Haunted Infrastructure: Religious Ruins and Urban Obstruction in Vietnam

Abstract

AbstractThis 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 Diệc Pagoda—co‐constituted by spirits, legends, and practitioners—as it abetted and disrupted colonial, socialist, and market‐oriented urban development. Drawing on Edensor's () 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 Diệc 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. [Ruins; Urbanization; Infrastructure; Socialism; Urban Heritage; Religiosity; Ghosts]