Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia write by Nils Bubandt. This book was released on 2014-06-05. Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Indonesia has been an electoral democracy for more than a decade, and yet the political landscape of the world’s third-largest democracy is as complex and enigmatic as ever. The country has achieved a successful transition to democracy and yet Indonesian 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. Through a series of biographical accounts of political entrepreneurs, all of whom employ spirits in various, but always highly contested, ways, the book 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. Engaging with recent attempts to look at contemporary politics through the lens of the occult, Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia will be of interest to academics in the fields of Asian Studies, Anthropology and Political Science and relevant for the study of Indonesian politics and for debates about democracy in Asia and beyond.
Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia
Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia write by Nils Bubandt. This book was released on 2014-06-05. Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Indonesia has been an electoral democracy for more than a decade, and yet the political landscape of the world’s third-largest democracy is as complex and enigmatic as ever. The country has achieved a successful transition to democracy and yet Indonesian 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. Through a series of biographical accounts of political entrepreneurs, all of whom employ spirits in various, but always highly contested, ways, the book 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. Engaging with recent attempts to look at contemporary politics through the lens of the occult, Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia will be of interest to academics in the fields of Asian Studies, Anthropology and Political Science and relevant for the study of Indonesian politics and for debates about democracy in Asia and beyond.
Political Power, Corruption, and Witchcraft in Modern Indonesia
Political Power, Corruption, and Witchcraft in Modern Indonesia - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Political Power, Corruption, and Witchcraft in Modern Indonesia write by Amich Alhumami. This book was released on 2012. Political Power, Corruption, and Witchcraft in Modern Indonesia available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This thesis examines the relationships between political power, corruption, and witchcraft in modern Indonesia through an analysis of the discursive construction of these concepts in Indonesian society. The subject is approached through an observation of how public discourses of corruption and sorcery are used by people in an instrumental way to talk about and understand political processes in the country. The central argument of the thesis is that Indonesian society experiences contemporary politics in a context that combines values and practices of political modernity and secular rationality with those of witchcraft, sorcery, and the occult. The thesis demonstrates how Indonesian politics has been transformed into a modern-secular democracy by juxtaposing traditionalism and modernism. Both are interconnected features of contemporary Indonesian modernity. The thesis focuses on corruption and sorcery discourses within the context of the political democracy that has been established in Indonesia following the collapse of the New Order state. There is currently a great deal of expectation that the system of democracy will promote public participation - in the sense that people become involved in political processes, that civil society becomes more effective and that the holders of state powers become more accountable - which should in turn curb corruption. Unfortunately, corruption appears to be pervasive within the new democratic polity, and both corruption and sorcery persist alongside the dynamics of political contestations and power struggles. In the light of continuing corruption practices, many groups of Indonesian society initiate anti-corruption movements by mobilizing social and political resources through collective action. Anti-corruption initiatives are taken by both state institutions and civil society associations, and seek to improve public governance and promote political reform. Nevertheless, non-state actors--NGOs and civil society agencies--appear to have become the major voices of public criticism against corruption and they have taken the lead in promoting anti-corruption reforms. These actors involve educated people from the urban middle classes: social and political activists, intellectuals, artists, poets, journalists, as well as religious leaders associated with Islamic organizations: the Nahdhatul Ulama (NU), the Muhammadiyah, and the Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI). It is argued that the ideas and practices of anti-corruption have found new spaces of expression under the new democratic system, and that Indonesian civil society and NGO activists are determined to continue their struggles to fight corruption for the betterment of the nation despite a great deal of opposition which is mostly political. They believe that the new system of political democracy will be much more beneficial for all Indonesian people if corruption can be eliminated from state agencies and political institutions.
Beyond Oligarchy
Beyond Oligarchy - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Beyond Oligarchy write by Michele Ford. This book was released on 2014-06-25. Beyond Oligarchy available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Beyond Oligarchy is a collection of essays by leading scholars of contemporary Indonesian politics and society, each addressing effects of material inequality on political power and contestation in democratic Indonesia. The contributors assess how critical concepts in the study of politics—oligarchy, inequality, power, democracy, and others—can be used to characterize the Indonesian case, and in turn, how the Indonesian experience informs conceptual and analytical debates in political science and related disciplines. In bringing together experts from around the world to engage with these themes, Beyond Oligarchy reclaims a tradition of focused intellectual debate across scholarly communities in Indonesian studies. The collapse of Indonesia's New Order has proven a critical juncture in Indonesian political studies, launching new analyses about the drivers of regime change and the character of Indonesian democracy. It has also prompted a new groundswell of theoretical reflection among Indonesianists on concepts such as representation, competition, power, and inequality. As such, the onset of Indonesia’s second democratic period represents more than just new point of departure for comparative analyses of Indonesia as a democratizing state; it has also served as a catalyst for theoretical and conceptual development.
The Empty Seashell
The Empty Seashell - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Empty Seashell write by Nils Bubandt. This book was released on 2015-05-06. The Empty Seashell available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
