Jean M. Langford. Consoling Ghosts: Stories of Medicine and Mourning from Southeast Asians in Exile. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, vii+263p.

Abstract

Consoling Ghosts: Stories of Medicine and Mourning from Southeast Asians in Exile Jean M. Langford Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, vii+263p.Consoling Ghosts focuses on how Southeast Asians in the United States-Khmer from Cambodia, and Hmong, Kmhmu, and Lao from Laos; all refugee emigrants from US wars in the region-engage with death, ghosts, spirits, and souls. Jean Langford's study was initiated when the research unit of a hospital in the United States hired her to interview Southeast Asian emigrants about their ideas concerning death. The idea was that each ethnic group had its unique ideas about death, spirits, and such and that the hospital stood to benefit from knowing the key to each culture. The reader does not learn the details of that initial research (location, duration, or results). Instead, the book is a rich exploration that draws on Langford's change in focus. She found no particular value in the quest for ethnically specific cultures, and shifted to her own study of how people manage the ethics of life and death.The Southeast Asian materials come from interviews-aided translators fluent in the four Southeast Asian languages-and the ethnographic literature on the region. These are framed people's engagement with hospital and hospice care, particularly the repeated frustrations gener- ated the expert management of death that precludes Southeast Asian engagements with the dying person, the body, and the soul of the dead. The material is interspersed with western theory (Sigmund Freud on the uncanny, Michel Foucault on biopolitics, Giorgio Agamben on thanatopolitics, and so on) and Jean Langford's own experiences of death and loss. The book's sometimes-heavy academic tone is balanced, between chapters, poetry; Kmhmu ritual chants, more self-conscious Southeast Asian emigre reflections on war and exile, and a western doctor's reflections involving some Southeast Asian patients. By evoking the possibility of haunting, emigrants call spirits as witnesses to violations of the in wartime Asia that resonate with similar violations within U.S. institutions. Rather than read the violations of the as meta- phorical of violence against the living, I understand them as metonymic of a pervasive tendency within thanatopolitical regimes (in which I include war and state terror alongside medicine and mortuary science) to foreclose social interchange between living and dead (p. 4).Chapter 1 brings up the importance of dealing with ghosts of war, through interaction, ritual, and exchange. This is in sharp contrast to the prevailing focus on truth-telling and reconciliation as the adequate closure to wartime. In the stories that Langford heard from Laos and Cambodia there was an excess of suffering and death. No one appears consoled telling the stories. Instead, the suffering that the Southeast Asian wars triggered appears accentuated by the everyday violence of minoritization, poverty, and social fragmentation in the present (p. 47). Chapter 2 introduces ideas of place spirits (neak ta, phi ban) and various creatures on the borders of animal- ity. Such discussions never stray too far into ethnographic detail and instead trigger strings of theoretical associations: were-tigers and water serpents evoke Agamben on bare life, Derrida on stealthy wolves, and Deleuze and Guattari on becoming-animal (pp. 65-70). In one recollec- tion, a log hit a boat carrying people across the Mekong River as they fled Laos at the end of war. The teller of the event was eerily aware of the power of phi-ban place spirits, but for Langford it occasions recall of what Sigmund Freud said of the uncanny and what Dipesh Chakrabarty observed regarding the chance of encountering spirits in modern life (p. 71). But in the context of state violence even spirits suffered; interviewees from both Cambodia and Laos mentioned that the spirits communicated their inability to protect their constituents when Buddhist monks and various spirit mediums were being harassed and persecuted the authorities (p. …