Ethnographers have long been fascinated with the supernatural and the means by which people engage with it. Often the focus has been on shamans, usually understood as ritual experts who are skilled at navigating the spiritual world and interacting with the forces they encounter there, or on mediums, professionals who serve as conduits between spirits and humans. Mai Lan Gustaffson’s book focuses not on mediums or shamans—although they are discussed in later chapters—but on individuals who endure repeated attacks by the angry ghosts of family members lost in the Vietnam War. These angry ghosts, or con ma, are of persons who died “bad deaths,” killed by violence before their time and unable to be properly memorialized by family members who often had no body to bury. Normally, surviving family members perform an elaborate sequence of rituals after a person’s death, and if they discharge their duties properly “the deceased will be transformed into a benevolent ancestral spirit” (57). But war tears family apart in more ways than one, and those who are unable to properly mourn their deceased family members often find themselves beset by the person’s vengeful ghost.
During fieldwork conducted in the late 1990s, Gustaffson interviewed numerous people haunted by the restless spirits of war victims. The narratives they relate serve to frame their present suffering in the violent past of the Vietnam War, connecting individual lives to national identity and international conflict. In each case, the angry spirits take temporary possession of their victims and cause them to behave in bizarre and sometimes violent ways. Among Gustaffson’s informants are a successful entrepreneur tormented by the ghost of her brother, who causes her to scratch and tear at her own flesh; an old woman who suffers from intense pain and recurring nightmares of serving dinner to her dead family; and an American veteran who is haunted by the ghost of a Vietcong soldier.
The work is a straightforward discussion of a phenomenon evidently experienced by hundreds of people. The narratives supplied by Gustaffson’s informants are allowed to stand on their own, supplemented by contextual information that positions them in the broader framework of contemporary Vietnamese social life. However, a strangely discordant note is struck when Gustaffson points out early in the work that virtually no other ethnographers of contemporary Vietnam have dealt with this phenomenon (25ff.). She suggests two primary reasons for her informants’ willingness to discuss their personal hauntings with her: her half-Vietnamese ethnicity, and her obesity. The latter is apparently the more compelling reason, because “my weight was a clear indication to all that I was ill, and it was this identification as a fellow sufferer that opened doors that might otherwise have remained closed” (33). Gustaffson claims that the people she interviewed assumed that her illness came from the spirits, but she spends only a single paragraph in elaborating this claim before shifting focus away from herself and back to the “overpopulated” spirit world.
Gustaffson is careful to locate her informants’ experiences in the changing social contexts of Vietnam over the years leading up to and following the war. Her chief concern is with exploring how individuals cope with the constant incursions of the angry dead into the lived present and with the violent past that created them. Often professional mediums are the last resort for those beset by angry ghosts, and Gustaffson discusses their role in an ongoing spiritual battle. She emphasizes the necessarily secretive nature of consultations with mediums in a nation where many such practices are deemed illicit. In so doing, the author links the lingering effects of spirit attacks to a political system that renders the traditional defenses against such attacks impossible for most people to enact.
In discussing the experiences of people from a wide range of backgrounds (none of whom are professional mediums or shamans), Gustaffson explores points of contact between the spirit world of traditional Vietnamese culture and the lives of contemporary people who, very often, were raised in a social atmosphere that dismissed such experiences as superstition. She writes, “Urbanite or country dweller, man or woman, child or grownup—the one thing uniting all the people I had the privilege to interview for this book was the war and its presence in their lives in the form of illness” (128). In this context, “haunting” has a double meaning that usefully and poignantly underscores the tendency of the violent past to encroach into present life, embodied, as it were, by the angry spirits of the war’s dead.
Despite minor flaws, Gustaffson’s work remains compelling. She makes it clear that her goal is not to generate new theory; instead she spends most of her time in detailing specific encounters with angry spirits and pointing out connections between the war, the lingering dead, and the post-war politics that have made it exceedingly difficult for Vietnamese people with spiritual afflictions to receive the spiritual help they need. She explicitly rejects the “overarching theories” of many works on spirit possession which “serve to explain away sufferer’s experience” (130), choosing instead to emphasize the fact of their suffering as one manifestation of the unbearable tension between national politics, traditional culture, and individual lives. In her conclusion Gustaffson links the phenomena of spirit attacks to the important idea of honoring the fallen victims of war. Enduring the suffering the ghosts inflict is a way to honor their sacrifices (134–136).
In the end there may be no way to propitiate the spirits, but in an epilogue full of “where are they now?” vignettes, Gustaffson shows that many of her informants who were able to seek the (illicit) spiritual expertise of a medium recovered from their afflictions. Human relationships and human conflicts are given new meaning by the supernatural, and the presence of spiritual phenomena in daily life forces the engagement of individuals, families, and nations with the very real and very pressing legacies of violence.
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[Review length: 979 words • Review posted on May 5, 2010]