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Interview with an ancestor

Spirits as informants and the politics of possession in North Maluku

University of Aarhus, Denmark, bubandt{at}hum.au.dk

A B S T R A C T This article explores the relationship between spirit possession, politics and subjectivity. Based on an account of two possession ceremonies on the island of Ternate in eastern Indonesia, I show that as spirits are being conjured up for political reasons, they partake in a spiritual politics in which they are both instruments and actors. Methodologically, I use these accounts to suggest the need to treat spirits as informants. From this I develop a critique of the continuing link between the anthropological concept of the informant and conventional ideas about bounded subjectivity, a link that remains unquestioned despite much contemporary anthropological research into the complexity of lived subjectivity. Analytically, I argue that treating spirits as informants reveals how possession rituals construct and make intelligible a particular relationship between politics, experience and emerging democracy in Indonesia. Treating spirits as ‘methodologically real’ therefore has important analytical consequences for how we understand their political efficacy.

Key Words: spiritual politics • subjectivity • critique of the informant • democracy • Indonesia

Ethnography, Vol. 10, No. 3, 291-316 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1466138109339044


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