I still get the chills when I think about “La Patasola,” the monster that haunted my childhood nights. Though I know that her ghostly image is a product of my culture and my imagination’s interpretation of her, not even adulthood and multiple educational credentials have taken away my fear of her and all other monsters that make part of Colombian folklore. They fascinate me as an object of study, yet they terrify me because deep inside I feel that they might be real.
This book gets at the heart of that feeling – the feeling of fearful fascination that characterizes research on the unknown, and the intellectual curiosity to take a closer and more sensible look at those we study and the contemporary issues of our world. With the compilation of stories in this book, readers join the editors and the authors on a journey of living with monsters from different continents. Their intricate stories mingle with those of the ethnographers who embraced their enthrallment with monsters. Noteworthy, though, is the lack of stories from the diverse folkloric traditions of Latin American countries. Including them would have made for a richer compilation.
The book starts with a short introduction that discusses the term “monster” and its nuances – bodies, alterities, and subjectivities that exist in liminal social, geographic, and temporal spaces. All these issues are objects of analysis within the humanities and social sciences. Monsters can be spaces for reflexivity about the social world and a tool for an introspective view of the fabric of culture. As the editors suggest, monsters are “good to think with.” It is unavoidable to simultaneously feel the thrill of a good narrative and the scholarly excitement of critical reflection while reading the fourteen stories and the accompanying bibliographic notes.
However, the reader must construct the narrative that connects the stories, as one story follows the other without an underlying curated sequence or theme. For me, it made sense to arrange the stories in a thematic sequence that allowed me to compare the richness of ethnographic experiences in the stories.
The first thematic line of stories relates to how monsters serve to illustrate the power of knowledge: whose voices are listened to, and whose voices are ignored. The journey of living with monsters starts at Olympic National Park (U.S.A.), where Cailín Murray discusses how narratives of disbelief and belief elucidate knowledge hierarchies. Through this account of Wild Man, Murray embarks on a political commentary on Indigenous knowledge and colonialism. Similarly, Yasmine Musharbash’s story of Justin in Central Australia resonates with contemporary discussions on the impact of foreigners on local communities. The scholar allows the reader to feel the frustration of being a foreigner, but also the frustration of not having your voice heard. This discussion reminds of Quijano’s (2000) “coloniality of power” as the voices of the subaltern are disregarded in the name of a narcissistic and individualistic endeavor.
The second broad topic is vulnerability. In “Possession, in Four Voices,” Richard Davis ingeniously discusses how possessions and exorcisms are to be understood within cosmogonies. The author compares possession of the traditional monster Muruyg in Northern Australia to westernized understandings of demonic possession. This scholar illustrates how “the arrogance of colonialism” (232) transformed possession from an act based on love to an act based on evil. Vulnerability is also touched on in Misty Bastian’s account of wanting to interview a ghost and using a medium as a key informant for her research in the United States. The end of the story presents us with the question of the boundaries between the ethnographer as a person and the ethnographer as a scholar. As ethnographers, it is our vulnerability that makes us great observers, yet our research can touch us in very particular ways.
Paul Manning takes us to a travelers inn in Georgia where a distressed traveler talks about forest monsters, mostly female monsters. The traveler’s discussion centers on domesticity and the fragility of masculinity when faced with empowered femininity, a monstrous commentary on gender inequality. In “A Mare’s Field Guide to Monsters in Iceland,” Mary Hawkins and Helena Onnudottir provide an account of the vulnerability of horses in the wild and their relationship with humans and other monsters. Similarly, the last chapter of the book touches on the fragility of life on Earth. Susan Lepselter discusses some of the most pressing issues of our time – immigration, surveillance technologies, environmental degradation, the prospects of nuclear annihilation, and wealth inequality. “Those of us who – let’s be blunt – have the means to do so will want and need to leave this old Earth behind when the time is right” (280). Through her experience studying aliens in the Southwest United States, Lepselter builds a story around narratives collected in the course of doing her research. This would be a great chapter to assign for introductory sociology and anthropology courses.
Monsters are also cultural products that seek to socialize or reinforce values within a society. Leberecht Funk transports us to the fractured reflections of a Taiwanese child and the role that the Anito play in her socialization. Through narratives about different monsters within Hinduism, Indira Arumugam questions the Western understanding of monsters, situating it within values and traditions in Southern India. In reference to Ghana, Matthew Gmalifo Mabefan and Kalissa Alexeyeff discuss the anthropo-monstrification of the contemporary fear of the loss of values. Sakawa boys are monsters who, driven by poverty, scam the internet, “running the risk of being turned into zombies, being dehumanized” (212). This story is a powerful illustration of an “alternative modernity” (212) where the perpetrator of crime has been forced into “monster-hood” because of worldwide social inequality.
Finally, a few authors discuss the creation, the mutation, and the commodification of monsters within popular and consumer culture. Michael Dylan Foster narrates the history of the Kappa in Japan and their relationship to current characters of popular culture such as Mario Bros. and Pokémon. Jeffrey Tolbert presents a story where digital monsters become objects of popular culture, questioning consumer agency in creating folklore. Caitrin Lynch and Adam Coppola take the reader on a trip to Riverway, New England, a town characterized by the closing of industries. This ethnographic fiction account tells the story of a group of anthropologists that visit a factory inhabited by ghosts. The story is a commentary on “how ghosts, metaphorical and literal, are always haunting capitalist landscapes” (257). Matt Tomlinson picks up Lynch’s and Coppola’s discussion by showing how monsters also abide by capital-oriented processes such as marketing, in “How to Brand Your Monster.”
During fieldwork the anthropologist is caught in a stage of “complicity” toward those being studied and “ambiguity” towards the processes that are under scrutiny (18). Because “[t]he monsters our authors are concerned with, for the most part, are understood to be real by those they haunt…fieldwork encourages anthropologists to start noticing things they had previously overlooked” (17)—and to reflect upon them.
In the last decades scholars’ positionalities and personal reflections have become an intrinsic part of research in the social sciences, providing access behind the scenes of scholarly production. This book, however, turns things around: the research becomes the behind-the-scenes of the stories. As the editors note, it is in this seeming disjuncture that ethnographic fiction becomes a powerful venue to transcend dry academic writing and embrace the humanity of the ethnographic experience.
As readers, we are invited to delve deeper into the ethnographic accounts that produce these well-written (and sometimes) intimate stories in which ethnographers can be read through the fiction they produce. Overall, the book is a fascinating piece that brings forward the best part of the anthropologist as a human and also as a scholar.
Work Cited
Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America,” International Sociology 15:215-232.
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[Review length: 1292 words • Review posted on October 11, 2024]