Contextual Autism: Anthropological Fieldwork about the Experience of Ghosts and Haunting

This project deals with the notion of ghost anthropologically and artistic. The contextual autism of ghosting reveals itself as a sensation of in-betweeness in art as well as in everyday life. The ghost is not easily defined; as Jacques Derrida states in Spectres of Marx (1993/1994) about the spectre: ”It is something that one does not know, precisely, and one does not know if precisely it is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corresponds to an essence.” (Derrida 1994:5). The ghost is hollow, it is not what it seems to be, and it seems to point to something that you don’t know. As a non-present presence the ghost flavours its host with ghastly sensations of something dim, vague, and indifferently deadpan. On the basis of an ongoing anthropological research project about Haunted Houses and a parallel artistic artwork-process, joining forces in museum exhibitions and publishing of books, the anthropological and the artistic ways of getting closer to and deconstructing ghostly phenomena converge. Deconstructing the ghosts all the spirits disappear and leave the remnants less scary, but more perverted. The artistic approach is trying to catch the poetics of ghosts, while the anthropological approach is questioning haunted people about their real experiences of the unreal in haunted houses; homes, hangars, hospitals, museums, kindergartens, and the like. The one haunts the other. The presentation will be a co-work of anthropological research paper and art theories on haunting.