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5 The ghosts of the American
War By Heonik
Kwon
relationship. If the spirits of the
dead are close to the living in both physical and
relational terms, they are not ghosts but
ancestors.
In sociological literature, the
identity that is physically close but relationally
distant is called "the stranger" and this has been
an important concept in the theory of objectivity.
The very development of the fieldwork method in
anthropology is in fact inseparable from this
particular notion. Ethnographers, too, usually
assume the ambiguous position of being physically
close to a foreign cultural reality yet
relationally far from it, and they
claim to
offer a good objective picture of the reality from
this particular "bifocal" positioning. It is with
Simmel that "the stranger" has taken on full
sociological importance.
Simmel argues
that the main characteristics of "the stranger"
are mobility and diversity, and that this
demonstrates the constellation of being near and
remote at the same time. The social form of the
stranger generates positive relations because,
according to him, "he is not bound by roots to the
particular constituents and partisan dispositions
of the group, he confronts all of these with a
distinctly 'objective' attitude, an attitude that
does not signify mere detachment and
nonparticipation, but is a distinct structure
composed of remoteness and nearness, indifference
and involvement."
The Vietnamese category
of co bac suggests that the identities
addressed as such are the social outsiders to the
ancestral spirits of ong ba in the world of
the dead. They stand as cosmological strangers or
outsiders (nguoi ngoai in Vietnamese) to
the community of the living when the latter
demonstrates its affinity and moral unity with the
ancestral spirits. They are the products of "bad
death" - violent death away from home, which the
Vietnamese express as "death in the street"
(chet duong). These spirits of the dead are
imagined to suffer from wandering between the
periphery of the other world and the margins of
this world without a site to anchor their memory
in, just as strangers in this world move from
village to village without finding a place to
settle.
They constitute a composite group
of individuals with various backgrounds of
historical life, just as the strangers differ from
the settlers with their characteristic lack of a
homogenous background. These qualities of mobility
and diversity distinguish the life of ghosts from
that of ancestors, whose memories, after their
ritually appropriated "death at home" (chet
nha), are permanently settled in the social
world according to the genealogical and spatial
order.
At the center of this concentric
conceptual moral order consisting of settled
ancestors and placeless ghosts, there is the
dexterous body of the ritual actor. The structure
of Vietnamese domestic commemorative ritual, in
the tradition of the central region, situates the
ritual actor in between two separate modes of
afterlife and milieus of memory. On the one side
lies the household ancestral shrine, or the
equivalent in the community ancestral temple,
which keeps the vestiges of family ancestors and
household deities. The other side is oriented
towards what Taussig calls "the open space of
death", which is the imagined life-world of the
tragic, non-ancestral, unsettled, and unrelated
spirits of the dead.
The ritual tradition
in the central region represents this open space
of death in the form of a small external shrine,
popularly called khom in Quang Ngai and
Quang Nam provinces, which is usually placed at
the boundary between the domestic garden and the
street. Within this dual concentric spatial
organization, the typical ritual action in this
region engages with both the interior and exterior
milieus of memory through a simple movement of the
body. The most habitual act of commemoration
consists of kowtowing and offering incense to the
house-side ancestors and turning the body to the
opposite side to repeat the action towards the
street-wandering ghosts. This two-directional act
may be accompanied by a single beat of the gong
followed by three or four beats of the drum.
Within this system of dual structure and
two-way practice, two ways emerge to imagine
social solidarity. On the house side, we can say
that the ritual action affirms the existing
solidary relations between the living and the dead
in the way that, in Durkheim's expression, "each
individual is the double of an ancestor".
Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious
Life highlights the power of rituals to
generate the senses and the effervescent sensation
of moral unity and mutual belonging among the
members of a community. Arguing that collective
social consciousness is fundamentally
performative, he emphasizes the role of "totemic"
or "ancestral" spirits in binding individuals with
the sacred space of a social whole.
