The Empty Seashell explores what it really is wish to reside in a global the place cannibal witches are undeniably actual, but too ephemeral and contradictory to be an item of trust. In a booklet according to greater than 3 years of fieldwork among 1991 and 2011, Nils Bubandt argues that cannibal witches for individuals within the coastal, and predominantly Christian, group of Buli within the Indonesian province of North Maluku are either corporeally actual and essentially unknowable.

Witches (known as gua within the Buli language or as suanggi in neighborhood Malay) seem to be traditional people yet occasionally, particularly at evening, they take other kinds and assault humans with a purpose to kill them and consume their livers. they're probably far and wide and nowhere whilst. the truth of gua, as a result, can by no means be pinned down. The name of the publication comes from the empty nautilus shells that often float ashore round Buli village. conference has it that should you discover a dwell nautilus, you're a gua. just like the empty shells, witchcraft regularly turns out to recede from experience.

Bubandt starts off the booklet via recounting his personal confusion and frustration in coming to phrases with the contradictory and inaccessible nature of witchcraft realities in Buli. a close ethnography of the surrounding inaccessibility of Buli witchcraft leads him to the belief that a lot of the anthropological literature, which perspectives witchcraft as a process of ideals with real explanatory energy, is off the mark. Witchcraft for the Buli humans does not clarify something. in reality, it does the other: it confuses, obfuscates, and frustrates. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida’s proposal of aporia—an interminable event that is still regularly in doubt—Bubandt indicates the necessity to take heavily people’s experiential and epistemological doubts approximately witchcraft, and descriptions, by way of extension, a unique frame of mind approximately witchcraft and its relation to modernity.