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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 Indonesia's 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 Indonesia's seemingly peculiar problems with democracy and spirits in fact reflect a set of contradictions within democracy itself.
List of contents
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
About the author
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.
