N Bubandt
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 13084 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | N Bubandt |
| NOMBRES | N |
| APELLIDO | Bubandt |
| FIRMA | BUBANDT N |
| AFILIACIONES | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1655-6727 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 47 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 910 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 47 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1998 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Shamanism, Cheesecake, and Other Weird Theories
Drawing in Cosmopolitics
Known in scuba circles as a world-class dive site and in conservation as a marine protected area with record-breaking biodiversity, the coral reefs of Raja Ampat in the Indonesian province of Southwest Papua are also the dwelling place for a catalogue of spiritual beings who take the shape of animals as well as foreigners. Using the method of drawing elicitation, I show how this cosmopolitical (bio)diversity operates across beings and registers t…
Infrastructural cascades
Infrastructure projects are a hallmark of the industrial world and a driving force of the Anthropocene. This article develops an approach for studying the historical emergence and rippling ecological effects of infrastructure within an analytical frame that we call infrastructural cascades (IC). Drawing on the notion of trophic cascade from ecology, we argue that infrastructures should be conceptualized as nodes in metabolic capitalist systems an…
Trance Against the Machine
This article explores the musical performances, aesthetics, and multi-situated reception of Indonesian electronic dance music in Europe and Indonesia, focusing on the duo Gabber Modus Operandi (GMO). Since their first international tour titled “Trance Against the Machine” in 2019, the duo has gained significant attention, especially in Europe, because they are seen as part of a seismic shift in the electronic dance continuum. The article critical…
Anthropologists Are Talking About Ecography
Philosophy on fieldwork case studies in anthropological analysis
How do we teach analysis in anthropology and other field-based sciences? How can we engage analytically and interrogatively with philosophical ideas and concepts in our fieldwork? And how can students learn to engage critical ideas from philosophy to better understand the worlds they study? Philosophy on Fieldwork provides "show-don't-tell" answers to these questions. In twenty-six "master class" chapters, philosophy meets anthropological critiqu…
Anthropology and Philosophy
The present book is no ordinary anthology, but rather a workroom in which anthropologists and philosophers initiate a dialogue on trust and hope, two important topics for both fields of study. The book combines work between scholars from different universities in the U.S. and Denmark. Thus, besides bringing the two disciplines in dialogue, it also cuts across differences in national contexts and academic style. The interdisciplinary efforts of th…
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
Koralteori, eller hvad koraller kanlære antropologien om multispecies socialitet
Sammendrag Stefan Helmreich har foreslået at se koraller som harawayske figurationer; det vil sige som ”sciencefiktionelle” skabninger, der vækker til teoretisk eftertanke. Denne artikel udforsker, hvad der sker, når man kombinerer koraller som en videnskabelig figuration med koraller som etnografisk teori. Inspireret af feltarbejde på et koralrev i den indonesiske provins Vest-Papua samt af indsigter fra marinbiologien, vil jeg vise, hvordan kor…
Of wildmen and white men
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 coll…
Patchy Anthropocene
The Anthropocene deserves spatial as well as temporal analysis. "Patchy Anthropocene" is a conceptual tool for noticing landscape structure, with special attention to what we call "modular simplifications" and "feral proliferations." This introduction suggests guidelines for thinking structurally about more-than-human social relations; "structure" here emerges from phenomenological attunements to specific multispecies histories, rather than being…
Wasteland Ecologies
On the western edge of the former brown coal mines in Søby, an area in central Jutland in Denmark that is now protected as a natural and cultural heritage site, a public eyesore hides behind dirt mounds and fences: the waste disposal and recycling facility known as AFLD Fasterholt. Established in the 1970s, when prevailing perceptions were that the entire mining area was a polluted wasteland, the AFLD Fasterholt waste and recycling plant has sinc…
Feral Dynamics of Post-Industrial Ruin
Anthropologists Are Talking - About Capitalism, Ecology, and Apocalypse
Capitalist enterprise is transforming the world, reshaping the registers of what Felix Guattari (2000) has called the three ecologies: namely those of the environment, of social relations, and of h
