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Paper short abstract

In Tibetan southwest China, history-in-person is lived through ghost-inflicted pain. Ritual-medical diagnostic manuals archive ghosts by the fatal historical events in which they died and guide cures, making diagnosis a technology of historicity that links bodily symptoms to historical deaths.

Paper long abstract

What does history look like when it is lived as affliction rather than recalled as memory? This paper examines ghost-inflicted pain as a mode of history-in-person in a Tibetan community in southwest China, based on 20 months of fieldwork (2021–2023). I argue that ghosts make the past present not primarily through narrative memory but through episodic pain and illness. Here, history is not primarily told, but suffered, diagnosed, and treated.

A key ethnographic focus is ritual-medical experts’ diagnostic manuals – a local archive that catalogues ghosts through fatal historical events and guides specialists in identifying which ghost is afflicting a patient and how to expel it. Drawing on healing encounters that use these manuals, I show how this archive of ghostly affliction enacts practical historical reasoning: it links bodily symptoms to relations with the dead, to historical events of violence and misfortunes, and to local topographies and cosmological time.

Developing an account of history-in-person, I show an alternative historicity in which fatal historical events never fully recede, but return without warning, taking hold of persons as sensations, pain, and symptoms. This points to an alternative temporality in which “the past” is not a completed domain, but is entangled with space and circular time, capable of intruding into the present, and confronting people unexpectedly in and through their bodies.

I argue that ghost manuals and diagnostic practice constitute a technology of historicity through which haunting becomes an embodied form of history-in-person, extending anthropological theories of historicity beyond memory and representation.