Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

this book arrived in great shape, like new, and very quickly! would purchase from this seller again.

Quibble (as many well) with the specifics of particular examples, or the choice of them, Gordon's crucial conceptual leap is to explain the supernatural in terms of the psychology of anxiety, hallucination, and ultimately, religion and myth. Her work adds a critical, and unifying, piece to the work of Joseph Campbell, Sigmund Freud and others which ultimately go to the underlying workings of the human mind and the bases of consciousness.

I find Ghostly Matters a brilliant, useful, and (hauntingly) beautiful book. I especially appreciate the way Gordon brings together ostensibly disparate approaches and subjects (sociology and literary studies, the material and the spiritual, Argentina's "disappeared" and slavery in the U.S., and different kinds of writing in her own text) to call into question our conventional ways of seeing, to bring back those whom History and "just the Facts, ma'am" have tried to bury or relegate to permanent shadow. I'm going to give this book as a holiday present to everyone I love who hasn't read it already.