Nils Bubandt

Nils Bubandt is a Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Ethnos. He is the author of Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia (Routledge, 2014) which analyzes politics and corruption discourses in Indonesia in light of widespread beliefs in (as well as disbelief about) the reality of spirits, and of The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island (Cornell University Press, 2014) which suggests doubt – a key feature of conspiracy theories – as the analytical fulcrum for understanding witchcraft.

Publications dealing with conspiracy and paranoia in political discourse include:
“Rumors, Pamphlets, and the Politics of Paranoia in Indonesia,” in Journal of Asian Studies.
“Sorcery, Corruption and the Dangers of Democracy in Indonesia,” in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
“From the Enemy’s Point of View: Violence, Empathy, and the Ethnography of Fakes,” in Cultural Anthropology.
(with Rane Willerslev) “The Dark Side of Empathy: Mimesis, Deception, and the Magic of Alterity,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History.

Nils Bubandt currently works on doubt and conspiratorial imaginaries in the Anthropocene as part of the research project Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA). For more infomation on the project, click here.

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