Haunted Infrastructure: Religious Ruins and Urban Obstruction in Vietnam

Abstract

This essay examines encounters between urban infrastructure and the spirit world, or what I am calling "haunted infrastructure." It does so through the case study of an historic pagoda in Vinh City, Vietnam, that was destroyed by US aerial bombing in 1968, leaving only the charred front gate standing. As one of the last visible ruins of war that mark a history of imperial violence to the landscape, the pagoda's remains have been designated a site worthy of remembrance and preservation as architectural heritage. For urban residents, this symbolic space of urban destruction-and subsequent myth-making-has remained one of the most affect-laden places in the city and the center of renewed religious practices through the spontaneous reconstruction of the pagoda and its altars. In the essay, I trace the dynamic social life of Diê : c Pagodaco-constituted by spirits, legends, and practitioners-as it abetted and disrupted colonial, socialist, and market-oriented urban development. Drawing on Edensor's (2005) notion of the productive capacity of the ruin to contest state power, I argue that religious ruins, as animated materiality that channel collective energies, have emerged as powerful sites to protest the encroachment of socialist development in and through the ghosts that inhabit them. While contemporary practices at Diê : c Pagoda speak to religious diversification across urban Vietnam, they do so through obstructing, rather than enabling state projects of modernization. Haunted infrastructures and their attenuating myths thus reveal deep-seated ambivalences about the postcolonial state and the specter of foreignness in the city.

Shouting absences: Disentangling the ghosts of Ukraine in occupied Crimea

“…Petra's lived experiences offer an important starting point for a sociolinguistic inquiry of ghosts and haunting that is further developed below. By focusing on social phenomena that betray what is 'missing'-'appear to be invisible or [lie] in the shadows' (Gordon 2008:15)-this article adds to the semiotic landscapes scholarship of uneasy places that have endured denial, trauma, dispossession, and colonial ruination by drawing insights from the research on vibrant matters, material debris, and the afterlives of destruction (Schwenkel 2017;Pardue 2018;Gordillo 2021;Judin 2021;Stoler 2021). This study insists that destroyed and annihilated landscapes are not dead matter, but rather lively and charged with affect.…”

Spectral kinship

“…Lincoln and Lincoln 2015). Sometimes these are literal ghosts (ma) that haunt and disturb people (Gustafsson 2009;Kwon 2012;Schwenkel 2017); sometimes they are metaphoric gestures hinting at troublesome and conflict-ridden pasts (Leshkowich 2008); sometimes they are images besetting people's minds, refusing to go away no matter how hard the sufferer tries to erase them (Gammeltoft 2014a(Gammeltoft , 2014b. This sensitivity to aspects of life that exceed the immediately present may be particularly acute in Vietnam as a consequence of the country's history of war and massive human losses, but research conducted in other societies indicates that spectral aspects of human coexistence are not unique to Vietnam (for an overview, see Lincoln and Lincoln 2015).…”

Cultural evolution in Vietnam’s early 20th century: a Bayesian networks analysis of Hanoi Franco-Chinese house designs

“…The strong signal of Buddhism on the house façade in the 20th century is also an interesting finding given that Buddhist pagodas and Buddhist office buildings in North Vietnam were either destroyed or confiscated during the 1950s and 1960s, known as the "cultural revolution" (Werner, 2015) and also after the victory of the war in April 1975 (Buswell, 2003, p. 170;Schwenkel, 2017;Tran, 2013). The result hints at a quiet, subtle undercurrent of cultural evolution, of Buddhist influence always lurking in the Vietnamese culture even when it was not officially allowed or publicly declared.…”