Co-habiting with Ghosts

Knowledge, Experience, Belief and the Domestic Uncanny

Caron Lipman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409467724
• eBook ISBN: 9781317164678
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

How does it feel to live in a 'haunted home'? How do people negotiate their everyday lives with the experience of uncanny, anomalous or strange events within the domestic interior? What do such experiences reveal of the intersection between the material, immaterial and temporal within the home? How do people interpret, share and narrate experiences which are uncertain and unpredictable? What does this reveal about contested beliefs and different forms of knowledge? And about how people 'co-habit' with ghosts, a distinctive self - other relationship within such close quarters? This book sets out to explore these questions. It applies a non-reductive middle-ground approach which steers beyond an uncritical exploration of supernatural experiences without explaining them away by recourse only to wider social and cultural contexts. The book attends to the ways in which households in England and Wales understand their experience of haunting in relation to ideas of subjectivity, gender, materiality, memory, knowledge and belief. It explores home as a place both dynamic and differentiated, illuminating the complexity of 'everyday' experience - the familiarity of the strange as well as the strangeness of the familiar - and the ways in which home continues to be configured as a distinctive space.

1 Approaching the Ghost

DOI: 10.4324/9781315572550-1

How does it feel to live in a ‘haunted home’? How do people negotiate their everyday lives with the experience of uncanny, anomalous or strange events within the domestic interior? What do such experiences reveal of the intersection between the material and immaterial within the home, and the relationship between the home’s materialities and temporalities? How do people interpret experiences which are uncertain and unpredictable? How are these, explained, shared, narrated? What does this reveal about contested beliefs and different forms of knowledge? About how people manage to ‘cohabit’ with ghosts, this self–other relationship within such close quarters? This book sets out to explore these questions, to gain insight into a quite common but neglected experience of home. It extends work on the geographies of home, and attends to the ways people understand their experience of haunting in relation to ideas of subjectivity, gender, materiality, memory, knowledge and belief. The home as a site of haunting is a realm of complex and shifting emotional, sensual and social relationships, of the co-existence of different types of bodies and encounters. This book explores the domestic arena as both dynamic and differentiated, illuminating the complexity of ‘everyday’ experience – the familiarity of the strange as well as the strangeness of the familiar – and the ways in which home continues to be configured as a distinctive space. In this introductory chapter, I set out how I approach this material, consider what questions might be posed in exploring the experience of living in haunted homes, and how we might frame a key set of relationships: between experience, narrative and belief, between the uncanny and the home and the different self–other relationships which create it and are affected within it.

Approaching the Ghost

The ‘haunted home’ has enjoyed a long-standing position as a popular motif. People continue to believe in and to experience ghosts, despite the fact that belief in the supernatural has often been positioned in opposition to ‘modernity’, ‘perceived as two incompatible phenomena’ (Selberg, 2003). ¹ The apparent secularisation of modern Western society includes the current influence of a particular form of radical atheism (Dawkins, 2007); and yet ‘positivism persists in confident assertion of the decline of experiences and beliefs that stubbornly are not declining’ (Cowdell, 2011: 4). Recent academic work has focused on a consideration of modernity itself as ‘uncanny’ (see Collins and Jervis, 2008), and modern cities to be haunted places. In a study of Singapore rituals to appease ghosts, geographer Steve Pile rightly cautions that the beliefs underpinning them ‘do not simply co-exist with modernity, nor are they some kind of vestigial pre-modern superstition that will somehow disappear in the modern city; they are part of what it means for Singapore to be modern.’ (Pile, 2005: 134–6).

1 According to a recent survey of April 2009 by think tank Theos, four in ten Britons (and 50 per cent of Londoners) claim to believe in ghosts and the supernatural (Theos, 2009: website); a similar number to a 1998 MORI poll which suggested 40 per cent of people believed in ghosts and 15 per cent had had a personal experience (MORI, 1998: website).

Throughout this book, I refer to the ‘supernatural’ as phenomena unexplained by natural processes (modern discourses often favour the word ‘paranormal’). I used the phrase ‘haunted home’ with participants as a shorthand term which they understood in general but related to in specific, different ways. I refer at various points in this book to the ‘uncanny’, ‘haunting/haunted’ and ‘ghost’. The phrases ‘uncanny event’ or ‘uncanny experience’ are used as key descriptors of all witnessed anomalies reported by participants. The word ‘event’ is neutral but dynamic, whilst ‘experience’ suggests something having human impact or involvement; they are non-specific enough to incorporate a wide range of phenomena and responses. Uncanny events or experiences sometimes include (or are interpreted as caused by) the more specific figure of a ‘ghost’. Haunting is often used in the literature to express a rather internal or psychological process, but has general application here; ‘the uncanny’, likewise, is used rather broadly, in keeping with its varied definitions (the term is discussed later in this chapter).

