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Paper short abstract

This paper examines speculative letter writing and dramaturgical character work as methods for engaging psychiatric archival case files and attending to hauntings anthropologically.

Paper long abstract

Psychiatric casefiles from archives and hauntings seem rather unrelated. Unless it is a horror story. Maybe it is a horror story. And if archival documents are “a tear on the fabric of time, an unplanned glimpse into an unexpected event” (Farge 2004, 6) then reading them can be a sure way to being haunted. After all a haunting call for attention and refuses to be forgotten. But this is in fact less of a thrilling story about a method. It is a story about a method for reading psychiatric casefiles and attending to a haunting anthropologically. Rossbottom (1977) suggests that to write letters is “to attempt at the attenuation of the time and space that separates the correspondents (286). I turn to letter writing (Ralph 2020; Edmiston, 2021) and dramaturgical character work (Dunn 2017) in conversation with the lyric essay, a form that allows archival facts to coexist with imaginative practice. By approaching psychiatric casefiles through speculative letter writing, I stay close to documentary traces while opening onto what cannot be fully captured. The archive, a site of epistemic polarity that is conventionally framed as factual and stable becomes newly inhabitable through dramaturgy and letter writing as modes of attentive, careful engagement.