1
Specters and Spectral Economy
Dead men are at work. Their cause is not lost. They labor on, screened from us by smoke.
—Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light
We should begin, no doubt, by introducing the two primary subjects of this book: the figure of the ghost and the reciprocal circuits of exchange—whether for care, or profit, or both—that are constructed in its name. These must be set within two historical frames. The first concerns the beliefs of diasporic populations who migrated to Southeast Asia from southern China. These are traditions of ancestral veneration and funerary rites, for tending to the dead in the netherworld. The second is more recent and concerns the reimagination of these practices within a speculative logic.
Singaporean Chinese are a migrant population, now just over 76 percent of the citizenry. Their ancestral lands are found in southern provinces of Guangdong (particularly Chaoshan in the east), Fujian, and Hainan. This is a diverse population that today includes communities from all regions of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and from other points across the diaspora of so-called hua ren, Nanyang (literally, “Southern Ocean”), or “overseas Chinese.”1 The nation’s recognized dialect groups include Hokkien, Teo Chew, Hainanese, Cantonese, and Hakka.
Many cosmological assumptions of Chinese religion emerge from the common practice of religious Taoism and Buddhism, with other “folk” conventions. This remains an identifiable, though flexible, amalgam of ritual forms in prayer, geomancy, and mediumship. The form of Buddhism–Taoism practiced in peninsular Malaysia has also been called Shenism (deriving from shen, “god/s” in Mandarin), which connotes the worship of numerous deities. Early twentieth-century scholars also used the term Tankism—putting emphasis on the figure of the tang-ki, or spirit medium.2 The variant that is observed by Nanyang throughout Southeast Asia is thought to have begun as a hybrid of Hokkien and Cantonese folk traditions with Taoism during the Qin and Han dynasties, in a moment of absorption into the broader Chinese empire.
Formal Taoism is traced to Lao Zi (born 1301 B.C.) and his writing of the Tao Te Ching during the Shang dynasty (1751–1152 B.C.). Many of the deities that survive to the present are thought to be of even older provenance, having merged into mainstream Taoist practice from strains of agrarian animism.3 Gods have been transported across provinces, also, through labor migration and trade. There remains a very strong influence of Confucian thought in the particular admixture practiced throughout Southeast Asia. Buddhism–Taoism in Singapore can be traced to the earliest days of Cantonese and Hokkien settlement. The stamp of these regions can be seen in the deities who are worshipped, as well as in the liturgical forms—and, centrally, nuances of funerary practice—that continue into the present.
Taoism, in its religious aspect, centrally involves offerings made to a pantheon of gods, spirits, and lesser deities. These number several thousand, and a neotraditional Chinese altar can appear rather populous. A temple dais often includes figures such as the nine Emperor Gods, the child deity Ne-Zha, Guan Yin, and the infamous monkey god Qi Tian Da Sheng (Great Sage, Equal to Heaven)—he who features in Wu Cheng’En’s famous sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West. The cast also includes patrons of very specific professions, including the Goddess of Prostitutes and of Night Entertainers. Dedicated “homes” exist in Singapore for specific deities and their mediums, such as that for the popular Sun God in the western Bukit Batok neighborhood.
Taoist worship takes place in temples and small shrines (sin tua) throughout the island. The location of these is not legislated, and the separation of the sacred and the profane—to follow Durkheim’s famous analysis—often takes place at a microspatial scale, if at all.4 Small altars are found at niches in hotel basements, at the service entrances to shopping centers, in living rooms and doorways, welded to security gates, in the spiral ramps of parking garages, or on the fore-columns of traditional Singaporean shop-houses.5 Taoist prayer, for the most part, is integrated flexibly into the course of daily life. There are also significant periods set by the lunar calendar, such as the first and fifteenth days of the month—as well as annual sacred dates—on which particular rites are observed.6
Extent of participation in Chinese religion on the island is unclear, as there is officially no such category; the government acknowledges only singular faiths. “Taoist” may be the closest proxy. In the 2010 Singapore Population Census, members numbered 339,149 out of 3,105,748, or just under 11 percent—and appeared to decline to 8.8 percent in 2020.7 However, such figures fail to account for syncretism in popular worship. Many among the nation’s Buddhists, more than one million, take part in rites honoring ghosts and deities.8 It is impossible to determine how such individuals are classified, as the census format does not allow one to claim multiple affiliations. Many Taoists also visit Buddhist temples, which may include altars to shen. For the same reason, there is no way to account for those who pray at both the Sri Krishnan Hindu temple and the adjacent Kwan Im Buddhist temple in Waterloo Street, for example—a well-known local practice.9 This makes for a rather unsatisfactory picture, as nonexclusivity appears to be common; Victor Yue, a prominent commentator on local Taoist matters, has noted the joint appearance of Hindu and Taoist deities on daises.10
There is an acute awareness, among Singaporean respondents, of this polyglot nature. For example, Mrs. Tan—an elderly landscape gardener “auntie”—noted that she and her coreligionists were “not really Buddhist. Buddhist pray Buddha only. But Singaporeans are all mostly mixed.”11 Likewise, Harry, a Christian property developer, described local religion as