A second look at invisibility
Spirits as technology
From Head-hunter to Organ-thief
In the last few years, occult head-hunters - elusive figures that have haunted communities and the public imagination in Indonesia since at least colonial times - appear to have adopted a novel and troubling tactic. Instead of decapitating their victims and using the heads in construction rituals as they are said to have conventionally done, head-hunters are now allegedly harvesting their victims' organs to sell them on the global market of body …
When in doubt
Response to Hau Symposium on Bubandt, Nils. 2014. The empty seashell: Witchcraft and doubt on an Indonesian island. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press
The Empty Seashell
Dyrevelfærdsstaten
Denne artikel er et forsøg på at koble analysen af velfærdsstatens historie sammen med dyrevelfærdens historie. Vi tager etnografisk udgangspunkt i den danske produktionsgris og demonstrerer, hvordan grisens velfærd, i stalden og i den offentlige debat, historisk afspejler udviklingen og afviklingen af den nordiske velfærdsmodel. Med udgangspunkt i grisen som en 'figuration' -en narrativ figur, der accentuerer aspekter af livet, som ellers ignore…
Anthropologists Are Talking - About the Anthropocene
Love it or hate it, the Anthropocene is emerging as an inescapable word for (and of) the current moment. Popularized by Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen, Anthropocene names an age in which human in
The Empty Seashell
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 …
Less Than One But More Than Many
How might one responsibly review a field just coming into being-such as that provoked by the term Anthropocene? In this article, we argue for two strategies. First, working from the premise that the Anthropocene field is best understood within its emergence, we review conferences rather than publications. In conference performances, we glimpse the themes and tensions of a field-to-come. Second, we interpret Anthropocene as a science-fiction conce…
The Dark Side of Empathy
This article challenges the tendency, both academic and popular, to assign empathy the status of a virtue. The widespread inclination to associate empathy with the morally and socially 'good'-with compassion, understanding, cultural bonding, and non-violent sociality-ignores what we propose to call the 'dark side of empathy': that is, the multiple ways in which empathy is routinely deployed to manipulate, seduce, deceive, and dehumanize others by…
Introduction
Anthropologists Are Talking - About the Anthropocene
Love it or hate it, the Anthropocene is emerging as an inescapable word for (and of) the current moment. Popularized by Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen, Anthropocene names an age in which human in
Patchy Anthropocene
The Anthropocene deserves spatial as well as temporal analysis. "Patchy Anthropocene" is a conceptual tool for noticing landscape structure, with special attention to what we call "modular simplifications" and "feral proliferations." This introduction suggests guidelines for thinking structurally about more-than-human social relations; "structure" here emerges from phenomenological attunements to specific multispecies histories, rather than being…
Vernacular Security
Tracing the political history of the concept of ‘security’ through a variety of global, national and regional inflections, this article argues for the analytical usefulness of the concept of ‘vernacular security’. Entailed by this concept is a proposal to treat ‘security’ as a socially situated and discursively defined practice open to comparison and politically contextualized explication, rather than merely an analytical category that needs refi…
The Dark Side of Empathy
This article challenges the tendency, both academic and popular, to assign empathy the status of a virtue. The widespread inclination to associate empathy with the morally and socially 'good'-with compassion, understanding, cultural bonding, and non-violent sociality-ignores what we propose to call the 'dark side of empathy': that is, the multiple ways in which empathy is routinely deployed to manipulate, seduce, deceive, and dehumanize others by…
Less Than One But More Than Many
How might one responsibly review a field just coming into being-such as that provoked by the term Anthropocene? In this article, we argue for two strategies. First, working from the premise that the Anthropocene field is best understood within its emergence, we review conferences rather than publications. In conference performances, we glimpse the themes and tensions of a field-to-come. Second, we interpret Anthropocene as a science-fiction conce…
From the Enemy's Point of View
