The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island

by Nils Bubandt

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.

Genres: Anthropology, Witchcraft, Ethnography

320 pages, Paperback

First published December 30, 2014

Reviews

[FluffyNyctea]

The gua is a subversion, a parody, an embodied reminder of the horrifying possibility of destruction – all that is held dear, all of life, is also an opening to an other, an inherent vulnerability. Think about all the joints and orifices that sustain your existence, that provide you with a world in which you can thrive; and think about how they’re also the very sites where you can be attacked and undone, the inseverable danger that haunts your thriving. The gua, as Bubundt puts it, is world unmaking. What world exactly is being unmade?

In Buli, ‘bodies, objects, and social collectives have comparable shapes and proportions (pp. 138).’ For example, boats have body-based dimensions, as much as bodily entrails are configured as boats. Sociality is prescribed by those visceral measurements, by ‘the symbolic orders that guide the proper boundaries of embodied being (pp. 140),’ or, put differently, by the norm. The gua throws it all into doubt; the gua unmakes the normative world. But isn’t the unmaking of one world also the condition under which another world is made? And isn’t this possibility of both making and unmaking the very capaciousness of doubt?

There’s an affinity between the host and victim of the gua. ‘The gua … lures and destroys the bodies of human witches and human victims at will (pp. 119).’ The host becomes ‘a flying head with “its entrails dangling from the neck (pp. 129).”’ The victim becomes incredibly sick, mad, or dies a horrible death. Both the host and the victim embody something so strange that Bubandt finds them abject, namely, impossible to be incorporated into human sociality. They cannot be recognised. This unrecognition exits the realm of doubt, and embraces instead the certainty of destruction.

To take doubt seriously, I propose, is to inhabit a zone of indeterminacy where the gua can be as generative as it is destructive. Following a line of queer theory that understands queerness as that which troubles normativity, and crip theory that foregrounds embodiment in the troubling of normativity, I understand both the host and victim of the gua as queer and crip. I wonder, what worlds could be made as they unmake the normative world? What if, underlying Buli people’s feeling that they’re just as possible to become the gua as they’re to be attacked by the gua, is the recognition that the host and victim are more kin than enemies? What if the affinity between the host and victim is also a mutual relationality, where illness, madness and death are not anti-social, but generative of sociable worlds? I don’t have the answers, but I linger in doubt, in the possibility that the queer and crip haunt one's shadow and liver , and beckon the (un)making of worlds.

[Anders Norge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely one of the best anthropological works on "witchcraft". This exemplary book is a must-read for anthropologists of religion/witchcraft/spirits/invisible agents and other people with an interest in these things!

[Nate Chavez · Rating 3 out of 5]

cool exploration into indigenous cultures of witchcraft 👍 but having to write a ~20 page paper on it took all of the enjoyment from it