a rojak. A salad. It’s so much of a mix inside that even a lot of the worshippers confused. Taoism has been mixed up in Buddhism. Buddhism has to do only with Buddha. Not with all these gods—Sun God, and so forth. You find that Taoism is more animistic. . . . These two have illegally married together, so to speak, and now nobody knows what is the bottom line.12
Beliefs regarding the character of ghosts mirror the diversity within Chinese religion. Here, too, there is notable variety. In interviews, those who considered themselves “more Buddhist” often emphasized a soul’s unhappy attachment to worldly things and resistance to reincarnation. Others, of a more Taoist bent, focused on the presumed character of yin and yang energies and their relationships to the built and natural environments.13 In certain depictions, the netherworld is tightly bound, with visitations occurring primarily during the seventh month; in others, nonancestral spirits haunt Singapore year-round. Likewise, their manifestations seem to vary. In some tales, they speak and act, assume the forms of people, and pursue specific ends (see later). In other cases, their being is characterized by a certain generality, a social “type” described via norms of motivation that are largely assumed.14
Moreover, diasporic diversity has produced a certain novelty in beliefs about cosmology, energies and geomancy, the spirit, the soul, ghosts and deities, life and death, and the nature of the afterlife. These often appear to conform less to “traditional” discourses, such as those described in studies of Fujian and other regions of China.15 Even more, these have rubbed shoulders with Indian, Malay, Javanese, and Western concepts for more than two centuries. There are continual rapprochements and compromises, which in my own experience have occurred most anxiously between folk traditions and new forms of charismatic, evangelical Protestantism.16 Such accommodations become yet more heterodox when one factors in the undeniable influence of local and foreign cultural production: films, books, comics, and the like. What follows represents the accounts shared by an array of respondents that varied along lines of dialect group and language, class, age and generation, faith (or lack thereof), education, and profession. We must proceed with the awareness that there can be no “single” account of the Singaporean ghost, nor even of the ethnic Chinese ghost. Rather, this polyvocalism gives rise to great interpretive and practical creativity, as well as to some confusion. Modern spirits are constantly subject to conjecture, rationalization, and reimagination.
Broadly speaking, however, most nonliving entities are thought to fall within a spectrum denoted by the Mandarin compound term gui-shen. Gui means “ghost(s),” while shen refers to “spirit(s).” Shen is a term also used to refer to deities and other celestial beings, as Chinese cosmology does not differentiate “gods” in a Judeo-Christian sense of sui generis, all-powerful creators. All disembodied souls exist as formations of energy (qi) of yin (female, dark) and yang (male, light) varieties. As a rule, gui are more dominantly associated with yin qi and shen with yang qi. Properly speaking, shen might refer to a well-tended ancestral spirit, while gui carries the impoverished, submissive/recessive, damp and dark associations of the spectral—of true ghostliness. In short, while ghosts are a subset of spirits, only unlucky and forgotten spirits become ghosts.
Explanations of ghosthood within Chinese medicine are complex and involve the five modalities of shen, which dwell in different organs of the body of the living. After death, two—hun and po—linger. Hun is primarily of yang qi and upon death rises upward, like warm air, into the spiritual planes. Po, by contrast, is cold and sinks to remain entangled with the corpse and grave. By consequence, the “soul” of the departed can be multiply located. Hun is often thought to return to be reincarnated, to join the ancestors, or to be situated near the deceased’s plaque in the temple. Po, by contrast, will often roam the earthly plane as lost souls. In mainland Chinese traditions, hun and po hauntings differ in character and intent. By contrast, Singaporeans often truncate this complex relation in speaking of gui, and aspects of both infiltrate the modern imaginary.
Such assumptions engage more social-behavioral ones, arising from modernized folk conceptions of a Chinese “hell,” a somewhat confusing term that refers both to the spirit world and its spaces of punishment (from the Mandarin di yu, “earth prison”; both words appear in respondent accounts and are used herein). Chinese popular understandings depict di yu as striated—comprising tiers that increase in discomfort and misery as one descends.17 The world of the living sits (like Singapore) near the equator. This relates to older historical notions of China as the Middle Kingdom and is thought to explain why “both good and bad things are happening” on earth.18 Hell has ten courts of judgment, and the assignment of the deceased among the levels of torment or comfort depends on their actions in life.19 As designer Arthur noted,
you can move up to hell and heaven at any time, depending on your credits. So, feeding a ghost and burning paper money is giving them credit, so they can move up. [laughs] So, it’s totally commercial. Somehow you can buy your way; the living can help the spirits. That’s why people feed ghosts, to allow them to better themselves.
“Credit,” variously imagined, is the factor that moves individual spirits along the axis from ghosts to gods; even the gods are themselves of variable standing and rely on human action (such as mediumship) to elevate their own positions.
