ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that hauntings (Derrida, 1994; Gordon, 2008) offer a useful conceptual way of capturing the presence of affect, which is often felt and lived as suffering. Our exploration of suffering as an affective assemblage of human bodies, matter and things, discourses, practices and performances is focused on the analysis of intergenerational suffering caused by historical violence, and of family secrecy about the biological relatedness of children fathered by enemy soldiers. The chapter offers a detailed ethnographic account of the intergenerational practice of secrecy as an affective moral economy of caring wherein 'emotions do things', which is reinforced by heteronormativity and the effects of structural racism that reverberate across generations. It forms part of a larger, ongoing anthropological research project on Indisch memory and genealogy work that Dragojlovic began in 2009. The formation of Indisch cultures began in the colonial Dutch East Indies, which is the present day Indonesia.
