“Social Haunting” has become something of a ‘thing’ in social sciences as we have become more and more aware of the power of haunting to impact our lives both individually and collectively. As we become familiar with the notion of ghosts hanging around our social lives, we are able to bring them into our writing in ways which illuminate some of the complexities and difficulties of experiences, often traumatic, which are otherwise difficult to articulate. Ghosts are doing us a favour, then, but they are not content. One difficulty remains with the ways that ghosts are drawn upon in the social sciences and the ways that the ghosts wish to make their presence felt. This was something intimated long ago by Avery Gordon, in her seminal work ‘Ghostly Matters; Haunting and the Sociological Imagination’ where she very clearly pointed out that ghosts are real, they are not a metaphor.
Despite this insistence on the reality and the agency of ghosts, social sciences still feel more comfortable representing them as a trope, as a metaphor – it is as if we are haunted. Our minds, our thoughts, our feelings and our memories trouble us, but this comes from somewhere within us, we are not actually haunted by a disembodied presence. Or so it would seem, certainly this approach makes social science feel more comfortable. My interest, however, is to explore the possibility that ghosts have minds of their own, that they are real, not simply metaphorical, and that we can work with them to deepen our understanding of the people we work with and the societies they live in.
Having set out my intention, the next problem I face is where to start? Do I try and trace in a thousand words or so, the history of ghosts in social sciences? That would not be possible; that history is long and deep and very complex so that must be left for another time. Instead, perhaps I should choose a particular ghost; in effect, perhaps I should tell you a ghost story. This seems like a good place to start, but which ghost and which story? I think perhaps I will tell you the story of the Australian Artists, the talking stick and the ghost that grabbed them by the throat.
It was some years ago now and I had not long returned from a trip to Australia where I had been interviewing Aboriginal Artists with a view to engaging some of them in a residency in the North Yorkshire Moors. Gordon and Raymond were two of the artists that had been invited to take part in the residency and they were in the middle of their visit, creating art works that explored ideas around land access, land rights and belonging. That part of North Yorkshire was particularly proud of its connections to Captain Cook (the ‘discoverer’ of Australia) and the Captain Cook Birthplace Museum in nearby Middlesbrough was hosting an exhibition of Australian Aboriginal art to which Raymond and Gordon had been invited. I went along with them, and we walked slowly around the paintings on display discussing the political pros and cons of such a museum promoting particular styles of Aboriginal art that appealed to the art establishment of the western European art market. Needless to say, we were not hugely impressed by the politics that lay behind the exhibition, nor of the ignorance of the culture that had created the artwork, however the art itself was stupendous. Ambivalence and uncertainty about how we should or wanted to respond to the exhibition led us away from the gallery rooms and into other areas of the museum where various artefacts were on display behind glass cases. As this was the evening and not during public opening hours these rooms were dimly lit and quite eerie. We wandered around various bits of ‘loot’ captured from the peoples of the countries that Captain Cook had visited as he paved the way for later European colonisation. It was difficult to see some of the exhibits in the gloom and sometimes our reflections would catch us unawares and it would feel as though there was something or someone else there, following us, or watching us.
As we walked on Raymond bent a little closer to see something, peering into a display case – and at that moment the ghost jumped out at him and grabbed him by the throat! Raymond gasped and stumbled in the darkness, putting out his hands to stop himself from falling. Gordon, who had been looking in a different direction, turned sharply and reached out to help Raymond, but he also staggered backwards, stumbling and almost falling, crying out and shielding himself from a blow. Both men reeled sideways, reaching out with their hands to try and steady themselves, breathing deeply and staring around them in a panic. They moved as quickly as they could towards the door and I followed, stunned and confused, not knowing what to make of the whole scenario. We escaped from the room and both Raymond and Gordon struggled to stand, gasping heavily; it looked as though they were trying not to cry, and they could not catch their breath to say anything, they just kept pointing back towards where we had come from with a look of fear on their faces.
Eventually they were able to compose themselves and they started to put together what had happened in the exhibition hall. There was an object there, they said, that should not be there, that has a spirit that should not be on public display. Both Raymond and Gordon said that they had been struck by that spirit and that it had made its anger and pain felt by the two of them, it had attacked them so that it would not be ignored any longer. Once they were able to talk calmly again Raymond and Gordon demanded to see the curator of the museum, who was still mingling with the important guests who had come to preview the exhibition. They insisted that they talk to the curator immediately, and to be fair to her she did speak with them straight away. She was genuinely shocked to hear about their experience in the exhibition halls and seemed to be quite disturbed at Raymond and Gordon’s insistence that if the object, a Talking Stick, was left on public display that immeasurable harm would come to the museum and its patrons. They were very clear that the ghost had promised this; it was tired of being quiet and had just been waiting for someone to come along who could hear it and make its wishes known.
True to her word, the curator took the item off display and no further harm came to anyone visiting the museum.
But that is not where I want to leave this story because what I want to explore is the idea that there was an actual ghost in that museum that was lying in wait until someone came along who could understand it, make sense of it, and that when Raymond and Gordon came along it pounced, shaking them up so much that they could not bear to ignore its message. This was no metaphorical ghost, no intellectual or emotional sense of a troubled history or past injustices, this was an entity that had an impact in the physical world. It caused two grown men to stumble, to gasp for breath, it brought tears to their eyes and left a very clear understanding of what they were to do and what the consequences would be if they did not do that. This ghost does not fit easily into our categories of what is real and what is not, it challenges the intellectual safety and certainty of what we believe, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
If as social scientists, we are to understand more fully the worlds of the people we work with and the issues we research then our methods need to acknowledge that there may be more to these worlds than meets the eye. To quote Feyerabend in Against Method:
Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges toward an ideal view; it is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness. Without understanding the reality of ghosts, it would not be possible to truly understand the experience of Raymond and Gordon that evening. To gloss those ghosts as metaphor means to continue to colonise their worlds and their psyches. Social sciences have to learn to work with ghosts and not hide them behind a metaphorical veil. To do so means asking social sciences to move out of its comfort zone and begin to find ways to accommodate ghosts in our research.
Suggested citation: Buckler, Sarah (2025) ‘Finders Keepers? The Ghost in the Museum’, SLSS Research Blog (RGU), 2025/05. Available at: https://rgu-slss.blog/?p=2145
