”Antropocæn” er et problematisk begreb med en problematisk etymologi. Det beskriver et sæt af fæn... more ”Antropocæn” er et problematisk begreb med en problematisk etymologi. Det beskriver et sæt af fænomener, som vi kun lige er begyndt at ane sammenhængene imellem. Ikke desto mindre rummer det også potentiale for tværfagligt samarbejde og mellemartslig sameksistens. Det er lykkes ordet at bryde igennem lydmuren mellem naturvidenskab og samfundsvidenskab, mellem videnskab og kunst, mellem universiteterne og medierne. Dermed synes det at tilbyde, hvad ingen andre ord for nuværende kan: at åbne muligheden for en politisk aktuel, empirisk og tværdisciplinær viden om klimaforandringerne som global krise. I seks teser, der vokser ud af et forskningssamarbejde på Aarhus Universitet mellem biologer og antropologer (AURA), forsvarer Nils Bubandt et såkaldt gennemstreget begreb om Antropocæn og argumenterer for, at vi skal bruge det som udgangspunkt til at undersøge en verden, som ingen af os længere kan genkende....
A Nonsecular Anthropocene: Spirits, Specters and Other Nonhumans in a Time of Environmental Change, 2018
An exploration of the uncanny valleys of the Anthropocene and why they require a nonsecular appro... more An exploration of the uncanny valleys of the Anthropocene and why they require a nonsecular approach.
What is it like to live in a world where cannibal witches are undeniably real, yet too ephemeral ... more What is it like to live in a world where cannibal witches are undeniably real, yet too ephemeral and contradictory to be an object of belief?
The Empty Sea Shell, the first in-depth study of witchcraft (in the strict sense of the term) in Southeast Asia, seeks to answer this question by exploring the contradictory and inaccessible nature of witchcraft on the ‘Spice Island’ of Halmahera in the Indonesian province of North Maluku.
Based on three years of fieldwork, the manuscript argues that cannibal witches (gua in the local Buli language or suanggi in Malukan Malay) for people in the coastal, and predominantly Christian, community of Buli are both corporeally real and fundamentally unknowable. The reality of witches is therefore inherently and always in question. As such, witchcraft can never be an object of belief. Rather, it is an aporia, an 'interminable experience’, that remains continuously in doubt. In a critical engagement with both recent and classic studies of witchcraft, the book employs Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘aporia’ to suggest a novel analytical approach to witchcraft in terms of contradiction, doubt, impossibility, and absence. Such a focus, the book demonstrates, not only forces us to reconsider the conventional idea that witchcraft is a ‘form of belief’; it also turns the relationship between witchcraft and modernity, as it is frequently portrayed in anthropology and history, in its head.
In contrast to most proponents of the modernity of witchcraft approach, the book suggests that witchcraft in Buli is not a means of comprehending, a comment on, or a mechanism for coping with global modernity. Rather, it is witchcraft that is the central question, the existential problem. Witchcraft does not explain anything. It is rather witchcraft that demands – continuously – an explanation. Modernity, for this very reason, is desirable to people in eastern Indonesia, because modernity for over a century has presented itself, in various guises, as a potential but so far unsuccessful answer to the unfathomable problem of the gua.
Indonesia has been an electoral democracy for more than a decade, and yet the political landscape... more 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. Indonesia is simultaneous a country that has achieved a successful transition to democracy and a flawed, illiberal, and predatory democracy.
This book provides a portrait of Indonesia’s contradictory democracy through a series of biographical accounts of political entrepreneurs, from the political ‘periphery’ of North Maluku and the ‘political centre’ of East Java respectively. Each biographical account is focused on one contentious area of democracy in Indonesia – elections, corruption, decentralization, and regional representation. The chapters explore the intimate ways in which the political world and the spirit world are entangled. The core argument of the book is that Indonesia’s seemingly peculiar problems with democracy and spirits in fact reflect a set of contradictions within democracy itself.
The book 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 democracy in Asia and beyond.
