According to Palmié and Stewart, most social scientists begin with an ontologically real understanding of history, seen as “#nished.” So much so that historical reenactments, historical monographs, video games, and other performative and sensory modes of engaging with the past, such as ghost tours, have rarely been accorded the status of “history” (2019: 3). History is enshrined as an “activity focused on the methodological critique of evidence from the past, the collation of the data thus derived, and the assembling of this data into the most plausible narrative of the past” (ibid.). What if we set aside, they say, this “view from nowhere,” and instead focus on local epistemologies of history (see also Hartog 2003; Kwon 2008; Ross 2019; Stewart 2016)? Following Derrida’s “hauntology,” thought of as a return of the irrepressible past of postwar Europe (1994), which in e ect set in motion the pervasive social analysis of irrepresentable experiences, Avery Gordon (1997) has argued that “ghostly matters” are essentially about uncanny social memory and experience at the limits of the visible. Ghosts, or present absences, pull us into structures of feeling, which we experience a ectively, situationally. In this essay, we pull together two different types of irrepresentable traumas, namely, related to Chile and Angola, respectively. We argue that the trope of the “performance of trauma” (Taylor 2003, 2009), where temporal dimensions are kept in loops of e ffect for an audience and a particular form of temporality is spun, is apt for both ethnographies. Some of the themes we will therefore operate are those of performance, trauma, repetition, theatrics, and play.

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• Anthropology - Social Sciences