Little People, Ghosts and the Anthropology of the Good

Abstract

Although ghosts might not be found universally, as Laura Bohannon observed in her classic article on the Tiv of West Africa (Bohannon 1966), they are undeniably popular. As embodied figures of culturally contoured anxieties about death experiences, ghosts tend to make excellent subjects for stories. Narratively, they spring to life, whether doing so as alternative forms of kin (Kwon 2008), patrollers of boundaries (Taylor 2014), voices of political truth and legitimacy (Greenblatt 1999), figures of tragedy who paradoxically offer good fortune (Ferguson 2014) or any other of the seemingly countless characterisations found in the ethnographic literature. In this article I analyse stories about ghosts ‘yalo’ in Fiji and compare them with elusive dwarf spirits known as veli, to see what critical insights can be gained by aligning these distinct figures. In doing so, I am trying to avoid the Scylla of explaining them away as delusions and the Charybdis of throwing them into the overly expansive category of “haunting”, a category which, under the influence of Derridean “hauntology” (Derrida 1994), has attempted to encompass such sprawling, ungraspable referents as the “seething presence” of “that which appears to be not there” (Gordon 1997: 8). As Heonik Kwon has cautioned for ghosts, it is crucial to distinguish between the way they are “concrete historical identities” and the way they are “idea[s] of history” (Kwon 2008: 2). Ghosts and veli can be both things, but keeping the categories analytically separate helps avoid the loose excess of turning them into tokens of an indefinable, seething haunting. In analysing the similarities and differences between ghosts and veli as figures in history and figures of history, I draw on the recent work of Joel Robbins (2013) on suffering and hope. Robbins has proposed an “anthropology of the good” that treats difference in terms of promise rather than trauma, and this article is an attempt to work through the implications of Robbins’ framework. Robbins focusses on anthropological paradigms, not things that go bump in the night; but those things that go bump in the night, in Fiji at least, do tend to arrange themselves along the lines Robbins draws. Keeping ghosts and dwarf spirits together in the same analytical frame reveals them as complementary alternative perspectives in imagining and engaging with pasts and futures.