Varieties of Secularism is an ethnographically rich, theoretically well-informed, and intellectua... more Varieties of Secularism is an ethnographically rich, theoretically well-informed, and intellectually coherent volume which builds off the work of Talal Asad, Charles Taylor, and others who have engaged the issue of secularism(s) and in socio-political life. The volume seeks to examine theories of secularism/secularity and examine concrete ethnographic cases in order to further the theoretical discussion.
Whereas Taylor’s magisterial work draws up the conditions and problems of a belief in God in Western modernity, it leaves unexplored the challenges posed by the spiritual in modernity outside of the North Atlantic rim. This anthology seeks to begin that task. It does so by suggesting that the kind of secularity described by Taylor is only one amongst others. By attending to the shifting relationship between proper religion and ‘bad faiths’; between politically valorised and embarrassing spiritual phenomena; between the new visibilities and silences of magic, ancestors, and religion in democratic politics, this book seeks to outline the particular formations of secularism that have become possible in Asia from China to Indonesia and from Bahrain to Timor-Leste.
Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropologypresents a series of essay... more Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropologypresents a series of essays from leading anthropologists that critically reexamine the relevance of holism as a foundational tenet of anthropology, and its theoretical and methodological potential in today's world.
- Represents the first volume to consider the modern role of holism as a central anthropological concern across a wide range of anthropological traditions
- Critically examines the past and present predicament of holism and its potential for the renewal of future practice
- Features contributions from leading anthropologists which discuss how anthropology should be re-designed in the context of a changing world
- Challenges many of contemporary anthropology's central methods, theory, and functions.
In recent years, social scientists have sought to show that nature is not an eternal constant but... more In recent years, social scientists have sought to show that nature is not an eternal constant but an intrinsically unstable concept - a historical, cultural and social construct with powerful emotional, moral and political connotations. Imagining Nature sets out to explore some of the implications of and lacunae in this recent push to "denaturalise nature". But rather than asking, What is nature? as many academic writers have been doing, the contributors here ask, How is nature established as an entity? Through what processes and practices does nature achieve reality?
The intention of this article is to discuss the relationship between the processes of fiscal and ... more The intention of this article is to discuss the relationship between the processes of fiscal and political decentralisation, the outbreak of communal violence, and what I call ‘the new politics of tradition ’ in Indonesia. In 1999 under the former President, Jusuf Habibie, the Indonesian parliament (DPR) voted in favour of two laws, No. 22 and 25 of 1999, which promised to leave a significant share of state revenues in the hands of the regional governments. Strongly supported by the liberal ideologues of the IMF and the World Bank, the two laws were envisaged within Indonesia as a necessary step towards devolving the centralised control of New Order patrimonialism and as a way of curbing separatism and demands for autonomy by giving the regional governments the constitutional and financial wherewithal to maintain a considerable degree of self-deter-mination. Decentralisation was in other words touted as the anti-dote to communal violence and separatist tendencies—an anti-dote admini...
A large portion of the inhabitants in Buli, a village on the island of Halmahera (eastern Indones... more A large portion of the inhabitants in Buli, a village on the island of Halmahera (eastern Indonesia), expect globalisation to bring about the destruction of the world. The A. analyses this apocalyptic interpretation of globalisation in order to show how the global is being imagined in different ways at national and local levels in Indonesia. He argues that while concepts like culture, identity and locality have received considerable critical attention within anthropology, the same degree of critical reappraisal has not been extended to the concept of globalisation. Rather than taking globalisation for granted, he contends that the complex diffusion of the concept of globalisation into political rhetoric, popular culture and local discourse calls for detailed, reflexive analyses of the ways in which the global is imagined.