This essay looks at the social, aesthetic, and violent life of fake documents. It suggests that fakes and forgeries, both as a general phenomenon and in the specific context of communal violence, offer a useful analytical site for an investigation into the relationship between empathy, power, and authenticity. Based on an analysis of a series of false letters that appeared in the lead-up to violent conflict in Indonesia, I approach the politics a…
Anthropologists Are Talking - About Capitalism, Ecology, and Apocalypse
Capitalist enterprise is transforming the world, reshaping the registers of what Felix Guattari (2000) has called the three ecologies: namely those of the environment, of social relations, and of h
Sorcery, corruption, and the dangers of democracy in Indonesia
Magic is the continuation of politics by other means. This, at least, has been the case in North Maluku since the political reshuffle that followed the fall of Suharto and the implementation of decentralization in Indonesia. The strategies pursued by the regional elite to obtain lucrative positions in the new landscape opened up by regional autonomy are thus seen to be thwarted by sorcery from political rivals. Following the life and death of Muh…
The odour of things
Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of calls for anthropology to devote more attention to non-visual modes of perception. This paper explores the sense and symbolism of smell in Buli, a village in eastern Indonesia, to argue that smell is part of an ontology that catches Buli people in a malaise of their own. 'Bad' smell attests to an ambiguous moral order that can be traced across myth, ritual and everyday life. Ambiguity is ever-pr…
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
Rumors, Pamphlets, and the Politics of Paranoia in Indonesia
This paper analyzes the role of rumor as a mobilizing agent in communal violence. Taking as its point of departure a series of violent clashes in North Maluku in Indonesia during 1999 and 2000, it shows that rumor often took a written form. Outlining the contested origins and composite effects of a particular rumor—as it appeared on the political scene in leaflet form—I argue that these “hardcopy rumors” became social agents in the paranoid polit…
Interview with an ancestor
A B S T R A C T ■ This article explores the relationship between spirit possession, politics and subjectivity. Based on an account of two possession ceremonies on the island of Ternate in eastern Indonesia, I show that as spirits are being conjured up for political reasons, they partake in a spiritual politics in which they are both instruments and actors. Methodologically, I use these accounts to suggest the need to treat spirits as informants. …
The Empty Seashell
A second look at invisibility
A Psychology of Ghosts
The afterlife is currently being psychologised on a global scale. Based on a comparison of recent transformations in the reality of ghosts in eastern Indonesia and in contemporary Hollywood ghost series, this paper explores the links between spirits and changing conceptions of self in a global world. In Indonesia, ghosts are becoming traumatised, while in the West spirits increasingly struggle with emotional problems. In different ways, the paper…
From Head-hunter to Organ-thief
In the last few years, occult head-hunters - elusive figures that have haunted communities and the public imagination in Indonesia since at least colonial times - appear to have adopted a novel and troubling tactic. Instead of decapitating their victims and using the heads in construction rituals as they are said to have conventionally done, head-hunters are now allegedly harvesting their victims' organs to sell them on the global market of body …
Of wildmen and white men
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 coll…
When in doubt
Response to Hau Symposium on Bubandt, Nils. 2014. The empty seashell: Witchcraft and doubt on an Indonesian island. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press
Spirits as technology
Anthropology and Philosophy
The present book is no ordinary anthology, but rather a workroom in which anthropologists and philosophers initiate a dialogue on trust and hope, two important topics for both fields of study. The book combines work between scholars from different universities in the U.S. and Denmark. Thus, besides bringing the two disciplines in dialogue, it also cuts across differences in national contexts and academic style. The interdisciplinary efforts of th…
Anthropologists Are Talking About Ecography
Dyrevelfærdsstaten
Denne artikel er et forsøg på at koble analysen af velfærdsstatens historie sammen med dyrevelfærdens historie. Vi tager etnografisk udgangspunkt i den danske produktionsgris og demonstrerer, hvordan grisens velfærd, i stalden og i den offentlige debat, historisk afspejler udviklingen og afviklingen af den nordiske velfærdsmodel. Med udgangspunkt i grisen som en 'figuration' -en narrativ figur, der accentuerer aspekter af livet, som ellers ignore…
