ABSTRACT
Avery Gordon's Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination is about haunting, a paradigmatic way in which life is complicated than those of us who study it have usually granted. Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither premodern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. The nation, which was the dream and the reality of the nineteenth century, seems to have reached both its peak and its limit with the 1929 crash and the National Socialist apocalypse. The search for economic homogeneity has given way to interdependence when it has not yielded to the economic superpowers of the world. Raewyn Connell's Southern Theory is a startling criticism of the Northern bias of sociology and social theory. Among the criticisms of Subaltern Studies was that it had little to say about caste, and little to say about gender relations.