Hell, like Singapore, is a very expensive place. It is also similarly bureaucratic. There are precise roles in the work of godly administration, an expansive collection of offices including, among others, judges, assistants to the chief justice of the Court of Hell, judges of the infernal courts, and seemingly endless aides and functionaries. Costs incurred in this sphere have to do, perhaps, with the Taoist idea that we incur debts in life that must be paid in the netherworld.20 Other explanations characterize di yu as a venal entrepôt, where officials and guards can be bribed for better conditions and accommodations (unlike in Singapore, rent-seeking behaviors are said to be rife).
The ghost’s condition is perpetual lack: it is, to various degrees, in need of status elevation and fungible goods. Our reciprocal relationship with the spirits consists of helping them to be elevated through the levels but also to not be forgotten. For this reason, Taoist practice—and Chinese religion more widely—centrally involves ancestral observances. As with all folk religion, this, too, is a hybrid form with a rich and varied repertoire of rites, rules, and representations. There are numerous essential features, however. Strict Taoists will keep tablets in home shrines, inscribed with the names of predecessors. These may be accompanied by photographs or personal effects. Beyond special moments in the lunar calendar, such as Hungry Ghost Month (Zhong Yuan) and Qing Ming festivals, offerings of food and joss paper are made to the spirits of immediate family in a loosely regular way.
In a common version recounted by Tong Chee Kiong,21 the ancestral dead become “hungry” ghosts in the absence of care: when their descendants do not tend to them via rites and offerings, when there are no descendants, or when the spirit was flung from existence by a violent event. When untended, even beloved ancestors may undergo a frightening process of wasting; they become disoriented, forgetful, angry, and vindictive. Prior to this, they are “bright spirits.” But hunger is a fact of afterlife just as it is of life. The experience of the netherworld is not composed primarily of penury and bitterness but becomes so if one is neglected. There might be a literal pain caused by such deprivation or—as described of the Ndembu by Turner—the indignity of diminished social status and respect. In this vein, Hui Ping, who joins her mother in making offerings annually during Zhong Yuan, notes that “Chinese just feel that the ancestors will get upset” if you don’t make sacrifices to reaffirm remembrance and care.22 Here, as in many of the religious questions that follow, Singaporeans appear divided between abstract discourses of remembrance and literal, rationalized and monetized understandings of metaphysical conditions.
Figure 1. During specific days of the lunar seventh month, it is common to see multiple offerings taking place along a street. Top, A modest one is conducted using a cooking oil can as a brazier. Bottom, An expedient offering is made, here, directly on the ground; no officially provided brazier is used, resulting in a cloud of “contaminated” ash drifting along the street.
A spirit can become a ghost through starvation—but also, more rapidly, via trauma. The speed and violence of road accidents, suicides, and murders leaves the soul stranded and wracked with pain and are said to produce ghosts instantaneously, even if proper funeral rites are administered. These tortured souls are said to haunt the sites of their misfortune. The result, as in so many other global contexts, is that gui serve to draw attention to specific historical tragedies and their sites. In an analysis of popular discourse and among my respondents, such recollections overwhelmingly concerned atrocities committed by Japanese occupiers from 1942 to 1945. (This is discussed in detail in chapter 5.) This mode of explanation quickly returns to the economic dimension: the role of the ghost as a victim of trauma ostensibly makes it yet more powerful as a potential business partner, and sites of tragic events are (by the same logic) rife with opportunities as well as dangers.
However, everyday Singaporean haunting narratives are often surprising for their lack of emphasis on trauma or historical evil.23 Visitations do concern past injustices. Just as often, however, the ghost emerges to demand a glass of brandy, suggest a course of action, or protest some trespass by the living. Gui are presumed to exist in an alternate present, in a space outside of time, rather than in some repressed past. They visit, rather than return—and as such are often concerned with immediate needs or wants. Discourses surrounding Singapore’s spirits are frequently not nostalgic or backward looking, for the simple reason that they are assumed to remain, in the contemporary, as a form of lingering personhood. As we will see, trauma and memory sit amid a cacophony of other cultural preoccupations: desired commodities, money, filial obligation, climate and landscape, political and social power. Ghosts have something to “say” about practically everything in Singaporean life.
Because spirits are understood to be social beings and not representations, death provides a projective zone in which all the concerns of the living are often contemplated via inversion, mimesis, and disproportion. This, combined with the popular assumption of the Chinese di yu as a condition of privation, can result in spectral obsessions that seem oddly prosaic.24 As Singaporean gravedigger Wong Shun Feng pointed out in 2009, “ghosts are the same as human beings. . . . They have feelings and emotions as well.”25
This opens a broad series of potentials for the dead to speak and to behave, many times in a way that is poignantly human. In this respect, the ghost is pictured very differently from Western analogues. By contrast, this is a man or a woman: rebellious, hungry, and angry or kindly, curious, generous, ham sup (Cantonese for “perverted,” “horny”), or playful and mischievous. These ghosts do not merely haunt, in the sense of “remind.” In fact, their motivations, as assumed by those who speak of them, are purposive and familiar. They are often driven by the same consumerist desires as typical Singaporeans. Or, like their living relatives, they are compelled by bureaucratic rules and legalities, a notable characteristic of hell. They must file petitions and occasionally pay an infernal civil servant.26 As perfectly summed up by gravedigger Wong, ghosts are people (albeit dead ones) and share our foibles.
