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The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island by Nils Bubandt (Paperback, 2014)

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By Nils Bubandt ISBN: 9780801479458. The reality of gua, therefore, can never be pinned down. Convention has it that if you find a live nautilus, you are a gua. Like the empty shells, witchcraft always seems to recede from experience.

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The Empty Seashell explores what it is like to live in a world where cannibal witches are undeniably real, yet too ephemeral and contradictory to be an object of belief. In a book based on more than three years of fieldwork between 1991 and 2011, 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. Witches (known as gua in the Buli language or as suanggi in regional Malay) appear to be ordinary humans but sometimes, especially at night, they take other forms and attack people in order to kill them and eat their livers. They are seemingly everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The reality of gua, therefore, can never be pinned down. The title of the book comes from the empty nautilus shells that regularly drift ashore around Buli village. Convention has it that if you find a live nautilus, you are a gua. Like the empty shells, witchcraft always seems to recede from experience. Bubandt begins the book by recounting his own confusion and frustration in coming to terms with the contradictory and inaccessible nature of witchcraft realities in Buli. A detailed ethnography of the encompassing inaccessibility of Buli witchcraft leads him to the conclusion that much of the anthropological literature, which views witchcraft as a system of beliefs with genuine explanatory power, is off the mark. Witchcraft for the Buli people doesn't explain anything. In fact, it does the opposite: it confuses, obfuscates, and frustrates. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida's concept of aporia-an interminable experience that remains continuously in doubt-Bubandt suggests the need to take seriously people's experiential and epistemological doubts about witchcraft, and outlines, by extension, a novel way of thinking about witchcraft and its relation to modernity.

Product Identifiers

Publisher
Cornell University Press
ISBN-13
9780801479458
eBay Product ID (ePID)
208920886

Product Key Features

Author
Nils Bubandt
Publication Name
The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island
Format
Paperback
Language
English
Subject
Anthropology
Publication Year
2014
Type
Textbook
Number of Pages
320 Pages

Dimensions

Item Height
235mm
Item Width
155mm
Item Weight
28g

Additional Product Features

Title_Author
Nils Bubandt
Country/Region of Manufacture
United States

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The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island by Nils Bubandt (Paperback, 2014)

About this product

Product Information

Product Identifiers

Product Key Features

Dimensions

Additional Product Features

All listings for this product

item 1 NEW The Empty Seashell By Nils Bubandt Paperback Free Shipping

item 2 Nils Bubandt The Empty Seashell (Paperback)

Best Selling in Adult Learning & University

Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan B. Peterson (1999, Paperback)

Eduqas GCSE (9-1) Religious Studies Route B: Catholic Christianity and Judaism by Deirdre Cleary, Andrew Barron, Joy White, Patrick Harrison (Paperback, 2017)

Aradale: The Making of a Haunted Asylum by Nathaniel Buchanan, David Waldron, Sharn Waldron (Paperback, 2020)

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Paperback, 2000)

Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: Healing Right Brain Relational Trauma by Patricia A. DeYoung (Paperback, 2021)

Time Management by Peter Quarry (Paperback, 1986)

Save on Adult Learning & University

The Australian Native Bee Hive Book: Keeping Stingless Sugarbag OATH Tim Heard

Netter Atlas of Human Anatomy: Classic Regional Approach

Havard's Nursing Guide to Drugs

George Hrabovsky Leonard Susskind Classical Mechanics (Paperback)

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