Place ghosts and gypsies
Jeremy Harte seems to contradict himself in his article on gypsy ghosts [ FT407:32-39]. “There is no phenomenon to explain”, he says, “because place ghosts are a convention of settled culture. Gorjers (settled peoples) see them because they expect to see them. Gypsies don’t expect, and don’t see.” This is after he lists numerous examples, in fact a whole strand of gypsy ghost lore, where ghosts of particular places are identified by non-gypsies as people well known to have died in the locality.
Gypsies experience place ghosts. The fact that different cultures report ghosts in different ways does not invalidate the
phenomena. Because different cultures have different views of gender, or crime, or sexuality does not mean those phenomena are not real. While standing between cultures gives us perspective, it does not make our views objective, or allow us access to some sort of chilly otherworldly certainty. Anthropology is an artefact of our particular culture, and conclusions reached by it are still the conclusions of our culture, not “the truth”. Mr Harte concludes with the idea that place ghosts, an artefact of our culture, are not real, because gypsies don’t see them (even though he has already told us they do), but following the fashion of current popular anthropology, does not infer that gypsy mullos (ghosts or revenants) are not real because we settlers don’t see them. In an earlier age, when anthropology’s job was to justify our culture rather than vilify it, he might have made the latter assertion rather than the former. Neither trend is evidence of ‘Truth’, just of fashion.
Dean Teasdale
Gateshead, Tyne & Wear
Jeremy Harte responds:
A place ghost, to me, is a sequence of past events that replays at the same location automatically, like a scene in a film. Ghosts of this sort are culture-bound: some communities see them and others, like Gypsies, don’t. Nevertheless, they are real, i.e. factual, because they happen regardless of the individual that sees them; but they aren’t real, i.e. objective, because objective things are the same everywhere, and don’t change their form to fit in with different societies. I don’t think that ghosts are something natural that have been interpreted differently by different cultures, in the way that a rainbow is always a rainbow, whether we’ve been trained to see it as three colours or seven. I think they’re more like stories or songs, which have common features throughout the world but can be quite different from one culture to another. Except that stories are thought up by human minds, whereas ghosts are independent of them. If we knew how that could happen, we wouldn’t spend so much time fretting over whether what happened was real or not.