Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia

Recent writing in anthropology, particularly of Southeast Asia, suggests a “spectral” turn within ethnographic theorizing, influenced by Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx and wide‐ranging writing on ghosts, haunting, and spectrality within cultural studies. This article argues that “haunting” and “hauntology” have a critical place within psychological anthropology and theories of subjectivity. The article provides a personal genealogy of how the author has come to use this concept for reflections on over 20 years of work in Indonesia. And it makes four suggestions for theorizing hauntology in psychological anthropology. It suggests first, that hauntology requires that we address the complex processes through which traumatic dimensions of contested historical experience are simultaneously kept hidden and made visible, and second that such accounts must address the complex relations between individual psychological experience and the political, which in turn requires a conception of the barred self and its haunting. Third, it suggests that we address questions of why outbreaks of ghosts appear when they do and what kinds of social and psychological responses they provoke. The article concludes with a brief exploration of the possibilities of a “hauntological ethics.”

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Memori melompat (‘jumping memory’): The mnemonic motion of Indonesian popular culture and the need for a local reframing

Arps

2023

Memory Studies

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The third phase of memory studies is considered to have taken memory into ‘the global age’, yet this article illustrates that in many ways, the nation has since been reinstated within a global context. This article critically scrutinises the idea that memory travels freely and shows that a straightforward mobility of cultural memory does not apply to every local context. In Indonesia, memory travels temporarily, briefly and not far. It therefore suggests more of a jump rather than a journey. As a demonstrative semantic device, the Indonesian term memori melompat (jumping memory) signifies cultural memory formation beyond the West. Nevertheless, the choice of an Indonesian term does not denote a uniqueness to Indonesia, but emphasises instead that Indonesian popular culture about the Indonesian War of Independence is indicative of the need for a local reframing of existing memory concepts to better understand contemporary engagements with the (colonial) past.

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Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia

Cited by 3 publications

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Hauntology: Theorizing the Spectral in Psychological Anthropology

Memori melompat (‘jumping memory’): The mnemonic motion of Indonesian popular culture and the need for a local reframing

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