ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the homologies and overlaps between the world of ancestors and the world of politics that emerged during the 2007 gubernatorial elections in North Maluku. Lawsuits and ancestral retribution, the chapter suggests, are similar kinds of political displacement: the displacement of the politics of democracy into new arenas, in which the competitive struggle for politically legitimate power can continue by other means. The ruling on the 2000 US Presidential election demonstrates that this trend is not restricted to former colonies like Indonesia. The 'judicialization of politics' may be defined as the displacement of politics onto a legal system amenable to covert manipulation. Governors were now elected by general plebiscite rather than by the members of the regional legislative body (DPRD). Spirits and corruption are simultaneously opaque and known to all, politically effective but rhetorically muted.