Ghostly Encounters
The “spectral” refers to a problematic mode of being and of perception. The etymology of the word, which is tied to visibility, is troubling because the visuality of the ghost is fugitive. It exists on a spectrum, accessible to human sight to varying degrees: haunting narratives describe presences that can be seen, that can barely be seen, or that can only be grasped via other senses or through logical deduction—or, as in the case of Derrida’s “visor effect,” not at all.27 Detecting a specter may require conjecture, or intuition, in the absence of empirical evidence. It is, in this way, also intimately related to the act of speculation.28
Singaporeans often spoke of “seeing” ghosts, but this phrase was shorthand for a wide array of actual experiences. Often, they saw a normal person whose true nature was revealed only by odd behaviors or through questioning or interaction. Others materialized in unreal ways or were clearly out of place: walking through walls or suddenly standing in the corners of rooms in private homes or hotels. Many descriptions shared the association, in modern media, of ghostliness with transparency. The body may look incorporeal or empty or may lack clarity or detail. Here Singapore resembles other societies with highly developed filmic and telepictorial sensibilities.29 In a frequent trope, the dead were said to present themselves with traumatic injuries or in the form of monsters or animals. An example is Jean, a doctor in her sixties, who was repeatedly visited by a departed relative in the guise of a partially simian creature.30 Such transfigurations might clarify, or confuse, the meaning of the visitation.
Respondents also frequently shared the notion that ghosts can be viewed only obliquely or peripherally, in the corner of a space or on a tree branch above. It is common to hear the leitmotif that a haunting “happened right next to me.” Terrence, a young architect, experienced this on a march in the night during his army days. He felt a vague presence, following just out of sight on his left. A friend and fellow soldier, walking on this same side, was suddenly abducted when his gaze was briefly averted.31 Likewise, investor Mr. Ang recounted numerous incidents of mischief, in the form of stolen and broken objects, that occurred “very close to me, at the moment I looked away.”32 The living are often said to be surveilled or approached from behind, especially during the seventh month, when one is cautioned not to suddenly turn around.
As David Toop has argued, however, vision is not the sole mode of apprehending the spectral.33 Often, this takes place via other senses.34 In Southeast Asian lore, supernatural presences are associated with odors. This is most famously so with the Pontianak, a vampiric female spirit of Malay-Indonesian origin who is attended by a heady scent of frangipani (a traditional funeral flower). Respondents enumerated other aromas for Chinese ghosts, from bodily musk to perfumes and colognes to specific foods or liquors favored by the deceased. Inexplicable smells underscore the disquieting character of invisible presence and the sense of being watched. A similar unease arises with auditory phenomena, with the creaking of footsteps on floorboards and the eerie suggestion of weight exerted by incorporeal visitors. One common phenomenon, in this context, is tactile: an inexplicable microclimatic effect, described as an unnatural chill within Singapore’s hot, humid air. This is said to be cooling by yin energy, associated with death and the grave. The sensation is compared, unnervingly, to the hypercooled currents of air conditioning.
Spectral atmospheres are also often affective. Witnesses describe waves of feeling that arise with a ghostly presence. These can be associated with the terrifying, as in cases described elsewhere by Tom Gunning.35 But also common is a sense of the ineffable, of a mood that evades classification. Such narratives articulate what Edgar Allan Poe called “a feeling for which I have no name” and “a sensation that will admit of no analysis.”36 There are echoes here of Brian Massumi and others, who place certain affective states beyond the assimilating effects of emotive categories.37 In this aspect, Singaporean ghost stories recall tropes of nineteenth-century “eerie” fiction, of works such as Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, Rudyard Kipling’s “They,” or Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia.”38 Herein ghosts present as “a sentiment ineffable”: a bafflement or unease, characterized by what Mark Fisher defines as “something present where there should be nothing, or nothing present where there should be something.”39 This is sometimes followed by “dread” or “horror.”40 There is often, also, an unexpected sense of power and possibility. Witnesses frequently had difficulty putting such multivalence, and discord, into language.
Charles, an oral surgeon in his fifties, expressed a common position. “I’ve sensed them before,” he said. When looking to rent a flat on Balmoral Road, Charles felt something deeply amiss. When he entered the unit, he sensed “something heavy or oppressive.” This was followed by sadness and a yearning without a clear object. Charles told me, “When I left, the realtor said, ‘OK, I’ll tell you because you’re not interested in renting, but the owner died on the stairs.’”41 Mei Zhen Jie, a retired domestic helper, told me that she feels “confused” and saddened when ghosts are nearby. She clarifies, “They are wherever we are, like our shadow. I’ve never seen them, but I feel their presence.”42
Experiences of sense and affect often exacerbate problems of articulation—of decoding what a ghost “wants.” Literary specters have commonly been cast as bearers of comprehensible, if untimely, messages. In Singaporean narratives, however, their statements are often described as mixed and opaque. Certainly some are straightforward: a plea, a corrective, a want in need of satisfaction. As often, however, the ghost seems to be attempting to impart multiple meanings or significations that go beyond language.43 This may be evidence of mixed feelings or the confusion of hunger and anger. As such, the gui is depicted in many accounts as an unreliable procurator of its own desires. For this reason, one experienced in such matters—a medium—cautioned me not to take the messages of the spirit world at face value.44 Rather, he suggested, we should place the stated intentions of the ghost (when one is able to speak) within a pattern of phenomena: shifted objects, aggressive acts, and affective atmospheres. Spectral events, moreover, typically take place against a complex backdrop of social circumstance: a family disturbance, a ritual occasion, tragedy, or a streak of bad luck. These are themselves open to an array of competing decryptions. Such factors may be complicated yet furthered by the copresence of other spirits with conflicting or competing wants. The dead themselves exist in a condition of social relatedness, with balances of power, objectives, and reciprocities of their own. The inference of these constitutes a sort of popular detective work, one of the skills that distinguishes an effective medium or geomancer.
