Nils Bubandt

The odour of things: Smell and the cultural elaboration of disgust in Eastern Indonesia

Abstract Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of calls for anthropology to devote more attention to non‐visual modes of perception. Frequently, the implicit suggestion of these calls has been that the acknowledgement of different ways of organising the senses could help us escape the supposed malaise of modern ‘ocular‐centrism ‘. This paper explores the sense and symbolism of smell in Buli, a village in eastern Indonesia, to argue that smell is part of an ontology that catches Buli people in a malaise of their own. ‘Bad’ smell attests to an ambiguous moral order that can be traced across myth, ritual and everyday life. Ambiguity is ever‐present because ‘bad’ or disgusting smells destabilise the very conceptual order they also help support. The analysis of smells as they relate to local notions of disgust is therefore suggested as an alternative way to conceptualise the contradictory nature of power.

Anthropologists Are Talking – About the Anthropocene

Love it or hate it, the Anthropocene is emerging as an inescapable word for (and of) the current moment. Popularized by Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen, Anthropocene names an age in which human in...

Rumors, Pamphlets, and the Politics of Paranoia in Indonesia

This paper analyzes the role of rumor as a mobilizing agent in communal violence. Taking as its point of departure a series of violent clashes in North Maluku in Indonesia during 1999 and 2000, it shows that rumor often took a written form. Outlining the contested origins and composite effects of a particular rumor—as it appeared on the political scene in leaflet form—I argue that these “hardcopy rumors” became social agents in the paranoid politics of the “Maluku wars.” Recent scholarship has rightly stressed the mobilizing role of rumor. This paper demonstrates how the affectivity of rumor, usually attributed to its spontaneous and anonymous nature, may in fact be boosted by the authority of writing. It suggests that “xeroxlore,” the circulation of written and photocopied rumors, may play an essential role in generating the murky political atmosphere in which sectarian violence is instigated, enacted, and justified.

Interview with an ancestor Spirits as informants and the politics of possession in North Maluku

A B S T R A C T ■ This article explores the relationship between spirit possession, politics and subjectivity. Based on an account of two possession ceremonies on the island of Ternate in eastern Indonesia, I show that as spirits are being conjured up for political reasons, they partake in a spiritual politics in which they are both instruments and actors. Methodologically, I use these accounts to suggest the need to treat spirits as informants. From this I develop a critique of the continuing link between the anthropological concept of the informant and conventional ideas about bounded subjectivity, a link that remains unquestioned despite much contemporary anthropological research into the complexity of lived subjectivity. Analytically, I argue that treating spirits as informants reveals how possession rituals construct and make intelligible a particular relationship between politics, experience and emerging democracy in Indonesia. Treating spirits as ‘methodologically real’ therefore has important analytical consequences for how we understand their political efficacy.

The Dark Side of Empathy: Mimesis, Deception, and the Magic of Alterity

This article challenges the tendency, both academic and popular, to assign empathy the status of a virtue. The widespread inclination to associate empathy with the morally and socially “good”—with compassion, understanding, cultural bonding, and non-violent sociality—ignores what we propose to call the “dark side of empathy”: that is, the multiple ways in which empathy is routinely deployed to manipulate, seduce, deceive, and dehumanize others by means of vicariousness. Two diverse ethnographic cases, of hunting in Siberia and political violence in Indonesia, provide the empirical background for a discussion of the complex relationship of empathy to mimesis, deception, violence, and sociality.

Pigs and profits: hybrids of animals, technology and humans in Danish industrialised farming

Farm animals live and die as part of a food production system rich in paradoxes. One central paradox of modern farming revolves around the classic anthropological opposition between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Inspired by Bruno Latours diagnosis of the processes of purification and mediation that attend the separation between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in the modern constitution, we trace how this paradox plays itself out on Danish pig farms. The paper argues that, although they have to be consistently ignored, hybrids of various kinds are essential to the co-production of meat and profit on industrial, debt-ridden and highly effective farms in the Western world.

Feral Dynamics of Post-Industrial Ruin: An Introduction

frameworks, too, to understand their agency. To study our waste places, we will need an ethnobiological field guide, in which the nature-making practices of northern elites are just as worthy of study as other vernaculars. But most field guides identify entities one at a time, whether plants, birds, or rocks. One-on-one interactions are only enough if nature is relatively stable, autonomous from humans, and benevolent to us; in modern ruins, we humans join jumbled interactions and confront mixed-up layers. To study this mess, we will need to follow contingent histories. The field guide we propose requires attention to histories of social relations crossing points of view, species, and even inanimate objects, such as water and sand. It would show us “feral dynamics,” that is, anthropogenic landscapes set in motion not just by the intentions of human engineers but also by the cascading effects of more-than-human negotiations. This special section works toward just this kind of field guide. We offer methodological notes toward a historical ecology of the northern European Anthropocene, understood as a site of the continual making of industrial ruins. Incorporating new forms of biology that stress relational and dynamic features of life, we bring together social and natural histories to show the emergence of unintended anthropogenic effects. Our field site is an abandoned brown coal mine in the center of Denmark, Søby Brunkulslejer, or “Søby Brown Coal Site” (Figure 1). Located at the heart of Jutland, the main peninsula of Denmark, Søby was the Feral Dynamics Of Post-Industrial Ruin: An Introduction

Wasteland Ecologies: Undomestication and Multispecies Gains on an Anthropocene Dumping Ground

Abstract. On the western edge of the former brown coal mines in Søby, an area in central Jutland in Denmark that is now protected as a natural and cultural heritage site, a public eyesore hides behind dirt mounds and fences: the waste disposal and recycling facility known as AFLD Fasterholt. Established in the 1970s, when prevailing perceptions were that the entire mining area was a polluted wasteland, the AFLD Fasterholt waste and recycling plant has since changed in response to new EU waste management regulations, as well as the unexpected proliferation of non-human life in the area. Based on field research at this site—an Anthropocene landscape in the heartland of an EU-configured welfare-state—this article is a contribution to the multispecies ethnography and political ecology of wastelands. We argue that “waste” is a co-species, biopolitical happening—a complex symbolic, political, biological, and technological history. We combine ethnographic fieldwork, social history, wildlife observation, and spatial analysis to follow what we call “undomestication,” the reconfiguration of human projects by more-than-human forms of life into novel assemblies of species, politics, resources, and technologies. Waste landscapes, this article argues, are the result of unheralded multispecies collaboration that can be traced empirically by attending ethnographically to multispecies forms of “gain-making,” the ways in which humans and other species leverage difference to find economic and ecological opportunity.

Anthropologists Are Talking – About Capitalism, Ecology, and Apocalypse

Capitalist enterprise is transforming the world, reshaping the registers of what Felix Guattari (2000) has called the three ecologies: namely those of the environment, of social relations, and of h...