Genesis in Buli
Christianity and local ontology in the North Malukan village of Buli intersect in surprising ways that upset conventional ideas about tradition and modernity. The poetics and cultural politics of blood, as these emerge in an idiosyncratic telling of Genesis, attest to a paradoxical modernity. In this ambivalent modern imaginary, traditional ontology frequently structures pretensions to being modern, while modern sensibilities form the basis of os…
The odour of things
Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of calls for anthropology to devote more attention to non-visual modes of perception. This paper explores the sense and symbolism of smell in Buli, a village in eastern Indonesia, to argue that smell is part of an ontology that catches Buli people in a malaise of their own. 'Bad' smell attests to an ambiguous moral order that can be traced across myth, ritual and everyday life. Ambiguity is ever-pr…
Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique
Genesis in Buli
Christianity and local ontology in the North Malukan village of Buli intersect in surprising ways that upset conventional ideas about tradition and modernity. The poetics and cultural politics of blood, as these emerge in an idiosyncratic telling of Genesis, attest to a paradoxical modernity. In this ambivalent modern imaginary, traditional ontology frequently structures pretensions to being modern, while modern sensibilities form the basis of os…
Vernacular Security
Tracing the political history of the concept of ‘security’ through a variety of global, national and regional inflections, this article argues for the analytical usefulness of the concept of ‘vernacular security’. Entailed by this concept is a proposal to treat ‘security’ as a socially situated and discursively defined practice open to comparison and politically contextualized explication, rather than merely an analytical category that needs refi…
Speaking of Places
AustralianNational University.It is around these core papers that the rest of the volume has slowly taken shape
Sorcery, corruption, and the dangers of democracy in Indonesia
Magic is the continuation of politics by other means. This, at least, has been the case in North Maluku since the political reshuffle that followed the fall of Suharto and the implementation of decentralization in Indonesia. The strategies pursued by the regional elite to obtain lucrative positions in the new landscape opened up by regional autonomy are thus seen to be thwarted by sorcery from political rivals. Following the life and death of Muh…
Rumors, Pamphlets, and the Politics of Paranoia in Indonesia
This paper analyzes the role of rumor as a mobilizing agent in communal violence. Taking as its point of departure a series of violent clashes in North Maluku in Indonesia during 1999 and 2000, it shows that rumor often took a written form. Outlining the contested origins and composite effects of a particular rumor—as it appeared on the political scene in leaflet form—I argue that these “hardcopy rumors” became social agents in the paranoid polit…
Gold for a Golden Age
Interview with an ancestor
A B S T R A C T ■ This article explores the relationship between spirit possession, politics and subjectivity. Based on an account of two possession ceremonies on the island of Ternate in eastern Indonesia, I show that as spirits are being conjured up for political reasons, they partake in a spiritual politics in which they are both instruments and actors. Methodologically, I use these accounts to suggest the need to treat spirits as informants. …
From the Enemy's Point of View
This essay looks at the social, aesthetic, and violent life of fake documents. It suggests that fakes and forgeries, both as a general phenomenon and in the specific context of communal violence, offer a useful analytical site for an investigation into the relationship between empathy, power, and authenticity. Based on an analysis of a series of false letters that appeared in the lead-up to violent conflict in Indonesia, I approach the politics a…
Anthropology and the Predicaments of Holism
This chapter contains sections titled: Why Bother With Holism? Holism in Anthropological Self-Representation The Abject Heart of Anthropology A Brief History of Holism The Scope of the Book The Structure of the Book: Four Kinds of Experiments in Holism References
Contemporary religiosities
Introduction: Religiosities toward a Future-in Pursuit of the New Millennium Bruce Kapferer, Annelin Eriksen, and Kari Telle Chapter 1. The Politics of Conviction: Faith on the Neo-liberal Frontier Jean Comaroff Chapter 2. Strategic Secularism: Bible Advocacy in England Matthew Engelke Chapter 3. Pentecostal Networks and the Spirit of Globalization: On the Social Productivity of Ritual Forms Joel Robbins Chapter 4. Healing the Nation: In Search o…
