1st Edition
Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia
Introduction: Politics with Spirits
Chapter 1. The Kyai: Spirits and Corruption
Chapter 2. The Bloggers: Spirits, Embarrassment, and the Battle for Islam
Chapter 3. The Politician: Sorcery and Decentralization
Chapter 4. The Sultan: Elections, Ancestors, and the Law
Chapter 5. The Prophet: World Renewal and the Ghost of a President
Conclusion: Democracy from a Spirit Point of View
Biography
Nils Bubandt is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Culture and Society at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork on politics, witchcraft, and magic in Indonesia since 1991. Co-editor of Varieties of Secularism in Asia: Anthropological Explorations of Politics, Religion, and the Spiritual (2012) and of Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology (2011), his monograph entitled The Empty Sea Shell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island is forthcoming.
"Nils Bubandt has hit upon an ingenious idea...The brilliance of this book stems from Bubandt’s realisation that studying these interconnections can transform our understandings of both politics and spirits. He has set an important agenda for future studies of Indonesian politics."
Nicholas Long, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Inside Indonesia 121: Jul-Sep 2015'This is a truly inspiring book, providing a fresh take on Indonesian politics and the anthropology of politics and religion. The text weaves together the spirit world with politics, corruption and the execution of law, without treating spirits as an epi-phenomenon of the latter but as a formative power.'
JÖRGEN HELLMAN, Gothenburg University, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