The
society is created from within, he explains,
through the ritual drama in which the living would
act as if they were the double of their totemic
ancestors. The act of worshipping the sacred
existence of the dead, in this scheme, is that of
rendering sacred the profane entity that the
former stands for in relation to the living - the
genealogical unity. For Durkheim, to build a
society is to feel collectively that this society
exists, and this affective construction of society
is what rituals achieve. This symbolic
construction of social unity, according to
Durkheim, is focused on what he calls "the true
spirits" of the place, which he contrasts to what
the ghosts stand for:
A ghost ... is not a true spirit.
First, its power is usually limited; second, it
does not have definite functions. It is a
vagabond with no clear-cut responsibility, since
the effect of death was to set it outside all
the regular structures. In relation to the
living, it is demoted, as it were. On the other
hand, a spirit always has some sort of power,
and indeed it is defined by that power. It has
authority over some range of cosmic or social
phenomena; it has a more or less precise
function to perform in the world
scheme.
For Durkheim, the categorical
distinction between "the true spirit" and "the
ghost" relates to the relative conceptual distance
between the soul and the body. He writes, "A soul
is not a spirit ... it is the body's prisoner. It
escapes for good only at death, and even so we
have seen with what difficulty that separation is
made final." The true spirit is the result of a
successful separation of the soul from the prison
of the body, whereas a failure in this work of
mortal separation results in a ghost. The former
develops to a "positive cult" through which the
living associate with the memory of the dead in
socially constructive and regenerative ways, while
the latter falls to a "negative cult" accompanying
a system of pollution taboos and abstinences.
This way of dividing death into two
separate moral domains and focusing analytical
attention on the positive spirit of the society
(genius loci) has set a dominant trend in
the subsequent study of religious symbols. Most
notably, Bloch discusses the reburial practices in
Madagascar in this light and describes their
custom of separating the ancestral bones from the
decomposed bodies as a core symbolic gesture in
the making of a social order. The bones cleaned
from the flesh represent a sacred spirit removed
from the profane body and their assembly in the
collective ancestral tomb creates "the society of
ancestors" - an ideal social form in the
collective consciousness of the living. Bloch
later changes this idiom of symbolic removal to a
stronger language of "symbolic conquest" as he
tries to advance a general theory of human
religious experience.
He argues with
reference to male initiation rituals that the
logic of these rituals is to have the ancestral
spirit conquer the body of novice members of a
social group. The initiates obtain the rights for
full membership in the society by becoming the
double of ancestors and this is achieved through
the ritual enactment of renouncing their profane
bodily substances in exchange for the reception of
the transcendental ancestral spirit. It is
important to note that the idiom of symbolic
conquest works in two ways. It describes how the
soul of the dead transforms to a true spirit on
the one hand and how this pure spirit in turn
makes new bondage with the living on the other.
The idiom postulates that a social order is
created on the basis of this war against profane
substances imagined to take place on both sides of
the cosmological threshold.
Ghosts are an
uninvited category to the paradigm of symbolic
conquest. In the language of the rites of passage,
they are perpetually liminal beings who are
neither entirely separated from the world of
mortals nor incorporated into the socially defined
world of true spirits. According to Durkheim, they
exist outside the social structure and have no
clearly defined social functions. With this
background, it is not surprising to find that
ghosts have played no significant part, contrary
to ancestors, in the advancement of social theory.
The absence of ghosts in social theory is
a product of the theory's preoccupation with
functional values and structural order. In
addition, the exclusion of ghosts from the
symbolic construction of sacred social order
relates to a problematic definition of "the
sacred". The Latin term sacer, as Agamben
explains, has double meaning of "sacred" and
"accursed", and it incorporates both the holy
spirit of moral unity and the spirits excluded and
banned from the unity. In Casey's phenomenology of
place, the genius loci ("the spirit of the
place"; Durkheim's "true spirits") should be
distinguished from the anima loci ("the
soul of the place") but the two, nevertheless,
cannot be considered separately. In this
conception of the sacred, the negative cult of
ghosts is mutually constitutive of the positive
cult of ancestors and we cannot imagine the
symbolic values of ancestors without placing them
in a wider relational structure with those of
ghosts.
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