An exploration of the uncanny valleys of the Anthropocene and why they require a nonsecular appro... more An exploration of the uncanny valleys of the Anthropocene and why they require a nonsecular approach.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2019
People on the Indonesian island of Halmahera claim that the hairy and barely human giants that ar... more People on the Indonesian island of Halmahera claim that the hairy and barely human giants that are said to roam the jungle are seventeenth‐century Portuguese colonizers. Employing the feminist concept of ‘inappropriate/d’, I show how the appropriation of the Portuguese wildman into village narratives, regional political history, and national development plans as well as into global discourses of science and media in each case inappropriately collapses the boundaries that the white wildman is implicated in maintaining: those between human and animal, the colonial sovereign and ‘the primitive native’, cryptozoology and the politics of the real. The wild‐yet‐Western figure, I argue, is inappropriate/d – is ‘on the loose’ – across local, regional, and global registers of reality in ways that trouble linear histories of the wildman as fading from reality into allegory. Like so many other monsters of the Anthropocene, the truthlikeness, or verisimilitude, of the white wildman is enhanced ...
”Antropocæn” er et problematisk begreb med en problematisk etymologi. Det beskriver et sæt af fæn... more ”Antropocæn” er et problematisk begreb med en problematisk etymologi. Det beskriver et sæt af fænomener, som vi kun lige er begyndt at ane sammenhængene imellem. Ikke desto mindre rummer det også potentiale for tværfagligt samarbejde og mellemartslig sameksistens. Det er lykkes ordet at bryde igennem lydmuren mellem naturvidenskab og samfundsvidenskab, mellem videnskab og kunst, mellem universiteterne og medierne. Dermed synes det at tilbyde, hvad ingen andre ord for nuværende kan: at åbne muligheden for en politisk aktuel, empirisk og tværdisciplinær viden om klimaforandringerne som global krise. I seks teser, der vokser ud af et forskningssamarbejde på Aarhus Universitet mellem biologer og antropologer (AURA), forsvarer Nils Bubandt et såkaldt gennemstreget begreb om Antropocæn og argumenterer for, at vi skal bruge det som udgangspunkt til at undersøge en verden, som ingen af os længere kan genkende....
A Nonsecular Anthropocene: Spirits, Specters and Other Nonhumans in a Time of Environmental Change, 2018
An exploration of the uncanny valleys of the Anthropocene and why they require a nonsecular appro... more An exploration of the uncanny valleys of the Anthropocene and why they require a nonsecular approach.
What is it like to live in a world where cannibal witches are undeniably real, yet too ephemeral ... more What is it like to live in a world where cannibal witches are undeniably real, yet too ephemeral and contradictory to be an object of belief?
The Empty Sea Shell, the first in-depth study of witchcraft (in the strict sense of the term) in Southeast Asia, seeks to answer this question by exploring the contradictory and inaccessible nature of witchcraft on the ‘Spice Island’ of Halmahera in the Indonesian province of North Maluku.
Based on three years of fieldwork, the manuscript argues that cannibal witches (gua in the local Buli language or suanggi in Malukan Malay) for people in the coastal, and predominantly Christian, community of Buli are both corporeally real and fundamentally unknowable. The reality of witches is therefore inherently and always in question. As such, witchcraft can never be an object of belief. Rather, it is an aporia, an 'interminable experience’, that remains continuously in doubt. In a critical engagement with both recent and classic studies of witchcraft, the book employs Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘aporia’ to suggest a novel analytical approach to witchcraft in terms of contradiction, doubt, impossibility, and absence. Such a focus, the book demonstrates, not only forces us to reconsider the conventional idea that witchcraft is a ‘form of belief’; it also turns the relationship between witchcraft and modernity, as it is frequently portrayed in anthropology and history, in its head.
In contrast to most proponents of the modernity of witchcraft approach, the book suggests that witchcraft in Buli is not a means of comprehending, a comment on, or a mechanism for coping with global modernity. Rather, it is witchcraft that is the central question, the existential problem. Witchcraft does not explain anything. It is rather witchcraft that demands – continuously – an explanation. Modernity, for this very reason, is desirable to people in eastern Indonesia, because modernity for over a century has presented itself, in various guises, as a potential but so far unsuccessful answer to the unfathomable problem of the gua.
Indonesia has been an electoral democracy for more than a decade, and yet the political landscape... more 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. Indonesia is simultaneous a country that has achieved a successful transition to democracy and a flawed, illiberal, and predatory democracy.
