Paper Short Abstract:

In exploring how WW2's long shadow takes spectral form as haunted battlefields, death camps, and bomb-damaged cities, my ethnography harnesses psychoanalytic and mediumistic practices of "reverie" to accentuate receptivity, attunement, and discernment to the war's preternatural aftermaths.

Paper Abstract:

In exploring how the "long shadow" of WW2 violences and traumas takes spectral form in former battlefields, death camps, and once-bombed-out cities worldwide, my current ethnography asks: When the wartime past speaks to us through ghostliness and hauntings, what does it say? How do we hear? What do we understand? To answer these questions, my project harnesses the power of psychoanalytic and mediumistic practices of "reverie" (intersensory introspection, imagination, and waking dream-states) to accentuate ethnographic receptivity, attunement, and discernment. Following from Alexander Nemerov's proposition that "the past is most available through irrational methods", my paper qualifies reverie as an idiosyncratic interdisciplinary technique which allows ethnographers to better summon the hazy, fragmentary, and ephemeral traces leftover from the war and those who once lived it. Reverie affords access to vitally instructive atmospherics and phenomenologies and complements anthropologists' use of more standard methodologies. For when reverie's results are preternaturally unusual or even inexplicable, though, ethnographers and interlocutors alike may struggle to give words to their experiences. My paper therefore highlights the theoretic and descriptive vocabularies used by social scientists and others -- ranging from psychologists to writers and artists, for example -- to interpret and give fuller voice to these kinds of spectral encounters and learnings. In the doing, my paper tackles and dismantles some of the barriers which too-often inhibit anthropologists' uses of non-traditional forms of ethnographic engagement and representation to tell different kinds of stories.