Description:
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.
Brief description: Nils Bubandt is Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University. He is the author of Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia and coeditor of several books, including Varieties of Secularism in Asia: Anthropological Explorations of Religion, Politics and the Spiritual.
Review Quotes:
In this intriguing study of witchcraft in a Buli community in Indonesia, [Bunandt] sets out to explore the complex nature of witchcraft in that community as something that exists but is unseen.... Overall, this well-written and welcome book adds to the understanding of witchcraft in anthropology, especially in regard to doubt and modernity.
-- "CHOICE"