Ghostly presences loom large in our popular imagination. However, they are rarely the subject of serious study. Professor of Sociology Avery Gordon tackles the spectral in her scholarly work Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, and looks at the impact that dispossession, repression and exploitation have on people and society.

Ghostly Matters was first published in 1997, and as Gordon points out in the introduction to this new, 2008 edition, the themes addressed then remain as relevant today. In fact, they may be even more so. As she states ‘when this book was first published...security/dirty wars , torture, disappearance and captivity, state repression...enslavement, these were, in the first world, treated as obsolete practices’ (xix). Sadly, as we know, they are no longer obsolete, in neither the first nor the third world.

So what does all this have to do with ghosts and haunting? Surely the terrors described above are much more frightening than spectral figures? But Gordon is not writing about the ghosts of our popular imagination—the sometimes comic, sometimes spooky spirits of folklore and film—rather she is looking at haunting as a ‘social phenomenon.’ As she states in her first chapter: ‘Ghostly Matters is about haunting... a constituent element of modern social life...neither pre-modern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import’ (7).

She goes on to say that ‘haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence...the ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost or barely visible...makes itself known or apparent to us’ (8). So what is a sociologist doing looking at ghosts and haunting? As she concedes, ‘ghosts are a somewhat unusual topic of enquiry for a social analyst’ (7), but she has done so because ‘ghostly things kept cropping up and messing up other tasks I was trying to accomplish’ (8). It seems it is difficult to examine society without considering the impact of what is missing or ignored.

The book is divided into five chapters, and three deal with several different kinds of ‘ghosts.’ In ‘Distractions’, the author searches for a woman named Sabina Spielrein who ‘was not in a photograph in which she was supposed to be’ (27). The other two chapters are each built around novels: Luisa Valenzuela’s He Who Searches, about state terror in Argentina, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which deals with the ‘lingering inheritance of US racial slavery’ (27).

Beloved is the story of a runaway slave who kills her baby daughter, rather than see her returned to captivity. The child, unnamed, is known as Beloved, from the single word on her tombstone. Beloved’s mother and family are haunted by her absence, and when a stranger appears, bearing the same name, they are convinced that the dead child has returned. In doing so, she speaks not only for the child who was lost, but perhaps also for the ‘sixty million or more’ (140) victims of slavery.

The novel is based on real events, and Gordon recounts the story of the historical figure at the centre of the case—Margaret Garner—and how her plight was used by abolitionists to highlight the inhumanity of the slave trade. She also looks at the way the novel examines haunting and the ‘need for the dead to be remembered and accommodated’ (179). Beloved is eventually exorcised, and Gordon sees this resolution as ‘helping us see that haunting as a way of life...or as a type of political consciousness must be passed on or through’ (182). As she states in her conclusion, ‘ultimately haunting is about how to transform a shadow of a life into an undiminished life whose shadows touch softly in the spirit of a peaceful reconciliation’ (208).

While Ghostly Matters deals with a fascinating topic, unfortunately the book is not particularly accessible. Gordon’s scholarly and sometimes convoluted language, along with the complexity of her analysis, makes this a challenging read. However, it is worth persevering with, in order to come to a full appreciation and understanding of her argument.

There is certainly no question about its relevance. What ghosts are going to be unleashed by the horrors of Darfur, Zimbabwe, and Iraq? How are the victims and the perpetrators going to be haunted by the events of the past? Gordon states that the task of the politically engaged individual is to ‘side with the excluded and the repressed’ (xix); clearly she believes that we must exorcise the ghosts created by such tragedies by seeking justice and reconciliation for the victims.

Some believe that ‘ghosts hate new things’ (xix). Perhaps if we are ever able to rid our society of oppression and injustice, and build a fairer world for all people, we would no longer be so haunted.

Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
(2008)

by Avery F. Gordon
University of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816654468
252pp US$22.50