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Nils Ole Bubandt

Title

Professor, PhD

Primary affiliation

Nils Ole Bubandt

Areas of expertise

  • Environmental anthropology
  • Coral reefs anthropology
  • Extinction anthropology

Contact information

Telephone number
Email address

Profile

I am an anthropologist with a long-term interest in the study of the "otherwise", in seeing how something we take for granted might well be different.  On the basis of fieldwork conducted in Indonesia over the last thirty years, I have studied how democracy may sometimes be awkwardly reproduced by corruption, and how corruption itself is implicated in conspiracy theories about the corona pandemic in Indonesia; how human-made environmental disruption and climate change are co-produced by animals and other nonhumans; how some stones might just possibly be alive; and how witchcraft might not be so different from a global viral pandemic as we might like to think.

My current research interests revolve around climate change and environmental disruption, multi-species ethnography and the strange time that is the Anthropocene.  Specifically, I am researching the relationship between coral death and the return of Jesus in Papua; the way care for songbirds on Java is leading to their extinction; and the conundrum of why noise music is a political provocation in Indonesia, a country in which few people otherwise worry or are upset about noise.

 

Current research projects:

 

Research

   

     

   

    

 

Collaborations

When I am not teaching, I am:

  • Editor-in-Chief (with Mark Graham) of Ethnos, an international, peer-reviewed journal of anthropology.  Ethnos is included in the Social Citation Index and  in 2022 had an impact factor of more than 1,3 in the Thompson Citation Report, making it the premiere journal of anthropology in Europe and one of the highest-ranking in the world.