Nils Ole Bubandt

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.

I gave the honorary lecture at the Norwegian Anthropological Society's annual meeting, titled "Birds, Death, and Beauty: Some Thoughts about Aesthetics in a Time of Extinction," in October 2025, and I have been invited to deliver the Marett Memorial Lecture at Exeter University in October 2026.

Current research projects:

• I am PI of the reseach project BLUE: Multispecies Ethnographies of Oceans in Crisis. The project is financed by the Danish Research Foundation and investigates four of the global crises that the world's oceans currently face: rising water temperatures, acidification, micro-plastics, and invasive species.
• I am an associated researcher in Java-Futurism. Chronotopes of Sonic Activism in Indonesia, a research project that studies noise and experimental music in Indonesia from an interdisciplinary aesthetic-anthropological perspective. Java-Futurism is financed by the Swedish Research Council and led by PI, Sanne Krogh Groth at Lund University.
• I am PI of the research project Aesthetics of Extinction. The Asian Songbird Crisis Revisited. The project examnies the aesthetic vectors driving the interest in and extinction of endemic songbirds in Indonesia. The project is supported by an Aarhus University Research Research Foundation NOVA grant fra 2025-2027. Sanne Krogh Groth, a musicologist from Lund University participates in the project.
• I am finally a participant and member of the management committee of the EU COST project “Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories (COMPACT)”. 

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 2024 had an impact factor of more than 1,7 in the Thompson Citation Report, making it the premiere journal of anthropology in Europe and one of the highest-ranking in the world.  

I am currently tinkering with:

1. A book on corals, conservation and the Second Coming of Christ
2. A book about experimental music and political imaginaries in Indonesia (with Sanne Krogh Groth)
3. An article about stones, geology and spirits in the Anthropocæne.
4. An article about aesthetic equivocation in Javanese noise music (with Sanne Krogh Groth).
5. A chapter about the aesthetic ecology of songbird training and contest in Indonesia that demonstrates the link between aesthetics appreciation and extinction