The study of supernatural beliefs has been a major field in anthropology throughout its history. The study of paranormal experiences as such, however, has been largely left for folklorists to handle. This paper is an attempt to study the genesis, structure and interpretative schemes of narratives of paranormal experiences, specifically ghosts and hauntings, so that through the figure of the ghost (our perception of it, the ways in which we interact with it, how we read it and then talk about it) core experiences that turn non-believers into believers and believers into collectivities can become visible. Because experience is, for those who are said to have had paranormal encounters, what turns beliefs (or disbelief) into certainties, I have focused on theories that set experience and individual constructions of reality at the center of the actor-structure relation. My main purpose is to explore people’s narratives of alleged paranormal occurrences as they develop from individual experiences to cultural systems of legitimized meanings, in order to understand the processes that dynamically link micro and macro levels. I contend that a deeper understanding of all elements involved in the production of the personal-collective will further the development of better analytical tools to study the broad spectrum of cultural matter that escapes formal inquiry due to an old-yet-still-predominant divide between the objective and subjective, concrete and abstract, material and immaterial, public and private -dichotomies that lie at the very core of social and cultural theory. Through compelling analyses of ethnographic accounts on ghosts and the haunted I seek to reformulate the premises on which we understand this dilemma.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-175548 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Caballero, Adelaida |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Kulturantropologiska avdelningen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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