But the ghost is still, for all this, a ghost. Although it is often depicted in familiar, all-too-human terms, it nonetheless remains a source of very real fear: a powerful, incorporeal subjectivity. The confused condition of the hungry spirit gives rise to unpredictability and disproportionate violence. Incidents at construction sites and army camps, among other locales, describe an astonishing brutality—a sort of performative excess that is in blatant disproportion to the triviality of its wants (we will see this in chapter 5, in the evisceration or displacement of bodies, of soldiers or builders, over minor infractions).45 Their abuse is often presaged by moments of corporeal strangeness; the possessed are forced to express nonrational motions, like dancing or convulsion, or the characteristic stagger-step of the tang-ki in trance.
Events of this kind wreak havoc upon plans. The fear of violence serves, almost without fail, to disrupt an operation or venture: the military exercise, the scheduled construction or development timeline, or the functions of a bureau. In a moment of “weak” messianism, the ghost steps in to alter the course of scheduled events.46 Gui would appear to militate against knowable futures, producing a rule of the unplanned, to which humans must react rather than assert projective agency. The result of such happenings—to the chagrin of all concerned—is to pause the flow of time, to prolong the present moment and obstruct (if temporarily) the passage into the new realities touted by government and speculative actors.47 This serves to emphasize the present as an ambiguous locus within which divergent objectives, subjectivities and legalities, and sources of power are suddenly corelated. The actions of the ghost emphasize the present above the historicity of pasts and the determinacy of designed outcomes. This stands in direct contrast to state discourse that presents its urban utopianism via a regime of inevitability: photorealistic imagery and unwavering timelines. Such disruptions should not be subjected to the “romance of resistance”—often, the ghosts merely want to be paid.48 But the outcomes of haunting nonetheless contrast the linear projections of the PAP, with its forward rhetoric of “paths” and “laps.” The ghost thus stands as an inversion of that ur-Singaporean figure, the planner.
Hence one more key quality of the ghost should be considered for what follows—its power as a socially projected subject. Just as death places the soul beyond the reach of probability and risk, it is allowed to “act” beyond the spatial-legal boundaries of the living agent. The spectral performs, via a kind of collective ventriloquism, a potency that is seen by civil society as originating outside itself. This is not conventional political agency. It does not follow a coherent or consistent program and often is involved only in the work of negation. But the hauntings are understood to cause genuine trouble where contestation rarely occurs and to assert alternative modes of control. Gui assume the character of “concrete abstractions,” acquiring inexorable force even within an avowedly secular regime.49 They are deeply feared by believers, and the intensity of this fear is respected (as we will see) even by those who doubt.
Allegations of visitation thus create a sticky issue for governance; the dead heckle the state in ways that fall outside of its carefully structured limitations on speech and political demonstration. The ghost is a Singaporean, but not a “citizen.” Its actions are not easily framed as subversive in any of the registers in which the PAP defines this term. As I have argued, elsewhere, the ghost’s disembodiment creates difficulty for an authority that is based on the disciplinary and biopolitical.50 These are persons without flesh; they have nothing against which “law-preserving” violence can be threatened. Public order is famously associated, here, with forms of corporal and capital punishment, with hanging and caning (the latter being very much the icon of the nation’s discipline in the global imagination).51 The spirit’s immunity to such treatment is dramatized in the practices of local tang-ki, who are publicly whipped by their disciples during possession states and show no outward signs of suffering.52 Ghosts are, equally, beyond the state’s provision of the stuff of life: housing, jobs, health and social services. In terms of formal governance, then, they are characterized chiefly by a fearsome independence.
Spectro-Economy: An Introduction
Ghosts are not, however, beyond the regime of the economic. Quite the contrary: Singaporean Chinese spectral culture presumes an uncommon intimacy between ghosts and matters of value, money, and speculation.
