The Imagination of Disbelief

I have continued reading Heonik Kwon’s Ghosts of War in Vietnam (a book I mentioned in my previous post). What struck me about Kwon’s work was how completely and carefully it establishes the material significance of ghosts without asking the reader to “believe” in them. He brings in major theories, scholars, histories, ethnographic observations, and the concrete consequences of people’s relationships with the dead, until there is very little room left to dismiss ghosts as irrelevant to serious knowledge.

More importantly, the point is never believe in ghosts. The point is what becomes visible when one takes their presence seriously: particular histories of violence, alternative kinships, relations between the living and the dead, postwar communities, obligations, memories, and forms of social repair that are very real and badly need to be understood.

Which is why I was genuinely shocked when I happened to look at the promotional description on the back of the book.

“Popular imaginings.”

“These ghosts of war play an important part in postwar Vietnamese historical narrative and imagination.”

“Although these actions are fantastical…”

These were not casual remarks from someone discussing the book over dinner. This was how Cambridge University Press, the institution that edited, published, and promoted the book, chose to represent it.

I could hardly believe it.

The book had just spent hundreds of pages establishing precisely why imagination and fantastical are insufficient categories for what is happening. And then, in the very language meant to represent the book to its readers, that accomplishment was quietly cancelled. The ghosts were placed safely back inside “imagination.”

Perhaps this language was meant to reassure readers who had not yet entered the world of the book. But that possibility troubles me just as much. Why would ghosts have to be returned to the safer language of “imagination” and the “fantastical” in order for the book to become legible—or marketable—to its anticipated reader?

And it brought back a memory from my PhD.

At the time, I could not understand why conversations with my advisers went wrong so persistently, or why my research seemed so difficult to communicate. Now I sometimes wonder how I managed to finish the degree at all.

My first chapter was already about Korean shamanic ritual. Again, it was not a chapter that asked anyone to believe in shamanism. If anything, the argument deliberately did not require shared belief: I was interested in what ritual materially, politically, and relationally did regardless of whether every participant understood its cosmology in the same way.

Yet throughout that chapter, one adviser repeatedly left versions of the same comment: “I don’t share this religion, so I can’t follow.”

This was not a request for more background information. It was not, “I don’t know enough about this practice; can you explain it more?” I knew this person’s political commitments were strongly materialist. The objection was to the content itself.

I think encounters like this explain a great deal about why I have repeatedly struggled in Western academia. Of course we cannot inhabit one another’s worlds when the cultural assumptions beneath those worlds are already different. But I want to explore what becomes particularly visible from within mine: the philosophy carried through a ritual, for example, or the very concrete political work that a spiritual practice can perform.

And yet the conversation keeps refusing to move beyond questions such as: But is shamanism real? Do you actually think ghosts exist?

If that is where the conversation continually returns, then it is not an environment in which my research can grow far. I want to ask what becomes thinkable once these worlds are taken seriously -- I do not want to spend my intellectual life repeatedly bringing the same reader to the threshold.

Korean shamanism is often described as a religion, but it is both religious and not quite a religion. It has no written scripture, no single doctrinal authority, no exclusive god, and no centralized institution that determines correct belief. It works more as a medicinal and practical system attentive to the order of the land: a way of listening to relationships among bodies, places, ancestors, spirits, illnesses, histories, and circumstances, and of attempting to restore some balance when those relationships become blocked.

It can, of course, become formalized and hardened into something more recognizably religious, and that institutionalization can also be abused. But that process is distinguishable from its more fundamental identity, particularly if “religion” is understood as a bounded system organized around fixed doctrine, scripture, and centralized authority.

Today, shamanic knowledge continues to operate within the cultural unconscious of Korea, continuously reconnecting everyday life to the particular order of the land.

Shamanism has no inherent monotheistic exclusivity, and its logic is plural: there may not be one correct answer or one correct method for everyone. The work is to remain attentive enough to circumstances to find what might work for this person, this household, this illness, this place, at this particular time.

In that sense, it is possible that people living on Korean land may practice Christianity, Buddhism, or any number of other religions while a broadly shamanic grammar continues to operate at a larger cultural level. Perhaps because this understanding is so commonplace, it has never required pronounced theorization by any particular person; few Koreans, however, would find the proposition unintelligible.

The move to immediately classify shamanic knowledge as religious and therefore provincial, superstitious, or biased thus looks to me like a much more religious intervention than anything I am proposing.

