Haunted Pacific: Anthropologists Investigate Spectral Apparitions across Oceania ed. by Roger Lohmann (review)

This edited volume, deeply rooted in Pacific ethnography, might best be described as the spiritual successor to the Pacific-focused volume Spirits in Culture, History, and Mind (1996), edited by Jeannette Mageo and Alan Howard. Attention is evenly split between what one might loosely call the "Austronesian" cultural sphere (a linguistic and cultural region that cuts across the older colonial categories of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia) and the non-Austronesian cultures of Papua New Guinea. The book also includes a programmatic introduction and an afterword of final thoughts in which each contributor reflects on the book's contents. A solid contribution to the areal literature, this volume is especially intriguing because of the tension that exists between its editor's theoretical framing and the contributions of the individual authors. Roger Lohmann's introductory essay describes his own theory of how human beings come to hold beliefs in the supernatural that are, to his mind, clearly false. And yet the contributors to Lohmann's volume often push back against his claims, taking issue with the concept of haunting, stretching it beyond its normal meaning or even rejecting it altogether. As a result, the volume has an interesting push and pull as its contributors politely but visibly resist the book's central premise.

In his introduction, Lohmann proposes that hauntings occur when people experience things in the world that appear to be the result of some plan or agency, but which are really just natural occurrences. I agree with Lohmann to the extent that he claims perception is underdetermined by reality, culture shapes perception, and the world offers affordances that culture takes up; this is a standard, neo-Kantian cultural-anthropological account of perception and classification. Lohmann's claim, however, is stronger. There is a close parallel in his argument to Mary Douglas's claims in her book Purity and Danger (1966): just as Douglas argued that pollution was matter out of place, so too Lohmann argues that hauntings are mind out of place—perceptions of action with intent where there ought not be any. Douglas claimed that matter out of place creates a cognitive dissonance and an embodied sense of disgust. So, too, Lohmann proposes that experiences of mind out of place are "spooky" (6). While the contents of beliefs about haunting are culturally specific, he argues, the capacity to be haunted and the affective charge associated with it are universal.

In making this argument, Lohmann is part of a long "intellectualist" tradition in anthropology that sees culture and belief as a response to intellectual questions about why the world is the way it is. This tradition stretches from Douglas through to E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Victorian writers such as James Fraser and E. B. Tylor. We might also associate this tradition with Lévi-Strauss and his students Phillipe Descola and Valerio Valeri. In contrast, the contributors of the volume seem to recapitulate the "functional" turn in anthropology in the 1920s. This was a time when authors such as Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown argued that beliefs were not merely the solution to intellectual problems—a sort of primitive form of science—but played a role in the whole life of an individual and society. The authors in this volume, following this line, emphasize that belief in the "supernatural" is not merely an intellectual glitch with an uncanny affective charge, but deeply woven into the lives of the communities they study. For instance, Mia Browne's study of Mugaba (Rennell) Island, comprising chapter 2, is just one of many studies showing that ancestral spirits tie people to kinship groups and land, creating a world whose meaning and emotional depth not only shapes society but makes life meaningful for individuals.

Many authors join Browne in noting that the "spooky" affective charge of haunting is not a universal feature of experiences of the supernatural in Oceania. In the third chapter...