Seeing Ghosts

Abstract

This essay is a narrative meditation on fieldwork and the construction of ethnographic knowledge of lived experience drawn from my fieldwork in rural Kumaon, a region of the Indian Himalaya. It reflects critically upon fieldwork, writing practices, memory, and imagination. This is accomplished through unfolding a specific ethnographic encounter in the context of events which took place in the autumn of 1994, a moment of keen significance in Kumaon because this is when the movement for a separate hill state escalated and became violent. The state of Uttaranchal was established in 2000, but in 1994 agitation for it was fresh and raw. In this essay, a girl and a ghost become entangled during the same time that supporters of the movement come under attack and schools close. Rather than analyzing spirit possession or political culture as such, this essay explores the diverse ways in which women occupying multiple subject positions negotiated, discussed, and imagined the presences of a ghost and of an anthropologist, and of how, in turn, I now construct them.