Ghosts. Apparitions. Spirits. Specters.
St. Louis Cathedral and Jackson Square Fog in the French quarter.
For the 2025 meeting of the American Anthropological Association, we take inspiration from the popular reputation of New Orleans as “the most haunted city in America” to examine the ways that the past haunts the present, and that the immaterial becomes tangible to inflect the everyday. Glimpses of ghosts abound in the city, far beyond the tours that seek to commercialize them. Water lines from past floods reflect topographies of racial segregation. A trace of a spray-painted “X,” the marker of a first responder’s search during disaster, is now preserved as a token of authenticity on a short-term rental. “Ghost bikes” index places where cyclists are killed in traffic accidents, and impromptu memorials, with candles, flowers, and photographs, spring up to mark those killed in intentional acts of violence. Hauntings are inscribed all through the landscape of southeastern Louisiana, where petrochemical plants occupy the footprints of former plantations, legacies of extractive destruction literally built over the burial places of the enslaved and of Indigenous peoples.
We welcome our colleagues to embrace the creative potential of the ghostly and the spectral. Our ghosts take many forms. They appear in social theory, useful metaphors for the mysterious power of commodities, or for the occult economies that lurk in the shadows of daily life. They can be found in the impacts of conquest and exploitation, reminders of the never-completed tasks of decolonizing, whether it be of lands or epistemologies. They manifest in the flood of images through which warfare and genocide are mediated, masks of all-too-real suffering. They resonate in the sense of the uncanny that permeates the quotidian: the unsettling look of an AI-generated photo, realistic but somehow distorted, or the resurgence of long-discredited conspiracies that fuel political extremism.
On the other hand, ghosts communicate; they may provide inspiration, cautionary tales, insights, and guidance, giving new forms to hopes and dreams. They can remind us of things that have been forgotten and of those who have come before. They generate insights into a world and into cultures that, even in a state of constant transformation, can’t quite escape their pasts. The discipline of anthropology has a long history of engagement with the realm of spirits, encountered through informants and through the interlocutor of the ethnographer. And, after all, the anthropologists of the past are some of our own ghosts, manifesting themselves at times inconveniently, with all of their imperfections, when we intone their names or cite their intellectual pedigrees.
For us, the theme of ghosts also opens up dialogues about the role of the anthropologist as a public intellectual in times of crisis. It is certainly a moment for such conversations in Louisiana, where these meetings are taking place. Here, recent shifts in the political landscape threaten to further erode the rights of women, of immigrants, and of the LGBTQ+ community; to weaken workers’ power and deregulate industry; and to destroy educational freedoms. We challenge conference attendees to engage with local communities, organizations, and activists, both in and out of the conference, to see how they are confronting these threats. Ghosts may allow us to articulate our fears, but they also allow us to defy them.