This should not be viewed as exceptional or exotic. In fact, the spectral has long been associated with forms of risk-based capitalism—both at its putative “centers” and in colonial peripheries—and has fueled schemes of prognostication and manipulation. The Clafin sisters, a duo of clairvoyants who conducted séances to pick stocks, were the doyennes of London’s exchanges as early as 1870 (their role appears to have narrowly preceded the various “magic formulas” and secret algorithms that now pervade finance culture). In England and New England, women were frequently accused of witchcraft, in cahoots with the dead, when their gambles paid out.53 Tabitha Stanmore has shown that, while women were being persecuted for a range of allegedly “satanic” practices, enterprising Englishmen and -women were plying the trade of “service magic” to hedge private bets.54 Transnational organizations of churches preaching the prosperity gospel must be considered as, likewise, a medium for the seemingly endless expansion of charismatic discourses that exchange spirits (plural) for the Holy Spirit. Economic enchantments, past and present, now constitute their own interdisciplinary research network, with a growing roster of publications, meetings, and podcasts.55 Not least for our purposes are Derrida’s painstaking attentions to Marx’s use of ghostly analogy—in the famous opening to The Communist Manifesto, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and in Capital, Volume 1—which have provided the basis of the field of hauntology.56
Ghosts in Singapore, while generally feared and avoided, are also assumed to exert a determining effect on the efficacy of capital. This occurs in their mastery of risk, in the production of good and bad luck, and in their ability to direct flows of value. Power over speculative ventures is derived from their nature as beings of powerful yin (dark, female) energy. While often lost and confused, spirits exist outside of human time and thus can see transparently through probabilistic phenomena. They are thought to know, for example, whether the values of stocks will rise or fall and which lottery numbers will be drawn. The more powerful among them—such as those who die in tragic circumstances (see earlier)—are also thought to alter the outcomes of deterministic phenomena at will.
What I call the spectro-economy, the sum of ritual transactions among the living and the dead, is built around a vocabulary of sacrificial conventions to transmit wealth and nourishment to the afterlife. While the living care for the spirits out of a broader sense of filial responsibility and religious obligation, it is presumed that the latter may return the favor with improved fortune in business or gambling, health, and happiness. Offerings of food and drink may be consumed when placed upon altars with lit incense. Myriad forms of joss paper “spirit money” (yin zhi) and so-called hell notes are also burned, remitting their vast denominations beyond the mortal plane (see the next chapter). These are purchased at local shops and markets, and their value is thought to pass to a specific ancestor or nearby ghost. Elaborate paper architectures, palatial homes, and office buildings—and, more recently, banks, fast-food outlets, and cinemas—are likewise set ablaze to provide the dead with shelter and entertainment. There is a whole proxy commodity-world on offer: computers, smartphones and tablets, designer shirts, credit cards, unusual pets, and domestic workers that exist as paper simulacra. When reduced to ash, these objects reappear in the netherworld.
Figure 2. A typical offering consisting of varied joss paper (at right) and foods. The three central candles determine the duration of the period during which the spirits “consume” these goods. When these burn near to the base, a coin toss or other method will be used to determine whether the rite is concluded.
In a related practice, ordinary commodities and ornamental objects are auctioned for exorbitant prices at public events during the Ghost Month festival. As Tong Chee Kiong describes,
a schoolbag, which normally costs less than ten dollars, may be sold for two to three hundred dollars. A rice-cooker, sold in the stores for less than fifty dollars, can fetch up to five hundred dollars. Lottery tickets, which cost a dollar each, can command prices of up to one hundred dollars.57
These items are considered to be unusually lucky and effective because they have been invested with spiritual power and will assist the owners in meeting life’s challenges. The schoolbag, for one, is a hotly contested item, as it is believed to assist the winning bidder’s child in the merciless competition of the Singaporean education system. Proceeds of these sales fund large pyres of paper cash and goods for dispossessed spirits.
Reciprocal circuits leading through the afterlife operate year-round, reaching considerable volume during festivals. It is impossible to estimate the total value of goods and services involved, as the spectro-economy is cash dominant, and much takes place off the books.58 However, some figures are indicative. We may consider the cost of Ghost Month hampers: boxes containing an assortment of yin zhi, hell money, paper coins or ingots, joss paper clothing, and other popular items. These are standard purchases of individuals and companies, to be set alight at the beginning, middle, and end of the festivals. They range from a low of S$60 to a high of S$888 for those who court greater protection and profit in the following year.59 Such packages are often bought in multiple. They are stacked high in the specialist shops during run-ups to significant dates and are offered with an ever-diversifying range of contents available online—especially given the vast inventories of contemporary e-tailers, such as Lazada.60 There is no bad year for burnt offerings. Lean times and crises sharpen the need for protection by spirits, and bullish economies are seen as opportunities for growth. Likewise, orders for the conventional large-scale bamboo-and-joss-paper effigies are fulfilled during this period. These still represent the pinnacle of postmortem luxury, likely due to their intimidating prices and traditional prestige. Artisans make them by hand in a process that is bespoke and punishingly labor intensive. Lai Yew Onn, a well-known fabricator, sells increasingly personalized homes, vehicles, and pets for S$30,000 or more.61
Forms of wealth burned for the dead are understood literally as remittances, not as metaphors for filial piety or respect for lineage. Tong clarifies that they are “perceived by informants to be real,” rather than representations.62 The bills are considered legal tender between the human and spirit worlds. Importantly, these offerings open reciprocal exchanges that are expected to benefit the living in turn. While understood as a form of care and benevolence, burning is also the original moment of a cycle of wealth production, whereby the ghosts return the favor in the form of windfalls or improved luck. The effect of this trade is seen as self-evidently positive, as a win-win that profits everyone involved.