Co-habiting with Ghosts, then, gives voice to the people who, in contemporary England and Wales, continue to witness anomalous phenomena, uncanny events within their homes. It offers a pause at the event itself and its aftermath, allowing space for the witnesses, asking how they themselves might describe, explain, and negotiate such experience. We might even allow the ghosts and the haunted homes their own oblique but central presence, allow the more imponderable forces space to be, even if they can’t speak and won’t be interviewed. This is not to ignore wider social and cultural influences, as if the uncanny event was somehow distinct and apart from them, not to romanticise such events, reify the homes in which they occur, or attempt only to reproduce naïve descriptions, but to work creatively with our cultural assumptions without blindly reiterating them, exploring the ways in which cultural processes and social relationships are imbricated, exposed, enhanced, through such experiences, at specific places. It is to attempt an approach which steers a course somewhere between, on the one hand, an uncritical exploration of supernatural experiences, and on the other, explaining them away by recourse to wider social and cultural contexts, what geographer Julian Holloway has called a non-reductionist approach to ‘spaces of the religious, spiritual, or the sacred’, a ‘middle ground’ which doesn’t reduce causes to ideology or social relations (Holloway, 2006: 186). Extending this approach to the supernatural, I consider how far it has been utilised and what insights I might gain elsewhere in testing it out.

If we look to close approximate areas of focus we see similar questions being posed. One issue for some anthropologists, for example, is how to avoid imposing a western theoretical framework (such as psychological models) to explain ritual experiences, without foregoing analysis completely. ² Debates within geographies of religion have, in turn, included responses to a concern that social constructionist ideas are over-used in the analysis of beliefs in the sacred, of fears that ‘through reductionism the sacred will be eliminated completely and replaced by political, economic, and social explanation’ (Ferber, 2006: 178). Much of this work, it is argued, explains away religious belief in relation to wider social and economic processes. ³ Geographer Paul Harrison, contributing to an online discussion, eloquently states the problem thus: ‘Most of what passes for the “geographies of religion” seems to be identity politics by another name, where the fact that these are putatively religious or spiritual phenomena makes little or no difference to their study.’ He asks: ‘Is it possible within the epistemological and methodological terms of social science to actually study such phenomena as religious experience without explaining it away as ideology or identity?’ (Harrison, 2004). In a similar vein, geographer Anne Buttimer complains that to ‘deny reality to phenomena that appear to be beyond the reach of currently available analytical methods smacks of naïve empiricism’ (Buttimer, 2006: 198). She argues that it is ‘surely credible and analytically defensible’ to claim that ‘religion and belief systems have been socially constructed; it is quite another matter to claim that there is “nothing but” socially constructed discourses to religion’. There is an added question of where to demarcate the line between ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ beliefs, and what’s at stake in reinforcing such a divide – historically the role of religion, to keep ‘appropriating new arguments for designating correct and true beliefs’ (Selberg, 2003). Ghosts ‘do not stand outside orthodox religious institutional practice, but in discursive and disputational interaction with it’ (Cowdell, 2011: 137), and in order to understand religion, it is ‘necessary to understand the relationship between official, folk and individual beliefs and practices’ (Bowman, 2004: 5). We might add that in order to understand belief in the supernatural, it is important to explore the intersection of different kinds of belief, both formal and informal – religious, supernatural, folkloric, cultural, and to see how beliefs might even be challenged or changed in the light of uncanny experience.

2 See for example, Nabokov, 2000. 3 See Ong, 1987; Scott and Simpson-Housley, 2001.

If we turn more centrally to academic work on ghosts, hauntings and the uncanny, we find a current apex of interest within cultural, literary, and social theory. From one direction, there has been a flurry of cultural histories of ghosts and hauntings, work which tracks ghost stories over centuries, listing the recurring tropes associated with particular phenomena, and framing these descriptions as a means of reflecting social and religious mores. These accounts offer a sweeping overview of continuities and changes associated with ghostly behaviour, the form of their immateriality and rationale for haunting, with some interventions sounding familiar, others specific to particular times. While this work is useful in offering a wide historical and cultural context – and we might note how people living in contemporary haunted homes utilise particular tropes in interpreting uncanny events – it is underpinned by a dismissal of uncanny experience as only ever a product of historical and cultural influences, an assumption that the ‘wealth of oral and written lore about paranormal experiences – especially ghosts – deeply colours any experiences’ (Trubshaw, 2012: 75). ⁴

