Nils Bubandt is Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University, where he (with Anna Tsing) co-directs AURA (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene). With Mark Graham, he is also editor-in-chief of Ethnos. Recent and forthcoming publications include The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island (Cornell University Press, 2014); Democracy, Corruption and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia (Routledge 2014); and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (co-edited with Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson and Elaine Gan)(University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
Gabriel Abend is an associate professor of sociology at New York University and a current fellow of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg. He got his undergraduate degree at the Universidad de la República (Montevideo, Uruguay) and his PhD at Northwestern University (Evanston, United States). One of his ongoing projects takes issue with prevalent approaches to morality, because of their overreliance on individuals’ judgments, neglect of thick concepts, and blindness to the moral background that makes moral life possible. It shows what sociological, anthropological, and historical contributions can help rectify these errors. Another line of research compares the epistemological assumptions of different social scientific communities—see his articles “The Meaning of ‘Theory’”; “Styles of Causal Thought: An Empirical Investigation” (with C. Petre and M. Sauder); and “Styles of Sociological Thought: Sociologies, Epistemologies, and the Mexican and U.S. Quests for Truth.” A third ongoing project examines how the brain figures in societies’ institutionalized understandings about love, art, religion, spirituality, empathy, and morality.