Value here is imagined as a cosmological essence—an energetic flow, capable of “feeding” spirits. It multiplies via intercourse between the markets of Singapore and di yu. These bounded territories are open to the traffic of the universal energies that animate objects and phenomena. As one such force, value is not delimited by the partition between life and death. Earthly money and goods provide only temporary reservoirs for it; when these are destroyed, it is again free to migrate across the mortal horizon—and, in so doing, multiply exponentially. Passage of value among media and across the borders of the ghost-world is assumed to generate dramatic leaps in value—bypassing conventional economic rationality. Spectacular gains occur through transfers from “real” dollars to spectral currency, from paper to ash, from this world to the other, from yin energy to lucky numbers and winning outcomes. A hell note costing ten cents is assumed to become millions in the netherworld. It is the hyperbolic nature of this mysterious currency to be, at the instance of purchase, worth more than it costs. A paper house or office block may command anywhere from a few Singapore dollars to a few thousand but materializes in the beyond as an asset worth vast amounts. In this way, as we will see also, the ghost-economy elides currencies and commodities, in a play on dominant investment logics. In the spirit world, everything is rendered speculative, as inputs to reciprocal exchanges are thought to bring unlimited returns.
The nation’s popular 4D lottery system is also centrally associated with the logic of spectro-economic practices. Lucky combinations are frequently selected with the aid of hungry ghosts or cooperative ancestors. Alongside stacks of hell notes, chits of paper containing numbers are set alight at graves or accident sites, and the last to burn are used to configure four-digit sequences. Alternately, selection is performed by shaking dice in a cup or using wooden sticks.63 These are particularly popular among “uncles and aunties” in their fifties and sixties. There is even a shrine in the famous Maxwell Market, an open-air food court, that dispenses 4D numbers during the seventh month on an LED screen.64 Contemporary practices grow here, also, from Chinese popular traditions in which the dead have been thought to speak to the living via numerical sequences.65 This is a brisk trade during the seventh month; dispossessed or “hungry” ghosts are considered to be particularly solicitous when it comes to dispensing tips, as they long most acutely for wealth, food, and attention. Those who die by unnatural causes are even more so.66
Figure 3. Hell notes may be burned individually or in stacks or fans. This contrasts with more traditional joss money, which is typically opened into circular spirals or individually folded.
Interestingly, however, the ghost is assumed to wield power even when outcomes are not subject to pure luck. The clearest example is in real estate and property. Development and construction are predominant foci of haunting narratives, and deals with ghosts are known to have great impact on value. This may have to do with costly delays in construction, as mentioned earlier, or with depressed sales prices, or with resident gui ruining the fortunes of occupants or causing sickness.67 In many cases, though, as we will see, spectral intervention is assumed to exert a contrary, positive effect. Architecture provides a conduit for their agency in numerous ways: as the home of people at the mercy of life’s uncertainties, or as a speculative commodity. These powers are understood to be at work wherever value is at stake—which is everywhere. In this view, increasingly, all matters are matters of risk.
The Regime of Chance
This, in summary, describes the broad assumptions of the ghost and its own economic circuitry. The following chapters delve into this in all its evocative detail, with special attention to questions of money and financialization, commodities, and real estate. Before moving forward, however—and by way of some conclusion—we should address an immediate question that arises with Singapore’s gui and their dealings. Why should a well-informed public resort to ghosts as a medium to explain, and participate in, economy? Why should the link between specters and speculation exist at all?
Peter Geschiere and Jean and John L. Comaroff have theorized similar phenomena of “occult” economies in South Africa and Cameroon, in which the accumulation of ineffable wealth in the age of deregulation and financialization is explained as the work of dark, supernatural forces—particularly by those living at the remote margins of a new economic dispensation.68 No doubt, we might find similar explanations in Singapore. Mysterious sources of disproportionate wealth are accounted for by the mechanism of spiritual intervention. It is perhaps not surprising that Singapore’s own numinous discourses should mimic those forms of finance that are least understood—or seen as most able to produce wild disparities of income that exponentially outpace labor.
But the citizenry of Singapore is not, as in the examples of Cameroon and South Africa, a rural population at a remove from the sites where contemporary value is created. This is a public that is relatively well-versed in business. Awareness of, and participation in, the world of speculative economic practices is widespread. The expansion of Singapore’s economy into operations based on risk has not been limited to business elites—quite the contrary. There is a generalized interest in abstract financial and monetary instruments, and investment activity remains high among the public, despite often painful memories of the 1997 and 2008 crashes. Moreover, the nation’s businesspeople—entrepreneurs, investors, fund managers, and cryptocurrency “bros”—are often those participating in ghostly exchanges and (as we will see) spending baffling sums on offerings and Ghost Month auctions. The hundreds of thousands of Singapore dollars for haunted commodities and amulets are, after all, not paid by low-wage workers. I have spoken to geomantic experts who make and sell charms for bankers, fund managers, and venture capital executives. Likewise, property developers with publicly listed companies employ mediums to purify and align the spiritual forces on their building sites. This might be initially surprising, and it may be unclear why those with privileged access to capital should want in.
