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Accepted Paper:
Gifting a ghost: haunting, debris & the uncanny present
Laurie Denyer Willis
(University of Edinburgh)
This year as a birthday gift I was given a haunting. It had once belonged to my dad. Working through the materiality of an uncanny death through its debris, documentation, and remnants, I consider the ever-present weight of the haunt, to think through an anthropology of presence, and the present.
Paper long abstract:
This year as a birthday gift I was given a haunting. My dad received it first on his 17th birthday, and shared it later with his sister. It was her brother too, she’d say, when my dad would claim the haunting as his own. Their other siblings were less inclined to be haunted, so they were never visited by their ghost brother -the man who I would never know personally as my uncle. But they didn’t deny the haunting. It was of course tangible, palpable, when we all gathered together for Sunday dinners. His scent would drift up from the cramped basement, mingling with the flavour of roast drippings. My grandmother was already haunted when her son died suddenly and strangely and messily. It involved fence wire. Uncannily? I don’t know, that last adjective is hard to get right. The details of the death can only be spoken late at night after much drinking. In this paper, I work through the materiality of this gifted haunting; its debris, documentation, and remnants. In other words, the ever-present weight of the haunt, in order to think through how ghosts move through time (or not), how they age with you (or not), and how they are inherited (or not). How do ghosts engage memory and present together, kin too, confusing the boundaries of present-tense desire and a longing for the past? Indeed, ghosts make sure the past is always present.