This book provides a portrait of Indonesia’s contradictory democracy through a series of biographical accounts of political entrepreneurs, from the political ‘periphery’ of North Maluku and the ‘political centre’ of East Java respectively. Each biographical account is focused on one contentious area of democracy in Indonesia – elections, corruption, decentralization, and regional representation. The chapters explore the intimate ways in which the political world and the spirit world are entangled. The core argument of the book is that Indonesia’s seemingly peculiar problems with democracy and spirits in fact reflect a set of contradictions within democracy itself.
The book 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 democracy in Asia and beyond.
Varieties of Secularism is an ethnographically rich, theoretically well-informed, and intellectua... more Varieties of Secularism is an ethnographically rich, theoretically well-informed, and intellectually coherent volume which builds off the work of Talal Asad, Charles Taylor, and others who have engaged the issue of secularism(s) and in socio-political life. The volume seeks to examine theories of secularism/secularity and examine concrete ethnographic cases in order to further the theoretical discussion.
Whereas Taylor’s magisterial work draws up the conditions and problems of a belief in God in Western modernity, it leaves unexplored the challenges posed by the spiritual in modernity outside of the North Atlantic rim. This anthology seeks to begin that task. It does so by suggesting that the kind of secularity described by Taylor is only one amongst others. By attending to the shifting relationship between proper religion and ‘bad faiths’; between politically valorised and embarrassing spiritual phenomena; between the new visibilities and silences of magic, ancestors, and religion in democratic politics, this book seeks to outline the particular formations of secularism that have become possible in Asia from China to Indonesia and from Bahrain to Timor-Leste.
Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropologypresents a series of essay... more Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropologypresents a series of essays from leading anthropologists that critically reexamine the relevance of holism as a foundational tenet of anthropology, and its theoretical and methodological potential in today's world.
- Represents the first volume to consider the modern role of holism as a central anthropological concern across a wide range of anthropological traditions
- Critically examines the past and present predicament of holism and its potential for the renewal of future practice
- Features contributions from leading anthropologists which discuss how anthropology should be re-designed in the context of a changing world
- Challenges many of contemporary anthropology's central methods, theory, and functions.
In recent years, social scientists have sought to show that nature is not an eternal constant but... more In recent years, social scientists have sought to show that nature is not an eternal constant but an intrinsically unstable concept - a historical, cultural and social construct with powerful emotional, moral and political connotations. Imagining Nature sets out to explore some of the implications of and lacunae in this recent push to "denaturalise nature". But rather than asking, What is nature? as many academic writers have been doing, the contributors here ask, How is nature established as an entity? Through what processes and practices does nature achieve reality?
The intention of this article is to discuss the relationship between the processes of fiscal and ... more The intention of this article is to discuss the relationship between the processes of fiscal and political decentralisation, the outbreak of communal violence, and what I call ‘the new politics of tradition ’ in Indonesia. In 1999 under the former President, Jusuf Habibie, the Indonesian parliament (DPR) voted in favour of two laws, No. 22 and 25 of 1999, which promised to leave a significant share of state revenues in the hands of the regional governments. Strongly supported by the liberal ideologues of the IMF and the World Bank, the two laws were envisaged within Indonesia as a necessary step towards devolving the centralised control of New Order patrimonialism and as a way of curbing separatism and demands for autonomy by giving the regional governments the constitutional and financial wherewithal to maintain a considerable degree of self-deter-mination. Decentralisation was in other words touted as the anti-dote to communal violence and separatist tendencies—an anti-dote admini...
A large portion of the inhabitants in Buli, a village on the island of Halmahera (eastern Indones... more A large portion of the inhabitants in Buli, a village on the island of Halmahera (eastern Indonesia), expect globalisation to bring about the destruction of the world. The A. analyses this apocalyptic interpretation of globalisation in order to show how the global is being imagined in different ways at national and local levels in Indonesia. He argues that while concepts like culture, identity and locality have received considerable critical attention within anthropology, the same degree of critical reappraisal has not been extended to the concept of globalisation. Rather than taking globalisation for granted, he contends that the complex diffusion of the concept of globalisation into political rhetoric, popular culture and local discourse calls for detailed, reflexive analyses of the ways in which the global is imagined.
