A beautiful and inspiring book. Nils Bubandt's analytical starting point-understanding witchcraft through Derrida's notion of aporia-is thoroughly innovative, not only for witchcraft studies but also for more general issues that have haunted anthropology: understanding 'belief,' surpassing simplistic oppositions between West and non-West, or making sense of human sociality. Bubandt characterizes gua (witchcraft) among the Buli as 'a vortex' which sucks ... Read moreup any tentative certainty that people try to attain. As a piercing form of existential doubt, gua inspires the author to audacious forays into philosophy which, however, always remain related in telling ways to vivid examples from daily life among the Buli. This combination-and Bubandt's engaging style-make the book a true adventure to read and a challenge to studies of witchcraft and human sociality in general.
Peter Geschiere, University of Amsterdam, author of Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust: Africa in Comparison Nils Bubandt has a big idea: 'belief' is a modern product and we should stop ascribing it to modernity's Others. Instead, we might appreciate doubt-as, for example, Bubandt learned itmixed with terrorat the heart of Buli witchcraft. For Buli, modernity attracts because it brings belief, which might quell witchcraft's ambiguities. Anthropological certainties are set on their heads. The Empty Seashell is a tour de force.
Anna Tsing, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins The Empty Seashell never strays far from the scene of witchcraft, from the myths that offer historical and ontological explanations for the close knit between human life and witchcraft in Buli through accounts of individual lives rent apart by accusations or attacks to the destructive ramifications of such occurrences for the community, including how incidents may reverberate across generations as old grudges or suspicions are resurrected to animate new ones.... Bubandt is to be commended for highlighting the precariousness and forces of world-unmaking that are as much a part of social life as the assumed sturdiness that prevails in social scientific works.
Patricia Spyer
Anthropological Forum
Bubandt likens the witch-menace to nuclear war on terrorism: 'a threat that is both real and yet often absents itself from daily experience.' Witchcraft is, therefore, a paradox: it's everywhere and nowhere, real and impossible,hauntingly vivid yet intangible and invisible.... Bubandt describes a characteristic of the human mind that is universal yet not always obvious to those proud of their post-Enlightenment heritage. Our brains are simultaneously full of knowing and not knowing,believing and doubting, fearing and rationally dismissing fears. We know these to be incompatible opposites, but can't help having them both in play at any one time. And so we comfort ourselves with the illusion of singularity, and of secular triumph. One thing we know for sure is that we have to appear to know things, when really we may know nothing at all.
Malcolm Gaskill
Fortean Times
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.
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