4 See also Cowdell, 2011; Davies, 2007; Maxwell-Stuart, 2006; Finucane, 1996

A tension between mainstream and alternative knowledge has been read politically, including the gendering of the emotion-reason binary. Film theorist Annette Kuhn points to an ‘opposition between dominant (middle-class, male, white) ways of knowing’ and ‘knowledge from below’, or ‘common knowledge’ which is ‘often dismissed as superstition, ‘female intuition’, ‘old wives’ tales’; or at best patronised as ‘folklore’, the ‘quaintly earthly wisdom of the unlettered’ (Kuhn, 2002:120). Whilst there is a danger that Kuhn’s holders of ‘common knowledge’ may be romanticised, it is true that ghost stories were often disparaged as irrational and female – particularly after the Enlightenment. During the early twentieth century, women were perceived as more suggestible than men, and those considered inferior and weaker were assumed more likely to succumb to social influence (see Blackman and Walkerdine, 2001). Emotion has also been ‘viewed as ‘beneath’ the faculties of thought and reason’ (Ahmed, 2004:3); ‘emotions are associated with women, who are represented as “closer” to nature … less able to transcend the body through thought, will and judgement’ (Bondi, 2005: 1). ⁵

5 I was surprised to read some of these ideas persisting into the 1970s: ‘Remember that more women see ghosts than men. This may be due to the fact that … women have more vivid imaginations; or (perhaps an old-fashioned suggestion) that they are more emotional than men and are therefore endowed with a lesser degree of logic’ (Green, 1973: 106). And, elsewhere (also expressing racial and other stereotypes): ‘It is helpful to know that blacks, widows, women and people with a conviction are more likely to have contact with the dead, but it is astonishing, perhaps a little unnerving, to know that more than one-quarter of the American population has had such experiences’ (Greeley, 1975: 43).

Written folkloric accounts are untrustworthy because folk collectors felt no onus to take them seriously or repeat them accurately. The wayward ghost narrative was tidied up through what Sociologist Gillian Bennett calls a ‘literaryfying’ process, ‘rounded off’ into narrative style, thus perpetuating clichés: the ‘printed stories which tend to survive may parody the informal, oral tales they were based on’ (Bennett, 1999: 193). More recently, ‘contemporary legend’ research focuses on genre analysis, underlying which is an assumption that folkloric beliefs remain latent, ‘even while they are often shared as experiences’ (Cowdell, 2006: 70). Folklorist Paul Cowdell cautions that ‘too-narrow concentration on genre can lead us to ignore the broader significance of a story’s content for the narrator’ and ‘raises the possibility of misrepresenting ghost narratives’ (80–81).

The ghosts have also been enlisted as signposts to critiques of modern life, with Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters (1997) being particularly influential. Gordon uses the figure of the ghost to point at the ‘presence of absence’ in social life and social theory – a compelling account of what gets left out. The book has been at the heart of attempts to mine thinkers including Karl Marx and Jacques Derrida for their concern with material conditions. The act of summoning the spectre ‘serves to unsettle notions of presence, thereby forcing the witness to acknowledge that which has been excluded or repressed from the here-and-now in the process of rendering the present both comprehensible and habitable’ (Spearey, 2000: 171). Gordon, as others, draws in particular on Derrida’s deconstruction methodology, he called a ‘hauntology’, a theory of ghosts. The self is a ‘ghost in the sense that it is never fully present to itself. The ghost also haunts texts, standing for meanings that have been repressed or denied; but because the attempt to fix meaning is doomed to fail, the ghost is always present. The presence of ghosts, then, reminds us that such a project fails to see everything; and what it does not see – as well as the act of not-seeing itself – constitute social injustice’ (Gordon, 1997: 12). Gordon’s ghost is perhaps not so much a metaphor, but certainly not quite real. Her approach has triggered a flurry of elaborations, where the ghost has become a metaphor for all manner of social lacks, silences, absences and inequalities, or is enlisted as a ‘resistor’ or exposer of modernity, of particular power dynamics, or an exemplar of the ‘abject unlivable zones’ of social life populated by those who ‘do not enjoy the stat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Approaching the Ghost
• PART I: SPACES AND TIMES OF THE HAUNTED HOME
• 2 The Material Uncanny
• 3 The Temporalities of the Haunted Home
• PART II: STRATEGIES OF COHABITATION
• 4 Embodying, Domesticating, Gendering the Ghost
• 5 Strategies of Distance and Communication
• PART III: BELIEF, KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE
• 6 Knowledge and Uncertainty
• 7 Belief, Evidence and Experience
• Conclusion: The Liminal Home/Self
• Appendix: The Households
• References
• Index