Pinto Sarah
Department of Anthropology, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, USA.
Med Anthropol. 2018 Nov-Dec;37(8):621-629. doi: 10.1080/01459740.2018.1520710. Epub 2018 Dec 12.
In considering the persistent ways that haunting, as a metaphoric operation, informs our attentions to history and human experience, this article introduces this special issue by asking what qualities of knowing, reading, and understanding, and what particular histories, might be rolled into "ghostliness." Infrastructural hauntings at once jog the fixity of certain metaphors and help us world our analytics. With the aid of a recent feature film that draws fear from the infrastructural ruins of a haunted hospital, I propose contrasting modes of attending to ghosts in the world and the world in ghosts--finding and conjuring, in which finding sees ghosts as something, while conjuring sees ghosts as always, inevitably, something else. With ghosts and ghostliness at hand, how might we, as anthropologists, consider the unspoken imperatives of our metaphors? How might we invite a localizing turn into our own efforts, being attentive to the ways our analytics propel ways of knowing into the world?
在思考作为一种隐喻操作的萦绕如何持续影响我们对历史和人类经验的关注时,本文通过询问哪些认知、阅读和理解的特质,以及哪些特定的历史,可能被纳入“幽灵性”来引入这个特刊。基础设施的萦绕一方面动摇了某些隐喻的固定性,另一方面帮助我们构建分析框架。借助一部近期的故事片,该片从一所闹鬼医院的基础设施废墟中汲取恐惧元素,我提出对比在世界中对待鬼魂和在鬼魂中对待世界的不同方式——发现与召唤,其中发现将鬼魂视为某种东西,而召唤则将鬼魂始终且不可避免地视为别的东西。有了鬼魂和幽灵性,作为人类学家,我们该如何思考隐喻中那些未言明的要求?我们该如何引导自己的努力转向本土化,留意我们的分析将认知方式推向世界的方式?