The Language of Ghosts in Postwar Vietnam

Abstract: Trauma and PTSD pervade American daily discourses and recent American political history. The Vietnam War – and the regular return of foreign wars in 20 th century American history and into the new millennium – provide one main point of emergence for current psychiatric, biomedical, and psychoanalytic models of wounded psyches. A large archive of theoretical and empirical studies has shown that these terms lack conceptual clarity and remain deeply contested. Yet, as I discuss here, if one listens ethnographically to experiences of war and state violence among southern Vietnamese other narratives emerge. There are no discourses of "trauma" in daily life in Vietnam, since psychic shock is not conceptualized in these terms. Instead, flexible cultural models of bad death, errant souls, and complex spirit worlds provide frames for elaboration. Through detailed ethnographic narratives in Saigon (now renamed Ho Chi Minh City), and reflections on my graduate school training and experiences at Cornell, I examine notions of haunting and ghostly apparitions, as the main local frameworks for interpreting and making sense of these violent pasts and their ongoing aftermath today. Academic life at Cornell in the late 1990s and 2000s, and contemporary academic research, provide key examples of the ongoing afterlife of these harsh conflicts, with problematic repercussions on the emerging study of postwar Vietnam.