Part 1

• Ghostly folklore: Global media circulation and haunted sites in Indonesia Alicia Izharuddin National University of Singapore

  My paper argues that “folk culture” and sites of transnational hauntings are shaped by the various modes of media reception in different international and local socioeconomic contexts and their distributive flows. Crucial to practices of reception is the graduated webs of distribution that control the global flows of cinema. Of particular interest to this paper are mediated folk culture made at the lower economic end of film production, distribution, and media technology, a site of democratically shifting meanings and tastes that can catapult “exotic” and “trashy” culture into rarefied curated spaces. It compares and contrasts the reception of two films about ‘haunted places’ in Indonesia that fall within these aesthetic parameters, Mystics in Bali (1981) and Misteri Bondowoso (2005) to demonstrate the ways in which “folk culture” can be reconstructed across the flows of global media circulation and distributive formations and coalesce into what I call the ‘transnational weird’.

• Hantulogi and Hauntology Tito Ambyo RMIT University
• Disaster zone: Accidents and ‘haunted infrastructure’ in Indonesia Kari Telle Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI), Norway

  Scholarship on Southeast Asia has long addressed the role of ghosts and spirits in both facilitating and disrupting construction projects and urban infrastructural development. Drawing on Schwenkel’s (2017) notion of ‘haunted infrastructure’, this paper will consider why the Mandalika Street Circuit in Lombok, an icon of national pride, has also become a site of ghostly encounters. While Mandalika is promoted as ‘the world’s most beautiful’ racetrack, nearby residents are more ambivalent, and point to accidents as evidence that the circuit is traversed by machines, humans and avenging spirits. Drawing on media sources and conversations with people living near the track, this paper will suggest that the circuit is perceived as an immanent disaster zone. As the landscape has been radically altered, ghosts and place-spirits have not only assumed new and unrecognisable forms, but become more prone to lash out against seemingly innocent victims. In important respects, their transformation mirrors the sense of dislocation expressed by those who have endured the demolition of two-sub-villages and the removal of graves. Local residents suggested that their accumulated sentiments of hurt and anger have coalesced around the circuit, turning it into a dangerous place. Unlike other situations where violent dislocations have galvanised new ritual and religious practices, this case provides less closure and suggests that more accidents are in the making.

• Fighting Ghosts with Duck Tape. Parenting, Fieldwork, and the (Im-)Permeability of Ontology Verena Meyer Leiden University

Part 2

• On the Spatiality of Hauntings: Ghosts in Urban Southeast Asia Martin Slama Austrian Academy of Sciences

  The paper starts from the observation that ghosts in Southeast Asia do not only appear in forests, temples and all kinds of old houses and historic sites, but also – and to no lesser extent, it seems – at the heart of capitalist real-estate development, i.e. in the skyscrapers of apartment towers, office buildings and hotels as well as shopping malls, upscale gated communities and airports. Such spectral phenomena have been described and variously interpreted by scholars of contemporary Southeast Asia. One aim of the paper is to review these approaches with a special focus on how the spatiality that is created through the construction of these buildings is taken into account and utilized for the analysis of spirits that can be understood as space-occupying more-than-human entities. On this basis, an ethnographic example from urban Indonesia is introduced, a large apartment complex in Jakarta that, according to some of its (former) residents, is severely haunted. Following the paper’s focus on spatiality, it investigates the place where the apartment towers have been erected, including their immediate surroundings, as well as the spatial organization of the complex. It develops an argument about how these hauntings can be understood by considering both, the modern spatial arrangements that provide new housing for ghosts and (not necessarily successful) ways to deal with them that correspond with religious and cosmological traditions displaying historical depth and potentially gaining renewed relevance in contemporary urban settings.

• Colonial Ghosts in Urban Hanoi Gertrud Huwelmeier Humboldt University Berlin

  After the end of the colonial regime in Vietnam, the French Cemetery in Hanoi was levelled to make way for newly planned collective apartment blocks. Due to rural migration to the city and the subsequent housing shortage in the 1960s, people settled there, some occupying the lower rooms of the mortuary as accommodation. Humans were not the only residents; they cohabited with wandering ghosts of tirailleurs Sénégalais, French colonial soldiers from Africa. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, my paper traces the building of socialism after the First Indochina War by investigating the implications of urban planning and construction work on the territory of the former French graveyard. As this urban area is conceived of as being animated by spirits, I argue that it emerges as a potent site where colonial ghosts appear protesting against their displacement. Over the last ten years, however, human residents from this neighborhood are also threatened by eviction due to urban redevelopment.

• Non-human agency and the limits of possibility: what do generative AI and spirits possessing Javanese dancers have in common Eva Rapoport University of Antwerp

  As the land and cityscapes of Southeast Asia are being haunted by ghosts, spirits, and deities of various origins, the World Wide Web during the past two years began being haunted by either disturbingly surreal or way too real images created by the generative AI (like Midjourney, DALL-E, and others). ?an we see these AIs as another case of non-human agency and does it have anything in common with how traditional spirits and ghosts help to shape social realities and creative endeavors? This presentation attempts to build a reflection upon the newest technological trends on the extensive studies of Javanese spirit beliefs and spirit possession practices. What parallels can be drawn between Javanese spirit possession (and also European spiritism) and the use of generative AI technologies in terms of how these phenomena affect the boundaries of what is real, what is possible and what is permissible? The fact that until nowadays the process of creation within traditional Javanese crafts and performing arts often implies collaboration with the inhabitants of the unseen world can offer some solid grounds for this seemingly quirky comparison.

• Setan, hantu dan jelek: Encountering the supernatural in Australia’s Indian Ocean territories. Melathi Saldin Deakin University

  Fieldwork can oftentimes create unexpected challenges. This paper discusses one such challenge – an encounter with the supernatural in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an Australian Indian Ocean Territory. Constituting a group of 27 atolls, with only two inhabited (Home Island and West Island), the islands were the private fiefdom of the Clunies-Ross family, descendants of a Scottish merchant, John Clunies-Ross who sailed there in 1825. The islands became the base for their thriving copra (coconut meat) plantation and was driven by “Malay” indentured labourers from the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya. The family ruled the islands for 150 years from their stately manor – Oceania House – located on Home Island. A 1984 referendum, however, saw a majority of the Cocos Malays vote for integration with Australia, ending the Clunies-Ross reign. An emerging tourist destination, the islands are also a strategic base for Australia’s military operations in the Indian Ocean.
  The paper discusses a particular supernatural event experienced by the lead author at this colonial manor (now a Commonwealth-listed heritage place and tourist accommodation) during a recent fieldwork expedition. This experience is firstly used as a lens by which we examine the notion of the supernatural in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands (i.e., Cocos Malay beliefs about Oceania House or Ruma Besar/Big House and its place in the island’s ‘cosmology’) in the context of such beliefs in the broader Malay World. Secondly, using reflexive research practices, it explores what such experiences can tell us about the dynamics of power, politics and culture in a rapidly changing corner of the world.

Abstract