An exploration of the uncanny valleys of the Anthropocene and why they require a nonsecular appro... more An exploration of the uncanny valleys of the Anthropocene and why they require a nonsecular approach.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2019
People on the Indonesian island of Halmahera claim that the hairy and barely human giants that ar... more People on the Indonesian island of Halmahera claim that the hairy and barely human giants that are said to roam the jungle are seventeenth‐century Portuguese colonizers. Employing the feminist concept of ‘inappropriate/d’, I show how the appropriation of the Portuguese wildman into village narratives, regional political history, and national development plans as well as into global discourses of science and media in each case inappropriately collapses the boundaries that the white wildman is implicated in maintaining: those between human and animal, the colonial sovereign and ‘the primitive native’, cryptozoology and the politics of the real. The wild‐yet‐Western figure, I argue, is inappropriate/d – is ‘on the loose’ – across local, regional, and global registers of reality in ways that trouble linear histories of the wildman as fading from reality into allegory. Like so many other monsters of the Anthropocene, the truthlikeness, or verisimilitude, of the white wildman is enhanced ...
Response to HAU Symposium on Bubandt, Nils. 2014. The empty seashell: Witchcraft and doubt on an ... more Response to HAU Symposium on Bubandt, Nils. 2014. The empty seashell: Witchcraft and doubt on an Indonesian island. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
alternative perspectives, as promised in the title. Instead of ‘rethinking’ India, the authors he... more alternative perspectives, as promised in the title. Instead of ‘rethinking’ India, the authors heavily depend on existing well known and frequently cited literature, with little input of their own. What is also jarring is the inclusion of essays on issues such as the theological teachings of Sankara and Longchenpa and the prevalence of corruption in Bangladesh, which hardly fit well within the overall thematic scheme of the book.
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Books by Nils Bubandt
The Empty Sea Shell, the first in-depth study of witchcraft (in the strict sense of the term) in Southeast Asia, seeks to answer this question by exploring the contradictory and inaccessible nature of witchcraft on the ‘Spice Island’ of Halmahera in the Indonesian province of North Maluku.
Based on three years of fieldwork, the manuscript argues that cannibal witches (gua in the local Buli language or suanggi in Malukan Malay) for people in the coastal, and predominantly Christian, community of Buli are both corporeally real and fundamentally unknowable. The reality of witches is therefore inherently and always in question. As such, witchcraft can never be an object of belief. Rather, it is an aporia, an 'interminable experience’, that remains continuously in doubt. In a critical engagement with both recent and classic studies of witchcraft, the book employs Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘aporia’ to suggest a novel analytical approach to witchcraft in terms of contradiction, doubt, impossibility, and absence. Such a focus, the book demonstrates, not only forces us to reconsider the conventional idea that witchcraft is a ‘form of belief’; it also turns the relationship between witchcraft and modernity, as it is frequently portrayed in anthropology and history, in its head.
In contrast to most proponents of the modernity of witchcraft approach, the book suggests that witchcraft in Buli is not a means of comprehending, a comment on, or a mechanism for coping with global modernity. Rather, it is witchcraft that is the central question, the existential problem. Witchcraft does not explain anything. It is rather witchcraft that demands – continuously – an explanation. Modernity, for this very reason, is desirable to people in eastern Indonesia, because modernity for over a century has presented itself, in various guises, as a potential but so far unsuccessful answer to the unfathomable problem of the gua.
This book provides a portrait of Indonesia’s contradictory democracy through a series of biographical accounts of political entrepreneurs, from the political ‘periphery’ of North Maluku and the ‘political centre’ of East Java respectively. Each biographical account is focused on one contentious area of democracy in Indonesia – elections, corruption, decentralization, and regional representation. The chapters explore the intimate ways in which the political world and the spirit world are entangled. The core argument of the book is that Indonesia’s seemingly peculiar problems with democracy and spirits in fact reflect a set of contradictions within democracy itself.
The book 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 democracy in Asia and beyond.
