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 has recently been ranked No.23 in the Thompson Citation Report for anthropology as one of the highest-ranking journals in Europe.  For more information see here.
• Research Head of the research network Sufism and Transnational Spirituality (SATS). Experience, Meaning and Network in the Global Rise of Sufism. The project will start in September 2010 and is funded by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities until 2013.  For more information click here.
• Member of the steering committee of the new, English-language and cross-disciplinary graduate programme Human Security. For more information click here.

Recent publications that I am quite happy with include: 

(2012) ‘A Psychology of Ghosts. The Regime of the Self and the Reinvention of Spirits in Indonesia and Beyond’ Anthropological Forum 22(1)-1-23.

• En article that analyzes the relationship between spirits, media, and the pyschologization of everyday life in the contemporary world.  The article suggests that the spirit world is being changed and in many cases reinvigorated on a global scale by the media’s fascination with the occult and by the psychologization of the modern notion of the self.  The article takes this as an indication of the ways in which regimes of rationalization entail their own forms of reenchantment.

(2012) ‘The Spirit Army. The Mobilisation of Jins to Protest against Corruption Reveals the Fault Lines of the Indonesian Struggle for Democracy’ Inside Indonesia 108 (April-June 2012).

• An account from the world’s only Koranic school whose students consist entirely of spirits. Read the full article here.

(2011) Varieties of Secularism in Asia. Anthropological Explorations of Religion, Politics and the Spiritual (edited with Martijn van Beek). London: Routledge.

• An anthology that takes up Talal Asad’s challenge to explore secularism anthropologically and comparatively as a political concept and phenomenon.  It is the first to do so with a focus on Asia. See more here.

(2010) Experiments in Holism. Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology. Ed. Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt. Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell

• A theoretical book with contributions from 12 eminent anthropologists who offer their analyses of the state-of-the-art of contemporary anthropology through a reflection on the current utility of holism in anthropology.  See more here.

Soon to be published:

The Empty Sea Shell. Witchcraft, Aporia, and Modernity on an Indonesian Island. 

• A book about witchcraft as impossibility and modernity as hope. Based on over three years of fieldwork in Halmahera - the largest of the renowned Indonesian 'Spice Islands' – the book is a critique of conventional notions of witchcraft as explanation, function, and belief. For people on Halmahera the suanggi (witches) are at once real and impossible, and skepticism rather than faith characterizes their relationship to witchcraft. Based on an analysis inspired by Jacques Derrida’s concept of aporia or paradox the book traces the over one hundred-year engagement of people on Halmahera with the modern world in a desperate but so far unsuccessful attempt to liberate themselves from the impossible reality of witchcraft. The book manuscript is currently under review.

I am currently tinkering with:

1. A book manuscript about democracy, spirits, and corruption in Indonesia

2. A journal article about Portuguese wildmen in the Eastern Indonesian jungle

3. A journal article about the dark side of empathy based on comparative material from Siberia and Indonesia (with Rane Willerslev)

4. A journal article about sultans and the reinvention of modernity in Eastern Indonesia

5. A book chapter on (dis)trust, inauthenticity and temporality from an anthropological and philosophical perspective (with Sune Liisberg)