One thing I learned slowly but gradually after moving to the United States was how deeply Christianity functions as an unmarked background worldview, almost a kind of civic religion. Most of the time it is difficult to see because so much of the surrounding culture already shares its assumptions. But when certain lines of thought are followed far enough, Christian structures are found waiting underneath them as the organizing ontology. Its monotheistic structure has historically insisted not simply on one God but on one ultimate order of reality, leaving other ontologies to appear as error, superstition, or imagination rather than worlds capable of coexisting with its own.

Such an order helps explain how people can enter a culture they have barely inhabited and dismiss intimate accounts of ghosts as “imagination.” What still astonishes me is the ease of that dismissal: even when something contradicts one’s own belief, why is it so difficult to step back before a world one does not know, show some respect, and acknowledge that the world may be larger than one’s own experience of it?

When receiving uninformed questions about shamanism, I find myself at a loss because the question already arrives with an ontology built into it. If ghosts must not be real because they cannot currently be demonstrated through a particular materialist standard of proof, then scientism—the insistence that only what can be verified through that standard deserves ontological legitimacy—begins to assume a religious structure as the organizing system.

Why is shamanism the only structure in this encounter that must first be identified as “religious,” and therefore treated as something requiring skepticism before discussion can even begin?

Christianity, science, philosophy, and shamanic practice have all developed, in their own ways, methods for approaching realities that exceed immediate perception and easy measurement. At the root of serious knowledge is shared recognition that the world exceeds what a human being can presently measure, and that multiple interpretations therefore exist.

If so, what kind of intellectual position is it to insist that one religion’s unseen world may remain respectable, another must be dismissed, and one’s own underlying metaphysics need not even be named?

There is an old saying in Korea that when family and friends gather, they should avoid talking about religion and politics. It is because they sit too close to the foundations of how people understand the world. Push hard enough, and one may simply discover how fundamentally different those worlds are without producing any agreement.

Which makes me wonder about the confidence of mainstream academia when it speaks from its own religious and political assumptions as though they were not assumptions at all.

Quantum mechanics has been with us for more than a century, unsettling ordinary assumptions about matter, observation, and reality. And, as Kwon himself demonstrates, major theoretical traditions have long found sophisticated ways to think about ghosts, hauntings, and nonmaterial presences. If those arguments have already been made over and over and still have to be taught again from the beginning every time, what kind of intellectual environment is this?

Is it an environment organized toward learning, or toward reproducing itself?

If religion and politics mark the deepest divisions in worldview, then I have little desire to spend my life arguing over them. So I usually stop talking.

But I continue to wonder: with what confidence do people who did not grow up with ghosts so easily evaluate the knowledge of people who did? What gives them such certainty that they already know what ghosts are? I wonder whether fear is part of it—whether the insistence on pushing them away becomes stronger because the possibility that they might be real is too scary.

Once, at a gathering, I met someone who had never encountered Korean shamanism before. When I told them about my research, they asked, “Ah, so you mean you’re into ghosts and supernatural things?” I answered, “It’s not really relevant whether I’m into them or not. They already exist on their own—mediums, ghosts, shamanic practices. I’m looking at how they already work among themselves.”

The person replied, “I don’t believe in that. But you know what? I’ve had some weird experiences.” They then proceeded to tell me several stories about strange—spiritual—experiences they had had.

And I said, “Exactly -- it doesn’t matter whether you believe in them or not. The fact is that things like this continue to happen to you. Shamanism is one of the major languages through which that world is understood.”

I have heard variations of this sentence many times:

“I don’t believe in it, but hear me out—I had this really weird experience.”

These stories demonstrate how people experience things they did not expect to experience, including those who believe such things should not happen to them. A close friend of mine who does not 'believe' in ghosts, for instance, once turned into an alley and saw, with extraordinary clarity, two figures dressed in white mourning clothes whom he immediately understood as ghosts.

I grew up in an environment surrounded by strong singi, what might loosely be called shamanic or mediumistic sensitivity. It was normal. We all knew certain principles about how ghosts behaved. None of it were particularly dramatic. These were things that occasionally happened as part of ordinary reality, far less spectacular than the exaggerated supernatural world made sensational in media. As I grew older, I learned that this experience was not shared by everyone.

When someone encounters the supernatural primarily through media, constructs an idea of what a spiritual world must look like, and then dismisses the accounts of people who actually live in contact with such worlds as “imagination,” whose imagination is doing the work? And whose reality is being erased?

For most of my life, the small incidents of singi in my world seemed far too minor and ordinary to document. Because they were so common, they hardly seemed worth recording.

I have now begun wondering whether I should collect them. The small things my relatives and friends have seen, heard, sensed, dreamed, or known. The experiences no one thought important enough to write down because they were simply part of life. Perhaps if I put my own name behind them, and the names of my relatives, some part of their reality might travel a little farther.