What types of beings and what types of interlocutors are the deceased invited to become by those who survive them? This is one of the questions that anthropologist Grégory Delaplace explores in his latest book, The Voice of the Ghosts. When the dead overflow (Threshold, 2024). This director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris provides an ethnography of funeral rites and the different ways in which the dead manifest themselves to the living. Because, regularly, the former rebel and return to persecute the latter, as demonstrated by this ambitious anthropology of the invisible worlds.
We have the idea that, in our modern Western societies, the belief in ghosts would be evacuated and belong to other cultures. What is it really?
As in many societies, few people will openly say that they believe in ghosts. On the other hand, everyone knows stories that destabilize them to a greater or lesser extent. The fact that we do not decide about the presence of the dead and how they manifest themselves is no exception in France.
But do we believe in the existence of ghosts? It depends on what we understand by “ghost”, but also by “existing”. Most people deny the existence of ghosts as floating beings in the environment, but have a hard time ruling out the possibility that the dead are still present in some way.
Are ghosts a common object of anthropology?
No. Anthropologists have tended to view ghosts as epiphenomena, saying little about the structures of social life and the cosmology of a people. Rather, it is the ancestors that have interested anthropology, such as those who preside over social reproduction and the administration of relationships with the natural environment, such as the rivers that must be calmed or the forests with which one must negotiate to obtain hunt.
But ghosts have also been forgotten because they are difficult to capture: they are beings that appear unexpectedly, without always having been summoned, to certain people and not to others. They are rarely emblematic of a cosmology in general, but rather of a particular experience.
You talk about “ancestors,” who play a role in social reproduction, whom you differentiate from ghosts, who manifest themselves outside the frameworks provided by society. So what exactly is a ghost?
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