In what follows, then, we must answer a more difficult question: why a population of relative cognoscenti should resort to ghostly understandings of economy. They do so, I argue, because spectral and speculative economics today share common anxieties regarding the fundamental ineffability of risk. Unlike industry—in which profits can, at least in theory, be estimated via inputs and normative pricing—there is an irreducible mystery at the center of late capital. Value here is ultimately beholden to the outcome of unknown events, which, despite sophisticated modes of statistical divination, ultimately resist calculable certainty.69 In this strange condition, as willing or unwilling participants in this game, we are all at the mercy of a metaphysics of value that can be only dimly understood by proxy. This proxy might be the algorithm or unproven formula in the office of a hedge fund (see the introduction to this volume)—or, as in the case of gui or London’s Clafin sisters, it may be the ghost.
Respondents’ discourses about ghosts, as we will see, address concerns about life’s risks, broadly imagined. In turn, their religious practices purport to offer practical means for managing these risks. Chinese religion allows for an understanding of probability as embedded in the totality of our conduct and spatial location: as beholden to a calculus of “luck” and “prosperity” that arises from our actions and personal energies, ritual practices, and the spaces in which we live (at scales from the domestic to the notional and beyond). Financial success cannot be separated here from the broader conditions of being. Singaporeans frequently make sense of inchoate patterns of good and bad events, unexpected occurrences and coincidences, through an interplay of spirit, geomancy, energy, and value, often alongside modes of statistical estimation. Those entrepreneurs who bet on ghost-trades still obsess over business plans, projected costs, and prices—in short, their odds. It is worth noting, however—as have Hacking, Gingerenzer and colleagues, King and Kay, and Taleb—that such calculations provide reliable predictions only when phenomena are isolated from broader causal networks, which is never the case. They cannot handle the widespread, wicked problem of “radical uncertainty.”70 There remains a mystical irreducibility to matters in the real world, because our commitment to the stochastic does not do away with interventions by complex determinate phenomena, or what insurers call “acts of god.” There is likewise the hard nut of theodicy; probability may suggest the likelihood of an outcome but not an explanation for its causes.
At the same time, other problems of knowability arise from the emergent legal-technical conditions of finance as practiced, which create problems that are not reducible to economic literacy. After all, many financial instruments exist within “black boxes” of proprietary code or in the form of experimental scripts and functional code that are not fully comprehended even by their inventors—who often adapt other formulas experimentally using market simulations. In effect, no one knows, the buyers or even the banks and funds themselves, precisely how these come to be effective or if they might suddenly and disastrously fail. As a former analyst at JPMorgan Chase in Singapore admitted, “they work, but we don’t exactly know how they work.”71 This logic is replicated in those practices and “products” directed to ghosts. Many who offer food or joss paper money admit that they do not understand precisely how value or substance is transferred to hell or why yin zhi should experience wild fluctuations of value. They employ these rituals simply because they are known to be efficacious and because they can be simply explained by the gratitude or disfavor of the spirits.
Ghosts, in sum, appear to solve the problem of risk. This is what gives them their social power, alongside their presumed capacity to cause harm and create disorder. The spectral world provides straightforward rules of conduct and protocol. These concepts are conceived not as probabilistic but rather as areas in which determination is invisible and unknowable and available to divine intervention.
This, of course, speaks primarily to epistemological concerns. But we should not dismiss the glamour of a participatory economy that would purport to offer unfettered access to circuits of capital, that democratizes modes of investment and promises potential returns far beyond inputs of labor. We will see actual wealth effects that are based on the social logic structuring ghostly reciprocity. Within communities of belief, haunted objects do generate actual value in ways akin to the charismatic megachurches that are also popular in Singapore. They dramatize a kind of efficacy as “evidence” that they work. The attraction of this is not hard to see. Singapore is a predominantly lower-middle-class society in which more than 80 percent of the public lives in subsidized housing.72 The rise to extreme wealth has overwhelmingly enriched a small business elite and left many behind. Although it is true that the nation offers greater chances of upward mobility than elsewhere, much accrues to those who already benefit from the advantages of embourgeoisement: inheritance, educational capital, or work ethic. No less significant is the depression of wages as a key aspect of the government’s strategy for attracting multinational corporations since independence. This means that many have not seen significant growth in spending power, while others in rarefied sectors have gotten ahead. One can imagine, in this context, the appeal of the radical freedoms and rewards promised by the spirit world.
The ghost, as a source of fear and comfort, is blissfully unaffected by that stubborn mystery that underlies the human predicament. While the dead continue to suffer deterministic privations, and behave quixotically, they have been placed beyond the influence of that which is both Singapore’s shared terror and its dream: the dictatorship of the unknown outcome. In an economy and society largely premised on the quixotic control of volatility—speculative construction, securitized transactions, the inflation and marketing of tourist spectacles, logistics, and naked betting—such power is nothing short of godly.