ghost thesis excerpt

There are rules in telling ghost stories and both storytellers and audience recognize these rules, which are continuously used and hence, reified, with every ghost story told. Furthermore, one’s experience of a ghost story, be it sacred or secular, is mediated concurrently by a set of instruments triggered by the bodily sentient, when faced with variables that are socially shared within a community of people. The latter acts as a far more interesting ethnographic study as it enables us insight into the dimensions beyond that of macro structures (like religion and Science), allowing instead for an introspective look into a more micro discourse of how we as humans negotiate our boundaries between the self and ghostly other. Additionally, the processes of crafting ghost stories and the telling and re-telling of them, mimics the form of water in a reservoir- collected and stored for use. What are we then collecting from our reservoir of ghost stories? And what is retrieved from it?