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"Spiritual healing and spiritualism Vietnam."
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War and Shadows
Vietnamese culture and religious traditions place the utmost
importance on dying well: in old age, body unblemished, with
surviving children, and properly buried and mourned. More than five
million people were killed in the Vietnam War, many of them young,
many of them dying far from home. Another 300,000 are still
missing. Having died badly, they are thought to have become angry
ghosts, doomed to spend eternity in a kind of spirit hell. Decades
after the war ended, many survivors believe that the spirits of
those dead and missing have returned to haunt their loved ones. In
War and Shadows , the anthropologist Mai Lan Gustafsson
tells the story of the anger of these spirits and the torments of
their kin.
Gustafsson's rich ethnographic research allows her to bring
readers into the world of spirit possession, focusing on the source
of the pain, the physical and mental anguish the spirits bring, and
various attempts to ameliorate their anger through ritual offerings
and the intervention of mediums. Through a series of personal life
histories, she chronicles the variety of ailments brought about by
the spirits' wrath, from headaches and aching limbs (often the same
limb lost by a loved one in battle) to self-mutilation. In
Gustafsson's view, the Communist suppression of spirit-based
religion after the fall of Saigon has intensified anxieties about
the well-being of the spirit world. While shrines and mourning are
still allowed, spirit mediums were outlawed and driven underground,
along with many of the other practices that might have provided
some comfort. Despite these restrictions, she finds, victims of
these hauntings do as much as possible to try to lay their ghosts
to rest.
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