Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2019. 256 pp. US$38.00, paper. ebook. ISBN 978-1-5310-1412-4.
The term “haunting” usually conjures images of eerie, supernatural beings or frightening, alarming experiences. A person can be haunted by a traumatic event, but in the English language and culture, hauntings are often linked to places and are experienced as external phenomena. Ghosts, souls, and spirits are manifest as tangible beings, sometimes visible or audible, and occasionally felt as a kind of presence that has no materiality. As such, people can be haunted and so can places. The Pacific hauntings explored in the essays in this volume often share such characteristics, but with significant variations. As the editor, Roger Lohmann, observes in his introduction, while inexplicable perceptions and illusory experiences appear to be universal, the explanations and meanings that are attached to them are culturally specific. The book’s contributors offer ethnographic description and interpretation of the nature and meaning of haunting in the Pacific communities where they worked.
Mia Browne examines the ways that Rennellese cosmology remains manifest in the landscape of the island, where stories about origins, spirits, and ancestors permeate natural features. Genealogies and communications with ancestors legitimate land ownership and give meaning to contemporary relationships as they connect people to their past. In Rennell, as in other Pacific Islands, Christianity has generated new understandings of life and the effects of death—understandings that have dislocated some of the connections which formerly maintained a social order ensuring fertility and strength.
A common theme in these essays is the accommodation of Christianity or extraneous spirits within Indigenous cosmologies and theologies. Unlike the Rennellese, whose experience of conversion diminishes them, as ancestral links are attenuated, Marshallese people see the Christian God as encompassing their world while their spirits, deities, and ghosts of the past remain ensconced in Enewetak. Laurence Carucci illustrates how spirits of the dead continue to haunt the living, and powerful deities of place, wind, and wave remain potent forces in everyday life. In many places in Papua New Guinea, charismatic Christianity has had a profound effect on the relationship between people and spirits. In the Sepik community of Nyaura, where Christiane Falck lived, spirits are incorporated into the world of the living through mediums who become possessed. These Sepik spirits can be benign, advisory, or enhance health and power, but they can also inflict harm. While their corporeality is mainly through possession of a living person or animal, sometimes white people are considered to be embodied spirits of deceased relatives. Falck’s experience echoes that of numerous others who have been embraced as relatives returned from the dead in Papua New Guinea, and she considers the resultant ethical and practical dilemmas that ensued during her fieldwork. Her chapter elucidates the cosmological and ontological problem of being in a Melanesian world where there are two modes of being: one designated earthly and corporeal, the other comprised of spirits who are more real and more powerful. When her Sepik interlocutors place her firmly in the latter category, she is alarmed and dismayed by their refusal to acknowledge her own conception of self.
In almost all of the essays, the significance of place, and the identification of spirits and ghosts with specific locations, is paramount. Richard Feinberg’s contribution shows not only that earlier traditions of spirits and deities persist within an adherence to Christianity, but that Taumako people who migrate add another layer of syncretism by accepting that the spirits of their host country can also influence their lives. Wolfgang Kempf provides a very detailed geographical taxonomy of the various places beyond Kiribati that are inhabited by various supernatural forces and beings. Lohmann describes the complexity of Asabano syncretic conceptualizations of the souls or spirits that are divided, can be located and haunt different parts of the landscape, and might go to heaven or hell, or even both places. And Arve Sørum’s chapter deals with spirit possession among the Bedamini.
Anthropologists “…go to the field to study the ghosts of ‘the other’ but may also be haunted, in the sense of a person who has unfinished business” (186). Fictionalized anthropologists, based on actual people, figure centrally in the three novels discussed by Diane Losche. She shows how their experiences during fieldwork can become both the subject and object of hauntings and continue to affect their lives.
The co-existence of spirits with corporeal humans and their capacity to interact with people are ubiquitous in Pacific concepts of their world. While this raises questions about Pacific epistemologies, notions of knowledge, proof, and the verifiability of experiences are not really subjected to analysis in this collection. Moreover, in concentrating upon the culturally specific or traditional understandings of spirits—even though Christianity is acknowledged—somehow it is underplayed as a factor in contemporary world views. The Pacific people represented in this collection are now all avowed Christians and have been brought up as such for decades. Even so, the representations seem to insist on a split between past and present, as if Christianity is an imposed unreality or a veneer. Syncretism itself is not scrutinized.
The concluding chapter comprises brief responses from the contributors. Each author reflects on their impressions of other contributions and the collection as a whole. My own response coincides with that of Wolfgang Kempf, who asks: “What, then, is ‘haunting’ or ‘to be haunted?’” (222). The authors present such diverse interpretations of haunting—from florid spirit possession to a world view that has no distinction between the material and the spiritual—that by the end of the book, I felt that perhaps it should have been given another title. This is not to detract from the quality of the ethnographic presentations, but indicates the difficulty of dealing with the supernatural as a force in human lives.
Martha Macintyre
The University of Melbourne, Melbourne