Ghost and the other. Dangerous commensalities and twisted becomings

This article focuses on ghost-related othering: of those alive and those dead in a Siberian village; of those who subscribe to the existence of ghosts by certain Russian officials; of texts that do not reduce ghosts to a second order of reality from the genre of ethnography, and their authors from the rank of fellow anthropologists. Pushing the logic of the “ontological turn” in anthropology to its limits, it asks whether such instances simply resemble each other, or whether it is possible to discern some sort of ontological continuity between them. Could the similitudes be the effect of ghosts’ (perhaps fragmented and partial) existence, rather than their (monolithic, ultimate and unquestionable) non-existence?