a reference to the fall of Saigon on 30 April
1975: the author is using the Vietnamese format for dates]. At: https://www.facebook.
com/VietTide/posts/54993 1 2284603 17?fref=nf (accessed 1 May 2014).
O'Dowd, Edward C. 2007. Chinese Military Strategy in the Third Indochina War: The
Last Maoist War. Abingdon: Routledge.
Onions, C. T. 1996. Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
O'Riley, Michael F. 2007. Postcolonial Haunting: Anxiety, Affect, and the Situated
Encounter. Postcolonial Text 3: 1-15.
Parham, Marisa. 2009. Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and
Culture. New York: Routledge.
Pháp luât and Xã hôi (Law & Society). 2011. Chuyên buôn vê cây da oan hôn ö An
Giang (Sad story of a grievous banyan tree in An Giang). At: http://phapluatxahoi.
vn/20 1 1 1 002060436547p 1 00 1 c 1 049/chuyen-buon-ve-cay-da-oan-hon-o-an-giang.htm
(accessed 27 Mar. 2013).
Pilar Blanco, Maria del and Esther Peeren, eds. 2010. Popular Ghosts: The Haunted
Spaces of Everyday Culture. New York: Continuum.
Pilar Blanco, Maria del and Esther Peeren, eds. 2013. The Spectralities Reader. London:
Bloomsbury Academic.
Pile, Steve. 2005. Spectral Cities: Where the Repressed Returns and other Short Stories.
In Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksbury, eds., Habitus : A Sense of Place. Aldershot:
Ashgate, 235-57.
Pokorny, Julius. 1959. Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Bern: Francké
Verlag.
Pons, Christophe. 2002. Le spectre et le voyant : les échanges entre morts et vivants en
Islande. Paris: Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne.
Rabaté, Jean-Michel. 1993. La pénultième est morte: Spectrographies de la modernité.
Paris: Editions Champ Vallon.
Redding, Arthur F. 2011. Haints : American Ghosts, Millennial Passions, and Contem-
porary Gothic Fictions. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Richardson, Judith. 2009. Possessions : The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson
Valley. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Schlecker, Markus and Kirsten W. Endres. 201 1 . Psychic Experience, Truth, and Visual-
ity in Post-War Vietnam. Social Analysis 55, 1: 1-22.
Schwab, Gabriele. 2010. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational
Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sharp, Lesley A. 1993. The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits, Identity, and
Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sion, Brigitte. 201 1. Conflicting Sites of Memory in Post-

ity: An International Journal of Human Rights 2: 1-21.
Thanh Niên (Youth). 2010. Longing for Retribution ... Bu
www.thanhnienne ws. com/20 1 0/pages/20 1 202 1 7-longing
coming.aspx (accessed 25 Oct. 2013).
Thomas, Louis-Vincent. 2000. Les chairs de la mort: co
Sonofi-Synthélabo .
Thu viên Pháp luât (Law Library). 2014. Quyêt Dinh 92
Ministry of Culture and Information). At: http://thuvienp
dinh/Quyet-dinh92-VHTT-QD-xep-hang-l 7-di-tich-lich-su
aspx (accessed 28 Apr. 2014).
Tylor, Edward B. 1871. Primitive Culture: Researches into t
ogy, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. London: J. M
Valenzuela, Luisa 1977. Como en la Guerra. Buenos Aires:
Valk, Udo. 2006. Ghostly Possession and Real Estate: The
tonian Folklore. Journal of Folklore Research 43: 31-51.
Verdery, Katherine. 1999. The Politics of Dead Bodies:
Change. New York: Columbia University Press.
Walde, A. and J. B. Hofmann. 1972. Lateinisches etymolog
berg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
Weisenburger, Steven. 1998. Modern Medea: A Family
Murder from the Old South. New York: Hill and Wang.
Westad, Odd Arne and Sophie Quinn- Judge. 2006. The Thir
between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972-79. New Y
Williams, Paul. 2004. Witnessing Genocide: Vigilance and
and Choeung Ek. Holocaust and Genocide Studies 18: 2
Young, Harshini Bhana. 2006. Haunting Capital: Memory, T
Body. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press.
Abstract: While cross-disciplinary analysis of ghosts a

geoned in recent decades, much of this scholarship presu
ghost as a less than literal apparition. We propose that w
Derrida and Avery Gordon, who make use of the ghostly
describing a phenomenon we term secondary haunting, d
of unquiet spirits who address the living directly with
redress: a visceral and often frightening experience we t
Drawing on a contemporary account of the ghosts of a m
village, we explore the complex interaction of primary an
the different kinds of memory work they engage in and th
munities they mobilize.

LINCOLN TowardCriticalHauntology 2015

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

LINCOLN TowardCriticalHauntology 2015

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Toward a Critical Hauntology: Bare Afterlife and the Ghosts of Ba Chúc

Author(s): MARTHA LINCOLN and BRUCE LINCOLN

Toward a Critical Hauntology: Bare

University of California, Berkeley

Acknowledgments: We wish to thank Lauren Berlant, Shawn McHale, Nguyên-võ Thu-hiromg,

1 Gordon 2008[1997]; Bell 1997; Cho 2008.

context.12 In its ñiller development, the "spectral turn" in scholarship (L

historic memory. Accordingly, the very few concrete examples he cited

Gordon thus creates space for consideration of things non-material or

15 Benjamin 2003 [1940]: theses XII and XIV, respectively.

reporters, activists, researchers, novelists, hauntologists) do the dead appe

in Cho's vocabulary, the terms "ghost," "specter," "phantom," and "haunting"

There are, however, other approaches that take non-metaphoric r

In contrast to the hauntological texts we have previously discussed, these

As Gustafsson recounts, Sam consulted a Vietnamese medium, who success-

After these revelations, rectification followed. At the diviner's instruction, Sam

involves a confrontation between two individuated su

28 In Vietnam, though formal recognition of ghost beliefs was foreclosed by socialist s

Third, in primary haunting, the encounter between th

demands, those interpellated by secondary haunting

The danger Nguyên-võ Thu-huong addresses in these remarks is not so much

Figure 1 Ba Chúc and Surrounding Region. (Geo-referenced country and province

33 Kiernan 2002: 485; Migozzi 1973: 44-46.

include a commemorative stele, an information center, a lotus pond, a

Although the literature regarding this monument is limited, trave

In addition, the memorial site's presentation of the victims' remains trans-

The memorial thus converts bodies into forensic evidence, consti

These events, villagers averred, had caused the infusion of spiritual ma

Responding to such perceptions, local authories proposed utilitarian s

Figure 5 The Grievous Tree of Ba Chúc ( Pháp luât & Xã

the dead into a discursive instrument with which to

specific sufferings of specific dead, secondary haunti

APPENDIX 1: THE SAD TALE OF A BANYAN TREE

The Tomb of Ba Chúc

murdered by primitive means such as a hoe-strike to th

mountain god, and tens of thousands of people every year go on pilgrim

government gave us permission to remove it, but no one dares to accep

Anderson, Melanie. 2013. Speciality in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Kno

Mauss, Marcel. 1921. L'expression obligatoire des sentiments. Journal de psyc

Sion, Brigitte. 201 1. Conflicting Sites of Memory in Post-

Abstract: While cross-disciplinary analysis of ghosts a

You might also like