Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory

This groundbreaking book rethinks landscapes of the social world and historical practice by theorizing ‘social haunting’: the ways in which social forms, figures, phantasms and ghosts of the past become present to us time and time again.

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This book is a groundbreaking attempt to rethink the landscapes of the social world and historical practice by theorising ‘social haunting’: the ways in which the social forms, figures, phantasms and ghosts of the past become present to us time and time again.

Examining the relationship between historical practices such as archaeology and archival work in order to think about how the social landscape is reinvented with reference to the ghosts of the past, the author explores the literary and historical status and accounts of the ghost, not for what they might tell us about these figures, but for their significance for our, constantly re-invented, re-vivified, re-ghosted social world. With chapters on haunted houses and castles, slave ghosts, the haunting airs of music, the prehistoric origin of spirits, Marxist spectres, Freudian revenants, and the ghosts in the machine, Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory adopts multi-disciplinary methods for understanding the past, the dead and social ghosts and the landscapes they appear in.

A sociology of haunting that illustrates how social landscapes have their genesis and perpetuation in haunting and the past, this volume will appeal to sociologists and social theorists with interests in memory, haunting and culture.