ABSTRACT This account explores how circumstances verging on the other‐worldly alter human perception and consciousness in a fieldwork situation. The case study involves an archaeological field survey team stranded for a time on a remote Lapland mountain. By applying the method of weirding, drawing inspiration from the narrative force of weird fiction, we examine how the team interacted with their decrepit shelter—a cabin teeming with fungal life amidst the terrestrial alien entity of the mountain. The experimental paper applies reflexive, autoethnographic writing in conceptualizing the experience of the unusual circumstances, considering what such otherworldly episodes can reveal about human engagement with the unfamiliar.

ABSTRACT The article argues that current discussions on epistemic injustice, centered around the distinction between testimonial and hermeneutic types of injustice, cannot adequately deal with the injustice done to Indigenous epistemology. This happens primarily because of the significant difference in the way phenomena like self, mind, and knowledge are understood in Indigenous life. After discussing the salient features of Indigenous life, the article points out how the understanding of self, mind, and knowledge is interdependent in both Indigenous and Modern ways. Indigenous epistemology is primarily a matter of knowing and oriented towards a process rather than knowledge as a product. Treating knowing rather than knowledge as the basic epistemological category is not something that the Modern consciousness can do easily, given its tendency to find identity and satisfaction in the accumulation of knowledge. Thus, the article attempts to bring out the formidable difficulty in doing justice to the Indigenous ways of knowing by drawing attention to the need to employ a radically different kind of attention and embrace a reality different from the usual one.

ABSTRACT This essay examines the controversy surrounding the Bhoot Vidya certificate program proposed by the Faculty of Ayurveda at Banaras Hindu University in 2019. Drawing on media coverage, curricular materials, and government policy, I analyze how the debate reveals broader tensions in the politics of contemporary Ayurveda, nationalism, and decolonization in India. I situate bhūtavidyā within its classical textual foundations and modern projects of Ayurvedic revitalization, highlighting how colonial transformations, orientalist framings, and selective appropriations of tradition persist in institutional discourse. The program's fraught reception, marked by criticism of foreign media and the disavowal of ghost‐related etiologies, exposes the spectropolitical stakes involved in defining legitimate knowledge. I argue that the proposed program embodies a form of modernity in which ghosts are simultaneously invoked, denied, and repurposed for nationalist projects. The case illustrates how hauntological analysis may help better understand contested negotiations of authenticity, authority, and belonging in Indian medical and political life.

ABSTRACTWe use Critical Narrative Analysis (CNA) to examine collected apparitional accounts within the geographic region of Western Georgia in the United States. We discuss the extant local folklore on ghosts in the literature while providing a methodological backdrop. The analysis of the data yields four dominant discourses, which are countered in five salient ways: through (1) the extension of consciousness across space and time, (2) lucid perceptual experience, (3) the presence of anomalous phenomena, (4) adjudication to story and hearsay, and (5) consensual or repeated verification. We discuss the implications of these countermoves and recommend further critical research on exceptional experiences.

Abstract This paper analyzes Dolores's case of collective spirit possession as a paroxysmic form of possession idiom, serving as a powerful and creative internal mechanism that both safeguards and revitalizes the core structure of ancestor worship. Drawing on my ethnographic research in North Honduras since 2009, my study reveals that rather than leading to the erosion of possession rituals, entropic forces, such as resistance, modernity, and impiety serve as vital resources, reinforcing the foundations of ancestor worship. This paper explores possession idioms and striking events, such as contagion, abduction, dramatization, illness, and death to highlight the resilience of a possession‐based religion as a self‐sustaining total social system rooted in “tradition,” yet shaped by a dynamic interplay of historical, cultural, and personal experiences. While traditional interpretations of spirit possession have viewed possession cults as forms of protest against hegemonic power—“a weapon of the weak” used to gain respect and process trauma—I suggest that spirit possession is multifaceted, ambiguous and underdetermined, operating within a social theater where critique, social irony, impiety, historical consciousness, and the carnivalesque intersect.