Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the telling of ghost stories in the context of Indigenous Australian's removed from their families. It reflects on the challenges of such encounters, and asks how we approach the ghost as a real entity as well as a metaphorical, interpretative to understand trauma and suffering.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the telling of ghost stories in the context of Indigenous Australian's removed from their families. Known as the Stolen Generations, this group of people, were subjected to institutionalisation, adoption, and forced removals from their families, friends and communities. In many of my encounters with Stolen Generations, they brought me into their world of ghosts and hauntings. This presentation reflects on the challenge for the ethnographer in thinking with and through such encounters, and asks how we approach the ghost as a real entity as well as a metaphorical, interpretative lens through which to understand trauma and suffering. As "merchants of astonishment'' (Geertz 1984: 275), ghost hunting anthropologists face innumerable challenges in their research and writing. That we can imagine having a relationship with our ghosts and the ghosts of our research participants, that they seem to exist as part of a different and more flexible ontology, is what makes their presence and subsequent analysis all the more interesting. What is terrifying about these ghosts is that they are akin to Nietzsche's abyss, they seemingly have their own agency and unpredictability; it is this predicament that we must manage in our scholarly writings in order to do justice to the lives of our research participants.