Speaking with revenants: Haunting and the ethnographic enterprise

This article considers two revenants – a man and a ghost – who haunt the Fann Psychiatric Clinic in Dakar, Senegal. Following Derrida’s assertion that haunting is historical, I take seriously the concept of haunting and insist upon its relevance to anthropological inquiry. As a mode of storytelling that comes from a particular way of apprehending the world, I argue that anthropology might give credence to specters as social figures and assign ethnography the task of chasing after ghosts, not simply for the poetic spaces they may open up but out of a concern for justice and responsibility in the past, present, and future. My own ethnographic encounter with the two revenants described here has generated questions about the often taken-for-granted equivalence of the real and the true. Likewise, it has encouraged me to interrogate the unpredictable (and oftentimes uneasy) cohabitation of memory and history, both within the Fann Clinic and beyond.