Whereas Taylor’s magisterial work draws up the conditions and problems of a belief in God in Western modernity, it leaves unexplored the challenges posed by the spiritual in modernity outside of the North Atlantic rim. This anthology seeks to begin that task. It does so by suggesting that the kind of secularity described by Taylor is only one amongst others. By attending to the shifting relationship between proper religion and ‘bad faiths’; between politically valorised and embarrassing spiritual phenomena; between the new visibilities and silences of magic, ancestors, and religion in democratic politics, this book seeks to outline the particular formations of secularism that have become possible in Asia from China to Indonesia and from Bahrain to Timor-Leste.
- Represents the first volume to consider the modern role of holism as a central anthropological concern across a wide range of anthropological traditions
- Critically examines the past and present predicament of holism and its potential for the renewal of future practice
- Features contributions from leading anthropologists which discuss how anthropology should be re-designed in the context of a changing world
- Challenges many of contemporary anthropology's central methods, theory, and functions.
Papers by Nils Bubandt
The Empty Sea Shell, the first in-depth study of witchcraft (in the strict sense of the term) in Southeast Asia, seeks to answer this question by exploring the contradictory and inaccessible nature of witchcraft on the ‘Spice Island’ of Halmahera in the Indonesian province of North Maluku.
Based on three years of fieldwork, the manuscript argues that cannibal witches (gua in the local Buli language or suanggi in Malukan Malay) for people in the coastal, and predominantly Christian, community of Buli are both corporeally real and fundamentally unknowable. The reality of witches is therefore inherently and always in question. As such, witchcraft can never be an object of belief. Rather, it is an aporia, an 'interminable experience’, that remains continuously in doubt. In a critical engagement with both recent and classic studies of witchcraft, the book employs Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘aporia’ to suggest a novel analytical approach to witchcraft in terms of contradiction, doubt, impossibility, and absence. Such a focus, the book demonstrates, not only forces us to reconsider the conventional idea that witchcraft is a ‘form of belief’; it also turns the relationship between witchcraft and modernity, as it is frequently portrayed in anthropology and history, in its head.
In contrast to most proponents of the modernity of witchcraft approach, the book suggests that witchcraft in Buli is not a means of comprehending, a comment on, or a mechanism for coping with global modernity. Rather, it is witchcraft that is the central question, the existential problem. Witchcraft does not explain anything. It is rather witchcraft that demands – continuously – an explanation. Modernity, for this very reason, is desirable to people in eastern Indonesia, because modernity for over a century has presented itself, in various guises, as a potential but so far unsuccessful answer to the unfathomable problem of the gua.
This book provides a portrait of Indonesia’s contradictory democracy through a series of biographical accounts of political entrepreneurs, from the political ‘periphery’ of North Maluku and the ‘political centre’ of East Java respectively. Each biographical account is focused on one contentious area of democracy in Indonesia – elections, corruption, decentralization, and regional representation. The chapters explore the intimate ways in which the political world and the spirit world are entangled. The core argument of the book is that Indonesia’s seemingly peculiar problems with democracy and spirits in fact reflect a set of contradictions within democracy itself.
The book 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 democracy in Asia and beyond.
Whereas Taylor’s magisterial work draws up the conditions and problems of a belief in God in Western modernity, it leaves unexplored the challenges posed by the spiritual in modernity outside of the North Atlantic rim. This anthology seeks to begin that task. It does so by suggesting that the kind of secularity described by Taylor is only one amongst others. By attending to the shifting relationship between proper religion and ‘bad faiths’; between politically valorised and embarrassing spiritual phenomena; between the new visibilities and silences of magic, ancestors, and religion in democratic politics, this book seeks to outline the particular formations of secularism that have become possible in Asia from China to Indonesia and from Bahrain to Timor-Leste.
- Represents the first volume to consider the modern role of holism as a central anthropological concern across a wide range of anthropological traditions
- Critically examines the past and present predicament of holism and its potential for the renewal of future practice
- Features contributions from leading anthropologists which discuss how anthropology should be re-designed in the context of a changing world
- Challenges many of contemporary anthropology's central methods, theory, and functions.