In terms of characterizing ethnographic places, and really space/place more generally, Gordon’s conceptualization of haunting actually shifts the way we think about temporality in a given space. Haunting, for Gordon, is simultaneously in the past, present, and future.. And isn’t linear, but is really repetitive. Gordon’s work thinks about repetitions and she talks about how ghosts tend to return to familiar places. I think shifting the way we think about time in relation to space could really open up possibilities for us to think about ethnographic sites. Thinking in relation with McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds, I also think this shift in temporality allows us to operate at various scales simultaneously.
“To write a history of the present requires stretching toward the horizon of what cannot be seen with ordinary clarity yet.. To imagine beyond the limits of what's already understandable is our best hope for retaining what ideology critique traditionally offers while transforming its limitations into what was called utopian possibility” (195)
Above is one of my favorite quotes from Gordon and I think this notion of stretching beyond the horizon to really theorize a present is a great way to think about our ethnographic sites. How do we think toward the future? How do we think beyond a give space and even time? How does haunting disrupt knowledge production generally and what does that disruption do for our thinking of place/space?
The text calls on us to reconize the "ghosts" that characteristically attach themselves to the ethnographic places that produced them in the first place as "haunting reminders of lingering trouble" (xix). According to Gordon, there are "place[s] where things stand gaping" within ethnographic fieldsites, and these might bring us to question the limits of representation and how we present the world. While the ghost represents loss and paths not taken, they also speak to the future possibility and hope of a place. Gordon asserts that social scientists are responsible for considering how we grapple with the history of places when dealing with the present circumstances, asking questions such as the following: How are certain aspects of a place (such as social memory) silenced and absented? How do we capture the fundamental sociality of haunting in a particular place and time?