Nils Bubandt's Books

The Empty Seashell

Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island

By: Nils Bubandt

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The Empty Seashell

Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island

By: Nils Bubandt

The Empty Seashell explores what it is like to live in a world where cannibal witches are undeniably real, yet too ephemeral and contradictory to be an object of belief. In a book based on more than three years of fieldwork between 1991 and 2011, Nils Bubandt argues that cannibal witches for people in the coastal, and predominantly Christian, community of Buli in the Indonesian province of North Maluku are both corporeally real and fundamentally unknowable.Witches (known as gua in the Buli language or as suanggi in regional Malay) appear to be ordinary humans but sometimes, especially at night, they take other forms and attack people in order to kill them and eat their livers. They are seemingly everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The reality of gua, therefore, can never be pinned down. The title of the book comes from the empty nautilus shells that regularly drift ashore around Buli village. Convention has it that if you find a live nautilus, you are a gua. Like the empty shells, witchcraft always seems to recede from experience.Bubandt begins the book by recounting his own confusion and frustration in coming to terms with the contradictory and inaccessible nature of witchcraft realities in Buli. A detailed ethnography of the encompassing inaccessibility of Buli witchcraft leads him to the conclusion that much of the anthropological literature, which views witchcraft as a system of beliefs with genuine explanatory power, is off the mark. Witchcraft for the Buli people doesn't explain anything. In fact, it does the opposite: it confuses, obfuscates, and frustrates. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida's concept of aporia—an interminable experience that remains continuously in doubt—Bubandt suggests the need to take seriously people's experiential and epistemological doubts about witchcraft, and outlines, by extension, a novel way of thinking about witchcraft and its relation to modernity.

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Page Count

316

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801471966

ISBN 13

9780801471964

Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia

By: Nils Bubandt

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Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia

By: Nils Bubandt

Indonesia has been an electoral democracy for more than a decade, and yet the political landscape of the world’s third-largest democracy is as complex and enigmatic as ever. The country has achieved a successful transition to democracy and yet Indonesian democracy continues to be flawed, illiberal, and predatory. This book suggests that this and other paradoxes of democracy in Indonesia often assume occult forms in the Indonesian political imagination, and that the spirit-like character of democracy and corruption traverses into the national media and the political elite. Through a series of biographical accounts of political entrepreneurs, all of whom employ spirits in various, but always highly contested, ways, the book seeks to provide a portrait of Indonesia’s contradictory democracy, contending that the contradictions that haunt democracy in Indonesia also infect democracy globally. Exploring the intimate ways in which the world of politics and the world of spirits are entangled, it argues that Indonesia’s seemingly peculiar problems with democracy and spirits in fact reflect a set of contradictions within democracy itself. Engaging with recent attempts to look at contemporary politics through the lens of the occult, Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia will be of interest to academics in the fields of Asian Studies, Anthropology and Political Science and relevant for the study of Indonesian politics and for debates about democracy in Asia and beyond.

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Page Count

175

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1317682521

ISBN 13

9781317682523

The Empty Seashell

Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island

By: Nils Bubandt

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The Empty Seashell

Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island

By: Nils Bubandt

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

316

Publisher

Cornell University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801471966

ISBN 13

9780801471964

Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia

By: Nils Bubandt

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Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia

By: Nils Bubandt

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

175

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1317682521

ISBN 13

9781317682523

The Anthropocene and the Undead

Cultural Anxieties in the Contemporary Popular Imagination

By: Simon Bacon

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The Anthropocene and the Undead

Cultural Anxieties in the Contemporary Popular Imagination

By: Simon Bacon

The Anthropocene and the Undead describes how our experience of an increasingly erratic environment and the idea of the undead are more closely linked than the obvious zombie horde signaling the end of the world. In fact, as described here, much of how we understand the anthropocene both conceptually and in practice involves undead entities from the past that will not die, undead traumas that rise up and consume the world, and undead temporalities that can never end. Fifteen original essays by cultural and anthropological experts such as Kyle William Bishop, Nils Bubandt, Johan Höglund, and Steffen Hantke, among others, study the nature of humanity’s ongoing complicated relationship to the environment via the concept of the undead. In doing so, The Anthropocene and the Undead sheds invaluable light on adjacent concepts such as the Capitalocene, Necrocene, Disanthropocene, Post-anthropocene, and the Symbiocene to trace real and imagined trajectories of our more-than-human selves into undead and undying futures.

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Page Count

277

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

1793625832

ISBN 13

9781793625830

Book's by Nils Bubandt

The Empty Seashell

The Empty Seashell

Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia

Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia

The Empty Seashell

The Empty Seashell

Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia

Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia

The Anthropocene and the Undead

The Anthropocene and the Undead

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