Tiltrædelsesforelæsninger
Nils Bubandt. Demokrato som selvfølge: Hvad kan antropologi sige om globaliseringen af folkestyret? Andreas Roepstorff. Eksperimentel AntropologiRane Willerslev. Det guddommelige blik: En analyse af 'Den Dansende Troldmand
Varieties of Secularism in Asia
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…
A Psychology of Ghosts
The afterlife is currently being psychologised on a global scale. Based on a comparison of recent transformations in the reality of ghosts in eastern Indonesia and in contemporary Hollywood ghost series, this paper explores the links between spirits and changing conceptions of self in a global world. In Indonesia, ghosts are becoming traumatised, while in the West spirits increasingly struggle with emotional problems. In different ways, the paper…
Pigs and profits
Farm animals live and die as part of a food production system rich in paradoxes. One central paradox of modern farming revolves around the classic anthropological opposition between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Inspired by Bruno Latour's diagnosis of the processes of purification and mediation that attend the separation between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in the modern constitution, we trace how this paradox plays itself out on Danish pig farms. The paper …
Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia
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 imagin…
Menuju Sebuah Politik Tradisi Yang Baru? Desentralisasi, Konflik, dan Adat di Wilayah Indonesia Timur
The intention of this article is to discuss the relationship between the processes of fiscal and political decentralization, the outbreak of communal violence, and what I call 'the new politics of tradition' in Indonesia. In 1999 under the 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 government…
Rice as Symbolic Capital
Dengan menggunakan konsep Pierre Bourdieu mengenai 'modal simbolis' ( symbolic capital ), tulisan ini mengkaji perubahan pertanian di salah satu pemukiman transmigrasi di Pulau Halmahera, Maluku Utara. Pada musim kemarau panjang tahun 1997 para transmigran dari Desa Bicoli di Halmahera Tengah mulai menanam padi untuk pertama kali. Merekalah kelompok transmigran satu-satunya di antara kelompok-kelompok transmigran lokal di daerah transmigrasi yang…
Towards a New Politics of Tradition? Decentralisation, Conflict, and Adat in Eastern Indonesia
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 go…
Di Pinggir Konflik
"Konflik-konflik berdarah yang menyertai Indonesia setelah jatuhnya Orde Baru cenderung terjadi di Indonesia bagian Timur, dengan pengecualian daerah Aceh. Saat ini banyak analisis akademis, baik dalam bahasa Indonesia maupun Inggris yang telah mulai menguraikan aspek-aspek politis, sosial dan diskursif dari konflik-konflik di Timor Timur, Maluku, Maluku Utara, Poso, Kalimantan dan Papua. Penelitian-penelitian ini telah mulai meninggalkan penelaa…
Conspiracy Theories, Apocalyptic Narratives and the Discursive Construction of ‘the Violence in Maluku’
Dalam mengulas kekerasan di Maluku, penjelasan-penjelasan yang beredar di media cetak dan eletronik cenderung memfokus pada upaya pelaku-pelaku politik nasional dan regional dalam melakukan pemanipulasian dan penghasutan untuk melakukan kekerasan. Teori-teori ini, yang disebut penulisnya dengan 'instrumentalis' ( instrumentalist ), menyarankan bahwa kekerasan di Maluku dipandang sebagai hasil dari 'instrumen' permainan dan tipu daya politik. Moti…
The Empty Seashell
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 …
Less Than One But More Than Many
How might one responsibly review a field just coming into being-such as that provoked by the term Anthropocene? In this article, we argue for two strategies. First, working from the premise that the Anthropocene field is best understood within its emergence, we review conferences rather than publications. In conference performances, we glimpse the themes and tensions of a field-to-come. Second, we interpret Anthropocene as a science-fiction conce…
The Dark Side of Empathy
This article challenges the tendency, both academic and popular, to assign empathy the status of a virtue. The widespread inclination to associate empathy with the morally and socially 'good'-with compassion, understanding, cultural bonding, and non-violent sociality-ignores what we propose to call the 'dark side of empathy': that is, the multiple ways in which empathy is routinely deployed to manipulate, seduce, deceive, and dehumanize others by…
Philosophy (25 obras) · Sociology (25 obras) · Political science (20 obras) · Asian Studies and History (18 obras) · History (17 obras) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (16 obras) · Philosophy (16 obras) · Politics (14 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Epistemology (11 obras)