Bøker av Nils Bubandt

In a book based on more than three years of fieldwork, 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.

What it is like to live in a world where witches are undeniably real, yet too ephemeral and contradictory to be an object of belief? Nils Bubandt argues that cannibal witches for people in the predominantly Christian community of Buli in the Indonesian province of North Maluku are both corporeally real and fundamentally unknowable.

Indonesia has achieved a successful transition to democracy and yet this 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. It seeks to provide a portrait of Indonesiäs 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 Indonesiäs seemingly peculiar problems with democracy and spirits in fact reflect a set of contradictions within democracy itself.

Indonesia has achieved a successful transition to democracy and yet this 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. It seeks to provide a portrait of Indonesiäs 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 Indonesiäs seemingly peculiar problems with democracy and spirits in fact reflect a set of contradictions within democracy itself.